Chileans Voted for an End to

Neoliberalism
By
Pablo Abufom

Last week, the people of Chile voted for sweeping structural reform and an end to
neoliberalism. It's one of the Left's biggest victories since the end of Augusto Pinochet's
dictatorship.

People gather in Plaza Baquedano in Santiago on May 17, 2021, to celebrate the
triumph of left candidates in the Chilean elections. (Felipe Figueroa/SOPA
Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

If just two years ago someone had said that the Left in Chile would today be celebrating
one of its biggest political victories since the nation’s democratic transition away from
Pinochet’s dictatorship, many would have balked. And yet, here we are.

Elections on May 15 and 16 for local and regional offices and for members of the
Constitutional Convention have completely changed the national political landscape in
Chile. The Right, gathered around president Sebastián Piñera, was dealt a major blow,
and the ruling centrist coalition, Concertación, collapsed spectacularly. The Left and
social movements swept the contest, winning a series of vital political offices and,
perhaps most importantly, majority representation in the assembly responsible for
drafting Chile’s new constitution.

The two-day mega election — deciding mayorships, municipal councils, regional

governorships, and the composition of the Convention — is a milestone, the impact of
which will resonate for decades to come. By winning substantial representation, the Left
made good on the promise of radical change announced by the popular revolt that broke
out on October 18, 2019. Just as importantly, a clear signal was sent that Chile’s
reigning transitional regime — brokered at the end of the dictatorship between the
center-left, the Right, and the military — is on life support.

Left-wing parties Frente Amplio and the Chilean Communist Party made major inroads
into local and regional governments, and won numerous seats at the Constitutional
Convention. The non-party left — feminist and environmental movements, in particular,
as well as representatives from First Nations and Indigenous peoples — also won
important political offices, and will be sending a number of representatives to the
Convention. On balance, almost overnight, a left-wing groundswell has achieved major
footing in institutional politics, an arena from which it had been almost entirely
excluded for decades.

Meanwhile, the traditional Chilean political elite, still reeling, has put forward its own
narrative of its election defeat: it was a “message” to the political class that it had fallen
out of touch with the people.

But last week’s election did not simply produce a protest vote. Rather, the people of
Chile went to the polls to cast their votes for a clear-eyed program of guaranteed social
rights and an end to neoliberalism.

Toward a New Constitution

Chile’s path to a new constitution has not been simple. On November 15, 2019, in an
attempt to placate the popular revolt of October, the entire Chilean political
establishment — except the Communist Party — signed the Agreement for Social Peace
and the New Constitution. Aiming at pacifying the protests, the agreement provided a
temporary lifeline for the embattled Piñera administration, but it simultaneously kicked
off the historic process of redrafting Chile’s constitution, inherited from the Pinochet
era.

The Constitutional Convention, approved by an overwhelming 78 percent in 2020’s

national plebiscite, is an elected assembly responsible for drafting the new constitution.
It will be formed by 155 members — 77 women and 78 men — who will be in charge
of writing Chile’s new Magna Carta. The body will decide on such fundamental issues
as social rights, the role of the state, and the country’s private-property regime.

The constitutional reform voted by the legislature establishes that any law proposed at
the Convention must achieve two-thirds majority support. That a one-third minority is
capable of blocking any proposal has been a comfort to the Right, insofar as its veto
power would at least act as a shield of defense against more radical proposals. However,
with the Right having now failed to win the necessary 33 percent representation, it no
longer has the power to even block proposals.

We can expect that the weeks leading up to the Convention’s first session will be busy
with alliance formations. The general understanding is that the center-left and Left
together form an overwhelming majority opposition to the right-wing government, but it
remains to be seen how voting blocs will form. One possible scenario is that alliances
will divide into three groups: the Right and center-right (including Piñera’s Chile
Vamos and the right-wing of the Concertación), the center-left (which includes the
Socialist Party and other reformist parties) and the Left (comprised of the Communist
Party, Frente Amplio, and the independent left and Indigenous representatives). In that
scenario, the Left bloc would have a simple majority (50.3%) — requiring dialogue
with the moderate Left to overcome the two-thirds threshold.

Where the Left is concerned, their voting bloc may not form a monolithic majority —
some social movements and Indigenous groups are still wary of the political process.
But a broad anti-neoliberal left has a historic opportunity to exert its influence over the
Convention and set the terms of debate for a political cycle that is just beginning.

In one of the most striking turns, the independent left and social movements picked up
many seats at the Convention. The Plurinational Feminist Constituent Platform, uniting
feminist candidates under the banner “if one enters, we all enter,” made good on its
slogan by picking up five seats. The so-called People’s List, channeling the
insurrectionary spirit of the October revolt, won twenty-six seats, surpassing many
parties of the ex-Concertación. Of the seventeen seats reserved for Native peoples,
seven went to Mapuche leaders.

Shortcomings and Roadblocks

Amid the enthusiasm, Chile’s recent elections also pose a number of open questions.
Perhaps the most pressing matter is to understand why there was such low voter turnout
(around 43.4 percent), forming a sharp contrast with the massive participation in the
Constitutional Plebiscite of October 25, 2020.

In addition, in one of the main electoral districts in the country, four feminist candidates
were left out of the Convention due to an electoral method, the so-called D’Hondt, that
privileges party lists over individual votes. In addition to that, mandated gender-parity
laws contradictorily resulted in some women candidates being excluded in favor of their
male counterparts. As Alondra Carrillo, elected to the Convention as a representative of
the Coordinadora Feminista 8M, told Jacobin, parity laws often operate “as a ceiling
and a form of exclusion, to reassert the presence of men at a time when women become
the majority.”

Other social forces expected to win a seat at the Convention were left out. The United
Workers’ Central failed to win representation, and the Coordinadora Nacional NO+AFP
(which for years has been fighting for a new social-security system) only elected one
spokesperson, despite running many candidates.

Nor was the election a resounding victory for all social movements. Newer movements
— feminist and LGBT groups, plurinational sectors, ecologists, and students —
performed quite well, but organized labor underperformed.

With just weeks until its first session, the first great battle of the Convention will
revolve around procedural rules. Here, the main tension is between conservative sectors
calling for the terms of the November 15 agreement to be fully respected, and those on
the Left that will challenge those terms on the grounds that they are antidemocratic.
Specifically, the Left will want to challenge formal limitations such as the two-thirds
majority clause and the lack of popular influence over the proceedings, as well as bring
more substantial socioeconomic issues, like international trade agreements, into the
debate.

The majoritarian anti-neoliberal sector has the potential to dictate the terms of the
Convention, but to do so they must not back down in the face of an inevitable backlash
from the combined forces of the Right and the Concertación.

A Historic Opportunity to Write the

Future
The other key area to watch in weeks to come is the alliance formed between the two
largest left-wing parties: the Communist Party and the Frente Amplio. Both parties
scored historic victories by picking up mayorships and governorships in the most recent
elections, and together they form the largest left bloc at the Convention. 

Since its foundation in 2017, Frente Amplio has spurred an important revival of
progressive, youth-led politics in Chile. However, it has increasingly acquiesced to the
reigning model of transition-era politics, placing a higher priority on governability and
negotiations when, some would argue, a more radical approach is needed. (Frente
Amplio, for example, signed Piñera’s Agreement for Social Peace.)

The more seasoned Communist Party has shown itself adept at collaborating with the
center-left around key areas while still hewing closer to a strong anti-neoliberal stance
when called for. Key to the formation of a broad anti-neoliberal majority at the
Convention, the two parties must overcome sectarian tendencies and recognize that the
Chilean left is much broader than party ranks.

The challenges facing the Chilean left are many, but so are its opportunities. Never has
the Left been so close to converging around a common feminist and anti-capitalist
program — a far cry from the typical demands for greater social rights or immediate
improvements in living conditions. The Left has successfully turned the Constitutional
Convention into a conduit for the revolts of October 2019; now it must strike a balance
between maneuvering within the halls of power and maintaining a clear vision of a
future society that will serve the interests of the working class. 

In short, the Chilean left has shown the power of revolt and must now face its greatest
test: whether it can take the reins of power and turn the contestation of the Pinochet-
inherited economic system into a majoritarian movement for a completely different
society. Maintaining the active participation of the independent left and social
movements — plurinational feminism, in particular — will be fundamental to the
success of organized progressive parties. Chile’s (and Latin America’s) Feminist
General Strike has been one of the most significant political events in recent decades;
were it to be sidelined by other progressive forces, it would blunt the vanguard of the
most openly anti-capitalist current of the progressive bloc.

Finally, for the Left to seize its historic opportunity, it will need to do more than simply
exert pressure from within the Constitutional Convention. Various sectors of the Left
and social movements have called for popular mobilizations in the street so as to
“besiege” the Convention and ensure that the process does not bypass the will of the
people. In the days and weeks to come, the streets of Chile must be an expression of the
same popular will that set the constitutional process in motion.

The Convention must be opened to popular participation, allowing space for proposals
and deliberation from rank-and-file sectors. Even for those political demands that
exceed the scope of the Convention, today is still the moment to press for an end to
state-sponsored terrorism, especially in Mapuche territories, and to strengthen the
working-class institutions of Chile that have played such an important role in
challenging neoliberal authoritarianism.

Chile has taken a decisive step toward ending the neoliberal and antidemocratic
constitution of 1980. Its next steps must be toward a sweeping structural transformation
of society led by the people and the working class. What happens over the next two
years as the Constitutional Convention advances will determine the political contours of
the future for years and decades to come

Colombia Is in Revolt Against

Neoliberalism
By

Aaron Tauss

More than five million Colombians — 10 percent of the country’s total population —
have taken to the streets over the past two weeks to protest neoliberal policies,
government corruption, police brutality, and the systematic murder of activists.

Demonstrators take part in a protest against the government of Colombian president

Iván Duque in Cali on May 19, 2021. (Luis Robayo / AFP via Getty Images)

Since April 28, Colombia has witnessed one of the largest popular mobilizations in the
country’s history. The massive protests began as a national strike — called by students,
workers, trade unions, left-wing parties, social movements, peasant communities,
indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, and feminist collectives — against the
US-backed government of far-right president Iván Duque and a now-withdrawn
regressive tax reform.

The bill would have raised taxes on basic necessities and public services (water,
electricity, and natural gas), disproportionately affecting the poor and middle classes.
Over May Day weekend, the demonstrations expanded in scope and intensity, turning
into a popular uprising despite a deadly police crackdown.

More than five millions Colombians, 10 percent of the total population, have taken to
the streets over the past two weeks to protest against neoliberal policies, economic
hardship, social injustice, environmental devastation, government corruption, police
brutality, and the systematic murder of activists. They demand the resignation of
President Duque and fundamental social, economic, and political reforms. Yet
progressive opposition politicians, such as the center-left reformer and 2018 presidential
candidate Gustavo Petro, have not played a leading role in the protests.

War Zone
All major cities and the countryside have seen violent clashes between the protesters
and the police’s riot control unit. Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city, in the south of the
country, has become the epicenter of the protests and state repression. After President
Duque ordered its “maximum” militarization, parts of the city now resemble a war zone.

Military helicopters rotate over burning roadblocks, while hooded youths defend
themselves with shields, helmets, masks, and stones against water cannons, tear gas
projectiles, and rubber bullets. Numerous videos have circulated on social media
showing the police, armed civilians in SUVs, as well as residents in rich neighborhoods
fire live ammunition at protesters. More than twenty people have died so far.

After President Duque ordered its ‘maximum’ militarization, parts of the city now resemble a
war zone.

The repression is not limited to Cali. According to the Colombian nonprofit

organization Temblores, a total of thirty-nine people have been killed, around eight
hundred injured, and almost a thousand arbitrarily detained. Human Rights Watch has
reported forty-eight deaths. Over four hundred protesters swept up by police are missing
and believed to be held in clandestine detention centers.

There have also been numerous attacks on UN staff and journalists. The United States,
the European Union, the United Nations, and human rights organizations like Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch have condemned the repression. Colombian
nongovernmental organizations and leftist senator Iván Cepeda filed a complaint before
the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the United Nations Security Council against
the government for crimes against humanity.

The Colombian right, on the other hand, has criminalized the protest and called for an
even more repressive approach. Former president and Duque’s patron Álvaro Uribe,
still highly influential in national politics, speaks of “terrorist vandalism” and accuses
the protesters of being orchestrated by Colombia’s other remaining guerrillas, the
National Liberation Army (ELN), the drug trade, and the regional left.

Multi-Crisis
The protests come as Colombia is facing a deadly third wave of the COVID-19
pandemic, with high infection rates and overcrowded intensive care units. More than
eighty thousand people have died — the third-largest number in the region after Brazil
and Mexico. The pandemic has devastated an already crisis-ridden economy and fragile
social fabric, leaving millions unemployed, impoverished, and hungry.

Poverty has increased by 6.8 percent from the year before the pandemic; 42.5 percent of
the population now lives below the poverty line, 15 percent in extreme poverty. The
sharp devaluation of the peso has made imports more expensive and fueled inflation.
The price increases hit poorer sectors hardest, widening the gap between them and an
opulent ruling class.

According to the World Bank, Colombia is the country with the second-highest social
inequality in Latin America after Honduras; globally, it ranks seventh in this category.
Many of those who protest today against the government’s failed crisis management
literally have nothing left to lose. This is especially true for the younger generation: a
recent survey showed that 84 percent of those between the age eighteen and thirty-two
support the national strike.

The protests come as Colombia is facing a deadly third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, with
high infection rates and overcrowded intensive care units.

But poverty, unemployment, and precariousness aren’t the only complaints of the
protesters. Free trade agreements and subsidized agricultural imports from the United
States and the EU threaten Colombian small farmers’ existence. Environmental groups
and indigenous movements criticize the expansion of large-scale extractive projects, the
introduction of fracking, and the controversial resumption of aerial fumigation with
glyphosate in areas with coca plants. Trade unions complain about the creeping
privatization of the public pension system and the chronic underfunding of public health
care. Students are denouncing the deepening crisis of public universities and the
brutality of state forces in the streets.

