The social market economy label was emptied of its original neoliberal meaning

Evidence

On the one hand, this concept can be assessed as a successful local implementation strategy for the transplantation of ordoliberal ideas into the West German postwar society of the 1950s. PR campaigns were successfully employed, in much the same way that one would sell soap or cars, to overcome the widespread skepticism of the West German people toward a market-oriented order of society. … Since the trade unions and the Social Democratic Party learned to use the concept in the same opportunistic way as the ordoliberals, persuading governments to expand the welfare state under continuous reference to the social market economy, the model increasingly lost its original neoliberal content. Thus, the social market economy as a programmatic concept was gradually afflicted with dissolution, first and foremost because of the evolutionary structure and flexibility inherent in its own argument. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 558

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the corruption/cooptation of other ideological labels by their opponents; connects to later accounts of how ‘neoliberalism’ itself became a contested term. — connects to: The labels liberal, capitalist and socialist were already incoherent by 1945 — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 34; Labels like platform capitalism obscure today’s actual systemic transformation. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 457; The social market economy originated inside the neoliberal family, not against it — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 498 (+5 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: how PR and label-marketing works when selling an ideology, and how adoption by opponents hollows out a brand.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism is a caricature of liberalism reduced to a theory of economic organization #corroborates (0.78) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2121
• Neoliberalism lacks a stable meaning or historically specific constituency #corroborates (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 17
• Feminist ideals were resignified to serve neoliberal market individualism #corroborates (0.72)