CNL in Noah Smith’s Newsletter

I noticed that the think tank formerly known as the Neoliberal Project, and now known as the Center for New Liberalism, has changed its name…This is not wholly unexpected. These folks, who are Clintonite center-left liberals, had adopted the moniker “neoliberal” as a sort of ironic stunt, after increasingly looney and strident Twitter socialists started calling Barack Obama, and any Democrat not aligned with the Bernie faction, “neoliberal”. Shortly after this, I was elected as Twitter’s “Chief Neoliberal Shill” for 2018, in a series of rigged online polls, before losing the title to Matt Yglesias by 2 percentage points the following year. It was always highly unlikely that a name that emerged from this sort of ironic Twitter inside-baseball would catch fire with anyone who isn’t terminally online.