The Strange Death Of Neoliberalism, Which Isn’t All That Strange

Neoliberals often have an air of perpetual youthfulness about them, but they are now in their 40s, 50s and even their 60s, and a younger generation of bloggers set off a backlash. If you surf the Web these days, for example, you find that a horde of thousands have declared war on the Time magazine columnist Joe Klein. ~David Brooks

That does have something to do with a generational shift from (failed) neoliberalism to a more combative progressivism.  It also has a lot to do with Joe Klein writing and saying any number of phenomenally foolish things about all subjects that draw the ire of all self-respecting bloggers everywhere.  In this sense, the war against Joe Klein is simply a war of relatively more insightful, interesting people against a dreary consensus journalist.  It is like what would happen if conservative bloggers declared war on David Brooks. 

More representative of the neoliberal/progressive fight would have to be the short-lived spitting contest between the Kossacks and The New Republic.  Even though Lieberman won the election, TNR pretty much lost the contest for the loyalty of Democrats, as its downwardly spiraling circulation and recent change in management show.  A generation gap doesn’t entirely explain the collapse of neoliberalism.  No less than neoconservatives, neoliberals have been wrong, either morally or practically or both, about every major question of the last fifteen years, and it is this serial wrongness and Democratic political weakness and failure that have pushed neoliberalism towards extinction.