The Duque government has also long been criticized for stalling the implementation of
the peace agreement, signed with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC) guerrillas in 2016. In particular, the land reform envisaged in the agreement has
been ignored to the benefit of large landowners and narco-traffickers.

Acts of violence have also increased again under Duque. The United Nations counted
seventy-six massacres in 2020, the most since 2014. The victims are mostly activists,
small farmers, and indigenous leaders, defending their land and ways of life against
armed groups, mining megaprojects, and agribusiness. According to the
nongovernmental organization Indepaz, three hundred ten activists were murdered in
2020 alone. And since 2016, more than two hundred fifty former FARC members have
lost their lives through violence. In both cases, the perpetrators are mostly right-wing
paramilitaries, dissident FARC groups, the military, or drug gangs.

Growing Radicalization
The ongoing protests in Colombia are not a spontaneous and unforeseeable uprising
against the Duque government. They are rather the continuation and radicalization of
the mobilizations of late 2019. Back then, mass demonstrations, work stoppages, and
road blockades shook the country for weeks.

A new nationwide strike, planned for March 2020, had to be postponed, due to the
pandemic and quarantine measures. Since then, the government’s inept handling of the
health crisis has further fanned the flames of discontent. More and more people are
demanding structural change from an increasingly violent and authoritarian government.
Whereas in the past, the protests had primarily a defensive character, they are now
growing more offensive. The participants are not only rejecting the prevailing social
order; the idea of a socially just, democratic, and peaceful Colombia is also taking
shape.

People demonstrate against the government in

Bogotá on May 15, 2021. (Raul Arboleda / AFP via Getty Images)

Colombia’s popular uprising is diverse, not only in its demands and particular interests,
but also in its protest forms and symbols. But the protesters have understood how to
foreground the unifying elements among them. What unites the different sectors is the
positively connoted self-definition as pueblo.

In the Colombian context, the term is clearly a class concept. It groups together the
various sectors of the excluded, exploited, marginalized, and dissident popular classes
— formal and informal workers, housewives, students, peasants, indigenous and Afro-
Colombian communities, leftists, women, and LGBT groups — and pits them against a
repressive government, defending the interests of large landowners, agro-industry,
transnational companies, big finance, business conglomerates, and paramilitaries.

Many of the concerns and demands of the protesters are directly or indirectly related to the
socioeconomic and ecological repercussions of the country’s neoliberal, extractivist
accumulation model.

The activism and the political struggle of the pueblo is not only directed against
Colombia’s oligarchic-plutocratic regime and its representatives in government. Many
of the concerns and demands of the protesters are directly or indirectly related to the
socioeconomic and ecological repercussions of the country’s neoliberal, extractivist
accumulation model. The rejection of the latter unites the pueblo.

The radicalization and expansion of the protests over the past years is thus a sign of a
profound crisis of that same model. The material concessions conceded to the popular
classes are just not enough to build a broad and stable cross-class consensus around how
Colombia’s economy should be organized.

Anti-Uribismo
Another aspect that has unified the protesters is the rejection of Colombia’s far right,
personified by former president and now senator Uribe. Uribismo hegemony has long
seemed solid in the country. When Latin America saw center-left governments come to
power during the “progressive cycle” between 1998 and 2014, Uribe escalated
Colombia’s civil war with the guerrillas and intensified counterinsurgency activities
against the civilian population. During his presidency (2002–10), the country became
the staunchest regional ally of the United States, which gained access to at least seven
military bases on Colombian territory.

Uribe then strongly objected to the peace negotiations between the government of his
successor Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC guerrillas. The opposition of his camp to
the peace process paved the way to the presidency of Uribe’s handpicked candidate
Duque in 2018. Yet, despite the victory, the hegemonic decline of Uribismo had already
begun.

It was the former guerrilla Gustavo Petro who made headlines on Election Day,
achieving a historic result for the Left in the runoff against Duque. During his
campaign, signs of a political awakening were palpable, especially among young people
and students. Since then, the anti-Uribe sentiment has grown stronger. The massive
mobilizations of 2019 and the ongoing popular uprising are the latest chapters of a
deepening crisis. The capacity of Uribisimo to lead large sections of the pueblo —
culturally, intellectually and politically — is fading.

Moving Ahead
Despite this dual crisis, the decentralized and sometimes uncoordinated nature of the
protests makes it difficult to formulate common political goals. The first attempts in this
direction have come from the National Strike Committee, which unites the different
protest groups. The committee is calling for police reform, a basic income for the
poorest sections of the population, a halt to the planned glyphosate spraying, and the
demilitarization of the country.

For many protesters, the demands do not go far enough; they reject the strike committee’s
representation and vow to continue the struggle in the streets.

Talks with the government have so far failed to produce any results. For many
protesters, the demands do not go far enough anyway; they reject the strike committee’s
representation and vow to continue the struggle in the streets. Community assemblies
and neighborhood councils have emerged across the country.

For Colombia’s left, the cycle of mobilization, the emerging hegemonic crises, and the
growing action in the streets could play an important role in view of the 2022
presidential elections. Leading in the polls, Petro will run again with a broad social and
political alliance. Many protesters, however, understand that profound and
emancipatory social change in Colombia would require more than Petro’s electoral
victory. As the past two weeks have shown, the repressive state apparatus and right-
wing paramilitaries are prepared to defend the interests of the ruling classes by any
means necessary.

Uncertainty Prevails
How long Colombia’s popular uprising will last, and in which direction it will develop,
can’t be foreseen. The situation in Cali remains extremely tense. Meanwhile, the
protection unit of the indigenous communities from the neighboring Cauca region has
arrived to support the demonstrators on the ground. But after two weeks of
mobilizations, clashes and road blockages, the city is now experiencing shortages of
food, fuel, and medicines. As the price hikes mainly affect the poorer population, there
are more and more voices calling for an end to the protests. But that end is still not in
sight.

Last week in nearby Pereira, Lucas Villa, one of the student leaders of the local
uprising, succumbed to his gunshot wounds in the hospital. His killers were armed
civilians who wanted to send a message to all his comrades fighting for change.

Villa has now become a symbolic figure throughout the country. For many, he
embodied the rebellious spirit, the fearlessness and the joie de vivre of all those who
yearn for a different Colombia. One of his last voice messages, sent to his cousin the
day he was shot, turned out to be a fatal premonition: “The worst can happen, güevon.
Everyone for everyone. Many of us can die because today, right now in Colombia, the
mere fact of being on the street, being young and being on the street, is risking your life.
We can all die here

Explaining Our Morbid Political

Symptoms
An interview with

Wendy Brown
We can’t talk about the rise of right-wing populists like Donald Trump, reactionary and
bizarre conspiracy theories like QAnon, and the increasingly pervasive sense of nihilism
across global politics without talking about neoliberalism.

A flag for the QAnon conspiracy theory is flown with other right-wing flags during a
pro-Trump rally on October 11, 2020 in Ronkonkoma, New York. (Stephanie Keith /
Getty Images)

You can listen to this interview on Daniel Denvir’s podcast The Dig here. It has been
edited for clarity and length.

Interview by

Daniel Denvir

Why is so much of American culture pervaded by this intense nihilism, this thrill to the
raw and transgressive exercise of power and domination and cruelty, from the president
on down? In her book In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic
Politics in the West, political theorist Wendy Brown argues that neoliberalism has
played a powerful role. Not just as an economic program that crushes labor, privatizes
public services, deregulates industry, unleashes capital mobility, and slashes tax on the
rich. But also, as Brown puts it, as a force that has

prepared the ground for the mobilization and legitimacy of ferocious antidemocratic
forces in the second decade of the twenty-first century. . . . [T]he rise of antidemocratic
politics was advanced through attacks on society understood as experienced and tended
in common and on the legitimacy and practice of democratic political life.

Brown warns against the intellectual temptation to rely on one big idea like
neoliberalism to explain everything. The damage done by neoliberalism also explains
much about liberal and Democratic troubles countering Donald Trump. Brown writes,
“Outrage, moralizing, satire, and vain hopes that internal factions or scandals on the
right will yield self-destruction are far more prevalent than serious strategies for
challenging these forces with compelling alternatives.” That’s in part because liberals in
the Democratic establishment have been looking for an exit from nihilism; Joe Biden,
because he represents a sort of normalcy, appeared to offer just that.

But I think there’s also a form of liberal nihilism at play here, in the rationale that many
offered for not voting for Bernie Sanders, even though they supported Bernie’s policies.
That Bernie’s proposals or his candidacy were just impossible. That democracy, its
promise of self-government, and achieving through such self-government a caring
society and a humane future on this planet might be noble ideas, but there’s nothing we
can do to implement them. It’s the task of the Left, then, to fight for the social and for
democracy, to build power while expanding people’s horizons, to insist that our fates
are linked, and that we can together, imagine, and fight for a livable future.

DD

You write that debates over the causes of Trumpism have been confused in part because
they often pit economic and social explanations against one another. “Understanding the
roots and energies of the current situation requires appreciating neoliberal political
culture and subject production, not only the economic conditions and enduring racisms
that spawned it.” What sort of political culture and human subjects has neoliberalism
made, and how does that in turn fit in with an economic analysis of the rise of
Trumpism?

WB

Let’s start with the familiar understanding of neoliberalism as a set of policies. Our
standard understanding goes something like this: neoliberalism slashes the social state,
privatizes public goods, turns progressive taxation into regressive taxation, smashes
unions, and above all deregulates capital, locally and around the world. That’s true, but
neoliberalism is much more than simply a set of policies; it’s also something that
governs us — society, culture, ways of understanding ourselves, and ways of
configuring social relations — as much as it transforms capital. Neoliberalism
transforms what we might call a social state or a Keynesian economic order, not just at
the level of economic policy, but at a much deeper level pertaining to how we are to
understand freedom, the state, our relations with one another, society, and morality.

Why does this matter? Because neoliberalism delivers a full-frontal attack on the very
notion of the public good and society. Margaret Thatcher said it best: “There is no such
thing as society. There’s only individual men and women,” and then she paused, “and
their families.” There’s no common, there’s no social, there’s no society, there’s only
individuals and/or families.

What this does is paraphrases something that Friedrich Hayek spends pages, books on,
which is attacking the very notion of society, and with it attacking the idea of a state that
is oriented toward producing the good for society.

Neoliberalism is much more than simply a set of policies; it’s also something that governs us as
much as it transforms capital.

That means a state that might redistribute the wealth through progressive taxation or
through forms of social goods, but also a state that might enact social justice through
anti-discrimination and other forms of equality measures. A state that might rectify
wrongs like systemic racism or systematic and institutional forms that make women
everywhere subordinated, less well paid, less independent, and fundamentally less
equal.

Neoliberalism does not just attack the idea of Keynesian economic order, but the very
idea of the social state, at the level of the social. Why is that important? Because it rolls
out in its stead the idea of economic freedom for individuals, but also the idea of a
moral order that emanates from “traditional morality.” Instead of the state intervening in
the hierarchies, the exclusions, the racisms, the sexisms, the heteronormativity that has
so long secured our order, neoliberalism essentially makes way for a political culture
that says no, freedom and the good rest in traditional moral orders.

What do we get at the moment that we are starting to get emerging authoritarian leaders
like Trump around the world? We’re getting a population that for four decades has been
steeped in the idea that the state should not be intervening in economic freedom or
traditional morality.

We’re getting a deep suspicion of democracy as something that overreaches, that builds
a state that legislates too much, that tries to push the common, tries to push social
justice. We’re getting a population that has been fashioned by a form of reason in which
social justice is simply wrong and actually an attack on freedom.

Supporters watch a video of US president Donald Trump

while waiting in a cold rain for his arrival at a campaign rally at Capital Region International
Airport October 27, 2020 in Lansing, Michigan. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

Combine that with the economic disaster that neoliberalism produced. Rampant and
extreme inequalities, dislocations, deindustrialization in the North as capital fled to the
South and to the East of the world, looking for cheap labor and cheap resources. You
get a population that, on the one hand, is weaned on this form of neoliberal reason, and
on the other hand, is full of rancor and resentment about its falling status, its collapsing
economic future, and feeling more and more that something else in the world is getting
what it was supposed to have.

Trump comes along and says, “It’s immigrants. It’s all these people who are jumping
the queue. You’re the anointed ones. You ought to be having pride of place.” On top of
that, you have all of this demonization of the global elites, the “politically correct,”
multiculturalism, and so forth. All of that is born and bred out of a neoliberal economic
and cultural political order.

DD
What you’re arguing is that we can’t fully understand neoliberalism without both
Marxist and Foucauldian analyses. What do both offer, and what’s missing if we just
rely on one and not the other?

WB

If we stick with the Marxists, we stick with the idea that neoliberalism is capitalism on
steroids. It may be a particular form of capitalism on steroids, because financialization
is born out of neoliberalism, so you get rent-seeking and other forms of “unproductive”
wealth production. But it’s still basically about the exploitation of labor and the
extraction of wealth from the poor concentrated in the rich.

Neoliberalism does not just attack the idea of Keynesian economic order, but the very idea of
the social state.

That’s important. It’s absolutely right, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the larger
order of reason that has produced a particular orientation toward that development on
the part of the populations governed by it. It doesn’t tell us anything about the anti-
democratic thrust of neoliberalism, the ways it frontally assaulted democratic
institutions and the very idea of democratic decisions about how things ought to be
ordered, how goods ought to be distributed, how the social and economic world ought
to be approached.

It doesn’t tell us anything about what kind of subject formation, what kind of making of
the human being neoliberalism generates — how it literally converts workers into
human capital, not just by generating a gig economy, but also by disseminating the idea
that your task is to enhance your own value, keep it from depreciating, and do this at
every level, from your social media profile to your résumé, to the particular things you
volunteer for, to your particular networks.

DD

The entrepreneurialization of the self.

WB

The entrepreneurialization is an earlier phase; then we get the financialization of the

self, where instead of just entrepreneurializing your assets, you then start to get the
move to present and brand yourself such that you attract investors in that self and
calculate your own self-investments. It’s an interesting shift. This is where I’d have to
leave Michel Foucault behind, but keep the framework that he offers, where we’re
thinking about the relations of power through which the self or the subject is being
made. He teaches us that neoliberalism gives us an order in which we’re
entrepreneurialized — that was the Thatcher/Reagan idea. But now we’re in a
financialized model, in which it’s not about literally having a financial portfolio, it’s
about treating yourself as if you were one.

