Even as it was attacked from the left, however, liberalism was, to paraphrase British cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall (1978), moving to the right. As Irving Kristol famously quipped in the late 1960s, a neoconservative was merely a liberal who had been “mugged by reality.” The image of a mugging invoked the specter of black street crime, the alleged soft tolerance of “liberal” inclusion, and rage at the perception that the U.S. had lost its moral claim to be the world’s exemplary liberal-democracy in the wake of the Vietnam War. It is clear that since the 1970s another renovation of liberalism—often arrayed under the moniker “neoliberalism”—has been underway and gaining momentum. A hybrid (like all forms of liberalism), neoliberalism resurrects “pre-Keynesian” assumptions that free markets automatically generate civic order and economic prosperity, even while it gradually eviscerates democratic norms of political participation by an informed citizenry, re-imagining both individuals and groups as primarily “entrepreneurial actors” (W. Brown 2003, 5).

This is an excerpt from Nikhil Pal Singh’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 144).