"For me the distinction is that "left neoliberals" are people who don't understand themselves as neoliberals. They think that their commitments to anti-racism, to anti-sexism, to anti-homophobia constitute a critique of neoliberalism. But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things."
Moreover:
"it's hard to find any political movement that's really against neoliberalism today, the closest I can come is the Tea Party. The Tea Party represents in my view, not actually a serious, because it's so inchoate and it's so in a certain sense diluted, but nonetheless a real reaction against neoliberalism that is not simply a reaction against neoliberalism from the old racist Right." <http://jacobinmag.com/archive/issue1/wbm.html>
That's his argument. Neoliberalism arose "as a kind of commitment precisely to" gender, racial and sexual equality, and the Tea Party is thereby a "real reaction against neoliberalism".
And surely, even supposing his argument was just as you have described it - let's say that in the above argument he lets his contrarianism get ahead of him and offers some hostages to fortune on account of it - it would be fallacious. Neoliberalism's moral individualism is not a way of being anti-racist, anti-sexist or anti-homophobic, but rather a way of making racism, sexism and gay oppression invisible. It is not a way of co-opting demands for equality but rather of rendering them unintelligible. Demands for equality only make sense in light of structural oppression, but when its effects are interpreted as being merely the outcome of individual transactions in a free market, then such effects are deemed either random or meritocratic - hence no injustice has taken place, thus no demand for equality is called for. What neoliberalism does permit is a critique of individual prejudices, and if WBM's point was that neoliberalism disarms the proper assault on structural injustice toward African Americans, for example, he would be on point. As it is, he maintains that under neoliberalism it would be entirely possible to achieve racial/gender/sexual equality without it fundamentally affecting the class structure, which is bonkers.
-- *Richard Seymour*
Writer, blogger and PhD candidate
Email: leninstombblog at googlemail.com
Website: http://www.leninology.blogspot.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/leninology
Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Seymour_(writer)
Book 1: http://www.versobooks.com/books/307-the-liberal-defence-of-murder
Book 2: http://www.zero-books.net/obookssite/book/detail/1107/The-Meaning-of-David-Cameron