DD
Your book analyzes the relationship between neoliberalism’s founding thinkers, people
like Hayek and Milton Friedman, and the relationship between their ideas and the
actually existing neoliberalism that we live under. Why do these ideas of these thinkers
matter if, as you write, “Popular enthusiasm for autocratic, nationalist, and in some
cases neofascist regimes, fueled by myth mongering and demagoguery, departs as
radically from neoliberal ideals as repressive state communist regimes departed from
those of Marx and other socialist intellectuals, even if, in each case, the deformed plant
grew from soil fertilized by these ideas.”

Why do these thinkers matter then? Is it because, even though this was not their desired
world, it is indeed the world that their ideas put into practice and made necessary?

WB

We would not say Marx doesn’t matter, because after all, state communism veered so
dramatically from the vision that he etches of communism as a form of emancipation,
equality, and the withering away of the state, where we reduce labor time to a minimum
and we are finally free to “express our human energies” in an utterly creative way.

No state communist regime looked anything like that, but we don’t say, “Oh, well, it
doesn’t matter then . . . Marx doesn’t matter because these things veered.” No, the ideas
really do matter, because they were inspirational.

Thatcher would thump Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty and refer to it as “our Bible”
when she was arguing with some of her advisers about how to dismantle the social state
of the UK. I don’t want to argue that all that matters is ideas. I’m not making that
argument. But I do think the ideas matter. Certainly Friedman mattered in inspiring the
first experiment in neoliberalism in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. The guys who ruled out
the neoliberalization of Chile were, as we know, called the Chicago Boys, they studied
under Friedman. And the “ordoliberals,” that other, lesser known school of liberalism to
most Americans, have been extremely influential in Europe and in the development and
in the transformation of the European Union.

DD

To the extent that some people call the EU an “ordoliberal state.”

WB

Exactly. So the founding intellectuals matter a lot. They’re not all the same. They don’t
all agree with one another, but they shared a vision of free markets and traditional
morality organizing what they understood to be an emerging totalitarian state coming
out of social democracy.

What I’m arguing is that these ideas really need to be grasped in detail for the vision
and the organizing principles — what Foucault calls the “political rationality” of
neoliberalism. At the same time, we need a little Friedrich Nietzsche. No founding idea
ends up being realized without a lot of transmogrifications along the way and inversions
of those ideas as they encounter other powers, appropriations of them, and distortions.
Did the neoliberals dream of an antidemocratic authoritarian liberalism? Which is how I
would describe a contemporary regime like the one we’re in with Trump right now. Did
they dream of that? Absolutely not.

Ideas themselves don’t fully shape history. They intersect other kinds of powers, and they
generate effects that are often unintended.

As opposed to a lot of QAnon-believing myth-mongering, rallying, high-energy, stupid

masses, they hoped that the masses would be completely politically pacified, by
reducing them to economic actors and moral actors tending their own lives. They were
interested in depoliticizing the masses, depoliticizing the state, and casting the state as
that which would tend construction and the stability of markets, the imperative of
economic growth, the facilitation of global competitive orders, and the protection of a
moral order that has gone so wildly off the rails — a reminder that ideas don’t make
history. They may be an important part in generating new possibilities — that’s why we
traffic in them, that’s why you and I believe in them, that’s why we think it’s important
for students to explore them and think about them and why we think it’s important to
circulate new ideas in a political culture dominated by ideas that we think are terrible.

But ideas themselves don’t fully shape history. They intersect other kinds of powers,
and they generate effects that are often unintended.

DD

You write, “The social is where we are more than private individuals or families, more
than economic producers, consumers, or investors, and more than mere members of the
nation”; that, you write, is “precisely what neoliberalism set out to destroy conceptually,
normatively, and practically.”

What is “the social,” and why is it fundamental to democratic culture? And then, why
do neoliberals like Hayek believe that society does not exist? And why does that lay the
groundwork for totalitarianism?

WB

When I tried to specify it in the passage that you just read, my aim was to remind
readers that if we go to the kind of extreme individualism rooted in families and
understand those individuals as simply economic and moral actors, in an order where
they pursue their own good and pursue their own values and their own beliefs, and get
rid of this domain we call “society,” we have eliminated two important things.

We’ve eliminated the domain where we actually live together, not just as individuals in
households, but live together in a world. But we’ve also eliminated the space where
thinkers like Marx and like other social theorists of equality and inequality identify the
powers that subject some groups, elevate others, exclude or marginalize. We’ve
eliminated the space where racism and sexism and, of course, class operate.

Neoliberals wanted to eliminate this idea that there is a web of connections among us that
subordinate some and elevate others.
That’s exactly what the neoliberals wanted eliminated. They wanted to eliminate this
idea that there is a web of connections among us that subordinate some and elevate
others. They wanted to eliminate the web of connections and connecting powers among
us, that both potentially bind us together in common, but also stratify and alienate,
atomize, and put us against one another.

They fully believed that it was the social, the belief in the social and the tending of the
social, that was the material of totalitarianism — that this is where we could be bound
together by the state, tended but also dominated by the state and rearranged by the state
in an utterly inappropriate fashion. That what we needed to do to get rid of that bloated
state was first to attack the very idea that there was a domain of the social, a domain of
society in which the state belonged, in which it ought to intervene. So that means
everything was off the table related to racial or gender justice. And, of course, it meant
getting the state out of the redistribution business. So, if you were rich or if you were
poor, that had to do with your own individual entrepreneurialism or failure at it. The
state certainly didn’t belong in the business of providing schooling or food stamps or
anything else that would remedy or soften those inequalities.

DD

One upshot of this disavowal of social power relations is that if society doesn’t exist,
then those who complain of racism or sexism or exploitation are declared to be weak,
whining snowflakes, who also somewhat, perhaps contradictorily, are would-be
dictators bent on imposing “a tyrannical political correctness.” How does this denial of
the social work to facilitate this remarkable inversion, whereby oppressed people are
demonized as the true oppressors of real Americans’ liberty? And how does that, in
turn,, fuel this grievance culture that is so pervasive on the Right, from evangelicals and
their persecution complex to our extremely whiny and sensitive president?

WB

It’s fairly easy to extend our understanding of the demonization of state intervention in
society and the demonization of social justice. The first one to decry social justice
warriors was Hayek himself. So the antagonists have a nice pedigree here.

Traditional morality is the proper ordering of relations, because it’s tested, evolved over
the years; it’s our evolved form of living well on Earth, so it must be right. If the state
inappropriately starts equalizing gender relations, legitimizing queerness, upsetting race
relations, not only is this despotism, interfering with the freedom of evolved orders and
the people in them, but it’s a mangling of the proper order of things. It’s statism, it’s
totalitarianism, it’s dictating where there ought to be freedom. That gets summed up in
the idea, too, of political correctness. But it’s also implicitly a kind of exoneration of the
weak or the subject or those down on the bottom of the hierarchies, the snowflakes.
Who complain about how they’re not getting ahead or how they’re not getting rich or
how they’re not succeeding in school because of one vector of power or another that
they say ought to be redressed. But actually, this is either their own doing, because
they’re failing to simply be good entrepreneurs of the self; they’re not being the right
kind of neoliberal subject, but also they’re whining and depending on the state for it. So
we get that combination of rejection of social justice and political correctness, on the
basis of it being both totalitarian dicta, and inappropriate, because it’s really about
whining and complaining and being soft and weak when you ought to be tough and self-
made like our president imagines he is.

President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during

a rally at the Des Moines International Airport on October 14, 2020 in Des Moines, Iowa. (Scott
Olson / Getty Images)

What happens such that we get all of this grievance at the other end of the spectrum?
How do you simultaneously reproach snowflake culture and totalitarian culture, and
then claim that you’re victimized as an evangelical or Trump supporter? It seems to me
that we have to track the way the Right understands that it was victimized for too long
by political correctness culture. But it’s also a grievance against who they imagine
controls elite institutions, including academic institutions. It’s a grievance against the
so-called global elite and all that was identified with the Davos world. It’s a grievance
against all of those who got stuff they shouldn’t have gotten, or who have power to hurt
the little guy. Here’s where the aggrieved populism of Trump’s supporters melds in an
interesting way with the anti-statism of neoliberalism. They’re not identical.

You’re seeing an interesting convergence of neoliberal anti-statism, and anti–social

justice formulations merging with the displacements and the dislocations and
dethronements of whiteness and white masculinity that have been part of our last forty
years. That’s a little bit of a different story than just pure neoliberalism.

DD

Let’s connect this all to how neoliberals saw politics. You write that political equality is
the necessary basis for democracy, and that within a capitalist nation-state, creating the
conditions for anything approaching political equality requires measures that foster
social and economic equality. “More than an ideological persuasion, social justice —
modulation of the powers of capitalism, colonialism, race, gender, and others — is all
that stands between sustaining the (always unfulfilled) promise of democracy and
wholesale abandonment of that promise.” How does this connect the discussion we’ve
been having about the social to the political? How does the destruction or degrading of
the social lay the groundwork for this attack on the political in general, and on
democracy in particular, that’s so core to the neoliberal project?

WB

Here, I would divide your question into two. One, why is attending to the social so
important if we are to have any hopes of any kind of democracy? Forget constitutional
or “bourgeois” liberal democracy. If we’re to have any twenty-first-century versions of
democracy that are more satisfying and more effective, we still have to attend to that.
But the second has to do with the neoliberals’ direct assaults on democracy. We forget
sometimes that if democracy is about more than voting, if it’s really about sharing in
rule, if it’s really about sharing in governing the powers that otherwise govern us, we
have to have the capacity to be political equals. That’s not the same as being
economically equal, but it is a capacity that requires that all voices matter, that ability to
participate is something that’s afforded to all.

And that’s why attending to the domain of what we’re calling the social is so important.
Everybody has to have the capacity to be sufficiently housed, fed, and tended to at the
level of basic health, mental and physical. Everybody has to have an adequate education
to be able to understand what’s going on in this world. So we need shelter, food, ability
to participate, knowledge and education, or information sufficient for that.

If you enfranchise the masses, if you have universal enfranchisement, you’re going to get
demands from the masses for a social state.

This is not radical. Democrats have known for almost every century that democracy has
been theorized or practiced in the West or elsewhere, until our own. Where democracy
is either reduced to market forces or it’s reduced to voting, or it’s reduced to minimal
enfranchisement — all of those things, of course, enfranchisement and voting may
matter, but they’re insufficient to have democracy.

We have no better testimony to that than what has been the effect on democracy of the
tremendous denigration of public education in the past forty years. Destroy an educated
population, and you basically have destroyed democracy. Especially now, when we
really need to be able to understand and know things, and sift information in order to be
able to be part of the discussions and the powers that otherwise govern us. That’s why
it’s important to think about the social in relationship to democracy. You don’t just
leave home and then go and be a democrat.

Second, the neoliberals understood that if they could reduce democracy to voting, to
bare liberalism, rights and voting, that they could get rid of what they considered the
danger of the social state. They were very clear about it: if you enfranchise the masses,
if you have universal enfranchisement, you’re going to get demands from the masses for
a social state.

DD

That’s an old-fashioned conservative view, that universal suffrage is a big problem.

WB

It is, but they’re very blunt about it. But they didn’t try to get rid of it, at least the
mainstream guys. They just said we need to reduce it. We need to get rid of democracy
understood as popular sovereignty. It’s not about the people ruling, it’s just about the
people voting and having rights. And those who are legislating must not legislate in the
economy or in the social order — they must just legislate for it, to keep it propped up.
They have to keep the train running. They have to keep markets competitive. They have
to construct the laws that will help protect traditional morality and markets, but they
can’t actually get in there and mess with those things.
And then, if they could restrict legislators from doing more than simply protecting
markets and morals, they had reduced democracy without destroying universal suffrage.
What did they reduce it to? They really just reduced it to liberalism, classic liberalism
with a little neo turn. Because instead of assuming that markets run themselves and that
a minimal state or no state is the best state, you need some state to keep the whole thing
running, and you need some technocrats, but they weren’t interested in those people
being democratic representatives.

That’s where we get to a crucial issue. They were perfectly happy, especially Hayek and
the ordoliberals, with something they overtly called “liberal authoritarianism.” You
could have an authoritarian in power, as long as that person respected both markets and
morals and the civil liberties of the people.

DD

Because for them, it was only totalitarianism that was illiberal.

WB

That’s the problem: totalitarianism means for them an expansive overreaching state.
Authoritarianism simply means an authority, and as long as liberalism is the constraint
or the limit, then it’s okay. And that’s what we got. I mean, we don’t have the version
they wanted, because they would hate Trump. It’s unsteady, it’s chaotic, it’s messing in
markets, it’s messing in all kinds of things. He’s a good demagogue, he’s got mass
energies that they want to deactivate. All of that they would loathe.

DD

Instead of the political being constrained, it’s everywhere.

WB

Right. But something like the EU, that’s okay, because that’s a technocratic operation
that makes sure all the states and nation-states in the EU South are held to a strict
liberalizing standard, austerity measures. They are essentially held to it by a
technocratic form of governance. It’s literally governance by algorithm. If Greece or
Spain submit a budget to the EU that is not properly balanced and looks insufficiently
competitive, it will trip a bunch of algorithmic wires, and the budget’s rejected, and
austerity measures get imposed. That would be fine with them.

DD

Milton Friedman wrote, “The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in

the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority.” But we do,
in fact, have an oligarchy, thanks to neoliberalism. How could Friedman and others
deny that power relations exist within markets and that those private imbalances of
power then become larger if unchecked by government? And that then such
concentrated market power inevitably exercises political power, not only in terms of
capitalist labor relations, which they would also deny, but also just directly, through the
democratic state itself. Does Friedman do this just by tautologically defining coercion as
repressive power exercised by the state?

