THIS PRESENT DARKNESS
In 1989 Francis Fukuyama published an essay entitled “The End of History?”1 Though the 1992 book-length version of the argument is better-known, the shorter essay is an interesting document in its own right. Coming before the fall of the Berlin Wall (which would happen in November of that year), much less the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself (which would endure through 1991), it is more cautious than one would expect from the book’s subsequent reputation. Where the latter appeared in the context of triumphalism, as Americans came to believe that they had “won” the Cold War, the shorter essay focuses more on “the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.” On the basis of this ambiguous victory in an ideological war of attrition, Fukuyama claims that “we may be witnessing . . . the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” (1).
This one-sided emphasis on liberal democracy as a political ideal is strange, given the primary evidence Fukuyama adduces for the global triumph of Western thought is precisely the spread of Western commercial culture: experimentation with markets in the Soviet Union, the popularity of Western classical music in Japan, “and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran.” And though he attempts to obscure it somewhat through his idiosyncratic descriptions, the narrative arc he supplies for the twentieth century is one in which politics and economics are deeply intertwined:
The twentieth century saw the developed world descend into a paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism [sic] and fascism, and finally to an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war. But the century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an “end of ideology” or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism. (1)
In terms of the main events, this is a narrative that critics and exponents of neoliberalism would recognize. Yet both would equally object to the idea that “economic and political liberalism” was somehow passively waiting for the various alternatives to exhaust themselves. As we have seen, the return to a new version of classical liberalism at the end of the twentieth century was not the simple reemergence of something that had always been lurking in the background but the result of an aggressive political movement. Fukuyama knows this very well, because he had not only witnessed that transformation—as a member of the Reagan administration, he actively participated in it.
Hence Marika Rose is right to connect Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis to the triumph not of liberal democratic political institutions but of neoliberalism.2 And Fukuyama is actively contributing to the “end of history” that he claims to be documenting, insofar as he is hard at work naturalizing neoliberalism as what is left over once its ideological opponents have exhausted themselves. From this perspective his argument marks a turning point in the history of the neoliberal “end of history,” the shift, in Will Davies’s terms, from “combative neoliberalism” to “normative neoliberalism.”3 The former period, which Davies defines as lasting from 1979 through 1989, was the Reagan-Thatcher era, when neoliberalism “was a self-conscious insurgency, a social movement aimed at combating and ideally destroying the enemies of liberal capitalism” (126). The latter, ranging from 1989 to 2008, was the era when ostensibly progressive parties took the lead, responding to the new political terrain in which “a single political-economic system” had emerged victorious by embracing the “explicitly normative” project of “how to render that system ‘fair’” (127).
In retrospect, the 1990s and early 2000s were the classical era of neoliberalism, the period when the project shifted from its one-sidedly polemical emphasis toward a more positive and constructive stance. Embracing the ethos of omnipresent competition, center-left neoliberals like Clinton and Blair attempted “to ensure that ‘winners’ were clearly distinguishable from ‘losers,’ and that the contest was perceived as fair” (127). Under normative neoliberalism “neoclassical economics becomes a soft constitution for government, or ‘governance’ in its devolved forms. Normative questions of fairness, reward, and recognition become channeled into economic tests of efficiency and comparisons of ‘excellence.’ Coupled to markets and quasi-market contests, the ideal is that of meritocracy, of reward being legitimately earned, rather than arbitrarily inherited” (128). In other words, where the combative stage had been content to secure the actual victory of neoliberalism, the normative stage undertook to legitimate it. And they were largely successful, as rising income inequality did not become a major political issue as long as economic growth continued and the various economic and quasi-market testing regimes appeared to be fair and evenhanded. The mantra of “there is no alternative”—which under Thatcher and Reagan had been at once an aspiration and a threat—fell aside as meritocratic metrics took on an “a priori status” throughout all levels of society. Only with the Global Financial Crisis was the spell truly broken, when “it emerged that systems of audit and economic modeling could potentially serve vested political and economic interests.” This means that massive income inequality, “which had been rising in most of the Global North since the 1980s, returned as a major concern only once the tests of legitimate inequality had been found to be faulty” (129).
In the wake of the crisis, Davies believes we moved into a new stage: punitive neoliberalism. Where normative neoliberalism had witnessed an explosion of credit at every level, justified as a motor for creating economic opportunity, punitive neoliberalism marks the moment when the bill comes due: “The transfer of banking debts onto government balance sheets, creating the justification for austerity, has triggered a third phase of neoliberalism, which operates with an ethos of heavily moralized—as opposed to utilitarian—punishment. What distinguishes the spirit of punishment is its post jure logic, that is, the sense that the moment of judgment has already passed, and questions of value or guilt are no longer open to deliberation” (130). As Rose points out, this is the “end of history” with a vengeance: a Last Judgment that consigns us all to the hell of eternal indebtedness. Here Agamben’s vision of the hellishness of modernity’s eternal economizing is horrifically overlain with Christian eschatology—the ultimate synthesis of providential neoliberalism and demonizing neoconservatism. Under this regime, public policy takes increasingly punitive forms that in terms of “most standards of orthodox economic evaluation . . . are self-destructive.” The overall ethos is one of retribution, driven by “the sense that we ‘deserve’ to suffer for credit-fuelled economic growth” (130). “There is no alternative” does not name a project—whether the negative one of tearing down public institutions or the positive one of constructing elaborate artificial markets—so much as the absolute trump card that silences all debate and dissent. Davies quotes former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’s description of his experience negotiating the terms of his country’s debt as exemplary: “You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on—to make sure it’s logically coherent—and you’re just faced with blank stares. It’s as if you haven’t spoken” (121).
Aside from the intrinsic interest of his analysis, what makes Davies’s piece so valuable for thinking through our present is the perspective he brings. I mean this in two senses. First, he is writing before the twin shocks of 2016: the Brexit vote and the cruel Electoral College technicality that led to the Trump presidency.4 Second, he is writing from a British perspective, meaning that “punitive neoliberalism” had clearly been in force long before 2016. With Davies’s periodization in mind we can see that Obama represented a failed attempt to salvage normative neoliberalism in the United States. Seemingly through sheer force of personal charisma, he was able to maintain the presidency for two terms, allowing him to expand health care access along normative neoliberal lines and subsequently to restrain the worst excesses of the more clearly punitive neoliberalism espoused by Tea Party Republicans. At every level of government below the presidency, however, punitive neoliberalism made more and more gains with every election, creating a situation in which the Republicans could come close enough to winning the popular vote to seize the presidency.
