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chapter 1

Empire31

Ours is a period of profound social upheaval. A prominent symptom of this upheaval is the collapse of public confidence in the normative institutions of liberal democracy. This crisis has been gestating for many years, but two events crystallize the contradictions of our cultural moment: the political and military debacles in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) and the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Combined with the exploitation of long-simmering racial resentments for political gain, the fundamental crises of the military and financial institutions of the liberal order created an opening for the emergence of the right-wing populist movements now ascendant.

As discussed in the introduction, these political formations have attempted to undermine features of democracy that block the expansion of plutocratic and racist policies. In the United States, the dominant response among critics to the ascendancy of Trump’s authoritarian populism has been to diagnose it as an aberration and to argue that if he is defeated in 2020 order will be restored to the American political system. This interpretation is either extraordinarily naïve about American history or a disingenuous attempt to pathologize an individual rather than criticize an entire system. In either scenario, the result is to inoculate the American public from a confrontation with the economic, political, and cultural contradictions that have generated the politics of exclusion now on the rise in the United States.

In this chapter, we examine these conditions by criticizing the neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony that preceded this authoritarian populist formation and prepared the ground for its ascendency. We first analyze neoliberalism as the dominant economic-political formation in our world today that serves to economize both the political and cultural realm and that has generated a widespread sense of nihilism among certain demographics in the United States. Second, we examine neoconservatism as an ideological and policy orientation that plays a critical role in the maintenance of a neoliberal order via both its cultural politics as well as foreign policy commitments. We conclude the chapter by examining the alliance of neoliberalism and neoconservatism with religious conservativism as well as its mutation into an authoritarian populist and white nationalist politics under Trump.

While Trump and Trumpism will be invoked throughout this chapter, it should be emphasized that the object of critique remains a broader set of political formations: the neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony and its mutation into a new form of authoritarian populism on the right. Trump is a vulgar carrier and a weak representative of this political orientation. As a result, he might very well be defeated in 2020. If he is defeated this will not represent the end of the brand of authoritarian populism ascendant on the right. There will be successors to the movement, and these successors will be far more disciplined and effective than Trump at practicing the revanchist politics that deliver plutocratic victories to economic elites and racialized grievance politics to the base.32 It is important, therefore, to grapple with authoritarian populism as not just the politics of an individual (Trump) but as a broader and more durable political movement that seeks to undermine egalitarian aspirations in society.

Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is notoriously difficult to define, even to the point that some scholars claim that it is merely a label for “whatever I do not like.” It is true that the particular term “neoliberalism” is generally used by its critics from the left side of the political spectrum. Also, given that in the United States, “liberalism” tends to be associated with “leftist,” social welfare policies, it is difficult to figure how neoliberalism was originally a product of the political right. Even worse, those who espouse the political-economic ethos that others call neoliberalism refuse to use that name. But when properly defined neoliberalism offers an important lens through which to analyze the dominant political and cultural formation in our world today.33

The history of neoliberalism is remarkable. In dramatic fashion, neoliberalism emerged from an obscure economic ideology debated among members of the Mont Pelerin Society in the 1940s and 1950s to the common-sense understanding of much of the world in the twenty-first century.34 Neoliberalism has spread in distinctive ways in response to the concrete demands of diverse political and economic situations. In the global South, neoliberalism spread through the use of military/political force (foreign interventions, juntas, and the disciplining of populations by the police/military) and economic coercion (structural adjustment policies).35 In the late 1970s and early 1980s the method in the North Atlantic world was ideological and pursued by equating freedom with free markets, by disseminating best practices in nonprofit sectors, and by subtly transforming law, the state, and the human subject to accord with market dictates.36 A bipartisan consensus—one that counts among its advocates Thatcher and Blair, Reagan and Clinton, Bush and Obama—has supported this project.

