The viral magnifying glass enlarges the characteristics of our contradictions and of our limitations. It is a reality principle that collides with the pleasure principle. Death is its companion.

–Jean-Luc Nancy

We must live with the awareness that conflicts between life and freedom may occur…even if we uphold both universal principles, we cannot observe both of them unconditionally in many highly sensitive situations.

–Agnes Heller, Beyond Justice

On February 27th, days after authorities in Lombardy and Veneto invoked Italy’s first quarantine measures in an effort to stem the tide of the COVID-19 pandemic, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben published a brief essay entitled L’invenzione di un’epidemia (The Invention of an Epidemic) wherein he asserted that “there is no SARS-CoV2 epidemic in Italy.” Needless to say, that essay didn’t age well. Less than a month later the Italian healthcare system was overwhelmed with the sick and dying, and Italy overtook China as this “fake” pandemic’s epicenter. On March 17th, having received a good deal of pushback for proffering pandemic skepticism, Agamben published a set of Clarifications.

There is something very peculiar going on in Agamben’s Clarifications that bears further attention. It concerns our perennially complicated and uneasy social and political struggle to respect both the value of life and the value of freedom. In most cases, mind you, this isn’t a problem, since both freedom and life are respected as important social values. However, certain concrete situations arise that place these values in conflict. Dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic presents us with just such a situation.

In taking a dissenting position on Italy’s lock down measures (which were justified in the interest of saving lives) we might expect Giorgio Agamben to champion the value of freedom over the value of life. He doesn’t. Instead he does something odd. He points to Italy’s lockdown measures as proof that freedom no longer exists as a value in Italian society. Agamben writes:

“The first thing that the wave of panic that has paralyzed the country obviously shows is that our society no longer believes in anything but bare life. It is obvious that Italians are disposed to sacrifice practically everything — the normal conditions of life, social relationships, work, even friendships, affections, and religious and political convictions — to the danger of getting sick. […] what is a society that has no value other than survival?”

As we see, Agamben doesn’t express freedom’s ‘social extinction’ explicitly. His is an argument about value attrition, the claim that social values have dwindled to a single value: bare life. In effect Agamben claims that, at least in Italy, conflicts between the values of freedom of life are no longer possible. Italy is now a land of slavish, cowering survivalists.

What is peculiar about this ‘resolution’ is that Agamben is clearly not ‘pro-bare life’. His pronouncement is a lament. Given that he is a member of Italian society himself, we might even characterize it as an ironic lament.

What I find unbearable about Agamben’s assessment — particularly as it comes from a political philosopher of the Left — is its mournful conservatism. I mean conservative here, not in the ideological sense, but in the sense of voicing a politics of resignation. There’s no proposed resolution to what he characterizes as an almost obsequious obsession with bare survival, no call to action, no possible path to emancipation. Quite to the contrary actually. Agamben’s Corrections reads as a surrender to an increasingly dystopian status quo ante. With a tone of disgust, Giorgio Agamben ‘washes his hands’ of the whole affair. “We in fact live in a society that has sacrificed freedom to so-called “reasons of security”,” Agamben writes, “and has therefore condemned itself to live in a perennial state of fear and insecurity.”

Regarding the conflict between the values of freedom and life that the COVID-19 pandemic provokes, I want to add that there is an inverse ‘normatively totalizing resolution’ to the one articulated by Giorgio Agamben. One that is at least as unsettling and unsatisfactory. It’s not an exact antipode. That is to say, it doesn’t deny the very existence of life as a social value. Instead it insists that freedom is the ultimate value, to which all other values (including that of human life) are subordinate. Where Agamben’s lamentable resolution is slavish, this one is aspirationally homicidal.

Examples of this position abound among certain segments of the American Right for whom pandemic precautions have been cynically astroturfed into an election year partisan political issue. On April 30th, for example, hundreds of protesters armed with rifles seized the Michigan state house demanding that state legislators put an end to pandemic lock down measures. Few of them wore masks, and the crush of bodies clearly violated any semblance of social distancing. This is antithetical to Giorgio Agamben’s depiction of Italian society willing to sacrifice “nearly everything” to “the danger of getting sick.” Explaining his motivation, one protester made it perfectly clear: “In America, we should be free. Don’t let them try to protect us from ourselves.”

To be sure, the example above is not indicative of the attitude of American society as a whole. Plenty of other Americans support pandemic protection measures expressly in the interest of saving lives. We must also bear in mind that there are plenty of laid-off and furloughed working class Americans who oppose pandemic lockdown measures, not in the interest of freedom, but in the interest of life. 40 years of neoliberal austerity and historically-unprecedented levels of wealth inequality have transformed the United States into an economically brutal place with a nearly non-existent social safety net. For many poor and working class Americans, being deprived of the ability to work is, like the pandemic itself, a threat to life. It can result in losing one’s home, losing one’s access to healthcare, and quickly descending into poverty and food insecurity.

These caveats notwithstanding, there is, as author Anand Giridharadas has noted, “a primordial American tradition going back to the founders of being freedom-obsessed.” This freedom obsession makes we Americans “so afraid of the government coming for us that we’re blind to other types of threats.” As if to illustrate Giridharadas’ point, it’s worth noting that his comments caused conservative American media to lose its collection of atomized individual minds.

Some Americans take the Revolutionary war slogans Live free or Die! and Give me liberty or give me death! so literally that they preclude any possibility of compromise between life and freedom. Social media is replete with videos of the most appallingly antisocial examples: belligerent patriots who not only refuse business owners’ requirement that customers wear masks, but in some instances intentionally cough in the faces of low-wage service industry workers or spit on them.

While freedom is valorized in these examples, it’s important to note that freedom is understood very narrowly as negative freedom (aka liberal freedom), which amounts to the right of the individual to be unmolested (especially by the government). No one can force me to wear a mask or stay in my home. No one can stop me from getting my hair cut. No one can legitimately force me — a free individual — to do, or to abstain from doing, anything.

Liberal freedom has an economic expression as well, captured well by the French phrase laissez-faire (leave alone, or literally, “let do”). No one can legitimately regulate the way I (or a corporation) conduct business in the market. The market must remain free, even if it means your grandmother has to die from a virus. Even if it means immolating your children’s future on the bonfire of impending climate disaster. These are, after all, matters of mere life.

Here we reach a point of conservative common ground between Agamben’s resolution and that of certain American political conservatives. Much like Agamben’s capitulation to the value of bare life, the conservative valorization of negative (liberal) freedom serves as a counterweight to intentional political interventions into the status quo.

Frankly, I’m really not interested in normative stances that serve to protect our highly dysfunctional late capitalist way of life from a viral pandemic. Quite to the contrary, I’m interested in the opportunities that the pandemic’s radical disruption of ‘business as usual’ might afford us for rethinking and ultimately changing our world for the better.

To this end, what strikes me about the two ultimately conservative positions I’ve highlighted above is the extent to which each is captured by the spell of what critic Mark Fisher describes as capitalist realism. The term capitalist realism expresses the idea that late capitalist ideology has been reified. That is to say, it’s principles and values are no longer understood as a set of values you can take or leave, but instead are understood as fact, as part of nature, and as such, implacable and irresistible. This understanding is famously captured by a demoralizing slogan that Margaret Thatcher often repeated whenever anyone called into question her commitment to neoliberal economics: “There is no alternative” (TINA).

What’s fascinating about the COVID-19 pandemic is that it’s revealed to us that there are alternatives. It did so, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek noted back in March, by confronting us “with something we considered impossible.” It stopped the world. Or as the economist Yanis Varoufakis recently put it, the pandemic “pressed the pause button on capitalism”. According to prevailing cultural hegemony (capitalist realism), this isn’t supposed to be possible (TINA). For a moment at least, the capitalist realist spell is, if not broken, at least weakened.

In the spirit of “striking while the iron is hot” I want to explore the window of opportunity that this pandemic rupture of capitalist realism affords. However, to really “crack this open,” so to speak, it’ll be worthwhile to examine the normative flaws (yes, we’ll be doing actual normative philosophy) in the two conservative takes on the value of freedom and life I highlighted above. Doing so will take us some way towards revealing what is missing from the political world (or what remains of it) that capitalist realism built.

For this reason I’ll be splitting this exploration into two pieces. Taking my cue from philosopher Agnes Heller, in this first piece, I’ll address the complicated dialectic of freedom and life that confronts us in concrete situations like that posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. In a second piece we’ll move on to exploring the opportunities that the pandemic disruption of capitalist realism afford us.

Life and Freedom are Co-Ultimate Universal Values

In engaging our public discourse regarding what to do about the COVID-19 pandemic, it has never occurred to me to become an uncompromising partisan on either side of the ensuing dialectic of freedom and life. I’ve been inoculated from doing so by Agnes Heller. In her remarkable book Beyond Justice, Heller compellingly argues that in modernity there are two co-ultimate universal values “in which all principles or maxims are rooted:” freedom and life.

To say that freedom and life are both ultimate values means that contestation and validation of all other norms, values, principles, and laws ultimately make appeal to one or both of these two. To say they are co-ultimate values means that any “higher-order consensus” resulting from our social and political discourse requires that both values be recognized without subordinating one to the other.

If the idea of contesting norms in public discourse seems philosophically esoteric in some sense, it’s not. Heller notes that at least in democratic societies where open dialogue is permitted, arguments about norms, rules, and principles are “an everyday occurrence.” We don’t always make comprehensive appeals to the ultimate values that undergird our normative arguments. Demonstrating, for example, how one contested norm contradicts another mutually accepted norm often suffices. However, as Heller reminds us, “one can have recourse to such ultimate values if one chooses to argue in full.”

We also continuously validate norms and values by our actions because values motivate actions. In this sense values remain concrete. No one can plausibly point to a culture where people protest in public, for example, and claim that that culture does not value freedom. In this way, Heller insists, “people act such that these cultural values should exist, should flourish, or occasionally be ‘immortal’.” She cites as examples, “the nation (my nation), the family, freedom of speech, progress, health, humankind, independence, welfare and culture.” There are, of course, many more. The co-ultimate values of freedom and life don’t impose any kind of “consensual hierarchy” on these values, which is part of the reason why we constantly contest them. The way these contests get resolved can vary by culture and are constantly evolving.

What is so powerful about Heller’s demonstration that freedom and life are co-ultimate universal values in modernity is just how straightforward it is. The claim can be verified, she notes, “via all modern versions of the ethico-political concept of justice.” When philosophers ponder the “just society,” dating at least back to Hobbes, life and freedom are “presupposed, and in this sense they are axiomatic.” In each case ensuring the life and liberty of citizens is a central feature of what it means to be a just society.

There is more evidence still. All theories of natural law (and the social contract theories premised upon them) declare that we are born free and have a right to life.

Need written proof? The claim can also be verified by reference to various declarations of human rights. Heller mentions “The American Declaration of Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.” I would add to this the UN Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948. Article 3 states: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”

n short then, her argument is historical and empirical, and in this sense, demonstrable. This is entirely appropriate given that we’re dealing with a question, not about the nature of freedom or human life, but of what we who are living in the world actually value. It’s a properly historically-contextualized question.

Even the universality of the values of freedom and life coalescing into a higher-order consensus, Heller argues, is “understood as a historical product.” As such, their universal validity is not a priori, but a “factual universality”. At first blush this may appear implausible given conditions of value pluralism within and across a diversity of cultures. Heller acknowledges that as part of the modern human condition “we live in a pluralistic moral universe”. Nevertheless, when Heller says the values of freedom and life are “factually universal,” she explicitly means “transculturally universal.” This universality is illustrated by the fact that “[t]here is no culture today in which unfreedom could be publicly chosen as a value.” Indeed, “not even the worst kind of tyrant can now publicly confess that he prefers unfreedom to freedom.” This doesn’t mean, of course, that an authoritarian society, for example, will not impose severe limitations on people’s actual freedoms. It does mean, however, that even authoritarian governments don’t ‘sell” their authoritarianism as ‘unfreedom’ for the simple reason that freedom is an important culturally recognized value.

This last point is noteworthy in the context of Giorgio Agamben citing the fact that Italians tolerated the Italian government’s use of state-power to enforce pandemic lockdown measures as “proof” that Italian society has finally forsaken freedom as a value. Agamben’s claim was immediately contested publicly, including by a number of fellow Italian intellectuals who, as members of the very society that reputedly eschews the value of freedom, performatively refute Agamben’s thesis.

There remains a question as to how we know that freedom and life are the only ultimate universal human values. Why aren’t there three or five? What about other contenders, like justice or equality? Addressing this question begins to drag us off topic, so rather than recount Heller’s argument here I refer you to Beyond Justice, which addresses this question in detail.

Freedom and Life in Conflict

Having walked through Heller’s arguments, it’ll now be easy enough to successfully contest both Giorgio Agamben’s claim that Italian society has abandoned the value of freedom in favor of bare life, and the American conservative claim that liberal freedom is the sole ultimate value in America, to which the value of life must be subordinate.

Here is a link to a video of protesters gathered in Rome on June 7th (during a pandemic). The protesters are chanting, in English, the phrase “I can’t breathe.” One of the protest organizers, Denise Fuja Berhane, explained in an interview that the purpose of the event was “to protest the murder of George Floyd and the systemic racism that keeps African Americans from living fully free lives in America.” With this protest and this comment Girogio Agamben’s claim that Italian society believes in nothing but bare life is refuted. We could cite more examples, but this is sufficient.

As for American conservatives who storm state houses with rifles to end the tyranny of pandemic lock-down measures, or who refuse to wear protective masks in public on the grounds that their negative (liberal) freedom is more important than human life? It would suffice to demonstrate that these people lack the conviction of their own claim. To do so, we might simply ask them, in regard to abortion rights, if they support a woman’s right to choose. Most of them, being American conservatives, will predictably flip normative positions without a second thought. Despite the fact that the ability of women to control their own reproductive destinies is essential to any hope for their free and equal participation in American social, economic, and political life, most American conservatives disallow this freedom ultimately, on the grounds that the value of life is more important. Indeed, conservatives even have a name for this stance, and it’s not “pro-freedom”. It’s “pro-life”. If conservatives remain unaware of this contradiction, it’s in large part due to a failure to engage the dialectic of freedom and life seriously enough to recognize, as Agnes Heller would have predicted, that they actually value both freedom and life.

American political culture is obsessed with ferreting out and condemning hypocrisy, and this appears to be an almost paradigmatic example. We should note though that this ‘hypocrisy’ cuts both ways. There are ample instances in which liberal and leftist Americans champion freedom over life in one concrete situation, and life over freedom in another. There are more than enough instances, in fact, to hang us all as ‘hypocrites’. A more sympathetic reading is that these are instances of people grappling, sometimes well and sometimes poorly, with the perplexity and confusion we all experience in dealing with freedom and life in conflict.

To be clear, we can easily conceive of life and freedom as compatible values without contradiction. Nevertheless, there are concrete situations (like the COVID-19 pandemic) that place these co-ultimate values in conflict. What this amounts to, to quote Agnes Heller, is that in the particular concrete situation “our actions cannot be guided by both principles, or at least not by both equally.” We’re then forced by circumstance to give priority of one value over the other. This is a choice that, according to our own normative commitments, ought not be made. This is why they make us uncomfortable, and frankly a little crazy. Such is the nature of the dialectic of freedom and life. At best we will negotiate some kind of a compromise. However, even this never settles the issue. Genuine conflicts between the value of life and value of freedom are irreconcilable.

There are innumerable concrete situations where such conflicts arise. In fact, Agnes Heller hypothesizes that “all value discussions which remain unsettled in modernity” result from “conflicts between the values of freedom and life.” The reason I selected the abortion issue as an example at the beginning of this section is because it’s a textbook illustration of just such a conflict. Pacifism is another, as is taxation, as are (more recently given the American epidemic of suicides and mass shootings) Second Amendment rights in the United States. Now, unfortunately, we must add the COVID-19 pandemic to the list.

The Normative Distortions of Capitalist Realism

If you were hoping I had a secret recipe for resolving conflicts between the values of life and freedom, let me disappoint you now. I don’t. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that all of us are all over the place when it comes to these concrete conflicts, sometimes prioritizing life and sometimes prioritizing freedom, and typically unable to offer a fully coherent account of our various choices. That said, seriously engaging the dialectic of freedom and life does matter.

Here, as I suggested at the beginning of this piece, serious engagement in the dialectic is further complicated by the normatively-distorting effects of capitalist realism. Perhaps the best way to make this clear is by examining the most ominous and consequential instance of a concrete conflict between the values of freedom and life: the climate crisis.

When the Sunrise Movement, Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Ed Markey, and others lobbied for a Green New Deal to address the impending threat of climate change, a typical response from mainstream Democrats, Republicans, and corporate media outlets alike was “how are you going to pay for that?” Embedded in this response is the perverse thought that saving the human species from extinction might simply be too expensive. If this response sounds homicidal, that’s because it is. I’m sure, however, that if you polled the people who express this view, they would be unlikely to characterize themselves as nihilists harboring a species-level death-wish.

This idea that the economy can ill-afford to support the continuation of human life on earth is a perfect expression of what Mark Fisher describes as capitalist realism. It reflects the claim, which Fisher attributes (via Slavoj Žižek) to Fredric Jameson, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. This claim articulates the reification of market values (including liberal freedom in the form of an unchecked market) into facts, into unalterable nature itself. “There is no alternative” (TINA).

Regarding the climate crisis, then, capitalist realism proposes an ultimate resolution to all conflicts between the values of freedom and life: market freedom, recast as necessity (TINA), finally vanquishes life. Conflict resolved. Game over.

This is not what taking the dialectic of freedom and life seriously looks like.

Our handling of the COVID-19 pandemic is all the more concerning in this context inasmuch as it’s effectively a ‘dress rehearsal’ for how we address our future political interventions (or lack thereof) into the climate crisis. It’s why we should all be concerned with breaking the spell of capitalist realism.

The Democratic Politics of Freedom and Life

It’s understandable for people to want to be settled in their judgments, to see tensions eased, and to see socially and politically contentious matters resolved. What is egregious, however, is the attempt to force a final reconciliation to a normative conflict that affects entire communities (in the case of climate crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic, the entire world) by preemptively dissolving, rather than engaging in, the dialectical tension between the values of freedom and life. This ends up being a political failing in the case of both of the conservative ‘resolutions’ to the COVID-19 pandemic we’ve been exploring. By political failure in this instance, I mean specifically a preemptive refusal to entertain the kind of freedom that democratic politics depends upon. It’s a refusal that is, we shall see, reinforced by capitalist realism. In Giorgio Agamben’s case, it entails surrendering any democratic aspirations (entailed in surrendering all freedom) to a dystopian biopolitical governmentality (a la Michel Foucault). In the case of American conservatives, it entails suppressing democratic politics by aggrandizing negative (liberal) freedom into absolute freedom.

What is missing in each case is positive freedom. Whereas negative or liberal freedom is freedom from any kind of interference or harassment, positive freedom is active freedom. It’s the freedom to do. Among a plurality of persons (e.g., in the world we all live in), positive freedom can take the form of democratic freedom: the freedom of a polity to collectively determine its own destiny.

The very idea of absolute freedom (liberal freedom taken to the extreme) is anathema to democratic politics. In economic terms, absolute freedom takes the form of market fundamentalism — the idea that unregulated free-market capitalism can solve all of our social, political, and economic problems (including, as we saw above, offering a “final solution to the human life problem”). Democratic freedom, which, per Agnes Heller, promises optimum rather than absolute freedom, is directly at odds with market fundamentalism because it proposes that a plurality of persons, a democratic polity, should guide and determine its own destiny rather than the market.

As we’ve seen, absolute freedom (liberal freedom on steroids) also takes a sovereign individual form which is not only anathema to democratic politics, but hostile to politics in general. Agnes Heller describes this form as “the deification of individuals qua individuals.” It’s “the idea of absolute autonomy of the empirical person, the individual unrestricted in action and behavior.” Because we inhabit the world with others, such persons don’t really exist, Heller insists. It’s merely an ideal, and a dangerous one at that because it entails “the renunciation of all human bonds constituted by symmetric reciprocity.”

We see this renunciation clearly in the cases of people refusing to wear masks to protect vulnerable members of their community and, more appallingly, intentionally coughing in the faces of service industry workers simply to make a point about their sovereign individuality. To put Heller’s point crudely, people who valorize the idea of absolute freedom don’t give a shit about anybody but themselves.

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt echoes Heller’s point. “If it were true that sovereignty and freedom are the same,” Arendt writes, “then indeed no man could be free, because sovereignty, the ideal of uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership, is contradictory to the very condition of plurality. No man can be sovereign because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth…”

Under capitalist realism, these two idealized forms of absolute freedom work together to ensure that democratic politics doesn’t happen. Political action — action in the plural expressing positive freedom — is stymied by what Judith Butler characterizes as “responsibilization”. Political problems demanding political solutions are recast as problems for which individuals are responsible, and this leaves the market “unmolested” so it can just do its thing.

We see this happening again and again. From casting an epidemic of police murders of black men as a ‘problem’ caused by “a few bad apples,” to corporate HR departments reducing systemic racism to a psychological problem best addressed by corporate training (see Robin DiAngelo’s recent book White Fragility), to attributing the Great Recession’s economic meltdown to “a few bad actors abusing the system,” responsibility for structural, historically-, legally- and institutionally-sedimented social, economic, and political problems is deflected onto individuals to protect the increasingly dysfunctional market from political intervention.

For our current purposes, what’s important to note in these examples is not simply that responsibilizing individuals protects a dysfunctional economic system (although it does do that). Rather, it’s that it ensures that no intentional collective human action can intervene in crises that impact human beings in the plural — things like climate change and viral pandemics. In short, it aims to eradicate democratic freedom.

I am reminded, in this respect, of an Obama era satire in The Onion entitled Republicans Vote To Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed For Earth. In this piece Rep. Steve King (R-IA) remarks, “The voters sent us to Washington to stand up for individual liberty, not big government […]. We believe that the decisions of how to deal with the massive asteroid are best left to the individual.” While this is satire, this is the actual “solution” to the climate crisis implied by capitalist realism.