If we follow Melinda Cooper in viewing the neoliberal era as defined by the alliance between neoconservatives and neoliberals, then Davies’s periodization could look like a cycle in which each partner takes turns leading the way. In terms of my analysis, that alternation would correspond to a greater focus on either demonization (neoconservatives) or the providential opportunity for redemption (neoliberals). Within such a scheme, our present moment could be interpreted as “normal” in the broad run of things, and we may even allow ourselves to hope that the current neoconservative phase will be succeeded by a new Obama-style “neoliberalism with a human face.”
What such a vision of alternating emphases misses, however, is that the overlap between neoliberals and neoconservatives was never complete. On the one hand, a vocal minority of neoconservatives has always rejected the basic legitimacy of their neoliberal partners and thoroughly demonized them. In the United States one thinks of the Clinton impeachment and the “Birther” conspiracy theory that claimed Obama was not even a US citizen and, in the United Kingdom, of the scapegoating of the European Union and the immigrants it brought with it. Both Clinton and Obama were happy to forge bipartisan deals with the neoconservatives who sought to annihilate them, just as New Labour was eager to listen to “legitimate concerns” around immigration, even as the neoconservatives grew ever more implacable and demanding. On the other hand, the traditionally progressive parties that neoliberals used as a flag of convenience still housed a remnant faithful to the Fordist social welfare state (such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn), who have skillfully exploited unexpected opportunities and thereby reintroduced pre-neoliberal values into the public debate. As these tensions have grown more and more unmanageable, we seem to have entered new terrain, where the spell of “there is no alternative” has been broken. Whereas for an entire generation it was impossible to vote against the neoliberal consensus, now we are witnessing the emergence of political leaders who explicitly reject neoliberalism.
Is this the end of neoliberalism? In this chapter and the conclusion that follows, I will not attempt to answer this question in any straightforward way. Instead, I will seek to interrogate the question itself using the tools of political theology that I have developed so far. This means asking what it might mean for neoliberalism to end and how we could tell if a genuine alternative were taking form, rather than merely a new variation on the theme. Naturally, I will be largely (though not exclusively) concerned with analyzing the present political conjuncture. My primary focus will be the debacle unfolding in the United States, as that is the setting where the reactionary wave has most directly taken power so far. This chapter was initially drafted in the summer of 2017, when there were seemingly daily revelations surrounding the Trump-Russia connection and UK politics took on an increasingly surreal tone with Teresa May’s ill-fated snap election. Rather than update it with later news events that will seem almost equally dated by the time this book is ultimately published, I have chosen to limit my examples to events from that baffling period of time. I hope the reader will forgive the out-of-date references, in recognition of the fact that my aim in this chapter is neither journalistic nor predictive, but diagnostic and retrospective. Rather than trying to guess at the outcome of a confusing political moment, I will be treating the unexpected and often quite disturbing political forces that have emerged in recent years as a source of new information about neoliberalism’s weaknesses and internal contradictions as a political-theological paradigm.
I Wish We’d All Been Ready
The immediate aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis is arguably the last time that the alliance between neoliberals and neoconservatives was fully functional in the United States. Though the Democrats, who by then controlled Congress, required some coaxing—Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson “literally bent down on one knee” to beg House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to support the bill,5 which ultimately passed only after an initial failed vote caused a stock market crash—in the end both sides of the alliance (represented roughly by the two major political parties) came together to pass and implement the bailout policy. In what was reportedly one of the smoothest presidential transitions in history, outgoing Bush officials worked closely with their incoming Obama administration counterparts to administer the largest financial-sector bailout ever seen. And as I pointed out in my first chapter, it all proceeded according to neoliberal chapter and verse. The US bailouts ultimately solved the massive market failure by injecting funds into all major players, in a way designed to minimize state influence over each firm’s internal decision making, while turning a modest profit for the US Treasury.
Yet despite the studious avoidance of direct state control over the major banks, the period immediately following the crisis was also the point when the illusion of a clear separation between state and economy—so crucial for neoliberalism’s attempt to naturalize the economic order it had installed—began to break down. Even the most casual observer could recognize that for the first several years after the crisis, financial markets moved primarily in response to central bank pronouncements on monetary policy rather than any purely economic trends. And on the fiscal policy side, the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, so crucial to the development of the postwar Fordist order that neoliberalism had dismantled, enjoyed a brief vogue as economists argued that government deficit spending could boost economic output overall. This led to the passage of the relatively modest stimulus bill, which consisted primarily in accelerating the funding for already-approved projects and was the last major Obama initiative to enjoy any support from Republicans. By the time he turned to health care reform—starting with a template developed by conservative think tanks and implemented at the state level by the Republican Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts—the Republicans began the program of unrelenting opposition and obstruction that would characterize the remainder of Obama’s presidency.
What went wrong? Though there was significant public outrage related to the bank bailouts, particularly after bailed-out firms paid bonuses to their employees despite having caused a world-historical economic downturn, political elites were largely unresponsive to such concerns. The problem was not the bailouts or even the economic downturn as such. The neoliberal era had seen its share of both, and none had seriously called the legitimacy of the system into question. What made this crisis different was that it was so intimately tied up with the household and hence raised profound questions of legitimacy.
As Cooper has shown, what Davies calls combative neoliberalism came to power in part through its skillful manipulation of anxieties surrounding family structure, crafting a narrative that reinterpreted the economic crisis of the late 1970s as a reflection of a moral crisis that had thrown gender roles, sexual norms, and racial hierarchies into disarray. Less than a month after Obama’s inauguration, a similar narrative began to crystallize around an odd political rant delivered from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade by the stock trader Rick Santelli, during a segment on the business news network CNBC. Castigating the government policies that he believed would reward the “losers” who had freely chosen to buy houses they could not afford, Santelli called for a “Chicago Tea Party” to protest the state’s refusal to let people bear the consequences of their actions.6
This was certainly a counterintuitive setting and messenger for the Tea Party movement, at least if we accept the identification of that movement as “populist.” It makes perfect sense, however, if we view Santelli as expressing the intuitions behind Davies’s punitive neoliberalism, over against Obama’s attempt to extend the normative neoliberal era. This conflict could be couched as a dispute within the neoliberal side of the alliance, insofar as, at least in its early days, the Tea Party was normally viewed as jettisoning the religiously inflected “culture wars” baggage of neoconservatism in favor of a more principled libertarian noninterventionism. Yet already in Santelli’s rant we can see that the real emphasis was not on economic policy or GDP growth, but on making sure that people suffer for making bad choices. That is to say, the debate was not primarily economic but moral—and the specific inflection of that morality fit with the neoconservative tendency toward demonization rather than the neoliberal rhetoric of redemption through equality of opportunity.
