a firm and so its strategic focus is to facilitate economic growth and attract investors. Traditional concerns about equality, justice, and the well-being of citizens are now demoted, viewed as marginal to the primary responsibility of government, and useful only as instruments that can be deployed to sell neoliberal economic policies to the public.70
Despite their different approaches to neoliberalism, Harvey and Brown converge in their assessment that neoliberalism represents a frontal attack on democracy.71 Harvey claims that the antidemocratic consequences of neoliberalism are most evident in its attempt to unleash the power of capital from the countervailing forces of the state, labor, and other structures of accountability and control. The liberation of capital from these limiting forces not only deepens inequality in society but also intensifies the coordination between financial elites and political representatives.72 Brown also criticizes neoliberalism for intensifying inequality in society and creating conditions for democracy to devolve into plutocracy.73 However, Brown argues that neoliberalism’s challenge to democracy is both deeper and broader than the consolidation of political and economic power by elites. Neoliberalism’s effects are not limited to the corporate takeover of liberal democratic institutions; its influence has spilled over into the spheres of education, culture, and everyday life. Thus, even if it were possible to roll back neoliberal public policies, the effects of neoliberalism would continue to undo democracy because of its presence in diverse social fields, from business and law to education and cultural life.74 This is why Brown refers to neoliberalism as a reality principle: “With neoliberalism, the market becomes the, rather than a site of veridiction and becomes so for every arena and type of human activity.”75 Because “the market is itself true” it “represents the true form of all activity.” It follows that insofar as persons are rational they “accept these truths” and thereby accept “reality.” To refuse to act in accordance with economic rationality in every domain of existence is to refuse reality. As a result, any proposal to organize the political order or even one’s life according to principles that differ from economic rationality is quite simply unintelligible within the neoliberal imaginary.76
Establishing the market as truth, furthermore, provides cover for a set of actions that sacrifice the needs of citizens, those expelled from the neoliberal order, and the natural world itself. As Brown details in Undoing the Demos and a subsequent essay, “Sacrificial Citizenship,” neoliberalism’s austerity policies require the shared sacrifice of citizens in order to ensure the national economy’s competitiveness, the health of its credit rating, and continued economic growth.77 However, in contrast to Reagan’s discourse on trickle-down economics, which made the promise to citizens that economic growth would benefit everyone, neoliberalism dispenses entirely with this pretense and instead demands insecurity, austerity, and sacrifice as the price for economic growth.78 In addition to the elimination of job security, pensions, and public benefits in the name of economic competitiveness, globally neoliberalism authorizes the sacrifice of the environment, refugees, and the global poor. These represent the “collateral casualties” whose destruction and stunted lives are viewed as the price paid for development and progress.79
Neoliberalism, as a pervasive reality principle, deepens these interconnected crises in three ways. First, the public policy commitments of neoliberalism—deregulation, privatization, cuts to social spending—intensify the destruction of the natural world and exacerbate the social suffering of those judged as expendable within the neoliberal order. Second, neoliberalism largely has succeeded in reducing the human person to human capital whose sole responsibility is to compete with other human capital over scarce resources, the effect of which is that inequality now becomes “legitimate, even normative, in every sphere.”80 Life, now viewed as competition without remainder, inevitably generates winners and losers, and the losers deserve the punishment they receive. Furthermore, because one’s status in a neoliberal order is always precarious, threatened by downgrades, unemployment, and even expulsion, individuals are pressured constantly to pursue their individual self-interest in every activity. Because it is too great a risk to one’s future to pursue those activities that do not directly enhance one’s own value, individuals find it almost impossible to do anything other than passively deliver their lives over to the sovereignty of the market. Third, because neoliberalism constitutes a wholesale attack on the social—the common good, social solidarity, social welfare—it undermines many of the protections and securities necessary for a stable social order.81 In the absence of economic protections, many Americans have become increasingly attracted to authoritarian and antidemocratic leaders who promise protection from economic insecurity and racialized threats by castigating globalization, immigration, and multiculturalism.82 A felt sense of despair or nihilism lurks just beneath the surface of much of the populist anger on the right, which threatens to enact revenge on the perceived causes of its own insecurity and impotence. Wendy Brown has described the convergence between the experience of precarity generated by neoliberal reforms and the intensification of racist and misogynist impulses among those disempowered by these reforms as a form of apocalyptic populism. This strain of populism is apocalyptic because it would rather destroy the entire political and social order than experience further disempowerment.83 In this regard, Trump’s chaotic approach to politics serves as a fitting expression of the mood of a significant segment in the American electorate.
Neoconservatism
Following the American military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq a public debate emerged concerning the question of whether these actions represented a new form of imperialism. Discussion of American imperialism, often dismissed as a “rhetorical excess” of the left, became a focal point of the critical conversation in the 2000s.84 Those who defended the exercise of American power either celebrated the reemergence of American empire (Niall Ferguson) or employed the euphemism “hegemony” to defend the actions of the United States (Robert Kagan).85 Critics on both the right (Andrew Bacevich) and the left (Noam Chomsky) argued that the neoconservative policy orientation of the Bush administration in the Middle East had merely intensified the imperialist orientation of American foreign policy.86 American history is replete with violent foreign interventions, from settler colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade to the Monroe Doctrine and Cold War interventionism in Asia and Latin America. But from the 1980s to the present the neoconservative movement has served as the primary ideological system of legitimation of American interventionism abroad. And while the politics of American empire should not be viewed as coterminous with it, neoconservatism has represented the most bellicose carrier of the militarist features of American foreign policy over the past forty years.
As a distinctive approach to domestic and foreign policy neoconservatism has been a central fixture of the political hegemony on the right since Reagan and, much like neoliberalism, has influenced the policy commitments of politicians on both the left and the right. In what follows we will analyze neoconservatism as a potent manifestation of the politics of American empire that entails both domestic and foreign policy commitments.
As an ideological orientation, neoconservatism is notoriously difficult to define because it lacks ideological uniformity and has shifted over time from a movement on the left with a domestic focus in the 1960s to a movement on the right with a foreign policy focus in the 2000s.87 In broad terms, neoconservatism proposes a vision for the state in which the state sets a moral orientation for the world by utilizing political persuasion, legal enforcement, and military force to achieve its strategic aims.88 Neoconservatism emerged in the 1960s as a reaction to the New Left—the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the antiwar movement—and evaluated this new political formation as fundamentally anti-American.89 Jeane Kirkpatrick, the secretary of state during the Reagan administration, summarized this view when she argued that the New Left represented a frontal attack on American exceptionalism by claiming that “the United States was immoral—a ‘sick society’ guilty of racism, materialism, imperialism, and murder of Third World people in Vietnam.”90 Representative of the broader neoconservative response, Norman Podhoretz’s response to the New Left called for a “new nationalism” rooted in the fierce embrace of the moral purpose of the nation, a renewed effort to patrol cultural and national borders, a defense of the traditional family, and a celebration the values of Judeo-Christian civilization.91 While neoconservative opposition to multiculturalism and feminism is not distinctive in relation