Mark Fisher discusses this very matter in Capitalist Realism. “Instead of saying that everyone — i.e., every one — is responsible for climate change, we all have to do our bit,” Fisher writes, “it would be better to say that no-one is, and that’s the problem.” Assigning individual responsibility for problems that can only be effectively tackled collectively ensures that no one takes responsibility. In Fisher’s words, “the model of individual responsibility assumed by most versions of ethics have little purchase on the behavior of Capital or corporations.” I would add that this isn’t necessarily a shortcoming of ethical theory. Rather, it’s simply due to the fact that the climate crisis cannot be effectively dealt with via individual ethics. It’s a social, political, and economic problem — that is, a problem to be addressed by human beings in the plural. What can have purchase on the behavior of Capital or corporations is politics.

In both the case of the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis, then, what’s called for isn’t so much a deeper normative commitment to the value of life as it is a need for a more robust understanding of freedom. This is part of what it means to take the dialectic of freedom and life seriously — and more importantly, to take it seriously in a way that offers hope for actually doing something about these crises.

In his response to Giorgio Agamben’s epidemic denial essay (The Invention of an Epidemic), Italian philosopher Rocco Ronchi expressed this need well:

“The virus rather articulates existence, ours and that of others, as “destiny”. Suddenly we feel we are being dragged by something that is overpowering, which grows in the silence of our organs, ignoring our will. […] Among the virtues of the virus, we must also mention its ability to generate a more sober idea of freedom: the freedom achieved in doing something about what destiny does to us.”

Ronchi summarizes this “sober freedom” with a distinctly anti-capitalist realist prescription: “Politics must have precedence over the economy.”

While I am loath to find anything virtuous about a deadly virus, I would add to the viral “virtues” Ronchi mentions its ability to pierce the seemingly seamless facade of capitalist realism. This will serve as the topic of the forthcoming second part of this piece entitled Shit Just Got Real: Pandemic Interventions in Capitalist Realism.

I’ve been researching the corrosive effects of America’s for-profit election industry on democracy in recent months (see the piece I posted in October entitled The Election Industry versus Democracy). One of the more insightful works I’ve read on the subject is political scientist Adam Sheingate’s 2015 book Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy.

In this book Sheingate details how American electoral politics have been transformed into a multi-billion dollar, for-profit industry. This commercialization was facilitated, he argues, by “[l]ikening the act of voting to a matter of consumer choice.” It’s this conflating of voting and consumption, which at least to my mind sounds horrible for democracy, that I want to explore today.

In my first piece in this series I focused on how the election industry operates from the ‘business side’. A professional class of political consultants broker relationships between wealthy and corporate donors seeking to purchase political influence in the ‘political marketplace’, and the two political parties and their candidates who are insatiably hungry for funding for their now perpetual and obscenely expensive (re)election campaigns. In each campaign cycle, billions of dollars of investment capital are transformed into various campaign ‘products’, which predominantly consist of advertising aimed at the consumer target audience (i.e., you and me).

In this installment we’ll take a peek at the ‘customer-centric’ consumer side of the election industry. How did we, as citizens of a democratic republic, get hoodwinked into signing onto this? Why do we allow ourselves to be complicit in a process that ultimately heaves democracy overboard to transform politics into a commodity market and a profit center? When democratic participation is reduced to something akin to choosing a breakfast cereal, is it still really ‘democracy’ in any politically meaningful sense?

To get us started, I want to begin with a confession (bear with me, it’s directly related to our topic). I bought Adam Sheingate’s book, Building a Business of Politics, on Amazon.com. There is a certain irony in this, which makes me feel embarrassed and a little bit ashamed.

“Alexa: Destroy Democracy”

Why am I embarrassed and ashamed about buying a book about the business of politics on Amazon.com? It’s complicated, but only slightly so. It starts with the recognition that Amazon is a horrible company. It’s horrible, for instance, to working people. Amazon fights efforts at unionizing. It engages in wage theft. Its warehouse workers now frequently strike to protest “inhumane working conditions”. According to journalist James Bloodworth, who went undercover, some Amazon warehouse workers in the UK pee in bottles or forego restroom breaks just so they can keep up with Amazon’s unreasonable fulfillment demands.

Amazon is also horrible for communities. It’s devastated the brick-and-mortar retail industry and the host of jobs that that industry once supported. It free-rides on public infrastructure and extorts taxpayer funding from states and municipalities to subsidize its corporate expansion, despite the fact that the company itself pays no taxes.

Amazon is also horrible for democracy. It invested an unprecedented $1.5 million in Seattle’s city council race in an effort to replace progressive councilmembers with “business-friendly” (i.e., Amazon-friendly) substitutes. It’s founder and chairman, billionaire oligarch Jeff Bezos (the richest man in human history), reportedly recently asked fellow billionaire Michael Bloomberg to run for President, presumably in an effort to promote plutocratic interests in the face of increasingly popular democratic support for prorgessive political reforms.

As an aspiring monopolist that destroys market competition, Amazon is even horrible for capitalism. It’s predatory pricing practices are notorious. Because of its vast wealth Amazon can go head-to-head with nearly any competitor in nearly any industry, selling its products at a loss until it drives the competition into bankruptcy. It can then weaponize this strategy at any time to create a barrier to entry for any prospective future competition. After Amazon becomes a virtual monopoly, it can charge whatever prices it likes.

All of that said, Amazon has outstanding customer service. Holy shit, do they treat customers well! In fact, Amazon sets the standard for what great customer service means. Here is where my relationship with Amazon starts to get complicated.

“Thanks for Voting Amazon #1” reads a headline on Amazon.com from early 2018. The headline continues: “For the ninth consecutive year customers rank Amazon #1 in customer satisfaction.” Nine years! As consumers we love Amazon so, so much!

Amazon’s customer service is so outstanding that on its basis I chose to order Adam Sheingate’s book on Amazon despite knowing all of the horrible shit I just detailed about what Amazon does to workers, to communities, and to democracy. This is the source of my embarrassment and shame. What the hell is wrong with me? Why would I do this? This is already quite political, and we haven’t even begun discussing electoral politics yet.

At the very least my behavior tells me something about myself–about how I am ‘put together’, so to speak, as a human subject living in contemporary American consumer culture.

The Consumer Persona

Like anyone else in America, I am put together as a subject in multivariate ways. I’m a family member. I’m a friend. I’m a member of several communities. I’m a voter. I’m a worker. I’m a citizen of a (putatively) democratic republic. I’m a tax-payer. I’m a moral personality who recognizes certain ethical obligations to other persons. And yes, of course, I‘m a consumer.

I approached my decision to purchase Sheingate’s book on Amazon.com as a consumer. As a consumer I knew that Amazon would be fast, cheap, and super convenient. I didn’t consider all of the issues that are important to me qua democratic citizen, qua voter, qua working person, and so on. I didn’t consider these other things because my consumer persona brackets these other important considerations and focuses solely on my self-interest in the market. From a consumer perspective, these other things don’t matter. From the perspective of a citizen, however, they matter quite a lot. Or at least I think they ought to.

Human relationships in the marketplace are largely transactional and self-interested in nature. When I enter the market the rest of the world falls away and all that exists is me and my rationally self-interested transactional partner. Fuck the rest of all y’all, and your kids, and your student loans, and your medical debt, and your precarity, and the climate crisis, and the latest US-backed regime-change war.

Harsh? No shit! When I adopt my consumer persona I’m kind of a selfish ass. I’m shopping. I’m seeking my own advantage. I’m looking for a deal. This shrewd, self-interested consumer perspective might not be such a big problem if I adopted it only when I entered the marketplace, and (this second part is key) if the marketplace occupied only a very narrow dimension of human life. In this case one might then acknowledge that while I’m kind of a selfish jerk when I’m ‘shopping’, the rest of the time–which is most of the time–I behave like a decent human being who is considerate of the needs and interests of others.

Unfortunately, however, the world of the narrowly inscribed marketplace is no longer a reality. We in the twilight of the neoliberal era are well down the road towards the realization of a certain Hayakian utopia wherein no place exists “outside of the market.” This includes the sphere of politics. To paraphrase a worry Jürgen Habermas used to frequently articulate, we’re on the verge of seeing the market colonize our entire lifeworld.

If human relationships in the marketplace tend to be self-interested and transactional in nature, then when the market captures all spheres of human life, all of my relationships begin to look self-interested and transactional in nature. I begin to look less like Aristotle’s zoon politikon (political animal) who understands that human thriving entails recognizing and pursuing certain goods in common with others in the polis. I begin looking more like homoeconomicus. Atomized. Instrumentalizing. Selfish. What I’m calling the consumer persona is the attitude of homoeconomicus when homoeconomicus goes shopping.

Instead of Citizens, It Produces Consumers

Lest this claim that 40-some years of neoliberalism has converted most of the world into a giant consumer market, let’s be a bit clearer about what we mean. It’s all quite familiar: years of successful market deregulation, the creation of global free-trade agreements that put the market beyond the control of political steering mechanisms, privatization (capture and sale) of the commons, defunding of social programs, and shrinking (financially starving) the government (“down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub” as Grover Norquist once famously put it) through tax cuts and austerity.

The consequences of these decades of neoliberal marketization of all things is captured quite succinctly in a quote that is widely misattributed to Noam Chomsky, and which serves as the epigrammatic quote at the beginning of this essay. The quote is from Robert W. McChesney’s introduction to Noam Chomsky’s 1999 book Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. It bears citing in a bit more detail:

“…to be effective, democracy requires that people feel a connection to their fellow citizens, and that this connection manifests itself through a variety of non-market organizations and institutions. A vibrant political culture needs community groups, libraries, public schools, neighborhood organizations, cooperatives, public meeting places, voluntary associations, and trade unions to provide ways for citizens to meet, communicate, and interact with their fellow citizens. Neoliberal democracy, with its notion of the market über alles, takes dead aim at this sector. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.”

This quote, from 1999, is already antiquated in regard to its mention of shopping malls replacing communities. As we enter the year 2020, we well understand that shopping malls have been rendered obsolete, in turn, by Amazon.com.

The Customer-Centric Revolution

One of the ways Amazon achieved its market dominance was by becoming the driving force behind a customer-centric revolution (“Thanks for voting Amazon #1!). This innovation in which businesses focuses obsessively on providing a great customer experience, has everything to do, not only with creating consumers rather than citizens, but creating consumers of a certain kind. Allow me to explain.

If you own a business today, and you’re not focused on providing a top-notch customer experience, your competitors will surely have you for lunch. It’s not just your direct industry competitors that you’re competing with, either. From a customer experience perspective, you’re also competing with Amazon. And here the competition is daunting. When customers interact with your business–regardless of the industry you’re in–they increasingly expect and demand an Amazon-like customer experience.

As someone who has had his share of absolutely infuriating interactions with phone companies, airlines, and cable television providers over the years, I don’t want disparage Amazon for raising the bar on good customer service as such. When businesses give a shit about how they treat their customers, we all benefit. However, it’s produced a certain ‘side effect’.

If over time neoliberal marketization has produced consumers rather than citizens, then obsessive focus on customer-centric business practice has shaped those consumers into a particular kind of consumer. This consumer has a name. Her name is Karen. And Karen is a monster.

Karen Wants to Speak to the Manager

Surely we’re all acquainted with the meme (circa 2014). ‘Karen’ is a Gen X white woman with a suburban mommy style, two-toned angular bob (see my cover photo). She’s the bane of the existence of anyone who works a service industry job.

The pretext here is that the service worker has made a minor mistake or has otherwise slightly inconvenienced Karen somehow. She forgot to provide the dressing on the side on Karen’s salad order. She forgot that Karen’s latte was supposed to be no foam. She regretfully informed Karen that her half-off coupon had expired, or that the hotel had no more rooms available with a king-sized bed. Something petty like that. Karen then immediately escalates the situation to DEFCON 1 by asking “to speak to the manager.”

This meme is about the site of confrontation between the customer persona (Karen) and the persona of a working person with little clout or social standing. The kind of worker the meme suggests is what British sociologist Guy Standing would describe as a member of the precariat (a portmanteau of precarious and proletariat).

Karen is a villain in this meme because her behavior is stone-cold harsh, and unnecessarily so. The interaction with the service worker is non-reciprocally abusive. Karen is going to get this relatively disempowered precarian in trouble with her manager over a trifle. Karen feels entitled to wield this power, because at least at this moment Karen is the customer–the supremely important focal point of business. This is what customer-centricity does to consumers. It entitles them.

Maybe the hapless precarian who is serving Karen will receive a reprimanded. Maybe she’ll get the sack. Karen doesn’t give a shit because Karen is in full, empowered, self-interested consumer mode.

We should note that this very well may not be Karen’s only ‘mode’. Perhaps Karen works at a job where she is forced to confront unreasonable Karens of her own. Perhaps it’s only when Karen is on the customer-side of the equation that Karen becomes noxious.

I want to know why Karen behaves the way she does because I’m Karen too. While I can’t recall ever asking to “speak to the manager”, thanks to my Amazon experience I now expect my books to be delivered literally overnight. Maybe I don’t get anyone fired. But maybe the price of making this happen is that an Amazon warehouse worker gets his head crushed under a forklift. Maybe a contract delivery driver kills a 9-month-old baby when he crashes his rental-truck packed with Amazon packages into the back of her mother’s jeep in his mad rush to meet the unreasonable delivery deadline that now squares with my expectations. Maybe tax-payers have to shell over a few hundred million dollars for Amazon HQ2.

As my customer experience improves incrementally, the world I live in with you becomes a little bit darker. I don’t know where it ends. I don’t typically consider these human costs when contemplating my purchase. I’m Karen and I want my fucking book right now.

Karen in the Political Marketplace

In the customer-centric era we all love to be the customer. In this respect, we’re all Karen (at least when we’re not serving Karen). Thanks to the customer-centric revolution, whenever we consume we’re treated as though we are important, we’re valuable, we’re VIPs. “How are we doing? Your opinion counts!” nearly every website and every app tells us. And then our feedback is solicited. Will you please write a review? Answer a brief survey? How many stars will you give? How can we do better? We care about what you think.

The seduction of great customer service on the customer persona is powerful–perhaps even addictive. Work life, family life, social life, political life can range from ‘meh’ to awful. But when we consume we’re royalty. We like how that feels, and this feeling serves to reinforce our desire to be the customer all the time.

Unfortunately, however, this is absolutely devastating for democracy. As customers we demand to be served. We expect high quality service from all businesses, including the business of politics. And there’s the rub. The role of a customer being served is a passive, rather than an active role. And the more we view ourselves as passive consumers of government rather than active members of a democratic polity, the worse off the prospects for the future of democracy become.

Consider, for example, the surge of popular democratic activism in the early days of the Trump presidency. Let’s imagine how this might have gone for Karen.

On January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Karen probably donned her pink pussy hat and joined millions of people worldwide in a Women’s March in protest of Trump’s appalling comments about women, immigrants, minorities, and the LGBTQ community. Reputedly, this was the largest single day protest in U.S. history.

Days later, when Trump signed Executive Order 13769 (the Muslim travel ban), maybe Karen joined thousands who showed up at U.S. airports to protest. Karen had been shaken out of a long standing state of political apathy. Karen was getting woke. Suddenly concerned citizens were engaging in grassroots political organizing and Karen was actively participating. Karen was behaving like a citizen, working in solidarity with her fellow citizens. Karen was active rather than passive. Karen was political.

Then in May of 2017 the Mueller investigation began and something shifted in Karen’s political comportment. Since ‘someone from the government’ was finally going to do something about this Trump situation, Karen didn’t have to. Hashtag Muelleriscoming! Hashtag Muellertime!

Reverting to her default customer persona, Karen now simply wanted to speak to the manager. As a consumer of government Karen wanted the manager to know that ever since Trump had become president she’d been having a really bad customer experience. She demanded to know what Robert Mueller was going to do about it. And CNN, and MSNBC, and The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and other mainstream media outlets sold a lot of ads keeping Karen apprised of the situation. And Karen fell back into consumer mode.

Now every two years there is a new set of ad campaigns, and a new set of political products to choose from. Every four years she gets to express her consumer pick for the manager candidate she likes best out of the set the election industry has curated for her. The tough-talking African-American policewoman was promising, but now Karen is torn between the ‘Native American’ law professor and the McKinsey consultant who also happens to be a handsome gay Millennial.

It’s a Cookbook!

n reflecting on the dark side of the customer-centric revolution I am reminded of an episode of the original Twilight Zone TV series called To Serve Man. In this episode a species of 9-foot tall, giant-brained space aliens (the Kanamits) visit earth. One of the Kanamits visits the UN and addresses various world dignitaries. He doesn’t have a stated name, this Kanamit, so let’s call him Bezos. Bezos explains that the Kanamits had heard that the earth suffers many calamities–famine, war, energy shortages. The Kanamits wished to share their advanced technology to resolve them all. No ulterior motive. Despite being way smarter and more powerful than us, they’ve come to serve, not to conquer.

For some reason when Bezos departs the UN, he leaves a book on the table. No one can read it because it’s written in an alien language. Over time, while the Kanamits render Earth a utopia by implementing their promised technologies, US military cryptographers attempt to translate this mysterious book. Early on one of the cryptographers, Peggy, reports that they were able to at least translate the title: To Serve Man.

“Awesome!” They all say (I’m paraphrasing here). “These Kanamits are all about providing exceptional customer service. Nothing to be suspicious of here!” Not exact words, but this is the gist of it.

Eventually the Kanamits decide to fly their giant flying saucer home, and they invite a lot of humans to join them. The Kanamits’ planet is reputedly more idyllic than can be imagined. Craving even more exceptional customer experience, a lot of humans enthusiastically climb aboard. Among them is Mr. Chambers, the head cryptologist-spook from the Pentagon.

Just as Chambers is walking up the ramp into the spaceship, a very distraught Peggy runs up.

“Mr. Chambers,” she yells, “don’t get on that ship! The rest of the book To Serve Man, it’s… it’s a cookbook!” Whoa!

Before Chambers can run away a giant Kanamit shoves him in the ship and closes the door.

Later Chambers, now locked in a cell on the spaceship, breaks character and speaks to the TV audience: “How about you?” he asks. “You still on Earth, or on the ship with me? Really doesn’t make very much difference, because sooner or later, all of us will be on the menu… all of us.”

I’m pretty sure that Karen and I are on the ship with Chambers. Where are you?

The electorate is not too stupid or too tired to control the political system. It is merely too poor.” –Thomas Ferguson

In a post-Citizens United political ‘marketplace’ where money = speech, ‘free’ speech has become remarkably expensive. According to The Center for Responsible Politics, a non-partisan money-in-politics watchdog group, the total cost of elections for the 2016 U.S. election cycle was $6.5 Billion. Borrell Associates, an advertising industry market data and research agency, puts the figure at $9.8 Billion and expects that figure to balloon to $11.7 Billion for the 2020 election cycle. That’s a lot of ‘speech’. The vast majority of that money was spent on advertising (mostly tv ads) and campaign consulting.

While there has always been money in American politics, something dramatic has occurred in the course of the neoliberal period of the past 40 years. American electoral politics has effectively transformed from a public institution into a multi-billion dollar private industry. It’s the inevitable outcome of unleashing market forces on democratic politics.

It’s telling that John McCain, co-sponsor of the 2002 bi-partisan McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act (overturned by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v FEC), was the last Presidential candidate to accept public campaign finance funding. Elections are mostly privately funded now (exclusively at the Presidential level), overwhelmingly by the rich and by powerful corporate interests eager to purchase political influence.

According to the religion of American capitalism, everything in life is better when we let the market decide for us. With few limits on spending, the advent of the superPAC, and the influence of “dark money”, the market now decides in our elections as well. The American business of politics is a full-blown campaign-industrial complex in the words of some critics, replete with its own professional experts and consultants, and its own pay-to-play rules of engagement. Because if this pay-to-play nature, un-monied interests (i.e., the overwhelming majority of American citizens) get no representation for their political interests. As political scientist Thomas Ferguson starkly puts it, the electorate is now simply “too poor” to control the political system. This paints a dour picture for democracy–and with it the hopes, dreams, and needs of ordinary citizens.

While this situation is rather bleak for we the people, it’s not without hope. Recent political campaigns ranging from the presidential bids of Barack Obama in 2008, Donald Trump in 2016, and Bernie Sanders in 2016 and aiming at 2020, to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s unexpected grassroots-campaign-fueled upset of DNC establishment heavyweight Joe Crowley in 2018 reveal cracks in the election industry’s otherwise seamless grip on democracy. Disrupting the election industry in defense of democracy is possible. In this introductory piece we’ll explore how the campaign industry works to cut the democratic electorate out of the political process. In a follow up piece we’ll examine the various strategies used by Obama, Trump, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez that provide insights regarding how to wrest democratic control back from the plutocrats.

The Campaign-Industrial Complex

Laundry detergent and Kamala Harris are very different products, but the methods and techniques by which each is sold is remarkably similar. And not just Harris obviously, but also “Mayor” Pete, Beto, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, and the rest of the Democratic presidential contenders. And recalling the 2016 GOP presidential primaries let’s not forget Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and the full GOP family of products. Empty suits jockeying to be stuffed with cash, offering up poll-tested talking points in the hopes that one or two of them might ‘stick’. Their language is artfully vague enough to allow them to lean in if a sound bite resonates, and to plausibly disavow, reinterpret, and deflect if it doesn’t. If it sometimes seems as though they’re speaking just slightly over your head, they are. Bear in mind that as a poor, uninfluential voter you’re only nominally the target audience. They’re pitching to the donor class who funds their exorbitantly expensive campaigns. The donor class who ultimately determines with investment dollars who will be elected.

The simultaneous rise of modern advertising and PR techniques (commercial polling, market research, etc.) and the mass communication capabilities afforded by radio gave birth to the modern American “business of politics”. Pollsters, in the words of historian Sarah Igo, simply “transferred the techniques honed for selling soap and cereal from the buying to the voting public.”

In the early days, some of the same ad agencies that advertised consumer goods also offered their modern selling techniques and services to political candidates. Unfortunately, however, the partisan nature of political campaigns proved bad for business. If the same ad agency that hawks Buicks and Pontiacs also hawks a Democrat candidate congress, that will sour Republican consumers on buying Buicks and Pontiacs–and there goes the General Motors account. This advertising conundrum left open an incredibly lucrative business opportunity, which modern political consultants gladly filled. Political consultants avoid this partisan pitfall by offering modern selling techniques to political campaigns only, and typically to one party only. There are Democrat consultants and Republican consultants.