WB

From my reading and from reading others who read the neoliberal classics, not one of
them would have endorsed the plutocratic or oligarchic regimes that we have today.
They understood that not only will the masses demand a social state if you let
democracy run rampant, but that the other great danger was monopolies and
concentrations of economic power, unless the state intervened to keep those broken up.
And their dream was not to have the state run by capital, but to have the state insulated
from the demands of the people, on the one hand, and captured by capital, on the other.
Neither one has happened. This is where we’re looking at the deviation of the revolution
from the intellectual formations that inspired it.

The Bernie campaign, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Sunrise Movement, and the Green New
Deal — they all seem fundamentally connected in their insistence on the primacy of the social.

But this is why the work of people like Thomas Piketty and others are so important.
What they are revealing is the extent to which the capture of the state by plutocrats, by
capital, has not only made the rich richer, but has also throttled economies at the level of
productivity. That it’s made them into rent-seeking economies. We have one today that
is constantly cutting tax breaks and subsidizing the rich while squeezing the poor.
That’s not a market economy, that’s a state captured by capital. And in particular, the
ordoliberals really argued that what you needed to insulate against that was a
technocratic state. You need a technocracy that is not run by a vested interest.

DD

I mean, the ordoliberals seem a lot more clearheaded in general about what sort of state
power is required to get what they want accomplished.

WB

Yes. That they were also a lot closer to the fascist. They’re the one group in the Mont
Pelerin Society that did not see fascism as being as much an enemy as they saw
socialism. It doesn’t mean they were fascists, but they didn’t have any trouble at all with
a mass society organized by a very strong state that would tend to the people through
particular moral political practices and establish a very technocratic state that had no
responsiveness whatsoever to popular demands.

There’s kind of a multistep, mutually reinforcing process here. It makes this state less
democratic, but then it also engenders hostility toward and disaffection with the very
notion of democracy. This entails a sort of redpilling of people — oh, democracy is
false, and now I understand that this is how things really operate, which paves the way
for popular support for authoritarianism.

But to me, things seem quite different on the Left. The Bernie campaign, Occupy, Black
Lives Matter, the Sunrise Movement, and the Green New Deal — they all seem
fundamentally connected in their insistence on the primacy of the social. Bernie’s call to
“fight for someone you don’t know,” Occupy’s collective occupation of public space as
a means to reintroduce class politics into democracy, the massive multiracial character
of this year’s anti-racist protests, or Sunrise’s insistence that we can indeed imagine and
then build a livable future together.

DD

Do you think that the neoliberal attack on democracy has had an opposite effect on this
newly resurgent socialist left, which has instead been demanding a deeper form of
democracy than we’ve ever experienced in this country, at the very same time that the
Right is embracing kind of total antidemocratic nihilism?

WB

Yes. Starting in this country, with Occupy, and then the first wave of Black Lives
Matter, there is an insistence on democratizing political, social, and economic life. For
Occupy, that identification of the 99 percent, and then what became a routine chant at
every social movement for the next decade, “This is what democracy looks like.” When
gathering in assemblies, when gathering in squares, when protesting, when shouting, but
also when presenting as Black Lives Matter and Occupy and Extinction Rebellion and
others, as a kind of naked demand on the part of the people for a better world and a
world in which power was not concentrated, held, used against us, used against the
planet. I agree with you that there is an emerging, radical democratic demand and vision
from these movements.

We might pause, though, and think about whether the anti-statism of the neoliberals is
one of those inadvertent inheritances that is also part of what shapes and contours some
of the understandings that emerge from these movements. I think the emphasis on
mutual aid today that’s coming out of the anarchist wing of a lot of these social
movements, the absolute suspicion of state forms of distribution, the way abolitionism
has moved across every domain of state power and the suspicion of any possibility of
democracy, social justice, or socialism entailing state power or the use of the state — I
think we at least have to worry about it.

Sen. Bernie Sanders greets supporters at his Super

Tuesday night event on March 3, 2020 in Vermont. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)

I raise that because the reality of the Bernie campaign, which I supported from
beginning to end, is that it was a campaign mobilizing the people for popular power, for
social movements, for popular demands, for all the right things. Education, health care,
transformation of the way we understand public goods and public provisioning — all of
it, in the end, lands at the feet of the state. Making all of those things work would
require not only a tremendous amount of state mechanisms for creating programs, for
generating and distributing goods. We know that, and at the same time, all of them also
require capitalism. All of them require a mode of financing, which depends on a mode
of growth. I’m not saying they require competition in the deregulated form of the
neoliberals, but they’re not about a radically new political economy.

They’re about a radically transformed or reregulated and redistributed capitalism, but it

can’t be that radical without crumpling.

So there are some things that have been inherited by the Left. And in our visions of a
more radical democracy, a more socially just world, a more sustainable one, we still
have some of the anti-statism of the neoliberals in them.

DD

Isn’t it also an age-old question for socialists, which is, how do you use social
democracy, which is going to raise money from capitalism, skimming it off the top,
while moving toward a horizon of something beyond capitalism?

WB

It is an age-old question. It’s a really big question, now that capitalism is fully
globalized and financialized. It means that we don’t get to imitate what the endlessly
cited Northern European states represent, because that was a postwar production of a
much less globalized capitalism and a pre-financialized capitalism with tremendous
resources in those states. We’re in a different game now. We’re certainly in a different
game in terms of where production takes place of most of the goods that most people in
this country, and elsewhere in the North, depend on and want. And we’re in a different
game because of the need to cut our relationship to fossil fuels yesterday. So it’s an old
question with a novel set of challenges and predicaments.

We need to own up to it and not promise magic while, at the same time, responding to
the emergency that the climate crisis and the devastation older forms of democracy have
produced. Those twin crises mean something has to happen that’s pretty dramatic. But
at the same time, the possibilities of snipping the threads of financialization are almost
zip. And the possibility of being able to radically reconfigure globalized production and
distribution, as even Bernie promised to do, to return jobs to Americans — that’s also
magic. So we need to get real here, even while we need to be radical and utopian and
urgent in the reality that we try to build.

DD

Let’s turn to neoliberalism’s relationship with social conservatism, both in theory and in
practice, which is really core to the argument you make in your book. For Hayek, both
markets and morals are “[r]ooted in liberty and generating spontaneous order and
evolution.” They “both ‘spontaneously’ yield order and development without relying on
comprehensive knowledge or reason and without a master will to develop, maintain, or
steer them.” Are markets and traditional morality, for Hayek and other neoliberals,
similar but distinct things with a shared enemy, or are they more basically part of the
same organic order that structures humans morally, and then relates those humans to
one another through the price signal?

WB

They’re only similar for the neoliberals in one important way, which is that they both
have this quality that Hayek calls “spontaneous.” By this, he simply means that they
emerge out of an energy of their own without being directed by the human mind or even
human intention, and they don’t come from the font of human knowledge — they
emerge from a system that they build on their own.

What works out, according to Hayek, is that an emergent system arises, and the
emergent system of markets, the emergent system of morality, those are tried and tested.
They evolve, they adapt, they change. They order our actions, but they don’t order our
actions by telling us what to do. They order our actions through the incentives and
constraints and mores and so forth that they harbor.

But that’s where the parallel probably needs to stop, because what Hayek wants to say
about markets is that order is provided by competition. What they want to say about
morals is that that order is provided by hierarchy, by order that is structured with
everyone having a place.

DD

Yet it’s not coercive, like markets. It’s a voluntary conformity, and somehow not
coercive.

WB

Exactly. It’s not coercive, because the hierarchy doesn’t actually entail a state. This is a
sleight of hand, but I’m just trying to channel them for you here.

Judge Amy Coney

Barrett testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the second day of her Supreme
Court confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on October 13, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Caroline
Brehman-Pool / Getty Images)

Amy Coney Barrett is perfect here. She was part of a religious order that was absolutely
hierarchical. Submissive women agreed to everything, from being lower down on the
hierarchy to providing sex on demand, yet agreed to it because it gratified a need for
order. She could have walked away anytime.

DD

Voluntary submission.

WB

Absolutely right.

DD

What does that mean?

WB

Probably we need to go back to Plato here. Finding your place in the order. Nothing is
better than doing what you were fitted to do. So their understanding of this is not that
markets are hierarchical. Markets are unequal. They have unequal results, and what
happens in their mind is that people who are aggrieved about market results confuse
results with the freedom that they had in the market itself — that results are a different
matter from the fact that you’re free and equal in the market.

But moral orders are different. They’re not structured by equality and freedom in that
way. They’re structured by hierarchy and an order that is stable, and comforting, and
generative, and secure, because they’ve been tried and tested over time.

Hayek is the best theorist of this stuff. He goes the furthest on it. He does have an
awareness that what he refers to as traditional morality, a Christian morality, a
patriarchal morality, a private property–centered morality, family morality, is not the
only morality in the world. He’s not unworldly. He knows there’s other things going on,
not just in the West but outside of it. But he insists that the only moral orders that really
last have three principles at their heart, the ones that survive the competition that goes
on among moralities: family, private property, and individual freedom. So now we’ve
got the complete ideology that makes traditional morality absolutely reconcilable with a
principle of freedom, and a principle as well of the intact heteronormative family and
private property, private ownership.

DD

This rests on a pretty obvious misunderstanding of how tradition actually works. For
Hayek, it’s this Burkean set of consensual norms that are refined through this almost
Darwinian process of social evolution. When in pretty obvious fact, tradition is
constantly being made and fought for.
As Corey Robin writes, it’s volitional, productive, forward-looking, a political reaction
that seeks to maintain various forms of hierarchy. If we look to the most classic sort of
tradition in US history, we can look to the antebellum and Jim Crow South.
Ordoliberals, by contrast, are explicitly constructivists. They want a technocratic state
ruled by experts to protect the market from democracy, but also this political and social
program to demassify society, “countering proletarianization by entrepreneurializing
(hence reindividuating) workers, on the one hand, and regrounding workers in practices
of familial self-provisioning on the other.”

Is it fair to say that the version of neoliberalism that won out in the United States, that
what it ultimately looks like is ordoliberalism reinterpreted through American Christian
conservatism?

WB

That’s a nice formulation. Yes and no. I would say yes to the extent that we see what we
have long called neoconservatism conjoined with neoliberalism. That is the emphasis on
family authority and a strong state that came through the neoconservative movement,
conjoined with an emphasis on free enterprise, maximum individual liberty, and a very
minimal state. That’s a version of ordoliberalism, except there’s an awful lot of anxiety
about the overreaching state. But I think your formulation will do, because what we’ve
ended up with is an endorsement of an authoritarian regime, protecting a market order
and a traditional moral order. That move that the ordoliberals made to reground the
individual in family, and even in a kind of agrarian pre-twentieth century of village-like
life, that was a very specific ordoliberal thing. And it did come out of something that
you mentioned in the first half of the sentence that you read out, which is that they were
very aware of the danger of a highly atomized society that capitalism would continue to
produce.

They worried about this under the rubric of proletarianization. What happens when you
just turn workers more and more into appendages of capital and divest them from their
families, from their farms, from their villages, and so forth. So they understood the need
to have a kind of state program that would reinstall people in that order of things, while
at the same time, turning them into bits of human capital.

DD

There’s a real parallel there with godfather of neoconservatism Irving Kristol. He

thought that capitalism was good in some ways, but also morally degrading and
engendering of nihilism. So conservative morality’s role was to counter the moral rot
that the market unleashed.

WB

Right. Church and state. You need a state that has a strong, moral bent and a strong
leadership in that direction, and you need people bound to the values that religion and
the family values that emanate from it provide.

DD
You write about how neoliberalism has shaped social conservative politics and
jurisprudence by linking market freedom and traditional morality together in the
protection of businesses’ private right to discriminate. Specifically, these recent
marquee Supreme Court cases, like Hobby Lobby, Masterpiece Cakeshop, are
revealingly animated by some of the very same sorts of ideas that people like Barry
Goldwater articulated to explain their opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

How have conservatives managed to unite private property on the one hand, and
traditional morality and the family on the other, and in doing so, use the First
Amendment to both allow for private forums of religious domination and also more
generally curtail government’s right to regulate private business?

WB

In recent years, in Supreme Court cases concerned especially with pushing back against
equality provisions — same-sex marriage, gender equality, women’s reproductive
rights, Hobby Lobby, the wedding cake case, so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” that
do not properly identify that they are not medical clinics but are in fact part of the pro-
life movement — what we see is the Supreme Court using the First Amendment and its
promise of freedom of conscience to expand the rights of corporations and small
businesses. What we’ve seen is small businesses and corporations getting the right to
freedom of conscience, the right to religious liberty, as a right that allows them to push
against equal rights when they wish to.

The US Supreme Court

building in Washington, DC.

It’s a clever move that needs to be understood as very much rooted in neoliberalism,
because it has to do with granting economic actors, from corporations to small
businesses, a status of persons, as persons themselves are reduced to human capitals.

One of the things that neoliberalism does is convert us from citizens to subjects and
makes our subjectivity into the standing of human capital — that’s what we exist as,
that’s what we exist to enhance, that’s what we exist to protect. At the same time, this
personhood that is now human capital has extended the status of persons to capital. And
in doing that, capital acquires civil rights — intended by the founders to be attached to
individuals.

These include free speech, thanks to Citizens United. These include freedom of
conscience and freedom of religion.

So what you get today is, on the one hand, the right of capital to do whatever it wants,
and the right of capital to acquire the power of conscience and religious liberty to push
back against equality mandates intended to secure the equality of those who previously
didn’t have it — those who, by virtue of race or religion, minority religions, or gender,
or sexuality, have been historically socially disenfranchised. The crisis pregnancy
centers go out of their way to disguise what they are and to lure pregnant women in.
They’re very explicit about this. I write about this in the book — they go out of their
way to lure young pregnant women, usually in crisis, under the imagined auspices that
they are places that will give women the whole story on all of their options. In fact,
they’re there to keep them from making a decision to have an abortion.

