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What is the meaning behind the 'NPC' meme in political discourse?
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. A few years back, the online right became enamored of a new epithet for liberals. NPC, short for non-player character. The term was lifted from video games, where an NPC refers to the computer-controlled characters that populate the game, while you, the live player, you make the actual decisions. NPCs don't have minds of their own.
They don't have agency. They're automatons. They do as they're told. NBC quickly became a favor dismissal for all those liberals with their BLM and MeToo hashtags, their Ukrainian flag icons, their they-them pronouns and anti-racism reading groups. Liberals in this story, they thought what they were allowed to think. They said what they were allowed to say.
You might have seen these memes if for your sins you're sufficiently online. Featureless gray faces, sometimes surrounded by liberal icons. Elon Musk loved posting them. Like any good insult, the NPC meme served a dual purpose. It contains a kernel of truth about its target. We liberals can be conformist. We can be too afraid to offend. We can be overly deferential to institutions.
We can be cowed by the in-group policing that we inflict on ourselves. and a little quick to take up whatever the cause of the moment is. But the real purpose of the MPC insult was self-congratulation. The right was full of live players. You could see it in their willingness to offend, their mistrust of institutions, their eagerness to debate what liberals would not even say out loud.
This became part of the Trumpist right's self-definition. They were the nonconformists, the coalition that wasn't made of automatons. And that's what America needed. Live players. And here we are in 2025. And at this point, I'm willing to concede at least half the argument. American politics does have an NPC problem, possibly a lethal one. But it's not on the left.
I can make a generous case for a lot of what the Trump administration is on some level trying to do, or at least saying they're trying to do. There is something to the argument that the administrative state is too hard for the president to guide or even control. Government is too gummed up by process and protocol. It is too hard to hire and fire in the civil service.
Even if I agree with the goals of many DEI programs, and I do, many of them don't achieve those goals. Some of them make the problems they seek to fix worse. There hasn't been rigor at looking at which is which and getting rid of the bad ones. There is actually a good argument for auditing USAID.
We probably should convert more of what that agency spends to cash grants and direct public health support. And yes, how the government manages software procurement and bills and maintains digital services is hopelessly cumbersome. I was saying all this before the election too. All of it is well-known, including among liberals.
Many liberals have spent a lot of time trying to think about how to fix these problems. And so it is a genuine failure of Democrats that they did not put more energy into making the government faster and better and more responsive when they were in charge. How the hell did the Biden administration pass $42 billion for broadband in 2021 and have basically nothing to show for it by November of 2024?
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