NEOLIBERALISM’S DEMONS
Polanyi famously characterized the interplay between market forces and society as a “double movement”: when market relations threaten to undermine the basic foundations of social reproduction, society (most often represented by state institutions) intervenes to prevent or at least delay the trend set in motion by the market. Compared with Aristotle’s distribution of categories between the political and economic realms, Polanyi’s account is itself a “great transformation” on the conceptual level. Where Aristotle distinguished state and household and placed both legitimate economic management and unrestrained accumulation in the latter, Polanyi’s “society” combines the household and the state, leaving only out-of-control acquisition in the purely economic realm. And in this schema, society represents the spontaneous and natural, while the economic force of the market is what is constructed and deliberate.
This latter point may appear initially contradictory, since the “double movement” portrays the state primarily as reactive to market forces. As Polanyi points out, however, markets do not simply spring up naturally but have historically been created and cultivated by state actors—something that is above all true of the global market of the nineteenth century. At the same time, by creating the conditions for a worldwide, self-regulating market, governments were unleashing forces that they would later be forced to contain. Polanyi neatly captures this paradox: “While laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate State action, subsequent restrictions on laissez-faire started in a spontaneous way. Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not.”1
Writing in 1944, Polanyi’s account of the relation between society and the market reflected the deep presuppositions that would shape the emerging postwar order known as Fordism. And as Melinda Cooper points out, Polanyi’s analysis has proven quite durable in the post-Fordist era, as his “thesis of the ‘double movement’ is pervasive and well-nigh uncontested in contemporary left-wing formulations of anticapitalist critique.”2 One of Cooper’s primary ambitions in her bold reexamination of the interplay between neoliberalism and social conservatism in the last forty years of American politics is to displace Polanyi’s theory. At the heart of her critique is the observation that “Polanyi imagines the countermovement [of society against market corrosion] as external to the dynamics of capitalism and yet historically inevitable and indeed necessitated by the free market itself” so that within his framework “resistance can only be imagined as conservative” (14).
The legacy of Polanyi should already be familiar to us in the many analyses of neoliberalism that see the state, nationalism, and other similar forces as extrinsic “leftovers” that precede or exceed neoliberal logic. Normally such interpretations first point out the supposed irony or hypocrisy that neoliberalism comes to require these exogenous elements for its functioning while claiming that those same “leftover” institutions can be sites of resistance. Hence, for instance, one often hears that the left needs to restore confidence in state power over against the market, that socialism can only be viable if a given country isolates itself from the forces of the global market, or in Wendy Brown’s more abstract terms, that the left must reclaim the political to combat the hegemony of the economic.
The goal of the previous chapter was to demonstrate that critiques of neoliberalism based on binaries between the political and the economic are ultimately self-undermining. Cooper’s argument shows that the same can be said for the other institutions that make up Polanyi’s “society”: above all the family, but also race and religion. Her guiding assumption is that “what Polanyi calls the ‘double movement’ would be better understood as fully internal to the dynamic of capital” (15). While capitalism is undoubtedly corrosive of traditional institutions, Cooper asks rhetorically, “is it not also compelled to reassert the reproductive institutions of race, family, and nation as a way of ensuring the unequal distribution of wealth and income across time? Isn’t it compelled, in the last instance, to reinstate the family as the elementary legal form of private wealth accumulation?” (18). And we can adapt this notion to specific phases of capitalism: neoliberalism does not simply destroy some preexisting entity known as “the family,” but creates its own version of the family, one that fits its political-economic agenda, just as Fordism created the white suburban nuclear family that underwrote its political-economic goals.
Neoliberalism achieves this transformation of the family not by deploying economic as opposed to political tools, nor by setting unfettered Aristotelian acquisition over against “natural” household management. Rather, neoliberalism carries out its own “great transformation” by reconfiguring the relationship between the political and the economic and reimagining the household precisely as a site of indefinite accumulation. As Cooper points out, the explosion of inherited wealth, in the wake of an era in which its importance had declined precipitously, was not an accidental or unforeseen result of neoliberal policy but an explicit attempt to create greater incentives for capital accumulation. Nor indeed were cuts to welfare programs motivated solely or even primarily by a desire for an abstractly “smaller” and less costly government. Rather, neoliberals recognized that “the dismantling of welfare represents the most effective means of restoring the private bonds of familial obligation” (60), as those deprived of an impersonal public safety net will be forced to rely on a familial private safety net. Hence, in this political moment, both neoliberals and neoconservatives can “seize upon the necessity of family responsibility as the ideal source of economic security and an effective counterforce to the demoralizing powers of the welfare state” (73).
Cooper’s revisionist history also highlights a factor that rarely receives extended attention in accounts of neoliberalism: race. The Fordist nuclear family that the state subsidized both directly (through welfare provisions) and indirectly (through subsidies encouraging homeownership) was figured explicitly as white, and in Cooper’s telling, the definitive transition from Fordism to neoliberalism can be traced to the reaction against a demand to extend the guarantee of the “family wage” for a male breadwinner to black families.3 That the legacy of slavery should prove decisive will come as no surprise to any student of American history. Nor should readers of Aristotle be taken aback, since in his account, home economics are deeply entwined with the question of slavery. Indeed, the master-slave relationship is discussed earlier and at greater length than the other relationships (marriage, parenting) that appear much more central to the life of the household from a modern perspective. In these same passages, Aristotle engages in speculations that resonate with modern conceptions of racial slavery, above all when he claims that “nature intends to make the bodies of free people and slaves differ, one sort strong for necessary service, the other upright and useless for labors of that kind, but useful for a political life.”4 In Aristotle’s view, nature does not manage to achieve this goal in practice, but centuries later, white slave masters claimed to find in the black body an inherent enslavability. And even when blacks were formally emancipated, it remained (and arguably still remains) an open question whether black men would be allowed to be heads of households alongside whites or would instead be consigned to servile labor.
And here arises another question that seldom comes to the fore in accounts of neoliberalism: that of gender, in the form of the ideal that a wife’s place should be in the home. From this perspective it makes sense that the welfare program that came in for the greatest criticism, despite making up a trivial portion of the federal budget, was Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Toward the end of the 1970s, a series of legal challenges resulted in “revised AFDC rules [that] allowed divorced or never-married women and their children to live independently of a man while receiving a state-guaranteed income free of moral conditions.”5 The specter of state-sponsored woman-headed households and the demand for blacks to enjoy the privileges of the Fordist family wage converged in the figure of the black “welfare queen,” who enjoys a life of luxury at the hardworking taxpayer’s expense. Within the ideological narrative, the welfare queen does not simply victimize the broader community through her parasitism, but she comes to embody the moral crisis that was reflected in the inflation crisis of the late 1970s. In short, the welfare queen exercises a near-demonic power over American society, far out of proportion to what the poverty of actual welfare recipients would lead us to expect.
