What you seek to get out of politics largely depends on why you’ve gotten into it in the first place–for some, the pursuit of an elusive utopia at the expense of mass appeal is a worthwhile project despite obvious feasibility concerns, but others aren’t so imaginative about the future of politics that they choose to stick with norms pre-established and maybe do small iterations here and there where needed. What I just described here is the contention between the Marxist left and the informal left-to-center collective of neoliberals, and it’s something the subreddit it’s representative of — r/neoliberal — would have trouble challenging given it’s the movement’s main driving ethos.
It wasn’t always the case that neoliberal politics gripped much of the globe so strongly–following great economic hardship in the early 20th century, there was reason to temper free market forces lest the pursuit of short-term gain at the expense of the destitute many swallowed whole any prospect of future prosperity. Partly as a reaction to what neoliberals then deemed the sacrilegious act of rigorous market intervention, neoliberalism took discursive and rhetorical shape as the poster child of classical liberalism, the two becoming largely synonymous in intellectual circles as the post-WWII liberal consensus took hold.
What you get from politicians and electorates however is a hodgepodge of different socio-economic and political schools of thought that may ultimately have a neoliberal expression, but they aren’t strictly and patently of that mold. That’s where Reddit’s essentializing power comes into place–for many of the site’s most popular subcommunities, assimilation is an exercise in orthodoxy, and every member is trying to strike closest at the heart of something pure, yet all-too-elusive the same. The following are a few examples to illustrate my point: r/wallstreetbets’ collective of day traders embody a spirit of pure capitalism demonstrative of their blind faith in the dynamics of the free market, r/KotakuInAction are so hell-bent on ratifying the original thesis of Gamergate even if it means fabricating falsehoods with the intention of compromising their subjects of ridicule, r/The_Donald served up some of the most devout Trumpian…
