- Helsing
- Aug 23, 2003
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DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU  JOE BIDEN
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Greetings to my fellow prisoners of the worst timeline.
About a week ago the automatic newsfeed on my android starting trying to get me to go to a place called r/neoliberalism on a daily basis, and then today this article showed up
quote:
Yes, there really is a neoliberal meme community
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The alt-right and the radical left may be losing elections, but there's one kewl territory where they're still gaining turf: the meme wars.
Take a look at 2016. Weaponized white nationalist frog militias dominated elections in the United States, as memes of Bernie cuddling tiny kittens climbed their way to the Tumblr top. Largely absent were memes coming from free market centrists known, always disparagingly, as "neoliberals."
The moderates have a meme problem.
SEE ALSO: The alt-right's worldwide weaponization of memes
Neoliberalism, a socially liberal, pro-immigration, pro-market ideology popularized by Bill Clinton in the 1990s, does have its fans and its memes. There's r/neoliberal, which currently boasts over 11,531 "free traders" and some unapologetically wonky commentary. The page Gnarly Neoliberal Memes offers the equivalent on Facebook.
By and large, though, this technocratic, proudly unsexy political movement feels antithetical to populist meme culture — posing a real obstacle for moderates trying to capture the heart of the internet and even a few of their votes.
These memes are every bit as clever, sexy and compelling as you'd expect
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May 19, 2017 17:01
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Apr 25, 2024 23:26
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- Helsing
- Aug 23, 2003
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DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN
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/r/neoliberal
12,050 (((globalists))) shilling evidence-based policies for 6 years!
Being the only subreddit where "feel the Bern" refers to the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, r/neoliberal gives you the unique opportunity to spam "thanks mr bernke", admire Milton Friedman's erotic baldness and worship evidence-based policy. Thanks to an unregulated meme-based economy and free trade treaties with subreddits such as r/badeconomics and r/globalistshills, it enjoys high Gross Domestic Content.
Have you ever thought about becoming a (((globalist shill))) instead of whining about "the establishment"? If so, this subreddit is for you. Whether you're a supporter of Hillary Clinton of Jeb Bush, if you've been called a cuck or a dirty liberal, you can probably fit in in r/neoliberal. Neoliberals do what's almost unthinkable in our times - they pay attention to what policy experts say. In this elitist ivory tower, you can use UN, IMF and the World Bank to do whatever you want.
Neoliberals embrace the insult that has been used by people to criticize whatever they don't like about the current system. Because they are open-minded about endorsing any policy based on its scientific support, they usually wind up in the center of the political spectrum. They believe in empirical evidence-based policy instead of rigid abstract ideologies. They priorities of neoliberals are: eliminating global poverty with free trade, forging stronger international ties to prevent wars, and using capitalism to ensure growth and prosperity.
1. Tell us about yourselves!
THE_SHRIMP I took this mod position after my stint being a Hillary Clinton internet shill ended. Clearly, I didn't work hard enough.
DracoX872 I'm just a lowly undergrad studying econ and math. I hope to go to grad school for economics or finance. I've also become to central planner for this sub because the other mods are slacking... *clears throat loudly*
Wubotarian I have an undergraduate degree in economics. I have been a part of the Reddit Economics Network for awhile - and have been a bit of a meme.
I also moderate /r/badeconomics where I enforced rules that make it the best economics forum on the internet.
2. What was your journey to becoming a neoliberal? Why are you a (((globalist)))?
THE_SHRIMP You know, one of the most frustrating things is the amount of polarization in politics. Everyone is always yelling at the other side for not being bipartisan, but it's not that they want to compromise with the other side, they just want them to agree with their own views. That's not bipartisanship, that's whining. Also, (((evidence-based policy))) gets my dick looking like a LRAS curve, so there's that.
DracoX872 I was an unironic Bernie bro and what happened was basically this. As I looked for better solutions to things that I believed were problems, I found myself moving towards #neoliberalism. Not the Wikipedia definition of neoliberalism, but rather ideas that resulted in my being called a neoliberal/globalist shill by the Social Dem left. I decided to look more into the term, and what I found was something that fit my beliefs and was quite different from what most people think it is.
Wumbotarian I was a libertarian in college as a freshman - an Austrian AnCap at one point. It was bad. Through my continual education in college and reddit, my rejection of Austrian nonsense and gathering economic facts, I moved to a more moderate libertarian. Now, I think I am a neoliberal as described by the sidebar. I am still probably more libertatian than others here given my roots, but I see neoliberalism as the natural evolution of Libertarianism in the 21st century.
3. How did you get involved in /r/neoliberal?
THE_SHRIMP I posted some dank memes and harassed /u/DracoX872 enough that he gave me a position
DracoX872 About a month ago, I noticed this sub existed but it was completely empty. I didn't really think of myself as a neoliberal, but I decided I might as well ask to get ahold of it because why not. So, I pm'd the owner of the sub, Vakiadia, and he puts me in as a mod. I originally intended for this sub to be about serious policy discussion, but the memes started flooding in; I decided to leave the MemeEconomy deregulated. I grabbed a few more moderators, re-invited the old owner of the sub, and now we're here. It's still a very new subreddit, but we're growing fairly decently imo.
