Why YSK: I’ve noticed in recent years more people using “neoliberal” to mean “Democrat/Labor/Social Democrat politicians I don’t like”. This confusion arises from the different meanings “liberal” has in American politics and further muddies the waters.
Neoliberalism came to the fore during the 80’s under Reagan and Thatcher and have continued mostly uninterrupted since. Clinton, both Bushs, Obama, Blair, Brown, Cameron, Johnson, and many other world leaders and national parties support neoliberal policies, despite their nominal opposition to one another at the ballot box.
It is important that people understand how neoliberalism has reshaped the world economy in the past four decades, especially people who are too young to remember what things were like before. Deregulation and privatization were touted as cost-saving measures, but the practical effect for most people is that many aspects of our lives are now run by corporations who (by law!) put profits above all else. Neoliberalism has hollowed out national economies by allowing the offshoring of general labor jobs from developed countries.
In the 80’s and 90’s there was an “anti-globalization” movement of the left that sought to oppose these changes. The consequences they warned of have come to pass. Sadly, most organized opposition to neoliberal policies these days comes from the right. Both Trump and the Brexit campaign were premised on reinvigorating national economies. Naturally, both failed, in part because they had no cohesive plan or understanding that they were going against 40 years of precedent.
So, yes, establishment Democrats are neoliberals, but so are most Republicans.
Turning the other way while migrants drown in the Mediterranean isn’t “Identity Politics” and the insistence on cultural homogenization and labeling plurinationalism “Identity Politics” is very typical of European right-wing social ideology that pervades the parties in power.
Now you’re just using an “appeal to emotion” falacy.
A person who genuinelly wants to help others LOGICALLY starts by the ones most in need, and those are mainly those living in horrible conditions in refugee camps, not those who have a few thousand dollars to pay a trafficker.
Your barelly disguised neoliberal take on Equality with “oh so obvious” late XXth century marketing shaped appeals to emotion and eternaly repeated unthinking slogans which are fashionable within certain tribes (and hence social tokens of group membership amongst that crowd, who really are just in it for the sweet social ego-stroking) isn’t left-wing, it isn’t even a genuine want to do good by others, since it doesn’t obbey even the basic logic of “to do the most good you start by those in most need” something which would force looking at wealth inequality.
The internal-inconsistencies needed to exclude wealth inequality from that bundle of easilly parroted marketing slogans that portrays to be a political theory that fights Equality are so large, that even the idea that help should be allocated by need not by “insert easilly visibly characteristice people were born with” is seen as a threat.