It’s not only their effectiveness at employing advertising techniques to win elections that popularized the professional political consultant. As political scientist Adam Sheingate explains in his book Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy, an unintended side-effect of campaign finance law made consultants almost a necessity for managing a successful campaign. Candidates for political office are required to keep track of and report every campaign dollar spent. Tracking millions of dollars spent in multiple markets, via multiple vendors and services, over months and years, is an overwhelmingly complex accounting and management task best left to professionals.

Today no campaign is taken seriously until it hires professional consultants “to signal,” in Sheingate’s words, “the viability of their campaign and secure the support of donors.” “Like the microscopic bugs in our gut,” Sheingate explains, political consultants are “crucial to the metabolic functioning of a system of influence peddling that turns vast amounts of money into legally sanctioned political services.” Primary among those services are advertising, polling, and direct mail marketing.

TV Ads, Long Campaigns, and SuperPACs

This year’s Canadian federal election campaign season will run for 40 days. 40 days! It’s like they never end! Can you imagine having to listen to political candidates pitch their platforms for over a month?

I’m being facetious. From a US perspective this is hardly a campaign season at all. It would be nigh impossible to spend $11.7 Billion in such a short time frame. The next US federal election is in November of 2020. The first Democratic candidate to declare his candidacy for US President was the milquetoast neoliberal John Delaney on July 28, 2017. That’s more than 1,100 days before the election! Now that’s a meaty spending season. Our elections run for years. They never end, really. Consider that Delaney threw his hat in the ring for the 2020 election before the 2018 election! Campaigning overlaps successive elections, making them perpetual and incredibly lucrative.

American politicians are always campaigning, or at least always fundraising to be able to continue to afford campaigning. This they do instead of, for example, actually legislating or performing the other functions they were elected to do. Adam Sheingate suggests that we have the “political consultant racket” to thank for this–for reasons I’ve already alluded to. The election industry is a for-profit business. It’s fundamentally an extension of the advertising business. It’s important to note that this is the same business that Facebook, Google, and almost all magazines, newspapers, television networks, and other mass media are in. The longer the campaign cycle, the greater the opportunity to sell ads. And political candidates, eager to take advantage of every edge against their competition, are loathe to say no to their consultant’s advice to advertise early and often.

Speaking of advertising, there is now plenty of evidence that TV advertising for political candidates is highly ineffective. And yet, as I noted in my opening paragraph, the vast majority of campaign cash continues to be spent on TV ads. Why? Because political consultants work on commission. They get a cut of the ad spend, and TV ads are expensive.

Some political consultants have become millionaires on ad commissions. When candidates began to realize what a killing the consultants were making on ad commissions they demanded a bit of austerity so that their campaign war chests might last longer. Here, Citizens United’s allowance for SuperPACs was a godsend for the consultant industry. Super-PACs can raise unlimited funds so long as they’re isolated from the candidate. Now the candidate, by law, cannot know how the Super-PAC is run. Consultants must provide a firewall between the two, which of course means that the sky’s the limit on how big of a cut of the ‘investments’ the consultant class takes.

Requiem for the Median Voter Theorem

Suggesting that all of this money in politics might have a corrupting influence on our democracy is an outlandish understatement. It’s obvious even to the most unobservant citizen. Nevertheless, most people–from average voting citizens to political pundits and academics–continue to evaluate American elections as though they’re a public democratic institution rather than a commercial industry. They want to know what voters think, what their issues and concerns are, and how they’re likely to vote–as though the dog of democracy still wags its tail rather than the tail wagging the dog. One would be better off evaluating elections according to economic investment principles that apply to markets, because this is, after all, now they actually function.

In a nutshell, this is the premise of University of Massachusetts Professor Emeritus Thomas Ferguson’s life’s work: The Investment Theory of Political Parties. His 1995 master work Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems is the definitive resource on the subject. In terms of its predictive power for determining election outcomes and policy, the Investment Theory of Political Parties has proven to be devastatingly accurate.

Before digging into Ferguson’s work, however, it’s worth our while to examine and debunk a widely held and wildly flawed view of how elections work: the Median Voter Theorem. If so many Americans subscribe to the Median Voter Theorem, it’s in part due to the fact that it seems almost commonsensical. Here is how it works.

Take any political policy proposal. For purposes of our example we’ll call ours Proposal X. Some people will be enthusiastically all in on Proposal X (YES on X!) and some people will be vehemently opposed to Proposal X (NO on X!). Everyone else will occupy a position somewhere in between those extremes. This is the premise of the Median Voter Theorem. For any given political proposal the Median Voter Theorem posits that voters can be placed along a single spectrum bounded by the extreme YES and extreme NO positions. It assumes, moreover, that in terms of numbers of voters the spectrum isn’t flat. Nor is it slanted sharply to one side in the case of a very popular (or very unpopular) proposal. It assumes, instead, that the spectrum is more like a bell curve with most voters residing towards the middle. This is the position of the much coveted median voter. Being fully for or fully against any policy proposal on this model is thus a losing proposition. To win an election, the savvy politician will stake a moderate position between the extremes: either center-YES or center-NO. That’s where most of the voters are.

It’s on the basis of the common-senseness of the Median Voter Theorem that Liberal Centrism purports to be a pragmatic politics (I explored centrism in detail in this article in June). The same could be said for the now extinct (R.I.P.) moderate Republican. The problem with the Median Voter Theorem, however, is that it’s a horrible predictor for determining what’s politically popular. I can illustrate this with a very simple example that serves almost as a reductio ad absurdum.

Imagine you’re a political analyst who is asked to predict how a school bus full of children will vote on the proposition “who wants ice cream?” We all know that while there may well be a few children who don’t care for ice cream, are lactose-intolerant, etc., the overwhelming majority of children will be enthusiastically all in on ice cream. We know this because we know that ice cream is extremely popular among children. If you’re a political pundit who subscribes to the Median Voter Theorem, however, you will predict that the children will be solidly “meh” on this ice cream proposal. “Yay! Ice cream!” is simply too extreme of a view for a majority of children to get behind.

While the Median Voter Theorem may be predictive concerning certain highly polarizing topics, in the end this accuracy is akin to that of a stopped clock offering the correct time twice per day. In many cases (like children and ice cream) it’s simply wrong. Despite this harsh reality, the Median Voter Theorem remains extremely popular both among academics and the mainstream media punditry. It explains, for example, Edward Luce’s very plausible prognostication in Financial Times on December 30, 2015 regarding the prospects of the presumed Republican presidential front runner (Ted Cruz at the time, as Trump still wasn’t quite being taken seriously):

“But elections are still won in the centre, or what is left of it, and Mr Cruz will be too far to the right of the median voter to make it to the White House. Despite uncomfortably close polls, Mrs Clinton will win the electoral college by a landslide. Democrats will take back the Senate. But she will start her term in a very polarised Washington. There will be no honeymoon“

It was a reasonable prediction save for the fact that Hillary Clinton lost, and the Republicans retained control of both the Senate and the House. In other words, it was completely wrong.

According to an analysis of the 2016 elections by Thomas Fegurson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen the Clinton campaign failed, in large part, due to its own Median Voter Theorem assumptions. Remarking on this research, Feguson, et. al. write:

“…if one looks at the Clinton campaign’s fundraising, it is immediately apparent that it was trying to run an American version of the famous “Trasformismo” system pioneered by a succession of center-right Italian politicians in the decades before World War I. The basic idea of that system was simple: put measured representatives of the left and right centers together against extremes, especially from the left.”

This approach entailed reaching out for support into “sectors and firms that have rarely supported any Democrat,” making the Clinton campaign look “like no other Democratic campaign since the New Deal,” but with a “strong resemblance to the profile of the Romney campaign in 2012.” In a populist political climate where many Americans believed that the country was headed in the wrong direction and needed dramatic change, this was a losing strategy.

If we were to presume based on these miscalculations that the Democratic National Committee and the mainstream media punditry learned a valuable lesson, we would presume wrongly. Rather than question the utility of the Median Voter Theorem they’ve spent the past three years entertaining conspiracy theories about Russian meddling and collusion. As the 2020 race unfolds, they’re trotting out the Median Voter Theorem again, insisting that popular proposals like Medicare-for-All, the Green New Deal, and college tuition reform are–as in the case of ice cream with school children–too extreme. They insist, instead, that unseating Trump will require a median-voter-capturing status quo moderate like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or Pete Buttigieg, who offer uninspired and watered down versions of popular platforms. “Trasformismo 2.0” if you will.

Duopoly and the Vanishing Middle Class

In his book The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, Harvard University economist Peter Temin offers what ought to be an obvious observation concerning the assumptions behind the Median Voter Theorem. If winning policy proposals reflected where the majority of voter support lies, then issues important to the low-wage sector would dominate American politics. This, simply because more than half of the American electorate are from the low-wage sector. Of course, as is obvious to all of us, that’s not what happens. Quite the contrary, actually. Most Americans want to protect Social Security, they want to pursue economic policies that will result in higher wages, they want access to affordable education, and they want protection against the danger of bankruptcy resulting from medical debt. Public support for these issues is consistently high even among Republican voters. And yet we don’t even get an opportunity to vote on them in any meaningful way.

What this reveals (among other things) is that the Median Voter Theorem, which treats the electorate as a monolith, fails to recognize that the middle class in America is (to use Peter Temin’s language) “vanishing”, and that we effectively live in a duopoly. Temin isn’t speaking in the more dramatic Occupy Wall Street framework of the 1% versus 99%. Rather, much like the French economist Thomas Piketty he speaks more in terms of an elite 10% versus the bottom 90%. As the middle class vanishes, Temin argues, the population is increasingly polarized into a dual economy.

At the top end of this dual economy sits an elite FTE sector (people who work in Finance, Technology, and Electronics). These are people who work on Wall Street, for instance, in banking, lending, insurance, and real estate, and for Silicon Valley tech firms. They’re the winners in the global neoliberal economy even if most of them are not exactly part of the billionaire set. The bottom end of the dual economy, which now constitutes most Americans, is what Temin describes as the low-wage sector. These are the working poor and those (like many teachers for instance) who have fallen out of the middle class. I assume I don’t even have to ask you to guess which sector’s issues and concerns receive the most political representation in our “democracy”. I don’t have to ask you to guess which sector owns and controls the mainstream media, or Google, or Facebook. Similarly I assume it’s obvious which sector these industries target their ad revenue-funded messaging to.

In his 2008 book Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, political scientist Larry Bartels analyzed Senate roll-calls on bills related to minimum wage, civil rights, budget waiver, and cloture. He discovered that Senators attached no weight at all to the political concerns of constituents from the bottom ⅓ of the income distribution, and only slightly more weight to middle-income constituents. It seems highly unlikely–on the presumption that we live in a democracy–that United States Senators would consider it politically viable to ignore the concerns of ⅔ of their constituency. And yet that’s what the data reveals. As Peter Temin notes, however, this is exactly what the Investment Theory of Political Parties would predict.

The Investment Theory of Political Parties

“The real market for political parties is defined by major investors, who generally have good and clear reason for investing to control the state,” explains political scientist Thomas Feguson. “Blocs of major investors define the core of political parties and are responsible for most of the signals the party sends to the electorate.’’ This is the basic thesis of the Investment Theory of Political Parties (the Investment Theory for short). Let’s unpack it a bit.

Whereas the Median Voter Theorem (the “median voter fantasy” in Ferguson’s words) hypothesizes that successful policy will align with where most of the voters are (the center of a spectrum it assumes), the Investment Theory instead hypothesizes that successful policy will align with where most of the investment dollars are. This is a slight oversimplification, but you get the idea. It’s an oversimplification because the Investment Theory doesn’t predict at the level of specific issues and policy proposals. Rather, as its name suggests, it predicts at the level of party success. Political parties and the party’s candidates don’t represent single issues. Rather, they represent clusters of issues. If those clusters of issues–or clusters of investments if you will–coalesce into a winning investment bloc, that translates into winning elections. Certain successful investment blocs can dominate for decades (i.e., the blocs can become hegemonic blocs).

This arrangement presents a few very significant implications, which the Investment Theory predicts. First, it means that “whole areas of public policy will not be contested at all even if they’re important to voters.” This, because as my opening quote from Ferguson suggests, the electorate is simply too poor to invest in these public policy issues.

Second, “[i]f major donors are aligned on a topic, there is no point in contesting.” Think of tax cuts for the rich, for instance. Think of deregulating the banking industry. Despite what conspiracy theory fans might want to suggest, this incontestability isn’t due to any sort of “active collusion between the parties,” Ferguson insists. Rather, it’s simply “because no effective constituency exits to force the issue onto the public agenda.” ‘Constituency’ in this context means investors (this is a marketplace), not voters. Voters, remember, most of whom are members of the low-wage sector, are simply not an “effective constituency.”

Third, Ferguson notes that “…on all issues affecting vital interests that major investors have in common, no party competition will take place.” This third point is important. It explains the bipartisan neoliberal consensus that has existed between the Democratic and Republican parties since the Reagan era. In her recent essay The Old is Dying and the New Cannot be Born critical theorist Nancy Frasier characterizes this bipartisan consensus as a Progressive Neoliberal hegemonic bloc–a hegemonic bloc that since the Great Recession has begun to fail.

Beginning with Reagan, the Republican party championed a Reactionary Neoliberalism which married reactionary culture war politics to retrograde neoliberal economic policy. Prayer in schools, anti-abortion, and traditional marriage were the stock in trade. Beginning with Bill Clinton, the Democrats championed a Progressive Neoliberalism (which won the day and became the dominant hegemonic bloc), which married progressive culture war politics with retrograde neoliberal economic policy. Women’s rights, racial justice, gay marriage, and LTBTQ+ rights were the stock in trade. These social-cultural issues, as we all well know, are so polarizing that the United States often seems poised on the verge of civil war.

And yet despite this fact the Democratic and Republican parties have long been in consensus on the neoliberal economic part. Since this represents a vital consensus among major investors, the Investment Theory predicts that there will be no party competition on neoliberal economic policy. The parties have been simpatico on policy issues related to neoliberal economics for decades, and perspectives that might challenge free trade agreements, austerity measures, financial deregulation, and divestment from social programs simply aren’t on offer in the ‘market’.

In 1995 Ferguson had already prefigured Fraser’s conclusions nearly 25 years later. “[I]f an emphasis on non-economic issues protects major investors in all parties,” Ferguson wrote, “then emphasis on ethnic, racial, or cultural values will proliferate relative to economic appeals.”

The Investment Theory and the Election Industry

There is nothing particularly sinister or conspiratorial about the way corporations and billionaires control the political system through financial investments. It is, rather, more of a structural consequence. Investing in politics in this sense is no different than any other business investment. Corporations respect the same bottom line and invest in anticipation of a good ROI. If you’re an investment bank or an oil company that could make a lot more money if certain sectors of your industry were deregulated, then it makes sense to invest in politicians and parties that will work to make that happen. And if this investment runs into the millions, yeilding a return in future billions, that’s a damn good investment. That’s how capitalism works, and when capitalism swallows the political sphere, that’s also how politics works. No hard feelings. As the line from The Godfather goes. “It was only business.”

Similarly, the success of the investment has little to do with outright buying votes, voter suppression, or other forms of election tampering. Rather, it depends on the power of advertising. And here our examination comes full circle.

In a basic cost-benefit analysis of becoming informed on various political issues, the cost for the average voter is incredibly high. To borrow an example from Peter Temin, low-wage sector voters want to understand why their wages have stagnated over the past 30 years, why, in short, they’ve been denied the American dream. Temin notes, “this is a complex problem with many parts.” It’s almost inconceivable that low-wage sector voters will have the time and resources to find the information to “put the picture together.” As Tom Furguson points out, “even highly motivated voters face comparatively enormous costs when they attempt to acquire, evaluate, and act upon political information.” Staying politically informed is very expensive in terms of time and effort–and expense few of us can afford. Consequently, Ferguson argues, “voters are only acting rationally when they cut information costs by using shortcuts like partisan identification or demographic facts to evaluate complex vectors of political variables.”

Voters rely on branding (i.e., party identification) and advertising to make political choices in more or less the same way that they rely on branding and advertising to make consumer choices. Unfortunately, however, in America there are only two brands (Republican and Democrat), and the information and solutions they advertise are limited to those that promote the interests of their major investors. Additional or alternative information to that which is advertised by the parties isn’t readily available, because no one–certainly not the electorate–can afford to advertise them in the marketplace. Finally, voters are forced to choose among a very small set of candidates, each of whom represents a specific bundle of political ‘solutions’ (again, reflecting the interests of major investment blocs) . These ‘solution bundles’ are highly curated, and the only ‘choices’ available to voters. If an issue they find particularly important isn’t part of the bundle? Well tough shit and fuck you. Nothing personal. It’s only business.

Afterword

I realize I’ve just painted a pretty grim picture as far as hopes for salvaging American democracy go. That said, the situation is not hopeless. In this essay my aim was simply to describe how the election industry works. In a piece to follow I’ll dive into what we might do about it if we care about democracy.

“Nazism led to the gas chambers, communism led to the gulags, and neoliberalism leads to soup kitchens.” — Paul Verhaeghe, Says Who? The Struggle for Authority in a Market-Based Society

Surely you recall the fairytale’s narrative logic from childhood. Goldilocks trespasses in the cottage of a family of bears. First she tries on Papa Bear’s politics, but Papa Bear’s politics are too right. Then she tries Momma Bear’s politics, but Momma Bear’s politics are too left. Finally, Goldilocks tries Baby Bear’s politics, and Baby Bear’s politics are juuuuuuuuust right. And like that Goldilocks becomes a liberal centrist of the Clintonian Third Way variety.

I know that’s not quite how the story goes. Of the things Goldilocks sampled during her uninvited visit to the bears’ cottage, politics wasn’t among them. Nevertheless, if politics had been on her menu, we all know that Goldilocks would have decided precisely as I just described. We know this because we’re well acquainted with Goldilocks’ shtick. When making selections Goldilocks always finds the middle term between two available extremes to be just right. It’s remarkably similar to the way liberal centrist thinking orients itself. Goldilocks and the centrists have more or less the same shtick. Not identical, but close enough to allow Goldilocks and the Three Bears to serve as a remarkably insightful metaphor for exploring and articulating the shortcomings of liberal centrist politics.

The ‘Just Right’ Center

Viewed in a certain light liberal centrism, this moderate, measured, non-extremist, just right politics, seems almost idyllic. Before we dive into its shortcomings, let’s take a moment to make sense of its appeal.

There is nothing inherent in liberalism as such that suggests “I am in the center.” And yet this center orientation has become a key element of its appeal. I take this to be an artifact of World War II and the Cold War, which provided us with the distinctively 20th century political spectrum we use to this day. Fascism, a 20th century invention that communists and liberal democracies joined forces to defeat in World War II, represents the far-right end of this spectrum. Soviet style communism, the liberal west’s ideological rival during the Cold War, marks the far-left end of the spectrum. And sitting in the putative ‘center’ like Baby Bear’s bowl of porridge is liberal democracy (political liberalism) and ‘free-market’ capitalism (economic liberalism). Liberalism predates both fascism and state-communism, so it obviously hasn’t always lived in the fascist-communist in-between. Now it’s hard to imagine it any other way.

There’s often plenty of wiggle room in the in-between. It seems entirely plausible, for instance, that after sampling Papa Bear’s too hot porridge and Mama Bear’s too cold porridge, Goldilocks might have made any number of declarations about Baby Bear’s porridge. It might have been cool (but not cold), or tepid, or just barely cooler than too hot. In other words, it might have been a serviceable porridge. Not great, but just sort of…“meh.” But that’s not what happens. Instead Goldilocks declares that Baby Bear’s porridge is just right. And to make it perfectly clear that this assessment wasn’t a fluke, she performs the same operation with the same results two more times: once with the just right chair bounded by a too hard and a too soft chair, and again with a just right bed bounded by a too hard and a too soft bed. When she does this she makes it clear that we’re dealing in each case with a golden mean.

Something similar is going on with liberal centrism. Virtue, Aristotle insisted, is a mean between two vicious extremes. And so it is apparently with porridge, chairs, beds, and political ideologies. The extremes of our Cold War political spectrum are vicious in just the way the Aristotelian reasoning requires. Travel to the far-right end of the spectrum (fascism) and you’ll end up in the gas chamber. Travel to the far-left end (communism) and you’ll land on the gulag archipelago. Both directions lead to totalitarian horror and mass murder. In the center is the just right domain of freedom itself, manifest in the form of a liberal democracy with a market economy. This is essentially the argument Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger offered in 1949 in one of the early articulations of Cold War liberal centrism: The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom.

This notion that the center is a virtuous golden mean performs an important function in liberal centrist politics. It keeps us from venturing too far into the radical wilderness. Since the vicious extremes–the fascist gas chamber and the communist gulag–define the terminal ends of a bounded spectrum, you can’t run away from one without running towards the other. The best possible political position under these conditions, the just right position, is equidistant to the gas chamber and the gulag, which is the position furthest away from both. Here we must stay put. And why would we ever want to leave? This position is the home of the political virtues: democracy, equality, economic opportunity, human rights, and freedom. Who wouldn’t want to be a liberal centrist?

The Vicious Center

This idyllic post-World War II liberalism is unfortunately just that: an idyll. It was never just right–certainly not for African Americans during Jim Crow, for example, or for women, or for any number of marginalized persons and communities living as less-than-full, -free and -equal citizens in liberal democracies. Still, at mid-century the liberal position was very attractive. Thanks to New Deal policies and post-war prosperity, the United States had a large and growing middle class, broad access to affordable education, and a fairly generous welfare state. This era of widely shared economic prosperity was also considered a capitalist golden age. Compared to memories of Nazi Germany, Stalin’s purges, and rumors of starvation in the People’s Republic of China, capitalism under liberal democracy looked about as just right as perhaps it ever would.