But the case was about whether or not they had to have a simple statement saying that
they were not medical facilities and that a full range of medical options were available
at the following number, and whether they had to post that anywhere in their offices.
And the Supreme Court said no, because these folks have the religious liberty to do the
thing they want to do. So there’s a recognition that these are entities that are religious
and have religious motivations, and what’s being expanded is their freedom as such
entities. That’s how it works side by side with deregulation. They’re not being
regulated. They’re being given more freedom to act as they want to act.

DD

Perhaps the greatest seeming contradiction between aspirational and actually existing
neoliberalism is the security state and all of its manifestations. We see it at the border,
the carceral state, and abroad through empire. But you write that a “twin model of
privatization,” economic privatization and also this familial and Christian privatization,
“extends to the nation itself. The nation is alternately rendered as a competitive business
needing to make better deals and as an inadequately secured home, besieged by ill-
willed or nonbelonging outsiders.”

Explain this dual privatization and how it links up the secured private home to a secured
private nation. Why does the neoliberal state turn out to be such a fundamentally
securitized and deeply repressive one?

WB

I do not believe that you can fully explain the security state, the police state, the
increasingly militarized borders through neoliberalism. One theory can’t do all the work
here. That said, though the founding neoliberals were not ardent nationalists — Quinn
Slobodian has written the definitive work explaining that neoliberalism was always a
globalist project — the nationalist turn can be explained not simply by old primordial
attachments or the immigration crisis in Europe or the displacement onto racialized
others of the problems of the white working and middle classes.
I think we also need to see the extent to which the privatization of everything, the attack
on public goods and the attack on the social, made it fairly easy for authoritarian or
right-wing politicians to emerge from the ruins of neoliberalism, the economic and
social-political ruins, to make an argument for the belonging of the nation to an ethno-
nationalist population, a white population, which was being invaded by outsiders. The
clearest example of this is Marine Le Pen in France, who quite literally campaigned
before she was defeated by Emmanuel Macron, on the slogan, “This is our house. We
hold the keys. France is our house. We hold the keys. We have the right to decide
whether the door is open, the door is closed, and who comes in.”

The privatization of everything made it fairly easy for authoritarian or right-wing politicians to
emerge from the ruins of neoliberalism.

That notion of the nation as a house that belongs to those who are already here comports
rather perfectly with the idea that there is no society, let alone global society, let alone
global society stratified by colonialism, post-colonialism, and the aftereffects of
American and European intervention on all the rest of the world. It comports perfectly
with the idea that we own our house. We own our country. The borders, the walls of one
are simply slightly magnified or ramified versions of the borders and the walls of
another. No world state gets to tell us who comes in; no nation-state gets to intervene in
my house. It’s an antisocial, anti-political, and obviously anti-inclusionist bit of rhetoric.
But it is important to see the extent to which neoliberal privatization is very easily
redeployed for something that it was not intended to be used for.

DD

Your book tracks the destruction caused by neoliberalism and then closes with a truly
fascinating discussion of what sort of reactionary subject emerges from neoliberalism’s
ruins. That’s a nihilistic subject. The nihilism that pervades so much of Trump’s
politics, from the rejection of the possibility of reasoned truth, to the thrill in causing
offense and suffering and violence, and all the trolling, to the indifference to climate
change, the incel movement, the celebration of Trump’s transgressive immorality as a
sign of his strength in power, including the power to exact revenge — this is visible in
and a result of all of these things we’ve been discussing from, “the explicit
transactionalism and politicization of religious values,” to an MLK speech being used in
a Dodge truck Super Bowl commercial, to the ability to pay for a VIP upgrade of
anything, to more recently, Jerry Falwell Jr’s brazenly deviant sexual conduct. It’s not,
you write, “merely the inegalitarian effects of neoliberalism,” but also “its relentlessly
inegalitarian spirit.” Explain your explanation of this turn toward such pervasive and
intense nihilism, and why you say it’s worse than anything that Nietzsche could have
imagined.

WB

Let’s begin by discussing nihilism a bit. It’s usually used to talk about a state in which
nothing has meaning, there are no values, there’s just darkness. It’s used in a lot of
millennial left culture to come close to fatalism or darkness, where it’s all just going to
end badly anyway.
I’m using it a little differently, as the term comes to us from the nineteenth century,
from a whole set of thinkers — Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nietzsche above all.
What does Nietzsche teach us about nihilism? That it’s not a condition in which values
disappear. It’s a condition in which values are toppled from their foundations. What he
means is that, as science and other prizes of modernity, like reason and rationality,
destroy the foundation for stable values and moral truths, that those truths and truth
itself as a value don’t disappear, they become trivialized, they become fungible, they
become instrumentalizable.

Nihilism is not a condition in which values disappear. It’s a condition in which values are
toppled from their foundations.

That is the condition we’re in today. They’re monetized, they’re branded, they’re
wielded as weapons. And the examples you just gave are perfect. Jerry Falwell Jr really
captured this at the end, saying essentially, I never believed any of this stuff anyway. It
was just good business.

DD

He was on this conservative talk show where he was like, I got caught. I’ve been a bad
boy.

WB

Exactly. And the fact that Trump is so easily exonerated for everything, from his
contractual marriage to the sexual philandering. It’s a condition we need to grasp as
something that is not simply describing those who are overtly engaged in deploying a
set of hard-core moral or religious values, while cheating on the side. We need to
understand this as a more general condition that besets our culture. It has a lot to do with
why we are in a “post-truth” world.

What has happened over the last couple of centuries is the devaluation of values. As
values were devalued but didn’t disappear, they also loosened the grip of conscience.
Why? Because conscience requires a certain sublimation of, Freud called it “instincts,”
Nietzsche called it “the will to power.” Conscience requires some throttling of human
will, human instincts, human desire, human impulse. And when values are devalued,
that conscience itself begins to lighten and loosen. Values are fungible and trivial and
instrumentalizable; then they don’t have that same clamp on the making of the subject.

What happens then? What Nietzsche warned us about was “de-sublimation.” Those
instincts or that will or that desire pops back up. But here’s where we need post-
structuralism added into the mix. The idea of instinct, the idea of will as this unformed
thing, is not very helpful. The idea of impulse or acting out from the wounds, from the
particular formations that we have — rancor, resentment, rage, frustration — that’s
another story.

One of the examples I use is the incel movement. Which is what? A movement of guys
who feel like losers, who instead of just feeling like losers — as they might have eighty
years ago, saying, “Oh God, we’re just the guys who can’t get a girl. We really feel bad
about ourselves” — the rage comes out, the rancor, the resentment, the misogyny, the
outrage at other men who are taking the girls. It’s an outrage that also has turned
murderous. I

But you see the same thing in the Proud Boys, you see the same thing in other kinds of
violent outbursts and everyday trolling. Just rage and rancor and resentment and
aggression. So when people talk about us becoming an uncivil culture and needing to
become nice again, there’s no reckoning with why we are uncivil. What has happened
here is the melding of this form of nihilism that has grown slowly, then has been put on
steroids by neoliberalism, with all the frustrations and the difficulties and the
nightmares and the wounds and the suffering and the failures of living in this world in
an everyday way.

DD

I have a theory about QAnon that I wanted to talk to you about, that I came up with
while reading your book. QAnon is, for Trump’s religious right base, the re-sublimation
of Trumpist nihilism into this Trumpist world-historical moral purpose. Which might at
first sound insane. But QAnon is a millenarian movement that identifies this maximally
stark moral divide between an evil elite pedophile cabal, on the one hand, and on the
other hand, Trump, the hero, who will destroy them and instantiate a blessed golden
age.

Its popularity has exploded since the onset of the pandemic. So it seems to be operating
at the same biopolitical level as the pandemic and the government response to it.

WB

I suspect we’re going to have articles, then books, then mega books on QAnon. It’s all
coming. But my own thinking is a little different, because first of all, we need to
remember that QAnon is not just popular in the United States. I read a frightening
statistic a few days ago, that one in four people surveyed in England finds QAnon
perfectly believable. It has a big German following.

So, yes to the pandemic effect. And certainly one of the pandemic effects has to do with
this idea that extracting a serum from these young children kind of parallels the
anxieties about both the virus itself and its movement, but also the possibility of
vaccines and so forth connects with the anti-vaxxers.

But I also think we shouldn’t get too hung up on the precise content of QAnon. Why?
Because it keeps morphing. QAnon had the pedophile thing in place from the
beginning, but a lot of its other content keeps changing and adapting, and the believers
keep growing. So then we need to ask why a conspiracy theory — that, as you say, is
very Manichaean and offers causal forces of bad and saviors for good — works right
now. Why is it so popular right now? On some level, it feeds what all conspiracy
theories and most religions do, which is offer an explanatory worldview amidst
enormous complexity and powers of all kinds, amidst which people feel not only
impotent but unknowing.
 A Donald Trump supporter holding
a QAnon flag visits Mount Rushmore National Monument in South Dakota. (Scott Olson / Getty
Images)

But I think the Trump thing is kind of interesting because, yes, it parallels Trump’s own
constant invocation of the dark webs of forces that attack him, the media, the deep state,
and it parallels his constant assertion of innocence, his invocation of innocence, and
invocation of the innocence of his followers, amidst all the darkness and swamps and
attackers. But Trump’s also less and less believable. I wonder to what extent QAnon, as
a conspiracy theory, is helping to keep Trump supporters supporting him, while paying
less and less attention to what he actually says.

That’s an odd thing to say about such a wild and nutty conspiracy theory. But I just
wonder if, in addition to all those powers that we can’t sort today and that we feel
helpless and powerless before, and in addition to the isolating effects of the pandemic,
which many people have pointed out already that QAnon addresses through its sociality
and alternate universe, because it gives people new friends and new worlds and new
causes, that there’s also something about resurrecting the picture of the world that
Trump drew and the idea of him as savior, even though he’s pretty much outrun the
figure that evangelical Christianity made him out to be in the beginning: “Okay, he’s an
unlikely savior, but he’s our guy, God sent him to us for a purpose.” QAnon takes that
another step, and in some ways, moves it beyond anything Trump does or says.

I think we need to treat QAnon as on a kind of spectrum or continuum rather than as

something wildly other and by itself. There is so much today that right and left have to
sort in the way of what we might call invisible powers or powers that are beyond our
comprehension. Russian trolling, the virus, surveillance capitalism, finance, who the
hell understands it? Even the highly trained investment bankers don’t. But then also,
lead in the water, and drug and sex trafficking, and 5G. Even Iran-Contra was hard for
many people to follow.

There’s something about the modern force field of powers — it’s not surprising to me
that, as we all try to piece together this world, some of the piecing together would take
this particular form. A bit more extreme, but it’s not that wild as a deviation from the
efforts more generally to map the powers that surround us, that organize us, and that
threaten to kill us, including climate change.

DD
And using actually the most mainstream, readily available material created by decades
of childhood safety panics, stranger danger, sex panics.

WB

Absolutely. And that links so beautifully with all the other ways in which moral panics
and pro-life forces have painted the world. But here’s where I would end. If it’s true that
the attraction to QAnon is some combination of a substitute figure for Trump himself —
because even though Trump is in the picture, he no longer has to be listened to or
believed, as I said, and it has to do with navigating contemporary powers when one
feels so small and so frightened and so existentially threatened by them — maybe what
we need here is something like a new psychosocial account of the structure of the fetish.
Freud told us that structure was, “I know, but still”; that is, I know it’s not true, but still
I believe; I know that carrying that little rabbit foot in my pocket is not going to keep
me safe, but still, I can’t leave the house without it.

And since the content of QAnon and other conspiracy theories, including those
organizing right-wing militias, keeps morphing, keeps changing, maybe that “I know,
but still” is part of what’s working here. It’s really unfortunate that neuropsychology is
on the rise today as a way of explaining human behavior, when what we really need are
accounts of the psyche in a global population facing existential dangers. The powers I
just described, they’re agentless. And there’s no reliable authority. Overwhelming
waves of disaster and difficulty. I mean, even what we’re facing just here in California:
the pandemic, the recession wildfires, rising seas — it’s overwhelming. Maybe what we
need are developments of psychosocial accounts of our subjectivity, our desires, what
we’re drawn to, what we’re oriented by, and not better neuropsychological accounts of
the chemicals driving our brains

The Politics of a Second Gilded Age

By

Matt Karp

The mass inequality of America’s first Gilded Age thrived on identity-based

partisanship, helping extinguish the fires of class rage. In 2021, we’re headed down the
same path.
Illustration by Rose Wong

The most important election of our lifetime — until the next one — produced no fewer
than three big, wet American winners. Amid plague, protest, and violence, three larger
trends emerged to mark the landscape of twenty-first-century politics far more distinctly
than any candidate or ideology.

In both a mathematical and a historical sense, America’s most notable winner was that
heartwarming index of civic health, participation in the democratic process. More than
two-thirds of eligible voters cast a ballot this fall, making 2020 the highest-turnout
election since 1900. New coronavirus-related voting options may explain some of this
surge, but not all of it, since participation also shot up in states that largely refused to
expand ballot access. In other states, like Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota, turnout
crested above the practically Scandinavian threshold of 75 percent.

This historic mobilization of the American masses led to the election of a Democratic
Party placeholder, whose launchpad to the world-straddling power of the US presidency
was a thirty-six-year career representing a province smaller than Cyprus. There is
something both absurd and apt about the simple fact that Joe Biden defeated Donald
Trump in a contest that generated more mass participation than any of the campaigns
that anointed Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, or Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The second winner of 2020, not unrelated to the first, was partisan polarization. As
long-standing social and institutional ties wear away, and national politics increasingly
takes the place of the union hall or the neighborhood club, party affiliation — Democrat
or Republican, Biden or Trump, Blue or Red — has become a kind of “mega-identity,”
in the phrase of the political scientist Lilliana Mason. American politics, as Obama
himself has accurately pointed out, is now “a contest where issues, facts, policies . . .
don’t matter as much as identity and wanting to beat the other guy.”

No figure embodies this truth so well as Biden, a nonentity who ran for office on the
non-slogan “Build Back Better,” without a defining political goal beyond beating
Trump — and rode that negative partisanship to win far more votes than any candidate
in US history. Yet even this extraordinary victory only sharpened the boundary lines on
our national political map, with the reds getting redder, the blues getting bluer, and
Republicans losing the presidency but gaining seats in Congress.

