Over Thanksgiving week the talk of the economically focused internet was a viral essay claiming, absurdly, that the real poverty line in America for a family of four is $140,000 a year.

If you were inclined to generosity, you would say that the essay resonated because it emphasized real problems, from the rising cost of child care and housing to the distorting effects of welfare benefit cliffs as people climb up from poverty. But its basic claim was still completely wrong, as are most apocalyptic accounts of the American economic situation. Beware of anyone, left or right, trying to persuade you that middle-class Americans have all plunged into poverty or that young Americans have no prospects anymore.

I doubt the author, an asset manager named Michael W. Green, considers himself a post-liberal, but his essay is relevant to the arguments over post-liberalism that I covered in my preholiday newsletter. In the great wrangle between defenders of the liberal order and their would-be successors, a key liberal claim is that populists and nationalists and socialists just misunderstand the economic landscape — catastrophizing about what globalization or neoliberalism has supposedly done to the common person when in fact the common person is doing pretty well.

In this reading of our era, the entire populist revolt looks like an internet-abetted, misinformation-fueled own goal. Not because everything is economically perfect under liberal conditions — maybe growth is too slow, maybe inequality is a problem, maybe technological progress isn’t what was hoped. But overall, Americans got richer across the neoliberal era, the populist and socialist alternatives yield slower growth and more corruption and a lot of the specific economic problems cited by neoliberalism’s critics (housing costs, say) would actually be ameliorated by a stronger dose of deregulation and free markets, the old liberal prescription made new.

In which case the restoration of a liberal consensus is simply a matter of people abandoning bad ideas — perhaps after a dispiriting experience with tariffs? — and returning to good ones, and the struggle with populism is essentially a struggle to persuade people stuck at the end of a blind alley to turn around and head back to the sunlight.

I think this perspective is fatally incomplete — more on that in a moment — but it gets enough right to win some key debates with post-liberal thinkers. In particular, the liberal case wins on the following points:

1) Relative to the realistic counterfactuals, the big neoliberal reforms of the 1970s through the 1990s (deregulation, tax cuts, freer trade, modest limits on the growth of government, and so on) prevented a deeper stagnation in the developed world and made almost everybody at least somewhat richer.

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