The Personal, Protected Sphere Must Be Extended
There is … a moral inheritance, which is an explanation of the dominance of the western world, a moral inheritance which consists essentially in the belief in property, honesty and the family, all things which we could not and have never been able adequately to justify intellectually.… We must return to a world in which not only reason, but reason and morals, as equal partners, must govern our lives, where the truth of morals is simply one moral tradition, that of the Christian west, which has created morals in modern civilization.
—Friedrich Hayek, 1984 Address to the Mont Pelerin Society
Theorizing Moral Traditionalism as an Element of Neoliberalism
“God, family, nation, and free enterprise” is a familiar conservative mantra. These commitments, however, do not cohabit easily outside of a Cold War binary in which socialism is presumed opposed to each and thus binds them together. Enthusiasm for the market is typically animated by its promise of innovation, freedom, novelty, and wealth, while a politics centered in family, religion, and patriotism is authorized by tradition, authority, and restraint. The former innovates and disrupts; the latter secures and sustains.1 Moreover, even before globalization, capital generally has disregarded creed and political borders, while nationalism has fetishized them. Consequently, most scholars have treated the Right’s commitments to neoliberal policy and to its other values as running on separate tracks.2 Their relationship has been variously theorized as one of supplement, genealogical hybrid, resonance, contingent convergence, or mutual exploitation. Each approach is reprised briefly below.
Supplement: Irving Kristol, often called the godfather of neoconservatism, treated the political project of shoring up moral values as an essential supplement to free markets. In the late 1970s, he famously offered capitalism “two cheers” for the freedom and wealth it promised, but withheld the third cheer because “consumer societies are empty of moral meaning if not forthrightly nihilistic.”3 An explicitly conservative moral-political program is required, he argued, to counter these effects, as well as to counter capitalism’s contribution to the “steady decline in our democratic culture … sinking to new levels of vulgarity.”4 This nihilism and degradation render moral issues “proper candidates for the government’s attention.”5 Concretely, this entails promoting traditional values in families, schools, and civic spaces, affirming religious influence in political life, and cultivating patriotism. Beyond these, neoconservative politics addresses the need for a strong state to promote the national interest.6 Again, in this view, none of these state and cultural projects are naturally secured or supported by capitalism. Rather, they are its essential supplements.
Hybrid: Taking Kristol at his word, in previous work, I treated neoliberalism and neoconservatism in the United States as two distinct political rationalities.7 While bearing few overlapping formal characteristics, I argued, they have convergent effects in generating an antidemocratic citizenry that “loves and wants neither political freedom nor social equality … expects neither truth nor accountability in governance and state actions,” and “is not distressed by exorbitant concentrations of political economic power … or undemocratic formulations of national purpose at home or abroad.”8 Though emanating from different sources and addressing different purposes, the two rationalities mingled to produce dark forces of dedemocratization.
Resonance: William Connolly theorizes the “resonance” between contemporary evangelical Christianity and capitalist culture. Unlike logics of entailment, dialectics, conspiracy, or even genealogy, Connolly argues, resonance consists in “energized complexities of mutual imbrication, and interinvolvement, in which heretofore unconnected or loosely associated elements fold, bend, blend, emulsify and resolve incompletely into each other, forging a qualitative assemblage resistant to classical modes of explanation.”9 Connolly is especially interested in the “spiritual disposition to existence”—vehemence and ruthlessness, ideological extremism, and the “readiness to create or condone scandals against any party who opposes their vision of the world”—shared by aggressive religious evangelicals and champions of neoliberalism.10
Writing in Politico a decade later, Tim Alberta offered a different version of resonance between Bible-thumping working-class whites and the rich, vainglorious, nonreligious, thrice-divorced, “pussy grabbing” former casino owner they supported for president. Evangelicals, Alberta insists, identify deeply with Trump because of their shared experience of being disdained by cultural elites and attacked by worldly forces. “Both he and they have been systematically targeted in the public square—oftentimes by the same adversaries,” especially those hailing from academia, entertainment, and the media.11 Trump often refers to this shared experience of defamation when speaking to crowds of white evangelicals, and evangelical activists make frequent mention of their opponents’ mocking and derisive characterizations of their beliefs.12
Convergence: Melinda Cooper studies the convergence between neoliberalism and social conservatism at the site of the traditional family: “Despite their differences on virtually all other issues, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family need to be encouraged—and at the limit enforced.”13 Cooper sees both as hewing to the principles of the Elizabethan poor laws, in which, among other things, “the family, not the state, would bear primary responsibility for investing in the education, health, and welfare of children.”14 While neoconservatives promoted family values for moral reasons and neoliberals for economic ones, their agendas came together in policies through which the “natural obligations” and “altruism” of families would substitute for the welfare state and operate as both “a primitive mutual insurance contract and … a necessary counterweight to market freedoms.”15 Moreover, for neoliberal intellectuals and policy makers, the family was not just a safety net, but a disciplinary container and authority structure. They looked to it to thwart the democratic excesses and the breakdown of authority they believed to be incited by the provisions of the social state, especially those of welfare and public higher education. If individuals could be returned to dependence on the family for everything from out-of-wedlock children to college costs, they would also be resubmitted to its authority, morality, and economic discipline.16