This is the picture of liberalism that a lot of liberal centrists still think about when they think about liberal centrism. It’s such a powerful vision in the American popular imagination that in 1989–already more than a decade into the neoliberal turn that would utterly eviscerate this manifestation of liberalism–Francis Fukuyama was able to write (apparently in all seriousness) that “the egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx.” Wow! Everyone is equal! This is from his celebrated essay The End of History? wherein Fukuyama used the imminent collapse of the Berlin Wall to announce that liberal democracy (and capitalism) has once-and-for-all defeated its ideological rivals fascism and communism.

Here we begin to glimpse what’s problematic about liberal centrism. If it wasn’t obvious in 1989, it’s certainly obvious today: this liberal Eden, Fukuyama’s ‘classless’ egalitarian American society basking at the benevolent end of history, is as much a fairytale as Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

If liberalism looked like a virtuous mean at mid-century, it certainly doesn’t look that way today. The Vital Center that Arthur Schlesinger defended in 1949 was a liberal democracy with a state-regulated market economy (Schlesinger defended it in these terms specifically). That is to say, it was a New Deal mixed-economy driven by Keynesian economics, which took full employment to be an economic goal. Today the state that was tasked with regulating this market economy in the interests of a democratic polity has been fully captured by the market, and market logic rather than democratic politics rules the day. Beginning with the Carter Administration’s Volcker Shock and the deregulation of transportation, and then ramping up in earnest during Reagan-Thatcherism, Keynesian economics was abandoned for the monetarist and neoliberal-style economics of Milton Freedman and FA Hayek. A long, slow dismantling of the New Deal commenced, as well as a relatively fast (during my own lifetime) redistribution of wealth from the working and middle classes to a tiny, ultra-rich elite.

The term liberal centrist as we use it today derives from the likes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who suggested a Third Way, a centrism that marries center-right and center-left policies into a newly constituted golden mean. What it meant was that the New Democrats and New Labour were signing onto the viciously retrograde Reagan-Thatcherite neoliberal economic program, moving the center distinctly to the right. And to sweeten this bitter porridge, they actively embraced New Left style social movement politics. The resulting liberal centrism is what feminist critical theorist Nancy Fraser describes as Progressive neoliberalism: progressive on social issues narrowly inscribed (i.e., in a way that ensures no significant impact on economic policy), and neoliberal in its embrace of market fundamentalism.

The results of this neoliberal turn have been devastating, but many liberal centrists–still intoxicated by the Fukuyaman fairytale version of liberalism–stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that the transformation has occurred. Recent economic data paints a different picture. In his influential 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century the French economist Thomas Piketty wrote:

“…it is important to note the considerable transfer of US income–on the order of 15 points–from the poorest 90 percent to the richest 10 percent since 1980. Specifically, if we consider the total growth of the US economy in the thirty years prior to the [financial] crisis, that is, from 1977 to 2007, we find that the richest 10 percent appropriated three-quarters of the growth. […] It is hard to imagine an economy and society that can continue functioning indefinitely with such extreme divergence between social groups.”

So much for Fukuyama’s egalitarian classless society. The current level of inequality in America, Piketty claims, is “probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world.” Echoing Piketty’s assessment, a 2012 study by economists Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson shows that income inequality in America is likely greater than it was in 1774 even if you factor in slavery.

The Oxford, UK-based conglomeration of charitable organizations, OXFAM, publishes an annual report on economics and poverty. In January, 2016 OXFAM reported that the 62 richest individuals on earth owned the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of humanity (3.6 billion people). Only a year later (January 2017) OXFAM reported that this figure had dropped from 62 individuals to just eight men (yes men). Perhaps you’ve heard of some of these men. Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos. Amancio Ortega. Mark Zuckerberg. Warren Buffett. Carlos Slim Helu. Larry Ellison. Michael “I might run for president as a Democratic centrist” Bloomberg.

In January 2018 OXFAM reported that 1% of the world’s population pocketed 87% of all of the wealth produced in 2017.

These numbers are the stuff of Dickensian fiction. It’s almost unfathomable to imagine that anyone who looks seriously at these numbers could continue to believe that the liberal center is a golden mean of freedom, equality, and post-war prosperity.

In his book Says Who? The Struggle for Authority in a Market-Based Society, Belgian psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe offers an updated description of our familiar Cold War political spectrum: “Nazism led to the gas chambers, communism led to the gulags, and neoliberalism leads to soup kitchens.” Goodbye golden mean. Hello vicious center.

Amazon, the corporation that made Jeff Bezos rich, is valued at over $1Trillion (Amazon and Apple are the most valuable corporations in history). Last year Amazon paid zero dollars in taxes on $11.2 Billion in profits. Contributing absolutely nothing to the society that made Amazon’s success possible isn’t enough though. Amazon extorted the state of Virginia out of a $750 million taxpayer-funded cash subsidy by forcing American cities to compete in a race-to-the-bottom contest for Amazon’s second world headquarters. Imagine if, after sampling Papa Bear’s too hot porridge and Mama Bear’s too cold porridge, Goldilocks found Baby Bear’s porridge bowl empty because Jeff Bezos had eaten it aaaall up.

Goldilocks is a Conservative

Consider for a moment the full story arc of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Goldilocks tresspasses in the bears’ cottage while they’re out. She eats some of their food, breaks one of their chairs, and sleeps in one of their beds. The bears come home and find her. They’re all “WTF are you doing?” and then Goldilocks runs off. The end. That’s it. That’s the story. There’s no real point to it. Nothing noteworthy or meaningful happens. There’s a bit of drama, but it doesn’t go anywhere, just like liberal centrist politics.

The Goldilockean dialectic is a false dialectic. The thesis and antithesis are never sublated. They persist in their unresolved tension–too hot versus too cold, too hard versus too soft. The just right sits frozen in the middle, like an insect trapped in amber. There is no movement. The engine of progress is stuck in neutral. This may be the most scandalous shortcoming of liberal centrism–that is, if you happen to find any fault with the way the world is right now.

The metaphor of a just right center is disastrous to any hope for progress. When you position your politics within a spectrum bounded on each end by horror there’s simply no room for movement–no room for change. The vicious extremes exert inward pressure towards the middle, encouraging the centrist to stay put no matter what. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher famously captured this sense of being trapped in place with the now infamous phrase “There is no alternative” (TINA). Liberal centrism in this sense functions as a conservatism. It’s conservative in the sense that it defaults to a defense of the status quo ante. The centrist can’t chart a path to a better world because all paths lead either to the gas chamber or to the gulag. The centrist is resigned to the conclusion that utopia must be right here, right now (“America is already great!”)–regardless of how vicious the status quo may have become.

Presenting a vicious status quo ante as a utopia of the present is incredibly cynical. We see this cynicism clearly in liberal centrist support for the current batch of establishment Democrat presidential candidates. The substance of these candidates’ platforms boils down to a single objective: Defeat Trump! That’s all they offer because that’s all they intend to accomplish. The reactionary Trump has “papa bear” energy. That energy, coupled with Baby Bear’s ever-shrinking bowl of porridge, is allowing Trump to drag the progressive neoliberal center in the direction of the gas chamber. Hence, he’s got to go. But then what? Then nothing. According to (neo)liberal centrist logic everything magically shifts back to being great again, even though little will have actually changed. The goal is to return to the same vicious status quo ante that drove voters to Trump in the first place.

If that platform seems a little thin, not to worry. These mainstream Democratic candidates will borrow platform positions from the progressive candidates (Medicare for all, Green New Deal, free college, Tuition reform), because these positions are actually popular with voters. However, they’ll do so only vaguely, and after dramatically throttling them back in scope and ambition in that signature do-nothing liberal centrist fashion. They have no intention of actually working to institute them. That would only lead to the gulag.

In our post-Citizens United campaign financing landscape a cynical take on these cynics might point out the political corruption angle here. This simply adds (and certainly not without merit) a financial incentive to the conservative valorization of the status quo. As Labor Institute co-founder Les Leopold has noted, what “unites” these moderate establishment candidates is “their unwillingness to take on Wall Street,” the architects and primary benefactors of our current vicious status quo ante. Because of this unwillingness, Leopold adds, “they are unable to confront the defining problem of our era — runaway inequality,” which, in Leopold’s view, transforms centrism into an “extremist ideology.” On the pretext of defending an illusory liberal Eden from fascists (Trump) and communists (Sanders, Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), centrists are driving the whole world into the soup kitchen.

Goldilocks is a Pessimist

Liberal centrists are pessimists. As progressive journalist and political speech writer RJ Eskow has observed, “The Democrats have achieved their greatest political and policy successes when they have ignored the “centrists” — in reality, ever-present naysayers who cloak their negativity in the pseudo-technocratic jargon of centrism. It’s hard to imagine that the New Deal, Medicare, or the Moon Landing would have ever happened if milquetoast Democrats like these had been in charge.”

Centrists obviously don’t describe themselves as pessimists. Instead they describe themselves as realists, which is how pessimists always euphemize their pessimism. This tendency is constantly confirmed by the centrist’s persistent demand that we be realistic whenever anyone advocates for meaningful political change. Proposals for transforming the status quo into something different–something better–are dismissed as pie-in-sky. It’s a wet blanket that centrists throw over the top of any expression of idealistic enthusiasm.

See, for example, Senator Diane Feinstein explaining to existentially-threatened children from the Sunrise movement that we cannot avert human extinction because it would be too expensive. Doing what it takes to preserve organized human life on earth just isn’t realistic.

See Speaker of the House and professional kill-joy Nancy Pelosi letting the air out of a balloon in February: “We welcome all the enthusiasm that people want to put on the table, and the Green New Deal is one of them, but we have to operate in a way that’s evidence-based, current in its data.” This is forewarning that once we dig into the nitty-gritty of this ambitious save life on earth proposal we’re sure to find out that it’s unrealistic. It’s too bad because we were really rooting for humanity.

See small-dreaming non-visionary Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer justify his refusal to support Medicare for all. “I’m going to support a plan that can pass,” he explained. Chuck can’t see a path from here to there, so instead he’ll chart a path from here to here. That’s more realistic.

This is what happens when you adopt the status quo ante as your North Star. There is nowhere to go because you’ve always already arrived.

Liberal Centrist Post-Politics

It gets worse. The centrist’s insistence that we remain realistic about politics isn’t simply a reflection of pessimism. It also reflects a deeply internalized post-political orientation. That is to say, it reflects a belief that political change is not only improbable, but impossible. Politics are over. There is nothing left for us to do but to allow elites (who know better than us) to administer our neoliberal utopia of the present.

Politics–the means by which human beings collectively manage their affairs–unfold historically. When Francis Fukuyama declared in 1989 that liberalism had vanquished its ideological rivals fascism and communism, heralding the end of history, he was also declaring the end of politics. In doing so, Fukuyama, a member of the Reagan Administration at the time, was giving expression to one of neoliberalism’s ideological first principles. This first principle was most famously articulated by the Thatcherite expression we’ve already mentioned. To silence any debate about the shortcomings of global capitalism, free trade, and unregulated markets (i.e., neoliberalism), Thatcher would simply declare, “There is no alternative” (TINA for short). She kept saying it until it stuck. This naturalization of neoliberal economic policy, like Fukuyama’s attempt to ossify history, had a clear aim: to create the illusion of a politico-economic necessity such that it would no longer occur to people that they were free to pursue alternatives to neoliberalism via political means.

In the course of the gradual neoliberal neutralization and capture of liberal politics, “There is No Alternative” or “TINA” ended up getting internalized by liberal centrists. They’ve drunk the neoliberal Kool-Aid, unwittingly in most cases, and now they believe it. They think this bit of ideology–this post-politics–is reality. This is what cultural theorist Mark Fisher meant in referring to neoliberalism by an alternative descriptive name: capitalist realism.

In his book by the same name (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?) Fisher notes that “[a]n ideological position can never really be successful until it is naturalized.” What it means for an ideological position to be ‘naturalized’ in this sense is that the ideology ceases to be thought of as a value or an idea and instead is perceived as a ‘fact’, as a part of reality itself. Capitalist realism (aka neoliberalism) is ‘reality’ in just this sense–as a naturalized ideology.

When a liberal centrist politician suggests that ambitious progressive political programs are unrealistic, we shouldn’t mistake this as a simple plea for moderation or an incremental approach to change. We have every reason to believe that what they mean is that these programs are literally impossible. Until they awaken from their capitalist realist ideological slumber, we should view their half-hearted gestures to partially or “pragmatically” support these programs anyway with skepticism.

Baby Bear is a Baby

Consider the story arc of Goldilocks and the Three Bears one more time. Goldilocks tresspasses in the bears’ cottage. She eats their food, breaks a chair, and sleeps in one of their beds. The bears return and are alarmed to find what Goldilocks has done. Goldilocks runs off. The end. It doesn’t seem to have a point.

This pointlessness was not lost on the Austrian-born American psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim. In 1976 Bettelheim published a book entitled The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairytales. The value of fairytales, Bettelheim claimed, was in encouraging children to deal with the existential puzzles they must confront in the process of maturing into adults–problems like how to cope with separation anxiety and how to deal with oedipal feelings and sibling rivalry. Much to Bettelheim’s consternation one fairytale fails to fulfill this important function: Goldilocks and the Three Bears. As author John Updike noted in his 1976 New York Times review of The Uses of Enchantment, Bettleheim reports in “a rather grumpy tone” that in Goldilocks and the Three Bears “nothing much happens.”

Goldilocks ultimately fails to find what is fitting for her. The bears, rather than being touched by her misadventure, are appalled. They don’t accept the outsider the way the dwarves do in Snow White. This might have provided children with a moral about acceptance and generosity. Nor, on the other hand, do the bears eat Goldilocks for her transgressions, as was the case in an earlier version of the fairytale. That might have served as a cautionary tale about respecting other people’s possessions. “[A]t its end there is neither recovery nor consolation;” Bettelheim laments, “there is no resolution of conflict, and thus no happy ending.”

Because of its inherent stay putness, because its engine of progress is stuck in neutral, liberal centrism under neoliberal conditions disappoints in a very similar fashion. There is no resolution to conflict, and thus no happy ending.

It’s significant to observe that the just right selections that Goldilocks makes again and again belong to Baby Bear and that Baby Bear is a baby. By identifying with Baby Bear Goldilocks arrests her development at the infant stage. For Bettleheim, this is what’s wrong with Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It fails to encourage children “to pursue the hard labor of solving, one at a time, the problems which growing up presents.”

The political analogue here is straightforward enough. Liberal centrism is the idealization of arrested development itself. As practitioners of capitalist realist post-politics, liberal centrists refuse to pursue the hard labor of solving, one at a time, the difficult problems we all face as members of a democratic polity. This paralyzing timidity even in the face of existential threat (human extinction) is, from a grown up point-of-view, irresponsible in the extreme. To borrow vernacular from the Millennial generation, liberal centrists refuse to adult.

We should add that running to Papa Bear (the solution proposed by Trump and the other “daddies” of the world (Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro) simply perpetuates, rather than solves the problem of refusing to adult. Running to daddy to solve their problems is what children do.

On the Virtues of Disillusionment

When Papa Bear Trump promises to “Make America Great Again,” liberal centrists repeat the tone-deaf refrain “America is already great.” But for many Americans, and more every day, this simply doesn’t ring true. Indeed, plenty of people in the world are losing patience with Goldilocks’ Baby Bear ethos, the refusal to grow up and face the reality that it portends, and especially the economic viciousness it masks. Why can’t (or won’t) liberal centrists see this?

Using the Goldilocks and the Three Bears as a metaphor, I’ve argued that instead of confronting the vicious truth of a world ravaged by 30 years of neoliberalism, liberal centrists insist upon living in a kind of false utopia of the present, modeled after a mid-century liberal fairytale fueled by Cold War ideology. This fairytale, in its most egregious form, insists that the American Dream is alive and well, that most Americans are middle class, that the wealth gap between the richest and the poorest is narrow, and that class mobility and economic opportunity are abundant. In its more sober Capitalist Realist form, the fairytale acknowledges that problems exist, but concludes that there are no political avenues to address them (TINA). Both of these versions are delusional.

This being the case, I want to conclude by making a plea for embracing disillusionment.

Already in 1961, in his classic The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Daniel Boorstein offered the following observation regarding Americans:

“We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very existence.”

Boorstein was among the first to delve comprehensively into the ideologically-distorting power of “the image” (fueled by the 20th century advent of mass media). Since then much has been written about how mass media culturally reproduces not only ideology, but illusions, including what I’ve been describing as the liberal centrist fairytale. Becoming disillusioned, on Boorstein’s telling, entails having the ground pulled from beneath your feet. It entails tearing down the world you inhabit, even if that world is an illusion that keeps you from confronting reality.

Disillusionment is quite understandably painful. Consequently, if you attempt to disabuse liberal centrists of their delusion, they’ll fight you. We see this clearly in political discourse today, during this election cycle. They’ll accuse you of being a toxic bro, a misogynist, a racist, a Russian agent. Anything to keep the fairytale alive.

All of this work to maintain the delusion notwithstanding, the world can ill afford to protect the centrist from disillusionment. The future itself may depend on insisting that they embrace their disillusionment so they can begin adulting again in the domain of the political.

This plea is offered not only to liberal centrists themselves, who ought to embrace their own disillusionment. It also extends to those of you who may know and love a liberal centrist. To you I recommend the following: disabuse them of their illusions. Unplug them from The Matrix. Give them the red pill.

It’s only after losing control of the House in the midterms that President Trump suddenly turned and demanded 5.7 billion dollars in appropriations to build his damn wall — and then shut down the government when he didn’t get it. Before the media normalizes this (like every other outrageous thing he does) it’s important to stop for a minute and at least ask why.

Surely one reason is that 45 didn’t believe his party was going to get its clock cleaned, and so he must have assumed that he had more time to position himself for re-election in 2020. So rather than “own” this miscalculation like a normal politician, he instead wants to deny that “elections have consequences.” He wants to deny that we have passed peak Trump for this presidential term.

A normal president, of course, would seek popular reaffirmation in the next cycle (by successful reelection in 2020) as the basis for renewing the wall demand. But as should be pretty clear to all by this point, Trump is as interested in functioning as a wrecking ball as he is in forwarding any specific set of policy priorities. The destruction of our republican democratic form seems to be near the top of his list of social objectives. Which brings us back to the original question, why now?

Instead of doing what our democratic system demands fresh after such a midterm result — namely to compromise with the opposition’s view of border security and immigration reform — Trump’s stated solution is to insist on unprecedented special powers by declaring a state of emergency. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the unconditioned desire for still more power is therefore at the root of this intentional collision with both the leadership of the House and prior democratic norms of governance.

Invocation of the Unreviewability of Executive Orders

It’s worth remembering that this is not the first time he’s tried this trick — in the first month of his presidency he signed an immigration travel ban Executive Order, and sought to argue before the Appellate Court that a refusal to stay the lower, District Court’s Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) would harm the government because of the president’s authority to declare a state of emergency. In short, the government went before the Court of Appeals not to explain and make the case for the national emergency, but rather in order to argue that neither the District Court nor the Court of Appeals have any authority to review the President’s Executive Order.

In response to this “refusal to state the nature of the emergency,” the Appellate Court wrote that within our system, “it is the role of the judiciary to interpret the law, a duty that will sometimes require the resolution of litigation challenging the constitutional authority of one of the three branches…neither the Supreme Court nor our court has ever held that courts lack the authority to review executive action.”

In fact, the response continues, the Supreme Court has repeatedly and explicitly rejected the notion that the political branches authority over immigration, or national defense are unreviewable. It’s the job of the courts to “preserve unimpaired the constitutional safeguards of civil liberty…in war and in peace, in all circumstances.” The fact that a statute deals with foreign relations does not grant the executive totally unrestricted freedom of choice. It is beyond question, the judges write, that the judiciary retains the authority to adjudicate Constitutional challenges to executive action.”

State of Emergency and Executive Decision

What then can we learn from the administration’s prior arguments in favor of a stay of the Temporary Restraining Order? First, that the President, less than a month into his presidency, insisted through his attorney that the only thing that matters, in reviewing executive action, is that the President has the authority to take the given action. The only thing that matters, is the legality of the action, without regard to its rightness, as determined by a review of whether it accords with the values, norms, and rules found within the US Constitution.

This is what explains the strange contortionism of arguing for a ruling before a court the authority of which you do not recognize for reviewing the action. The country, the President has decided, is in a state of emergency. This emergency has to do with our immigration laws, norms, procedures, and rules. What is the nature of the emergency? The emergency is that America has ceased to be great, and we must make it great again. The President’s decision is validated by the 2016 election results (Americans agree with his decision). As the President’s Senior Advisor Stephen Miller spat out on Face the Nation, with his face contorted into a Nazi sneer right out of a Hollywood movie, “…our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

Strong Unitary Executive Power on Steroids

Before explaining the underlying political theory animating the Trump administration position, it’s important to point out that the strange scene we previously witnessed, where the judicial branch and the executive branch mutually accused one another of violating separation of powers, actually has its basis in a long simmering constitutional law dispute that has reached a rolling boil since the Presidency of George W. Bush.

Article II of the Constitution vests executive power in the President of the United States; but there have been both weaker and stronger intonations of what that “unitary power” over executive functions and agencies and officials ought to mean. In his book, Broken Government, Howard Dean writes, “In its most extreme form, unitary executive theory can mean that neither Congress nor the Federal courts can tell the President what to do and how to do it, particularly regarding national security matters.”

As Arthur Versluis has written, the Bush Administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq took place without Congressional authorization and the imprimatur of the UN, in violation of US and international law; as such it was essentially conducted under the invocation of strong unitary executive power. The same can be said for the Bush Administration’s selective abrogation of the Geneva Conventions (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo) as well as the abrogation of FISA in the mid-2000s. Both Bush and Obama inherently asserted unitary executive power by the use of signing statements to over-ride legal provisions with which they did not agree.

In general, until now, the Constitutional argument about strong unitary executive power has revolved around competing versions of the overlap between Congress and the President. To the extent that the Judiciary has been implicated in the matter, the discussion has tended to revolve around whether, under the weak interpretation, parts of the Executive Branch might sue other parts. This all brings us back to the travel ban and the Ninth Circuit, where Trump invoked strong unitary executive power over and against the courts where it pertains to matters of constitutionality like the abrogation of civil liberties. Three weeks into the Trump administration what we saw was strong unitary executive power on steroids. Assuming he actually declares a Wall emergency, we will soon be seeing it again.

