# Straight Dope 3/24/2023: What was neoliberalism, is it dead, and was it really so bad? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports\ **Created:** [March 24, 2023, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/straight-dope-3-24-2023-what-was-neoliberalism-is-it-dead-and-was-it-really-so-bad/981595 "2023-03-24T16:09:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 27
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2023, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/straight-dope-3-24-2023-what-was-neoliberalism-is-it-dead-and-was-it-really-so-bad/981595/27 "2023-03-25T01:33:52Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > we were arguably coming to this point anyway, if not because of the 2007/8 mortgage crisis or loss of manufacturing jobs but because of the student debt crisis and demographic decline. If anything, we can expect more populist candidates (of which Bernie Sanders is most certainly one on the far-leftist side of the political spectrum) that continue to polarize by appealing to peoples’ fears and uncertainties about their place in the national economy. > [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > Trump certainly dog-whistled to people with deep racist sentiments but that alone doesn’t account for the broad appeal that won him the presidency. It isn’t as if he did anything good for the people already suffering from economic calamity (and in many ways compounded it, especially for farmers) but part of his appeal was that he would bring in some kind of nebulous political change that would sweep away corporate interests and inside players. OK, let me see whether I can get this into coherent form. That alone doesn’t account for it, no. But I don’t think “peoples’ fears and uncertainties about their place in the national economy” accounts for Trumpism, either. Again, bear in mind that overall the people with the lowest incomes voted 52% for Clinton and only 41% for Trump. What’s the statistic that really jumps out? It’s not income level. From my previous cite (in post #11): > White voters voted 58% for Trump and 37% for Clinton. Non-white voters, who make up 31% of the electorate, voted 74% for Clinton and 21% for Trump. And not as drastic, but still more so than income: Women overall voted more for Clinton. > **[An examination of the 2016 electorate, based on validated voters](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examination-of-the-2016-electorate-based-on-validated-voters/)** > > One of the biggest challenges facing those who seek to understand U.S. elections is establishing an accurate portrait of the American electorate and the > Women were 13 percentage points more likely than men to have voted for Clinton (54% among women, 41% among men) And again, for in some cases a greater difference than the difference in income: (again from the Pew Research cite): > voters in 2016 were sharply divided along religious lines. Protestants constituted about half of the electorate and reported voting for Trump over Clinton by a 56% to 39% margin. Catholics were more evenly divided; 52% reported voting for Trump, while 44% said they backed Clinton. Conversely, a solid majority of the religiously unaffiliated – atheists, agnostics and those who said their religion was “nothing in particular” – said they voted for Clinton (65%) over Trump (24%) I don’t think what we’re looking at here is that Trump won because he appealed to “peoples’ fears and uncertainties about their place in the national economy”. The statistics on that appear if anything to point in the other direction. I think what he appealed to was peoples’ fears and uncertainties about their place in the national _society_. People who think that society is a zero-sum game – that advantages for one person or group must come at the expense of somebody else – are really vulnerable to this technique. It isn’t necessarily racism in the more standard senses – though there was certainly a good bit of that. But people who were used to assuming that they were the overwhelming majority – that _most people were like them_ – and who also assume that there is One Right Way to Live and are therefore likely to take anyone saying that it’s fine to live differently as saying, not that there should be multiple ways, but that the way the One Right Way people are living must be Wrong – I think people who think like that feel really insecure about the gains in civil rights made by Black people, by women, by people who don’t fall neatly into gender or sexual-behavior boxes, by people who are members of Other Religions or of none. And also made insecure by the apparent increase in numbers of people not in what they see as their group: in some cases a real relative increase, in many cases a perceived one — because people who were there all along but used to be quiet about it have become increasingly vocal. Because they’re seeing zero-sum, not only in finances, but in what to most people is actually more important at least as long as they’re not starving: societal respect. And then there are people insisting that the United States isn’t almost always right with an occasional problem that we fixed long ago, and that Christopher Columbus shouldn’t be praised as an unequivocable hero – things that to some are part of the foundations of what they think of as societal respect: that they’re part of and proud citizens of a country that they want to see as founded for all the right reasons and having continued for all the right reasons and being better (zero sum again) than all the other countries. That’s ‘if it’s my country it must be right’ patriotism. The kind of patriotism that’s “My Country. Right the Wrongs\*” they don’t understand. They think it’s an attack. – I don’t know if that was coherent. But it’s as close as I’m likely to get tonight. . . \*stolen from a 1970’s bumper sticker. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/straight-dope-3-24-2023-what-was-neoliberalism-is-it-dead-and-was-it-really-so-bad/981595)._