The GOP is only about serving the obscenely greedy/wealthy, with lip service thrown in for Christian nationalists, racists and the always fearful, whose votes they need to serve the rich.

Why Neoliberalism Is Finally on the Way Out
An economist’s apology for his generation
https://newrepublic.com/article/168000/brad-delong-neoliberalism-finally-way-out

#KillNeoliberalism #Neoliberalism
#NeoliberalismIsAboutGreed

"Michael: Let me begin by picking up on your last point. There are different audiences of voters, and yes, there’s a chunk of voters who aren’t going to care very much about democracy and threats to democracy. They care about what it costs to fill their gas tank, so this message is not for them. There are other messages for those voters about putting money in their pocket and making their lives easier that I think can get through to those voters. One thing that the right has done more successfully than liberals over the last 40 years is that they do talk about these big picture things. They talk in terms of big themes like freedom, so what I say is that Democratic politicians have to steal a page from their book and tie their particular economic ideas to ideals that Americans are taught from third grade, if not age three, to care deeply and passionately about, and those two ideals are democracy and freedom. I think it’s very easy to make these connections. Strengthening the middle class and the working class at the expense of the one percent or the 0.1 percent is not just something that puts money in the pocketbooks of working and middle-class people. It strengthens democracy. It retards our dissent into oligarchy, which is where we’re headed if indeed we’re not there. In sum, I say economics, democracy, freedom, these are not the separate arguments that liberals often make them out to be. It’s all one argument."

NeoLiberalism lives because too many people get their dysfunctional, psychological needs, like greed and power-hunger, satisfied by it. They care about that but not about the rest of us.

Why Neoliberalism Is Finally on the Way Out
An economist’s apology for his generation
https://newrepublic.com/article/168000/brad-delong-neoliberalism-finally-way-out

"Brad: There’s the inflation of the 1970s. There’s the productivity slowdown, that is that 3 percent per year wage growth above inflation no longer happens in America. There’s the upset caused by the oil shocks and gasoline lines, the resulting relative price shifts and exchange rate shifts that begin the process of hollowing out of Midwestern manufacturing and similar things. There is a genuine feeling that the world has been over bureaucratized. And there’s a general belief that, the system is too uptight and there needs to be more human freedom. So a coalition of left and right-wing viewpoints complaining that we could do significantly better and we should, the belief that we need to get rid of the New Deal order and replace it with something better, and then the fight over what will be better. Is it the left neoliberalism, which is try to use market means to social democratic ends in order to debureaucratize the system and to crowdsource things whenever possible? Or the right neoliberalism, in which we need not only to do that, but to make the poor poorer so they will work harder and the rich richer, so they will work harder? A greater degree of income inequality is in fact a feature, not a bug, because people deserve to have incomes depending on their worth, and your worth in the market is pretty much a sign of your moral worth.

Felicia: Which neoliberalism kind of won out, the right or the left?

Brad: ...but the policies wound up being right neoliberals because, say, whenever we left neoliberals did something like balance the budget and the interests of faster economic growth, the right takes power and promptly uses it to fund many more bigger tax cuts for the rich.
...
Michael: I would add here a political point, which is that all this, all the points Brad just made, are very much what rich people wanted to hear in the 1970s and the 1980s.
...
Michael: It fell very favorably on their ears. When you think back to the 1970s, early 1970s, 1971, the famous Powell memo, a memo written by Lewis Powell for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which went to him. This was before Richard Nixon put him on the Supreme Court, a few months before, and said, “We are losing our free market society. We are in danger of becoming a collectivist society. How can we stop this?” And so he wrote a memo that foretold and laid out the framework for much of what has become the right-wing infrastructure of think tanks and foundations and so on and so forth. There’s a big debate on the left about how much impact the Powell memo actually had. I’m just mentioning the fact of its existence by pointing out that rich people felt quite aggrieved by the New Deal order by the 1970s. So when Milton Friedman and others started saying this stuff, man, that’s what they wanted to hear and they put their money on that chip.
...
Brad: I still cannot believe that the New Deal order collapsed as rapidly as it did in the 1970s. It was still delivering enormous productivity growth and real wage increases and the fact that it was undergoing this inflationary and even this productivity slowdown speed bump, that people were angry at bureaucracy, that people were angry at unions that they saw as having perhaps excessive oligopoly monopoly power on their own part in the sale of labor, that those shouldn’t have led to the immediate collapse within less than a decade of the most successful political economic system and order that the world had ever seen. It ought to have been more stable than that and also that I really cannot believe that the neoliberal order persisted as long as it did. That is, its three promises in 1979, 1980 were that it was going to restore productivity growth; that it was going to right the distribution of income by getting rid of various intermediary institutions that had market and regulatory power and were using it unfairly; and that it also was going to restore the moral center of life by making people realize that they could not rely on the government to always provide an after-the-fact safety net in case they didn’t make good decisions and didn’t worry about living their lives right. It did absolutely none of those things. All it did was greatly widen income and wealth inequality and even if you thought greater income and wealth inequality was a feature rather than a bug, it’s still only batting one of four. And yet, it went putt, putting along and survived not just the 1980s, but the 1990s, although we had hopes of breaking through in the Clinton administration then it comes roaring back in the 2000s..."

