Dear subscribers,
As we approach the one-year anniversary since I founded the Neoliberal Standard, where as part of wiling away the hours of a dull birthday (not my favorite day of the year— I think birthdays are stupid) afternoon, it began with an impulse like the proverbial burst of inspiration— I want to take a moment to commemorate my launch, and, express to you my heartfelt gratitude for your audience.
Somewhat to signify my indefatigable high regard, all things being equal, for the Reagan-Bush status quo, my choice of the word, Neoliberal, was also a byword for my brash establishmentarian rejection of the unhinged demagogic populism, particularly of the Trump movement.
Though lately I’m inclined to blame Obama first for having properly set the train of 21st century anti-Americanism in motion, Trump’s elevation to the presidency represented for me a profound and terrible direction for America. With Trump’s hostility to military intervention in the Middle East, his contempt for multilateral alliances, including NATO, his hatred of free trade, and his opposition to both illegal and legal immigration, besides the mendacity and corruption of his character, I was convinced that everything he attacked required a full-throated defense. Insofar as some of these fashionable mood-swings about the Iraq war and trade were already a problem in the Democratic party, I believed that if these ideas were permitted to take root in the Republican party, too, then this illiberal, identitarian radicalism one way or another, by whichever party, would inevitable destroy the country.
It needed to be written about, especially when to my horror so many Never Trump conservatives seemed to be forming ideological coalitions with the leanings of Democrats just to oppose him. As the MAGA insurgency took over the GOP, purging moderates, many conservatives seemed to suffer a kind of buyer’s remorse over the neoliberal order they built. So that certain commentators, like David Brooks or Ross Douthat or Max Boot, became increasingly concerned about the fabled heartland or rust belt or whatever, regretting trade and lamenting overseas intervention. And all those people who write for the Bulwark? Forget it. They are traitors to conservative principles, demonizing the moral self-abandon of the Republican party opting to dance on its grave, hoping it never comes back, for profit. The Bulwark is Fox News in reverse—because we can all remember how civil and decent was the Tea Party movement in which they were so active.
With the Neoliberal Standard I would not give any quarter to the Democratic left afflicted as it is with its own populist malady— not just because of the insanity and stupidity of Donald Trump alone. I suppose it is a relief to you that I don’t sing pious platitudes for the sake of “our democracy.” Indeed one doesn’t defend in the concrete a legislative process in the abstract. With the Neoliberal Standard, I sought to build a fallout shelter for hard-headed pitiless Wall Street Republican realism.
If there’s one thing I give a damn about its liberty. Unlike many rightwingers today, I absolutely do not share Ron Desantis’s kleptocratic vision of using government to reward friends and punish enemies. And to an equal extent I abhor the left’s slow-motion systematic unravelling of all our liberal institutions and every mainstay of Western civilization, from banning gas stoves to reforming the Supreme Court, in the name of systemic racism.
I am a moderate conservative, and I know the authoritarian decadence of MAGA does not ennoble the left. Miraculously in a hyper partisan time, I can hold two issues in my mind at once. In fact the left is just as dumb, and judging by the antisemitic progressives in Congress, just as dangerous as it’s ever been. By the same logic, I would not make my bed with Marjorie Taylor Green either, just to oppose the derangement of the left. Faced with the choice between fascism and communism, I abstain. If 2024 comes down to Trump or Biden, I will certainly not vote.
You can try and persuade me Trump’s economy was better than Biden’s. I would respond Trump tried unconstitutionally, treasonously, to coercively reverse the outcome of a free election to keep himself in power with unsubstantiated claims of fraud. And, you can tell me Biden is still less chaotic than Trump, but I would retort first that Biden is corrupt for condoning if not taking money himself from his son’s influence peddling racket, state-owned Chinese energy companies and Russian oligarchs enriching the Biden’s in the millions. And second, in senselessly pulling out from Afghanistan he consigned Afghan women to slavery, and sacrificed our soldiers and American allies in an impeachable grand act of betrayal. I will not be forced to choose between two dreadful presidents and two morally bankrupt abysmal leaders and outright liars.
The Neoliberal Standard doesn’t condescend to impose these left-right choices on you. Rather I pride myself in being in a perpetual two-front war against both the populist right and the revolutionary left. So as you find me abhorring Trump’s relentless terrifying challenges to the rule of law, you will see that in the same breath, I condemn wokeness root and branch, and I waste no time in skewering progressivism. To me it is not necessary, it makes no sense and it is truly counterproductive, to compromise with either the far right or the hard left to save the country from the debatably worse side. And the presumption in that undemocratic perception of a do-or-die state of affairs degrades our humanity with the level of the unctuous mediocrity to which it reduces us. I have higher expectations for the American republic, thank you. And I will submit neither to be tyrannized by one demagogic personality—Trump—or one antisemitic and inflationary Democratic party with conspiracy theories of its own about the climate, gender, and racism for example.
