Yes, because black markets and Bronze Age trade really factors into the modern world. You should apologize for having assumed you were dealing with adults.

This presented a problem for disaffected socialists after the collapse of the Soviet Union, both ideologically and politically. They could no longer deny that central planning was a failure, and that their popularity was waning. This led critics of the "neoliberalism" of Reagan and Thatcher, and newly disaffected socialists and social democrats like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerd Schröder, to re-brand as free market progressives. They tried to push it as a global movement. It's odd; though they were explicitly critical of the supply-side economics of Reagan and Thatcher, they are somehow considered in the same pantheon as Reagan and Thatcher, with neoliberalism flowing through them.

Personally, I take a different approach. I would call their agenda and the period since Thatcher and Reagan (and perhaps Bush Sr.) "neosocialism", because it better represents the spirit of its architects and reflects their turn away from the Old Left socialism into what Bill Clinton called the New Democrats, or what Blair called New Labour. This political triangulation flows right into "compassionate conservatism" of Bush Jr. and David Cameron. Tony Blair stood in front of the International Socialist Congress in ‘97 and pleaded for a "modernized social democracy", and this modernized social democracy prevails. — NOS4A2

I don’t think the differences are as significant as you’re making out. The fact is that deregulation, privatization, and globalization continued apace, no matter the rhetoric. Reagan and Thatcher laid the groundwork for an abnegation of political control over the economy, the establishment of a system in which voters are not able to decide on the basic structure of society, capitalism being mostly left to do its thing except when things go wrong.

As others in this discussion have pointed out, echoing Quinn Slobodian and the SEP article I linked to in the OP, neoliberalism is okay with an interventionist state, if it’s interventionist in the right way. This doesn’t make it non-neoliberal unless you take neoliberal to be something like right-libertarianism, which it never was.

To me the term “neosocialism” doesn’t really work unless you’re just negatively fetishizing government, in the popular fashion of the American right; socialism is about common ownership and control, and we don’t have anything like that.

I’ll say a bit more. Although you frame the history differently from the way I do, I think you’ve identified what I’m most interested in, namely progressive neoliberalism, which can be said to have started with Clinton and Blair. Where you see them as a break from neoliberalism, or from Reagan and Thatcher, I see them as a continuation economically—despite the differences you mention—but a break in terms of social attitudes. In other words, they represented the formation of the left wing of neoliberalism, of which identity politics and wokeness are the latest developments on its left wing. (To clarify in case anyone takes this too weakly: I mean that identity politics and wokeness are the politics of the progressive wing of the ruling class of neoliberal capitalism.)

And this might have something to do with postmodernism, as you allude to here:

Philosophically, Michel Foucault’s idea of Biopolitics and “Left Governmentality” are worth checking out. Some say he was flirting with neoliberalism in those lectures. — NOS4A2

I’m trying to pull stuff together. Currently I’m not sure how postmodernism fits, though it’s a common observation that neoliberalism and postmodernism fit together pretty well.

Obama's bailing out of the banks after the 2008 crisis was a conspicuous neo-liberal move. Cornel West described Obama as a 'black mascot of Wall Street.' The point, I guess, is that liberalism seems inescapable.

It's something that might be justified under neoliberalism but it isn't uniquely neoliberal. Keynesianism would justify the same move. I think virtually all modern economic theorists would say you bail out the banks at that point; it's a 1929 type moment. The differences in economic theory apply more to "what do you do after bailing out the banks to prevent doing it again."

Obama wasn't even elected when the main bailout program, TARP, was passed on October 3, 2008 and wouldn't be President for several more months. He has other legislative options after that, but they had to pass Congress. He couldn't veto the bailout and I doubt he could have gotten a bill passed to kick the brace holding up the economy out of place at the exact moment unemployment was skyrocketing and contagion was hitting markets around the globe.

What you say is largely correct. My point is better described by journalist Glenn Greenwald who in 2013 wrote:

...one of the greatest and most shameful failings of the Obama administration: the lack of even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis: a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering.

What Obama justice officials did instead is exactly what they did in the face of high-level Bush era crimes of torture and warrantless eavesdropping: namely, acted to protect the most powerful factions in the society in the face of overwhelming evidence of serious criminality. Indeed, financial elites were not only vested with immunity for their fraud, but thrived as a result of it, even as ordinary Americans continue to suffer the effects of that crisis.

Worst of all, Obama justice officials both shielded and feted these Wall Street oligarchs (who, just by the way, overwhelmingly supported Obama's 2008 presidential campaign) as they simultaneously prosecuted and imprisoned powerless Americans for far more trivial transgressions. As Harvard law professor Larry Lessig put it two weeks ago when expressing anger over the DOJ's persecution of Aaron Swartz: "we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House." (Indeed, as "The Untouchables" put it: while no senior Wall Street executives have been prosecuted, "many small mortgage brokers, loan appraisers and even home buyers" have been).

There's a lot of journalism about Obama's ' business as ususal' neo-liberal presidency along these lines.

Though I would use different terms, and stress the difference, I think that’s a good assessment.

In the case of Clinton, his adopting of deregulation and small government was largely political triangulation rather than principle, meaning he used the rhetoric to syphon votes from his opponents as an act of opportunism. His finishing touch was to “put a human face on the economy”, I guess by continually biting his own lip.

But it’s interesting to watch the transition from the ideas of the 80’s into the ideas of the 90’s, as it was explained by the most powerful people on the earth at the time: Bill Clinton and a Tony Blair. If you ever have the time to waste, watch their Third Way conference in the below c-span video and you can witness the shift in real time between what you might call right and left-wing neoliberalism. It seems to me it was more a matter of being associated with the Old Left, than anything to do with liberal principle.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?122788-1/progressive-governance-21st-century

I probably wouldn’t connect neoliberalism to post-modernism, but only because many on the conservative side of the bench think liberalism is a 1-to-1 ratio with modernity, like in the philosophy of Alexander Dugin. He holds some ultra conservative, ethnocentric, and anti-liberal ideas, seeing the collapse of liberalism as the perfect breeding ground for a resurgent new right. Since he conflates modernism itself with liberalism, Dugin is explicitly post-modern and illiberal. He is a vociferous critic of neoliberalism and globalism because the individualism of it all dissolves his favorite collective, the “ethnos”.

If the rise of the European Right is an indication, what comes after “neoliberalism” will be anti-liberal, while all that neo-stuff remains intact.