Charles
........ Wojtek S
Shane: " The "public" doesn't support neoliberalim: how many people do you think have ever even heard, let alone understood the word?"
[WS:] That does not mean anything. They may not know the moniker, but they support key elements of it, like market, competition, individualism, business model, priority of private over public, etc. All those have tremendous popular appeal. People tend think of the economy as if it were a small mom-and-pop business, and this is a Trojan horse that smuggles in all the neoliberal imagery listed above.
The election results may be only a rough indicator of popular sentiments, but the fact that any party that is fundamentally opposed to neo-liberal ideas in favor of socialist or communist ones gets popular support in single digits is telling volumes.
Neoliberalism is what christianity was in the middle ages - people might have not been well versed in in intricacies of medieval theology, but they wholesale accepted the core belief system in god, jesus, heaven and all that nonsense. Likewise, they wholesale accept the core belief system associated with market economy.
The belief that the business class hegemony has been achieved solely by brainwashing through the corporate media strikes me as populist wishful thinking, to say the least. -- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."