As in the early days of combative neoliberalism, this moral discourse was also a racial discourse. The problem for the Tea Party was not merely that “losers” had unaccountably decided to get mortgages they could not afford, but specifically that ostensibly undeserving members of racial minorities had received government support for their financial largess. The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which outlawed discrimination against minority neighborhoods in mortgage lending (known as “redlining”), took on the same role that Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) played in the Reagan-era neoliberal imaginary. Once again, a minor program was granted the quasi-demonic power to bring the entire global economy to its knees, and this time the demonization was even more absurd, because the CRA does not even provide direct subsidies to mortgage applicants.
The Tea Party’s moral discourse was also a gendered discourse, and in a much more disturbing way. Rather than focusing on any program or policy that supposedly benefited women, the first wave of Tea Party candidates was characterized by a shocking number of callous comments about rape, including claims that women could not become pregnant in cases of “legitimate rape” and that women routinely make rape accusations as a way of avoiding the embarrassment of admitting they had consensual sex with an undesirable partner.7 These comments, which most commentators treated as bizarre non sequiturs, provoked considerable outrage, and thankfully all of the rape-apologist candidates lost their respective elections. In retrospect, however, they arguably paved the way for a presidential candidate who openly boasted on tape about committing sexual assault.
Overall, the idea that the Tea Party represented an innovative shift away from the “culture wars” quickly proved to be wishful thinking, as did the notion that Tea Partiers were primarily interested in libertarian economics and an abstractly “small” government. Like the Reagan Revolution before it—though at a considerably lower level of sophistication and refinement—the Tea Party movement represented an attempt to reassert the proper order of the household, in order to solve a moral crisis of which the economic crisis was only a symptom. The initial focus was on race and gender, but once their power was solidified in individual states, they moved on to sexual norms in the bizarre controversy over transgender bathroom access.
In contrast to the Reagan moment, however, the emphasis was not on positively cultivating desirable family structures, but on making sure that those who failed to conform were stripped of any assistance or subsidy. These efforts were pitched as an attempt to correct an injustice whereby undesirable populations had achieved unfair advantages over the more deserving straight white population. Within this outlook, blacks should not get federal housing assistance that gives them a leg up over whites, for instance, and women should not get the supposed “unfair advantage” of being able to make spurious rape accusations at will and ruin a man’s reputation. This general outlook explains the seemingly ever-growing animus toward so-called political correctness, which many white men view as allowing previously subordinate populations to sit in judgment of them. The fact that these issues, rather than libertarian bromides, were the real libidinal center of gravity for the Obama-era neoconservative movement should be clear from the fact that many of those same aggrieved voters coalesced around Donald Trump, who has no apparent interest in conservative economic nostrums but virtually embodies the ideal of “political incorrectness.”
My goal is not to say that we all should have seen Donald Trump coming—I certainly did not—but to point out that Trump is the culmination of a political sequence that began with the Global Financial Crisis. Nor do I intend to claim that the rise of Trump, or indeed the success of the Tea Party, was somehow predestined. In both cases they benefited from quirks in the American electoral system. Trump, of course, lost the election by millions of popular votes but took office as a result of indirect selection of the president via the Electoral College. As for the Tea Party, it maintains its stranglehold on power because of the unfortunate coincidence that its first wave election corresponded with a census year, giving it control over the redrawing of electoral district boundaries. The Tea Party took advantage of the opportunity to create gerrymandered districts that rendered it virtually impossible for Democrats to win back control of the House of Representatives even with a considerable nationwide popular-vote advantage. In both cases, of course, the Tea Party presented its manipulations and unfair advantages as necessary to counteract cheating on the other side, but such claims are almost universally rejected outside the movement itself.
Overall, then, the rise of the Tea Party and then Trump to power represented highly contingent events. The very fact that Hillary Clinton, one of the most demonized and divisive politicians in America, was able to win such a strong popular vote plurality testifies to the fact that normative neoliberalism maintains some genuine electoral legitimacy in the United States, even if only as a lesser evil. Nevertheless, the fact that such a thing was possible at all highlights one signal weakness of the neoliberal order: its ambiguous relationship to electoral democracy. Particularly in the United States, the era of normative neoliberalism witnessed declining voter participation and narrower electoral margins. Bill Clinton won only a plurality of the popular vote in both his terms; George W. Bush narrowly lost and then narrowly won the popular vote; and Hillary Clinton also won only a plurality. Only Obama achieved a clear majority for both of his terms, though by a lesser margin than Ronald Reagan or even George H. W. Bush. This situation has often been explained in terms of the political acumen of the various candidates and campaigns, but individual campaign strategies cannot account for such a durable, decades-long pattern across both major political parties.8
The prevalence of narrow electoral outcomes under normative neoliberalism ultimately traces back to the political-theological problem of legitimacy. A political-theological order that bases its legitimacy so overwhelmingly on individual free choice must receive the consent of the community as a whole, which happens via the electoral system. At the same time, once it is firmly established, not only does it not need a clear popular mandate for any candidate or party, but it does not desire one, because this would create unwanted expectations of large-scale change. Rather, the goal is to eke out a narrow and ambiguous victory in order to secure just enough popular legitimacy but not too much. It certainly does render the practice of electoral democracy less and less meaningful, as Brown rightly laments, but the end logic of the position is not the total abolition of democracy that Brown fears, because on the deepest level, neoliberalism relies on consent for its legitimacy.
This system produces a stable equilibrium as long as both neoliberals and neoconservatives are willing to play along and pursue broadly similar policies. Yet when an apparent challenge to the neoliberal order emerges, the tendency toward intentionally narrow victories and the reluctance to engage in serious voter mobilization creates the possibility of an upset. As seen in the case of the rape-apologist Tea Party candidates and in the case of Trump, neoliberals tend to fall back on a negative strategy of exhorting voters to reject the unacceptable opponent. This approach has often proven effective, but over the long haul, it risks exposing the mechanism of the forced choice on which neoliberal electoral politics relies. How many times can people be expected to show up and vote for the idea that this election should not even be happening in the first place, to freely endorse the prospect that there should be no alternative?
In any given case, of course, most people will accept the logic of the forced choice. Yet as we saw in our discussion of the first day of Creation, even among the very angels of the Lord, there will always be a certain number who will act out—all the more so when voting has been downgraded to an empty gesture. Many Brexit voters, for instance, reported viewing their vote as a gesture of protest, one they could afford to make because they assumed it would be impossible for Brexit to win. Surely the same logic was at work among at least some Trump voters in the three traditionally Democratic states that swung the Electoral College. If there is no alternative, if genuine change is impossible, why not vote as a way of letting off steam, confident that the system will prevent any seriously adverse consequences?