My goal in this chapter is to demonstrate that it is no accident that a demonized figure like the welfare queen proved so instrumental in America’s transition to neoliberalism. I have previously spoken of the ways that Brown and Agamben demonize neoliberalism, and in the present chapter I am going to do the reverse: to show how neoliberalism demonizes us. In this argument I will push my general theory of political theology to the limit by inverting the dominant approach: whereas most political theological accounts focus on the parallel between God and his earthly counterpart, I will argue that it is the parallel between God’s demonic foes and the social order’s subjugated populations that is most decisive for our understanding of neoliberalism.
Making this argument will also require a different approach to genealogy. I will be attending to the locus classicus of the transition from medieval Christianity to modernity, but I will do so by emphasizing the birth of capitalism in place of the usual one-sided focus on the birth of the modern state. And where most genealogical narratives in political theology attempt to unmask the unconscious, forgotten, or repressed theological origins of political institutions, I will primarily (though not exclusively) treat neoliberalism as a self-conscious attempt to return to the founding moment of global capitalism—a moment that had itself witnessed the instrumentalization of religion to discipline and scapegoat entire populations, above all through the rhetoric of demonization. Having established this connection, I will briefly review representative sources in an attempt to specify more exactly how demonization functions in Christian theology before turning to the many and varied ways that neoliberalism demonizes individuals and entire populations, with an emphasis on the distinctions of race and nation that neoliberalism supposedly renders obsolete. This political-theological account of neoliberalism will then serve as the basis for my final chapter, which will investigate the reactionary populist wave represented by the Brexit vote and the Trump presidency and the question of whether it makes sense to view these phenomena as betokening the “end” of neoliberalism.
Returning to the “Satanic Mill”
Even if one accepts Cooper’s critique, Polanyi does have a great deal to offer critics of the neoliberal age. Indeed, for a reader versed in neoliberalism, the narrative of The Great Transformation provokes a shock of recognition—or, better, an uncanny sense of retrospective dejà vu. In Polanyi’s account, as I have noted, the establishment of the supposedly autonomous, self-regulating market was not something that came about spontaneously but through concerted political action. One of the most decisive moments in the British context was the abolition of a set of laws that guaranteed a basic level of subsistence to all the common people, laws that were widely viewed as self-undermining and destructive in their effects.6 The parallel with the destruction of the welfare state, which was similarly blamed for economic stagnation, is clear. Other major points in his narrative invite comparisons to the last several decades of political-economic history as well: his account of how governments became obsessed with fiscal solvency and monetary stability to the near exclusion of all other concerns, for instance, or of how powerful international financial institutions took on a de facto governance role that allowed them to dictate terms to all but the most powerful states.
More telling for my purposes, however, are Polanyi’s repeated references to colonialism and the slave trade. Given his focus on the “One-Hundred Years Peace” on the European continent, these remarks could seem like incidental asides, but taken together, they amount to an insistent subtheme that highlights the violence at the heart of the free market. The most extended discussion comes in a section where he argues, against the idealized vision of free-market dogmatists, that “the Inferno of early capitalism” was in fact as bad as contemporary accounts had made it out to be. Against the contention that the amazing economic growth of the era healed all wounds, he contends that the real damage was “a social calamity” that cannot “be measured by income figures or population statistics.”7
Polanyi admits that there are not many points of comparison because of the infrequency of “cataclysmic events like the Industrial Revolution—an economic earthquake which transformed within less than half a century vast masses of the inhabitants of the English countryside from settled folk into shiftless migrants.” The imposition of such a radical social change by one class upon another within the same country is very rare indeed, but Polanyi claims that “such destructive landslides . . . are a common occurrence in the sphere of culture contact between peoples of various races. Intrinsically, the conditions are the same. The difference is mainly that a social class forms part of a society inhabiting the same geographical area, while culture contact occurs usually between societies settled in different geographical regions.”8 In those cases, as in the Industrial Revolution, the primary damage is not “economic exploitation, as often assumed, but the disintegration of the cultural environment of the victim,” or in other words “the lethal injury to the institutions in which his social existence is embodied,” which leads to “a loss of self-respect and standards.” And in the paragraph that follows, he gives the concrete example of the “condition of some native tribes in modern [meaning colonial] Africa,” which is every bit as degraded as “that of the English laboring classes during the early years of the nineteenth century.”9 Despite this obvious parallel, however, “the social historian fails to take the hint. He still refuses to see that the elemental force of culture contact, which is now revolutionizing the colonial world, is the same which, a century ago, created the dismal scenes of early capitalism.”10 In other words, the benighted social historian fails to see that the Industrial Revolution amounted to a kind of preemptive self-colonization.
A similar parallel has been observed by a contemporary historian of capitalism, Silvia Federici. While teaching in Nigeria in the mid-1980s, Federici witnessed the country’s “adoption of a Structural Adjustment Program, the World Bank’s universal recipe for economic recovery across the planet.” The process, as she describes it, echoes in many ways Polanyi’s narrative: “The declared purpose of the program was to make Nigeria competitive on the international market. But it was soon apparent that this involved a new round of primitive accumulation, and a rationalization of social reproduction aimed at destroying the last vestiges of communal property and community relations, and thereby impose more intense forms of labor exploitation.” In other respects, however, Federici’s account is much different. First, with Cooper she emphasizes the fact that market relations do not one-sidedly destroy existing social relationships but seek to shape “the reproduction of the work-force” and “regulate procreation rates,” which in the Nigerian context took the form of an effort to “reduce the size of a population that was deemed too demanding and indisciplined from the viewpoint of its prospected insertion in the global economy.” Second, and again anticipating Cooper, Federici is more attentive to the role of ideological discourse in this effort, a discourse that—in stark contrast to the brutal amorality Polanyi associates with capitalist apologetics—takes on a distinctively moralizing tone: “Along with these policies, aptly named the ‘War Against Indiscipline,’ I also witnessed the fueling of a misogynous campaign denouncing women’s vanity and excessive demands, and the development of a heated debate similar, in many respects, to the 17th-century querelles des femmes, touching on every aspect of the reproduction of labor-power: the family (polygamous vs. monogamous, nuclear vs. extended), child-raising, women’s work, male and female identity and relations.”11 The imposition of neoliberal structural adjustment, then, just like the original imposition of capitalism in Western Europe, is for Federici not an economic as opposed to social process, nor is it a process that seeks only to destroy society and get it out of the way. Rather, it is an equally economic and social process that actively seeks to reshape society into a form that can support and reproduce capitalist relations, using coercive as well as discursive forces (such as moral exhortation or scapegoating).
