All that is solid melts into air” is even truer about the hyperflux of everyday life today than it was when those words first appeared in The Communist Manifesto well more than a century and a half ago. Even adherents of the Tea Party—indeed, especially Tea Party partisans—might agree. In the realms of business and technology as well as in the evanescent fancies and fads of popular culture, we are fixated on now and tomorrow. But if Marx’s aperçu is truer nowadays than anything he could have imagined, there is one major exception: in our political life we are fixated on the past, forever looking backward.
Arguably, national politics over the last half century has polarized between efforts to defend and restore the New Deal order, and relentless attempts to repeal it and replace it with something even older.
The liberal left has fought to extend or at least protect what has been dismantled and weakened since the days of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Its advances in the realms of individual rights for women and minorities are of profound historical significance. Jim Crow and patriarchy no longer can rely on the institutional and legal supports that empowered them for generations. Together with the earlier triumph over industrial autocracy, these breakthroughs are fairly seen as the lasting and last achievements of that long nineteenth-century age of resistance.
Indeed, the civil rights movement was steeped in folk Afro-Christianity as much as it was in the Declaration of Independence. It drew on that ancient reservoir of perseverance and translated its injunctions to wait on the Lord to “be free” into the here-and-now bravery it took to crush apartheid. Today the movement is inscribed in searing images we’re all familiar with, in the sorrows and exaltations of its music, in the lingua franca of political speechifying, and in the iconography of a national holiday. If ever in the national experience there was evidence of the capacity of people to move out from under long generations of oppression, exploitation, and submission, out of the perennial midnight of all-sided coercions and fears and demeaning condescension, to free themselves of self-contempt, fatalism, and a sense of helplessness, this was that testimony.
Nonetheless, civil rights, like the rights of labor, were soon incorporated within the framework of civilized capitalism first erected by the New Deal. What began as collective shout-outs for liberation has ended in what the country’s first African American president calls a “race to the top.” Is there a more perfect way to express the metamorphosis of solidarity into self-advancement?
Still, the breakdown of old hierarchies rankles many. Seeking to restore the time before all that collapsed is the conceit of the conservative right. No one in those ranks (except for marginal cranks) actually imagines it possible or even desires to repost “colored” signs on water fountains or move people back to the back of the bus or repeal the Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972 or reestablish the sexual caste system. What they do yearn for is a time before the collectivism of the 1930s and the antic antiauthoritarianism of the 1960s despoiled the country. The right stands on that rock-of-ages flinty individualism of the free market, the disciplinary regime of the work ethic, the preeminence of business, and the reassurances of old-time patriarchal morality.
Two golden ages, two mythic moments, locked up in memory. While everything else about modern life accelerates the passage of time, political gridlock freezes it.
Efforts to stop the melting, to return the world to some solid state, do evince pathos. True, they also produce episodes of political burlesque, lots of adolescent noisemaking, gnashing of teeth, and mugging for the cameras, but not much else. Yet no one can deny the anguish trailing in the wake of neoliberal flexible capitalism. It has spread the liquidation of society and the psyche far afield and deeply into the tissues of social life. When Marx first spied it, the dynamic was as exhilarating as it was unnerving. It still is for those pioneering on the frontiers of advanced technology (although they tend to forget that the wonders invented in their homely garages would have been inconceivable without decades of government investment in military-related science, technology, and development). For many others, however, it is more apt to bring on queasiness, a sense of a free-falling, unmoored individual descending into the abyss, desperate for a grip.
More resonant even than “all that is solid melts into air” was another telling bit of social psychological insight by a man who, in his bones, couldn’t have been less a Marxist. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” was FDR’s legendary caution to a nation on the brink of the anticapitalist end time. One measure of how the temper of our times has changed since the long nineteenth century drew to a close in the Roosevelt era is that today we might aptly inverse what the president recommended: the only thing we have to fear nowadays is not being afraid enough.
Neoliberalism didn’t invent fear. Nor did FDR mean to minimize all that there was to be afraid of amid the calamity of the Great Depression. Losing a job, falling into debt, getting evicted, falling even further down the social pyramid, feeling degraded or helpless or abandoned, racial or ethnic threats to positions of relative privilege, moral vertigo, and phobias induced by deviations from norms of sexual behavior, and much more are not new. And FDR no doubt had his own reasons for cautioning against fear, including the overriding need to get the wheels of commerce and industry, paralyzed by the panic and collapse of confidence, moving again. What the president could count on—even if he didn’t actually count on it and would not have invoked if he could—was a multifaceted and long-lived culture of resistance that was not afraid to venture onto new terrain, to question the given.