In academic literature, neoliberalism is often depicted as an approach to political economy that favors market reform through privatization, deregulation, free trade, cuts to spending, and tax cuts. This is an accurate characterization of some features of neoliberal policy but fails to describe its revolutionary force as a project that aspires to transform the state, the human person, as well as common sense in society. A number of different frameworks have been offered to interpret the meaning of neoliberalism for democracy and society, but two recommend themselves for our purposes: Marxist and Foucauldian.37

The standard Marxist interpretation, exemplified in the work of David Harvey, interprets neoliberalism as a modification of classical economic liberalism and as the latest phase in the history of capitalism. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Harvey argues that we can “interpret neoliberalization either as a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites.” He maintains that the political project of restoring wealth and power has dominated in practice, while the utopian project of reorganizing capitalism has worked “as a system of justification or legitimation.”38 When the theoretical principles of the utopian project have conflicted with concrete policies that would restore class power, the utopian principles have been abandoned. At its core, Harvey maintains, neoliberalism is a political-economic project motivated by class warfare, even as it is legitimated as a utopian project designed to enhance human flourishing “by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”39

For Harvey, neoliberalism represents a new formation of capitalism or a new stage of economic liberalism that attacks any structures that delimit the power of capital. Neoliberalism came to prominence as a project to turn back the Keynesian tide—a regulatory state, progressive taxation, labor controls, and the redistribution of wealth by a welfare state—and restore power to the capital class. And while neoliberalism developed in distinctive ways in response to political and economic pressures in different parts of the world, all of these manifestations held one feature in common: they were a response to the capital accumulation crisis of the 1970s which threatened the economic and political power of the ruling class. In response to this crisis, economic and political elites orchestrated a multifaceted assault on domestic and international structures that restricted the power of capital and obstructed the process of accumulation. Harvey observes that “the ruling class wasn’t omniscient but they recognized that there were a number of fronts on which they had to struggle: the ideological front, the political front, and above all they had struggle to curb the power of labor by whatever means possible. Out of this merged a political project which I would call neoliberalism.”40 The result of these efforts was dramatic: the rapid ascendancy of neoliberalism, which gained state power throughout the North Atlantic world in the 1980s and achieved global hegemony in the 1990s through a variety of means, but most importantly, the efforts of international economic bodies—the IMF, World Bank, and WTO.

In the North Atlantic world—particularly England and the United States—the fundamental strategy for dissemination has been ideological. Neoliberals recognized that because it would be impossible to convince the general public to consent to a political-economic project whose aim was to restore class power it would be necessary to cultivate consent by appealing to deeply held convictions and values “of regional or national traditions.”41 Neoliberals chose well when they seized on individual freedom as the ideal to sell neoliberal reforms to a popular base. Freedom not only represents a core value of Western civilization but also served as an ideological bulwark against twentieth-century totalitarian regimes: fascism, socialism, and communism. And while individual freedom served as the ideological rallying cry, neoliberals labored to draw the link between individual freedom and private property rights, free markets, and free trade. And because the regulatory and distributive power of the state was cast as a threat to these institutional arrangements, neoliberalism emerged “as the exclusive guarantor of freedom.”42

Harvey highlights the role that the ideological struggle played in the ascendancy of neoliberalism, noting that Hayek recognized that the battle of ideas would be critical, and it would take some time to defeat all forms of political-economic organization opposed to the neoliberal vision of economic freedom (communism, socialism, Keynesianism).43 Neoliberals used corporations, the media, and institutions of civil society (schools, churches, and professional associations) to wage this battle. The Business Roundtable was created, and alongside the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, it served as the lobbying arm of the neoliberal movement. Additionally, Harvey contends that because neoliberals viewed universities as inhospitable terrain for the cultivation and dissemination of their ideas, they funded a series of think tanks that could serve as neoliberal laboratories: the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute. These think tanks were given the task of producing “serious technical and empirical studies and political-philosophical arguments broadly in support of neoliberal policies.”44

All of these efforts—lobbying efforts, think tanks, and media—contributed to neoliberalism’s ideological success, but Harvey maintains that the political victories of Thatcher and Reagan proved decisive. He observes, “Once the state apparatus made the neoliberal turn it could use its powers of persuasion, co-optation, bribery, and threat to maintain the climate of consent necessary to perpetuate its power. This was Thatcher’s and Reagan’s particular forte.”45 Reagan and Thatcher utilized political power to discipline and transform the population through neoliberal policies and offered reforms that emerged out of the same playbook: attack and dismantle unions (coal mining with Thatcher and air traffic control with Reagan), reduce taxes, privatize and deregulate industries, and cut the welfare state. These policies had a twofold effect. First, they served the interest of their corporate donors and supporters and created enormous wealth for the capital class. Second, these policies disciplined the population and began to remake social relations and reform expectations about the function of government. In this, Thatcher and Reagan made decisive progress toward the neoliberal goal of producing new subjects. As Thatcher famously quipped, “Economics are the method . . . but the object is to change the soul.”46

