Somebody: Yeah. It's easy to invest yourself in the narrative that we're living in a neo-liberal era, in which technocratic elites are waging class warfare against the proletariat, but this can obscure more than it clarifies.
I mean, we've just had a pretty singificant expansion of Medicaid especially for single individuals, subsidies for the uninsured to get health insurance, we've had Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage for seniors, SCHIP for low-income children... at what point can we admit that the narrative that neo-liberals are steadily dismantling the welfare state is a little simplistic? In the end, we've gotten an expansion of some entitlements, the rollback of others like welfare, and a kind of stasis for the rest, including social security. And overall, the government's role in the economy in terms of spending percent of GDP has remained about the same. Is this what a return to the 19th century is supposed to look like?
The great success of neo-liberalism will probably be seen in the long-run to have been merely to slow the growth of the welfare state.
Given that the working class has been quiescent for so long, and that socialism has been liquidated worldwide, it's interesting that social democracy, in fact if not in name, is still viable.