Mutual exploitation: Over the past several decades, scholars Nancy MacLean, Michael Lienesch, Susan Harding, Linda Kintz, and Bethany Moreton all anticipated what the 2016 Trump campaign put brilliantly into practice.17 Each contributes to understanding how Christian traditionalists could be bought off by neoliberals concerned with other agendas, from deregulating industries and winning corporate tax cuts to challenging laws and policies aimed at racial equality.18 Nancy MacLean argues that the Virginia public choice school of neoliberalism, heavily funded by the Koch Brothers, understood well the importance of recruiting Christian evangelicals to the project of contesting democracy with a white male plutocracy. MacLean writes:
Cynicism ruled Koch’s decision to make peace … with the religious right despite the fact that so many libertarian thinkers … were atheists who looked down on those who believed in God. But the organizers who mobilized white evangelicals for political action—men such as Reverend Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed and Tim Phillips—were entrepreneurs in their own right, so common cause could be made. The religious entrepreneurs were happy to sell libertarian economics to their flocks—above all, opposition to public schooling and calls for reliance on family provision or charity in place of government assistance.19
The Trump campaign, particularly Steve Bannon, grasped early on the importance of the white evangelical vote. And after assuming office, Trump never stopped throwing this constituency meat—on abortion, same-sex marriage, transgender acceptance, Jerusalem, and expanded power for churches in civic, educational, and political life. Only 17 percent of Americans are white evangelicals today, but this population constitutes a full one-half of Trump’s base.20 Tim Alberta writes, “Evangelicals do not believe that Trump is one of them, as former presidents Carter and the younger Bush were, but never has a president catered to them so directly.” Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, who led the evangelicals’ battle to rescue the Supreme Court nomination of Justice Kavanaugh from sexual assault allegations and argued against sanctioning Saudi Arabia following its assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, is forthright about the difference between religious beliefs and the character of the political fights required to advance them.21 Jerry Falwell Jr., head of Liberty University and crucial to delivering the evangelical vote for Trump, is equally blunt: “Conservatives & Christians need to stop electing ‘nice guys’. They might make great Christian leaders but the US needs street fighters like @realDonaldTrump at every level of government b/c the liberal fascists Dems are playing for keeps & many Repub leaders are a bunch of wimps!”22
Mutual exploitation between religious zealots (and their followers) and irreligious ambitious politics is hardly unprecedented—Machiavelli was one of its most brilliant and early cartographers.23 However, the explicit transactionalism and politicization of religious values themselves are striking expressions of a nihilism that will be more carefully considered in chapter 5. Open tolerance of the alien values of others in exchange for advancing one’s own intolerant moral agenda is possible only when moral values have paradoxically lost their moral weight, when “values themselves have been devalued,” as Nietzsche put it. This was certainly on display in the December 2017 special election for U.S. Senator in Alabama: in an effort to defeat a “godless democrat” who fought the Klan as a young lawyer, evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for an accused pedophile seeking to criminalize abortion and homosexuality and equating the Koran with Mein Kampf.24 Contemporary Christian nationalism has this contractualism at its core: “The view is that God can use anybody as long as they’re promoting Christian nationalist ideals or values,” argues one sociologist of religion; “it’s all about a quest for power and what serves the purpose in the political moment.”25 The belief that God has explicitly chosen Donald Trump as his instrument for bringing about a more Christian world or the End of Days is common among white evangelicals.26
Each of the above accounts illuminates important aspects of the political present. None of them, however, apprehends the place of traditional morality—both securing and emanating from the family—within neoliberal reason. While some ordoliberals formulated this place in their concern to “re-embed” the proletarianized subject in the authority and provisioning of the family, it acquires its strongest theoretical articulation in Friedrich Hayek’s work. For Hayek, the relation of markets and morals in the neoliberal project has nothing to do with supplements, hybridity, resonance, convergence, or mutual exploitation. Rather, markets and morals, equally important to a thriving civilization, are rooted in a common ontology of spontaneously evolved orders borne by tradition. This ontology features perfect compatibility between and among discipline and freedom, inheritance and innovation, evolution and stability, authority and independence. Moreover, far from constituting a compensatory program to counter the ravages of capitalism, Hayek seeks to cultivate and extend “conventions and customs of human intercourse” in order to constitute a crucial bulwark against the wrong-headed designs of social justice warriors and the despotism of an overreaching state that those designs inevitably yield.
Friedrich Hayek on Tradition
For Hayek, freedom requires the absence of explicit coercion by other humans, whether that coercion is direct or comes through political institutions.27 Freedom for Hayek is not emancipation, it is not power to enact one’s will, and it is not license. Indeed, it is not even choice.28 Importantly, it is also not independence of the traditions generating rules of conduct and the habits of following them.29 Hayek writes in one of his notebooks, “Restraint is a condition, not the opposite of freedom.”30 But what kind of restraint can be noncoercive? Not those set by political decisions or imposed by one person on another, but rather, those “commonly accepted by the members of the group in which the rules of morals prevail.” Lest this seem a minor point, Hayek concludes this note to himself: “the demand for ‘liberation’ from these restraints is an attack on all liberty possible among human beings.”31 Hayekian freedom, then, has nothing to do with emancipation from accepted social norms or powers. Rather, it is the uncoerced capacity for endeavor and experimentation within codes of conduct generated by tradition and enshrined in just law, markets, and morality.32 Schooled by Edmund Burke, whom he modernizes via Darwin, Hayek marvels at the capacity of tradition to produce social harmony and integration along with a means of change, all without recourse to the coercive agency of institutions or groups.