Federici also views the parallel between colonization and the initial imposition of capitalism as much closer than Polanyi seems to envision. Whereas Polanyi sees colonization as a later development, Federici sees the two processes as inextricably intertwined from the very beginning in a single process of domination and exploitation. In particular, she highlights the ways that ideological weapons moved promiscuously between the colonies and the metropole, which serve to demonstrate that “capitalism, as a social-economic system, is necessarily committed to racism and sexism.” This is because “capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations—the promise of freedom vs. the reality of widespread coercion, and the promise of prosperity vs. the reality of widespread penury—by denigrating the ‘nature’ of those it exploits: women, colonial subjects, the descendants of African slaves, the immigrants displaced by globalization.”12 I emphasize the words justify and mystify to suggest that Federici could serve as another model for my general theory of political theology, with its concern for discourses of legitimacy and theodicy. But Federici’s work is connected with political theology in a narrower sense as well, given that she focuses on the role of religious rhetoric and institutions in the transition to capitalism, particularly in the phenomenon of witch hunts. Far from an unfortunate holdover of medieval superstition, she views the witch hunts as a systematic campaign of terror meant to destroy women’s control over the reproductive process. The techniques of this crusade evolved over time through cross-fertilization between antiwitch campaigns in the colonies and the metropole and were eventually adapted to the task of creating and reproducing racial divisions within the global proletariat.13
This perspective on the witch hunts highlights another difference between Federici and Polanyi: the place of the demonic. Admittedly, with Polanyi we are dealing with a pattern of metaphors rather than a sustained argument, but the pattern is telling. I quoted above his invocation of “the Inferno of early capitalism,” and within that metaphorical context, it is clear who the demonic torturers are: the free market ideologues, who seek to confine the people in a “Satanic mill” where they will be subject to the brutally efficient discipline of hunger. On a moral level these attacks are of course justified, but they are misleading historically because within mainstream discourse the demons were precisely those most victimized by the system. And as the example of the witch hunt shows, the demonization went beyond unkind rhetoric, leading directly to practices of coercion, torture, and execution. Nor is it a matter of mere historical curiosity, because, Federici points out, the same things continue to happen in the countries most afflicted by neoliberal structural adjustment:
The witch hunts that are presently taking place in Africa or Latin America are rarely reported in Europe and the United States, in the same way as the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, for a long time, were of little interest to historians. Even when they are reported their significance is generally missed, so widespread is the belief that such phenomena belong to a far-gone era and have nothing to do with “us.” . . . If we apply to the present the lessons of the past, we realize that the appearance of witch-hunting in so many parts of the world in the 80s and 90s is a clear sign of a process of “primitive accumulation,” which means that the privatization of land and other communal resources, mass impoverishment, plunder, and the sowing of divisions in once-cohesive communities are again on the world agenda. . . . In some countries, this process still requires the mobilization of witches, spirits, and devils. But we should not delude ourselves that this is not our concern.14
I would echo Federici’s exhortation here, with the proviso that the number of countries where neoliberalization “still requires the mobilization of witches, spirits, and devils” may also include the United States.
I have already referred to the “welfare queen,” that racialized figure of sexual license who depletes the public purse with her lavish lifestyle. One might be tempted to dismiss my evocation of her “demonic” character as a mere metaphor, but a number of the tropes that accumulated around her bear a striking similarity to what we find in an early modern witch-hunting manual such as the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches, 1468).15 The same kind of open contradiction is present: the “welfare queen” is defined at once by her poverty (hence her need for welfare payments) and her paradoxical wealth, while the witch is defined as almost all-powerful precisely because of her resentment of her low social standing. On the specifically sexual level, just as the “welfare queen” is supposedly eager to have extra children solely to gain more welfare benefits and yet at the same time constantly obtaining abortions, so too does the witch at once cooperate with demons to father monstrous children and seek to impede childbirth through infanticide or the removal of male genitalia.16 And where the “welfare queen” has the mysterious ability to cause mass inflation and economic stagnation, the witch possesses the even more awesome power of “depopulating the whole of Christianity.”17
The Christian legacy of misogyny in our contemporary world should be obvious: the scapegoating of single motherhood, promiscuity, birth control, and abortion are all centered in explicitly religious circles. And there is good warrant for connecting that misogyny to discourses of witchcraft and demonic influences: not only did the rise of neoliberalism correlate with a marked revival of the rhetoric of evil in American politics,18 but it also witnessed a resurgence of interest in the demonic and in apocalyptic religion more generally. Among the manifestations of this trend was the panic over so-called Satanic Ritual Abuse, a completely fabricated trend that echoed many of the tropes of traditional witch-hunting and for a time garnered the attention of serious researchers and mainstream media outlets. The 1980s and 1990s were also a fertile period for “end times” speculations that attempted to predict the precise timing of the end of the world and identified political opponents with the demonic forces envisioned in biblical prophecy.
One might be tempted to dismiss such phenomena as marginal, but they helped to solidify the sense of urgency that mobilized the religious right in ever-increasing numbers up through George W. Bush’s reelection campaign. And as Cooper documents, the religious right was not simply a voting bloc, but became virtually an arm of government as the state moved to outsource a whole range of social services to private charities, with an increasing preference for explicitly “faith-based” providers. In a twist on the Foucauldian narrative of this period, Cooper claims, “What looked like the deinstitutionalization of the disciplinary asylum, then, from another angle could be seen as the reinstitutionalization of religion, a process whereby religious charities resumed their once central role in the management of poverty but this time fully integrated into the contractual networks and budgetary calculations of the state.”19 Prison education programs, mental health services, and homeless shelters came to be increasingly dominated by evangelical Christian groups, subjecting the most vulnerable and excluded populations in American society to religious indoctrination and moral discipline as a condition of basic care: “Evangelical missions practice overt forms of proselytization, holding their clients in an unspoken pact whereby food and shelter are exchanged for evangelism.”20
In Cooper’s telling, the role of the religious right in welfare provision is part of an increasingly seamless alliance between neoliberals and neoconservatives when it comes to promoting family structures that support capital accumulation. This alliance is not without conflict—for instance, over gay marriage, which neoliberals tend to support and neoconservatives to abhor—but overall it has delivered nearly four decades of remarkably consistent bipartisan social policy. What Cooper does not mention is the extent to which the neoconservatives par excellence, the religious right, have conformed increasingly to neoliberal culture, with most groups lying somewhere along the spectrum between the corporate slickness of the evangelical megachurch and the outright worship of wealth that characterizes the prosperity gospel.21 And here again we can see a convergence between the margins and the metropole, as recent studies of the Pentecostal wave in the Third World have emphasized the prominent role of the prosperity gospel there.22 Apparently the neoliberal axiom “There Is No Alternative” holds increasingly in the spiritual realm as well, where the greatest aspiration is worldly success.