November’s third major winner, filling out the picture, was America’s headlong march
toward a party system entirely decoupled from the politics of class. To be sure, the
class-aligned politics of the long New Deal era — which happened to produce virtually
every worthwhile national law, from Social Security to the Voting Rights Act — began
to erode decades ago. But the last four years have seen a rapid acceleration of this trend,
with Republicans winning larger and larger chunks of the non-college-educated working
class, while Democrats gain more and more votes from affluent professionals and
managers.

The result is a party system in which “issues” and “policies” — that is, competing ideas
about the exercise of power or the distribution of goods — can hardly expect to find
meaningful expression, let alone material fulfillment.

Gilded Age Politics

Mass participation, feverish partisanship, and class dealignment: we have seen an
American electoral politics organized along these lines before. Notwithstanding the
noisy debate over Trump and the threat of “fascism,” a concept imported from interwar
Europe, this country’s own history furnishes a more useful precedent for our politics
today.

From the Civil War to the early twentieth century, two evenly matched national parties
traded biennial bouts of apocalyptic rhetoric and claims of election fraud, amid an
atmosphere of widespread, even routine, political violence. Across this “age of
acrimony,” as the historian Jon Grinspan calls it in a forthcoming book, American
electoral politics operated on a principle of partisan vituperation. As an Ohio governor
lamented in 1885, it was a “common thing to call the man with whom they do not
happen to agree, a liar, a thief, a villain, a scoundrel, a Yahoo, a marplot, a traitor, a
beast, anything and everything they may be able to command in the way of an epithet.”

Democrats and Republicans hated each other as much as they ever have, and their
antagonism revealed itself in Congress and at the ballot box. Partisans disputed election
results, incited mobs, and enouraged paramilitaries, while high-toned pundits denounced
the “Mexicanization” of American politics. If today’s elections feel less like a struggle
over state policy than a series of mass entertainment or sporting events — complete
with predictable fan riots at the end of each season — Gilded Age politics, too, became
a kind of national pastime, bursting with color, drama, and spectacle.

No General William Tecumseh Sherman or Red Army is marching along to save us.

The presidential races between James Garfield and Winfield Scott Hancock in 1880, or
Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison in 1888, for instance, are not remembered for
their ideological stakes, nor should they be. But they were contested as ferociously as
any election today, and they both brought more than 80 percent of eligible voters to the
polls. Despite the violent suppression of black votes in the post-Reconstruction South,
late-nineteenth-century elections saw the highest sustained voter turnouts of any period
in US history.

Yet the partisan politics of the Gilded Age, for all its storminess, was also the politics of
class dealignment. Both Republicans and Democrats claimed the mantle of the
American worker, accusing the other side of being owned by some privileged stratum of
the elite — and they were both right. Although the two sides argued endlessly about
economic issues, including tariffs and monetary policy, it was often difficult to identify
any class-based fault lines underneath the ruckus.

The real divisions lay elsewhere. Blue-collar workers remained fiercely divided by
geography, race, religion, ethnicity, and culture — in a word, identity — with white
Southerners and Catholics voting for Democrats, while northern Protestants and African
Americans (where they could vote) backed Republicans. The voracious capitalist class
at the helm of the economy, of course, remained flexibly bipartisan.

This was a formula for half a century of ruthless capitalist domination, racial
oppression, and imperial expansion. Though America’s streets, docks, mines, and rail
yards overflowed with protest — with more riots, uprisings, massacres, and police
crackdowns than any other era in US history — remarkably little of this mass frustration
left a deep imprint on the electoral system.

All the while, as if on a parallel track, partisan conflict between Republicans and
Democrats raged hotter than ever, borrowing the emotional intensities of the Civil War
era but without their ideological radicalism. Instead, the grievances of millions were
channeled into passionate but sterile identity politics — where the fires of that
enormous class rage fizzled into smoke. Does any of this sound familiar?

A comparison between today’s politics and the battles of Gilded Age America lacks the
moral urgency of the analogy to European fascism — and therefore is much less useful,
in different ways, to progressive commentators along a broad ideological spectrum. (For
liberals, the specter of fascism is a reliable tool to discipline wayward leftists; for the
Left, it is an irresistible opportunity to scoff at liberal complacency in the face of
apocalypse.) Unlike the struggle against Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini — a fight
that fits the moral arc of a superhero movie — the grubby, confused politics of the late
nineteenth century offer little promise of romantic inspiration or even wholesome,
spine-tingling distress.

No doubt, this Gilded Age analogy shares the defects of all crude historical analogies. It
underplays the substantive differences between today’s two parties. The Democrats,
despite losing much of their working-class base, retain the entrenched support of
organized labor. And the Republicans, while making feeble gestures toward populism,
remain far more hostile toward the foundational democratic principle of majority rule.

But thinking about late nineteenth-century US politics may be more politically

instructive than the ubiquitous comparisons to fascism or the American Civil War. For
all its sound and fury, the strife between today’s Republicans and Democrats does not
represent an ideological conflict on the verge of armed revolutionary struggle. Even the
most outrageous breaches of normal procedure only underline this point. When the pro-
Trump mob stormed the Capitol Building on January 6, it was apparently driven by no
larger social vision than keeping its televised hero in the White House for four more
years. Briefly gaining control of the House chamber, Trump’s champions sought not to
take possession of the US government but to take selfies.

If the denialist narrative of 2020 makes sense as partisan hoopla, it is baffling as electoral
analysis.
Viewed soberly, the American political situation portends much scattered violence, but
nothing that resembles either civil war or fascist coup. No General William Tecumseh
Sherman or Red Army is marching along to save us, and it does the Left no good to
pretend otherwise.

Contemporary US elections are, however, marked by widespread popular enthusiasm,

bitter partisan feeling, and hardly anything that looks like effective class politics. Our
fault lines, as Dylan Riley explains in the New Left Review, also lie elsewhere: between
the dueling political logics of “neoliberal multiculturalism,” on the one hand, and
“macho-national neomercantilism” on the other. (Or, as Chapo Trap House’s Matt
Christman has put it: “the party of Don’t Be an Asshole” versus “the party of Don’t Be
a Pussy.”)

As the electoral system spins toward these gendered politics of partisan identity —
further and further away from questions of wealth and power — the possibility of a
meaningful democratic challenge to capital recedes beyond the horizon. If we are ever
to break out of our own second Gilded Age, this destructive order of things must be
interrupted, beaten back, and eventually transformed.

Class Dealignment Is Real

Confronting the specter of class dealignment, liberal commentators have offered three
major responses: denial, celebration, and resignation. None of them are adequate to the
problem.

Even in the face of an obvious statistical trend, some Democratic Party loyalists
continue to downplay their party’s growing problem with working-class voters. Armed
with a fistful of (rather dubious) exit poll data, partisans can boast that Biden beat
Trump by 8 to 11 points among voters with incomes under $50,000. But even if these
numbers are correct, they only underline the fundamental point: lower-income voters
are narrowly divided between the parties, and the division is getting narrower. Eight
years ago, already waist-deep in the era of class dealignment, Obama won this same
group of lower-income voters by 22 points.

Far more than any Democratic president in US history, Biden’s victory in 2020
depended not on blue-collar workers but on white-collar professionals. When class is
measured by education, rather than income — “education polarization,” as liberal
wonks prefer to call it — the working-class retreat from the Democrats looks even more
dramatic.

The most influential version of denial acknowledges that Democrats have lost enormous
support from white workers since 2012: the numbers here are simply too large to ignore.
But by touting the loyalty of black and Latino voters, liberal pundits can still cast a
narrative that flaunts Democrats as the party of a multiracial working class. They’re not
wrong, exactly — no more than Gilded Age Republicans were wrong to claim that their
support from Mississippi sharecroppers and Vermont dairymen made them the party of
a multiracial working class. But it’s not a very convincing way to describe a party that is
less and less competitive with over half the blue-collar workers in America.
If the denialist narrative of 2020 — call it the “Stacey Abrams saved us!” theory —
makes sense as partisan hoopla, it is baffling as electoral analysis. There is no doubt that
Abrams, Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, and other influential black Democrats
deserve credit for Biden’s historic victory in Georgia, their party’s first since 1992. But
examinations of county and precinct data paint the same picture: the decisive swing
toward Biden and Kamala Harris came not from working-class black Georgians, whose
Democratic turnout probably did not rise as much as other groups, but from voters in
Atlanta’s prosperous suburbs.

The Georgia precincts that broke hardest for Biden, the New York Times found, were
those with median incomes over $100,000 a year. If Stacey Abrams saved the
Democrats, it was not primarily because she turned out new voters in the hardscrabble
black neighborhoods of southwest Atlanta, where Biden performed about as well as
Hillary Clinton and a bit worse than Obama. It was because Abrams helped engineer
truly massive gains in the upscale precincts of Sandy Springs, where the Democratic
vote soared almost 40 percent from 2016.

At the national level, the denialist narrative is even harder to sustain, since Trump’s
gains in 2020 extended not just to working-class whites, but to working-class Latinos
and African Americans, too. The massive shift among Hispanic voters in South Texas
and Florida cannot be attributed strictly to conservative Tejano oil workers or older
Cuban émigrés with long-standing GOP loyalties. The overwhelmingly Latino voters of
Sweetwater, Florida, a working-class Miami suburb, voted for Obama twice and gave
Clinton a 17-point victory in 2016. This year, they also voted for Florida’s $15
minimum wage amendment by a landslide margin of 33 points. But these same voters
broke strongly for Trump, who carried Sweetwater by 16 points.

A similar if less dramatic pattern played out all across the nation, with Trump
improving his margins in seventy-eight of America’s one hundred Latino-majority
counties. A closer look at this phenomenon, which extended from Dominican-American
communities in Massachusetts mill towns to Mexican immigrants on the California
border, underlines the working-class character of this year’s Latino shift away from the
Democrats.

Trump improved his margins with black voters, too, though his gains were much
smaller. The real story here is the same as in 2016: working-class African Americans
aren’t voting Republican en masse, but they are showing up to vote Democratic at lower
rates than the rest of the party’s coalition. Some of this is visible in national and state
data, but as usual, it is even more vivid at the local level.

Trump’s hapless legal effort to overturn the election results in Michigan made much of
Biden’s large margin in Wayne County, but, as many liberal commentators noted, the
city of Detroit itself was one of the few places in the state where the Democratic vote
actually shrank, in absolute terms, since 2016. In the highest-turnout presidential
election in over a century — where Michigan’s turnout climbed from 62 percent to
more than 73 percent — Detroit’s largely black, working-class residents voted at
roughly the same rate they had four years ago.

In the black-majority wards of northern Flint, Michigan — whose contaminated

drinking water has been a national scandal for six years — Biden ran behind Hillary
Clinton, both in total votes and in share of the vote. Although 2020 turnout spiked all
across Michigan and Genesee County, it actually declined in black working-class Flint.
Results from rural black-majority counties in Alabama and Mississippi, and precinct-
level returns in largely black districts like Chicago’s South Side, West Philadelphia,
North St. Louis, East Cleveland, and central Akron, show a similar pattern compared to
2016: small but consistent shifts toward Trump, alongside flat or declining turnout rates.

Nationally, of course, African Americans remain the most steadfast voters in the
Democratic coalition — and in some places, like the thriving, diverse Atlanta suburbs,
black turnout may well have jumped in 2020. But in poor and working-class black
communities, especially, where “economic anxiety” has been a problem for decades,
Biden and Harris again struggled to turn out voters.

At this point, the scale and specificity of the evidence — across almost every racial
group — is too large for all but the most committed denialist to ignore. “Across the
country’s working-class zones,” writes Gabriel Winant in n+1, “Republican
organization has tapped into actual living sociality and lent it reactionary meaning while
Democrats are surviving on existing and anachronistic ‘norms’ like an inheritance they
are spending down.”

In the New York Times, David Leonhardt was more direct: “The Democratic message is
failing to resonate with many working-class Americans.”

Class dealignment is all too real. But what does it mean for American politics?

Class Dealignment Is a Disaster for Left

Politics
For one prominent cluster of think-tank liberals, the changing Democratic coalition is
not a fact to be mourned but an opportunity to be seized. As Trump draws the
Republicans to “populism,” New America’s Lee Drutman argued after the 2016
election, the Democrats should work to win over “upscale cosmopolitan Republicans.”
After Biden rode this advice to victory in 2020, the Brookings Institution issued a blunt
pronouncement: “The future for Democrats is in the suburbs.”

The strategic case for dealignment on these terms is straightforward. The voters
Democrats are losing (“blue-collar” workers “in Western Pennsylvania,” as Chuck
Schumer infamously put it in 2016) represent a shrinking share of the US electorate; the
voters they are gaining (“moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia”)
represent a growing share. The new highly educated Democrats are also much more
reliable voters in off-year elections, as the 2018 midterms demonstrated. As more and
more Americans graduate from college, the theory goes, both the electorate and the
future become more and more Democratic.

Yet if class dealignment works to raise the floor of Democratic support, it also lowers
the ceiling, blunting the party’s ability to compete for the 65 percent of adults without
college degrees. The 2016 election showed what a Democratic defeat looks like under
this arrangement — a total wipeout in every branch of the federal government, with
losses at the state level, too. Perhaps just as troubling, 2020 has shown what victory
looks like: just enough suburban votes for Democrats to win back the White House and
Senate, but not enough to retake a single state house or summon a convincing majority
in Congress.

Of course, divided government is no disaster for the investor class or the politicians who
serve it. A Republican stake in government, as centrist leaders like Andrew Cuomo
understand, offers both a reliable guardrail against progressive ambition and a
convincing excuse for unmet campaign promises.

But everyone else should be concerned. As Jonathan Rodden shows in his book Why
Cities Lose, the combination of class dealignment and metropolitan concentration puts
Democrats at a massive disadvantage in the Senate, in the Electoral College, and in state
governments. Even in the House of Representatives, just 26 out of 435 districts contain
a majority of eligible voters with a bachelor’s degree. In 288 of those same districts,
meanwhile, non-college-educated voters make up at least two-thirds of the potential
electorate.