Liberty, more than limited by moral tradition, is partly constituted by it. Conversely, moral freedom, more than challenged by politically imposed justice schemes, is destroyed by them. This framework sets the stage for dismantling robust democracy in the name of freedom and moral values. Tradition parallels the ontology of markets. At times, Hayek even identifies markets as a form of tradition: both “spontaneously” yield order and development without relying on comprehensive knowledge or reason and without a master will to develop, maintain, or steer them. Both are antirationalist (neither designed by reason nor fully apprehended by it) without being irrational.33 “We stand,” Hayek writes, “in a great framework of institutions and traditions—economic, legal and moral—into which we fit ourselves by obeying certain rules of conduct that we never made, and which we have never understood.”34 These qualities of spontaneous, nonintentional development both prevent tradition from impinging on our freedom and supply its capacity for development and orderly adaptation to changing conditions. They do not compromise, but comport with a non-Kantian liberalism in which we are moral agents, even if we are not morally autonomous.35 They insulate norms emanating from tradition from requiring defense by reason or reasons for their legitimacy.
Sharing Burke’s insistence that what preserves society is organic to it, Hayek also recognizes variety in cultural traditions and warns against trying to import elements from one tradition into another. That said, the Darwinian in Hayek believes that traditions not only evolve internally, but also compete externally with one another. Only those that center family and property, he insists, will survive this competition.36 So, too, with personal freedom: traditions that fail to feature it prominently are doomed. This is not just because humans desire freedom, but because freedom strengthens tradition (through promoting adaptive innovations), while tradition moors freedom (through promoting conventions and order). This symbiosis is also revealed in the negative. Those seeking to replace traditional practices and institutions with deliberately contrived ones are the “enemies of freedom” insofar as they seek to impose rules of conduct designed by the few on the many and to replace intelligent design spontaneously generated by tradition with inevitably flawed rational design.37 For Hayek, then, tradition promotes a free way of life in contrast to that organized by political power: it promotes individual freedom through voluntary compliance with its norms, as well as through innovation, and it is sustained by protecting freedom against politics. “Paradoxical as it may appear,” he concludes, “a successful free society will always in a large measure be a tradition-bound society.”38
We need to dwell with this seeming paradox. While insisting on tradition as the proper basis for social order and norms of conduct, Hayek does not treat the past as possessing intrinsic wisdom or authority. Rather, “the evolutionary view is based on the insight that the result of the experimentation of many generations may embody more experience than any one man possesses.”39 Traditions that develop the best possible ways of living together emerge not from the sheer authority of the past, but from the experimentation and evolution that freedom permits. At the same time, tradition promotes freedom and avoids coercion only because with tradition “a high degree of voluntary conformity exists.”40 Voluntary conformity—both terms really matter in Hayek’s formulation. On the one hand, tradition produces conformity through habitual conduct, rather than “conscious adherence to known rules.” On the other hand, the voluntary nature of the conduct is what makes tradition dynamic, as well as a space of freedom. “It is this flexibility of voluntary rules which in the field of morals makes gradual evolution and spontaneous growth possible,” and “such an evolution is possible only with rules which are neither coercive nor deliberately imposed.… Rules of this kind allow for gradual and experimental change.”41
Hayek’s emphasis on competition, development, freedom, innovation, and change as fundamental elements of tradition suggest that his account of tradition is itself drawn from the model of the market, not only from Burkean organicism and authority. Equally important, however, markets are themselves a form of tradition for Hayek, which adds another layer to their legitimate insulation from political intervention. Indeed, the order generated by markets embodies the evolved, free, incomprehensible, unintentional, voluntary, yet socially integrated order of tradition at its finest. We are disciplined and oriented by market rules; they evolve, change, and develop; yet no one designed them, no one is in charge, and no one coerces us within them.
No mastermind, design, or enforcer imposes or secures tradition, and yet, Hayek acknowledges, it is religion that almost always codifies and transmits it. “How could traditions which people do not like or understand, whose effects they usually do not appreciate and can neither see nor foresee, and which they are still ardently combating, continue to have been passed on from generation to generation?”42 Religious mystifications supply the conduit: “We owe the persistence of certain practices, and the civilization that resulted from them, in part to support from beliefs which are not true … in the same sense as are scientific statements.”43 Feeling the slipperiness of the ground he is on, Hayek quickly moves to call religious beliefs “symbolic truths” that promote survival and flourishing. God, he speculates, may be a kind of shorthand required for a cosmology otherwise too complex to apprehend, describe, or even imagine. “Perhaps what many people mean in speaking of God is just a personification of that tradition of morals or values that keeps their community alive.”44 Besides, the fiction of religion is vastly superior to the “rationalist delusion” that we can use our reason to design moral orders.45 If religious mystifications and reifications are shortcuts to preserving traditions on which civilization depends, he implies, so be it.
Yet Hayek cannot be so sanguine about the role of religion and religious beliefs in reproducing tradition. Religious conceits of personification and animism are precisely what he seeks to dismantle in popular conceptions of social and political life, especially the dangerous conceit of sovereign intentionality, design, and will. As we saw in chapter 2, Hayek shares Schmitt’s appreciation of the theological underpinnings of political sovereignty; contra Schmitt, however, Hayek also locates the profound error and danger of sovereignty in its theological formulation of power. Hayek writes: “The pretended logical necessity of such an unlimited source of power simply does not exist.” Instead,
the belief in such a necessity is a product of the false constructivistic interpretation of the formation of human institution which attempts to trace them all to an original designer or some other deliberate act of will. The basic source of social order, however, is not a deliberate decision to adopt certain common rules, but the existence among the people of certain opinions of what is right and wrong. What made the Great Society possible was not a deliberate imposition of rules of conduct but the growth of such rules among men who had little idea of what would be the consequence of their general observance.46
If political sovereignty is rooted in the mistaken belief that societies are ordered by will and design, this belief must be undone. Hayek thus seeks to challenge, conceptually and practically, the anthropomorphized version of a divine will inscribed in political sovereignty.
