Don’t tread on me!” is part of the genetic code of mythic America. So is it conceivable that over the course of a long generation, emerging during the last quarter of the twentieth century, the capacity and will to stand up against the presumptions of the powerful has atrophied? Has something gone missing, died away, or been reduced to some vestigial remnant that once upon a time invoked robust resistance to the usurpations of power elites?
This seems unlikely. Perhaps it’s all an optical illusion, a case of political myopia. Just look around: the rise of the Tea Party all by itself strongly suggests that the “Don’t tread on me” instinct is alive and well. Excoriating limousine liberals and know-it-all government bureaucrats stirs up hot political emotions. Establishments in both parties run from or curry favor with this right-wing populist belligerency.
Meanwhile, social movements from the left attacking entrenched privileges of gender, race, and ethnicity are now embedded in our political culture. Their victories, if not absolute, cause those reluctant to give up these old forms of domination to seek cover, apologize, or simply deny that their behavior means what common sense plainly tells us it means. Immigrants living in the shadows of semilegality, discrimination, and exploitation mobilize for their human and political rights. A passion for social justice animates NGOs and elements of the religious world. Grassroots community organizations blanket the country, and even a president is proud to have worked for one.
True, wars abroad drone on endlessly. Still, they do elicit fitful, episodic opposition. Corporations fouling the biosphere arouse chronic anxiety, doomsday prophecies, and occasional uproar. It is entirely possible to tour certain zones of the worldwide web and come away believing the country is boiling over with rage directed at war makers, bankers, and profiteers, that the status quo can’t hold on much longer. All in all, the country remains a turbulent place. So why talk about acquiescence?
Furthermore, if today’s bankers, corporate muck-a-mucks and their political enablers can perpetrate wrack and ruin and emerge pretty much unscathed, what else is new? We might like to imagine a heritage of popular combativeness in confronting the high and mighty, and memorialize heroic challenges by the “masses to the classes.” In the soberer light of the country’s real history, however, perhaps that is a fairy tale.
There are indeed serious objections to the idea that we have been living through an era of surrender.
Surrender to whom? While American culture has always been acutely allergic to any intimation that the country might be bedeviled by the Old World’s class struggles, nonetheless something resembling a “ruling class” did rear its head now and then. There they were in plain sight: Loyalist aristocrats, the slaveocracy, robber barons, moneycrats, Tories of industry, the money trust, economic royalists, the Establishment, and other presumptive potentates did seem to exercise a hard-to-miss overlordship. You could usually distinguish them by their social breeding or education, or the way they talked and dressed, or by where they lived and whom they married and associated with, or by what they believed, and, most of all, by their wealth and their easy access to the instruments of political wherewithal, although these were not foolproof indicators. They might be admired and emulated, or loathed and their dominance challenged, but there they stood—faintly exotic, faintly alien American versions of a ruling class.
But then they vanished, dissolved into the polymorphous flux of postindustrial America. Can we any longer discern the profile of a ruling elite? After all, modern American consumer capitalism is irreverent to the core. It disrespects every established rank and order as “so yesterday,” holds up to ironic mockery all vestiges of ascribed authority and tradition, scorns the old-fashioned unless it can repackage it ingeniously as nostalgia, as something newly and stylishly old. If our titans of industry and finance dress up like cowboys and construction workers, if they mimic the accents of good ole boys, if they are only one generation removed—if even that—from their roots in middle-class suburbia and no-name state colleges, is there any way of telling the difference between a “populist” ubermensch and the rest of us? Does it make sense to claim that we have been suffering from osteoporosis of the political backbone if the whole of society has become one gelatinous invertebrate mass? Under these circumstances, zeroing in on the powers that be is harder than pinning down the location and velocity of a subatomic particle, a quixotic crusade at best. Even if armies of resistance existed and mobilized for action, they might still have to ask “which way to the Winter Palace?”
