Capitalism is pay for play. Literally, if you have enough money to invest in capital, you don’t have to work and should continue getting wealthier by already having money. Capitalism and markets are not synonymous.

Liberalism and capitalism is pro-oligarchy. By having money and capital, you get to decide how labor is allocated, what society produces, and the ability to discipline the populace through capital strikes, if not much more direct methods like lobbying.

Liberalism is not anti-oligarch, they would just prefer the paperwork is filled out properly, so it is technically lobbying and not bribery. Elon Musk was an oligarch LONG BEFORE DOGE, and liberals loved him before he was vocally pro-Trump. Liberals loved him because he became the wealthiest man on earth by his “innovation”, and only hated him, not because of his weird unhinged bullshit which existed long before, but only after that unhinged weirdness was pro-Trump.

Liberalism is not fully mutually exclusive with regulation, but liberal regulation is to try to maintain capitalist markets against their own failures. Yes, they can be willing to engage in some regulation to try to maximize future markets and capitalism. But they are pro-oligarch and pro-inequality, liberals are trying to maintain it long-term even if the most extreme excesses of oligarchs must be reigned in for the short term.

But most importantly, Oligarchy and monopolies aren’t an “upset” or disruption of markets, but the obvious and natural outcome. Profits are optimized by consolidation and removing competition. And even if competition is maintained, once one company wins the competition there is monopoly, and the fact that most capital intensive industries have a natural barrier to entry (it would take billions of dollars of venture capital to enter and be a very weak competitor with the incumbent) means that markets have oligarchy and monopoly as their natural and necessary outcome.

A homeless guy can’t just immediately become a billionaire by saying that there should be a competitor of genetic testing with 23andMe.

“Reality has a left-wing bias”

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No, both are pretty neolib. Even though Carter was the first Democrat neoliberal, Bill Clinton made neoliberalism unquestionable bipartisan orthodoxy post-Reagan, and killed any remnants of New Dealers in the Democratic party.

They’re free-marketeers, if it is useful as branding, they’ll do it. If it is not, they are fine with everyone in control being white men.

How dare you say air is a gas? this table is air and this water is air! You can’t keep to this unreasonable purity politics by saying that my laptop isn’t just solid air! Saying my desk can’t be water is “black and white thinking”.

No, it is just that both Reps and Dems are so thoroughly neoliberal that partisan horse-race observers can’t recognize the water that they swim in. Like fish getting angry because everyone keeps talking about this “water” they are swimming in.

It mostly means a dedication to deregulation and free markets. More specifically, private-public partnerships. That is the difference between them and Libertarians or Anarcho-Capitalists, since Neoliberals see that the government needs to provide things like courts, military, police, etc. but want to insert private companies to provide government services (e.g. in WW2, soldiers cleaned and laundered the military’s uniforms internally, now a private company will do the laundry for a military base at a 50% markup).

As all political ideology, in its original formulation, Neoliberalism was a deviation from liberalism, in the Vienna Circle, by its rejection of “political liberalism”. It didn’t believe in formal freedom, democracy, equality, etc. Real freedom is the freedom to buy and sell on an unregulated market, real democracy is the ability to vote with your wallet, and real equality is the lack of regulations protecting one group from another. This is why neoliberals of the 1920s and 30s were pro-fascist, since the fascists were so dedicated to privatization and repressing socialists and communists. Thus preserving the freedom of the market, even if later neoliberals want to walk that back.

Liberals are for oligarchy. How can you be anti-oligarchy if you are pro-capitalism and pro-markets?

Weird how the left is crushed and weak when the entirety of the US 20th and 21st century is crushing anti-oligarchy (a.k.a left) forces. Maybe it isn’t a failure of the goal, but that willing yourself into power isn’t going to magically make it happen.

Classical Western Liberalism created this dysfunctional government and is defending and trying to maintain it. The entire reason there is an opening for fascism is that the current liberal government is so dysfunctional and failing. And since both parties are anti-left, the only real option for opposing the failures of the status quo is joining the MAGA-fascist right. This is a repeat of the 1920s, showing how Liberalism enables Fascism.

Wait, when was there anti-fascist options for control of America? Was one of the two major parties anti-genocide, or opposed to putting minorities in concentration camps without due process? I think that you just want lower tariffs, so that your Nintendo is cheaper.

Wow, Trump really is undermining US foreign policy. Damn, Trump really wants to go out of the way to finally destroy Nixon’s legacy.