How to Create a Demon
How can we account for this striking affinity between neoliberalism—a cosmopolitan, materialistic, and often seemingly amoral ideology—and conservative religion? The parallels between Federici’s and Cooper’s accounts may tempt us to explain it as a case of history repeating itself: if neoliberalism is an attempt to “reboot” capitalism in the wake of welfare state reforms and the challenge of Real Socialism, then perhaps it stands to reason that it would use the same tools as in the original imposition of capitalism. Yet such an approach would still need to explain the early modern alliance between the tradition-destroying forces of capitalism and precisely the most reactionary and intolerant representatives of traditional religion.
I believe that this conjuncture cannot be explained away as mere coincidence or opportunism. A deeper conceptual link is at work. Taylor, Agamben, and Leshem have all shown the genealogical links that connect modern economic thinking with Christian conceptions of divine providence, and Taylor has demonstrated most forcefully that the Christian legacy is still very much at work in specifically neoliberal accounts of the market. To paraphrase Schmitt, all significant concepts of the modern theory of the market are secularized providential concepts.23 And that means that they are also moral concepts, because the doctrine of divine providence is not solely about the logistics of the divine administration of the world but is concerned above all with vindicating God’s justice—in other words, with the problem of evil.24
In the mature form that it had reached by the dawn of the modern era, the doctrine of divine providence deploys a two-pronged strategy in its attempt to reconcile the apparently contradictory facts that God is good, God is all-powerful, and evil happens. On one level it offloads responsibility for evil onto individual rational creatures (a category that includes both humans and angels), who misuse the divine gift of free will. Hence injustice and suffering is not God’s fault, but stems from the free choices of creatures. Then, in response to the commonsense objection that God should not have allowed creaturely free will if he knew that it would lead to such bad results, the doctrine claims that God is able to draw good out of those evil choices, indeed a much greater good than would have been possible in a hypothetical evil-free creation. As Augustine puts it, tying in the aesthetic concerns that Taylor’s genealogy highlights, the existence of evil enhances the beauty of creation, “as the beauty of a picture is increased by well-managed shadows.”25
These two claims are obviously in tension. If our evil deeds actually enhance the beauty of God’s creation—indeed, if they were, as the closely related doctrine of predestination maintains, very much part of the plan from the beginning—then why does God still punish us for them? The answer is that those deeds were freely chosen and hence morally blameworthy, regardless of whether God is able to derive some subsequent benefit from them. The determinative factor in God’s judgment is not what we happen to achieve through our actions, which could be the result of contingent factors beyond our control. Rather, it is the condition of our free will that God is concerned with, specifically whether our will is in submission to the divine command. Doing something that God wants is not sufficient—after all, literally everything that happens in God’s creation is ultimately what he wants to happen. Only an act of obedience that is willed as such is truly meritorious.
This connection between will or intention and moral judgment has deeply shaped the commonsense moral reasoning of the modern West. That profound influence makes it all the more disturbing to realize that in the Christian account of the will, at least in the form it had taken by the late medieval period, the emphasis falls overwhelming on the side of securing the blameworthiness of human actions, to the near-exclusion of any real consideration of moral achievement or merit. In the early centuries theologians could see in free will a sign of human dignity as being created in the image of God. Here Gregory of Nyssa, writing in the middle of the fourth century, is exemplary when he writes that God could not fail to provide us with “the most excellent and precious of blessings—I mean the gift of liberty and free will. For were human life governed by necessity, the ‘image’ would be falsified in that respect and so differ from the archetype. For how can a nature subject to necessity and in servitude be called an image of the sovereign nature?”26 Over time, however, and particularly within the Latin West, theologians viewed free will less as a sign of harmonious likeness to the divine than as a site of potential rivalry and rebellion against God.
This suspicion of the will is expressed most forcefully in the doctrine of original sin, initially developed by Augustine, systematized by Scholastic theologians like Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas, and then radicalized by the Protestant Reformers Luther and Calvin. For the sake of illustration I will take up Anselm’s account,27 which starts from the premise that every rational creature owes to God the submission of its will to God’s commandment. As is well known, our first parents failed to show God the proper obedience, and the result was a distortion in their wills that was subsequently passed down to each of their descendants (§2). This distortion of the will means that human beings are born in a state of de facto rebellion against God, a condition that we cannot resolve on our own (§7). Yet despite the fact that this condition of the will has come about through no fault of the infant’s own, it is nevertheless morally relevant precisely because it is a condition of the will, meaning that “all infants are equally unjust, because they have none of the justice which it is each man’s duty to have” (§24). This injustice, this failure to live up to God’s standards, is no less a sin than an obvious act of malice such as murder, and that means that every infant is born deserving to go to hell (§28). Thankfully, forgiveness of sin is available, which in Anselm’s system takes the form of applying the superabundant merits of Jesus Christ (which he accumulated through willfully submitting to death) to the believer’s debt of sin.28 Once that forgiveness is achieved, the believer has some ability to begin acquiring merit, but that merit will always pale in comparison to Christ’s merit, upon which it ultimately depends.
Not all of God’s creatures are so fortunate. For the fallen angels—better known as demons—the free choice to rebel against God is permanent and irrevocable. This is above all the case for Satan or the devil, the angel who initiates the demonic rebellion and subsequently tempts humanity, setting in train literally every evil deed ever committed in God’s good creation. The question of how the devil could ever turn against God presents a difficult conundrum, one that the theological tradition in the West seems strangely determined to exacerbate as much as possible. Early accounts provided the devil with something of a backstory, allowing for a comprehensible account of his motives. In the most common narrative, of which Gregory of Nyssa provides a well-known version,29 the devil was appointed as a kind of guardian angel of earth, but gets wind of God’s big plans for humans (who, as partly material beings, are clearly inferior to the purely spiritual angels in his opinion) and feels that his rightful position is threatened. Hence he conspires to seduce his human charges to keep them out of God’s good graces. It is a story that certainly paints the devil in a bad light but nevertheless gives him familiar motives—wounded pride and status anxiety—that help to make sense of his malicious act in the Garden of Eden.
