this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Neoliberal
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Free trade, open borders, taco trucks on every corner. Latest discussion thread: April 2024 **We in m/Neoliberal support:** - Free trade and competitive markets
- Immigration
- YIMBYism – ‘yes in my backyard’-ism
- Carbon taxes
- Internationalism and supranational governance – e.g. the EU, UN, NATO, IMF
- LGBTQ+ rights
- Democracy, human rights, civil liberties and due process Neoliberals can be found in many political parties and we are not dogmatic supporters of specific parties. But we tend to find ourselves agreeing more often with parties that espouse liberal values, internationalism and centrist economics, such as the Democrats in the US, Liberal Democrats in the UK, FDP in Germany, Renaissance/MoDem in France, the Liberal Party in Canada, and so on. **Further reading** - I’m a neoliberal. Maybe you are too.
- The neoliberal mind
- Neo-liberalism and its prospects
- Neoliberalism: the genesis of a political swear word **News sources** Here are some suggested news sources that we like and tend to find reliable. Please note that posts and threads are not at all limited to these sources! - The Economist https://www.economist.com/
- Financial Times https://www.ft.com/
- The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/
- New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/
- The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/world/
- The New European https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/
- Vox https://www.vox.com/
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As an outsider, the combination of this and the Republicans' contrived attempt to impeach Biden really serve to illustrate the knife-edge on which the US political system seems to have been built.
In countries that use a parliamentary system, the ability to get a budget through parliament is pretty much synonymous with executive power - a government that can't pass its budget resigns and then either somebody else attempts to form a government or, failing that, new elections are held. The US however operates a presidential system but leaves the budget to its parliament. That's an arrangement that can only be sustainable if the parliament is either under the control of politicians who are aligned with the president's agenda, or if there is a political culture and set of norms that values cooperation and the national interest over partisanship.
It's impressive that the US system has lasted as long as it has, but it's abundantly clear that the Republicans in Congress are no longer a party that can cooperate with their opponents in the national interest - those norms no longer exist, and they seem not to have existed for some time now. In such circumstances, I don't see how a presidential system can be sustainable in the long-term.
It truly is a deeply flawed system.
The problems, I think, start with the fact the entire thing was built on compromises with the slave states in the South who basically wanted a guarantee they could veto something they didn’t like - even if they didn’t have a majority.
How the US Founding Fathers failed to consider this type of extreme partisanship would grind the US to a halt is also somewhat baffling. George Washington even warned of the dangers of political parties in his farewell address, and he was clearly aware that partisanship would be a huge issue. Yet the system they put in place is poorly equipped to deal with it.
It really feels like almost everything wrong with the system stems from those concessions made at the nation’s founding. But I don’t see how any changes will be made. A parliamentary system would be much better, especially from a budget perspective.