The curious thing about the response to both the Brexit vote—which claimed a narrow majority amid surprisingly low turnout, not the supermajority normally required for a major constitutional change—and the Trump technicality—which occurred amid suspicions of foreign interference and illegal voter suppression—is how quickly the authorities submitted to the outcomes, treating them as clear declarations of the people’s will despite the ambiguities in both results. In both cases we are dealing with a huge self-inflicted wound, facilitated by authorities that clearly opposed both outcomes. The legal options were limited in the US context, but in the United Kingdom a nonbinding referendum was taken as the word of God: “Brexit means Brexit!” We can speculate about the motives of the individuals involved, but on the political-theological level, it makes a certain perverse sense. Neoliberals have always preferred the narrative of redemption, but they have not been shy about using the tools of demonization. When they find themselves repudiated, they can do nothing but take a page from the neoconservative playbook, demonizing the deplorable people who voted the wrong way and abandoning them to the suffering they have brought upon themselves. Surely by the next election they will have learned their lesson and will start making good choices again.
A Neoliberal Reaction
The unexpected success of the reactionary movement has thus given us some insight into one internal contradiction of normative neoliberalism as a political-theological paradigm: its simultaneous reliance on and minimization of popular legitimation via the electoral system. Combative neoliberalism was eager to seek out a commanding popular mandate because it needed to implement major transformative changes. By contrast, normative neoliberalism seeks a steady equilibrium in which two fundamentally similar parties pursue fundamentally similar policies. Once that dynamic breaks down, the strategies that secured neoliberal hegemony leave the system vulnerable to disruption.
With that in mind, what can we learn from the specific form that the reaction has taken? As I noted in the previous chapter, I reject the Polanyi-style analysis that claims that people are reasserting their racial and nationalist identities in the face of neoliberalism’s attack on the social fabric. I have already critiqued this position from a number of angles, but here I would add that the implications of this position are both dangerous and incoherent. On the one hand, it is dangerous insofar as it naturalizes racism and nationalism as inherent features of social life, when in fact they were both constructed in the service of the very capitalist order they supposedly resist. On the other hand, it presumes a near-infinite pliability of the populations seduced by racist and nationalist solutions. Yes, they embrace the radical right now, such commentators concede, but presumably they would rush to endorse the left-wing option of expanding the welfare state if only such an option were on the table. Yet if this were the case, how could similar populations have been mobilized against the welfare state in the Reagan years? And how could the same anxieties and resentments have been instrumental in both the foundation and the apparent unraveling of the neoliberal order?
In reality we are not dealing with the same anxieties and resentments at all. This is because there is no sexism, homophobia, racism, nationalism, and so forth, “in general.” All of these modes of oppression and exclusion take on historically specific forms and are articulated together in historically specific ways, within historically specific orders of domination. In the Reagan era, sexism, racism, and homophobia were all articulated together in response to anxieties about the consequences of the expansion of the welfare state, and the Cold War allowed for a mobilization of nationalism in simplistic good-vs.-evil terms. Since then, the situation has changed radically—most notably, the postwar welfare state has been dismantled and transformed and the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union no longer exists—and so we should expect the nature of the anxieties and resentments at play to change as well.
In the previous chapter I highlighted the ways that the neoliberal order has rearticulated white American racism against Latinos and blacks. To take the example of animus against Latinos, this newly articulated bias is in large part a response to neoliberal conditions, such as deindustrialization, declining job security, and stagnating wages. More interesting, however, is the fact that this bias has taken a distinctively neoliberal form. The general complaint is posed in explicitly economic terms—Latino immigrants are competing for jobs and driving down wages—and the conflation of all migrant workers with “illegal immigrants” implies that the success of Latino immigrants is the result of cheating (“cutting in line”). Meanwhile, little if any resentment is directed at the businesses that employ undocumented workers even though they are also breaking the law, because it is apparently taken for granted that businesses will try to cut labor costs as much as possible.
In short, the neoliberal rules of the game have been fully internalized and accepted, and the complaint is that the system is not abiding by them. A similar dynamic can be seen in all the many instances where right-wing commentators detect “unfair advantages”—cases that range from the inaccurate yet minimally plausible (affirmative action) to the incoherent (gay marriage, which is very explicitly a demand for precisely the same advantages) and the ludicrous (allowing transgender people to use the bathroom of the gender they identify with). The ideal of the “level playing field” is fully endorsed and even extended, in true neoliberal fashion, beyond the explicitly economic realm, transforming every aspect of social life into a competition.
This is not to say that the right-wing reaction is not racist. Clearly the hidden premise of their complaints is that whites are inherently more deserving and hence that in a truly level playing field, they would win. Since they are not winning to the degree they deserve, the game must be rigged via a whole panoply of unfair advantages handed out to their inferiors—including the “politically correct” insistence that they cannot be clearly designated as inferiors. The same can be said for the newly emergent form of nationalism. In a truly fair competition, America would always win, and if it is losing—for instance, losing manufacturing or mining jobs—that must be because of illegitimate advantages handed out to undeserving foreigners. Here there is a more overt rejection of neoliberal norms like free movement of capital or international coordination on “best practices” (above all on environmental issues), but the underlying logic is still deeply neoliberal insofar as the goal is to maximize “global competitiveness.”
Hence right-wing reactionaries are not being distracted from economic interests by their indulgence in racial prejudice or nationalistic fervor, nor are they reacting against a vague feeling of social ennui or asserting a desire to be part of something bigger than themselves in an individualistic culture. They are contesting the way that specifically economic benefits are parceled out on racial and national grounds. To that extent, they are contesting the legitimacy of the neoliberal settlement, but in a partial and ambiguous way that in turn highlights an ambivalence in the neoliberal settlement itself.
What allowed for the convergence of neoconservative and neoliberal interests in the Reagan era, as we have discussed, was a shared desire to dismantle and transform the Fordist welfare state and reinforce the traditional family, along with a shared recognition that neoliberal economics would further both goals. The overlap here was so substantial that it helped to mask an important divergence: where the neoliberals wanted to reinforce traditional family structures in order to provide a foundation for their economic model, the neoconservatives wanted to create a neoliberal economic model in order to reinforce traditional family structures. This difference in emphasis is potentially a much more serious problem on the political-theological level insofar as it calls into question the ultimate root of the system’s legitimacy: is it the family structure or the economic model? Which is means and which is end?