If our times are to be singled out as “unnaturally” submissive, it is first of all essential to settle on exactly what’s meant by acquiescence. There is the 1984 version and the Brave New World version. The first depends on brute mechanisms of intimidation, coercion, and studied deceit, physical and spiritual. The second relies on self-enslavement, where people come to embrace their own oppression, wallow in their own passivity, relish trivial distractions, and are pleasured into inertness, succumbing by choice. Is either of these scenarios apt today? Both perhaps?
Even if we acknowledge that the United States has in past times exhibited a penchant for notably violent social conflict, martial repression, and callous exploitation, certainly those overt forms of coercion have subsided substantially in more recent periods. The bloody triumph of the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century put an end to all that. America is now a democracy that behaves for the most part civilly, not as a bully (not here at home anyway). Yet might it be that, like a hide-and-seek ruling class, rumors about the dying away of fear as a mode of running things are greatly exaggerated? The politics of fear—the 1984 kind of acquiescence—may live a subterranean existence, under the radar but distorting the lives of multitudes. If millions of trees fall in the forest but no one notices, someone nevertheless may be wielding an ax.
What about that other way of giving in? This would include everything from self-administered anesthesia to the crafting of new forms of cultural legitimacy without which elites may find it too hard to get their way. Addiction to the multifarious delights of consumer culture, for example—from electronic gadgetry to crystal meth, from channel surfing to sugar-injected fast food, from buffo housoleums to logo-infested T-shirts—functions after all as a kind of deliverance, a part of daily life and an escape from it.
But it’s a peculiar deliverance, an emancipation of the imaginary and the libidinal whose thrills and dreaminess are prefabricated in the factories and marketing ateliers of modern industry. Its pleasures seem compelled. So the emancipation it offers might be called oxymoronic, a liberation that happens strictly in private, that veers away from confronting the obsidian structures of social power and domination as they actually exist in the “outside” world. Maddeningly too, each “emancipator” comes and goes with frustrating frequency. Each liberating “high” has a short life expectancy and demands so much chronic refreshening it can feel enslaving. Yet and still, this is our realm of free will. We have a choice. We can always choose brand X. If this be acquiescence, why worry?
Or has some alchemical combination of 1984 and Brave New World ensured us a deeper domestic tranquility beneath the surface of our everyday political raucousness? The founders of the Republic wouldn’t have had this particular psycho-political chemistry in mind, of course, but they were concerned with questions of authority, legitimacy, and “domestic tranquility.” They pondered how to reconcile customary practices of social and political deference to disinterested elites, behavior to which in many ways they were still attached, with the breakthrough notion of popular sovereignty.
Since those formative days, modern capitalist societies, including the United States, have arguably remained libertarian and authoritarian at the same time. But the mechanisms of stability and coherence have changed. Of late, they invite the peculiar forms of self-expression made available through the “free” market while relying on internalized self-restraints and public ideologies—“family values” or “America is number one” revanchist chauvinism, for instance—to sedate the caffeinated energies of excessive individualism. Otherwise, that seductive world of the marketplace would unleash a torrent of centrifugal desires that, left unchecked, would end in anarchic nihilism.
In the end, to acquiesce might mean only that while the people may not actually rule, they grant, tacitly at least, that those who do are doing a creditable job and are running things more or less in the general interest. Over vast stretches of time, this is the normal state of affairs in many societies—how could they go on otherwise? Perhaps then, it is misleading to deploy the word “acquiescence.” It conjures up images of the bended knee, when all we may have been witnessing here in America over the last generation is that mundane practice of going along to get along.
Business as usual in any society fissured by social cleavages, as most would admit ours is, means living day to day with submerged tensions. Various forms of surface compliance conceal instincts of the opposite sort. Public opinion polls, for example, regularly record sentiments in favor of higher levels of universal social insurance, redistributive taxation, workplace justice, and regulation of big business than the political system rarely comes close to acknowledging, much less doing anything about. This suggests that while the United States is formally democratic and egalitarian, people defer to the hegemony of wealth. Compliance is forthcoming (sometimes concealing a quiet resentment), either on pain of penalty (the corporation will outsource work abroad, flee to a tax-friendlier locale, fire troublemakers, and so on) or out of a genuine and indigenous belief in the efficacy and moral superiority of the business system itself. If what seems to be quiescence hides a muted discontent, perhaps we should not diagnose our current moment and recent past as particularly anemic.
