“We’re DSA if they were good.”

June 18, 2024 12:08 AM

Columbia Journalism Review on The New Old Liberals Neoliberalism had become a slur. A group of very online young politicos set out to change that.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs (40 comments total)

The search for a reliable mailing list continues.
posted by parmanparman at 12:59 AM on June 18 [2 favorites]

A group of very online young politicos set out to change that.

But why? Neoliberalism had failed spectacularly at every other career! This was the only thing it ever excelled at. It had finally found its calling, it loved being a slur! For once it felt like it was doing something useful and you want to take all that away?
posted by Ashenmote at 1:28 AM on June 18 [28 favorites]

But why?
There are actual cards;
posted by HearHere at 1:35 AM on June 18

They seem to have missed that the political philosophy that enabled the return of fascism as a going concern is unlikely to defeat fascism. In a fascist regime, Center-Right parties don’t fare that much better than Left parties, so maybe it’s a bad time to try and reignite Neoliberalism.

I suspect what they long for is the 90s, just before they were born, which was a comforting time, if you were the right sort of person, compared to today, when all the bills for Neoliberalism have started to come due.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:24 AM on June 18 [37 favorites]

I've never heard of these clowns before, and if I ever do hear of them again it'll be from their "why I left the Left" blog post also announcing their new business manufacturing landmines from sustainable materials.
posted by AlSweigart at 3:36 AM on June 18 [66 favorites]

I started reading this expecting to reach a section where the pushback might happen – a take if not a dunk – but it never really arrived. While the tone in the opening sections suggested a degree of detached amusement at this 'project', it ended up being a pretty repetitious advert for their product / podcast / whatever. I guess I thought it was going to be something more than a soft-pedal profile piece, but it wasn't. Ah well, seems these ne0 / new / scarcely-reinvented-and--actually-old positions are still good at capturing airtime / eyeballs, mine included. I suppose it's a bit like calling yourself 'Columbia Journalism Review';  it doesn't mean you're any more capable of journalism (of the sort that has a semi-long memory and knows something about the harms done to the world by giving over-confident-teenagers-dressed-up-as-Wall-Street-traders a boost) than if you were called 'Another von Mises Mouthpiece',  it just looks a little more GrownUp and Bankable.
posted by Joeruckus at 3:47 AM on June 18 [12 favorites]

This is what happens when you don't have enough internships for all the undergrads in your poli sci program. They become Redditors. Less the right flank of the DSA than the left of those "dissident right" telegram groups where "based paleocons" say slurs at each other and talk about how much they love Jesus.
posted by jy4m at 4:13 AM on June 18 [9 favorites]

Maybe they need to stake out “Neopaleoneoliberal” as a movement name.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:21 AM on June 18 [5 favorites]

Eddie Haskell goes to Washington.

These guys have figured out that they can get a lot of attention/money from the more well-endowed parts of the establishment by being the good little boys who show respect for their elders and share all of the same concerns about those other kids who aren't as respectful and deferential as they are.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:35 AM on June 18 [19 favorites]

The only thing they offer is something for the adults to point to and say "why can't you be like them?" when belittling young voters for actually being passionate about what they believe in.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:43 AM on June 18 [11 favorites]

Thanks to everyone upthread who read this for me and confirmed that I don’t have to. Ugh
posted by toodleydoodley at 6:10 AM on June 18 [19 favorites]

I have been on CNL's mailing list for some time, without knowing (a) what they were or (b) how I got on their mailing list. So...now I know what they are!
posted by mittens at 6:25 AM on June 18

It’s almost as if the rest of the world has realised that the neoliberal experiment has failed but maybe if we* pretend real hard, we can still party like it’s the early 2000s.

*they
posted by oxford blue at 6:32 AM on June 18 [1 favorite]

How out of touch do you have to be to think the Democratic party has a progressive tilt? This is like people talking about how Biden is a socialist. They think nobody realizes what they really think is ideologically indistinguishable from the Illinois Nazis' beliefs in The Blues Brothers.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:53 AM on June 18 [16 favorites]

their new business manufacturing landmines from sustainable materials.