From Unitary Executive Power to Political Decisionism

Perhaps the notion of executive rule by exception under conditions of national emergency has begun to ring a few bells. Surely, you might nonetheless think, we can’t mean to say that the American Presidency, under conditions of strong unitary executive theory, is coextensive with European fascism in the first half of the twentieth century. After all, the USA is a constitutional democracy, a nation of laws, and no one, not even the President is above the law. Our positive laws (the legal code) refer to the Constitution, and the Constitution is reflective of our universalist moral values and social and political norms.

Further, our Constitution, as an artifact of the Enlightenment, relies upon popular sovereignty and the social contract. In the seventy years since the defeat of European fascism, we have become accustomed to the assumption that social contractarian theories, or their contemporary derivatives (e.g., Rawls, Dworkin, Habermas) are the only game in town, where it comes to explaining sovereignty and the foundation of law and the exercise of state power and authority.

Democracy has its problems, we say; it’s messy. It has become so bureaucratic and filtered, that it is difficult to discern the ‘will of the people’ in its products. It is the captive of special interests. Political parties have lost most of their function as a point of orientation for their members. We find it hard to believe that we have leaders that can manage the complex decisions, the plurality of values and interests (ever more differentiated) that have to be taken into account in order to believe that the “will of all” is somehow being fashioned into a “general will.”

As Claus Offe saw already in the 90s, in Modernity and the State, “modern societies are condemned to rely solely on the will of the people as it ensues from equal and free rights of participation when it comes to…the final agency of and impetus for, collectively binding decisions…but the will of the people exhibits three problematic features: it is fictitious, fallible, and seducible.” All these things taken together, Offe concludes, “improves the chances of those on the political market who use populist ‘direct sales’ by appealing to innate resentment or the individual’s instinct for greater wealth.” For Claus Offe and other from this period, the challenges of representative democracy just sketched are to be taken as just part of the human condition, where human being is understood to be “homo democraticus.”

The problem was one of managing these unfortunate trends, or recognizing that they did not amount to a totalizing critique, and that anyway, there really aren’t any viable alternatives to the democratic expression of the will of the people. If it was the case that the state, under these conditions, amounted to nothing more than an aggregate of compromises between heterogenous groups (the sum total of their agreements) then surely people should recognize that this still must be the best possible world, all other things considered. The trick must simply be to find ways to renew the spirit of our constitutional patriotism, so that our institutions might be reflective of a unity found through shared commitment to democratic values, rather than allowing them to devolve into the ‘pacta sunt servanda’ or the ethic of civil war.

The Political Theory of Carl Schmitt: Sovereign is He Who Decides the Exception

In the 1920s, the German jurist and legal scholar Carl Schmitt became known for criticisms of the Weimar Republic’s parliamentary system which had understood itself in similar terms to those described above.

Insisting that the state had become subordinate to the various social and economic associations that made up the contemporary political landscape, Schmitt believed that a decision could not be eluded; as Dominique Leydet describes it, “either the state must collapse, or there must be a re-affirmation of unity through authoritarian presidential rule based on plebiscitary acclamation.” That the German judiciary after WWI was generally attracted to authoritarianism is of course, of no great surprise, since they were the generation of judges that had thrived under Bismarck. For most of this generation, as Ingo Mueller has written in Hitler’s Justice, the constitutional democracy of Weimar was considered illegitimate, a break in the political culture imposed from without by the treaty of Versailles, which in turn had come about because of internal enemies, the so called ‘stab in the back.’

What then, was the nature of the decision to be made, in order to save the State, in its sovereignty, from the polarized pluralism that increasingly besets it during Weimar?

In keeping with the general drift of the conservative, militarized political class, the content of the decision, per Schmitt, was the sorting out of “friend or foe.” According to Schmitt’s decisionism, the foundation of law is not to be found in the values and norms from which law derives, the content of the law, if you will; the validity of the law comes from the fact that it reflects the decision of the rightful authority, the Leader, on behalf of the people, in response to the state of emergency. The ultimate authority of government lies not with the constitutional process of making legislation, and not with the law as the ultimate standard to which we must appeal. The ultimate authority of government is found in the executive power to abrogate or suspend the law, to declare a state of exception. Thus, the meaning of Schmitt’s aphorism, “sovereign is he who decides the exception.”

Lest anyone think, even for a minute, that this is all just theoretical stuff, one need only continue to revisit the run up to the Nazi seizure of power with the Reichstag Fire Decree, as does Ingo Mueller. After WWI, writes Mueller, the courts increasingly recognized the distinction between “friend and foe” in legal opinions. It can be seen in the generalized leniency toward the right, and severity toward the left; it can be seen in the disappearance of the notion of the ‘loyal opposition’ which had been a great achievement of the nineteenth century legal system.

Most importantly, as should be obvious, it resulted in the decline of the rule of law. Murderers attorneys regularly pleaded for acquittal based on self-defense on behalf of the Government (which couldn’t defend itself because of the treaty of Versailles). The doctrine of defense of the State under conditions of national emergency were to be understood as justification for the defendant’s actions. The German courts regularly accepted the notion that belief in the state of emergency could justify breaking the law.

The apotheosis of all of this, of course, came with Reichstag Fire Decree, which annulled nearly all constitutionally guaranteed basic rights, including freedom of speech and assembly, the right to form organizations, protection from unwarranted search and seizure, privacy rights, etc. With the decree, the National Socialist State exempted itself from any normative constraint based on its claimed right to national self-defense.

Under the state of exception, the criminal law becomes all about protecting the state from the individual rather than the other way around. Where previously what was not expressly forbidden was allowed, post decree, what was not expressly allowed was to be taken as forbidden. As Mueller writes, “The nature of state power is revealed most clearly in the state of emergency…here decision and norm diverge, and authority proves that it need not have a basis in law in order to dispense justice.”

Schmitt’s aphorism, ‘sovereign is he who decides the exception’ describes how Hitler in fact took power, with the unilateral abrogation of civil liberties in Germany. The doctrine of national emergency came to be used as a justification of everything the National Socialist regime did. As David T. Pan has written, “The very existence of the Jews in German society constituted a state of exception for Hitler because of his conviction that they constituted a basic threat to German national unity. The state of exception was the judicial basis for the Nazi death camps.

The Conceptual Priority of the Decision Over the Norm

In the POTUS’s previous invocation of unitary executive power to make the case that executive orders in the realm of national security/immigration are unreviewable (because all that matters is whether he does or does not have authority to determine a condition of national emergency) we hear strong echoes of fascist decisionism.

Whatever one thinks about the strengths and weaknesses of various legal-philosophical projects to explain our heretofore modern conviction that the laws follow from reflecting shared universal moral values and norms, the project as a whole is reflective of the moral intuition of most people who live in modern societies. The notion that political decision by an authoritarian leader somehow founds an order of being, such that sovereignty somehow coalesces in the leader’s decision as the will of the people, presumably to choose their greatness, finds credibility only where a mythology of the ‘Volk’ as the superior racial-spiritual essence of a nation holds sway. For two hundred and forty years, American popular sovereignty is generally expressed in and through our commitment to the universalist values and norms reflected in the US Constitution, and the Constitution checks the authority of the President who is not above the law.

I have indicated that to claim that an Executive Order is “unreviewable” before the Appellate Court (from whom you are asking for a stay) is a truly bizarre contortion, because it is tantamount to denying the authority of the court to whom you are making the appeal. Such a contortion appears because of the absence of the kind of clear decision that I have been describing. Nazis don’t generally argue their case before democratic courts (because to do so results in such a reductio ad absurdum). Instead, they suspend constitutions by declaring a state of emergency and relocate sovereignty in the Leader’s absolute power of decision. By arguing about it, rather than just doing it, therefore, the administration showed themselves to be wavering. Based on what we are now seeing, it’s possible that they may make another try. It will be interesting to see if they have the balls.

[T]he liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism–ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.” — Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1938

I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble.” — Joe Biden, 2018

“One of the tragedies of the Trump era,” author Fatima Bhutto recently lamented, “has been how American liberals have co-opted and utterly ruined the word “resistance” so that it now applies to neo-con interventionist hawks, former CIA directors and anyone who has ever tweeted against the 45th president.” Partisan politicos should note that the neo-con interventionist hawks Bhutto is referring to are Hillary Rodham Clinton, Madeleine Albright and, thanks to the welcoming embrace of Michelle Obama, the waterboarding torture president, George W. Bush.

“Madeleine Albright,” Bhutto scathingly emphasizes, “who claimed that the death of a half-million children in Iraq in the 1990s was ‘worth it’, can be hailed as a principled anti-fascist fighter […].” She makes a valid point, I think. In the idiom of the Star Wars franchise, this version of The Resistance bears too much resemblance to the Death Starto serve as a convincing Rebel Base. These are not the anti-fascists you are looking for.

Bhutto’s observations allude to something unsettling and, at first blush, bizzare about the contemporary state of liberalism–especially American liberalism. American liberals are simultaneously obsessed with and not very serious about resisting reactionary-fascist politics. How can this be? In this first of several pieces exploring the relationship between liberalism and internationally ascendant far-right authoritarian, ethno-nationalist, and reactionary-fascist politics, I want to venture an explanation of this odd ‘obsessed/unserious’ state of affairs. My hope in writing this is a very practical one: that in some small way it’ll provide a bit of political insight for those of us trying to making sense of the political jockeying taking place as we ramp up for the 2020 election cycle.

In the course of these explorations it will quickly become apparent that this narrowly inscribed conflict–liberalism versus fascism–is far too narrow and ill-construed to afford us much practicable political insight. Rather than a head-to-head competition of political ideologies fought in a mythic ‘public marketplace of ideas’–tried and true liberal democracy battling against the out-of-the-blue resurgence of a hateful ideology we thought we’d buried on the battlefields of Europe–I want to suggest that it would be wiser for us to view the rise of reactionary-fascist politics as a symptom of a global crisis of liberal centrist governance. This crisis is, in turn, fueled by broader crises, the most prominent of which are the still unresolved deep crisis of global capitalism revealed in the financial crisis of 2008, the consequent growing recognition and popular dissatisfaction with the deleterious effects of neoliberal ideology, and the destabilizing geopolitical impact of the United States’ waning status as the world’s first true (and perhaps last) global hegemon.

This is obviously far more than we can chew in one bite, so for now let’s focus on mainstream American liberals’ fickle attitude about fascists.

Liberalism, Political and Economic

On one hand, American liberals are very much worried about the rise of authoritarian, ethno-nationalist, and neo-fascist movements–particularly as exemplified by Donald Trump. A quick glance at Yale philosopher Jason Stanley’s new book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them reveals that Trump almost instinctively displays many archetypal fascist characteristics. Among them are: racist animus, anti-immigrant nativism, ethnonationalist and ethno-supremacist mythologizing, valorization of the authoritarian strong-man daddy/protector figure, basic contempt for democratic institutions, valorization of masculine violence, hetero-conventional gender hysteria, and toxic, machismo-fueled misogyny, and (rarer but far from absent in Trump whose daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren are Jewish) violence-provoking anti-Semitic dog whistling. All of this is an affront to liberal political and moral sensibilities and American liberals are appropriately repulsed by it.

On the other hand, however, American liberalism is still in the drunken throes of a 40-year neoliberal bender, awash in corporate influence money, fawning towards Wall Street, celebrity, and elite wealth while contemptuously indifferent to the plight of working people, and willfully naïve about the uses, abuses, and consequences of American imperial power abroad. If these are the people you were hoping would save us all from fascism, I wouldn’t hold my breath. To the contrary, actually. Revulsion towards this ideologically neoliberal, economically-elitist, corporate capitalist comportment (which mainstream Democrats and Republicans share), fueled by the suffering and humiliation induced by the Great Recession, are the main ingredients in the toxic reactionary cocktail that produced a President Trump in the first place. After all, reactionary-fascist politics are just that: reactionary. They’re reacting to the very thing that American liberalism has invested itself in defending for the past 40 years: a global system of winner-take-all corporate capitalism so dysfunctional, so destructive to the lives of ordinary people, so caustic to social cohesion, and in such deep structural crisis that it’s destroying people’s hope for some semblance of ‘the good life’ and ‘the American Dream’ on a grand (dare I say popular) scale.

Liberalism’s two historical branches–political liberalism, which (among other things) valorizes the freedom of citizens, and economic liberalism, which valorizes the freedom of the market–have always cohabitated in uneasy tension. However, the current manifestation of economic liberalism, neoliberalism, has become so antagonistic to the better angels of our politically liberal nature that it’s generating a liberal democratic legitimation crisis–not just in the United States, but throughout the liberal democratic world. To put the matter in the simplest terms possible: political liberalism finds fascism abhorrent and neoliberalism in deep crisis is a fascist generator. As long as the latter problem goes unaddressed, the former attitude doesn’t really lead us anywhere.

This largely unreflected and unresolved conflict lives deep in the heart of the early 21st century mainstream American liberal. It at least partially explains the kind of ideological schizophrenia we saw from American liberal centrists leading up to the midterm election Blue Wave, and that we’ll continue to see as we move towards the 2020 elections. Progressive in their vehement opposition to the racist, misogynist, neo-fascist Trump. Strangely conservative in their defense of a devastating economic status quo ante–in evidence most clearly in the form of undercutting proposals from the economic left (e.g., Medicare for All, tuition reform, progressive taxation, a Green New Deal, etc.).

Progressive Neoliberalism

The feminist critical theorist Nancy Fraser offers an extremely useful framework for understanding the odd unreflected and unresolved conflict in liberalism I describe above. Fraser appeals to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (i.e., the dominant ideology of a ruling class established through a process of naturalizing the presuppositions of its worldview to the point that they are accepted as “common sense” cultural norms). Because it is internalized as commonsensical and natural, hegemony is obviously extremely difficult to counter.

The organizational counterpart to hegemony, Fraser explains, is the hegemonic bloc, “a coalition of disparate social forces that the ruling class assembles and through which it asserts its leadership.”

Until Donald Trump’s rise to power, Fraser argues, the dominant hegemonic bloc was progressive neoliberalism. If that sounds like an oxymoron, bear in mind that it’s effectively the unreflected and unresolved conflict I described above that lives deep in the heart of the early 21st century mainstream American liberal.

Progressive neoliberalism rose to dominance from among several hegemonic contenders. It’s main rival was reactionary neoliberalism of the sort birthed in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan. Reactionary neoliberalism married neoliberal economics and governance (financialization, deindustrialization, the free movement of capital, deregulation of banking, the growth of predatory lending, the weakening of labor unions, tax cuts and austerity, the uncoupling of the market from democratic steering) to reactionary politics (traditional marriage, Christian fundamentalism, neo-nationalist patriotism, and overt forms of patriarchy, racism, homophobia). Reagan formulated this ideological coupling by simultaneously championing neoliberal economic policy while rallying the, up to that point, apolitical “Moral Majority” of Christian fundamentalists into active political participation. It’s interesting to note that Atlas Shrugged author Ayn Rand, a pro-choice and anti-religious neoliberal of the Hayekian libertarian variety, hated Reagan because of it. It was nevertheless popular enough to survive as a counterhegemonic contender via the ‘culture wars’ through the end of the 20th century.

Fraser notes, however, that this conservative configuration of neoliberalism proved incapable of becoming hegemonic largely because the country was still coming out of the pro-labor and pro-democratic welfare state sensibilities of the New Deal and the social movements and civil rights revolution of the 1960’s New Left. These sensibilities made neoliberalism a hard sell. “Only when decked out as progressive,” Fraser writes, “could a deeply regressive political economy become the dynamic center of a new hegemonic bloc.”

To become hegemonic, Fraser explains, progressive neoliberalism married an “expropriative, plutocratic economic program with a liberal-meritocratic politics of recognition.” To succeed it first had to put down two main rivals: it had to destroy what remained of the New Deal coalition and it had to defeat reactionary neoliberalism. The former task, as we well know, was accomplished by gradually destroying the political power of organized labor. It accomplished the latter by embracing the kind of progressivism decoupled from economics exemplified by New Left social movement politics. That is to say, it championed anti-racism, feminism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, and LGBTQ rights.

The progressive neoliberal hegemonic bloc has now failed, thanks largely to the damage caused by neoliberal economics and the 2008 financial crisis. This failure was occasioned by populist backlashes on the right and left. This backlash initially became apparent in the rise of the Tea Party Movement. It was followed by Occupy Wall Street. It came to a head, as we all know, leading up to the 2016 election cycle. The first wave of socialist-progressive populist push-back–represented in the presidential bid of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders riding the wave of Occupy Wall Street anger–was successfully put down by Hillary Clinton and the progressive neoliberal Democratic National Committee. Neoliberals in the Republican Party, however, failed to put down the reactionary populist backlash represented by the presidential bid of billionaire reality TV star Donald Trump, who ran on what Fraser calls an ultra-reactionary platform. That is to say, a platform attacking both progressivism and neoliberalism.

Interregnum and Political Opportunity

So where does this leave us presently? Nancy Fraser suggests that are living in an interregnum. There is no dominant hegemonic bloc at the moment. Ever the con man, Donald Trump ran on a reactionary populist platform, promising to improve the material lives of his supporters. He’s ended up governing, instead, as a hyper-reactionary neoliberal, a bait-and-switch that was all-too-willingly backed by congressional Republican (and a few Democrat) neoliberals who were more than willing to look the other way where ultra-reactionary and neo-fascist misbehavior is concerned so long as they could continue to serve the interests of the corporate constituency who, in our post-Citizens United political environment, own them. Instead of dismantling neoliberal economic policy in favor of policies to help working people, Trump’s GOP offered tax cuts for the rich, attacks on affordable healthcare, a ballooning deficit, and repeated cries for more austerity.

Trump’s populist betrayal affords an opportunity, given that a “hegemonic gap” still exists in the vacuum of a failed progressive neoliberalism. That opportunity is to convince Trump’s followers to reject their “crypto-neoliberal” faux-allies to join other economic populists in supporting the progressive populist option that Senator Sanders championed. It’s economically populist like the platform Trump promised but failed to deliver, but universalist and inclusive rather than protectionist. It would entail demonstrating (which shouldn’t be difficult at this point) that no amount of border wall construction or scapegoating of foreigners is ever going to restore middle class jobs and the American Dream they feel they’ve been cheated out of. Doing this is, in my opinion, what is required to resist fascism seriously. This is the alternative offered by the growing contingent of democratic socialist and economically progressive voices that ran for and won office in the 2018 midterms.

To be successful, this economically progressive/democratic socialist alternative has to avoid the seducements and entrapments of neoliberal ideology, which is a quite formidable challenge. What happened with Syriza in Greece provides a cautionary tale in this regard (see the piece I wrote on neoliberalism and democracy in 2017). Neoliberal ideology not only has unlimited post-Citizens United “money as speech” supporting it. It’s also backed by decades of hegemonic weight, leading even very smart, informed people to view what is ultimately an ideology as natural, commonsensical, and inescapable–something for which, to quote Margaret Thatcher, “There Is No Alternative” (TINA).

These latter neoliberal dangers, of course, are the driving force behind a retrograde opportunity Trump’s betrayal also affords–the one we’ll see the liberal centrists attempt to pull off in 2020. By the liberal centrists, I mean the Rubinite/Clintonian New Democrats and their supporters who’ve controlled the Democratic party since Bill Clinton’s presidency; also people like the reliably swing-voting Blue Dogs ( Democrat enough to push through the Affordable Care Act, but Republican enough to unite with the GOP to kill the single payer option for the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies before it comes to a vote); the No Labels PAC-funded Problem Solvers Caucus, who recently held Nancy Pelosi’s speakership hostage in exchange for a weakening of House majority power; and finally, also that ever-shrinking, endangered species of ‘moderate’ Republican, like these three former Kansas Republicans, who remain committed neoliberals but who no longer have the stomach for the Trumpian fascist turn.

These liberal centrists will attempt to prop up a dysfunctional neoliberal capitalism in deep systemic crisis a bit longer, dragging out the mass scale human suffering it produces for the benefit of a tiny wealthy elite. They’ll do so by attempting to reinstate the lost status quo ante of progressive neoliberalism. Since progressive neoliberalism has already been dethroned (i.e., is no longer widely credible) as the dominant hegemonic bloc, propping it up a bit longer merely prolongs the interregnum. More importantly, as Nancy Fraser argues, “To reinstate progressive neoliberalism, on any basis, is to recreate — indeed, to exacerbate — the very conditions that created Trump. And that means preparing the ground for future Trumps — ever more vicious and dangerous.” In other words, it offers an anti-anti-fascist solution, and one that’s guaranteed to fail even if it ‘wins’.

In the few sections remaining I want to suggest that we use the framework of understanding provided by Nancy Fraser as something of a practical roadmap for deciphering the moves on the political gameboard coming out of the 2018 midterm Blue Wave and heading toward the 2020 election.

Lament for the Washington Consensus

Despite what I’ve shared above, and given how pernicious the ideological seducements of a hegemonic bloc can be, I am well aware that there are progressive Democrats who will take great umbrage toward what I’m about to write. I imagine the following retort. These liberal centrists–at least the Democrat ones–aren’t as economically regressive and plutocratic as I’ve painted them to be. Many of them are incredibly progressive. They’re anti-racist. They advocate for trans rights. They fought for gay marriage. They defend reproductive rights. They’re trying to protect immigrants. They’re the people behind the #meToo movement for crying out loud!

The progressive accolades in the latter part of this retort are are of course true. The opening apologia (that they’re not cold neoliberals) is simply false. That’s why the odd couplet progressive neoliberalism has been so effective.

To illustrate my point, and before diving in, I want to share a speech that former President Barack Obama gave as part of a panel discussion not a month ago (November 27, 2018). This was in the course of a panel discussion with James Baker (Ronald Reagan’s White House Chief of Staff and later his Treasury Secretary, and George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State). The occasion was the 25th anniversary gala and fundraiser for the James Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston (a pro-corporate think tank). You can watch the conversation in its entirety yourself here, although if you are a progressive fan of President Obama I will warn you that it’s hard to watch. For a synopsis of the key points with transcripts I suggest you watch here. I watched the conversation earlier this week and I confess that I was shocked by President Obama’s candor.