All of these objections, caveats, qualifications, and ambiguities run counter to an allegation about an Age of Acquiescence. They carry weight, and they can be more definitely measured only against what used to pass for normal. Many would agree that there was a time, a whole epoch even, when the sinews of resistance were tougher and more resilient, and when the popular imagination audaciously leapt beyond the boundaries of business as usual. Great waves of social upheaval regularly rolled across the landscape of American life. Their reverberations lent public affairs a frisson we no longer sense. If there was such an era running through that long nineteenth century, it is dead. What killed it?
Despots rely mainly on fear. They are masters of the means of coercion and intimidation, physical as well as psychological. Even the most brutal tyranny, however, seeks some measure of consent and for a time may win some. People may admire the tyrant for his frankness and audacity, his refusal to temporize—the way he embodies qualities they wish they could find in themselves and can thrill to vicariously. In the end, though, despots rule by blunt instrument.
Market democracies operate quite differently, and the element of consent is essential. This is not meant to imply that in these societies the politics of fear ceases to operate. On the contrary, it continues and may even flourish. But, as the economist Amartya Sen has noted, the “most blatant forms of inequality and exploitation survive in the world through making allies of the deprived and exploited.… Discontent is replaced by acceptance, hopeless rebellion by conformist quiet and… suffering by cheerful endurance.”1
If the endurance is a “cheerful” one, that is because capitalist societies promise something a great deal more than the ability to endure. They begin as liberation movements offering deliverance from the material privations, as well as from the social and political constraints of premodern life that have frustrated the desires and ambitions of everyman, reserving them for privileged castes of blood and position. Freedom is the promissory note issued in return for willing assent. American democratic capitalism especially has made good on that promise again and again over generations. Free to move, free to till the land and keep its fruits, free to start a business, free to work (or not work), free to speak, worship, vote, and write, free to rise (or fall), free to enjoy the good life.
Material abundance in particular has for more than a century represented the most compelling form of freedom on offer. It is the boast of both political parties that they, uniquely, can provide it. Freedom from want, the prospect of economic security, was after all the watchword of New Deal liberalism; similarly, economic growth and middle-class material well-being constituted the core of the mid-1990s Republican Contract with America.
Social commentators and scholars have long credited the country’s political and social stability to its remarkable capacity to provide a standard of living that until recently was unprecedented anywhere in the world. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Werner Sombart made his famous observation about socialism in America foundering on “shoals of roast beef.” And at midcentury, the distinguished American historian David Potter argued that America as a “people of plenty” had eluded, thanks to the cornucopia produced by its marvelous economic machinery, what might otherwise have been bitter political and social acrimony arising out of the abrasiveness of class inequities.2
Miracles followed. Wage labor, once considered an incipient new form of slavery, became instead an avenue to freedom. The struggle for higher wages, and through them access to the American largesse by even the humblest worker, promised its own kind of emancipation, if not the anticapitalist one dreamed of during the long nineteenth century. This proved true enough for many if not everybody.3
Nor should this be looked down on as a form of “goulash capitalism” running parallel to the “goulash communism” of the Soviet Union, which was so mercilessly mocked by the Chinese a half century ago as an abandonment of communism’s sacred trust to liberate mankind. Economic security and even material abundance carry their own forms of social, psychic, and spiritual liberation, first and foremost escape from the numbing intimidation of being without the wherewithal to get by, to raise a family, to preserve one’s self-respect, and to not feel abjectly dependent.
Moreover, all the material artifacts of daily life come charged with social significance. What after all does formal equality amount to if only a select few possess enough by way of education, health, time, and technology (not to mention more mundane creature comforts) to ensure their own dignity and self-development? The struggle for “more” is no mean thing. In times past it has been an organic part of historic quests for a freer life.