Folding tradition into liberalism, as Hayek does, then, sets liberalism on a dangerous course by Hayek’s own lights. His refashioning of liberalism withdraws authority from political life and confers it to religiously embedded norms and practices. The political, divested of sovereignty and the public interest, is confined to generating universally applied rules (themselves best when they are codifications of norms emanating from tradition) and techniques that have the status of being practical, rather than true. Tradition secured by religion, on the other hand, acquires the mantle of incontestability and symbolic truth at the same time that it serves as a limit on the political. This formulation explains a strand of the rationality organizing our current predicament: truth withdrawn from political life is rolled over to moral and religious claims rooted in the authority of tradition.47 The effect is to sever truth from accountability (a recipe for authoritarianism), to contest equality and justice with tradition, and to eliminate the legitimacy of popular sovereignty.
Still, Hayek’s quandary has not been solved. If the dangerous and fictive belief in sovereignty attributes to a power above what is spontaneously generated from below, that religion secures tradition remains a serious problem. His critique of sovereignty deconstructs a religious-political worldview featuring omniscience, omnipotence, master design, and master will. With his insistence that each is a dangerous ontological error, he aims to affirm freedom against political mandate, individuals against the collective, and spontaneous development against rational social design. He seeks to dereify society as nothing more than individuals and seeks the dethronement of politics so that markets and morals may resume their pure and rightful place. However, the state is neither the source nor the enforcer of morality—that Hobbesian path would wrongly inflate state power and convert moral law into unfree mandates and restrictions in place of voluntary conformity with conventions. State-dictated morality of any kind, whether religious dicta or secular social justice principles, is the signature of totalitarianism. Thus, the state can secure only the prerequisites of moral life—freedom, property, universal rules of justice, and political deference to tradition. It cannot legislate moral conduct or belief.48
How, then, to recover traditional moral principles from the corrosive effects of capitalism (and the decades of corruption by the social state, from which Hayek’s order would have to arise), when the neoliberal state cannot legislate morality or be a moralist? How to employ law and the state to shore up the authority of tradition without violating its organic nature and its voluntarism? How to minimize political coercion while securing “rule” by tradition? There are three techniques in the Hayekian arsenal: limit legislative power to generating universal rules and exclude it from making policy in the public interest; discredit all social justice talk as nonsense and totalitarian; and expand what Hayek calls the “personal protected sphere” to extend the purview of traditional morality beyond the confines of church and family. Together, these three techniques grant claims from tradition and its peculiar freedoms social place and power while restricting reforms rooted in rationalism, planning, or other nonorganic formulations of the good. Together, they promote traditional morality and markets while containing the reach of the political and restricting democratic reforms of society.
The first two techniques, discussed in previous chapters, are direct limits on the state. The third, both a limit and a kind of state action, is the only one that can actually restore traditional mores to a society where the social state has damaged or displaced them. It is precisely the technique that, in recent decades, has been used in executive orders, legislation, and adjudication empowering market and traditional morality claims against those of equality, secularism, and the common good. “Expanding the personal protected sphere” is Hayek’s novel contribution to neoliberalism and to reformatting traditionalism as freedom.
Coercive state power, Hayek writes in the Constitution of Liberty, is most effectively blocked by designating spheres and activities that it is prohibited to touch.49 Beyond this concern to secure a “protected sphere of a person or persons,” a familiar idea in all forms of liberalism, it is Hayek’s aim to enlarge this sphere’s contents and domain. He is specifically designating ever more activity within it as private, hence appropriately shielded from state impingement and democratic norms.50 “The recognition of property,” Hayek writes, is “the first step in delimiting the private sphere protecting us against coercion” but, he adds, “we must not think of this sphere consisting exclusively, or even chiefly, of material things.”51 Rather, through its unique formation by acceptance of “general rules governing the conditions under which objects or circumstances become part of the protected sphere of a person or persons,” this sphere gives us “protection against interference with our actions” from a range of sources.52 It walls out that monster coercive power, the state, but also coercion by democratic norms such as equality, inclusion, access, and social justice. This is how Hayek links freedom with diffusing traditional mores beyond the family and private sphere of worship. Personal freedom so expanded is the means by which “the traditional moral values alone can flourish.”53 Protection of the “personal protected sphere,” so expanded, is the means by which tradition and liberty repel their enemies—the political and the social, the rational and the planned, the egalitarian and the statist.54 Enlarging the domain in which personal freedom is rightly unrestricted allows traditional beliefs and mores, or what Hayek calls “conventions and customs of human intercourse,” to legitimately reclaim and indeed recolonize, the civic and social where democracy once ruled.55 It is a way of reclaiming the order from what Hayek depicts as the symptomatic and dangerous substitution of the “word ‘social’ for the word ‘moral’ or simply ‘good.’” He reads in this substitution the “growing influence of the rationalist conception” of human nature and human order in place of inherited moral traditions and rules that do not emerge from reason, cannot be fully fathomed by it, and do not depend on individual judgment.56 The “appeal to the ‘social,’” Hayek says wryly, “really involves a demand that individual intelligence, rather than rules evolved by society, should guide individual action.”57 It is an argument to “dispense with what could truly be called ‘social’ (in the sense of being a product of the impersonal process of society)” and to cast out moral tradition and its spontaneous effects in ordering society and our conduct.58
Here, we must remind ourselves what is at issue in seeking to reclaim democratically organized society with norms and codes of conduct derived from market and moral traditions. Of the “conventions and customs of human intercourse” harbored by tradition, Hayek writes, “the moral rules are the most important but by no means the only significant ones.”59 Rather, at stake are such things as heteropatriarchal norms and family forms; racial norms and enclaves; property ownership and wealth accumulation, retention, and transmission—in short, all that reproduces and legitimates historical powers and ordinances of class, kinship, race, and gender.60
Consider once more the importance of the ontological symmetry Hayek establishes between moral codes and market rules. Both are evolved practices, not simply natural, but are “good” because they are evolved, adaptive, and have stood the test of time. Both “conduct conduct” (in Foucault’s formulation) or produce “a high degree of voluntary conformity” (in Hayek’s) without coercion.61 And both require the state to secure and protect them with laws of property, marriage, contracts, and inheritance while also constituting limits on state action.