Later theologians increasingly rejected this story and, indeed, any recognizable narrative account whatsoever. Instead, they insisted, following Augustine, that the rebellious angels fell not only prior to the material creation, but as early as was logically possible—namely, the first instant after their creation.30 Where the earlier story had envisioned an indefinite period of time prior to the devil’s initial rebellion, Augustine claims that the devil “did not abide in the truth from the time of his own creation, and was accordingly never blessed with the holy angels,” because he “refused to submit to his Creator” from the very beginning (11.13). We should not conclude from this, however, that “the devil has derived from some adverse evil principle a nature proper to himself” (11.13), because following the dictates of one’s own nature is morally neutral: “if sin be natural, it is not sin at all” (11.15). Not nature but the will is the site of moral judgment, and the devil’s will rejected the obligation to submit to God at the first available opportunity. Therefore, once again, God is not to blame for the devil’s evil choice, since he created the devil with the capacity to submit to God’s will. As punishment for their rebellion, the devil and his fellow demons are deprived of any ability to turn their will back toward God, but as with the hell-bound infant, this state of their will, which they cannot control or change, is nonetheless morally blameworthy precisely because it is the state of their will.
This conception of the fall of the devil is very difficult to understand. Everything that we associate with moral responsibility seems to be lacking. There is no moral obligation at play here other than sheer submission to God, a demand that seems to have no concrete content. There is no way to assess motivations or circumstances, because the decision to rebel was not only instantaneous but at the time it occurred was quite literally the only thing that had ever happened in God’s created world. It seems more like a random impulse than a morally relevant choice, much less a choice carrying such severe and inescapable consequences. On this point, Augustine more or less agrees. When he asks what caused the demons to rebel while the other angels stood firm, he is forced to conclude that there is no discernible reason for this difference: “However minutely we examine the case . . . , we can discern nothing which caused the will of the one to be evil” (12.6). In short, an arbitrary, instantaneous demand elicits an equally arbitrary response.
On some formal level the demons had the freedom to choose “rightly,” as illustrated by the fact that some of their peers in fact did so. Yet their agency appears so small as to be meaningless, especially seeing that God holds all the cards here, since he did, after all, create all these angels out of nothing and could foresee precisely what they would do. It is difficult not to conclude that God is setting them up to fall specifically so that he can blame and punish them. This cuts against a commonsense reading of the doctrine of providence, namely that God allows evil to happen owing to the conceptual necessity of allowing free will and subsequently makes up for it by drawing good out of evil. What the primal scene of the fall of the devil shows is that the causation is reversed: the first thing God does is induce some of his creatures to “rebel” against a meaningless imperious demand, to ensure that there will be a reservoir of evil for him to turn toward the greater good.
In everyday language we tend to use the term demonization to refer to hyperbolic accusations or insults. I want to suggest that this detour through the Christian tradition provides us with a more precise sense of what it means to “demonize” someone. To “demonize” is to set someone up to fall, providing them with just the barest sliver of agency necessary to render them blameworthy. This is how the theological tradition envisions the process by which God produces demons, a strategy that he then repeats in order to entrap his human subjects into a debt of sin—all for his greater glory.
If God’s first move after creating the world is to secure the existence of evil by demonizing the rebellious angels, then that means that the paradigm of providence is necessarily tied up with the dynamics of demonization. My argument in this chapter is that the same applies to the secularized providence of the self-regulating market. This is so because both the openly theological and the ostensibly secular version of providence depend precisely on drawing good out of our negative inclinations: in theological terms our sinfulness and lust of the flesh, in secular terms our selfish and base material desires. The virtue of the invisible hand is that it is able to take our specifically self-interested choices and harmonize them into social good.
Yet the providential hand of the market, like its divine model, is not content simply to wait around for us to make selfish decisions. It must force us to be selfish in the particular way it demands, which means seeking open-ended material gain. Any impulse to seek the social good directly, apart from the grace of the market, must be stifled. For the wealthy, ideological discourse is often sufficient, while for the workers themselves, a more powerful form of persuasion is required—namely, the ever-present threat of starvation, which the ideologues of early capitalism publicly and explicitly promoted as a tool of public policy.31 If the workers cannot see their own self-interest, then it must be made inescapably clear.
The Market in Demonization
The alliance between capitalism (in its classical and neoliberal versions) and reactionary Christianity is founded in the indissoluble link between providence and demonization. The difference between the (neo)liberal and (neo) conservative approaches is primarily one of emphasis. Whereas (neo)liberals deploy the tool of demonization for the sake of maintaining the secular providential machine, (neo)conservatives have recourse to providence as a way of justifying their ever more hyperbolic demonization. After all, if the doctrine of providence emerged as a way to explain the existence of evil, the confrontation with the kind of sheer malevolent malice that the Malleus Maleficarum attributes to witches, for instance, necessarily kicks the providential apparatus into overdrive. Indeed, the first book of that infamous text is taken up with an extended, and surprisingly theologically rigorous, discussion of the providential implications of the witches’ supposed campaign of terror against Christendom.
Neither group seriously disputes that divine favor (as they construe it) is displayed through worldly power and prosperity. Where disagreements arise, they center primarily on the degree of demonization. Demonization in the strictest sense occurs only in the fall of the devil and his demons: an instantaneous and irreversible descent into evil, for which no redemption is possible. Yet what happens to human beings under the sway of original sin is not different in kind so much as in degree. Sinful humans start out, like the demons, in a state of moral dereliction from the very first moment of their existence, but unlike the demons, they have the opportunity to benefit from the divine economy of salvation. We can say, then, that original sin imposes on human beings a conditional demonization, in contrast to the absolute demonization experienced by the fallen angels.
Broadly speaking, the (neo)conservative is more comfortable with the gesture of absolute demonization, whereas the (neo)liberal is more open to the possibility of redemption. To use a contemporary example, reactionary Christians regard homosexuals as beyond the pale, whereas neoliberals are open to the possibility of allowing them to participate in family life and the wealth acquisition that it entails. The difference is that between demanding a degree of total repentance that homosexuals experience as absolutely impossible and making room for a choice to practice homosexuality in a “responsible” (monogamous, family-oriented) way. It is worth reflecting here on the extent to which this debate between neoconservatives and neoliberals hinges on the question of whether homosexuality is a “choice.” Where neoconservatives insist, as is required by their view that homosexuality is morally culpable, that homosexuality is in fact a choice, neoliberals view it as an intrinsic quality of the person and hence as not morally relevant per se—the only ground for moral judgment is how homosexuals express their sexual orientation, specifically whether they are able to embed their homosexual practice in a stable family life.