Wumbotarian I am a mod of /r/BadEconomics and friend of Draco's, and he brought me on to help moderate (though I am not as active as I ought to be).
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May 21, 2017 17:17
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- Helsing
- Aug 23, 2003
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DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN
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So another day, another article that out of nowhere is celebrating r/neoliberal, a subreddit nobody had heard of a month ago. I wonder if this is just econ journalists getting super excited by the idea that kids these days are turning to neoliberal memes or if somebody behind the scenes is actively trying to push this crap into people's newfeeds as part of a broader pushback effort against "extremism".
In this case watch a economics professor trying to pretend that FDR and paleoliberals are actually neoliberals.
quote:
Centrism Takes On the Extremes
A blend of free markets, regulation and redistribution turned the U.S. into the world's richest nation. What's not to like?
May 23, 2017, 2:00 PM GMT+2
We live in an age where political discourse is defined by internet memes -- iconography and symbols that compress complex ideas into short bursts suitable for the age of social media. Donald Trump’s most ardent online supporters often brag that they “memed a president into office.” But because memes are typically used by young people with extreme views, the format naturally lends itself to ideological excess. The sensible center just doesn’t have many memes of its own.
The people at the r/neoliberal subreddit -- a small neighborhood in the sprawling online forum Reddit -- aim to change that.
“Neoliberalism” isn’t the most well-defined of terms. It loosely refers to free-market economic ideas, combined with a technocratic, incrementalist approach to fixing market failures and redistributing wealth. Many criticize the term for being too vague, but it’s slowly catching on:
The Center Tries to Hold
Neoliberalism is essentially the centrist economic framework embraced by U.S. presidents like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It’s also the paradigm that most academic economists implicitly use to think about policy -- they see themselves as advisers offering smart, often subtle advice to generally benevolent policy makers. In other words, neoliberalism is the model the U.S. has been operating under for decades, and it has had significant influence abroad as well.
People on the socialist left, especially in the U.K., like to blame neoliberal ideology for many of the woes of the modern world. Meanwhile, on the right, protectionist and xenophobic ideas have rapidly replaced free-market libertarianism as the rallying cry of the Republican base. The neoliberal center is under assault from both sides. So some internet jokesters have decided it’s time to fight back.
The neoliberal memes poke fun at both the socialist left and the populist right. They proudly defend taco trucks from Trump’s rhetorical assaults and tease left-leaning politicians like the U.K.’s Jeremy Corbyn and the U.S.’s Bernie Sanders. And they portray centrist leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Canada’s Justin Trudeau not as embattled apologists for a disintegrating order, but as saviors leading the strays back to the light:
This nascent pushback is long overdue. People in Western countries have been far too quick to throw centrist technocracy into the dustbin of history. Despite the deep wounds of the Great Recession and the 2008 financial crisis, developed countries have not seen their economies collapse. Employment languished for almost a decade, but it’s now recovering to pre-crash levels:
Meanwhile, wages have begun to rise in the U.S. and are increasing faster for those at the bottom of the income distribution. Home prices and stock markets have fully recovered from their recession-era lows. There are still plenty of economic problems to be dealt with, but it’s now clear that advanced economies based on neoliberalism have not suffered any kind of systemic collapse. Battered and scarred, the system built in the late 20th century still stands.
And young radicals on either side of the political divide should heed the warnings of history. The Great Depression, almost a century ago, prompted many countries to turn to new and extreme political and economic philosophies -- communism, fascism, or militarism. In the end, the country that came out of that era in by far the best shape was the U.S., whose leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the original center-left technocrat.  The New Deal has taken a lot of criticism from hardcore free-marketers in recent decades, but it was just the compromise the U.S. needed to steer a middle path between self-destructive extremist ideologies. Many will disagree, but to me FDR seems like the original neoliberal.
But even as they rediscover their confidence and their voice, neoliberals should take caution. Recent decades have exposed flaws in standard centrist ideas that need to be addressed in order to neutralize the threat of extremism in the long term.
For example, economists are finding that workers displaced by forces like trade and technology are much slower to find new jobs than had been previously assumed. Standard neoliberal answers -- for example, that the government should compensate those who lose their jobs because of trade, or provide them with retraining assistance -- have proven either politically untenable or have failed outright. A better method of protecting workers from career-destroying shocks is needed.
Another issue is wealth inequality. Though some European scholars like economist Thomas Piketty have called attention to the problem, their counterparts in the U.S. and U.K. have shown much less interest. Wealth disparities have risen steadily, in good times and bad. Instead of assuming that this inequality isn’t a problem, neoliberals should talk more about how to combat it.
A third problem is monopoly power. For reasons not entirely known, a few superstar companies are coming to dominate their industries, fostering inequality and threatening to reduce economic output. Neoliberals should be thinking about how to use law and regulation to halt the menace of industrial concentration.
So while it’s great to see neoliberals fighting back against the dangerous forces of extremism, winning that fight will ultimately require more than funny internet memes. Centrism’s success comes from successful reforms that patch holes in the system. “Neoliberalism: Mend it, don’t end it” should be the slogan of the day.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
It's remarkable watching somebody with a PhD trying to stretch the term neoliberal so broadly that it covers both the New Deal and the people whose central political project was rolling back the New Deal.
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May 23, 2017 18:48
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May 19, 2017 17:01