As outgrowths of the neoconservative wing of the neoliberal settlement, the Tea Party and Trump question the legitimacy of the system on the basis of its outcomes: white patriarchal families, in their view, are unfairly falling behind in relation to undesirable and undeserving populations. Yet after a generation in which neoconservatism and neoliberalism have been so deeply intertwined, it seems unimaginable that the neoliberal economic model could be fundamentally illegitimate. There is an underlying faith that the free market, if properly structured, would still deliver the “correct” outcomes. We can see this, first of all, in the lack of any serious consideration of any direct government action to shore up white patriarchal families, such as a job guarantee or government subsidies. Even Trump’s plan to repair crumbling infrastructure—a relatively noncontroversial target for direct state investment—amounts to a complex public-private partnership in the grand neoliberal style, relying on tax credits and promises of privatization to nudge private firms to take part in renewing the nation’s roads and bridges.9 And more broadly, much of the focus has been on traditional libertarian themes such as tax cuts and deregulation rather than any positive economic intervention on the part of the state. Belief in the providential hand of the market appears to be unshaken.
It is also noteworthy that there appears to be no effort to positively enhance the life-chances of white patriarchal families (through investment in education and job training, for instance), nor is there the kind of exhortation to moral uprightness that is often directed at black fathers. Instead, the emphasis is on all the ways the most deserving populations have been cheated: the unfair advantages given to other groups, the bad trade deals that favor foreign countries over America, the global conspiracy to discredit the fossil fuels that power the American dream. As the last example shows, this line of thinking can quickly head in paranoid directions, but if we focus on the factual untruth of the claim, we risk missing its emotional root—namely, the conviction that good, hardworking Americans have been lied to.
In the previous chapter I cited the principle of “Volenti non fit injuria”—to the willing person no wrong can be done—which Cooper summarizes as “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.”10 Neoconservatives have traditionally deployed this principle against disadvantaged populations as a means of victim-blaming. The paranoid grievances of the Tea Party and Trump draw on that same principle to paint themselves as victims—of liberal elites who sold out their country, of systems rigged in favor of minorities, of an illegitimate president who faked his birth certificate. The competition must be fraudulent, because the only alternative is to face the unbearable shame of admitting that they competed and lost, fair and square.
Hence the very deepest neoliberal presuppositions—above all, the ones that affect us at the most profound emotional level—remain very much in place. This is not to say that the Tea Party and Trump simply “are” neoliberal, but to emphasize that the contemporary reaction is very much a reaction to neoliberalism, and one that is certainly not ready to abandon neoliberalism altogether. In theological terms it represents not an apostasy, not a total renunciation of the neoliberal faith, but a heresy. Here we should avoid misunderstanding: though there is a tendency to valorize heretics as rebels against Christianity, heresies can be better understood as an attempt to reclaim and purify Christianity. Despite the negative results that they perceive in mainstream institutional Christianity, heretics want very much to believe that Christianity is good and desirable, and they will construct whatever narrative allows them to preserve that belief. Thus from a contemporary perspective, many heresies—including Luther’s Protestantism, which was regarded as a heresy by the Catholic authorities of the time—amount to paranoid conspiracy theories about the illegitimate authorities that have hijacked and corrupted the gospel.11 In the same way, our present-day neoliberal heretics want to believe that the providential hand of the market rewards the deserving, and they want to believe that they are among the deserving (conceived in the explicitly neoliberal terms of winning the economic competition). And if reality does not match up with those beliefs, then so much the worse for reality.
I Want to Believe
It is here that we enter into the realm of “fake news” and “alternative facts”—two terms that have themselves ironically been caught up in a conspiracy theory about Russian interference in the 2016 election.12 This is not to say that Russian hackers did not in fact plant false news stories, leak damaging information, and attempt to infiltrate voting machines.13 As far as I am able to discern, those events really did happen. Yet those true facts have been taken up into a narrative that has the structure of a conspiracy theory, which personalizes and externalizes events and outcomes that really result from impersonal systemic forces. The classic conspiracy theory is of course anti-Semitism, which blames a conspiracy of Jewish leaders for the depredations of the capitalist system. It can’t be the case that our economic system has been intentionally structured in a way that produces these harmful outcomes, the anti-Semite reasons, and so it must be the result of scheming foreigners. Similarly, from the liberal-progressive perspective, it can’t be the case that a substantial plurality of their fellow citizens were willing to choose Trump over the most qualified candidate in American history, so the painful election result must stem from enemy interference.
Conspiracy theories are often associated with traumatic events such as the Kennedy assassination or 9/11. In contrast to paranoid anti-Semitism, however, the conspiracy theories associated with those events display the reverse logic: an event that really was contingent and exogenous is explained as an internal conspiracy among elites. It cannot be the case that some Marxist oddball could be in a position to kill the president nor that a bunch of guys with box cutters could hijack planes and kill thousands. Such events would call the strength and security of the United States into question, rendering the world’s great superpower a passive victim of chance events. The conspiracy theory restores American omnipotence, even if in an evil form. As Jodi Dean puts it with reference to 9/11 “Truther” conspiracies: “Countering the official story of passivity, here the government acts, ruthlessly. It’s organized, efficient, able to execute its plans without a hitch.”14 Some versions of the liberal conspiracy theory echo this structure, most notably the view that then-FBI Director James Comey’s late-breaking revelation of an additional cache of Clinton emails represented intentional interference in the election. This leads to the strange belief that the very same Deep State that (in the person of Comey) threw the election to Trump could just as easily reverse the result (again in the person of Comey, this time imagined as the hero whose congressional testimony will lead to Trump’s impeachment). Comey can’t simply be a career bureaucrat who made some questionable decisions about how to handle a politically awkward situation. He must be a villain or a hero—either one will do.
Such patterns of thinking are of course much more widespread, and much less fact-based, on the political right. Especially when they concern Hillary Clinton, conspiracy theories can take on lurid and disturbing forms, such as the claim—whose proponents include Michael Flynn, who served briefly as Trump’s national security advisor—that the former First Lady and secretary of state was running a child-molestation ring out of a pizza parlor.15 This theory, dubbed “Pizzagate,” epitomizes the trend of “fake news” that was quickly seized upon as an explanation for Trump’s Electoral College upset (and put forward as the primary mechanism by which the Russians intervened in the election). Surely, from the neoliberal perspective, people cannot have objectively assessed Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and decided that Trump was preferable, at least not in sufficient numbers to hand him the presidency. That would call into question all the deepest neoliberal convictions about meritocracy and the value of expertise. The problem must be that they were lied to and misled. And for good measure, these lies must have come from a foreign source.