These numbers put a hard cap on any coalition that depends on educated metropolitans.
If even huge Democratic mobilizations under this alignment, like Biden’s 81-million-
vote victory in 2020, can produce only razor-thin majorities, it becomes difficult to
imagine, let alone enact, a big-ticket reform like Medicare for All. And if the rising
Democratic coalition is electorally punchless, it is also ideologically inert. To be sure,
some progressive commentators have trumpeted the possibilities of a professional-class
Democratic Party, arguing that affluent suburban voters are no obstacle to economic
populist policy. But this species of argument — call it the “Katie Porter will save us!”
theory — was unconvincing last year, and it is no more convincing today.

It’s true that Porter, an outspoken progressive from a wealthy district in Southern
California, cruised to reelection in her House seat. But for every Porter, since 2018, the
newly blue suburbs have elected far more pro-business “New Democrats,” like Abigail
Spanberger and Jennifer Wexton (VA), Tom Malinowski and Mikie Sherrill (NJ), Colin
Allred and Lizzie Fletcher (TX), Elissa Slotkin and Haley Stevens (MI), Lucy McBath
(GA), Sean Casten (IL), Dean Phillips (MN), and Jason Crow (CO). None are
cosponsors of Medicare for All.

In 2019, the ideological limits of a Democratic Party centered around professional-class

voters were already visible, where state governments from Connecticut to Washington
proved unable to take even the gentlest baby steps toward economic redistribution. The
2020 election underlined that point in dark blue ink.

In Illinois, billionaire governor J. B. Pritzker spent much of the year attempting to sell
voters on a progressive tax on income above $250,000 a year — funding needed to
avoid dire cuts to the state budget. But in a statewide referendum, the bifurcated
Democratic coalition failed him. In Chicago, nonwhite working-class voters strongly
backed Pritzker’s tax, with the South Side’s 8th Ward (97 percent black) and the West
Side’s 22nd Ward (89 percent Latino) supporting the measure by over 50 points. Yet
overall Democratic turnout in both these inner-city wards — where Joe Biden’s vote
share also dropped — was down from 2012 and 2016.
Meanwhile, wealthy and well-educated Illinois Democrats backed Biden with far more
enthusiasm than they mustered for Chicago’s own Barack Obama, but their support did
not extend to the progressive tax. Here, it is worth distinguishing among three different
kinds of upscale neighborhoods. In the very posh, very liberal 43rd Ward, home to
Lincoln Park, voters turned Obama’s healthy 31-point lead in 2012 to a 64-point Biden
landslide in 2020 — but they only supported the tax by 7 points. In the moderate,
affluent North Shore suburbs of New Trier Township, including the $1.58 million house
where Home Alone was filmed, Biden extended Obama’s margin from 10 to 46 points
— but residents voted against the tax by 23 points. And in the traditionally Republican
village of Barrington, where reality TV star Kristin Cavallari and NFL quarterback Kirk
Cousins grew up, a 28-point Obama deficit turned into a 4-point Biden victory — but
the tax was defeated by a whopping 40 points.

The gap between Barrington and Lincoln Park suggests that not all rich Democratic
districts are created equal. But the similar results across the wealthy Chicago burbs,
from Northfield to Naperville — with Biden collecting from 30 to 70 points more than
the income tax — also suggest that this is not a Democratic coalition willing to pay for
public goods.

In Arizona, a similar ballot measure — to fund teacher salaries by taxing income over
$250,000 — managed to get over the finish line, winning 52 percent support statewide.
Yet a glance at metro Phoenix precincts reveals a familiar pattern. In wealthy resort
communities like Scottsdale and Paradise Valley, where the recent blue swing has been
most dramatic, Biden and Democratic Senate candidate Mark Kelly proved much more
popular than teacher salaries. The ballot measure only passed, it seems, due to residual
support in red-trending, working-class exurbs like eastern Mesa and Apache Junction —
areas where Trump won a majority but where taxing the rich still ran well ahead of the
Democrats.

In California, finally, new-blue rich suburbs were not the only areas that voted for
Proposition 22, which overturned labor protections for app-based drivers. (The
unprecedented $200 million spent by Uber, Lyft, and other companies helped win votes
everywhere outside the state’s most reliably liberal areas.) The most revealing fault line,
as in Illinois and Arizona, was a fiscal measure — Proposition 15, which proposed to
fund schools and local governments by raising taxes on business property worth more
than $3 million. Despite a corporate propaganda campaign against it — unfortunately
abetted by the California NAACP — Proposition 15 proved popular in working-class
Los Angeles, winning large margins from black and Latino voters in Compton,
Inglewood, and Bell Gardens. But once again, the newest wing of the Biden coalition
stepped up and batted down an attempt to tax the rich.

In the very wealthy, ex-Republican LA beach suburbs of Rancho Palos Verdes and
Manhattan Beach — where Biden ran 25 or more points better than Obama — the
business property tax failed by over 20 points. Orange County as a whole, which turned
blue for the first time in 2016, swung hard against Proposition 15. Even Katie Porter
couldn’t help save California schools and governments: in her own very wealthy
congressional district, voters rejected the property tax, 61 to 39 percent.

Summoning the democratic will for economic redistribution is difficult in the best of
circumstances. But it is harder than ever under conditions of accelerating class
dealignment — when the political party that claims to support progressive taxes
depends, more and more, on voters who strenuously oppose them.

If the future of the Democratic Party is in the rich suburbs, the future of American
politics is another long Gilded Age.

Class Dealignment Is a Choice

The most understandable liberal response to class dealignment is a kind of resignation
and acceptance. After all, the larger pattern of education polarization is not unique to the
United States in the age of Trump; as Thomas Piketty has shown more thoroughly than
anyone, it’s a broader trend that has marked much of the postindustrial world since at
least the 1970s. And as Piketty also notes, the class-centered politics of the early
twentieth century emerged from economic forces and social movements — in particular,
industrial development and mass labor organization — that do not exist in the same
form today. So why should we expect electoral politics to look the same?

We shouldn’t. But too often, for liberal pundits, the mere recognition of class
dealignment doubles as a meek surrender to its power, as if the rich suburban conquest
of the Democratic Party were a law of physics. In the eyes of such tough-minded
progressives, leftists who pine for the New Deal coalition — or any electoral politics
grounded in class — might as well be howling at the phases of the moon. It’s seen as a
mark of intellectual maturity to recognize that the future of progressive struggle lies in
the office parks and PTA meetings of Scottsdale and Sandy Springs, not the warehouses
and hospitals of northern Minnesota or Western Pennsylvania.

This logic, of course, enthrones Chuck Schumer’s butt-headed 2016 campaign strategy
as a driving force of world history.

Yes, some form of class dealignment has emerged all over the developed world, and no,
its US iteration cannot be reduced to particular national conditions — either unique
Democratic Party malfeasance or the deep history of American racism. But all this only
underlines something we already know well: that center-left parties in postindustrial
countries, facing similar social and economic currents, have followed similar paths,
prioritizing global markets, cosmopolitan values, and professional-class voters rather
than unions, wages, and blue-collar workers. Our world contains many Chuck
Schumers. The death of class politics is not an outcome these party leaders feared; it is a
goal they have zealously pursued. Just as laissez-faire was planned, class dealignment
was chosen.

Ironically, in the United States, the best evidence for this comes from the political figure
who appears to symbolize the Democrats’ transformation from a party of workers to a
party of cosmopolitans: Barack Obama. The irresistible rise of class dealignment, as
marked out in the alpine slopes of Piketty’s charts, suffered a major hiccup in 2008,
when blue-collar voters flocked to Obama over John McCain. Judged by income levels,
Obama’s first victory may even have seen more class-based voting than the New Deal–
era heyday of the 1950s and 1960s. Even the march of education polarization, perhaps
the strongest electoral meta-trend of the twenty-first century, was halted and reversed in
2008.
Since 2016, however, dealignment has soared like the Matterhorn. Viewed from the
pivotal swing state of Michigan, the class differences between the Obama and Biden
coalitions are both stark and enlightening. In 2008, Obama swept across white working-
class Michigan like the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — in fact, he won
the state by a larger margin than FDR did in 1932. In deindustrializing Bay County,
formerly a base for General Motors, he won by 15 points; in rural Menominee County
on the Upper Peninsula, he won by 10, the best Democratic showing there since Lyndon
B. Johnson. And in black working-class Detroit, Obama walloped McCain by 316,000
votes.

The 2020 election was a different story. Biden’s Detroit margin over Trump shrunk to
221,000 votes, a reduction that far outpaced the city’s population decline in the same
years. In Bay County, Biden lost by 12 points, a 27-point swing to the GOP; in
Menominee, he lost by 30, a whopping 40-point reversal. And yet, even in the context
of a much tighter Michigan race — with a winning margin that shrank from 16 to 3
points — Biden nevertheless managed to make gains in the richest parts of the state. In
prosperous, ancestrally Republican Kent County, home to Grand Rapids, the
Democratic vote in 2020 outpaced Obama and FDR alike. In the affluent Detroit suburb
of Bloomfield Hills — the single richest municipality in Michigan — Biden and Harris
ran 17 points ahead of Obama and Biden in ’08 (and 15 points ahead of the ’12 ticket).

These are differences that a single decade has made. The broad historical forces that
helped produce today’s dealigned electorate — global markets, weak unions,
disappearing jobs, and stagnant wages — were all operative, in their essential form, in
2008. They cannot be responsible for such a dramatic shift in such a short period of
time.

Nor can it be chalked up to the unique political talent of Barack Obama. After all, that
talent did not seem so impressive to wealthy voters in Bloomfield Hills — nor in the
country clubs of Houston and on the private beaches of Southern California, where he
received many fewer votes than both John McCain and Joe Biden.

In retrospect, Obama’s political skills seem to have been especially spectacular in the
very blue-collar precincts that many progressives now regard as lost to the Democrats
for a generation. What was it about Barack Obama that made him so attractive to
Youngstown, Ohio, and so unwelcome in Newport Beach, California? Maybe it had
something to do with the political energy of the 2008 campaign, which rallied around a
historic outsider’s bid to change Washington, get out of Iraq, and guarantee universal
health care — all while chanting the slogan of the United Farm Workers.

Obama’s eight years in power, of course, delivered something very different from the
populist energy of the campaign trail. Homeowners suffered foreclosure while
Washington bailed out Wall Street; health insurance remained ruinously expensive and
very far from universal; inequality rose as fast as ever. The rhetoric of class politics
gave way to the reality of cautious, stakeholder-centered government, both materially
and stylistically allergic to bold economic redistribution. As “Yes We Can” mutated
into “Don’t Boo, Vote,” is it any wonder that the Obama coalition changed shape, too?

Yet somehow, according to today’s calculations, the truck drivers and cashiers who
twice voted for a transformative, populist black candidate — only to grasp for another
outsider in 2016 — have now revealed themselves as fascists in sheep’s clothing.
Meanwhile, the corporate lawyers and realtors who spurned Obama twice, and only
came around to the Democrats after they nominated the safest possible symbol of
restoration — a white, six-term senator from Delaware — represent the progressive
future of the party. Such is the logic of Gilded Age politics, where partisan identity
transcends class, interest, and ideology.

A Gilded Age Pandemic

The difference between the Obama and Biden coalitions, of course, owes much to the
emergence of Donald Trump. Trump’s aggressive anti-establishment rhetoric and his
thinly coded racist appeals have clearly helped undermine Democratic support in white
working-class districts.

But the shape of two-party electoral contests is determined by the political decisions of
both parties. For the Democratic elites who always opposed class politics, Trump has
been nothing less than a godsend. (There’s a reason why so many anti-populist liberals,
from Neera Tanden to Jonathan Chait, were eager to see him win the Republican
primary.) In 2016, Hillary Clinton went all in on the Schumer strategy, crafting a
campaign that did not seek to discredit or outbid Trump’s rabble-rousing but actually
amplified it, in hopes of scooping up disgusted Republicans in the suburbs. That choice,
ratified by the 2018 midterms and Joe Biden’s victory in the Democratic primary, made
the contours of the 2020 campaign all but inevitable.

Although Biden made a few feeble gestures toward populist politics, “Scranton versus
Park Avenue” never really got off the ground. It was always going to be a tough sell,
given that Park Avenue voted for the son of Scranton at an 80 percent clip. Instead,
Biden focused like a laser on Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic,
making it the centerpiece of his campaign and the entirety of his closing statement at the
final debate. For all the pundit chatter about defunding the police or the future of
democracy, the vast majority of Americans, as the New York Times reported, understood
the 2020 campaign as “the pandemic versus the economy.” For Biden voters, poll after
poll demonstrated, the virus was the most important issue.

Amid an outbreak that has killed more than 300,000 Americans, public health was
bound to take center stage in the election. But Biden’s brand of pandemic politics felt
like it was designed in a biotech lab to accelerate the march of class dealignment. First,
in the primary, he and his allies mocked Bernie Sanders’s effort to connect the lethal
virus to the larger failures of America’s unequal health care system. COVID-19 relief
for all, Democrats made clear, did not mean Medicare for All or anything like it.

Second, in the general election, Biden lambasted Trump for his incompetence,
irresponsibility, and refusal to consult scientific experts. All these criticisms were richly
deserved; judged by the death toll alone, the United States has one of the worst virus-
response records in the world. But by limiting their attacks to Trump’s blundering
leadership, Democrats positioned themselves not as advocates for expanded social
welfare but as guardians of ideologically neutral “science.”
Considered on the whole, it was a politics of “high-minded white-collar rectitude,” as
journalist Thomas Frank wrote in the Guardian, perfectly pitched to win over educated
professionals in the suburbs. “Science is real,” announces the now-ubiquitous rainbow
yard sign — above “love is love” and below “no human is illegal” — eloquently
expressing the Trump-era liberal desire to reduce all politics to some combination of
identity and tautology. This catechism’s failure to mention health care, jobs, or wages is
not accidental. Within today’s Democratic Party — devoted to “a profoundly unequal
but rigorously equitable form of capitalism,” as Riley argues — academic expertise
ranks much higher than economic rights.