Societies everywhere and at all times depend on tales of justification and purpose as much as they do on the means of tangible survival to hold themselves together. These might be thought of as fables, fictive approximations of the truth perhaps, but ones that both reflect and help constitute social reality. Ancestral visions of Progress, of the Invisible Hand, of socialism, of the cooperative commonwealth, or the Social Gospel’s Christian commonwealth might be thought of as fables. Traditional tales of Christian redemption, as well as modern ones like the belief in a heroic revolutionary vanguard defying the philistines of the countinghouse or even Nazism, also qualify. They carried with them mythic narratives, a sense of the immanent, shadows of the metaphysical. And despite their shortcomings and self-evident differences—their mutual enmity even—they shared a conception of emancipation as something essentially social.
But times have changed. Keynesian consumer capitalism and what is sometimes depicted as its mortal enemy, neoliberal, “free” market capitalism, have together turned earlier notions of freedom inside out… or what might be more aptly characterized as outside in. New fables of freedom spawned in the Age of Acquiescence are profoundly individual, no matter whether they are expressed as material desires or as exalted aspirations for self-empowerment. They are distinctly asocial, sometimes savagely antisocial. Cheerfully they celebrate Margaret Thatcher’s drear axiom that “there is no such thing as society.” Whatever else can be said about them, they do not constitute the raw material of social rebellion.4
Three fables of freedom in particular have marked the last half century: emancipation through consumption; freedom through the “free agency” of work; and freedom through the heroism of risk, a fable in which the businessman emerges as plebeian liberator. These tales were not invented when Ronald Reagan was elected president—their roots go far back into the American past—but they have substantially shaped the contours of our more recent remarkable quiescence.
Old wine in new bottles, these tales have mutated and matured in the new political economy of our times. The phase change from industrial capitalism to “flexible” finance-driven capitalism has lent these stories about the way things are and the way they need to be a compelling emotional coherence. Moreover, these are kindred fables; they bleed into and breed one another and together conduce to consent.
Mass consumption already constituted the foundation on which the New Deal’s Keynesian commonwealth rested. The preeminence of finance in our new economy has not altered that. But it has vastly expanded the demographic and psychic reach of that economy. We may not have yet reached the terminal point predicted by Georg Simmel, the early-twentieth-century German sociologist and philosopher, in which “a life in boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé.… It agitates the nerves to the strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all.” Still a certain enervation and even melancholy is sometimes detectable—or the opposite, a hysterical rushing about, a bug-eyed fascination with the next new thing, an infinite calisthenics of sensation. The desires and compulsions of consumer culture now drill down into the most impoverished social depths. And they permeate the most intimate regions of daily life, turning what was once thought to be untouchable by the calculus of the market—love, friendship, babyhood, wisdom, beauty, play, inner peace, redemption—into vendible commodities.5
Furthermore, because our new economic order has become an otherwise austere one—“lean-and-mean” especially when it comes to paychecks and the social wage—it has managed to sustain the consumer economy only by encouraging a universal indebtedness. That debt on the one hand functions as a source of primitive accumulation for finance. But on the other, it keeps the recyclable dream of freedom through acquisition alive while tethering it to an intimidating dependency on the creditor class. Consumerism has made play culture compulsive and obligatory.
Meanwhile, another and opposite cultural inversion would have us behave and believe that in our “brave new world,” work has become a form of liberating play.
Flexible capitalism relies on—indeed, boasts about—its elasticity. That flexibility mainly refers to the way firms have managed to detach themselves from long-term relations with their workforce. Businesses enjoy the flexibility to respond to every perturbation in global demand most cheaply, recruiting workers when they need them without any ongoing obligations. Being flexible also means offloading functions once performed by the integrated corporation internally onto outside contractors and subcontractors, who may then be called into service or dismissed as the market dictates.
Together the casualization of labor and the shipping out of tasks has nourished a lively sense that in this new world work is undertaken at will by free agents. Men and women contract to undertake this or that project or job but, like their corporate partners, assume no continuing relationship, always remain alert to new possibilities, and retain their freedom as players in the marketplace—or so the story goes. In this way work, once to be escaped with as little pain as possible, a zone of dependency and constraint, seems to offer instead an unforeseen pathway to self-determination.
