Neoliberal Totalitarianism

The global hegemony of the neoliberal worldview—privatization, deregulation, financialization, and the individual as a market actor—to the point where it is the unchallengeable, "common sense" backdrop of all political and social life. There is no alternative (TINA). All institutions, from schools to hospitals, are remade in the image of the market. Resistance is framed as irrational, inefficient, or nostalgic. The totalitarianism is economic: your value is your market value, and your life is a portfolio to be optimized.

Example: "Neoliberal totalitarianism is when your public university stops being a place of learning and becomes a 'student customer service center' selling 'credential packages.' When your local hospital's priority isn't health, but 'patient throughput efficiency.' When you're told to solve climate change not by regulation, but by 'voting with your dollar' for green products. The market isn't a tool; it's the only permitted reality."

by AbzuInExile February 1, 2026

Neoliberal Orwellianism

The linguistic and managerial toolkit of neoliberalism: calling citizens "customers" or "stakeholders," recasting public goods as "investment opportunities," and framing massive inequality as "talent retention." It uses the language of freedom, choice, and efficiency to justify the consolidation of power and wealth, making exploitation sound like empowerment and extraction sound like growth.

Example: "The corporate memo was pure Neoliberal Orwellianism: 'We're empowering our associates with a dynamic career transition opportunity (mass layoffs) to streamline our talent ecosystem (cut costs) and enhance shareholder value (boost stock price). Your severance is an investment in your future journey (you're on your own).' It translated human devastation into the sterile, positive-sounding jargon of a business school case study."

by AbzuInExile February 1, 2026

Neoliberal Campism

A specific form of Liberal Campism centered on defense of the neoliberal order—the post-1980s consensus of deregulation, privatization, free trade, austerity, and market fundamentalism. Neoliberal Campism describes those who align not just with Western powers but specifically with the economic architecture those powers have built: the WTO, IMF, World Bank, free trade agreements, structural adjustment programs, and the global regime of capital mobility. They defend neoliberalism not as one economic policy among others but as the natural, inevitable, and only reasonable way to organize economies—and they defend the institutions that enforce it against any challenge, whether from the left (protectionism) or the right (nationalism). Neoliberal Campism is the camp of the Davos set, the economics departments, the policy consensus that presents itself as beyond ideology.

Example: "He'd criticize any policy that interfered with 'free markets'—except when Western powers imposed 'free trade' by force, which was always 'helping them develop.' Pure Neoliberal Campism: the market is sacred, and the West is its prophet."

by Dumu The Void March 14, 2026

Neoliberal Orthodoxy

The established, institutionalized set of beliefs that define mainstream neoliberal thought—the often-unexamined assumptions about markets, competition, privatization, deregulation, and individualism that have dominated policy since the 1980s. Neoliberal orthodoxy includes specific commitments: that markets allocate resources more efficiently than states, that competition drives innovation and quality, that privatization improves services, that deregulation frees entrepreneurship, that individualism should trump collective provision, that growth solves all problems, and that there is no alternative to market-based organization. Like all orthodoxies, it provides a framework for policy thinking, but it functions as ideology—making market-based arrangements seem natural and inevitable, obscuring their failures and harms, and delegitimizing alternatives. Neoliberal orthodoxy determines what policies are considered "reasonable," what economic arrangements are "realistic," and who counts as a "serious" policy thinker versus a naive idealist.

Example: "She suggested that maybe some services are better provided publicly—and was dismissed as wanting to 'return to communism.' Neoliberal orthodoxy doesn't allow questioning of privatization; it's treated as obviously superior rather than contestable."

by Dumu The Void March 17, 2026

r/neoliberal

r/neoliberal is one of the most rational, logical, polite online communities you'll ever find, and as a supporter of free speech it pleases me that Reddit would allow such a beautiful, booming hub of economic discussion, egalitarianism and calls for fostering of free democracy to exist.

Karl Marx: Hey I just read the r/neoliberal sidebar and now I completely regret writing all my evil commie books

by I have abandoned humanity UwU October 15, 2021

r/neoliberal

basically Liberals who hate both reagan and thatcher yet choose to call themselves neoliberals just to piss off both socialists and conservatives thus maintaining quality policy discussions based on academic evidence and consensus among professionals(like scientists, urban planners, economists, doctors etc) instead of bullshit peddled by far-left and far-right. Your "common sense" and historical materialism are not substitutes for empirical evidence.

they mostly believe in the fact that regulated market economies with global free trade, free movement of capital and labor leads to massive reduction in poverty and increase in human welfare and incomes of all groups. some commies think that poverty isn't declining instead the world bank has reduced the poverty line which is again bullshit, you can see poverty rate at different poverty lines here: ourworldindata.org/no-matter-what-global-poverty-line

sometimes r/neoliberal come across as smug technocrats, not that its a bad thing. Singapore is technocracy after all.

Originally shitposting sub for r/badeconomics .

Person 1: Why are people getting so radical nowadays? everyone thinks they have the whole world figured out and they know more than consensus of professionals who worked their whole life in their respective fields.

Person 2: yeah bro, people are getting their policy takes from BreadTube, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, Zizek, Karl Marx and other over-glorified idiots. You should visit r/neoliberal, we only have policy discussions with proper citations of research papers.

Person 1: wow this place is kinda nice, I too love the global poor now.

by gigachad economist February 15, 2022

Neo-Liberal

Neoliberalism refers to a political-economic philosophy that has had major implications for government policies beginning in the 1970s and increasingly prominent since 1980– that de-emphasizes or rejects government intervention in the economy, focusing instead on structured free-market methods, and fewer restrictions on business operations and that the most important class of rights to expand are those of property enforcement, and of opening nations to entry by multinational corporations. In a broader sense it is used to describe the movement towards using the market to achieve a wide range of social ends previously filled by government.
It is generally hostile to protectionism, social democracy and socialism. It is often at odds with fair trade and other movements that argue that labor rights and social justice should have a greater priority in international relations and economics.

A stark contrast to the earlier entry.

The Democrats in America are nothing more than a bunch of Neo-liberals, and the Republicans are freaking Neo-cons!

by Risky Stuff January 9, 2006