Politically, that may have been the right tactic, although I’d argue the Gingrich Revolution suggests otherwise. But substantively, it didn’t move the country very far forward at all. Its lasting legacy will be the elevation of counterintuitive argumentation and sardonic detachment in the press corps, but that’s a rather slight mark for a political ideology to make. ~Ezra Klein

It seems hard to disagree with Ezra Klein’s assessment of neoliberalism’s failure, which it certainly was from a progressive perspective.  If I were concerned about most of the things that progressives are, I would have to regard the age of neoliberalism as a long, unpleasant period of liberal collaboration in their own relative marginalisation.  But even from the more narrow perspective of advancing Democratic political fortunes, which I believe was always a central part of its rationale (by making liberalism more pragmatic and responsive to the voters the “paleoliberalism” of earlier decades had alienated), it is hard to see how it was not a colossal failure. 

The problem with the Democratic Party model was not so much its focus on interest group politics, but its increasing lack of interest in considering white ethnic working and middle-class voters to be important interest groups worth serving and its increasing tolerance for culturally radical views that these voters were never going to accept.  The era of neoliberalism was the era of general Republican political ascendancy across the nation (to which Clinton’s two terms were actually something of the odd exception).  With the collapse of the GOP’s power, neoliberalism stands not only discredited with respect to the policy views that it included but also stands discredited as the persuasion that was going to make the Democratic Party competitive again. 

Democrats became competitive again (admittedly in what was already going to be a very bad year for Republicans) when they stopped listening to the neoliberals in certain ways and tapped into opposition to the war, turned to economic populism and mobilised abiding popular resentments against the corporate and economic regime favoured by Red Republicans and New Democrats alike.  They also developed a certain flexibility that had been entirely lacking in previous years, so that they could run somewhat more conservative candidates in conservative districts, demonstrating some understanding of what it would take to become a fully national party once again. 

The one area where neoliberals have had a salutary effect on the Democratic Party is in their awareness of the cultural alienation of Middle America from the “values” of “Blue America.”  Unfortunately, even when a Harold Ford understands this and makes his credentials as a cultural conservative somewhat believable, he seems to think that reflexive militarism and support for the warfare state at home are necessary parts of the same cultural conservative package.  Jim Webb, meanwhile, would appear to bridge at least some part of this cultural divide without feeling obliged to kneel before either corporations or the foreign policy establishment.  For the neoliberals, there seems to have been a belief that there needed to be concessions in all three areas for their ideas to be politically viable.  They were deeply mistaken, and in their collaboration on the neoconservatives’ preferred policies on trade and foreign policy they have shown themselves to be not simply politically useless but also fundamentally wrong on the major policy questions of the day.