Obama and Baker shared their lament about the dissolution of the neoliberal Washington Consensus that reigned, as Obama stated, “between Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and certainly elements of my administration […].” Both men admitted that they’d gotten a “little smug” at the end of the Cold War. They even shared a joke at the expense of Francis Fukuyama regarding The End of History. President Obama acknowledged that the consensus, and the global capitalism it fueled, destroyed jobs in areas hit hardest by economic globalization, left a lot of people behind, lead to the massive increase in inequality we’ve seen, and helped to fuel the rise of the far right.

There is nothing shocking about these claims which, after all, any careful student of geopolitics already knew. What was shocking was hearing the words come out of President Obama’s own mouth, acknowledging and owning the accusations and admitting, despite these harsh conclusions, that he still considers himself to be a part of the consensus. He even went so far as to complain, only weeks after publication of the IPCC’s urgent and alarming report about climate change, that he hadn’t received appropriate credit for increasing oil production every year he was president (“That that whole, ‘Suddenly America is the biggest oil producer’ — that was me, people!”), and for making Wall Street rich (“Just say thank you, please.”).

I mention this conversation between two American liberal centrists (one Democrat and one Republican) as an indication of what we can expect from the centrist mainstream wing of the Democratic Party as the 2020 election approaches. In essence, what we’ll see is a reenactment of the struggle Nancy Fraser described in discussing progressive neoliberalism‘s initial hegemonic rise. It again will attempt to put down two main rivals: it will attempt to destroy, not a residual New Deal coalition dating from the time of FDR and the Great Depression, but instead the rise of a Green New Deal coalition emerging out of the Great Recession. And it must also defeat not simply a reactionary neoliberalism, but a hyper-reactionary neoliberalism. And our job, if we hope for the continued ability to hope, is to keep this from happening.

The Blue Wave and the Road to 2020

As Democratic momentum grew in support of the midterm Blue Wave last fall a certain progressive neoliberal narrative began to take shape. The gist of the strategy was basically to play up the progressivism, but to coyly ix-ne on the eoliberalism-ne. Out of the progressive neoliberal toolkit you had available the full force of New Left progressivism to use as a cudgel. And as an awful, fascistic, “pussy-grabbing” chauvinist, Trump makes an easy target. He’s a racist. He’s a homophobe. He’s a misogynist. He’s a danger to the transgender community. He’s a white supremacist. All so, so true.

As for the economic populism Trump ran on? No no. Don’t go there. To every think piece that suggests Trump’s supporters voted out of “economic anxiety” you must object. No! Trump’s supporters voted for Trump because they’re…(re-apply progressive cudgel here). They’re racists, they’re nazis, they’re misogynists, they’re a “basket of deplorables,” etc. Why is reactionary-fascist politics popular? Because haters gunna hate.

The general idea was that this Blue Wave of Democrats were going to wash away those alarmingly irresponsible Republicans who’d gotten cozy with the fascist president. At some point Robert Mueller will strike his hammerblow, and he’ll prove that Trump is also a usurper, that the reason the Democrats didn’t prevail in 2016 is because of collusion with foreign governments and widespread Russian election meddling. This part is key. This is the collusion narrative, and the DNC has a lot of its eggs in this basket. For DNC water carriers like Rachel Maddow it’s been the only thing worth talking about for two years. There are other impeachable crimes that the Mueller investigation may uncover. Obstruction of justice, for instance. Violation of the Emoluments Clause. Nevertheless, the collusion charge is the important one.

If Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the election, that means Hillary Clinton wasn’t beaten at the polls by an incompetent reality television star with fascist instincts. It means she was robbed. And if Hillary Clinton was robbed, then the charge that she was a weak candidate and that the Democratic Party’s progressive neoliberal platform was out-of-touch with voters isn’t necessarily true. In other words, the collusion narrative offers cover for have to rehash embarrassing economic questions raised against a neoliberal who give $657,000 speeches to Goldman-Sachs because “that’s what they offered.”

Challenges from the economically progressive and democratic socialist left obviously prove even more difficult to check on economic grounds. Unable to grab any economic tools from the progressive neoliberal toolkit without risking getting throttled on economic policy, again the centrist Democrats reached for the progressive cudgel, insisting, in the lead up to 2016, that “old white man” Bernie Sanders had a black problem and a woman problem (to which Briahna Gray, to her credit, played a continual game of identity politics whack-a-mole to disprove). And worse from Gloria Steinem (women who like Bernie are “boy crazy”), Madeleine Albright (women who don’t vote for Hillary are going to hell), and John Lewis (who never “bumped into” Bernie Sanders during the Civil Rights era). I wrote about this whole phenomenon in detail last summer in a piece entitled The Neoliberal Left is an Anti-Left.

When the progressive cudgel couldn’t be used on a democratic socialist Latina woman (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), the narrative had to switch to one explaining how democratic socialist (i.e., neoliberalism-challenging) economic proposals were all so much idealistic and unwinnable “pie in the sky” (TINA). What is needed instead is good old stodgy, even-keeled moderate centrist incrementalism.

Of course Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer needs to walk back efforts to champion Medicare for All. “I’m going to support a plan that can pass […],” he insists. By “can pass” it would not be at all cynical to assume he means “meets the requirements of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.”

Similarly, of course there will be no select congressional committee on a Green New Deal, despite a very recent poll that reveals that 81% of registered voters–including 64% of Republicans–support Green New Deal provisions. When the terrifying IPCC report suggests that radical intervention is needed within the next ten years, including not only the cessation of fossil fuel usage, but actual carbon capturing efforts like massive reforestation if we want to literally save organized human life on earth, we’ll say it sounds like some old fashioned incremental change is what’s needed. So instead we’ll slide into this climate change problem–test the waters for the fossil fuel lobby, so to speak. We’ll call up Kathy Castor (D-Fla) to resurrect the defunct House panel on climate change. And unlike other congressional committees it will be advisory only, with no subpoena power. And no, of course we won’t block membership to representatives who are funded by fossil fuel interests. That’d be an affront to the First Amendment!

Finally, in a time when a reactionary-fascist aspiring President has captured a major political party machine and the rest of us are suppose to be “resisting,” liberal centrists will insist that now is the time to “come together as a nation” to “heal” and reject all of this “tribal divisiveness.” That’s a desirable goal. The way to do it is to join together to address our collective social, economic, and environmental challenges. But that’s not what the gesture aims to accomplish. It is, instead, a call for the old center-right neoliberals in the Republican Party to join forces with the center-left neoliberals in the Democratic Party to crush these angry populists on the “far-right” and the “far-left” so that the proverbial 1% can keep all of the money until global warming drives the species to extinction. Charming, no?

The Liberal Centrist Dream

The path is clearly being paved. In two years, running roughly the same progressive-neoliberal playbook that Hillary used, we’ll elect a new sensible, moderate, centrist-incrementalist president. Who will it be? Neoliberal Joe Biden? Neoliberal Beto O’Rourke? Neoliberal Kamala Harris? Maybe Hillary herself if she’ll run again. And then what?

The dream, I suppose, is that the Europeans will join us by cobbling together various center-right and center-left TINA parties into Third Way style coalition governments. And magically the Pax Americana will be restored. We’ll all go back to being successful entrepreneurs, making money and posting beautiful photographs of our perfect lives on Instagram. We’ll champion various economically-benign progressive causes like (to paraphrase the Max Planck Institute’s Wolfgang Streek), helping women of high status secure high status executive positions in high status corporations, educational institutions, and the government, and by ensuring the tiny wealthy elite that owns the vast majority of the world’s wealth and resources is ‘fair’ by demanding that a representative minority of those elites consist of people of color in percentages that reflect the demographics of the wider population.

We’ll also re-commit to the Paris Agreement that President Obama signed up for while he was increasing oil production every year that he was president, and a combination of market incentives, green capitalism, and non-binding commitments will be just enough, and just in time, to preserve a habitable world for our children and grandchildren. Life will go back to the way it used to be before American nazis ran over their fellow Americans with cars, stabbed them to death on commuter trains, and shot them dead in Synagogue.

It’s a lovely dream, isn’t it?

Emmanuel Macron as Hillary Clinton: A Final Thought

I want to leave you with a final thought which illustrates, I think, why the progressive neoliberal centrist still fail even if they win. It’ll also set the stage for my next installment, which will focus more internationally on the crisis of liberal centrism throughout the world.

In an odd way, the fact that many Americans don’t realize that progressive neoliberalism has failed and cannot (should not!) be resuscitated has much to do with the fact that Hillary Rodham Clinton didn’t become president. We still have fantasies concerning how great things would be now had she only won. Of course, if she really had won we would suffer under no such delusions. The failure of progressive neoliberalism would be clear.

It’s possible to learn this lesson, however, by considering France’s progressive neoliberal president, Emmanuel Macron. In a sense sufficient for our little thought experiment, Emmanuel Macron is Hillary Clinton had Hillary Clinton actually become president. It might be interesting to ask in this context, how are things going for President Macron? Not so well it turns out. Just ask the gilets jaunes (yellow vests). What began as a protest against a hike in diesel fuel taxes by Macron–a tax that hit working class people particularly hard, has become a major popular movement. French protesters donning the yellow safety vests all French drivers are required to carry soon barricaded the streets, May ’68 style. Hundreds of thousands of them. This began on November 17. To date the protests are still happening.

What’s interesting about the gilets jaunes is that, much like Occupy Wall Street, they’re not identified with a political party or ideology. This is a general economic protest by, as superbly illustrated by the yellow vest, “everyman/everywoman”.

Many of these people voted for Macron to keep Marine LePen’s neo-Fascist National Front from taking power. And Macron won. Why, then, aren’t the French people happy now? Might there be some sort of problem with France’s progressive neoliberal centrist government?

In a well-conducted city, each member flies with joy to the assemblies; under a bad government, no one is disposed to bend his way thither…

— -Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, XV

Among the clear casualties of the Trump era, one must add to the list the entire edifice of what we might wish to call the American domestic experience of liberal post-politics. Here I am referring to the longstanding Panglossian conviction of American liberals that there is no need to “do politics” because, well, we already live in the best of all possible socio-political worlds.

It’s the belief that the existence of democratic values, embedded in the norms and practices of our institutions of government, present an impenetrable bulwark against out and out illiberalism. It is the willingness to allow a withered political party and its elected representatives, who remain the captive of special interests, to make deals with similar on the other side, so that the work of administration can go on under perennially divided government, until the next election. It’s also the comfortable reliance on proxy professional advocacy organizations, armed with our charitable contributions, to lobby, litigate, and/or do PR in conjunction with, or working against, business organizations, PACS, think tanks, and foundations.

For the purposes of this multi-part post, I am intentionally putting aside the more all-encompassing and more familiar variant of the end of post-politics, which could be placed under the slogan “the end of the end of history” since it concerns the status of the USA as global hegemon — here one finds consideration of the solidity of international norms and institutions, approaches to international political and economic governance, and the status of common international security arrangements.

My interest here is centered upon our uniquely American (and so far, very unsatisfactory) center-left debate about how to gather our collective resources in the interest of establishing something counter-hegemonic to the new species of fractured neoliberal hegemony that is presently emerging. By fractured hegemony, I mean the experience of a class of semi-elite beneficiaries of a prior hegemonic political consensus, whose cultural and political identity has rested upon a false consciousness about the extent to which they are, in fact, hegemonic elites.

If the end of liberal post-politics creates a possible opening for the emergence of a counter-hegemony, then it makes sense that civil society should now return to front and center of our concern.

Typically, when one thinks about hegemony and counter-hegemony, following Antonio Gramsci, one also thinks of civil society as a “war of position marked by a reciprocal siege between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic actors.” By means of hegemony, Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato have explained, “members of dominated classes are ideologically blinded to their subordinate position in the social structure.” Hegemony in the first instance, therefore, speaks to the manner in which dominated classes are guided, via various forms of cultural mass manipulation, to promote their interests in a manner that does not threaten the existing order.

It is my belief that before we can arrive at an effective coalition politics and counter-hegemonic strategy, it needs to be recognized not just that dominated classes are subject to hegemonic false consciousness, but that under neoliberal hegemony, the liberal wing of the dominant class has also been systematically misled–not about its subordination, but rather about its class dominance. This, after all, has been the genius of the corporate Democrats since Jimmy Carter first hired Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve.

What now has changed to unsettle this longstanding set of hegemonic practices? Simply put, it is the dominance of a new class of elites, the swollen ranks of the super-rich in our new gilded age, who have decided that the prior neoliberal consensus–with its (admittedly highly blinkered) republican, universalist, and cosmopolitan scruples–is an inconvenience that no longer has to be tolerated. The classical, dominant class hegemony has previously been all about effectively snowing the underclasses per se. Now it’s also about a polarization strategy (one that I am here calling fractured hegemony) that encourages the white working class and the shrinking white middle class to turn against semi-elite liberals–along with vulnerable minorities, immigrants and the poor–in a manner that buttresses the existing order of neoliberal elite class domination.

* * *

If the end of liberal post-politics creates a possible opening for the emergence of a counter-hegemony, then it makes sense that the question of civil society should now return to front and center of our concern. In an everyday sense, this is happening in two ways, reflecting the different instincts of liberal centrists and social movement activists about the relative fertility of pre-political (civic) soil. On the one hand, there is the desire to harness the resources of the civil society in some way, in order to reassert a sense of common cause among working class and middle class that will depolarize the American electorate. On the other, there is the imperative to bring together and radicalize the constituents of various social movements in a unified front, in order to then engage in effective political struggle.

It’s interesting to note at this point that whether one wants to depolarize, or to radicalize, either way, figuring out how to go about doing so involves some level of recourse to Gramsci’s (methodological) differentiation of civil society from both the economy and the state.

Civil Society at the Center of our Common Concern

Gramsci’s various statements about hegemony, civil society, the economy, and the state are notoriously ambiguous. Cohen and Arato, for example, identify what they call three systematic antinomies in his analysis, which can be seen to arise out of a set of simultaneous but divergent imperatives — to account for the Russian revolution and soviet society, while also giving a satisfactory account of the persistence of Western capitalist societies. The resulting overall picture of civil society, as David Forgacs has written, is at once “the political terrain on which the dominant class organizes its hegemony, and the terrain on which opposition parties and movements organize, win allies, and build their social power.”

In her article called “Gramsci’s Trenches: Civil Society as Warfare” Dutch professor of International Relations Marlies Glasius points out that there are actually two different conceptions of civil society that have been derived from Gramsci’s account:

Thick Hegemony: First, there is the version (following the cultural anthropologist James Scott) which she calls thick hegemony: here civil society is seen primarily as the sphere or set of institutions in which hegemony is exercised and reproduced, the realm of Michel Foucault’s “relations of power” in which the state and the dominant class hegemonically maintain a culture of putative consent. One should understand thick hegemony as being all about the stubbornness and deep-seated inherence of the dominant cultural hegemony within the bottom-up complexity of the civil society.

This is the reason, per Gramsci, it doesn’t make sense for the forces of the Left, armed with an economistic theory about the inevitable collapse of capitalism, to try to fight a “war of maneuver,” of class against class. Per Gramsci, such an assault would confront the fact that the capitalist state “was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.” Having destroyed the outer perimeter, Gramsci says, “the assailants would find themselves confronted by a line of defense which was still effective.”

Under the banner of thick hegemony, Glasius writes, “the emphasis is on the reproduction of the status quo in civil society, rather than challenges to it.” While the possibility of resistance is not excluded, as Cohen and Arato write, “hegemonic change requires “a radically pluralist conception that locates the forging of counter-hegemony in the multiplicity of antagonisms within civil society.”

Liberation Hegemony: Second, there is the thin version of hegemonic false consciousness, what Glasius calls the “counter hegemonic, or liberation” version. In this version, the organically complex, bottom-up network of trenches that comprise the civil society is seen as a natural bulwark against authoritarianism, one party rule, and the deployment of state coercion to enforce class dominance. Glasius says that the counter-hegemonic version provided the Latin American left with hope under right-wing dictatorships, “offering an arena for transformational political action “from under their very noses.” This view of Gramsci’s trenches also appears in Vaclav Havel’s account of the what he called the parallel polis–“Given the time and the means available, only a certain number of trenches can be eliminated, if at the same time, the parallel polis is able to produce more trenches than it loses, a situation that is mortally dangerous for the regime.”

Hannah Arendt Center Conference: Theda Skocpol & Chantal Mouffe

The tensions between these two versions of civil society, hegemony, and the state (springing forth from the head of Gramscian-Zeus like twin Athenas) were weighing on me when I sat down recently to watch the live webcast of the recent conference on civil disobedience held at the Bard College Hannah Arendt Center.

The Civil Disobedience conference events took place in early October, during some of the most uncertain final days before the 2018 midterm elections. Bard College President Leon Botstein, in the midst of having to watch the Central European University get kicked out of Budapest (Botstein is also Board Chairman of the Central European University) told the story with the sadness in his face, and with the probity of his short, informal remarks. Incidentally, while I agree with President Botstein’s remark that “the Internet is not a substitute for public space” I must confess that being able to “tune in” to The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard from the west coast–in order to hear him say it–blunted the edge just a little bit.

Two of the major speakers at the event were the Harvard historian Theda Skocpol (pronounced “scotchpole”), who writes about our diminished democracy and the imperative to recover a renewed sense of American civic nationalism, and the London-based political theorist Chantal Mouffe, a leading advocate of what has been called “agonistic democracy.” For purposes of the posts to follow in this series, I’d like to make the case that Skocpol and Mouffe work quite well as stand-ins for my Gramscian-Zeus’s two fully-formed Athenas — what I like to call the “de-polarize Athena, Goddess of Wisdom,” and the “radicalize Athena, Goddess of War.”

By looking at their highly divergent work on “reinvigorating democracy” in this manner (as having a common rootedness in the problem of civil society and hegemony) I hope (in the end) to be able to suggest some ways that we might disarm the apparent “either/or” of the two versions, by more radically rethinking American civic nationalism. In the next installment of this post, I will look at aspects of Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy(2003) and Chantal Mouffe’s recent paper, “Agonistic Democracy and Radical Politics.” This will set the stage for the final installment that revisits the case for civic nationalism, while also reading Ira Katznelson’s take on civil society and hegemony in his book, City Trenches.

What’s this? What’s this?
There’s something very wrong.
What’s this?
 — Jack Skellington, The Nightmare Before Christmas

We’re not Number One!

In 2016, The Global Democracy Index issued its annual report, and on this occasion felt it necessary to downgrade the United States from “Full Democracy” to “Flawed Democracy” status, because the USA’s total weighted score in their study fell below 8.0 for the first time.

Whereas the US used to keep company with most of the northern Europeans (and Uruguay), today we find ourselves 21st in the world out of 167 countries, and headed on average toward lesser European democracies and most Latin American countries. After Trump’s attacks on the media and the judiciary, voting rights, and immigrant rights, one can only assume that this downward movement will continue to accelerate.

Fall below 7.0 on the EIU scale, and we are bunking with Indonesia and Argentina at the top tier of that group. Admittedly, there’s a long way to drop in free fall before we land in the neighborhood of Russia and China (3.24 and 3.14 respectively). But for a country that annoyingly prides itself on being “number 1” in all things that matter to us (we regularly spurn silver and bronze medal Olympians) the passing of this threshold without any significant fanfare is really rather striking.

As we have moved apace through the too-numerous-to-count Trumpian outrages against the spirit and institutional practice of American democracy, the obvious question has continued to haunt me: does anybody actually even care about our (imperfect) American democracy? If not, why not?

This project was conceived when I was forced to ask myself a question that my prior understanding of democratic political legitimacy could not answer: Can the legitimacy of democratic institutions as such simply collapse? This question isn’t so much about why some people, even large numbers of people, might be attracted to some form of authoritarian political decisionism during times of crisis. I have written about these things in other places.

The question that concerned me here was, “how do I have to understand the legitimacy of liberal democratic institutions in order to explain the fact that large numbers of people are apparently willing to rescind their commitment to them? Or perhaps another, more Kantian formulation: Mature democracies can apparently collapse on their own. How is that possible?

These questions, I readily admit, rouse me out of my apparent educated lib-tard slumber.

Believe it or not, I had simply assumed–well into sclerotic middle age–that most people, when pledging their allegiance to the flag and the republic for which it stands, and feeling some reverence for the US Constitution, were like me, performing some version of an internal rational procedure. In this procedure, they understood themselves imaginatively to be personally ‘signing on the bottom line’ of the US Constitution, saying to themselves, “had I been there, that September day in Philadelphia, I would have taken the quill in hand, and with a cursive flourish unknown to this century, signed my name to the document, thereby recording my acceptance of it as a serviceable (albeit flawed) exemplar of the social contract.”

Ok. Go ahead, laugh. But my guess is there must be at least a few other people who grew up thinking like this!

Rational Reconstructions of the Social Contract

Now that the laughter has started to die down, it behooves me to point out that a lot of political theory produced in the second half of the twentieth century has also sought to “reconstruct” classical theories of social contract(from Hobbes to Locke to Rousseau and Kant) by inviting us to enter into internal rational procedures or thought experiments that are not too dissimilar. In Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, we find variations on a kind of a thought experiment concerning the transition from a “state of nature” to “society” that serves as a sort of rational justification for the legitimate authority of the state. While the notion of popular sovereignty and the consent of the governed survives into our own times, this classical political theory of the social contract presents a number of serious difficulties. Antiquated eighteenth century notions about such things as human psychology and natural law are now highly problematic, even where the basic intuition about the social contract ring true in various ways.

The standpoint of these projects turns out to be the shared liberal assumption that economic and political liberalism have simply “won the day” in the modern age, and are thus a permanent horizon and touchstone.

Latter day social contractarians such as John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas have sought to circumvent the many problems with eighteenth century political philosophy that begin with the thought experiment, “imagine the transition from a state of nature to the first civil society arrangements”. Seeking to retain the basic rational kernel in the theory of social contract, while dispensing with things like mechanistic psychological egoism and early modern natural law, Rawls invites modern persons under conditions of liberalism to arrive at principles of justice fairly in his book, A Theory of Justice.

He does so by inviting us to enter into a thought experiment with key information bracketed in what he calls “the original position, behind a veil of ignorance” — you must judge what is right and fair without knowing who you are: your gender, race, particular talents and abilities, age, social status, and more). In this fashion, instead of recourse to some imaginary “time one” where human beings rationally consented to live in society with one another, Rawls shows us what we must be willing to accept as rational persons in order to be capable of living in a just society where justice is fairness plus equality of chances to live a good life.