This symmetry in markets and morals sets Hayekian liberalism apart from libertarian or even classical liberal formulations. So also does Hayek’s affirmation of the conformist pressures of traditional morality; he does not share, for example, J. S. Mill’s worries about the effect of that kind of conformism on freedom or individuality.62 For Hayek, as long as these pressures are not coercive (which in this discussion he defines, tellingly, as “being in someone else’s interest rather than our own”), they are legitimate and valuable. They are especially important in contesting moral claims that emanate from sources other than tradition and that challenge family, property, and freedom.
It should now be clear that Hayek’s antipathy to social democracy and socialism does not derive solely from his appreciation of markets, an appreciation that is ubiquitous in the history of liberalism. Nor does it derive solely from his fear of expansive state power, also ubiquitous in classical liberalism and intensified by the twentieth-century experience of totalitarianism. Rather, for Hayek, the great error of social democracy rests in its attempt to replace historically evolved spontaneous order, borne by tradition, settled into custom, with rational master designs for society. This is the error that misunderstands the nature of human beings, history, change, and social cooperation, not to mention justice and freedom.63 Neoliberalism fights this misapprehension by affirming order rooted in tradition and freedom; it wages this fight through a far-reaching deregulatory ethos and practice by demonizing state justice schemes, by empowering tradition against such schemes, and by opposing the very idea of popular sovereignty.
Actually Existing Neoliberalism
Installing markets and morality where society and democracy once were, through the principle of freedom from state regulation—this is the Hayekian dream. This vision was also central to actually existing neoliberalism, especially its rollout in the United States and Britain. It took a different form than that imagined by Hayek and his brethren, and the moral half of the project tended to be ignored or rejected by some ardent advocates of market deregulation and globalization. This may be why economic privatization remains the familiar face of neoliberalism and keeps more veiled the equally important force of privatization constituted by extending the reach of the “personal, protected sphere.” In fact they work together conceptually and practically: dismantling public provision is routinely coupled with extended private sphere norms to delegitimize the concept of social welfare provision and the project of democratizing the social powers of class, race, gender, and sexuality. As everyday life is marketized from one direction and “familialized” from the other by neoliberal rationality, these twin processes challenge principles of equality, secularism, pluralism, and inclusion, along with democratic determination of a common good.
In her study of neoliberalism’s rollout in the United States, Melinda Cooper provides examples of this process in welfare reform, education financing, “fatherhood initiatives,” and “faith-based” welfare.64 Other examples include:
■ School voucher systems and charter schools, in place of public control over primary and secondary education, permit parents to choose “value-aligned” schools for their children and to avoid student bodies and curriculums they abhor.65 As vouchers indemnify family “choice” against a secular, pluralistic public, they simultaneously challenge the promise of equal opportunity embedded in public education, its limited, but important counterweight to the otherwise straightforward reproduction of (racialized) class. They thus embody both the antidemocratic familialization and economic privatization of one of the most crucial domains of modern public life.
■ Court decisions and proliferating state versions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act enable religious claims to displace democratically enacted principles of equality, inclusion, and nondiscrimination. More than “losers’ revenge” on issues such as abortion and marriage equality, these instruments empower Christian family values to trump legally secured reproductive autonomy for women, along with marriage equality and protections for persons of nonnormative gender.66 The expanded reach of religious liberty permits the rebuff of equality and restoration of supremacies and abjections iterated by traditional morality.
■ Repealing the 1954 Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches and nonprofits from direct or indirect participation in political campaigns is one of Trump’s biggest promises to his evangelical base.67 The repeal would amplify the already considerable political power of the largest and wealthiest churches, giving them political voice both from the pulpit and in the statehouse.68 The repeal would be to Christianity in politics what the Citizens United Supreme Court decision was to corporations in politics, with the additional boon of allowing megachurch pastors to incorporate voting directives into their sermons.