Involuntary servitude gave way to free labor; free labor turned into wage slavery; the affliction of wage slavery was eased by the American standard of living. Now we live, some of us anyway—an array of midlevel software designers, consultants, freelancers of a dozen varieties, even accountants and lawyers—in the era of voluntary servitude. It isn’t “arbeit mach frei,” but nonetheless the sense that work in the new economic order can be a form of self-emancipation thrives in certain quarters. Why accuse the inhabitants of acquiescing?
Of all the unlikely freedom fighters, denizens of Wall Street would have to rank as the most preposterous. The Street, after all, is the epicenter of that new global economic order. It was once known (and today is again known) as the “Street of Torments,” a place to shy away from unless you were wealthy, connected, or perhaps preternaturally lucky. During the second Gilded Age, however, hoi polloi found its way to the Street in great numbers. Conservative pension and mutual funds became risk takers as the growth of the finance sector picked up steam. Moreover, information technology seemed to make the secrets of the Street transparent to everyone. Ordinary people came to harbor the dream of incalculable riches piled up overnight. More than that, they imagined the freedom to control their own fate just like those stock market champions idolized in the media, flexing their financial muscle and staring fearlessly into the unknown. Everyman could be a speculator if only he/she had the courage to seize the moment.
Heroes of our time had proved it could be done. Surfacing on the unlikely terrain of the marketplace, men from nowhere managed to challenge the corporate establishment. These warriors not only stalked the forbidding canyons of Wall Street but triumphed as well on the far frontier of advanced technology: the information superhighway. They waged war on the ancien régime of stuffed-shirt bankers and faceless corporate suits and they won. They became our culture’s plebeian champions, our democratic plutocrats. What they had done was stunning and thrilling and reinvigorating the nation. More than that, the new economic and political order they midwived was open to all, or at least to a democracy of the audacious. Free at last.
Three fables of freedom have turned the more prosaic if systematic efforts to unwind the New Deal regulatory and administrative welfare state into an exhilarating series of stories full of moral purpose. However in touch they are with the most ingenious consumables, the most inventive new platforms for enterprising free agents, and the most exotic innovations in financial speculation, all three share a deeper coherence. They believe first of all in something quite old that has become youthful again: that the marketplace is the ideal matrix for fostering individual freedom, and that the dangers which may be part of that way of living are the price of liberation. This has always been a vital element of the national makeup, sometimes a more compelling one, sometimes less so. Freedom’s demeanor in this incarnation is that of the steely isolate, the implacable loner, and a distinctly masculine grotesque but a seductive one.
Fables mutate. These three draw their persuasiveness from something newer as well: that the world as reconstituted by flexible capitalism has given birth to the free-floating individual, so unmoored from all those ties of kin, home, locale, race, ethnicity, church, craft, and fixed moral order that her only home is the austere one of the marketplace furnished in unforgiving arithmetic. Her selfhood is that of the abstract, depersonalized fungible commodity, a homunculus of rationalizing self-interest.
Every citizen is well aware of the triumph of free market ideology that began during the Reagan era. Indeed, in the realm of ideas there was no more evident or potent sign of acquiescence to the rule of capital than the hostility to all forms of government regulation and intervention into the economy. Some attribute this remarkable turnabout in thinking and public policy to the sheer persuasiveness of that bevy of think tanks, foundations, talk radio and TV “news” shows, and magazines launched with great fervor and dedication by the ascending right-wing political establishment.
Doubtless the doggedness and ingenuity of these policy intellectuals, together with the enveloping centralization and uniformity of the mass media (pace the social media), have mightily constrained and foreshortened what is thinkable, what is worthy of attention and what not, what rationales are credible and which ones are off the reservation. To get deeply rooted, however, required penetrating into the subsoil beneath the rational. After all, this constellation of free market thoughts and emotions, although always running in the American grain, nonetheless had to fight its way through a thicket of New Deal–inspired views and sentiments that ran in a different direction. After all, that New Deal persuasion was a worldview that had dominated the American political imagination for a half century.
