Mouffe, 140.
29. Mouffe, Chantal Mouffe, 140.
30. Importantly, both Schüssler Fiorenza and West maintain that democracy is an internal norm of Christianity. See Schüssler Fiorenza, Power of the Word, 7, and West, Prophesy Deliverance!, 18ff. and 91ff.
chapter 1
Empire31
Ours is a period of profound social upheaval. A prominent symptom of this upheaval is the collapse of public confidence in the normative institutions of liberal democracy. This crisis has been gestating for many years, but two events crystallize the contradictions of our cultural moment: the political and military debacles in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) and the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Combined with the exploitation of long-simmering racial resentments for political gain, the fundamental crises of the military and financial institutions of the liberal order created an opening for the emergence of the right-wing populist movements now ascendant.
As discussed in the introduction, these political formations have attempted to undermine features of democracy that block the expansion of plutocratic and racist policies. In the United States, the dominant response among critics to the ascendancy of Trump’s authoritarian populism has been to diagnose it as an aberration and to argue that if he is defeated in 2020 order will be restored to the American political system. This interpretation is either extraordinarily naïve about American history or a disingenuous attempt to pathologize an individual rather than criticize an entire system. In either scenario, the result is to inoculate the American public from a confrontation with the economic, political, and cultural contradictions that have generated the politics of exclusion now on the rise in the United States.
In this chapter, we examine these conditions by criticizing the neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony that preceded this authoritarian populist formation and prepared the ground for its ascendency. We first analyze neoliberalism as the dominant economic-political formation in our world today that serves to economize both the political and cultural realm and that has generated a widespread sense of nihilism among certain demographics in the United States. Second, we examine neoconservatism as an ideological and policy orientation that plays a critical role in the maintenance of a neoliberal order via both its cultural politics as well as foreign policy commitments. We conclude the chapter by examining the alliance of neoliberalism and neoconservatism with religious conservativism as well as its mutation into an authoritarian populist and white nationalist politics under Trump.
While Trump and Trumpism will be invoked throughout this chapter, it should be emphasized that the object of critique remains a broader set of political formations: the neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony and its mutation into a new form of authoritarian populism on the right. Trump is a vulgar carrier and a weak representative of this political orientation. As a result, he might very well be defeated in 2020. If he is defeated this will not represent the end of the brand of authoritarian populism ascendant on the right. There will be successors to the movement, and these successors will be far more disciplined and effective than Trump at practicing the revanchist politics that deliver plutocratic victories to economic elites and racialized grievance politics to the base.32 It is important, therefore, to grapple with authoritarian populism as not just the politics of an individual (Trump) but as a broader and more durable political movement that seeks to undermine egalitarian aspirations in society.
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is notoriously difficult to define, even to the point that some scholars claim that it is merely a label for “whatever I do not like.” It is true that the particular term “neoliberalism” is generally used by its critics from the left side of the political spectrum. Also, given that in the United States, “liberalism” tends to be associated with “leftist,” social welfare policies, it is difficult to figure how neoliberalism was originally a product of the political right. Even worse, those who espouse the political-economic ethos that others call neoliberalism refuse to use that name. But when properly defined neoliberalism offers an important lens through which to analyze the dominant political and cultural formation in our world today.33
The history of neoliberalism is remarkable. In dramatic fashion, neoliberalism emerged from an obscure economic ideology debated among members of the Mont Pelerin Society in the 1940s and 1950s to the common-sense understanding of much of the world in the twenty-first century.34 Neoliberalism has spread in distinctive ways in response to the concrete demands of diverse political and economic situations. In the global South, neoliberalism spread through the use of military/political force (foreign interventions, juntas, and the disciplining of populations by the police/military) and economic coercion (structural adjustment policies).35 In the late 1970s and early 1980s the method in the North Atlantic world was ideological and pursued by equating freedom with free markets, by disseminating best practices in nonprofit sectors, and by subtly transforming law, the state, and the human subject to accord with market dictates.36 A bipartisan consensus—one that counts among its advocates Thatcher and Blair, Reagan and Clinton, Bush and Obama—has supported this project.
In academic literature, neoliberalism is often depicted as an approach to political economy that favors market reform through privatization, deregulation, free trade, cuts to spending, and tax cuts. This is an accurate characterization of some features of neoliberal policy but fails to describe its revolutionary force as a project that aspires to transform the state, the human person, as well as common sense in society. A number of different frameworks have been offered to interpret the meaning of neoliberalism for democracy and society, but two recommend themselves for our purposes: Marxist and Foucauldian.37
The standard Marxist interpretation, exemplified in the work of David Harvey, interprets neoliberalism as a modification of classical economic liberalism and as the latest phase in the history of capitalism. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Harvey argues that we can “interpret neoliberalization either as a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites.” He maintains that the political project of restoring wealth and power has dominated in practice, while the utopian project of reorganizing capitalism has worked “as a system of justification or legitimation.”38 When the theoretical principles of the utopian project have conflicted with concrete policies that would restore class power, the utopian principles have been abandoned. At its core, Harvey maintains, neoliberalism is a political-economic project motivated by class warfare, even as it is legitimated as a utopian project designed to enhance human flourishing “by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”39
For Harvey, neoliberalism represents a new formation of capitalism or a new stage of economic liberalism that attacks any structures that delimit the power of capital. Neoliberalism came to prominence as a project to turn back the Keynesian tide—a regulatory state, progressive taxation, labor controls, and the redistribution of wealth by a welfare state—and restore power to the capital class. And while neoliberalism developed in distinctive ways in response to political and economic pressures in different parts of the world, all of these manifestations held one feature in common: they were a response to the capital accumulation crisis of the 1970s which threatened the economic and political power of the ruling class. In response to this crisis, economic and political elites orchestrated a multifaceted assault on domestic and international structures that restricted the power of capital and obstructed the process of accumulation. Harvey observes that “the ruling class wasn’t omniscient but they recognized that there were a number of fronts on which they had to struggle: the ideological front, the political front, and above all they had struggle to curb the power of labor by whatever means possible. Out of this merged a political project which I would call neoliberalism.”40 The result of these efforts was dramatic: the rapid ascendancy of neoliberalism, which gained