For his part, Habermas is concerned to investigate the functioning of normative validity claims in a general theoretical reconstruction of everyday communication competence, in which we regularly and unavoidably establish and redeem claims to normative validity or moral rightness in our interactions with others aimed at arriving at various sorts of consensus. In showing what we always do, whenever we communicate and reach understanding with others, when we say that this or that ought to or should be the case, or that something is morally right, Habermas seeks to point out the unavoidability of certain idealizing presuppositions as a way to ground them for us thereby, without recourse to some set of metaphysical assertions about God or nature, etc.

The Questionable Persistence of the Liberal Constitutional State

My point in bothering to sketch this out is not merely to try to show that my naïve “constitutional patriotism” bears a striking resemblance to the reflective rational procedures called for in the work of leading political theorists in the latter half of the twentieth century. While I believe this to be very much the case (ok, except for my dancing in front of the tv to the songs of the musical 1776) my intention is to point out something else, namely the real vulnerability of projects that seek to ground legitimacy claims and/or claims to moral rightness in the underlying fundament of a shared commitment to live like rational people in a just society.

To be clear, I am not here pointing out the oft cited “problem of application” that must be addressed whenever theorists wrestle with procedural aspects of the justification of norms in social action. If a moral or social norm is deemed to be valid such that it can in principle command the rational assent of all affected by its observance, then there is also the problem of how to apply it to the full range of possible situations.

No, the problem here has to do with justification itself, some assumptions relating to confidence in the growing share of rationality in modern societies. There are clearly things that rational people do, as a matter of course, when they go about the business of seeking a rational consensus; and there are procedures that individuals can undertake, as a kind of rationality test, when they go about judging candidate principles of justice that will apply to all in a putatively just society.

Time and time again in Rawls, especially in his later work, we see appeals that are based on recognition of the superiority of democratic socio-political legitimation mechanisms and institutions over and against any and all possible alternatives where pluralism is decisive (something that is found pretty much everywhere in complex modern societies). All things being equal, so the argument goes, anybody and everybody can see that since leaders and programs and projects can be legitimated and de-legitimated without violence and instability under conditions of liberal democratic politics, any rational person would have to recognize that this arrangement is the best possible socio-political arrangement we can hope to find.

So too, with Habermas, something similar, but in a different way. Running like a thread from early to late at a certain level of his analysis, we find a consistent and confident assertion of the “evolution of society.” For Habermas, the fruitfulness of reconstructing communicative competence (so as to create awareness of necessary presuppositions about normative validity) is found in a recognition that human history needs to be understood as a cognitive/technical and moral/practical learning process, and as such can be structured into developmental stages, with the latter ones marked by ever greater degrees of societal rationalization.

In the work of both Rawls and Habermas then, the starting point for establishing the binding force that should compel people to recognize and perform a set of rational procedures to ground their normative commitments is the conviction that, by and large, and ever more so over the course of human history, people do and will consult their rational endowment and choose to live under conditions of procedural justice as fairness under a liberal constitution.

What if most people are not particularly reflective about normative validity claims?

The assumption that the post-war order of increasing global democratization is both progressive and irreversible, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, itself turns out to be a condition of the political theory intrinsic to liberal constitutional democracy. As Claus Offe wrote in 1996, in Modernity and the State, “As soon as we start talking about legitimating justifications…there is no alternative to the will of the people as the final agency justifying political rule…there is, in other words, no alternative to liberal democracy…”

Offe’s point is not that there aren’t better or worse (or even more or less perverse) instances of recourse to “the will of the people.” Rather, it’s that every regime, no matter how liberal or illiberal, must in some sense call itself a democratic republic, and then wrap itself in at least some trappings of democracy–even where their justification for a prorated democracy (via claims to having a unique system because of culture and historical considerations) remains something of a farce to European and American ears.

Offe is saying here what Rawls and Habermas are thinking, namely that even where things like positive law and economic conditions limit the scope of actual democratic decision-making, still, from the point of view of ultimate legitimacy, “…alternatives that have their foundation in a dynasty, a theocracy, a particular philosophy of history or in natural law simply no longer come into consideration…modern societies are condemned to rely solely on the will of the people.”

But what if it turns out that these assumptions simply can longer be taken for granted? What if most people are not particularly reflective about normative validity claims? What if society is becoming less reflexive in this domain rather than more so?

What if, rather than making my confessed constitutional patriotism less laughable by referring it to this massive corpus of philosophical erudition, I only succeed in showing these intellectual projects to be, in themselves, of only a limited, academic interest? What if all that gets accomplished via this introduction is to widen the sphere of laughter and ridicule?

The standpoint of these projects turns out to be the shared liberal assumption that economic and political liberalism have simply “won the day” in the modern age, and are thus a permanent horizon and touchstone, even though complex modern societies continue to evolve in new and unpredicted ways under conditions of advanced or late capitalism.

A More Realist View of Political Legitimacy

The subject of this set of posts isn’t why most people seem not to care about the erosion of our republican form of government as enshrined in the Constitution, and why we have recently drifted from liberalism (as seen in both Democratic and Republican governance from FDR to Reagan) to out-and-out illiberalism. I have attempted to address this elsewhere. Nor is the purpose to attempt some rational reconstruction of why anybody should care in the first place.

Instead, my objective will be to try to think anew about what happens when (advanced capitalist) democratic socio-political legitimation veers into the territory of political crisis. The topic of this series of posts, therefore is not why nobody cares, but rather, in the end, why it may no longer matter whether they do so or not.

In taking this approach, I am following Raymond Geuss who, in 2008, criticized the idea of an “ethics first” political theory, as if the right way to begin when studying the social world is to assume that politics is applied ethics. Geuss instead called for a more “realist political theory” where the starting point should not be concerned with how political agents ought ideally to act or value, but rather with the way the social, economic, political institutions actually operate…” Narrowing still further, I take the suggestion of Daniel Gaus, who, following Geuss, wants to inject more realism specifically into the study of political legitimacy per se. But mercifully, enough about Geuss and Gaus.

For what reasons do actual people in complex societies believe in the legitimacy of democratic institutions? Is there a specific set of crisis conditions for the breakdown of otherwise competitive democratic regimes? Finally, in a subsequent installment of the this post I will be asking: is there a unique set of crisis conditions relating to legitimacy under present conditions of advanced capitalism?

On the Breakdown of Democratic Regimes

In the introduction to his 1978 work “The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes” Yale political scientist Juan Linz stakes out the space for his investigation by saying that although there has been a lot of work done on conditions leading to stable democracies, there hasn’t been very much done on trying to understand the process of the breakdown of competitive or mature democracies. He credits this state of affairs to a pervasive “postwar optimism about the durability of democracies.”

Social scientists of a more Marxist orientation, of course, tend to focus on structural characteristics of society leading to class conflicts. Since Marxists by and large don’t think liberalism per se is inherently stable, what is surprising is the creative persistence of liberalism in papering over its contradictions, and not democratic collapse, when and where it might occur. While it is true, Linz writes, that breakdown, where it occurs, can be explained by things like social and economic inequity and concentration of economic power, etc., answering the why would still leave open the question of precisely how.

Hitler did not take power because of a putsch, and Mussolini did not march into Rome at the head of fascist legions — he was summoned by the king, and traveled in a sleeping car.

Linz goes on to say that his concern is with the space of political action and the decisions of political actors. He is convinced that once the dynamics of breakdown have been exposed, it is possible to lay out various probabilities, and that this calculus might be used to help assure consolidation, stability, persistence, and re-equilibration of democratic regimes. Alternatively, they might also be employed, Linz admits, as something useful in a “school for dictators.”

To understand how democratic regimes breakdown, we must first grasp something about where obedience to these regimes comes from. Linz says that among defenders of democracy, there are those significant sectors of society who value democratic processes in and of themselves, and there are those who value democracy only insofar as they produce policies that are found to be satisfactory; for this group, democracy is not valued in and of itself, but rather as a means to an end.

Linz says that in his view, these two standpoints represent ideal type extremes, and neither of them capture the real sense of the legitimacy of democratic regimes for the majority of people whose allegiance is the basis for the stability of democratic political institutions. A democracy cannot be based exclusively on an abstract claim of legitimacy (this is the standpoint described above where I invited you to laugh at me). Yet we must also reject the assumption, Linz writes, that a democratic regime’s legitimacy is reducible to the expression and defense of a particular socioeconomic, cultural, or religious order.

In Linz’s view, democratic socio-political legitimation must be understood to depend upon “activation of commitments to decisions that are binding on the collectivity.” Since expecting that people do this out of some “abstract or rational claim to legitimacy” has already been previously rejected, we are apparently supposed to understand that along with various other particularistic motives (custom, advantage, solidarity, etc.) people with diverse programmatic political allegiances commit to a democratic politics pragmatically, because they recognize that this is the best possible socio-political arrangement under conditions of value pluralism. In principle, a democratic system should be able to rally legions of people pursuing widely varying goals over time. In a democracy, Linz writes, a government should enjoy legitimacy even among those who constitute its opposition (they become known as the loyal opposition).

In this pragmatic conception (to be honest it’s hard for me to see how this conception doesn’t ultimately derive from an abstract approach, since it’s all about rational self-interest) there is also the role of what Linz calls “efficacy and effectiveness” since these can be seen to strengthen or weaken legitimacy over time.

Democratic regimes exhibit efficacy when they are capable of developing programs that represent goals that are acceptable the majority without representing excessive deprivations for their opponents, and which also appeals to vested economic and international interests as well. Obviously, this is a pretty tough balancing act. Linz says that regimes sometimes rely more or less heavily on what is called the tunnel effect (in which satisfaction of the expectations of some sectors of the society serves to give hope to other who do not see any immediate outputs).

Along with efficacy, there is also the aspect of effectiveness, namely the regimes ability to carry out the plans for which they were placed into power. A regime that overplays its hand at the level of efficacy (promising all things to all people) can end up with weakened legitimacy if they can’t manage expectations.

The Loyal, the Disloyal & the Semi-Loyal

In order for Linz to proceed to his account of the dynamic process of democratic breakdown, he must first finish setting the stage, with the introduction of the dramatis personae. First, we have the loyal opposition, as mentioned previously. Linz has a ten-point list of essential characteristics of a loyal democratic opposition. The list includes, among other things, an unambiguous commitment to achieve power only by electoral means, and a readiness to surrender it to others with the same commitment. There is also the rejection of violence, a willingness to denounce those who call for extra constitutional regime change, and a willingness to participate in governing, by partnering with ideological opponents, etc.

In societies with stable democracies, one tends to see two-party systems, or moderate multi-party systems with stable governing coalitions. Where there is greater polarization, you have greater distances among them. Under these conditions, it is harder to distinguish loyal opposition players from disloyal ones, because we see the emergence of a third player, what Linz calls the semi-loyal opposition. Semi-loyal opponents of the democratic regime are enfranchised participants in the system who nevertheless stand for its destruction (as opposed to the obviously disloyal opposition, like anarcho-syndicalists and others who fundamentally reject state authority, or fascists who insist on unitary executive power).

Moving to the process of breakdown, Linz writes, “no regime is without disloyal opposition. Most of the time, existing regimes tend to have the benefit of the doubt of large sectors of the society. Except in crisis situations, this allows it to isolate and otherwise discourage disloyal oppositions. “These facts he writes, “give semi-loyal oppositions a decisive role in the process of loss of power by democratic regimes.”

Semi-loyal are rightfully legal political actors who are nevertheless willing to cooperate with parties or interests that are perceived to be disloyal — they display a willingness to encourage, tolerate, cover-up, treat leniently, excuse or justify the actions of other participants that go beyond the limits of legitimate patterns of politics in a democracy. Bad behavior on both sides! So many sides!

Ultimately, Linz writes, “semi-loyalty marks a system-oriented party’s greater affinity for extremists on its side of the political spectrum than for system parties closer to the opposite side.”

Mussolini Traveled to Rome in a Sleeping Car

As mentioned before, per Linz, the stage is set when leaders in an incoming democratic regime offer up an overly-aggressive, and thus over-optimistic agenda, and thus having over-promised more than they can deliver under a set of complex interests needing to be balanced. Then when under pressure, they make certain mistakes. They engage in the politics of resentment, overly demonizing opponents, and in so doing, they miss their chances to incorporate potentially loyal forces into the ruling coalition.

Next, because of the intensified polarization, it becomes difficult to distinguish the loyal from the semi-loyal, since inter-party strife, discrediting of opponents, and identifying the opposition with narrow special interests are otherwise normal (except that the semi-loyal engage in it with an abnormal intensity and lack of fairness).

Crisis starts when a democratic regime, weakened by a lack of efficacy and/or effectiveness in the face of complexity, confronts a direct challenge to its legitimacy when semi-loyal forces join with disloyal ones to attack the system itself, and invoking ultra-nationalist and authoritarian themes, demand the power to implement sweeping and simple solutions to complex problems.

In the end, the breakdown occurs when semi-loyal forces take power legitimately, but then declare “a state of emergency” suspending constitutional protections and norms. As Linz reminds us, “Hitler did not take power because of a putsch, and Mussolini did not march into Rome at the head of fascist legions — he was summoned by the king, and traveled in a sleeping car.”

Legitimacy and Crisis under Conditions of Advanced Capitalism

As I said at the start of this post, this project was conceived when I was forced to ask myself a question that my prior understanding of the basis of democratic political legitimacy could not answer: Can the legitimacy of democratic institutions as such simply collapse? How do we need to understand the legitimacy of liberal democratic institutions in order to explain the fact that large numbers of people are apparently willing to rescind their commitment to them? It is apparently the case that mature democracies can apparently collapse on their own. How is that possible?

This first installment of this post reflects my attempt to inject some elements of realism in to the way that I had previously thought about the basis for democratic political legitimacy. But while the account from Juan Linz about how breakdown occurs in democratic society is clear enough, his treatment of legitimation is not fully developed.

Perhaps I still need some idealist chocolate with my realist peanut butter. In the second part, I try to zero in on the topic of legitimation, looking at treatment of the topic by Max Weber, and I also take a detour through Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies. My overall intention in this second installment is to set the stage for thinking about the notion of legitimation crisis, revisiting the 1973 work by the same name by Jurgen Habermas in my third and final installment.

In this work, written before Habermas had fully developed his mature academic project of a theory of communicative action, the author offers a very compelling account of how it is that society has entered a phase of overall development that exhibits a very unique aspect of crisis with respect to political legitimacy. Through this reading, I try to explain why it’s not so much that nobody cares about democracy, it’s rather that it no longer matters whether they do or don’t.

by Tedd Siegel

The ashtray and the paddle game and that’s all I need… And this remote control. The ashtray, the paddle game, and the remote control, and that’s all I need… And these matches…And this lamp. The ashtray, this paddle game, and the remote control, and the lamp, and that’s all I need. And that’s all I need too. I don’t need one other thing, not one…I need this. The paddle game and the chair, and the remote control, and the matches for sure…And this. That’s all I need.

— Steve Martin, The Jerk

Cue the Sun!

— Cristof, The Truman Show

Recently–over the last couple of months now–I’ve been concerned to try to interrogate Silicon Valley’s signature utopia of “technological solutionism.”

My starting contention was that Silicon Valley’s utopian optimism, it’s naïve confidence in the ability of tech solutions to simply banish societal problems, has rather suddenly and precipitously fallen on hard times (it has jumped the shark).

Simply put–and as a raft of national media across 2017 also testifies–it has become a matter of widespread popular reflection that tech solutionist utopianism has now metamorphosed into a full-fledged dystopian nightmare.

In my first and second installments of this post, I tried to characterize tech solutionism’s emergent dystopia in two related ways:

The first generally dystopian aspect I highlighted has to do with the manner in which Silicon Valley’s utopian solutionism, in offering up technologically inventive products and services, actually decides for us “what the problem is” so that a profitable tech solution can be seen to satisfy it. By making our most distinctly human needs increasingly responsive to the law of supply and demand, hyper-capitalist tech solutionism exhaustively recognizes human beings — everywhere and in every way–as primarily market actors. In so doing, it simultaneously both augments and also diminishes our human reality.

The second, related aspect had to do with an increasing discomfort felt by “those in the know” with the way that algorithmic decision-making is penetrating all domains of contemporary life, and how, by allowing this to happen, we are essentially turning over our collective pursuit of “the good life” to a big data-driven and hyper-capitalist “cybernetic functionalism” — one that relentlessly optimizes for the interests of advanced corporate capitalism, leaving diminishing opportunities for the articulation of properly human purposes. As Hans Jonas reminds us, cybernetic functions can sometimes appear teleological, but we always should remember that they serve a purpose rather than have a purpose — only living things have needs and act upon needs. As I have been saying in prior installments of this piece, and as Elon Musk, Ted Chiang, and Cathy O’Neil each point out, we forget this at our extreme peril.

These two significant aspects of Silicon Valley’s shallow solutionism, I am here suggesting, reflect a generally dystopian reductionism concerning the human condition. As I have said before; together they describe the essential ways in which high technology capitalism is fundamentally foreclosing our ability–as human beings–to advocate (both individually and collectively) for our essential needs satisfaction.

The Internet, the Public Sphere & Democracy

In the early 2000s, as Norwegian author and Media Studies professor Terje Rasmussen has written, it seemed to some people that the Internet was going to be the infrastructure par excellence for what Jürgen Habermas had been calling “the public sphere.” By this term, Habermas meant the informal, cultural/subcultural opinion-formation processes found in the civil societies of democratic states. These processes, partially mediated by the media, feed into formal decision-making activity, providing a critical sounding board for problems that must be solved by the political system.

The Internet, so the story went, was going to replace traditional mass media by cancelling the social division between speakers and listeners and making everyone a potential participant. In some senses, this has come true — it would not be incorrect to say that through the advent of blogs, YouTube, social media, “the public has transformed itself into narrators, reporters, editors, and broadcasters.”

Even back then, contra noted solutionists like Clay Shirky, there were others that were more skeptical. Along with Evgeny Morozov, there was also Jürgen Habermas, who, Rassmussen says, began to sniff a “communicative liquefication of politics” taking place in and through the information economy; and there was Benjamin Barber, who protested that he didn’t see how the Internet was going to be a contributor to what since the 1980s he had been referring to as strong democracy, where rational discourse and debate are essential conditions for reaching common ground in a multicultural society. Again, per Terje Rasmussen, the fragmentation of audiences into “isolated issues publics” was already understood, by the mid-2000s, as a consequence of the fact that the Internet addresses populations as “…consumers and private persons more than as citizens.”

We could call it Alexander Hamilton’s Nightmare, he says, “because it is really the exact opposite information environment of what he hoped the American public would have access to…

In 2010, Malcolm Gladwell had a piece in the New Yorker called, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will not be Tweeted.” “We are told,” Gladwell writes, “that the world is in the midst of a revolution…because the new tools of social media have reinvented social activism, upending the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will, making it so much easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns.” So much so, Gladwell further relates, that at an activist conference sponsored by Facebook, ATT, and Google among others, a State Department official told a group of cyber activists that “they were the best hope for us all.”

In reply, Gladwell writes that these are indeed “strong and puzzling claims…are people who log onto Facebook really the best hope for us all?” After all, the waves of anti-racist sit-ins at lunch counters in the 60s happened, Gladwell reminds us, without email, texting, Facebook, or Twitter. Why does it matter, he asks, who is eating whose lunch–on the Internet?

Social activism of the sit-in variety, Gladwell reminds us, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon, whereas the sort of activism associated with social media platforms are built around “weak ties.” Of course, there is also a certain strength in weak ties — especially where such things as the diffusion of innovation, matching buyers and sellers, and other similar things are at play. But where social media activism is wide and shallow, asking very little of a large number of people, transformative social activism, the kind that really challenges the status quo, is of another sort. Where this sort of activism asks people to make real sacrifices — think Red Brigades or the Mujahedeen — Facebook activism, Gladwell concludes, succeeds by “motivating people to do the things people do when they are not motivated to make real sacrifice.”

This brings us back to Benjamin Barber’s skepticism about the Internet and the role of the public sphere in relation to what he calls “strong democracy.” As Terje Rassmussen puts it, “the Internet and new media do not play a favorable role…their speed, reductive simplicity and tendency to polarization, the solitariness of their user interface, their bias toward images over text” and their “inclination toward segmentation rather than a single integrated community” create “niche knowledge for niche markets,” and so work against the possibility of deliberation and informed choices, tending instead to distribute illegitimate and confused information.

Alexander Hamilton’s Nightmare

In 2009, as Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein was headed off to take up his post in the Obama administration as the Director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Harvard Magazine Editor Jonathan Shaw published a short piece entitled, “The Internet: Foe of Democracy? The article amounts to a sort of a check-in with Sunstein concerning his views on “things Internet” views which had first come to prominence with the publication of his 2001 book, “Republic.com.”

Following discussion of Sunstein’s lamentation over the conception of free speech emerging in “today’s communications market,” which emphasizes an “architecture of control by which each of us can select a customized free-speech package,” (fully consistent with Rasmussen, Gladwell, Barber, etc.) Shaw also recounts Sunstein’s remarks (likely taken from Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution) about what he considered to be “the one original contribution” of the American founding fathers.

Whereas the general consensus among leading figures of the Enlightenment in the revolutionary era followed Montesquieu in the assumption that “successful self-government ultimately required everyone to be alike,” the Founding Fathers, in contrast, “believed heterogeneity and diversity constitute a creative force…this idea turned traditional republican thought on its head.”

In a 2017 piece published on Quartz.com, economics reporter Dan Kopf interviews Sunstein, where he is seen to echo and extend these remarks. Where Sunstein previously said that the “self-segregation” promoted by the Internet “created numerous small republics of like-minded individuals of the sort that Montesquieu preferred” but which the founders considered to be self-destructive to self-government, here he also asserts that the idea of “the daily me” which was first promulgated by Nicolas Negroponte in the 1990s, while perhaps fun and convenient, is a big problem for society as a whole.