Yet it succumbed. Something as earthbound as an overhauled economy—full of sunrise and sundown industries, ghost towns and edge cities, high-tech ateliers and sweatshops, international banks and transnational migrations of the uprooted, domestic deindustrialization and industrialization of the global South, planetary supply chains and big-box commercial megaliths, dying unions, emaciated or privatized public services, telecommunicating wonders and feral dogs roaming the wastelands of urban downtowns, new wealth, new poverty—has been kept aloft, in part, by the ephemera of the heart.
Fantasies can possess a tensile strength that belies their airy composition. These three do. They manage to efface reality’s harshness. More than efface, they have allowed us to perform a kind of mental cosmetic surgery on the ugliness of dispossession and decline, inequality and exploitation, refiguring them as good or virtuous or fated. We can revel rather than revile, feel strong and empowered. William Butler Yeats put it well:
We have fed the heart on fantasies
The heart has grown brutal from the fare.
Fantasy is powerful. But power is not all fantasy. What is truly remarkable about the grip these fables have exercised is that they managed it during an era when the most developed country on the planet was undergoing a protracted process of underdevelopment. If one clue to the mystery of acquiescence lies in the fables that enchant, we must also look to the way the starkness of flexible capitalism at ground level intimidates and demoralizes its latent opposition.
Fear wears many hats. There’s the day-to-day, how-to-get-by variety: how to hang on to the home or pay this debt or that one or buy the medicine. Dare I complain if the CEO decides to disappear my pension? Will my union go under entirely if we put up too much of a fuss when the boss or the government tells us it is imperative we become lean-and-mean? There’s the aspirational fear: how to pay for college and not get stuck in place; or negatively, the fear of falling, of failing, of that American nightmare of downward mobility. There’s the fear that comes from abroad: What if my company and my job migrate overseas, or immigrants come here and take it? Or will I be deported if I mention to someone in authority that my employer is violating every labor law on the books? There’s the fear of stepping out-of-bounds, of saying that which has become unsayable and “un-American.”
Fear of the other has always bedeviled American society (and of course not only America). Racism was the cancerous phobia present at the creation. Those who argue the incapacity of resistance movements of the past to endure rightly point to this racial divide as exhibit A. More recently, just as the axis of social conflict moved away from the labor question to the race question, just as the institutional and legal edifice of American apartheid was being dismantled, a new racial consciousness and activism renewed the politics of racial fear. Racial rancor became the medium of a class consciousness that dared not speak its name.
Fear more universal and existential than the phobias about race accompanied the great transformation from industrial to global finance capitalism. This is the anxiety of loss, of cultural and moral disorientation, of being passed over. People of alien colors and beliefs and languages and customs threaten fixed moral standards, the way men and women relate, what should happen in school, what rights need protecting and why the need for so many new ones, where does patriotism reside, what authorities need to be respected. Evolving demographics threaten the primordial, the taken-for-granted way things were and would always be. And fear of decline and fall can breed a fierce, desperate resistance. Here, fear of loss and the fable of the free market conjoin to generate the most enduring form of resistance in our Age of Acquiescence: the rise of the populist right. Yet this turns out to be a resistance on behalf of restoration, one that doesn’t pretend to confront the fundamentals as our ancestors once did.
And so there is a fear even more dreadful: namely, that we can no longer imagine a way of life and labor at odds with capitalism. The horizon is closing in. Everything in this inventory of acquiescence and fear also confronted our forebears living through the long nineteenth century, although in ways peculiar to that time—all, that is, except something so elemental it might pass unnoticed. Now but not then, capitalism seems the only answer to the riddle of history. We have become the slaves of a kind of fateful determinism, gussied up by supplications at the altar of technology and the marketplace.
Before exploring these fables of freedom and these politics of fear, it is important to see how this new species of flexible capitalism gave them life.