There is a word close to schadenfreude that I would use to describe this statement but would mean something about observing the irony in watching something become the monster it hates... but I am at a loss for it.
posted by Nanukthedog at 7:09 AM on June 18 [1 favorite]

I don't know if it is the acceleration of time with age but I find the world increasingly bewildering from a .......taxonomic?......perspective. Words seem to have lost meaning or their meaning is so situational as to render them almost pointless as a means of communicating ideas. Maybe it is the dilutive power of the ironic shading or that the polity has been completely defeated by emotionality vs material reality but I just don't understand what people are saying half the time. Reading this makes me think of the sepulchers in Heart of Darkness. There is a deep deep evasion of truth, or maybe just a genuine impossibility of reconciling that idea with our pixilated and faceted reality of observation.
posted by Pembquist at 7:23 AM on June 18 [9 favorites]

This feels like a really complicated way to a Crooked Media podcast.
posted by thivaia at 7:38 AM on June 18

[CW: very Australian bad swears]

What a bunch of utter, utter CUNTS

posted by prismatic7 at 7:52 AM on June 18 [3 favorites]

Every time I encounter one of these guys I ask what they think of the Chicago school and Friedman and the coups in South America, and to a man (because, obviously) they have no idea what I am talking about.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 7:54 AM on June 18 [23 favorites]

Mod note: One comment removed. Per the Content Policy, please avoid negative comments about someone's physical appearance.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:55 AM on June 18 [2 favorites]

the Center for New Liberalism (CNL), a political group aiming to provide a home for Zoomer, Gen Z, and millennial voters who feel alienated by the Democratic Party’s progressive tilt.

what
posted by nushustu at 7:56 AM on June 18 [13 favorites]

There’s three of them, but they have so much old rich guy money!
posted by Selena777 at 7:57 AM on June 18 [6 favorites]

The only thing they offer is something for the adults to point to and say "why can't you be like them?" when belittling young voters for actually being passionate about what they believe in.

Eh, they're entitled to their point of view, and they actually are (it certainly seems) passionate about what they believe in. Just because you don't agree with them doesn't mean they're wrong or evil or whatever. I don't agree with them OR with Ardent Progressives—both are narcissists and most of what both of them do is counterproductive—but "passion" != effectiveness.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 8:36 AM on June 18

"We’re Hillary Clinton Democrats, basically."

So, we found ArchLich Kissinger's phylactery.
posted by eustatic at 9:13 AM on June 18 [7 favorites]

> Words seem to have lost meaning or their meaning is so situational as to render them almost pointless as a means of communicating ideas

so should we start with saussure or do you want to dive straight into the fun stuff
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:14 AM on June 18 [5 favorites]

“Neopaleoneoliberal”

I was....never mind. Anyhow, I liked the idea of a taco truck on every corner.
posted by mule98J at 9:23 AM on June 18 [4 favorites]

Saw on reddit and can't stop thinking about:

The neoliberal project is gender equity in war deaths.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 9:38 AM on June 18 [7 favorites]

maybe there's a progressive lean, not a full tilt. maybe it's just a list. there is a progressive list to the democratic party.

I'd be curious to know this group's thoughts on, say, Biden's NLRB appointments, or about Lina Khan at the FTC. This is where the Democratic party is listing most heavily leftward.

I haven't read TFA yet, though. Will do later, sorry if these details are actually mentioned in the article.
posted by kensington314 at 9:56 AM on June 18 [2 favorites]

The one thing that’s particularly interesting about these folks is that, for all their adults-in-the-room posturing, they are almost wholly defined in opposition to people they don’t like online. They are no worse in that respect than many others, but certainly no better. I understand the feeling, but I don’t think that’s a politics.
posted by atoxyl at 10:31 AM on June 18 [10 favorites]

The one thing that’s particularly interesting about these folks is that, for all their adults-in-the-room posturing, they are almost wholly defined in opposition to people they don’t like online. They are no worse in that respect than many others, but certainly no better. I understand the feeling, but I don’t think that’s a politics.

Kinda depends to whom and when you are talking. Most memes and such tend to be anti-leftist or anti-conservative because it's easier to lol off of something else. But they tend to have solid positions on certain things, some stronger than others. Right now if you look through r/neoliberal you'll see the current theme is housing. The meme response is "build more housing" and YIMBYism with some digging deeper into zoning laws and such.

Sadly the other theme seems to be, "Biden's economy is great but voters are too stupid to understand" which at least seems to get pushback in responses about the reality of things on the ground.
posted by charred husk at 10:44 AM on June 18 [3 favorites]

There is nothing more convenient for our liberals than that ancient, colourless, general haziness—“oppositionism”, “progressism”. What is hidden behind those words, what sort of oppositional activity was displayed by an individual, which class he served, are things they prefer not to discuss. These things are distasteful to liberals[...]