The cultivation of democratic consent to these policies tells only a part of the story, even if it represents the dominant piece of it in the North Atlantic world. Harvey argues that the creation or manipulation of crises—natural disasters, coups, wars, and financial crises—were often the central means by which neoliberal policies were imposed on society.47 In the United States and Europe financial crises have led to austerity measures that further facilitated the neoliberal reorganization of society. It was in the global South, however, that the creation, management, and manipulation of crises served as the primary method for neoliberalization. Harvey points to Chile in 1973 and Iraq in 2003 as bookends of the process through which military intervention served as a precursor to neoliberalization. He observes of Chile and Argentina in the 1970s that the imposition of neoliberalism “was swift, brutal, and sure: a military coup backed by the traditional upper class (as well as by the US government), followed by the fierce repression of all solidarities created within the labour and urban social movements which had so threatened their power.”48 Harvey describes Iraq in similar terms, observing that after the “Shock and Awe” campaign in 2003 the United States went about the business of establishing a “capitalist dream” in the Middle East.49 Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, dictated orders to reorganize the economy of Iraq, which included the privatization of public enterprises, the elimination of trade barriers, the disciplining of the labor market, a regressive “flat tax,” the full repatriation of foreign profits, and full ownership of Iraqi businesses by foreign firms.50 This represented a wish list for neoliberals insofar as these orders secured economic “freedoms” for Iraqis “that reflect[ed] the interests of private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations, and financial capital.”51

As evidenced by Chile and Iraq, military force represented a dominant means of establishing neoliberalism internationally. But the more common practice was to employ the power of the IMF and the World Bank to impose neoliberal policies on countries in the global South.52 This tactic was created in response to the economic crisis in Mexico when Mexico defaulted on its debt in the early 1980s. The Reagan administration pushed the US Treasury and the IMF to roll over the debt, but to do so only on the condition that Mexico would undertake neoliberal reforms. This policy served to protect New York bankers from Mexico’s debt default and to disseminate neoliberal policies in the developing world. These so-called structural adjustment policies, which were created in response to the crisis in Mexico, soon became the standard practice of the IMF and World Bank (which, by the mid-1980s, had purged itself of any “Keynesian influence”). In return for debt rescheduling, structural adjustment policies required indebted countries to cut welfare, disband unions, and privatize public industries.53 Thus, while debt represents a very different type of crisis than military intervention, it nevertheless served as a potent means for imposing neoliberal policy on less developed countries.

This brief narrative gives a sense of how neoliberalism spread globally over the past forty years. Once installed, the neoliberal approach to statecraft followed a fairly standard set of policies: privatization, deregulation, the reduction or elimination of social spending (welfare, health care, education, pensions), liberalization of trade, tax cuts, and the eradication of unions as well as other organized forms of solidarity.54 For Harvey, the end result of these policies—across geographical and sociopolitical diversity—has been to restore class power for global elites.

With this characterization of neoliberalism, we return to the tension between the utopian and political dimensions of the neoliberal project. According to Harvey, the utopian interpretation posits that the freedom of the market—of businesses, corporations, and individual entrepreneurial initiative—is critical to wealth creation, which eventually increases the living standards and well-being of everyone. As Harvey puts it, “Under the assumption that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats,’ or of ‘trickle down,’ neoliberal theory holds that the elimination of poverty (both domestically and worldwide) can best be secured through free markets and free trade.” But while neoliberalism presents itself as a utopian political-economic project that institutes policies that will benefit everyone, “the main substantive achievement of neoliberalization . . . has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income.”55 Harvey rejects the utopian justification of neoliberalism as an ideological facade and claims that on the basis of its material effects neoliberalism is a class warfare project and not a poverty alleviation program or a set of political-economic reforms oriented toward enhancing human life. For Harvey, the situation is clear: neoliberalism is an intensified capitalist assault on the values of equality and justice, the commons, the environment, and democracy.