Since then, much has happened to wither away the courage and power to imagine a future fundamentally at odds with what we are familiar with or long to return to. In our times what at first seemed liberating sometimes ended up incapacitating.
The ubiquity of market thinking has transformed combative political instincts into commercial or personalized ones or both. Environmental despoiling arouses righteous eating; cultural decay inspires charter schools; rebellion against work becomes work as a form of rebellion; old-form anticlericalism morphs into the piety of the secular; the break with convention ends up as the politics of style; the cri de coeur against alienation surrenders to the triumph of the solitary; the marriage of political and cultural radicalism ends in divorce. Like a deadly plague, irony spreads everywhere.
What lends this thinking and behavior such tensile strength is its subterranean connection to the sense of personal liberation. One of the great discoveries of the feminist movement was that “the personal is political.” This undermined axiomatic assumptions about female inferiority and subordination from which patriarchy will never recover.
However, personalizing of the political also carried with it unforeseen consequences as the aperçu migrated into the wider world, carried there by the tidal flows of consumer culture. Nowadays we live in a political universe preoccupied with gossip, rumor, insinuations, and innuendo. Personal transgressions, scandals, outré behavior, and secrets have become the pulp fiction of politics. Our times didn’t invent that. Grover Cleveland was regularly raked over the coals for having an illegitimate child. Warren Harding’s sexual adventures were notorious. This is to cite two of many possible examples. Nonetheless, this kind of inquisitorial and, let’s be frank, voyeuristic pursuit, of venial sins as the way of sizing up political life, has reached heights undreamed of. And this can be entertaining—indeed, it may be intended by the media to be so, as it is eye- and ear-catching. It displays a kinship with the inherent sensationalism of consumer culture more generally. It is also, often, if not always, stupendously trivial or only marginally relevant, but is treated in exactly the opposite way. We have grown accustomed to examine all sorts of personal foibles as if they were political MRIs lighting up the interior of the most sequestered political motivations.
Credit this hyperpersonalizing of political life with keeping interest alive, even if it’s a kind of morbid interest in the fall of the mighty or the wannabe mighty. Otherwise, for many millions of citizens, cynicism (and only cynicism) prevails. The system seems transparently to have become an arena for gaming the system. Cycles of corruption and insiderism repeat with numbing frequency and in a nonpartisan distribution, verging on kleptocracy.
Arguably, “the personal is political” has morphed into something far more debilitating than liberating: namely, that only the personal is political. Just how disarming this is can be fully appreciated only when measured against the relentless growth of a leviathan state.
Government did not always arouse an instinctive suspicion. When first constructed, the administrative-regulatory-welfare state seemed a lifesaver. And for a while it was. But it has become a grotesque caricature of its former self. Its presumptions of expertise and dirigisme emasculate rather than empower. A mandarinate of experts bearing Olympian pretensions, rationalized by social science and psycho-medical portfolios, instills a sense of incapacity in some, in others a subcutaneous resentment.
Meanwhile the security and protections the state once offered have grown frail or were killed. Under the regime of neoliberal finance, the government’s inveiglement with commanding business institutions (trace elements of which were there at its creation under the New Deal) erodes its bona fides as an instrument of democratic will, not to mention the general welfare.
While the ranks of labor and its putative allies do vigorously complain about the undernourishment of social services and the like, little if anything is said about the nature of the state apparatus itself. Yet one epoch ago the rise of the bureaucratic state and the bureaucratic corporation were perceived by many as twin pillars of a new managerial capitalism. When anticapitalist urges still roiled the waters of public life, social reengineering aimed at restoring political stability and socializing the costs of capitalist production did not get a free pass. Critics saw it as a dead end or if not it seemed likely to create a new dependency and cut off pathways to class independence.
