Sorry about the delay, while I like long ping times for thoughtful responses, this was beyond my P99 boundary.

The failure of the GOP to provide a POTUS candidate in 2016 that wasn't a flaming nutjob will lead to all sorts of uniparty failures across the nation. Having an orderly rotation of power helps clean out & potentially prosectute the bits of corruption that burrow in over time. I would actually speculate that a lot of the failure modes at play in government is downstream of uniparty government (there's a book "The Big Sort" which talks about how the USA has been doing assortive sorting and effectively moving from purple zones to blue/red zones): if we do a fishbone diagram of root causes, I expect it to be a major contributor. Of course there are loops of causation etc here.

The time-freezing is probably going to ease up as the Hippies in the Haight generation dies off: the rose tinted lenses are, I reckon, driving a lot of the situation in SF & CA, specifically.

Let me try to characterize what I mean by neoliberalism.

(1) Neoliberalism has a slangy meaning and a technical meaning. There's... some... overlap between those two. Let me dump Britannica's definition as, presumably, it's been vetted by economicists or other experts.

(2) Neoliberalism, ideology and policy model that emphasizes the value of free market competition. Although there is considerable debate as to the defining features of neoliberal thought and practice, it is most commonly associated with laissez-faire economics. In particular, neoliberalism is often characterized in terms of its belief in sustained economic growth as the means to achieve human progress, its confidence in free markets as the most-efficient allocation of resources, its emphasis on minimal state intervention in economic and social affairs, and its commitment to the freedom of trade and capital.

-- https://www.britannica.com/topic/neoliberalism

(3) One example of the neoliberal project is the mythic version of Silicon Valley: a free market with unconstrained innovation and minimal regulation (reality markedly differs, naturally, but the vision, the ideal is of more importance, since perception drives politics).

(4) That noted radical leftist publication[], the Financial Times, has a fascinating letter by the editorial board on April 3..

https://www.ft.com/content/7eff769a-74dd-11ea-95fe-fcd274e92... - I'm going to share a quote.

> Radical reforms — reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades — will need to be put on the table.

And the article goes on to describe the key reversals described, which would be the in practice* neoliberal policies. The FT has a pretty stringent content lock, so I doubt I can get that specific article shared publicly.

(5) One consequence of minimum regulation / high individuality is a concentration of power as the game is iterated over a number of years. So out of the gate, things are likely to be good for most, but down the road, inequality rises as the early winners force the playing field to let them keep winning. I speculate that the dominance of FAANG and their ability to buy out competitors is a good case study here.

Another economic theory is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism, which is, roughly, similar to neoliberalism, but undergirded by the notion of welfare and regulation to manage social needs.

[] it's a business newspaper, comparable to The Economist and the WSJ, focused primarily on serving the investment community. It's extremely not leftist. The FT article surprised me a great deal. IMO it would be like the WSJ editorial board publicly suggesting that AOC is good, actually, and patriotic Americans should join the Democratic Socialists.

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Circling back to my initial starting point: the undergirding of the second half of the 20th C political systems are an unhealthy regard for individuality in contrast to the community. That's one reason why, for instance, Utah can jump in strange ways to the rest of the conservative states. The LDS church places a premium on community. In the liberal areas, it often means that they have no mental tools to address homelessness appropriately, because proper addressing demands a wide-scale cooperation, and on the West Coast, balkanization & fragmentation of many towns/cities, counties, and states: proper solutions involve a wide agreement on housing, mental health, policing, job reentry, early career job support. Each of those are expensive, and the burdens fall unequally. Proper management is going to involve not* handing off contracts to someone's favorite non-profit or private company. Having an ideology that prioritizes "we can't do a government thing because Freedom Demands Private Markets" is going to cripple the motion forward on these topics. I live in Seattle, it's pretty painful seeing the deadlock in progress with homelessness. Millions sunk into programs paying off non-profits, no apparent improvement, no change beyond the local minima(Any meaningful change at this point would be good to see - it would characterize the local ideation as non-stagnant, actually capable of learning from failure....).

My point is the community needs to own - via our government that we choose - things that of broad interest, as well as legally reserve to the community the right to find that new topics are of broad public interest, and to dismiss the ideology that demands private companies and outsourcing.