#NeoLiberalism
#KillNeoliberalism

NeoLiberalism is still alive because too many people get their dysfunctional, psychological needs, like greed and power-hunger, satisfied by it. They are too focused on that to care about how much damage it does to the rest of us.

Why Neoliberalism Is Finally on the Way Out
An economist’s apology for his generation
https://newrepublic.com/article/168000/brad-delong-neoliberalism-finally-way-out

"...Brad: Well, let me start with the bad neoliberalism, and in many ways the bad neoliberalism, basically it’s the market giveth, the market taketh away, blessed be the name of the market. That is, it’s the belief that if property rights are cut at the joints properly, the market economy then crowdsources the problem of increasing production and so effectively mobilizes human brain power to making a richer world in a way that no other system can. But I think its most powerful advocate, Friedrich von Hayek, warned accepting what the market gives us to as blessed comes at a horrible price. A market system cannot provide any form of social justice and if you demand that it be tweaked and managed to do so, it would wreck the market’s ability to do what it could, and so this is Margaret Thatcher’s Tina.

Michael: Which stands for “there is no alternative.” This was a slogan associated with Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party in Britain, basically saying a free market is the only way.

Brad:...There is no alternative other than taking the British polity, society, and economy and wrenching them back to one that trusts the market and that accepts whatever the market does as the best attainable end.
...
Felicia: Would you say, Brad, that whatever the market does, is its best attainable end?

Brad: No, and I would say that that is right neoliberalism and I will also say that there was a left neoliberalism as well, because the same word was used more or less in the 1970s to say that the post–World War II system had become overbureaucratized, too encrusted with rent-seeking groups, with politically strong clients that had weak claims on government programs and support, and that there was a good deal of truth in Von Hayek’s observation that a properly constructed market economy crowdsources the solution to an enormous amounts of human problems, that you’re not having some bureaucrat at the center or some central planner who has next to no information setting out what has to be done. You’re creating a flexible system in which the people on the spot with the information are empowered to act and to act for the common good as long as you can properly tweak things so that individual incentives are to act for the common good. And that good neoliberalism, that left neoliberalism...was going to be a huge improvement over what had happened in the post–World War II generation.

Felicia: ...just to summarize for listeners who haven’t been living and breathing this for years, like all of us here, left neoliberalism and right neoliberalism can agree on a few things. Both sides can agree that a free market is more efficient. But left neoliberals think that the market needs to be kind of clipped or trimmed to help ordinary people, small tweaks like tax credits. Right neoliberals, which we spend a lot of time talking about here, they just want to let the market rip. The bigger the company, the better, and maybe it’s going to create jobs and trickle down. I think both right and left neoliberals would disagree with people like me or people like Brian Deese because we think today that there’s a place for direct government investment to drive new sectors of the economy and there’s a place for government reigning in monopolies and that’s not neoliberal at all.
...
the ways that the economics profession, political activism, and the think tank and foundation worlds, of which you, Felicia, are a part too.
...
Michael: ...The way those three forces have worked in recent years to try to get at and attack the foundations of neoliberalism and build a new set of assumptions into the way we, and into the way regular Americans, think about the economy that hasn’t always been done very successfully. For example, I raise this question in my book, the Great Recession, by all rights, should have wiped out neoliberal thought. Why wasn’t neoliberalism dead and buried then in 2009? The answer to me is that our side hadn’t done a good job of formulating an alternative at both the practical level of policies and the somewhat more abstract level of the ideas that drive the policies. And I’m not an economist, so Brad forgive me, but economics is not just a statement of formulas.

Economics is a set of ideas about what motivates us, what motivates our actions in the marketplace, in life, how we define the good life and how we get there. So our side, broadly speaking, I think, didn’t do a very good job of countering neoliberalism on both of those philosophical and practical fronts until just recently."

#LeftNeoLiberalism
#RightNeoLiberalism
#NeoLiberalism
#KillNeoliberalism