“We could call it Alexander Hamilton’s Nightmare, he says, “because it is really the exact opposite information environment of what he hoped the American public would have access to…what Hamilton said clearly in the Federalist Papers was that the disagreements between parties promotes deliberation and circumspection.”

* * *

I have used this discussion of the unintended consequences and side effects of the Internet for democracy, as seen in Rasmussen, Habermas, Gladwell, and Sunstein, as a way to recapitulate concerns I raised in the two previous installments of this piece, but with a slight reframing, for reasons that I hope will become clear later on.

As a way to summarize and thus conclude this introduction — I am here to say that I share Evgeny Morozov’s essential impatience with Silicon Valley thought leaders and their Delphic solutionist babbling about how the putative values of the Internet, whether it be openness, or participation, or whatever else, should be seen as the prized yardstick for assessing every field of human endeavor. Internet-based solutions are not the solution to all our problems. Further, hyper-capitalist technological solutionism is profoundly undermining “strong democracy,” replacing the informal working of the “public sphere” with an insidiously pale substitute–a shared platform supporting and encouraging small republics of like-minded individuals, held together with consumer-oriented, weak ties and resulting in a communicative liquefication of our democratic politics.

More importantly, however, I have also tried to argue that the unintended consequences and side-effects that arise out of utopian technological solutionism stem from a fundamental reductionism concerning the human condition, a decision to make our most distinctly human needs ever more responsive to the laws of supply and demand, effectively disabling (dare I say short-circuiting?) the ability of human beings to advocate, both individually and collectively (politically) for their needs satisfaction.

Talking About Human Needs Along with Human Rights

It may very well be the case that the repeated use of the expression “human needs” in the various parts of this article make some people a bit uneasy. In liberal democracies, at least until recently, the tendency has always been to favor “rights talk” over “needs talk” and to support progressive agendas by insisting on the importance of recognizing rights, widening the sphere of rights, and increasing the sensitivity to rights. Lately, there is some sense that this strategy may have encouraged those eager to call out the whole human rights thing as an elaborate fiction resting on dubious foundations (you can’t handle the truth!).

“Needs talk” on the other hand, tends to flag a moral, political, or economic discourse as decidedly “Marxist” in its commitments. Marxism, as a universalist political philosophy and philosophical anthropology, tacitly acknowledges the reality of human needs, while Western liberal political theory has pretty much denied that such language is at all relevant to economic and political theory.

Perhaps someone thinks that I am now straying far afield and wondering how you get from a critique of Silicon Valley solutionism to a decidedly Marxist theory of needs.

In reply, I will simply say that this direction here is justified in two ways: it is extrinsically warranted by Evgeny Morozov’s insistent demand that Silicon Valley’s claimed right to define itself (always and everywhere) only out of its own utopian logic, be denied.

And it is my contention that it is intrinsically justified by everything that has come thus far in this three-part article, via the characterization offered here of Silicon Valley’s hyper-capitalist solutionism and cybernetic functionalism as an emergent dystopian nightmare.

Human Needs & The Law of Supply and Demand

A key aspect of the Silicon Valley dystopia, I have asserted, is the central tendency of utopian technological solutionism to subject an ever-increasing array of human needs to determination by market forces, to “the law of supply and demand.”

It would thus be perfectly reasonable at this point to want to ask what is meant by human needs, and what it might mean to think about them as something described in some way other than through a consideration of market exchange value, the way in which we are generally trained to think about them. I have spoken of the Marxist acknowledgement of the “reality” of human needs. A host of questions naturally arise.

In speaking of human needs in their universality, are we making claims to their objectivity? Are we speaking primarily about material needs of human beings as living organisms? Or do we also mean something more, including social and cultural needs, among others? What about love, friendship, the development of talents and abilities, and social recognition?

It’s worth pointing out that for economists of the Right, like von Hayek and Robert Nozick for example, the only way that welfare can ever be morally justified is on the model of charity.

Obviously, it is necessary to spend some time thinking about human needs per se before it can make sense to introduce the claim that the Silicon Valley dystopia is well-described as a “dictatorship over needs.”

In their 1991 book A Theory of Human Need, Len Doyal and Ian Gough step through a number of these issues. In their introduction, Doyal and Gough explain that their project began as an attempt to clarify a theory of human needs in order to help confront the rise of new movements of the Right in the 1980s which were seeking to challenge the legitimacy of liberal welfare state policies.

Along with this set of motives and concerns, two other principal threads, both of which are meaningful here, are discernible in A Theory of Human Need.

First, there is concern to avoid the pitfalls of revolutionary or authoritarian socialism in the articulation of a theory of needs. Any acceptable concept of need, they write, “must be designed so that it cannot be used in authoritarian and paternalistic ways.” Since welfare provisioning and effective democracy must be inexorably linked, per Doyal and Gough, the liberal welfare state “…must be sure to combine the individual right to need satisfaction with the right to participate in how such satisfaction is to occur in practice.”

Second, there is the issue, previously mentioned, of balancing rights and needs. “If individual liberty and privacy are too much ignored in the name of the collective,” Doyal and Gough write, then we risk discarding something essential; on the other hand, as the plight of the exploited and the deprived show, formal guarantees of political and economic freedom which ignore the material preconditions for their individual expression can undermine the principles of liberalism.”

Returning to the most central concern of the book, Doyal and Gough write that for quite some time, the trend has been for economists, sociologists, philosophers, liberals, libertarians, Marxists, socialists, feminists, and anti-racists all to describe human need as a “subjective and culturally relative concept.” But if the notion of objective need is groundless, they ask, “then what alternative is there but to believe that individuals know what is best for themselves, and to encourage them to pursue their own subjective goals and preferences? And what better mechanism to achieve this is there than the market?”

For what the authors call “the orthodox economist” the objectivity of need is suspect; preferences and demand are regarded as sufficient for the purposes of much “positive and normative economic theory.” As has been pointed out now multiple times, the prevailing attitude, easy for those of us raised in mature market economies to understand, is just this: that needs are something that get articulated in and through market exchange. Sellers present products and services; to the extent that they are addressing market demands with whatever it is that they are selling, then they can figure out how to sell and make a profit. In this way, markets are great experiments in needs testing. Sellers tell us we need something. If they are right, then people buy it. Buyers express their needs too. If smart producers are paying attention, they will no doubt address this addressable market. Similarly, with labor. If wage laborers and other workers offer their services to markets that need laborers, and they address it with the right skill sets, then both parties will get their needs met. And so, it goes.

The economists, Doyal and Gough explain, enunciate this in two fundamental principles of private sovereignty. The first is the subjective concept of interests — individuals are the only authorities on the correctness of their interests, or more narrowly, their wants. The second is that what is to be produced, how it is to be produced, and how it is to be distributed should be determined by the private consumption and work preferences of individuals.

The suggestion that some sort of objectivity (or even universality) should attach to human needs (which sort of follows if one goes about talking about “the human condition,” by the way) is suspect inasmuch as it is a threat to the abovementioned principles. Once you start talking about universal needs, people on the Right are always quick to tell you, you are legislating for others, and this of course is the slippery slope to authoritarianism.

As a result, and as is of course well-known by all, when the policy discussions turn in the direction of welfare state need provisioning (basic needs satisfaction) people on the right argue that it is better to turn to the market rather than to the welfare state. In fact, since basic human needs are to be taken as a dogmatic metaphysical fantasy, it is actually morally superior to do so, since everybody knows that there can be no real basis for agreement about principles of justice or consensual norms for determining which pattern of the distribution of wealth should be taken as the correct one. It’s worth pointing out that for economists of the Right, like von Hayek and Robert Nozick for example, the only way that welfare can ever even be morally justified is on the model of charity.

Never mind that under the sway of this model, there is the practical implication that the “preferences” of the well-off carry with them the same moral legitimacy as those of the poor. After all, Doyal and Gough explain, just because a majority might rank their preferences for food higher than for fashion does not mean that a clothes-conscious minority might not legitimately make the opposite choice.

Such choices, the Right concludes, are primarily to be understood as consumer demands, which either can or cannot be acted upon through the expenditure of income. To the extent that we speak about human needs, therefore, we are merely talking about a preference shared by many people which the government has been persuaded requires some special attention.

The Case for Radical Human Needs

As mentioned at the outset of the previous section, Doyal and Gough are looking to buttress welfare state provisioning by making a case for the objectivity of human needs over and against neoliberal economic arguments that only refer to market demands, and never to needs. As a result, the balance of the book is concerned to describe a table of objective needs and needs measurement for purposes of welfare state provisioning.

I want to end this third installment by encouraging you to listen, once again, to Tracy Chapman’s 1988 hit, “Fast Car.” I can think of no more poignant popular expression of what is at stake in the term “alienated needs” than what unfolds in the lyrics and chords of this song.

While InDarkTimes is editorially sympathetic to this position, it must be said that establishing the “objectivity” of basic human needs, as per Doyal and Gough, is not a shared priority. Earlier in this article I used the phrase “reality of human needs.” I did so intentionally, since in my view, the use of the term “objectivity of human need” drags along with it a complex baggage belonging specifically to the meaning and use of the term objectivity. The issue, as will hopefully soon be clear, is not merely semantic.

However laudable Doyal and Gough’s concern over the maintenance of welfare state programs to meet basic (universal) human needs, discussions about such things as “how human beings have the same potential to be harmed or to flourish” tend to lead quickly beyond the limits seemingly set by use of the term “objectivity,” especially where the concept of objectivity being entertained does not allow for the easy acceptance that socially or historically constituted facts can be possessive of some measure of objectivity.

Despite their workman-like commitment to their project (to make the world safe for democratic socialism) Doyal and Gough also tacitly acknowledge something like this. While defending a concept of need that is still protective of individual rights, they write, in something of an aside, that we mustn’t lose sight of the “the actual raison d’etre of redistribution” which is “the maximum development of the person.”

What kind of needs are we in fact talking about, where needs and their satisfaction are not determined exclusively (or even primarily) by market exchange based on supply and demand, and where needs are also not to be determined in some authoritarian fashion, by state planners and the like? What if we needed to talk about something different than the needs that social service bureaucracies, organized into large hierarchical units, deliver as predetermined services to passive clients? And what if we meant something else than the needs that priests and jurists, social workers and doctors create, that they alone are allowed to satisfy? What if the concept of needs being sought after was somehow more radical? What if we actually have alienated needs, such that we need to maintain a space for needs that we cannot properly articulate at present?

Listening to Tracy Chapman: Fast Car

In case you are “thrown for a loop” by the sudden wrenching of this (semi-academic) philosophical reflection on objective-universal-basic human needs toward an urgent questioning over alienated or radical needs, I want to end this third installment by encouraging you to listen, once again, to Tracy Chapman’s 1988 hit, “Fast Car.” I can think of no more poignant popular expression of what is at stake in the term “alienated needs” than what unfolds in the lyrics and chords of this song (yeah, ok, I’m old. Steve Heikkila says I should also be listening to Kendrick Lamar).

Unless you actually think that this “fast car” and the “plan to get us out of here” are anything other than a wistful, desperate crap shoot, I think you will see clearly something of what I will be referring to in my fourth and final installment as “radical needs.” Of course, Chapman’s song-character knows it too. You can hear it in her tone of semi-resignation and sadness. She knows that even if she should be lucky enough to be “working as a checkout girl,” and should she be “promoted and move out of the shelter,” the consciousness of alienation that she feels will not be solved, not even if she ends up “buying a bigger house and live in the suburbs.”

The fast car, the ticket to anywhere, these things are an expression of a consciousness that has exceeded the bounds of the painful contradictions of a specific social and economic existence, but which has no determinate content to express as a plausible counterfactual. There is only “I had a feeling that I belonged, had a feeling that I could be someone…gotta make a decision…leave tonite, or live and die this way…So take your fast car, and keep on driving…

In the final installment of this post, called “Silicon Valley’s Emerging Dystopia: The Hyper-Capitalist Dictatorship over Needs” I step through the account of radical needs provided in Agnes Heller’s first book, “The Theory of Need in Marx” (1974) on the way to my final destination, a tour through the 1983 work “Dictatorship Over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet Societies” which I believe yields a conception that can fruitfully be applied to the present Silicon Valley case.

Yes, there are two paths you can go by
But in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on
And it makes me wonder.

— Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven

For the opening sentence of his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant famously wrote, “The only thing that is good without qualification or restriction is a good will.” In so doing, he threw down a distinctly modern moral gauntlet, and did so in a rather breathtaking fashion. With this statement, Kant announces his “Copernican revolution in morality” — we need not (indeed must not) look outside ourselves for the source of moral value. Pure reason in its practical employment, he insists, is that which gives rise to moral objectivity, such that the everyday rational agent, responsive to the categorical imperative’s “moral ought,” determines his or her actions in a way that is possessive of moral worth.

But we are not here headed down the road of trying to plumb the oceanic depths of Kant’s categorical imperative across its four formulations. This is rather a shame. Were we to do so, we would grasp the stunningly deepened conception of agency and moral personality he innovates to do justice to nothing more and nothing less than our ordinary moral experience. Instead, however, we are headed down a different road:

The road we are headed down is the one taken by the 2018 GMC Sierra 1500.

I’m sure I know what you are thinking. What in the world could possibly connect these two roads? Just this: Where Kant writes that the only thing that is good without qualification is a good will, the GMC Sierra 1500 and its marketing department do not agree.

I’m quite certain that Kant would have been very distressed to learn that two hundred and thirty-three years later, the makers of the GMC Sierra 1500 not only disagreed with him about this, but had simply dismissed his idea completely out of hand.

Professional Grade A-Hole: Fade to Black

Fade from black, and you see the open road, the yellow center stripes passing quickly under your truck. Cue the strings section, repeatedly playing the same contemplative note, ostinato. We briefly see the driver’s face, pensive in the rearview mirror. Now cue the voiceover. “How do you want to live?” The husky male voice asks in quiet tones. “As a decent person? Not a bad guy? A good friend? Is that it? — Good?” Briefly, we see our driver from the back, standing and staring across a dark winter lake to the cloud-shrouded peaks on the far shore. “Of course not,” our narrator says. Now the pensive glimpses of our hero are interspersed with the GMC Sierra 1500, barreling up and down roads. Now the narrator’s voice gathers speed, betraying a touch of excitement; “King of the hill? Better. Top of your game? Win. All powerful? Like a boss. Like standard bearer. Like a pro.” The scene resolves to the confident and powerful GMC truck advancing head on toward the camera. “We couldn’t agree more,” GMC reassuringly intones. Fade to black.

Several points need to be made here, about this rather distressing dramatization of the hermeneutics of “type-A, kind-of-a-dick” moral experience. To begin with: there is no need, apparently, to tarry over what it means to be a “decent person.” Especially since it slides, as if on a generous layer of grease, into “not a bad guy” which pretty much tells us, by its use of the negative, that anything short of a first-class a-hole will apparently do just fine. The immediate follow up with, “A good friend?” tells us something else too–since between some shallow, all-around notion of decency, and the sphere of (male) friendship, is likely the space of relations with the opposite sex and that of the family — the space where the “not a bad guy” self-reassurance lives, in order to rationalize (and thus cover up) whatever it is that actually resides there.

But it’s the part which comes next that’s really the inflection point. How do you want to live? Decent person? Not a bad guy? A good friend? Is that it–good?”

I Went to Morality and All I Got Was This T-Shirt

Since when did being a decent person become something you could just check off and call it done and then regard as a sort of consolation prize, rather than a perennial struggle between duty (respect for humanity in ourselves and in others) and our various desires and inclinations?

Kant’s Groundwork was written during a time when empiricism and moral skepticism weren’t actually the default assumption of most ordinary people; the claims of rational theology resolved to a widely accepted moral point of view, while empiricism at that time was considered something of a scandal. But if morality itself was not a seen as a problematic concept per se, it was also perfectly understandable to Kant that, as empirical selves we nevertheless stand in resistance to the moral law (the law that we give to ourselves). We wish that virtue and happiness would just somehow naturally coincide for us; but the testimony of the world tells us a different story, since by and large, the righteous are made to suffer and the wicked often go unpunished.

Kant’s account of moral personality finds its coherence not in his metaphysics of morals per se, but via his account of the categorical imperative as binding on rational agents, and through its function in everyday casuistry (in the actual practice of testing our maxims of action to see if they meet our universalist moral standards).

The topic of this rant about GMC is therefore really my disgust at seeing the “human capital mindset” explicitly valorized over and against a distinctly moral point of view.

As I said before, the categorical imperative is deep, and is thus highly rigorist in its demands. Virtuous action is indeed possible, but it is a constant struggle — as the moral philosopher J.B Schneewind has written, if we could simply and without much fuss just do what is right, then either we would be trained animals (in which case our actions would not be moral) or we would be Gods, in which case the meaning of virtue would be effectively evacuated. This is why the struggle is real — because we are neither beasts nor angels.

Which brings me back to GMC Sierra guy, who appears to conflate something like the idea of the moral good with scoring only a “B on a test,” as if “good” here meant something less than excellent or outstanding on a grading curve. “How do you want to live? Is that it — Good? Certainly not.”

Much better than settling for being a decent person is to take it up a notch, because you know, that decency stuff is all well and good, but it’s mostly “for the stiffs.” Which is not to say that someone who lives their life to be “king of the hill, or top of their game, or all powerful” is some sort of a “wise guy.” No, aspiring to “be a boss, to be a pro,” is to have bought into what neoliberal ideology calls human capital.

Build on Moral Decency to Ensure Maximum ROI

Both Steve Heikkila and myself have written repeatedly on IDT about the accelerated and unacceptably reductionist “re-definition of the person” taking place under condition of an ascendant neoliberal ideology (in its various aspects–economic, political, and governance-related).

The topic of this rant about GMC is therefore really my disgust at seeing the “human capital mindset” explicitly valorized over and against a distinctly moral point of view.

To share in this disgust, by the way, you don’t have to partake of my enthusiasm for the rigors of Kantian moral theory. I chose to talk about it here because of the starkness of the contrast. But any garden variety Liberal humanism works almost as well. As a humanism, Liberalism at least recognized that our status as “free laborers” left us with needs and aspirations and interests that couldn’t be satisfied just by the law of supply and demand. This recognition of a lifeworld beyond the market is part of what led the Liberal state to protect its rights-bearing citizens from the vagaries of the market by extending social benefits.

Incidentally, even those who do not see themselves explicitly as moderns, but who cleave to a traditionally religious understanding of the dignity of the person, should find more common cause with their former Liberal humanist adversaries that with this sorry lot.

In the business world, Bill and Melinda explain, “people are a company’s most valuable resource.

Under the hegemony of Neoliberalism, the (hypothetical) citizen equality under rule of law and Liberal participation in popular sovereignty is replaced with a market formulation of only winners and losers. Since the market now supervises the state, it continually activates the state on behalf of the economy. To facilitate competition and growth, it now regulates the social by way of the market.

Wendy Brown has written that, “Today’s homo economicus is an intensely constructed bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its competitive position and with enhancing its portfolio value across all of its endeavors and venues.”

Where competition replaces concern over fair exchange and inequality becomes normative, labor ceases to be a central or meaningful category. There is only capital — financial and human, obscuring the remaining visibility of class and eliminating alienation and exploitation as the rationale for unions, consumer groups, and any other forms of economic and social solidarity. As human capitals, we are all equally entrepreneurs (except of course for our differing quantity of financial capital). Since our value as human beings is not intrinsic, it can appreciate or depreciate. If we turn out to be losers, there is nobody to blame but ourselves. So, don’t you want to be King of the hill? Top of your game? Don’t you want to be all powerful? Don’t you want to win? You know, like a boss. Like a pro!

What Bill and Melinda Want You to Know

This brings me to the other thing that seriously annoyed me, along with the GMC Sierra commercial (I’m not mentioning the things that made me want to weep). It was an “sponsored content” article developed as a collaboration between Vox Creative and the underwriter, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The title is Human Capital and the Benefits, Explained.

“In the business world,” Bill and Melinda explain, “people are a company’s most valuable resource. An individual can be the difference between closing a deal or losing a customer, for example, or they might boast a robust network of helpful contacts. In short, people possess intrinsic social and business currency.”

I mean, if you treat yourself like a commodity, is it really so bad if large capital investors do it too?

If you look closely at the subtle transition from “the business world” to “the world,” perhaps you will see what is going on here — namely, the naturalization of the market. The fact that it may be appropriate in the business world to think of people, first and foremost, as a resource, does not, in fact, mean that human beings as such possess intrinsic social and business currency. Business currency is not an intrinsic characteristic or quality or attribute of human beings–It is a characteristic of human beings as seen in the context of “the business world.” So, unless the business world is the whole world, the claim of intrinsic quality is false.

One way to assess “this personal value” is by considering human capital, which according to Bill and Melinda, is “the sum total of a population’s health, knowledge, and skills.” Since devoting funds to education and healthcare only has upsides, per Bill and Melinda, this leads to the big question — “why aren’t more countries prioritizing these investments?” Or put differently, why aren’t they thinking of them as investments?

By way of an answer, Bill and Melinda offer a brief history of human capital, to provide context. We are told that in the late 17th century, a certain Englishman first worked to “place a money value on laborers” and that a 19th century German economist came up with a formula to “figure out the total cost of producing a human being,” although, as it turns out, he neglected interest, depreciation, and maintenance. Despite the rise in the popularity of human capital after WWII, however, “…some hesitated to use the term due to the potential connotation with slavery, or an insinuation that people were a commodity.” Apparently, Bill and Melinda explain, the idea of treating human beings as wealth that can be augmented by investment ran counter to deeply held values.

Still, can it really be wrong to want to invest in people? After all, people invest in themselves, right? I mean, if you treat yourself like a commodity, is it really so bad if large capital investors do it too? Once we accept the idea of human beings as first and foremost human capital, all sorts of win-win scenarios are possible. Don’t you want to be like a boss? Like a pro? You just need to look at this the way an investor would — As Bill and Melinda tell it, “there are great global opportunities for human capital investments.”

For example, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2016 Human Capital index, the bulk of the world’s younger workers are located in Africa. By 2035, the continent is on track to have the largest workforce in the world. Of course, it’s true that these investments might not offer immediate dividends–but wise investors can afford to wait, right? Can there really be any doubt that they will provide a dramatic payoff down the line? How do you want to live, Africa? Top of your game? Better. Like a pro? Win!