Now, even when all the boats sank in the recent financial tsunami, the labor movement and many of its progressive friends rushed into the arms of the government, cheering on the bailout state, cowed by the politics of fear into believing that without rescuing the banks the end of the world was nigh. Now the whole notion of rebelling against the state is a foreign instinct where it was once a birthright. It lives on ironically in the ranks of the populist right.1
Unlike the welfare state, what has not grown frail or inept, what instead has become ever more self-aggrandizing and worth fearing, is the national security state. It is easy and perhaps convenient to forget that it too originated in those golden years after World War II so often celebrated by progressives. Recovery from the Great Depression and the global war that followed seemed to demand the metastasis of the state. It facilitated the triumph of America as the superpower of the free world and as its economic locomotive. Security was promised in a double sense: economic and geopolitical stability, resting on each other.
It is impossible to pry apart these two kinds of security, to divorce the American garrison state from the global New Deal. They grew up together and helped prescribe an “end to history” long before that terminology became fashionable. Today this remains the case, only more so. The delectables of home consumption originate in a global system of industry and finance watched over by the political and military institutions of the world’s sole superpower.
Neoliberal global capitalism is known for its antipathy to the state. It does not, however, deserve that reputation. It may in any particular instance be for or against government monitoring of commercial relations. But as a world order it depends completely on national and international political (and sometimes military) institutions to keep things humming: trade treaties, IMF loans, World Bank grants, mechanisms of debt enforcement or default, property law, a global necklace of military bases, state regulations monitoring the transmigration of labor, international concords assuring the unimpeded flows of liquid capital, oil, gas, and rare earth metals across national borders, and much more. A dense network of laws, sanctions, and government negotiations facilitate and defend flexible capitalism. As the regnant order, it naturally requires a thick and pervasive armature (cultural as well as coercive) to get its way.
However, we are not afraid of this state. This is not some Stalinist secret-police apparatus sending people off to the gulag. Instead, we fear what it fears, what it tells us to fear. There are real terrorists out there. They have slaughtered thousands of innocents. Around these acts of mayhem, however, there has grown up a demonology that persuades us to live in permanent fear, in a state not so much of total war (after all, more and more of the actual fighting is done with remote-control robotic weaponry) but of endless war.
State-sponsored paranoia exacerbates an already pronounced penchant to man up to the fear, to flex muscles not only at aliens overseas but at domestic strangers in our midst. What we are instructed to fear above all is that we are not fearful enough, not vigilant enough, not on the ready to detect and defend against each and every imputation against our way of life. We are incessantly reminded that indeed a way of life is in jeopardy. And that is true. What we are called upon to guard is global free market democracy, which incontestably is a way of life.
Presumably in this view the global market and democracy are joined at the hip. But as Iraq and the other Iraqs before and since suggest, or as the displacement or neutering of democratically elected governments in Europe behind in their debts indicates, or as our own “dollar democracy” here at home reminds us, what matters is the market. The United States has lived in harmony with corrupt military dictators, death squads, feudal sheikhs and plantation owners, kleptocrats and warlords—and with virtually every variety of autocracy and tyranny. The main point is to allow the state to do its work to keep fearsome enemies—any one of innumerable foes who might challenge the suzerainty of global capitalism run out of Washington—at bay.
Hence the dark matter of a para-state has grown up around us. It operates outside the law, or ad libs or reinvents the law, arrogating to itself powers undreamed of by the founders of democracy, but always on behalf of democracy. The smug self-assurance of these state mandarins is appalling. Still, there are no tanks in the streets (although now and then we do witness mass arrests or a drone takedown of a citizen). Rather persuasion, not force, does much of the heavy lifting. Many blame the media, which is so intertwined with the power blocs of politics and business, and is itself an increasingly concentrated planetary business. Now and then, it does indeed function like a propaganda machine and a censor.
But most of the time it operates more insidiously than that, narrowly circumscribing what is allowable and thereby what is verboten in public debate, what is legitimate and what is outré, what is to be taken seriously and what is to be coolly dismissed. It invokes the sounds of silence without gagging anyone.
Mainstream media instinctively mimic the version of events offered up by the empowered. Its elemental obligation as a “fourth estate” to interrogate and to keep its skeptical distance—something that happened with far greater frequency in past centuries—gets sacrificed on the altar of “insiderism.” The run-up to the Iraq war is perhaps the most lurid instance of this pathology. Mea culpas surfaced only long after it mattered. This manufacturing of or flight from reality is not a conspiracy to deceive but a closing down of the cultural frontier.