It should be clear by now that we are not dealing primarily with an epistemological problem here. “Fake news” stories, like conspiracy theories in general, must be understood as a political-theological phenomenon. They represent last-ditch efforts to save an order of legitimacy and meaning that is breaking down—a state of affairs that the conspiratorial narrative both denies and unconsciously acknowledges. On the one hand, the conspiracy theories will go to any length to save the horizon of meaning that they perceive as threatened, even to the point of embracing absurdities (single mothers on welfare have the power to destroy American society) or outright contradictions (the only hope for democracy is a coup by the state security apparatus). On the other hand, the immanence of collapse is inscribed into the narratives themselves, which often take on an apocalyptic form: it is always the last chance to save freedom or democracy or truth or America or the traditional family in the final battle against an enemy that is simultaneously strong enough to win permanently and yet weak enough to be utterly defeated.16
Neoliberalism has always had an apocalyptic edge. This is clear enough in its initial combative stage, when it freely deployed the rhetoric of demonization and evoked a world-historical struggle against evil. One might be tempted to dismiss this as a result of the necessary alliance with social conservatives and hence as extrinsic to neoliberalism proper, yet already in its prehistory as an intellectual movement far from the centers of power, neoliberal ideology could take on an apocalyptic tone. Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, published in the same year as Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944), argues that the embrace of the welfare state and economic planning will lead Western countries inexorably toward a Soviet-style command economy, completely destroying market freedoms and hence freedom as such.17 This theory is paranoid in its structure, using the logic of guilt-by-association to turn diametrically opposed political ideologies—most notably Fascism and Communism—into so many faces of a global conspiracy against freedom, which only the faithful remnant of economic liberals are brave enough to expose for what it is.
Once the evil empire of central planning was defeated and its domestic counterpart transformed beyond recognition, it could appear that apocalyptic rhetoric was no longer called for. At first glance, the transition seems straightforward: where the neoliberals of the combative era could view themselves as God’s army, defeating the demonic forces of Communism and the welfare state, the neoliberal order of the normative era was the Kingdom of Heaven itself, the hard-won Promised Land that comes after the titanic struggle against the enemies of freedom. Yet the situation is more complex than that, because the threat of apocalypse still loomed in the form of resurgent nationalism, extremism, terrorism, and other symptoms of irrational rebellion against the neoliberal order. The duty of the normative neoliberal was to keep such forces at bay, to restrain them. In other words, apocalypse is still very much in play, but it has taken on a different valence: it means not victory but defeat, not hope but disaster.
The combative neoliberal stance represents a more familiar and straightforward apocalyptic narrative, where the self-identified righteous ones long for the final battle with the forces of evil, in which God will win once and for all and his followers will be vindicated. The early Christian movement held to a version of this narrative. Though it incorporated the seemingly counterintuitive detail that the death of the messiah at the hands of the demonic imperial authorities was actually a necessary first step in the apocalyptic sequence, early believers still hoped for God’s ultimate victory, which many of them expected to occur within their own lifetime. As the final consummation was deferred—and, perhaps more importantly, as Christianity unexpectedly found itself no longer a persecuted sect but rather the official religion of the once-hated empire—attitudes shifted. As in the shift between combative and normative neoliberalism, the thought of apocalypse became a site of anxiety rather than triumph.
Emblematic here are two short books of the New Testament, the First and Second Letters to the Thessalonians.18 The first letter, potentially the very earliest of all Christian writings, was composed by Paul the Apostle to comfort a community of Christ-followers he had founded. Some members of the group had died, leading the others to worry that their fallen comrades might miss out on the new world God was soon to inaugurate. Paul reassures them that no one will be left out:
For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words. (1 Thessalonians 4:14–18)
The promise is one of total restoration, in which even death itself will be overcome and all believers will enjoy the fullness of God’s presence for all eternity. It is something to look forward to—and, as indicated by the use of the present tense (“we who are alive”), it is something that will happen while Paul and at least some of his recipients are still alive. By contrast, the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, which also claims to come from Paul but which many scholars now believe was actually a later author’s attempt to “correct” Paul’s apocalyptic claims,19 paints a more frightening picture:
Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day [of Judgment] will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction. He opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God. Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you? And you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed when his time comes. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will destroy with the breath of his mouth, annihilating him by the manifestation of his coming. (2 Thessalonians 2:3–8)
Here there is virtually none of the apocalyptic hope we saw in First Thessalonians. Instead the author focuses almost exclusively on the destruction that will be wrought by the “man of lawlessness” once the force or individual restraining him is removed. God is still going to win out in the end, but perhaps the restrainer is a better bet for the time being.
The figure of the restrainer (usually designated with the Greek term katechon) has been the object of considerable reflection in the field of political theology. Carl Schmitt has argued that the katechon was the central concept of Christian politics, allowing it to bracket its apocalyptic expectations and get to work creating political institutions in this present world,20 and many thinkers have argued that the concept of the modern state is a secularized version of this figure who restrains the forces of apocalyptic destruction.21 We can certainly hear an echo of this logic in Polanyi’s view of the state as a necessary counterweight to the demonic forces of the unrestrained market—a polarity that the neoliberal opponents of the Fordist social welfare state would in turn reverse.
Once neoliberalism gains global hegemony in the normative era, market forces and technocratic expertise are presented as a means to restrain the destructive forces of political conflict by channeling humanity’s competitive instincts into the mutually beneficial pursuit of economic prosperity. This gesture prompts Brown’s apocalyptic narrative in which the window for saving the space of political contestation is rapidly closing and we risk losing authentic freedom for good. I have already argued that this concern is exaggerated insofar as neoliberalism needs electoral legitimation and its electoral strategy is inherently vulnerable to upsets like the Trump technicality. Even if Trump himself was far from inevitable, some comparable fluke was bound to happen eventually.
Here I want to take a step further: the neoliberal attempt at depoliticization directly generates the right-wing reaction that it is meant to restrain. The very gesture of presenting ostensibly “neutral” categories like expertise, merit, evidence, and so forth as the grounds of legitimacy for the neoliberal order politicizes them. Neoliberals in the age of “alternative facts” bemoan the loss of any factual point of reference that can carry authority for all political actors, but this neutrality was a casualty of neoliberalism itself. Instead of being a neutral arbiter between political opponents, knowledge was identified with one side in a political struggle.
