The New Old Liberals
Neoliberalism had become a slur. A group of very online young politicos set out to change that.
n a Thursday evening in April, Jeremiah Johnson—a writer, podcaster, and political consultant—cracked a beer and settled in to host a two-hour Twitch stream on the “bad tweets” of the day. Behind him were two posters, one from an old political campaign that read “steer clear of the populist tides,” the other commemorating a Carly Rae Jepsen concert. Johnson—who is thirty-seven, with short red hair and fair skin that recall a baby-faced Mark Zuckerberg—is a founder of 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. Johnson started CNL with his friend Colin Mortimer in 2020, attempting to forge a “cultural countermovement to political extremism,” as Johnson put it. They hoped to thwart the socialist left’s online dominance; mostly through Reddit posts, tweets, and memes, and to a lesser extent newsletters and podcasts, they aimed to make the term “neoliberalism,” against all odds, cool. The night’s Twitch stream was an official CNL event. While a colleague fiddled with the tech, Johnson greeted everyone following along, about three hundred people. He recognized some of their usernames from the old days, when what is now the CNL community convened primarily on the r/neoliberal Reddit page, where the very online gravitated to discuss, troll, and meme the economic debates of the day. (A sidebar on the page summarizes its approach to neoliberalism as “free trade, open borders, taco trucks on every corner” and beckons, “Join the deep state.”) It was there that Johnson and Mortimer met; they were tapped to serve as volunteer moderators. (Johnson’s Reddit username is “MrDannyOcean.” Mortimer’s is “AuthorityRespecter.”) At the start, they called their group the Neoliberal Project. Why did they change the name, a member of the Twitch audience wanted to know. “Neoliberal” is a great word to use “when what you want to do is get in fights on the internet,” Johnson replied, but it turned out to be less great for recruiting congresspeople to your cause. (Later, Johnson told me, of the “neoliberal” moniker, “It’s the whole postmodern thing—you’re always steeped in irony, but you also kind of mean it.”) Johnson has spent years looking for lols in online political discourse. On his Substack, Infinite Scroll, he documents the latest trends on social media and lampoons what he views as misguided leftist stances; he also peppers in cultural commentary on Drake v. Kendrick and incels v. Taylor Swift. A recent post invoked Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation to critique those who claim to hold Democratic values but refuse to vote for President Joe Biden in the upcoming election because of his failure to stop the war in Gaza.
More From CJR: