Bevor die äußerste rechte Demokratie bedrohte, stridete der Neoliberalismus sie aus

I’m going to push back against this a bit.

First, its telling that the author „quotes“ some „neoliberal ideologues“ without actual attribution – just floating quotes from… someone, maybe, somewhere, who might have existed or not, who thought that there were too many blacks and women exerting political power. That’s already a pretty big red flag, but shouldn’t be unexpected given the substance of their argument.

Second, classifying the Brexiteers and Trump’s MAGA as a continuation of „neoliberalism“ is just reducing the word to mean „things that are generally bad“, and empty, meaningless phrase tossed around like a boogeyman with no intellectual substance beneath it. Both are strongly opposed to neoliberalism and its core tenets: free trade, multilateralism, globalism, and a regulated capitalist market economy. Brexit opposed the EU, a neoliberal dream project, and MAGA opposes trade, multilateralism, global institutions, and both the „regulated“ and „market economy“ sides of neoliberal economics. Both loath immigration and free movement.

Yes, a lot of neoliberals cut a lot of regulation. They’re generally opposed to laws that seek to create economic winners and losers and protected classes of workers whose economic sectors are valued politically rather than economically, to the cost of everyone else. Others used neoliberal rhetoric as a veil to pursue old conservative agendas of allowing the rich to be free of liability for harms done to health, welfare and even under contract to those less wealthy. Thatcher and Reagan were neoliberals. But so were Jimmy Carter, Chretien and Martin, Layton and Mulcair (though they’d deny it until red in the face), Romanow and Wynne.

Third, the central thesis of the article is self defeating. There has always been democratic control over economic affairs – that literally never went away, and both Brexit and MAGA prove it. It’s simply that the international trade projects that the neoliberals pushed for have been so wildly successful that nobody with even half a clue about the economy has proposed upending it, as doing so is, again, demonstrably, a terrible and economically ruinous idea. The NDP reached the height of their popularity after Jack Layton conceded this basic reality as so much of Canada’s manufacturing was dependent on this trade. Even the BQ/PQ separatist camp embraced a complete paradox of claiming that they wanted more democratic control over their economic destiny while promising that there would be no disruption whatsoever in the neoliberal status quo of trade and integration with Canada and the USA.

Just because everyone says „don’t touch the stove“ doesn’t mean we *couldn’t*, it was just always understood by consensus across the active political spectrum to be a truly terrible idea.

Continuously losing the public debate in politics does not make those politics „undemocratic“. This is true even when its the left that loses, not just when its MAGA.