There is scepticism and scepticism. As far as a public figure is concerned, one should ask: in respect of which class is he a sceptic? Sobolevsky (and his Russkiye Vedomosti) was a sceptic and even a pessimist in respect of the peasantry. He was an optimist in respect of the landowners; he pictured them as being capable of “reforms”, as “sincerely sympathising with the new social system” as “cultured people”, etc. The mixture of this landowner liberalism (not semi-slavish but utterly slavish) and Narodism, was a sign of the rottenness of the “enlightened”, well-to-do, satiated liberal society that taught slave morality and slave politics to the “millions of semi-slaves” who were awakening. This liberal society was, “to the marrow of its bones”, slavish towards the landowners, and the Narodism of Russkiye Vedomosti reflects more than anything else the patriarchal Russia of the humble muzhik and the landowner flirting with liberalism.

- VIL, 1913
posted by Richard Saunders at 10:44 AM on June 18 [5 favorites]

they are almost wholly defined in opposition to people they don’t like online.

Yeah, I got the reactionaries-who-call-themselves-liberals vibe from this article. Like Jimmy Dore fans or Lyndon LaRouche supporters. Or Caleb Maupin, even well before his sex pest scandal became public.
posted by AlSweigart at 10:56 AM on June 18 [5 favorites]

"They are Biden’s fighters in the meme trenches, doing what they can to make his brand of politics trendy again."

HAAAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA
posted by tovarisch at 12:09 PM on June 18 [4 favorites]

Like Jimmy Dore fans or Lyndon LaRouche supporters. Or Caleb Maupin

You mean “the liberal/center-left equivalent of?” I would say Dore and Maupin are very much in the category of people they are defined in reaction to, along with more left-liberal DSA types. There’s certainly a bit of an “anti-woke” strain among the self-identified neoliberal crowd but the first order version of their politics is anti-populist, anti-isolationist, pro-immigration etc. and I think the fact that there’s been no shortage of left-populists embarrassing themselves post-2020 explains some of the appeal. But if you are saying they are in danger of ending up in a similar place because it’s such a reactive , “fuck you, I am a neoliberal globalist” approach to politics, I agree.
posted by atoxyl at 12:22 PM on June 18 [1 favorite]

Neoliberal is privatization, deregulation, borrow and spend magical thinking, all failed policies. It uses liberal as libertarians use it, which is a deliberate misuse. The word "liberal" strung across centuries and boiled down to its essence basically means to vote for one's future, a bigger responsibility than is obvious and which assumes the future is unwritten. Conservatives reject the idea of an unwritten future and don't like voting because it means progress. One way conservatives deal with this is to work the populace into pretending that the vote is about a very special wish or desire, like saving babies or something; or better yet, that each candidate is a champion of an ideal, good or bad, doesn't matter. The distraction is to get as many people as possible to imagine their vote is for anything but their own foreseeable needs in the future, because conservatives know that these needs are the same for everyone, such as clean air and water, healthcare and education, safety nets, etc. A conservative nightmare is for everyone to be on that same page.
posted by Brian B. at 12:24 PM on June 18 [3 favorites]

Strong "we're taking back porch monkey" vibes from this concept.
posted by Dark Messiah at 12:51 PM on June 18 [5 favorites]

Whatever happened to the Euston Manifesto dipshits anyway
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:07 PM on June 18 [1 favorite]

I've had the misfortune to peek into their spaces before and my impression is that they're overwhelmingly privileged and smug, with a narrow perspective and convinced of their own superiority. 60 years ago they would've been the guys decrying MLK for being an extremist.
posted by ndr at 9:20 PM on June 18 [4 favorites]

These worthless people represent the democratic party from which they claim to feel alienated, as far as I can tell. Complaining that the democratic party is too progressive is not only the equivalent of saying that the problem with the tradwife movement is that it's just too sexy, it's also just straight up bullshit when you're talking up your love for Joe Biden, who is literally the spearhead of the democratic party.

I would love to believe that these center right dingdongs are outliers, the kind of people who if they'd been college students in 1969 would have been mad that their friends were all dirty hippies who just didn't appreciate a good Benny Goodman record, but from what I can tell they are actually the mainstream of the democratic party, which is incidentally why the democratic party is currently losing to an actual felon.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:22 AM on June 19 [1 favorite]

> Every time I encounter one of these guys I ask what they think of the Chicago school and Friedman and the coups in South America, and to a man (because, obviously) they have no idea what I am talking about.

The r/neoliberal subreddit is where the helicopter meme came from.

At least some of them are pretending not to know about the side of neoliberalism that excites them the most. Well that and taking money from real estate developers.
posted by Space Coyote at 7:34 AM on June 20 [2 favorites]