advocates for an interventionist state that introduces market principles into every sphere of life. Following Foucault, Wendy Brown argues that neoliberalism serves as a reality principle for our world: “Neoliberalism governs as sophisticated common sense, a reality principle remaking institutions and human beings everywhere it settles, nestles, and gains affirmation.”56 The ontological valence of this description of neoliberalism should be emphasized, because it points to the fact that neoliberalism is not simply an economic theory or a set of public policies but more deeply a way of structuring all of reality as market competition—or what, following Foucault, Brown terms a pervasive “political rationality.”57
In Undoing the Demos Brown turns to Barack Obama’s presidency to demonstrate the powerful hold that neoliberalism has on political common sense in the United States. At the beginning of Obama’s second term, in a matter of weeks he delivered two major policy speeches, “We the People” and the State of the Union, in which he focused on those “left out of the American dream by virtue of class, race, sexuality, gender, disability, or immigration status.”58 While Obama’s first term was characterized by a series of compromises with Republicans and centrist Democrats, these speeches appeared to announce a return to his progressive roots. Obama called for the protection of Medicare, immigration reform, progressive tax reform, the development of clean energy, and the elimination of sexual discrimination and domestic violence.59 These policies represented the agenda many on the left expected from Obama when he was elected in 2008. But just beneath the surface Brown detects a tension in Obama’s renewed progressive rhetoric. Obama justified these policies not on the basis of their moral rectitude or because they comported with the egalitarian aspirations of American democracy. Instead, he pitched these policies to the American public on the basis of their capacity to make the United States economically competitive. According to Brown, Obama is essentially arguing that “clean energy would keep us competitive—‘as long as countries like China keep going all-in on clean energy, so must we’ . . . Immigration reform will ‘harness the talents and ingenuity of striving, hopeful immigrants’ and attract ‘the highly skilled entrepreneurs and engineers that will help create jobs and grow our economy.’ Economic growth would also result ‘when our wives, mothers and daughters can live their lives free from discrimination . . . and . . . fear of domestic violence.’”60 At the level of Obama’s rhetoric, the fight for equality and justice is not an end itself, but rather a means to achieve the end of economic growth and competitiveness.
For Brown, this episode summarizes the core truth of neoliberalism as it relates to the state: “Economic growth has become the end and legitimation of government.”61 The state now functions like a firm and shares with it similar priorities: competitive positioning and a healthy credit rating. Brown observes, “Other ends—from sustainable production practices to worker justice—are pursued insofar as they contribute to this end.”62 Many firms view it as an effective business decision or as a strategic marketing exercise to engage in fair trade and green business practices not because of their concern for the rights of global workers or the threat of climate change but because they see an opportunity to appeal to a niche market and increase profit and shareholder value. Obama’s speeches depart only minimally from the strategies of modern business firms in this regard. Both the state and the firm are committed to justice and sustainability, but not as “ends in themselves.”63 These commitments are valuable to the extent that they create economic growth and stock/credit rating health. Brown concludes that Obama’s speeches indicate the degree to which political discourse has become so marinated in neoliberal reason that the “goals of the world’s oldest democracy led by a justice-minded president in the twenty-first century” have been reduced to “attracting investors and developing an adequately remunerated skilled workforce.”64
If Obama’s speeches disclose the manner in which progressive ideals are often couched in and motivated by the neoliberal values of economic growth and competitive advantage, the presidency of Trump depicts a scene of the near wholesale co-optation of democracy and the state by neoliberalism. The election of a businessman with no political experience and little knowledge of the US Constitution, democratic norms and procedures, and judicial principles reveals the extent to which neoliberalism has captured the political rationality of citizens and recast the function of the state in primarily economic terms.
Trump’s presidency represents the most thoroughgoing economization of the state to date, as evidenced by a few examples. First, Trump’s constant refrain that previous politicians have made “bad deals”—NAFTA, the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal, and so on—and that as a businessperson he is uniquely qualified to replace these deals with better deals betrays the extent to which he and many Americans view democracy as little more than business conduct. This approach extends to his tendency to punish critics as those on the losing side of the deal. Business conduct mandates that there are winners and losers and as a “good CEO, he will reward supporters and punish detractors or competitors, whether these are cities or states, groups or individuals, nations or international organizations.”65
Second, Trump’s presidency reveals the degree to which neoliberalism has successfully recast the political realm as an unhelpful and unnecessary intrusion into the market. An approach to politics rooted in a commitment to equality, fairness, and social justice is at best viewed as hostile to competition and unfettered market logic and at worst as leading to “tyrannical social justice programs and totalitarianism.” Politics is viewed by neoliberals as a hindrance or obstacle to market rule. In this sense, Trump’s call to “drain the swamp” was not a demand to restrain Wall Street or restrict the influence of monied interests on politics. Instead, it was a call to purge Washington of politicians, to “get politics and politicians out of politics.” Politics now recast in market terms is best left to businesspeople, who need not be bothered by democratic procedures and norms as they focus exclusively on generating economic growth. As Brown suggests, this is an anti-political posture and not an anti-state posture that opposes a view of politics in which the state regulates commerce, provides labor protections, redistributes wealth, and so on. Neoliberalism is often presented as anti-state tout court, opposed to it because it disrupts the sovereign logic of the market. But this is inaccurate, because it fails to present the entire picture. Neoliberalism approves of a state that intervenes on behalf of markets.66 Trump, as a quintessential neoliberal, is perfectly happy to employ the power of the state to eliminate those things that present a barrier to a friendly business climate: “regulations, procedures, checks and balances, separation of powers, internal opposition or disloyalty, demands for transparency, an independent press.”67
These two examples describe the ways that the election of Trump points to the economization of politics through which the fundamental commitments of democracy (freedom, equality, popular sovereignty) are transposed into market terms (economic freedom, inequality, market sovereignty). But in addition to this assault on the fundamentals of democracy, the Trump administration has implemented what amounts to an undiluted neoliberal policy package: elimination of labor protections, deregulation, cuts to public funding for education, health care, and the arts, removal of the United States from climate treaties, and enormous tax cuts for the affluent.68 Trump, as a businessman, is the embodiment of a neoliberalization of politics just as his policies serve to deepen and solidify the processes of neoliberalization that led to his presidency.
The examples of Obama and Trump raise a number of important points about the relation between neoliberalism and the state. First, as noted above, the neoliberalization of the state is a bipartisan affair. The foundational neoliberal commitment to economic growth represents the normative basis for consensus in American politics. Democrats and Republicans inflect their neoliberalism differently, with Democrats offering what Nancy Fraser describes as a “progressive” form by blending a politics of cultural emancipation (feminism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights) with financialization and neoliberal economic policies, and Republicans increasingly offering ethno-racial, reactionary, and punitive forms.69 But they converge in their view of the state as a firm that is responsive to the market above all else. This reality lies beneath the oft-voiced sentiment that while there exist two political parties in the United States, both pledge their most basic allegiance to the party of Wall Street. Related to this point, neoliberalism transforms the scope of the state’s responsibilities