As the 2020 campaign unfolded under the shadow of the pandemic, Trump helpfully
played his part, doubling down on the buffoonish antics that culminated in his infection
with COVID-19. The deadly outbreak — an actual extension of class war, in which
thousands of manual workers have died while bosses and professionals complain about
Zoom calls — was thus dressed up as another episode in the never-ending struggle
between Team Red and Team Blue.

Both major party establishments joined the effort to convince a plague-stricken, protest-
riddled country to bring its righteous anger to the ballot box. The corporate media,
whose own business models now expect Gilded Age levels of partisanship — 91
percent of Americans who depend on the New York Times for news are Democrats —
eagerly played along. And potential frustration at the for-profit health care system, or
mass unemployment, or the literally murderous shape of our economy, was rerouted
into familiar sectarian sniping about experts, masks, and individual misbehavior.

By accepting the false zero-sum choice of “the pandemic versus the economy,” Mike
Davis notes, Democrats practically advertised their unseriousness as a party of material
politics. But who needs material politics in an era of feverish culture war? Ultimately, it
was much easier to make Anthony Fauci a sex symbol than to campaign on anything
that bore the slightest whiff of resentment against the rich and powerful. In so many
senses, both the pandemic and the politics that emerged from it took place deep within
our second Gilded Age.

Forging a Class Interest

Where does this all leave the Left? Class dealignment may be a choice, but if
Democratic leaders keep choosing it, what hope is there to break the cycle? The two
Sanders presidential campaigns represented one effort, but they ended in a defeat that
only confirmed the supremacy of the Biden coalition.

The current order leaves the post-Sanders electoral left in a painful bind. To woo
polarized primary voters in deep-blue districts, and to build lasting institutional strength,
left-wing candidates feel that they must, as a matter of tactical necessity, lean further
into Democratic partisanship. That means concentrating their fire on Republicans,
making a degree of peace with the Democratic leadership, and accepting the burdens of
the Democratic Party “brand.”

And yet it is that same brand, that same leadership, and, above all, that same system of
partisanship that drives the march of class dealignment. The more left-wing candidates
present themselves as “like the Democrats, but more so” — on the model of many
progressives today — the faster they accelerate this fatal process. A post-Bernie
progressive movement that puts partisan identity ahead of class politics is a progressive
movement that has abandoned class politics altogether, except as a recruiting slogan for
college students. Nothing could make Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell happier.

The hard truth is that there are no real victories to be won within the current partisan
order. Our only hope is a political struggle on two fronts: first, and most fundamentally,
against the forces of economic reaction that have sapped class solidarity for over a
century. This is not primarily an electoral fight — it begins, above all, in the effort to
rebuild and reorient labor organizations. “The immediate unity of class interest,” as
political theorist William Clare Roberts writes, “is a myth that obscures the hard work
of forging a common interest.” Across the first Gilded Age, it took decades of savage
labor struggle to accomplish that work. In the very different conditions of the twenty-
first century, it will no doubt look very different, but it may take just as long.

Forging a real class interest, though, also requires fighting back against a national
political order that works to undermine it at every turn. That means a left-wing electoral
struggle aimed strategically not just at Republicans, or even at “moderates,” but at the
partisan alignment itself — the gargantuan clash of identities that sucks all material
politics into the infinity war of blue versus red.

Such an electoral struggle is not so simple as the familiar pundits’ pivot from “culture”
to “economics,” especially when “culture” refers to fundamental commitments better
described as civil rights. But it does mean refusing the temptation of today’s relentless
partisan culture, where party affiliation stands in for personal virtue, and incessant
manufactured outrage — over rude tweets, mean op-eds, “foreign” attachments, and
shocking episodes of personal misconduct — drowns out real clashes of economic
interest.

Class dealignment is both a historical process and a political choice. The history of the
Obama presidency underlines the larger forces and figures that have driven the
developed world away from class politics. But the history of the Obama campaigns —
alongside some elements of the Sanders primary runs — reminds us that other political
choices are possible, and other political coalitions are achievable. In the 2017 UK
election, Piketty shows, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party also halted the march of
dealignment by income and wealth.

As labor organizers battle in the trenches to challenge the power of capital, left electoral
politics must continue to fight, against the partisan grain, for a working-class coalition.
It is no great mystery why Democrats like Biden, Clinton, and Schumer have chosen the
path of class dealignment, which suits both their electoral fortunes and the larger
interests they serve. But for the fragile, fledgling Left that has emerged from the
Sanders era, no choice could be more disastrous.

This article previously listed Representative Sara Jacobs (D-CA) among a group of
recently elected Democrats who did not cosponsor Medicare for All. Jacobs is a
cosponsor of the Medicare for All Act of 2021
Não são 30 pesos, são 30 anos
– o que está acontecendo no
Chile, por Ana Prestes
Os acontecimentos mais recentes no país andino passou um recado: não
tentem mais tomar decisões sem o povo.

por Ana Prestes

Publicado 23/05/2021 18:36 | Editado 24/05/2021 12:04

(Foto: Reprodução do Twitter)

Em outubro de 2019, quando milhões de pessoas foram às ruas no Chile,
uma das palavras de ordem que mais se ouvia enquanto os
manifestantes pulavam indo ao ar e voltando com força estremecendo o
solo chileno era: “no son 30 pesos, son 30 años”. Uma referência ao
aumento de 30 pesos da tarifa do metrô que foi o estopim para o
“estalido social”, como eles chamam, e os 30 anos de implantação do
que entrou para a história como o modelo chileno de neoliberalismo. O
Chile possui pouco mais de 18 milhões de habitantes, cerca de 8% da
população brasileira. Naquele dia 25 de outubro de 2019, em que
decididamente a Praça Itália se transformou na Praça Dignidade, a
presença de mais de 1,5 milhão de pessoas nas ruas de Santiago
equivale ao que seria no Brasil algo como 15 milhões de pessoas
ocupando as ruas de Brasília.

A Constituição pinochetista de 1980 funciona como uma espécie de elo

que liga o Chile atual ao passado ditatorial pós-derrubada de Salvador
Allende. Mas desde sua publicação, não foi uma Constituição que
dialogou apenas com o passado golpista, mas principalmente com o
futuro neoliberal que projetava. A carta funcionou de lastro para o
neoliberalismo sistemático dos últimos 30 anos, entoados nos cânticos
dos manifestantes de 2019. Em um trabalho espetacular de compilação
dos efeitos dessas três décadas sobre o país, Giorgio Boccardo e outros
pesquisadores mostram como o conjunto das políticas de privatização
dos serviços públicos de saúde, educação, aposentadorias, gestão da
água e reformas laborais impactou nas condições de vida e na
democracia chilena[1].

Por muito tempo se ouviu que o Chile foi o único país latino-americano
que “deu certo”, fruto de um “casamento feliz” entre neoliberalismo e
democracia. Mas não demorou muito para esse casamento ir pelos ares
e o mundo conhecer a verdadeira tensão que estava latente sob o
assoalho desse edifício. Bastou o presidente Piñera anunciar um
aumento em 30 pesos (20 centavos de Real) na tarifa do metrô de
Santiago para que uma grande onda de protestos engolisse todo o país e
fizesse o mundo voltar os olhos para a “longa pétala de mar, vinho e
neve”, como o poeta Neruda[2] descrevia sua pátria. Era o estalido
social. Não eram 30 pesos, eram 30 anos. E isso se demonstrou também
pela violenta reação do Estado e suas forças de segurança. Pelo
massacre dos carabineros em diversos pontos das manifestações, os
mais de 11 mil detidos e mais de 2500 presos, muitos dos quais ainda
seguem no cárcere e as mais de 300 pessoas com lesões oculares ou
completamente cegas pelos disparos e ataques da repressão. 

Na segunda quinzena de novembro de 2019, três institutos de pesquisa

(Activa, Criteria e Cadem) davam entre 82% e 85% a taxa de
desaprovação ao governo de Sebastián Piñera por chilenas e chilenos.
Dali em diante o país vive uma crescente de mudanças que podem ter
impacto em todo o sistema político e social. A começar pela redação de
uma nova Carta Magna, fruto justamente da pressão que se fez sobre a
institucionalidade como porta de saída para o estado de paralisia a que
chegou o país, porque as pessoas simplesmente não deixavam as ruas,
mesmo sob violência e prisões arbitrárias. O pacto firmado em 15 de
novembro, chamado Acordo Pela Paz e Uma Nova Constituição, foi a
face mais evidente do nocaute sofrido pelo governo de plantão na
governabilidade do país. Uma série de partidos e movimentos, com mais
destaque para o Partido Comunista, não assinaram o Pacto justamente
por ter sido um arranjo feito a portas fechadas em gabinetes e com
normas pré-fixadas, sem a participação da cidadania. No fundo, a
realização de uma nova Constituição já estava dada e a não assinatura
do pacto por alguns era a demonstração de que seu regramento (como a
norma dos 2/3) não seria imposto pelos mesmos que governam o Chile
há décadas, mas seria disputado nas urnas, o que de fato se deu, e nas
primeiras decisões das e dos constituintes, o que ainda se dará nas
próximas semanas. A mensagem mais forte e que ainda ecoa: não
tentem mais tomar decisões sem o povo.
Resultado eleitoral para a Convenção Constitucional do Chile

Ao iniciar o ano de 2020 já estavam dados os preparativos para o

“plebiscito de entrada” de abril, nome que ganhou a primeira consulta
pública pela convocação ou não de uma Assembleia/Convenção
constituinte e se formato, híbrido (com parlamentares já eleitos) ou
exclusivo (com 100% de constituintes eleitos pelo povo). A pandemia do
novo coronavírus condicionou a mudança de data para outubro do
mesmo ano e com a participação de 50,95% das pessoas aptas a
votarem, venceu por ampla maioria de 78,28% a opção “Apruebo” contra
os 21,72% da opção “Rechazo”. Para o tipo de convenção, venceu por
79% a opção “Convención constitucional” contra 21% obtido pela opção
“Convención mixta”. Um ano após os protestos de 2019 e com todos os
desafios provocados por uma pandemia global, a cidadania chilena
reagiu contra o estigma que se tentava impor pelas forças conservadoras
de que “o vírus calou o Chile” ao comparecer à consulta plebiscitária e
não deixar margens de dúvida ao seu resultado.  

Começava então uma nova batalha pela composição da Convenção, que

pela primeira vez na história do Chile criará uma Constituição de forma
democrática e com participação popular. Novamente as condições
sanitárias impostas pela pandemia e a incapacidade do governo Piñera
de garantir um enfrentamento digno à situação de caos na saúde pública
e de desamparo econômico-social dos chilenos, as eleições previstas
para abril de 2021 precisaram ser adiadas e terminaram por serem
realizadas nos últimos dias 15 e 16 de maio. Uma retumbante vitória dos
setores populares e da esquerda chilena ficou evidente já nas primeiras
horas de apuração das urnas, onde foram depositados votos não apenas
para constituintes, mas também prefeitos, vereadores e, ineditamente,
governadores regionais. Vejamos nas próximas linhas alguns resultados
que sobressaem especificamente para a eleição de constituintes.

De partida, dois fatores já diferenciam enormemente esse processo

constituinte que sai das urnas de qualquer outro latino-americano e
mundial, a paridade na conformação da convenção, entre homens e
mulheres e a reserva de 17 dos 155 assentos para representantes dos
povos indígenas. Serão 81 mulheres e 74 homens as e os redatores do
novo texto. A incapacidade da direita pinochetista neoliberal agrupada na
lista “Vamos por Chile” de alcançar 1/3 das cadeiras também é um fator
importante e que diz muito sobre o descrédito que assombra os que se
achavam até bem pouco os donos do destino do país. Eles ficaram com
37 vagas. Na sequência as listas “Apruebo Dignidad” (partidária), com 28
assentos e a “Lista del Pueblo” (independente), com 27, somam os 55
representantes que já são dados como o bloco mais consolidado da
esquerda. A lista com partidos de centro, “Apruebo” conquistou 25
cadeiras e a lista de independentes “Nueva Constitucion” ficou com 11.
Os demais são os 17 dos povos indígenas e mais 10 eleitos de modo
independente com pautas específicas ligadas ao meio ambiente, luta
LGBTQ+, setores da igreja e lideranças sociais. Todos serão
empossados no próximo mês de junho e iniciarão um trabalho de
redação que durará de 9 a 12 meses, ao fim do qual será submetido a
um novo plebiscito popular, desta vez de ratificação, até 60 dias após o
fim da última sessão.

Qual Chile será regido pela nova Constituição? Em um processo

extremamente interessante e de grande movimentação a convenção
constituinte trabalhará ao mesmo tempo em que o país elegerá um novo
governo nacional. Poucos dias após a votação dos dias 15 e 16 venceu o
prazo para a inscrição das primárias presidenciais. Não comentei aqui os
resultados eleitorais para governos locais e regionais, fica para um
próximo texto, mas o resultado não foi muito diferente do que se
espelhou na composição da convenção. Com crescimento dos setores
da esquerda, estagnação do centro e perdas importantes da direita.
Deixo para reflexão o fato de que já a caminho da inscrição para
realizarem primárias conjuntas, o Partido Comunista (Daniel Jadue), a
Frente Ampla (Gabriel Boric) e o Partido Socialista (Paula Narváez), esse
último tentou carregar consigo o PPD (do ex-presidente Ricardo Lagos) e
o pacto social democrata Nuevo Trato, o que não foi aceito por
comunistas e frenteamplistas. Mesmo para quem não domina todos os
arranjos aliancistas e denominações partidárias chilenas (prometo
escrever a respeito) o importante é compreender o impasse pedagógico
em que se encontram as forças de centro que carregam o pesado fardo
neoliberal ao mesmo tempo em que tentam marchar ao lado daqueles
que sempre estiveram nas trincheiras antineoliberais. Afinal, não são 30
pesos, são 30 anos.          

Notas

[1] Ver livro em https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342453155

[2] Poema Cuándo de Chile:

https://www.neruda.uchile.cl/obra/obrauvasyelviento6.html