I wonder how many times I have looked up the word “farrago.” Just to “make sure,” you know. I guess I feel it should mean something more specific than my dictionary’s definition of “confused mixture.”

Much the same can be said about the word “neoliberal.” From writer to writer, news reader to teacher to journo to pol, the word apparently means many different things: I’ve been both accused of — and praised for — “being” a neoliberal. But so have anarchists I’ve known. So has Hillary Clinton.

What’s going on here?

In the March issue of Reason, Jesse Walker explains the predicament and its history. “It’s the End of the Neoliberal Era, and We Still Don’t Know What Neoliberalism Is,” captures the problem nicely.

The ultra-condensed take-away from this essay is: the word started out as an attempt between the first and second world wars to rescue some of the flavor of liberalism without all that rigorous laissez faire stuff. In other words, the term meant a market-friendly statist who opposed dictatorship and too much government. Pretty much what “liberal” meant in America, until all the Big Spenders and Over-Regulators turned it into a pinkish-hued cover for ”social democracy.” Now we just call them progressives.

But by the time Ronald Reagan got into office razzing “the liberals,” neoliberalism meant something else. And . . . leftists, aghast that Chile’s dictator General Pinochet had consulted with some free market economists (taking only some of their advice), began calling libertarians neoliberals, and . . . talk about farrago!

But it’s a farrago for our time. The upshot of Jesse Walker’s essay is that neoliberal may not mean anything specific, but it is a good specifier of the age now ending, the result of many competing paradigms and the compromises of diverse, on-the-make interest groups.

What a confused mixture.

twv