The most powerful tool for replacing democratic rule with deregulated markets and traditional morality is liberty disembedded from society and from democracy, traced in chapters 1 and 2. Liberty claims have been core to the religious right-wing strategy to re-Christianize the public sphere since the early 1990s, but have been ramped up and popularized in the past decade. The kinds of things now framed as protections of individual liberty include: the right of adoption agencies and T-shirt print makers to discriminate against LGBT people, the right of “pregnancy crisis centers” to lie about abortion and contraception, the right of legislatures to hold Christian prayer sessions, the right of Christian teachers and students to evangelize in classrooms, and the right of a college professor to refer to students by the pronoun of his choice, rather than theirs.
Challenging equality and antidiscrimination law as protections of individual liberty is the strategy brilliantly honed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the most powerful arm of evangelical Christianity in the United States. (ADF International takes the cause to other lands and other courts, national and transnational).69 The alliance is dedicated to challenging limitations faced by Christians to exercise their faith expansively and publicly. This work includes contesting prohibitions on displays of crucifixes or required sex education in public schools; fighting legal abortion; and above all, pushing back against protections for what conservatives call “SOGI laws”—protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.70 Described by its founder as the “Christian legal army” and supported by private contributions of more than $50 million annually, the ADF has trained thousands of lawyers and legislators, judges, prosecutors, professors, and attorneys general. It is the fount of most recent state and federal religious freedom legislation, and its attorneys appear frequently in front of the Supreme Court and the European Court for Human Rights.71
Both the legal and popular rhetoric of the ADF decries an overreaching state whose mandates threaten the liberties of Christians in public and commercial life. Thus, while domestic ADF cases invoke religious liberty or free speech in generic fashion, the ADF is no ACLU: freedom is but the mantle under which it strives to empower Christianity socially and politically. While insisting that Christian beliefs and voices are oppressed by LGBT and reproductive rights agendas, the ADF also filed a brief on behalf of Trump’s second Muslim ban, whose judicial critics they accuse of “inappropriately combing through a government actor’s tweets.”72 Moreover, ADF efforts to dismantle abortion law and transgender protections, battle same-sex marriage, and permit Christian prayer and iconography in schools and town halls make clear that more is at stake than allowing Christian bakers, pharmacists, teachers, and antiabortion activists to follow their conscience.73 The ADF’s long game is to (re)Christianize the culture through challenges to political and legal apparatuses bound to secularism, egalitarianism, and inclusion. As one ADF webpage declares: “Your faith isn’t private, and it’s more than where you worship on Sundays. It’s who you are, and it influences the way you live every day of the week. But today, efforts are being made to remove religion’s moral influence on society by censoring it from the public square. People of faith are increasingly threatened, punished, and silenced for simply living according to their beliefs.”74
Another page on the website depicts an aggressive secular war on the Christian fundamentals underpinning the United States legal system:
The Founding Fathers recognized that all people have inalienable rights that flow from the Creator. These rights are grounded in the unique, Judeo-Christian concept of man’s inherent dignity as a creature made in God’s image, endowed with reason, free will, and an eternal soul.… As secular forces chip away at our nation’s Judeo-Christian roots, religious freedom is increasingly threatened. Alliance Defending Freedom … opposes all attempts to compel people to compromise their beliefs or retreat from civil and political life as the price for following their faith.75
The ADF’s Blackstone Legal Fellowship Program, through which it develops new cadres of attorneys from law schools, also describes inculcating fellows in a jurisprudence aimed at Christianizing the culture, not simply protecting the rights of individuals. The ADF describes the program as offering “the highest level training in Christian worldview and constitutional law to help break the stranglehold the ACLU and its allies have on our nation’s law schools and judicial system.”76 Blackstone Fellows must hew to the ADF’s “Statement of Faith and Guiding Principles,” which includes affirmation of the Christian God as the only god and rejection of transgender, same-sex marriage and abortion rights.77 According to one testimonial from a fellow, the program employs “Christ’s Truth” to “recover the rule of law in America.”78
The commitments and strategies of the Alliance Defending Freedom have been warmly embraced by the Trump administration. The president himself appears frequently with ADF leaders, and Vice President Pence and several past and present cabinet members enjoy close ties with the organization. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is a major donor. ADF influence is everywhere in the administration’s judicial appointees and is the strongest hand in developing its Christian-friendly legislation. In July 2018, then-attorney general Jeff Sessions announced his launch of a “religious liberty task force” with these words:
A dangerous movement, undetected by many, is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom.… This is no little matter. It must be confronted and defeated.… We have gotten to the point where courts have held that morality cannot be a basis for law; where ministers are fearful to affirm, as they understand it, holy writ from the pulpit; and where one group can actively target religious groups by labeling them a “hate group” on the basis of their sincerely held religious beliefs.79
The Supreme Court majority also frequently affirms ADF legal formulations, especially its use of the First Amendment as a means of expanding the power of traditional morality to repel democratic law. Above all, as we will see in chapter 4, it has affirmed the ADF’s strategic conversion of religious liberty from a private right to a public liberty, shaping it as a public force and also permitting its extension to businesses (large and small) and municipalities.
Rights are the flying wedge with which democratic commitments to equality, civility, and inclusion are challenged in neoliberal legal battles. But the forces behind them, staging incursions against society and democracy, are the values and claims of the market, combined with those of heteropatriarchal Christian familialism.