Within each major party in the United States, the neoliberal “centrist” position represented reason and realism, while those who would contest the neoliberal consensus supposedly traded in irrationality and fantasy. Meanwhile, when it came time for the general election, both parties initially vied to be seen as the avatar of authentic knowledge—although this fragile dynamic had already begun to break down in the 2000 US election, which pitted the cerebral Al Gore against the incurious George W. Bush. And we would do well to remember in this context that the Bush years saw the first emergence of “fake news,” in the form of satirical news outlets like The Daily Show. An atmosphere of cynical knowingness pervades the liberal version of “fake news,” which ridicules Republicans as liars and fools. This ridicule is mostly deserved, but the concrete function of liberal “fake news” is to further the politicization of knowledge through the implicit claim that intelligence and honesty are the sole prerogative of centrist (neo)liberals.
Such a dynamic is especially pernicious when we recognize the increasingly high economic stakes of knowledge and expertise in the normative neoliberal era. Higher education is presented as virtually the sole path, not only to class mobility, but even to maintaining a middle-class lifestyle across generations. At the same time, the neoliberal era has witnessed a precipitous decline in public support for higher education, which is no longer conceived as a public good but as an attempt at increasing one’s individual income and career opportunities. Cooper documents how increased reliance on student loans, which began as a convenient legislative compromise between Reagan and Democrats in Congress, was “reformulated as a deliberate component of social policy” under Clinton, opening up more economic opportunities for the disadvantaged.22 As Brown bemoans, saddling students with student loans is a highly effective means of forcing them to think about their education in solely economic terms as an investment.23 This mind-set leads, as Morgan Adamson points out, to the view that education is “a capital investment aimed at building equity over time, much like an investment in real estate or financial stock.”24 This instrumentalization of education and expertise further contributes to the decline of any shared point of reference for assessing political or even factual claims (as in climate change denialism).
When we confront the contemporary “fake news” phenomenon, then, we are not dealing solely with the stupidity or stubbornness of individuals, but with a dynamic generated by neoliberalism itself. Conspiracy theories about how mainstream politicians and media outlets manipulate facts to serve their own power are often disturbingly wrong on the level of content, but they are true on the level of form. The neoliberal order really does instrumentalize knowledge to secure economic advantage and political legitimacy. What has changed in recent years is that the neoliberal claim to have privileged access to reality has been shattered in the era of punitive neoliberalism, not only by the Global Financial Crisis, but arguably even more by the mass suffering caused by dogmatic adherence to the neoliberal model in the aftermath. The supposed experts not only failed to predict and prevent the crisis, but they lacked the ability to clean up the mess afterward.
Hence we can begin to understand the paradoxical poll results showing that many people found Donald Trump more trustworthy than Hillary Clinton. In his obviously self-serving lies, Trump appeared more “honest” on a deeper level than Clinton, because he seemed to present the same face in every context. By contrast, Clinton’s calculated reserve—arguably even more than her secret Wall Street speeches or the hacking of her emails—opened up a space for speculation about her “real” motives, which could be assumed to be sinister from the very fact that she was hiding them. Clinton is of course a special case, because she has virtually embodied neoconservative anxieties about gender relations since she came on the political scene in her husband’s campaign and hence has been the subject of a harsh demonization campaign for decades. Yet in the postcrisis era, arguably any neoliberal candidate would be subject to the same charges of two-faced dishonesty, precisely because of their polish and sophistication. And all of this is predictable blowback of the neoliberal strategy to claim knowledge and expertise as the foundation of political legitimacy—in other words, the restrainer created the very force it has now so spectacularly failed to restrain.
Foreclosing the Future
One of the most alarming political developments of the Obama years was Republican intransigence on raising the federal debt ceiling. Originally created to save Congress the trouble of approving each individual decision to issue Treasury bonds, the ceiling allows the government to use debt funding up to a certain level, which up until the Tea Party revolution was periodically raised as a matter of course. Threatening to disrupt this routine was exceptionally reckless and dangerous. If Congress had really refused to increase the debt ceiling, it would have led to a default on the US national debt, triggering a second—and potentially much more severe—financial crisis within only a few years.
It would be a mistake to view the debt ceiling crisis as simply another case of political brinkmanship, however. In reality it was a crisis of legitimacy. Mainstream commentators implicitly recognized this when they decried the Republicans’ reckless endangerment of the “full faith and credit of the United States,” with some suggesting that willfully triggering a default may even be unconstitutional, owing to a post–Civil War amendment forbidding the repudiation of government debt. For their part, Republicans more or less openly questioned the legitimacy of the national debt as such, which they consistently associated with the social programs that they revile. After a generation of neoliberal policy, of course, social spending was an even more trivial part of the federal budget than the programs demonized in the Reagan era, and in general there was no reason to believe that the national debt—which has steadily increased over the more than two centuries of US history—had reached some kind of threshold that would render it suddenly unsustainable on an economic level.
Lacking any factual basis for an apocalyptic debt scare, then, the Tea Party created its own. And in this, Tea Partiers were exceptional only in their hardball tactics—as Davies points out, the era of “punitive neoliberalism” saw a wave of brutal austerity measures that were legitimated by the need to rein in government debt. As discussed above, such policies were actually counterproductive even on their own terms, as reduced government employment and spending produced a drag on economic growth that more than outweighed the cost savings achieved through austerity. Here, as Davies suggests, punitive neoliberalism shows itself to be governed not by cold economic calculation but by a depraved moral calculus: “Under punitive neoliberalism, economic dependency and moral failure become entangled in the form of debt, producing a melancholic condition in which governments and societies unleash hatred and violence upon members of their own populations. When debt is combined with political weakness, it becomes a condition for further punishment” (130). The optimistic tone of normative neoliberalism gives way to sheer sadism and victim blaming. As my political-theological analysis has shown, however, this is not a break with neoliberalism but a fulfillment of its deepest logic, insofar as neoliberalism is an order based on the moral entrapment that I have called demonization.
Neoliberalism’s increasing reliance on debt represents an attempt to moralize or, as Brown puts it, “responsibilize” ever more areas of life. The increasing burden of officially quantified debt represents a strategy to render one’s moral obligations more easily and precisely extractable.25 From this perspective the fact that student debt is one of the only forms of debt not dischargeable through bankruptcy in the United States makes perfect sense: the human capital the student has accumulated (or more precisely, had the opportunity to accumulate, since a growing number of student loan debtors never complete their degrees) is inalienable. Unlike in the case of a mortgage loan, where the lender gains title to the house if the borrower defaults, there is no possibility of foreclosing on the human capital (or failure to accumulate human capital) that is intrinsic to one’s own person. If the borrowers do not get the full benefit of that human capital in the form of the promised higher income, so the reasoning goes, that is their own fault, and their personal failure does not cancel their obligation to make good on the lender’s investment. Indeed, it only intensifies that debt, as penalties, fees, and skyrocketing interest rates can leave student loan borrowers with staggering balances that dwarf the original loan disbursements. Yet even if literal foreclosure is not possible in such cases, the nondischargeability of student loan debt does represent a figurative foreclosure of the borrower’s future as such. An open future, filled with a range of opportunities and options, is transmuted into a virtual enslavement to an unpayable debt.
