The Sad Saps of Neoliberal Reddit Trying to Make Globalism Cool Again

---

The resuscitation of r/neoliberal began in earnest this past February, shortly after the Trump inauguration, when a small cadre of self-identified neoliberals requested access to the subreddit’s moderation tools. The goal was to turn the dead forum into the foremost symposium for centrists around the world—the alleged silent majority of internet lurkers who felt alienated by both Jeremy Corbyn and Steve Bannon.

One of those interlopers is MrDannyOcean, who first made his name on a different subreddit called r/BadEconomics, where “an economics-grad-student-ish crowd” wields the piousness of the free market to scorn bad math on the extreme right and left. They will lampoon a poorly calculated argument against corporate tax cuts; they will demonstrate exactly why a border tariff does not (nor ever will) add up to Mexico paying for the wall.

Ocean, who asked to be quoted as his Reddit moniker, explains that he had a distinct vision for r/neoliberal’s rebirth. The term was thrown around so much after the election, why not lean into the momentum? “The goals were multifaceted,” he says. “First, to have a place to joke around and have fun, but also to have a place for serious discussion of politics, policy, and empirical research.”

By the spring of this year, the subreddit had emerged as the de facto online water-cooler for young people who still put their trust in the dominant 20th-century economic policies. When Ocean and his posse took over, r/neoliberal had less than 100 subscribers. Today, that number has spiked to 25,000. The moderators keep the community lively and well-stocked, with a curated schedule of discussion topics and an online book club. (At the moment they’re reading The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford.) To a certain extent, Ocean’s approximation of the subculture he’s fostered is correct. His forum is an environment where defused, collegiate economic dialogue can take place—like this thread in support of the Labour Party’s land value tax.

But the most popular posts, and the ones that routinely make it to the front page of Reddit, are the memes. They mimic the humor you’d find on the far right and left—almost as if they’re a plea that neoliberalism can be just as funny and energizing as the ends of the ideological spectrum. That’s not an accident, says a 27-year-old frequent contributor with the Reddit username Bropeth914. “When [the subreddit] started, it was a parody of all those other groups,” he explains over the phone.

This makes sense when you consider how blurred the boundaries between parody and earnest political commentary have become in 2017, as with the @dril-indebted discourse that’s sprouted out of the Democratic Socialists of America base. Insanely, an efficient way to describe your political allegiance is through a meme like milkshake duck. An adjacent force turned Pepe from a cartoon frog into an international hate symbol in a short few years.

R/neoliberal, on the other hand, was birthed after the alt-right and Twitter’s endless news-cycle ascended, and it comes off like a self-aware, tongue-in-cheek response to those trends. As a political platform, neoliberalism doesn’t carry the same venom or rage, as, say, the eternal labor struggle in the U.S. Sure, you can find some craven neocon shit, but there’s also plenty of platform #resistance-howling that’s just as tiresome as what you might find on your aunt’s Facebook page. (“It’s Mueller Time!”)

It’s only natural that a neoliberal take on online dada-ism would come off a tad hollow and borrowed. And Ocean himself regards the memes as little more than a strategic gateway to welcome newcomers to the more serious economic threads. It’s a typical neoliberal gambit, really: finding a niche and exploiting the market.

“We want to use the jokes and memes to get attention and draw others into the subreddit, and then hopefully educate and promote serious discussion once they’re here,” he says. “The goal is to keep a good balance of silly and serious.”

It’s fascinating that as the American political spectrum feels more volatile than ever before, with a newly impassioned base organizing around a federal living wage and single-payer health insurance, there is still a population of 20-somethings among us who feel compelled to fight for corporate capitalism. This is a cause Ocean takes very, very seriously. Beyond the memes, beyond the boneheaded economic debates, and beyond any lingering shreds of irony, he tells me his collective maintains an unshakable faith in neoliberalism.

“The last several hundred years of capitalism based on markets and private profit has produced the greatest leap forward in human history,” he says over email, annotating each of his points with hyperlinked statistics. “World poverty rates have plummeted for 200 years straight, by whichever definition of poverty you choose. While national inequality has been increasing and is troubling, global inequality has decreased greatly. We live in the healthiest, richest, most educated, most democratic time in human history. We fundamentally believe that the capitalist neoliberal paradigm works.”

All bold claims, when the one-percent claims ownership of half the world’s wealth, and when U.N. officials are touring across Alabama to investigate the state’s vast economic disparity.

But for the first time since the end of World War II, the neoliberals are out of power. The president of the United States ran on a platform of tariffs and isolationism, and the Clinton Democrats are in a shattered disarray. You sense a righteous conviction in Ocean’s words—for the first time, he’s been forced to make an argument for centrism. That’s a tall order, because as he admits himself, neoliberalism is kind of uninspiring.

“There’s a sense in which it’s easy to market yourself when you’re towards the extremes on any side,” says Ocean. “It’s much harder to market the idea that the world is a complex place and sometimes policy involves tough trade-offs.” It’s not “sexy or attention-getting,” he says, to point out that the world is “getting better”—“but not for everyone, so we should make some technocratic adjustments to X, Y, and Z programs which we think research suggests would fix the problem.”

“You fell asleep halfway through that sentence,” he observes.

Maybe someday the country will come back around to Ocean’s thinking. In the meantime, the neoliberals are planning Merkel tattoos and trying to meme back the status quo.