This use of civil liberties consecrates a specific mode of twinning individual freedom with traditional morality, and it is not exactly what Hayek or the ordoliberals had in mind. Indeed, it is noteworthy that the Mont Pelerin Society “Statement of Aims” decries a society in which “private rights are … allowed to become a basis of predatory power.” Criticism of the way rights and “rights talk” is displacing democratic deliberation styled from “household table talk … born of shared family and, often ethnic history” was also the subject of an important 1993 book by Mary Ann Glendon, today a prominent ADF board member who appears to have abandoned her earlier critique, aimed as it once was, mainly at the Left.80
As rights become a crucial vehicle for expanding conservative Christian morality into the public sphere, this morality is disembedded from tradition and therefore detached from both the organic roots and the spontaneous effects that Hayek ascribed to tradition. Instead of evolved and adapted codes of conduct with which an entire people “voluntarily conforms,” morality—and not only rights themselves—becomes politicized and weaponized. Such politicization alters the meaning of “morality” and the mode of governing conduct and at the same time increases their vulnerability to the contractualism that at once signifies and abets their nihilistic deterioration. We will pursue this further in chapter 5.
Refiguring the Nation as Family and Private Firm
Neoliberal economic privatization is deeply subversive of democracy. It generates and legitimates inequality, exclusion, private ownership of the commons, plutocracy, and a profoundly dimmed democratic imaginary.81 The other order of privatization we have been considering, privatization by familialization and Christianization achieved by extending the “personal, protected sphere,” subverts democracy with antidemocratic moral values, rather than antidemocratic capital values.82 Thatcher’s infamous dictum that “there is no such thing as society” concludes, after all: “only individuals and their families.”
Enacting this aspect of the proclamation wages familial, rather than market warfare on democratic principles and institutions. It generates exclusion, patriarchalism, tradition, nepotism, and Christianity as legitimate challenges to inclusion, autonomy, equal rights, limits on conflicts of interest, and secularism. While both kinds of privatization occur under the neoliberal rubric of expanding freedom against state dictates of social justice or market distributions, the second is especially important in generating the psychic and political formation of a liberal authoritarian political culture today. The ordinates of religion and family—hierarchy, exclusion, homogeneity, faith, loyalty, and authority—acquire legitimacy as public values and shape public culture as they join markets in displacing democracy. When this twin model of privatization extends to the nation itself, the nation is alternately rendered as a competitive business needing to make better deals and as an inadequately secured home, besieged by ill-willed or nonbelonging outsiders. Right-wing nationalism oscillates between the two. Consider Trump’s campaign speeches about America’s history of bad international deals on everything from trade to NATO, Iran to climate accords, and his depiction of the United States as savaged by its unsecured borders and his promise to build a southern border wall featuring a “great big beautiful door” through which legal entrants may visit or join “our family.”83 He would later analogize his proposed border wall to the “walls, fences, and gates” that wealthy politicians build around their homes, “not because they hate the people on the outside, but because they love the people on the inside.”84 Far from public and democratic, the nation is figured as privately owned and familial, and the president is the paterfamilias. Or consider Marine Le Pen’s 2017 “France for the French” campaign, in which she also perfectly combined economic and familial languages to depict the nation: “We are the owners of our country,” she declared at rallies in eastern France, and “we must have the keys to open the house of France, to open it halfway,” or “to close the door.” “It is our house,” the crowds chanted back.85 Or as one of her supporters explained, “She’s not against immigrants, only securing justice.… It’s like when the refrigerator is full we give to our neighbors, but when the refrigerator is empty we give to our children. The refrigerator of France is empty.” And another self-professed “moderate” Le Pen supporter, a mayor of a small town, asked of “the well-dressed young immigrant men” in his town: “what are they doing chez moi [in my house]?”86
When the nation is privatized and familialized in this way, it becomes legitimately illiberal toward aversive insiders and invading outsiders; thus does neoliberalism plant seeds of a nationalism that it formally abjures. Statism, policing, and authoritarianism also ramify, since walling and securitization of every kind is authorized and required by this privatization. Walls and gates of homes, of course, are the strongest visual signifiers demarcating the private from the public, the protected from the open, the familiar from the strange, the owned from the common. At the same time, as the domain of the private expands, it requires ever more state protection through law, public and private security forces, border patrols, police, and the military. In this way, the securitarian state grows along with privatization and is legitimated by it. Similarly, nationalist calls to wall out refugees and expel immigrants draw upon the figure of the nation as an endangered household where principles of democratic justice and human rights have no bearing. Expanding the “personal protected sphere” in the name of freedom, then, not only secures inegalitarian powers of class, gender, sexuality, and race; it generates an imago and ethos of the nation that rejects a public, pluralistic, secular democratic order for a private, homogenous, familial one.87 The former features commitments to modest openness, diversity, social and political equality, and the rule of law. The latter, especially in its traditional form, is walled, homogenous, unified, hierarchical, and authoritarian.
As we have seen, however, the play of markets and morality in actually existing neoliberalism is quite different from what Hayek imagined. States dominated by finance and other powerful industries seeking legislation and state action in their interests depart radically from the neoliberal aim of political institutions insulated from interests while promoting competition and stabilizing (or in the case of the ordoliberals, steering) capitalism. Traditional values, rather than spontaneously integrating social life and ordering conduct, are politicized, tacticalized, and commercialized. Morality in this form short-circuits tradition and is further unmoored from the natural authority Hayek imagined for it by its advancement through libertarian instruments and discourses.88 Instead of organically reproducing civilization, securing social bonds, and governing conduct, traditional values become battle cries against godless elites, egalitarians, secularists, and Muslims. As badges worn by political, religious, and corporate leaders routinely caught in behaviors violating them, traditional values are reduced to a corporate and political brand, at which point their nihilistic ablation is nearly complete.