Completely missing from the mainstream debate is the idea that homosexuality is a choice and that choosing it—including the nonnormative sexual and kinship practices it has entailed—would be morally salutary. Indeed, that position was explicitly rejected during the AIDS crisis when, as Cooper documents, neoliberals opposed any publicly funded effort to combat a crisis that they viewed as the result of freely chosen risky behavior. Using language familiar to students of the recent Global Financial Crisis, they viewed the problem presented by the AIDS crisis “as one of ‘moral hazard’: When the state subsidizes health care for those who have voluntarily assumed the risks of infection, it ends up lowering the price of high-risk behavior and endorsing irresponsible lifestyle choices such as promiscuity or addiction.”32 From the neoliberal perspective, “social insurance . . . actively discourages the classical liberal virtues of prudence and self-care by subsidizing the costs of high-risk behavior,”33 and so “to counteract the social costs of unsafe sex, they argue, the state would do well to limit its interventions to promoting marriage.”34
The question of free will, so central to the Christian moral order, is equally crucial for neoliberal morality. This is so at a literal level: “Volenti non fit injuria”—to the willing person no wrong can be done—“is the legal translation of the idea that risk, once consented to, must be borne entirely by the individual, unless one can prove fraud or duress in the performance of a contract.”35 One does not normally associate the decision to have sex with the kind of reasoned deliberation necessary for entering into a legally binding contract. But just as the fallen angels’ arbitrary impulse of resistance against God was interpreted as a morally relevant act of rebellion, so too from the neoliberal perspective is every decision, even the most impulsive and impassioned, treated as a reasoned attempt at utility maximization.
A particularly clear account of this moral outlook can be found in Gary Becker’s Nobel Lecture, entitled “The Economic Way of Looking at Behavior.”36 To characterize this text as a moral treatise may seem strange. First of all, he is quite insistent that his goal is the purely methodological one of providing ways “to analyze social issues that range beyond those usually considered by economists.” And the first step in developing that broader approach is to distance himself from the idea “that individuals are motivated solely by selfishness of material gain” (385). In Becker’s view, “Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences,” and we should limit ourselves to assuming “that individuals maximize welfare as they conceive it, whether they be selfish, altruistic, loyal, spiteful, or masochistic” (385–86; emphasis in original).
Becker’s first two examples fit with his reputation for amoral thought experiments, as he attempts to construe first racial discrimination and then criminal activity as rational choices. In the first case, taking for granted that some people have racist preferences, Becker argues that such preferences may not be absolute and hence could be offset by higher costs in other areas—whether through legal sanction in the case of antidiscrimination laws or through the less direct path of providing high-quality job training to minorities to make their value as employees outweigh the benefit the racist believes he derives from discriminating against them. In other words, the goal of public policy should be to figure out how much racial discrimination is really worth to people and then either make it unaffordable or else make nondiscrimination too profitable to pass up.
The idea of solving racism by buying off the racists is hardly an edifying thought, and at first glance, neither is Becker’s account of crime as a matter of coldly weighing the pros and cons of breaking the law. Nevertheless, he believes that his view is preferable to the prevailing opinion in the 1950s and 1960s that “criminal behavior was caused by mental illness and social oppression, and that criminals were helpless ‘victims.’” For his part, Becker reports that he “was not sympathetic to the assumption that criminals had radically different motivations from everyone else. I explored instead the theoretical and empirical implications of the assumption that criminal behavior is rational” (390). Though he does not dwell on it, one can detect an unexpected concern for the human dignity of criminals. They are not incomprehensible demons, trapped forever in irrational patterns of destructive behavior, nor are they automatons of fate. They are rational human beings just like Gary Becker, who himself confesses to committing the minor crime of parking illegally after calculating that the risk was likely worth the benefit (389). And he advocates an approach to crime that is as rational as Becker’s fellow criminals are, balancing costs and benefits without getting caught up in an emotional desire for retaliation and punishment.
This facade of moral neutrality begins to crack during his discussion of the family. Becker is amusingly cynical at times, most notably in his account of familial emotional manipulation as an economic strategy. Yet it is clear that his goal is to protect and promote some version of traditional family life and that he is primarily concerned with how to use public policy to foster intimate family relationships. Crucial to his discussion is the question of elder care, which he believes to be a major motivating factor in parents’ strategies to cultivate their children’s sense of affection and obligation (or else bribe them with the promise of a bequest). From his perspective, “programs such as social security that significantly help the elderly would encourage family members to drift apart emotionally, not by accident but as maximizing responses to those policies.” More generally, beneficial phenomena like “increased geographical mobility, the greater wealth that comes with economic growth, better capital and insurance markets, higher divorce rates, smaller families, and publicly funded health care” have “weakened the personal relations within families between husbands and wives, parents and children, and among more distant relatives, partly by reducing the incentives to invest in creating closer relations” (401; emphasis in original). It is only a short step from this analysis to the perceived necessity to eliminate welfare protections—precisely to force people into a position where they will choose freely and rationally to cultivate strong family relationships.
In theological terms, Becker’s analyses of crime and the family both point toward a kind of secularized grace, whereby the providential hand of the state sets up the economy in a way that “nudges” the individual toward righteousness.37 Yet this hopeful face of neoliberalism is inextricably tied up with the kind of callous abandonment of entire populations that we have seen in the neoliberal response to the AIDS crisis. For a privileged few, the providential economy of “nudges” allows them to begin accumulating merit. But for the majority of the population, the experience is that of demonization: the assumption of rational choice in the absence of meaningful agency generates only blameworthiness. Neoliberalism makes demons of us all.
The Neoliberal Inferno
This shadow side of the neoliberal concept of free choice grows naturally out of the fact that, as Brown points out, neoliberalism emphasizes not market exchange (which presupposes equality) but market competition (which necessarily entails inequality, since there must be winners and losers).38 And as the insistence on family shows, this competition is not purely individual but can involve larger groupings. Most accounts of neoliberalism emphasize competition on the geographic and political level, in which units ranging from the state (or superstate in the case of the European Union) down to the individual city and even neighborhood compete for capital and the jobs it can bring to their constituencies. Yet the importance of the family points in another direction, toward groupings defined by sexual practice (such as AIDS patients, as they were reductively envisioned in the mainstream media) or by racial descent. For gay men who “choose” to expose themselves to AIDS, as for black men who “choose” not to display the impossible level of instant abject submission demanded by police, the presumption of freedom becomes a trap that leaves them either abandoned to death or actively murdered—not on the basis of the individual’s own unique circumstances but on the authorities’ ostensibly “reasonable” reliance on stereotypes to increase efficiency in issuing their judgments.