As we have seen, the earliest stages of capitalism and the classical era of Polanyi’s “one-hundred years’ peace” both relied on geographic colonization. In a world where there is increasingly no outside to colonize, no significant territory that has yet to be incorporated into the capitalist order, we can view the explosion of debt as a form of temporal colonization, using the future itself as a site of primitive accumulation. This temporal colonization, like its geographical counterpart, does not produce simple uniformity. Just as uneven geographical development serves a productive purpose in the capitalist system, so too can variations in life chances be converted into varying levels of “risk” to be incorporated into complex financial strategies—in subprime loans, for instance, which actually prove more profitable, not despite but because of the fact that they are less likely to be paid off.
Overall, though, neoliberal financialization is an attempt to tame the future through the use of legal instruments that mandate the reproduction of the present. As Lazzarato points out, debt achieves this not solely through creating enforceable obligations but by shaping human subjectivity itself: “Debt is not only an economic mechanism, it is also a security-state technique of government aimed at reducing the uncertainty of the behavior of the governed. By training the governed to ‘promise’ (to honor their debt), capitalism exercises ‘control over the future,’ since debt obligations allow one to foresee, calculate, measure, and establish equivalences between current and future behavior. The effects of the power of debt on subjectivity (guilt and responsibility) allow capitalism to bridge the gap between present and future.”26 Here again, student loans are exemplary, because they force students to think of their educational choices in financial terms and of themselves as customers. This effect extends far beyond their graduation date, as public service and artistic pursuits appear much less realistic than corporate jobs in light of their high debt load—meaning that the capitalist class gets the direct benefit of the “human capital” that the student has paid the up-front cost of creating, along with the interest payments. And this is the most generous version of the dynamic, which in the case of predatory payday lenders takes the brutal and direct form of reproducing present poverty by extracting ever-increasing portions of the debtor’s income.
Yet this drive to settle accounts with the future, to perpetually “preempt” it,27 to restrain its apocalyptic implications, runs up against the stubborn obstacle that unaccountable events continue to happen. This renders the neoliberal order exceptionally fragile, not merely on an economic or political level but on the level of legitimacy. Its spurious claim to have accounted for the future in advance, its ruthless exploitation of the future as a means of propping up the present, means that the only thing that can happen, the only possible event in the strong sense, is a catastrophe.28
With this in mind we can understand why the neoliberal end of history is an era marked by crisis and terrorism. Terrorism is presented as the unforeseeable eruption of violence from the outside, from those who refuse the neoliberal order of freedom and rationality, while crisis represents an endogenous but still unforeseen threat. Familiar strategies of nationalism and scapegoating mean that terrorism, far from challenging the legitimacy of the neoliberal order, has actually reinforced it. Yet the situation is different in the case of crises, which cannot be as easily blamed on outsiders and which tend to expose the weakness and ineptitude of the governing authorities. The Global Financial Crisis is a case in point: the complex financial instruments that triggered the crisis were based on the assumption that a simultaneous nationwide real-estate downturn was impossible, yet the demand for the offending securities actually created the conditions for the supposedly impossible possibility by generating an unprecedented simultaneous nationwide real-estate bubble.29 Neither the supposed financial visionaries who created the scheme nor the government officials responsible for regulating them could anticipate such consequences, however, so deeply engrained was the assumption that the future would be fundamentally like the present.30
Here we can see the insidious contradiction in the normative neoliberal attempt to replace social benefits with access to credit. On the political-economic level, Cooper is right to voice skepticism: “How, after all, is it possible to overcome inequality by democratizing a legal instrument that is intended by its very nature to privatize wealth? Is social democracy achievable through the generalization of inheritance?”31 Yet the problem is deeper: how can we increase people’s freedom and independence by democratizing a legal instrument that is intended to create obligation and servitude? How can we open up people’s future by democratizing a legal instrument that channels all future possibilities into revenue streams? How long can a society endure if it can experience the unexpected only as violence and catastrophe, never as surprise and creativity? How long can people tolerate living in a society where every opportunity and promise is convertible into a threat and a trap?
In the face of the right-wing doubling-down on neoliberalism, we might be tempted to answer: “Surprisingly long!” Yet even in their grotesque parody of neoliberalism at its worst, one can detect a countervailing demand for neoliberalism to finally end. In the refusal to raise the debt ceiling, for instance, one could hear a refusal of a culture structured around debt, and more fundamentally, in the demand for the “right” people to permanently win the competition, one can discern a desire to escape from competition once and for all. Even in the people who seem to demand neoliberalism the most, then, there is a strong undercurrent of discontent, albeit one that has so far manifested itself only in the unedifying spectacle of politicians victimizing others while perpetually claiming to be the real victims.
More promising is the discontent of the younger generation, which has driven the unexpected success of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. Where Wendy Brown envisions future generations of neoliberal drones who have forgotten how to want political change, our contemporary experience shows that it is precisely the generation that has known nothing but neoliberalism that is most likely to reject it. The order that strove to shape the entire world in its image—nay, to reshape human nature itself!—appears to be failing spectacularly in the core task of any political-theological paradigm: ensuring that it is accepted and reproduced by the next generation.
If our present political moment teaches us anything, then, it teaches us that neoliberalism is not sustainable. This is not because it is economically inefficient (though it is), nor is it because it embraces an inherently fragile political strategy (though it does). The root problem is at the level of political theology: its approach to self-legitimation is self-undermining. The very strategies that it uses to justify itself and its outcomes inevitably create subjects who are anxious, ashamed, resentful, and exhausted. It may well hold out through inertia or through presenting itself as a lesser evil compared to the right-wing reaction, or it may attempt to convert itself into a more overtly coercive order. But neoliberalism will never again appear as the righteous insurgent of the combative period or as the self-evident order of the normative period.
The spell has been broken—or rather, it has collapsed, and therein lies the difficulty. Neoliberalism has lost its aura of inevitability, but at the same time no comprehensive alternative has presented itself. Though I cannot pretend to know in detail what that alternative will look like if and when it arises, in the time that remains I will attempt to sketch out some indications of how we might recognize it when it comes.