If you haven’t been paying attention to how neoliberalism is still making all the wrong choices for you, watch the 2015 Amazon Prime Video series Patriot. John Tavner (played by Michael Dorman) is a folk-singing intelligence officer tasked by his high-ranking father with effecting election interference in Iran via non-official cover at a piping firm. The series confronts workplace insecurity, downward social mobility, and neoliberalism’s threat to the family. It accomplishes this by relentlessly tormenting John.
As a cultural text, Patriot lays bare the fundamental contradiction of American identity in a still-thriving neoliberal order under the Obama administration. The series defies neoliberalism’s self-interest, manipulation, dehumanization, and loneliness by countering it with empathy and connection but ultimately indicates that these efforts are too little, too late.