Despite a formal commitment to nondiscrimination and “color blindness,” neoliberalism institutes a competition among sexualities and racialized groups, not just individuals, firms, and political units. In this competition, historically dominant groups certainly have an advantage, but minority groups can find a niche—as in the widespread perception of Americans of East Asian descent as a “model minority” with a special gift for meritocratic climbing, or the increasing acceptance of monogamous gay and lesbian couples. Yet this competition produces losers as well, such as blacks and members of sexual minorities that fit less easily into the template of the traditional family (e.g., transgender and other gender nonconforming people). Individual success stories may arise within disadvantaged groups—think of the rapid political ascent of Barack Obama, for instance, or the favorable media coverage of the transgender television personality Caitlyn Jenner in the wake of her transition—but the groups as a whole are exposed to deprivation, economic exploitation, and violence. And to add insult to injury, the social order alternates between declaring their plight a deserved result of morally culpable decisions and congratulating itself for generously providing opportunities for individuals to succeed despite their background.
No book has documented these dynamics as well as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.39 Her argument that the War on Drugs and mass incarceration have emerged as the latest way to maintain America’s racial caste system is as influential as it is devastating. It has awakened a new awareness of systemic racism in a society that had come to regard itself as “color blind” or “postracial,” and it has brought into the mainstream debate the radical claim that the prison system needs to be not simply reformed but completely abolished. While Alexander does not explicitly position her work with respect to neoliberalism, the evidence she accumulates points inescapably toward the conclusion that we are dealing not only with a New, but with a distinctively Neoliberal, Jim Crow.
On the level of explicit public policy, for instance, she makes it clear that Reagan’s goal of radically stepping up the enforcement of drug laws, a move that few states and municipalities supported when it was first proposed, was achieved not primarily through direct legal mandates but through financial incentives for police departments, which also gained the opportunity to use asset seizures as a profit center. It is hard to imagine a more literal response to the neoliberal imperative that government should be run like a business. Just as with the neoliberal approach to AIDS, the crack epidemic was viewed not as a public health crisis but as a question of culpable choices whose perpetrators must be made to bear the costs. This led to a massive increase in law enforcement and prison funding, while by contrast, the budget for the National Institute on Drug Abuse and for antidrug education programs were both cut by approximately 80 percent during Reagan’s first term (49–50).
The media storm that followed can only be described as a demonization campaign aimed at black communities most afflicted by the so-called demon drug: “Thousands of stories about the crack crisis flooded the airwaves and newsstands, and the stories had a clear racial subtext. The articles typically featured black ‘crack whores,’ ‘crack babies,’ and ‘gangbangers,’ reinforcing already prevalent racial stereotypes of black women as irresponsible, selfish ‘welfare queens,’ and black men as ‘predators’—part of an inferior and criminal subculture” (52). The figure of the “crack baby” is especially poignant from the theological perspective, because it envisions black children as born with a preexisting addiction to the very drug that was supposedly turning their parents into uncontrollable criminals—an uncanny parallel to the inborn distortion of the will caused by original sin. More broadly, the view that crack was irresistible once taken renders drug addicts, like the fallen angels, simultaneously irredeemable and morally responsible, since their condition results from their ostensibly free choice to take crack rather than “just say no.”
Some of the most upsetting passages in The New Jim Crow detail the ways that police attempt to draw even innocent or marginally involved people into the realm of criminal justice. Their techniques can almost all be characterized as forms of entrapment, designed to force people to “freely” confess to criminal wrongdoing. The anecdote with which she opens the book’s third chapter, “The Color of Justice,” is particularly outrageous:
Imagine you are Erma Faye Stewart, a thirty-year-old, single African American mother of two who was arrested as part of a drug sweep in Hearne, Texas. All but one of the people arrested were African American. You are innocent. After a week in jail, you have no one to care for your two small children and are eager to get home. Your court-appointed attorney urges you to plead guilty to a drug distribution charge, saying the prosecutor has offered probation. You refuse, steadfastly proclaiming your innocence. Finally, after almost a month in jail, you decide to plead guilty so you can return home to your children. (97)
Here we are dealing with literal criminalization: as a result of this spurious, extorted confession, she is “branded a felon” despite being factually innocent of any crime. The only thing that makes her a criminal is her having been induced to say that she was. As a result of this purely notional status, she is ordered to pay a massive fine, deprived of welfare benefits (including public housing, leading to homelessness), and stripped of employment discrimination protections and voting rights. Worst of all, the case in which she was swept up is ultimately dismissed, but she is still on the books as a felon because she confessed—freely, of course. This is an extreme case of entrapment, but Alexander documents widespread patterns in which police are able to seize on any action—including minor traffic violations or simply appearing suspicious in some way—as a pretext to subject blacks to searches that would otherwise be illegal, increasing their odds of being incriminated.
This campaign of demonization and entrapment appears even more cruel and gratuitous when one recognizes that “people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates” and that at the time the drug war was declared, “drug crime was declining, not rising” (7; emphasis in original). As Alexander notes, “Sociologists have frequently pointed out that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns. Michael Tonry explains in Thinking About Crime: ‘Governments decide how much punishment they want, and these decisions are in no simple way related to crime rates’” (7). Just as God needed a certain level of evil rebellion and set about inciting it, so too did the Reagan administration need a certain level of black criminality and set about creating it. In both cases the vagaries of free choice constituted the raw material out of which the demons could be crafted, and in both cases, the newly minted demons play a crucial role in legitimating the ruler. Reagan and the elder Bush both benefited from their ability to signal that they were forcefully putting blacks in their place while maintaining the plausible deniability of an ostensibly nonracial basis for doing so. For their part, Clinton and Obama were able to present substantively identical policies as an attempt to help black communities by freeing them of criminals, just as they could position welfare cuts as a bid to end dependency and thereby enhance black people’s dignity and self-esteem. The difference is one of emphasis rather than substance, with the neoconservatives favoring demonization and the neoliberals focusing on the possibility of redemption.
Criminalization and incarceration are the most extreme consequences of losing out in the tacit competition that neoliberalism institutes between the racialized groups. The prison system, moreover, is still very much a part of the neoliberal order. Not only do local communities compete to host prisons (and the jobs they carry with them), but in the United States the early 2000s saw a privatization wave in even this seemingly most central state function. Nor is it just a matter of warehousing prisoners for the sake of job creation and corporate profit: incarcerated workers can also be made available to private enterprises eager to cut labor costs, as the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in all cases except as a legal punishment.