When it came to the near terminal crisis of flexible finance capitalism itself during the Great Recession, ideas outside the box were locked out by fear and persuasion in equal measure. A culture that had learned to mythologize big moneymakers so extravagantly and without reservation as seers, saviors, prophets, and warriors was ill prepared to treat these heroes and the institutions they captained differently when they burned the house down.
After noting that a lot of people were ready to haul Wall Street out into the middle of New York harbor and drown it, the media picked up the more appropriate echo emanating from political and economic elites. We faced, all were tutored, a slim menu for how to get out of the mess: we could compress the social wage through austerity; we could use government largesse to seduce those corporate “job creators” and financiers who hadn’t yet felt inclined to create many; we could resort to that out-of-favor Keynesian remedy of deficit spending to haul the economy out of the muck. What we could not do, what was not even speakable, was to tamper with the basic institutions of financial capitalism. So, as for the banks themselves, they were to be bailed out, “too big to fail.” Après the banks le déluge, an article of faith even a large segment of the progressive community was too buffaloed to challenge.
Indeed, neoliberalism as a way of thinking about the world has been profoundly disempowering precisely because it conveys a techno-determinism about the way things are. It presents itself as a kind of Marxism of the ruling classes, suggesting that the telos of history and the relentless logic of economic science lead inevitably not where Marx thought they were heading, but rather to just where we are now. Defying that invites crushing irrelevance at best.
Naturally, under stress, the capacity of the neoliberal imagination to torture language has become Orwellian. Take the notion of economic “recovery,” which after all is so essential if the system is to right itself and reinforce the hard-wiring of acquiescence. Almost before the Great Recession had hit bottom, the media filled up with astrological-like sightings of recovery. Recovery beckoned; it was about to start; it had already started; the crisis was over. People in charge, especially President Obama and his inner circle of savants like Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, were quoted to that effect. Evidence accumulated albeit mainly in the financial sector, where big banks found themselves so flush with cash they were patriotically (and loudly) paying back their bailout money or were begging to do so. Profits in the FIRE sector were back, lavish bonuses were back.
But then there was the other kind of story, the one about the spreading misery of joblessness, foreclosures, homelessness, wage cuts, firings, amputations of social services, repossessions, bankruptcies, defaults—the dispossession of dreams. This story was told, not censored. What is therefore most astonishing and telling about our Age of Acquiescence is that amid the gloom of this dark tale the sun kept shining.
It might be seen as appalling, arrogant, callous, myopic, credulous, and maybe most of all morally embarrassing to talk with a straight face about recovery amid all this. What could that word possibly mean? Who exactly was recovering? What, after all, is the whole point of economic recovery if it doesn’t first mean some improvement in general well-being? What is it that licenses this official complacency that advises a sort of tough-love patience, but then again looks at the bottom line of Goldman Sachs and takes heart?
That is, however, the nub of the neoliberal persuasion. It also is the nub of our current dilemma. Recovery may indeed happen; it is already happening, but perhaps not in the way we might assume. As Keynes among others observed, there may be some absolute bottom to any severe downturn. But that does not mean that once reached, recovery will return the economy to its previous high point or move past it.
Something quite different may happen. Economic life may reproduce itself at some considerably lower level for a long time. That may be emphatically the case here at home, where long before the Great Recession hit, the financial sector was already cannibalizing what most people think of as the real economy. There have been sightings of the textile industry returning from the global South because the shipping costs to customers are lower, the quality control higher, and the wages in our native Dixie and even in the rust belt are now closing in on where they are in China. Flexible, neoliberal capitalism after all, was always, from one standpoint, not much different than regular capitalism minus the opposition that had made the long nineteenth century so fraught.2
More of that same toxic “recovery” medicine is on order for the future. The social inequities and iniquities and the cultural brutalization this will entail have been in plain sight for a generation now. Dispossession and loss are tough enough to bear. How much sorrier is it when a culture is so coarsened that it looks at legions of casualities and without batting an eye dismisses them as “losers.”
Our political universe may indeed be locked in the past. It looks backward because that’s just where we’re headed.
Is this all inevitable? No one can know. Decline is no more predestined than Progress was once thought to be. Occupy Wall Street seemed to erupt out of nowhere. It turned lower Manhattan into a Grand Guignol of long dormant resistance to the Street’s overlordship. And it sparked fraternal eruptions all around the world. Then it dwindled away. But most would acknowledge it did, as the saying goes, change the conversation.
