>>154833This - and my personal view emphasizes "current state." To say that liberalism was ever without hypocrisy or (severe!) flaws would be wrong, but at least the classical liberals tended to think like materialists as far as I can tell. At the foundation of the United States, corporate law was much stricter than it is today, and there seems to have been an understanding that accumulation of private property and power would act in ways similar to states and be tyrannical if unchecked.
From this perspective, neoliberalism is an entirely revisionist project, with the aim being to remove organs of the state from any modicum of democratic accountability and raid the state for resources. The justification for doing so, the excuse, is based on (shitty) idealism and ahistorical dogmas; "the profit motive is always the best," "only the political government can be oppressive and nothing else counts as a state," "checks on monopolistic power are illiberal," "accumulation and monopoly over land and fixed natural resources is just a right." In accordance, the first American postmaster general was Benjamin Franklin, a political philosopher
(among other things, many bad, some good, but you can't deny he was intelligent and had an interest in running a functioning state), and the Post Office Department was run as a tax-funded public service. The current postmaster general is a corporate raider from a private postal company bent on closing down many post offices and wrecking it, and the current USPS is required to rely primarily on financing from sales, and it is constantly subjected to disingenuous scrutiny because running a public service effectively is not actually that profitable.
It's very difficult to look at the events of the neoliberal era and not conclude that the philosophy behind neoliberal privatization dogma is precisely the same philosophy which drove the Nazis to invent privatization, repackaged as a form of "liberalism" because Americans find that more palatable than the overtly totalitarian project of the Nazis, which appealed to Germans then and still does to this day.