Deracinated from tradition, traditional values are depleted of their integrative function. Politicized as “freedoms,” they lose what Hayek affirmed as their noncoercive constraint on freedom, apart from limiting practices they oppose. Weaponized as individual and corporate prerogatives against equality and antidiscrimination laws, they become a means to attack and disrupt rather than foster social bonds and integration. The spontaneous order and common acceptance of rules of conduct through which Hayek affirmed tradition as free has no bearing on the fight for traditional values against democratic ones. Rather, winning strategies to repel policies of egalitarianism, diversity, and pluralism make recourse to individual and corporate freedoms secured through statism, rather than spontaneous order or commonly accepted norms. With their aggrieved melancholy for a phantasmatic past and aggressive supremacism, they rebel against rather than reproduce the order.
One twist away from Hayekian governmentality today, then, comes from (de)formation by battle and its framing by rights discourse and value pluralism. Hayek’s thought was intrinsically vulnerable in this regard. His formula for transitioning from social democracy to a neoliberal order featured political authoritarianism, which could hardly rebuild the bedrock of tradition—organicism, evolution, spontaneity, freedom—even if it touted traditional principles. Indeed, from Weber we know that instrumental rationality cannot mix with traditional rationality without destroying the latter—that is the meaning of the process Weber calls “rationalization.”89 From Dostoyevsky, we know faith cannot become politicized without inverting into its opposite—dictate and violence.90 Put another way, bringing tradition “back” is oxymoronic. Even in Hayek’s understanding, what remains of “tradition” after social democracy has had its way with it for half a century? How can an intensely politicized evangelical church, rife with contractualist, capitalist, and vengeful ambitions, recoup what Hayek valued for its organic, evolved, tacitly accepted mode of binding communities and conduct? In an important way, then, Hayek’s utopia crashes on the shoals of the political and the social it seeks to vanquish both theoretically and practically. It could not “govern” without deformation by the powers it sought to fight and was also required to wield. William Callison calls this a “political deficit” in neoliberal rationality.91
A second twist away from Hayek in contemporary mobilizations of traditional morality pertains to its uptake today by those for whom freedom is not a central principle or desire, those who would be sanguine about state and church authority used to compel obedience and secure order. Hayek sought to reconcile freedom with political and familial authority, not to sacrifice the former to the latter. His own distance-taking from conservatism is relevant here. Conservatives, he argues in “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” care for freedom only selectively and are willing investors in state power when it is deployed for things they favor: “The conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes.”92 Conservatives thus share with the Left two things Hayek regards as consummately dangerous: confidence that they know the good for society and willingness to employ political power to impose it. This kind of conservatism, especially fierce on the religious Right today, builds not just the authority of the state endorsed by neoliberals, but its expansion and extended reach, which they dreaded.
There is a third twist away from Hayek’s formulation of traditional morality in actually existing neoliberalism. This pertains to morality’s imbrication with the reactive energies of white male woundedness and displacements, its function as a retort to those it holds responsible for its wounds. As cosmopolitan urbanites champion feminism, nonnormative sexualities, nontraditional families, secularism, the arts, and education, aggrieved white midlanders reflexively roar against abortion, same-sex marriage, Islam, “attacks on whites,” godlessness, and intellectualism. This is not “tradition” or even morality speaking, but hatred of a world perceived to be wishing and washing theirs away.
Hayek says that tradition provides “order without commands” in the form of authority, hierarchy, and rules of conduct.93 This abstraction, made concrete, is a reminder that tradition carries the ordinances and stratifications generated by relations of property, kinship, caste, race, gender, sexuality, and age. Whatever else it provides and promulgates, the “traditional” family secures secure male supremacy, heteronormativity, and ethnic-racial loyalties. In the United States, Southern “tradition” carries the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, even as it may also carry modes of decorum and hospitality. Small-town “traditions” are generally built around ethnic, racial, and religious homogeneity, if not explicit exclusions.94 When traditional values campaigns are fueled by rancor about endangerment or loss, these features tend to become boldfaced and politicized, linking with fealty to nation and civilization.95 This is most evident at the extremes: Alt-Right white nationalist groups such as the Proud Boys and Identity Evropa explicitly mobilize Christian family values and the subordination of women for the war against “white genocide” (race mixing that dilutes the white race). They also express pride in what they identify as the white supremacism of America’s slave-holding Founding Fathers.
And yet, the cocktail of disinhibited because disembedded freedom and politicized tradition abets a nihilism that tradition is supposed to inoculate against. Hayek’s formulation, after all, was freedom restrained by tradition, not unleashed as an attack dog on order. Perhaps no one better exemplified the deformation of the neoliberal architecture of tradition, markets, and morals than right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopolous. Soaring briefly to commercial success by subjecting every subordinate social group and progressive cause to vicious supremacist taunts, he also fashioned a flamboyant queer persona of bacchanalian public disruptiveness and unqualified freedom to say anything about anyone anywhere. Claiming that such freedom is all he cares about, if he cares about anything, and inviting his followers to be equally irreverent and irresponsible, this composite perfectly expressed the raw will to power revealed in traditional values unbound from tradition and dropped in the acid wash of a nihilism that dissolves social bonds and meanings.
This brings us squarely to the problem of nihilism, fatalism and ressentiment, the subject of chapter 5. First, however, we need to examine more closely how the language of markets and morals has been fashioned into an antidemocratic jurisprudence by the U.S. Supreme Court.