Perhaps it did more than that. Not long afterward, Bill de Blasio was elected mayor of New York in a wholly unanticipated landslide of populist sentiment that seemed to repudiate an era of Wall Street/real estate domination which had cast the city in the role of “Capitol City” of a Hunger Games country. This was a rare political spectacle in our Age of Acquiescence. Pundits quickly began prophesying a “new populism” led by mainstream politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. The Democratic Party seemed to be rediscovering disquiet about inequality as a vendible political commodity. Pressure to raise the minimum wage spread from municipalities to the White House. A socialist actually got elected to municipal office in Seattle, and another one nearly did in Minneapolis.
Maybe there is a lesson or two to be learned. On the one hand, techno-determinism reigns. One of its pathologies is emotional evisceration, a creeping incapacity to feel; the danger it presents is not the old science-fiction one about machines taking on human qualities and taking over, but rather the scarier one about humans becoming increasingly machinelike and proud of it. Numbing like this may sedate. And it is antipathetic to the instinct to act politically in the world. Plenty of skepticism about just what New York’s new mayor could or even would try to do to undo the gross inequalities of power and wealth that had characterized the city for a generation emerged even before the ballots were counted. The “new populism” of the Democratic Party may be a momentary aberration. Skepticism of that sort could turn out to be a gloomily accurate forecast of what lies ahead.
On the other hand, however, this realism or resignation or fatalism or whatever one chooses to call it may suffer from its own timidity as well as a fateful forgetfulness. It becomes itself an accomplice of decline in an era of auto-cannibalism.
What is forgotten in a prematurely mature standpoint is that the capacity to envision something generically new, however improbable, has always supplied the intellectual, emotional, and political energy that made an advance in civilized life, no matter how truncated, possible. To be grown up in the Age of Acquiescence may be a sign of early-onset senescence.
Had someone painted a picture or taken a photograph of the collective psyche of America in 1930, it would have been a grim one: demoralized, fatalistic, full of cynicism and fear, inert. Painted again just four years later, that portrait would have captured the eruption as if out of nowhere of combative resistance and fellow feeling, a transfiguration conjured up not by the councils of government, but by the social energy and creativity of ordinary people that no one knew existed.
New populists may fail to live up to expectations and may soon be forgotten—or be a straw in the wind. The uprisings of the working poor at fast-food chains, at car washes, inside Fortress Walmart, and at dozens of other sites may die away—or they may break through the ossified remains of the old trade union apparatus and seed the growth of wholly new organizations of the invisibles. An economy that sometimes seems like it wants to reinvent debt slavery has aroused passions not seen for a century among college students, home owners, and supplicants of the credit card. Is debt likely to become the Achilles’ heel of the new capitalist order of things? Will the experience of mass downward mobility, the disappearing of the middle class so much talked about, shatter those cherished dreams of “making it” that have for generations renewed the will to believe? Mother earth grows sickly and dangerous. The environmental movement can count few victories in its struggle to save the planet. Yet that movement has sustained itself for decades and continues to grow, the only mass movement to accomplish that feat in the Age of Acquiescence. Is there some tipping point—an analog to the one global warming is fast approaching—when the convergence of auto-cannibalism and the ravaging of the earth open up a new era of rebellion and transformation?
Might we reimagine a future, as our ancestors once did, different than the mere extrapolation of the here and now? The myopia bred by short-term financial rewards and insatiable cravings for novelty cramps the future. It is a perspective about progress already grown stale by the stupefying, essential sameness of what’s on offer. Under the guise of individual freedom, the commodification of everything expels like so much waste matter coherent social relations, replacing them with anomic behavior, antisocial criminal behavior, and the nihilist liberation of Dostoyevsky’s “everything is permitted.” Is there some natural limit to this?3
Money talks. That is an axiom all agree with. Even those moved to question the inequalities of our times tend to frame their response in these terms. But all the great social upheavals of the long nineteenth century, including the passionate, moral outburst of the civil rights movement, always originated in a realm before money and looked for gratification in a realm beyond money. To be sure they were rooted in material need and not shy about saying what they needed to live in a civilized way. However, intermingled with those material wants and desires, affixed to them like emblems of the spirit, were ineffable yearnings to redefine what it meant to be human together.
Perhaps that is the enduring legacy the long nineteenth century bequeaths to our own.