Socialism Today as an Irrational/Flawed Backlash to Neo-Liberalism
Socialism is returning as a mood before it returns as a programme. Young voters hear "healthcare," "housing," "the billionaires," and reach for a word their grandparents treated as a warning label. The establishment treats this as a sudden fever. It is closer to an allergic reaction. For forty years the people who ran the West called a rigged, inflationary, bailout economy "the market." When the public finally hated the product, it hated the name on the tin. That is the trick neoliberalism performed, and it is why socialism now sounds, to millions who have never read Marx, like the only other shop on the street. Utterly mistaken of course.
The official story is tidy. After the 1970s, oil shocks, collapsing Bretton Woods, prices rising while output sat still, Keynesianism looked like a busted religion. Milton Friedman talked in complete sentences. Carter deregulated trucks and planes. Reagan and Thatcher spoke of enterprise, as did Hawke and Paul Keating. A "Washington consensus" supposedly restored capitalism after the Progressive and New Deal enlargements of the state. Both the salesmen and their enemies accepted the advertisement. One side said freedom had been unleashed. The other said the poor had been thrown to wolves. Neither described the globalist machine that was actually built.
What was built was not laissez-faire. Much of the famous deregulation was already law before Reagan took the oath and merely phased in on his watch. Tax cuts arrived with tax rises and "closed loopholes." Spending grew. The warfare state did not go home. The one Friedmanite idea the political class embraced with real appetite was the one that gave it more power, not less: a fiat central bank that should print, steer credit, and treat falling asset prices as an emergency. Monetarism, in office, became a theory of why the Federal Reserve must never allow a proper bust. Wall Street stopped being one place among many to put savings and became the scoreboard of the realm. Easy money on the way up, rescue on the way down: that is not a discovery of savers. It is industrial policy for people who already own claims on the future.
Call that capitalism often enough and you teach the next generation a false diagram. On one side, "the market," meaning asset prices, mega-firms that live on cheap credit and procurement, and a state that socialises losses. On the other side, "socialism," meaning the government should do still more, only this time for us. The second box is a communist disaster. Politicising prices, production and medicine does not humanise them. It turns them into a fight over a shrinking pile, with the loudest faction holding the pen. But the first box was never the market its defenders advertised. A teenager paying rent in a city inflated by credit, watching a contractor class harvest wars and a bank class harvest the aftermath, is not having a seminar on comparative economic systems. He is looking at a casino whose rules were written in Washington, London and Canberra, and calling the casino "capitalism" because that is the word on the neon.
Cronyism is older than Friedman. Progressive-era regulation was already, in large part, a way for connected firms to freeze out rivals under moral language. Crises then became the excuse to enlarge the same apparatus. Neoliberalism did not dismantle that inheritance. It refinanced it. Financialisation let the old transfers run hotter. When inflation returned in the 2020s, the public was told to blame greed, supply chains, or Vladimir Putin, anything but a decade of manufactured money chasing a limited set of houses, degrees and equities. Socialists arrived with a simpler story: the system is theft, therefore the state should steal in the opposite direction. The story works because the system really does transfer. It fails because it misnames the thief.
A genuine market is not a central bank putting a floor under speculators. It is prices that are allowed to fall, firms that are allowed to die, and no holy sector with a permanent call on the taxpayer. That order is harsh in the correction and humane in the recovery. The neoliberal order is kind to balance sheets in the boom and brutal to wages when the boom's bill comes due. People who cannot buy a house are then instructed to celebrate the index. After enough years of that lecture, "democratic socialism" sounds like empathy because the alternative was sold as nature.
The backlash will not stay polite. Once capitalism has been defined as whatever the connected extract, every new extraction becomes an advert for planning. Housing scarcity becomes a case for public developers. Medical prices become a case for single payer. Bank profits become a case for nationalising credit. Each proposal treats the distortion as proof that exchange itself is the crime. The correct inference is the opposite. If cheap money and implicit guarantees pumped assets beyond wages, the answer is to stop the pump, not to appoint a committee to allocate the foam.
Establishments that spent a generation wrapping intervention in market talk have no right to look shocked when the young unwrap the package and find the state. They taught the vocabulary. Socialism is the revenge of a mislabelled economy, a bad diagnosis following a false brand. The way out is not a larger brand. It is to stop calling privilege a market, stop calling bailouts discipline, and stop expecting people fleeced by the hybrid to genuflect to the name. Until that happens, the other shop will stay open, and it will keep selling the same poison under a kinder false sign, the contradictory term, "democratic socialism."
https://mises.org/mises-wire/how-neoliberals-fueled-rise-socialism
Good video linked here showing what a socialist future would really give:
https://www.joannenova.com.au/2026/08/how-to-win-the-culture-war-show-them-the-future-they-think-they-want/