I intended the Neoliberal Standard as the premier Substack for normal conservatives, who don’t watch Newsmax or read The Federalist, or get newsletters from The Heritage Foundation. We liberal conservatives don’t eat that fast food. We genuine globalists moreover get our news from the Wall Street Journal and The Times of London. We eat finer food. And if our elites disappoint us, we don’t childishly hate elitism per se. No, we like elites. We miss the William F Buckley’s of better times when conservatism was classy and cool, and it was fun. And we’re grateful that George Will and Thomas Sowell are still with us. Normal conservatives love the law most of all.
What makes the Anglosphere, and the liberalism that began under the auspices of the European enlightenment, superior to the whole world is our tradition of liberty, embodied in English common law and our founding documents. In the West we are a rights-bearing people, and we believe in applying the law equally to all individuals who enjoy its protection by right. Indeed the rule of law is the singular glory of modernity, where men are accountable to the law, and no one, no king, no priest, no billionaire, no AOC or Elon Musk or anybody is above it.
On the Neoliberal Standard I always proceed from the standpoint that fairness and also an ethos of being fair, and conducting oneself fairly, is of the supremest value and importance. So I hope that in my judgment I endeavor to be fair and impartial. I may not always be right. And I might make some mistakes. I am particularly bad with facts and numbers and dates, for example. But I hope that at least I am being fair to you and giving you my honest opinion. I don’t want your money. Well it would be nice. But really I would write anyway. And I am not trying to alter your consciousness like MSNBC or Tucker Carlson.
I can be bombastic. And I can be polemical. I like to use hyperbole and make ironic remarks to prosecute a line of argument, but I hope I am never catering to anything. I hope I never pander. There are two and only two political systems known to man that I consider worth defending, democracy and capitalism. And in seeking to conserve the conditions that maximize their utility, one would find much of what I say to align with the center-right. However, if the Neoliberal Standard is ideological it is not because I am a partisan. I have no loyalty to the Republican or Conservative parties. In America I am not a registered Republican. And if the Democratic or Labor party suddenly became a fountain gushing the Austrian school of economics and interventionist foreign policy, I would be all in. Even as I consider myself right of center, I find some outlets and individuals on the center-left very much worth reading and following, like the Financial Times, or the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampbell. There is Bloomberg’s Brooke Sutherland and the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf whom I read regularly, even being a bit more rightwing than they are. And frequently you may notice, where I part ways with the centrist Economist and the center-left Financial Times in my non-interventionist conviction on climate change, I take contention with my fellow conservatives in National Review on abortion, for example.
I am a neoliberal which if I’m using the word correctly, makes me neither too conservative nor too liberal. Perhaps you could say I’m liberal in my conservatism and conservative in my liberalism. And I share the traditional preoccupations and anxieties of the pioneers of neoliberal thought in the Austrian vein, which makes my outlook relatively libertarian. That is to say I do worry about world government, I have contempt for the UN the IMF and every international institution except for the WTO which is the only one that works. I am at least dubious about the merits and legitimacy of the EU. I worry about climate policy destroying the global economy and giving the government massive unconstitutional powers to meddle in our lives for the planet’s sake or the bureaucracies’. Similarly I am increasingly concerned about governments using AI for mass surveillance and social control. And it makes me livid that governments have sought to intervene in the information sphere to determine our behavior. When courts found that the Biden administration coercively pressured social media companies to censor and police misinformation, I was outraged. Central bank policy and the increasing powers of the Federal Reserve also keep me up at night. The prospect of a Central Bank Digital Currency of course repulses me. Debt also horrifies me.
This doesn’t mean I share every stereotypically neoliberal conviction from the 1990s or 2000s. From the idea that trade with China would make it a democracy, or that bringing democracy to the Middle East would solve all its problems, I understand where some of the contempt for neoliberalism comes from. However, I do defend the Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan. I also think Bill Clinton’s decision to normalize trade with China was a good idea at the time. Nevertheless the egalitarian powers of unfettered capitalism and the merits of democracy-promotion, I concede, were oversold. My neoliberalism is distinct from that of the internationalist imagination though. If I’m a neoliberal, then it’s because I think integrating market economies is not ideal, but only better than fragmenting or dis-integrating them with tariffs and quotas, though sanctions and export controls against Russia or China, in many cases, are warranted. And I believe not that we could impose democracy on the Arab world, however Saddam Hussein had to be overthrown for defensive reasons, much as the Islamic Republic of Iran needs to be today.
But this all needs no explaining, and I hate long addresses expounding a publication’s creed to readers who must already have a good idea of it. So let me stop there. Thank you. I hope you will stay with me and continue to support my defense of the unipolar neoliberal status quo, from the Berlin Wall to the present. Here’s to not being crazy or stupid. Here’s to all things normal.
Here’s to willing the end of history.
— Jay
I enjoy your posts Jay and I say that as a paid up member of British Labour Party (joined up to make sure Corbyn didn't get in again!)