I didn’t claim that neoliberals have never received a majority of the vote from electors given a reasonable alternative. But your failure to come up with an example suggests that maybe I should have.

Quite possibly you may have been right to make that claim. What I was objecting to was your statement “It wasn’t until the upheaval of MMP that NZ voters got any kind of choice, and even then, as you say, a limited one.”
NZ voters did have a sharply different choice of economic policy because of The Alliance in 1996.
I also think it is relevant, in juding the electoral strength of neoliberalism, to mention that while the Labour government of 1987 did not get a majority of votes, it did get 48% of the vote, an increase from when it won power in 1984.

In linguistics there is no argument from authority, either the word is commonly understood or it is not. In Latin America, “neoliberalism” is understood as “that which happened to us during the past two decades and has brought so much suffering”. Not even right-wingers want to be associated with it.

The problem I see with Americans’ approach to this new term (for them) is that it is etymological: what does “neo” mean, what does “liberalism” mean to me? Add the two and supposedly you get what “neoliberalism” actually means. I does not work that way.

In language, context is everything and the context of “neoliberalism” is Latin American reality and politics.

That is like saying you do not think butterflies should be called butterflies because not all are yellow and they do not flutter around garbage cans. There is nothing you can do about it. People use and understand the term so butterfly it is.

Regarding “neoliberal”, Latin Americans have analyzed what has been happening to us since the Washington Consensus – the document, the IMF justifications, increased inequality, privatizations, raids by hedge funds, financial collapses, diminishing budgets for public education and health, increased poverty – and called it “neoliberalism”. Granted, we could have called it something else. However, it is too late to change the term since it has already spread, people all over the world use and understand the term. So “neoliberalism” it is.

Henri: True, but I don’t know if neoliberal is a good choice for that term. In the US political context, Reagan was anti-liberal, and the leader of a movement that turned “liberal” into a dirty word, so in that context, calling him “neoliberal” sounds odd.

The US is notorious for rejecting world-wide usage of political terms much as it rejects the metric system. Other political terms Americans understand in their unique way are “socialism”, “left”, and “imperialism”. I wonder why.

…What I’ve learned (and what some readers of this column no doubt already knew) is that neoliberalism is a pejorative way of referring to a set of economic/political policies based on a strong faith in the beneficent effects of free markets. Here is an often cited definition by Paul Treanor: “Neoliberalism is a philosophy in which the existence and operation of a market are valued in themselves, separately from any previous relationship with the production of goods and services . . . and where the operation of a market or market-like structure is seen as an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action, and substituting for all previously existing ethical beliefs.” (“Neoliberalism: Origins, Theory, Definition.”)

neo-conservative is more accurately neo-liberal,,so classical-liberal is more accurately blatantly-conservative ??

the above is the answer, link below is the question

http://tofubo.blogspot.com/2009/04/riddle-me-this-how-can-you-reconcile.html

Perhaps you are missing the where, where is the term “neoliberalism” rejected? The only people I know who claim they simply cannot grasp its meaning, reside in rich countries, most particularly English-speaking countries, which are precisely the countries that benefited from the exploding pension funds, asset prices, wasteful consumption, and wars of choice granted to them by being on the right side of an unjust global system.

Neoliberalism is the system that enabled Bechtel to charge poor Bolivians for rainwater, US agribusiness to profit on the backs of a compliant, semi-literate, non-unionized, illegal workforce, and for capital to flow from poor countries to rich.

Rejecting the term the victims of this system give to it is to reject our voice and to reject injustice.