Back home, poverty and criminalization depress property values in black neighborhoods, making them ripe targets for urban gentrification or for predatory slumlords and payday lenders. The latter possibilities are particularly vivid illustrations of the neoliberal ethos of competition, where contracts are not an agreement between equals seeking mutual benefit so much as a calculated risk in the never-ending quest to accumulate both monetary and social capital. Hence punitive interest rates or unfair lease agreements are not an injustice perpetrated on the victims, but must be viewed as risks that they freely took on. By the same token, whatever profit can be extracted from them represents not exploitation, but an obligation freely entered into. Just as the state receives the glory of legitimacy for being “tough on crime”—either to punish blacks or uplift them, as the occasion demands—so too does the economy derive glorious surplus value from those who have been entrapped in neoliberalism’s version of hell.40
The same dynamics of entrapment and predatory lending play out in the grand competition for capital that neoliberalism institutes on an international scale. It is well-known that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have frequently imposed the strictures of the Washington Consensus on countries that were desperate for credit, leading to “structural adjustment” policies that often left them unable to service their debt—prompting another round of loans and another round of austerity and privatization. This is a very concrete way in which neoliberalism does, as Wendy Brown contends, hollow out democracy, by directly constraining democratically elected governments to implement policies that they have “freely” agreed to follow. The same happens within countries, as regional and municipal governments are forced to embrace neoliberal “best practices” to maintain “competitiveness” or else face capital flight and mass immiseration.
Some of the most potent conflicts in the neoliberal order happen where geographic and racial competition overlap—namely, outsourcing and immigration. The relationship between the United States and Mexico is exemplary here, as Mexico is envisioned as “stealing” American jobs in both directions, first by tempting American companies into relocating and then by sending migrant workers who habitually underbid and outwork their American counterparts. This is also a site of conflict between neoconservative and neoliberal forces, in which the latter emphasize the hard work and meritocratic striving of Latino immigrants, while the former attempt to demonize all Latinos as criminals by association with undocumented (or “illegal”) immigrants or, more broadly, as an inassimilable foreign element. Just as with the conflict over gay marriage, both sides agree on the broadly conservative goal of assimilation but differ on the extent to which it is possible.
The US-Mexico example is particularly interesting for our purposes because the United States has had a large population of Mexican descent virtually from the time of the Founding—indeed, large regions of US territory were at one time part of Mexico—and migrant labor from Latin America has been an integral part of the US agricultural system for generations. The specific relationship between the United States and Mexico imagined by mainstream American political discourse is therefore not the result of a sudden influx of Mexicans where previously there were none, nor does it represent some “leftover” element of racial animus toward Latin Americans that neoliberal politicians are opportunistically indulging. This conflictual relationship arose during the neoliberal era, as a direct result of the neoliberal restructuring of the US economy through deindustrialization and free trade. To the extent that it draws on a well of preexisting racism, the neoliberal situation has reconfigured that racism into a new and distinctly neoliberal form—just as it has done with white Americans’ more severe and durable racism against blacks.
Hence the “double movement” hypothesis, no less than the political-economic dichotomy, needs to be set aside. Neoliberalism is a social order, which means that it is an order of family and sexuality and an order of racial hierarchy and subordination. It is a political order, which means that it is an order of law and punishment and an order of war and international relations. And it is above all a remarkably cohesive moral order, deploying the same logic of constrained agency (demonization), competition (in which there must be both winners and losers), and conformity (“best practices”) at every level: from the individual to the household to the racial grouping to the region to the country to the world.
Neoliberalism is, in sum, a totalizing world order, an integral self-reinforcing system of political theology, and it has progressively transformed our world into a living hell. This is felt most acutely by those who have been fully demonized by an economically rapacious and brutally violent prison system. From a political theological perspective, we can see that this infernal system is far from being some merely particular “issue” or “cause”—it is the most extreme expression of the logic of our neoliberal order. The rest of those of us excluded from the elect 1 percent are not so thoroughly demonized, but our lives are increasingly hemmed in by a logic of entrapment and victim-blaming. The psychic life of neoliberalism, as so memorably characterized by Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism, is shot through with anxiety and shame. We have to be in a constant state of high alert, always “hustling” for opportunities and connections, always planning for every contingency (including the inherently unpredictable vagaries of health and longevity). This dynamic of “responsibilization,” as Wendy Brown calls it, requires us to fritter away our life with worry and paperwork and supplication, “pitching” ourselves over and over again, building our “personal brand”—all for ever-lowering wages or a smattering of piece-work, which barely covers increasingly exorbitant rent, much less student loan payments.
The vulgar libertarianism that neoliberalism presents as its public face is an integral part of this victim-blaming dynamic. Its atomistic individualism attempts to cover up the existence of systemic forces beyond any individual’s control. Its naturalization of the invisible hand of the market and rejection of the meddling influence of the state combine to obscure the fact that the economy is not a realm of unrestrained freedom but of governance and control—one that has been intentionally constructed in a certain way by human beings who, as Mirowski forcefully points out, can often be named individually. Libertarianism does not describe the actual workings of the neoliberal economy, but it does perfectly capture its moral dynamic of using freedom as a mechanism to generate blameworthiness. If you fail, it is your fault, and yours alone. You are in control of your destiny, and if your destiny is miserable, then misery must be what you deserve, because the market is always right. If Job’s friends were alive today, they would be libertarians.
This dynamic of demonization entraps us emotionally. If we buy into the narrative of personal responsibility and agency, then our financial insecurity and underemployment must be our own fault—leading to a feeling of shame when we prove persistently unable to overcome them. If we recognize the systemic forces at work, it can be difficult to avoid a feeling of utter despair. And meanwhile, not even the system’s ostensible beneficiaries seem to be enjoying themselves, as our ruling classes—most notably the billionaire who has reached the pinnacle of power and fame—continually complain of being unappreciated and unfairly attacked.
The neoliberal order increasingly spreads only misery, but in this very misery there may be a paradoxical glimmer of hope. Even though there really is no “leftover” institutional form that automatically escapes the logic of neoliberalism, there are still desires and demands—including among those, such as myself, who have known nothing but the neoliberal order for our entire lives—that reject it and potentially exceed it. Already, those desires and demands are beginning to place a major strain on the neoliberal order. The question that remains for us is whether they can be harnessed to form a genuine alternative. As the next chapter will show, the early indications are mixed at best.