The second approach to neoliberalism follows Foucault’s 1979 lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics, and theorizes it as a modification of political liberalism. This framework differs with the Marxist interpretation in that it approaches neoliberalism not as an intensification of economic liberalism but instead as a new form of liberal governmentality. According to Foucault, where classical liberalism protected the market from government in order to allow society to benefit from market exchange, neoliberalism advocates for an interventionist state that introduces market principles into every sphere of life. Following Foucault, Wendy Brown argues that neoliberalism serves as a reality principle for our world: “Neoliberalism governs as sophisticated common sense, a reality principle remaking institutions and human beings everywhere it settles, nestles, and gains affirmation.”56 The ontological valence of this description of neoliberalism should be emphasized, because it points to the fact that neoliberalism is not simply an economic theory or a set of public policies but more deeply a way of structuring all of reality as market competition—or what, following Foucault, Brown terms a pervasive “political rationality.”57

In Undoing the Demos Brown turns to Barack Obama’s presidency to demonstrate the powerful hold that neoliberalism has on political common sense in the United States. At the beginning of Obama’s second term, in a matter of weeks he delivered two major policy speeches, “We the People” and the State of the Union, in which he focused on those “left out of the American dream by virtue of class, race, sexuality, gender, disability, or immigration status.”58 While Obama’s first term was characterized by a series of compromises with Republicans and centrist Democrats, these speeches appeared to announce a return to his progressive roots. Obama called for the protection of Medicare, immigration reform, progressive tax reform, the development of clean energy, and the elimination of sexual discrimination and domestic violence.59 These policies represented the agenda many on the left expected from Obama when he was elected in 2008. But just beneath the surface Brown detects a tension in Obama’s renewed progressive rhetoric. Obama justified these policies not on the basis of their moral rectitude or because they comported with the egalitarian aspirations of American democracy. Instead, he pitched these policies to the American public on the basis of their capacity to make the United States economically competitive. According to Brown, Obama is essentially arguing that “clean energy would keep us competitive—‘as long as countries like China keep going all-in on clean energy, so must we’ . . . Immigration reform will ‘harness the talents and ingenuity of striving, hopeful immigrants’ and attract ‘the highly skilled entrepreneurs and engineers that will help create jobs and grow our economy.’ Economic growth would also result ‘when our wives, mothers and daughters can live their lives free from discrimination . . . and . . . fear of domestic violence.’”60 At the level of Obama’s rhetoric, the fight for equality and justice is not an end itself, but rather a means to achieve the end of economic growth and competitiveness.

For Brown, this episode summarizes the core truth of neoliberalism as it relates to the state: “Economic growth has become the end and legitimation of government.”61 The state now functions like a firm and shares with it similar priorities: competitive positioning and a healthy credit rating. Brown observes, “Other ends—from sustainable production practices to worker justice—are pursued insofar as they contribute to this end.”62 Many firms view it as an effective business decision or as a strategic marketing exercise to engage in fair trade and green business practices not because of their concern for the rights of global workers or the threat of climate change but because they see an opportunity to appeal to a niche market and increase profit and shareholder value. Obama’s speeches depart only minimally from the strategies of modern business firms in this regard. Both the state and the firm are committed to justice and sustainability, but not as “ends in themselves.”63 These commitments are valuable to the extent that they create economic growth and stock/credit rating health. Brown concludes that Obama’s speeches indicate the degree to which political discourse has become so marinated in neoliberal reason that the “goals of the world’s oldest democracy led by a justice-minded president in the twenty-first century” have been reduced to “attracting investors and developing an adequately remunerated skilled workforce.”64

If Obama’s speeches disclose the manner in which progressive ideals are often couched in and motivated by the neoliberal values of economic growth and competitive advantage, the presidency of Trump depicts a scene of the near wholesale co-optation of democracy and the state by neoliberalism. The election of a businessman with no political experience and little knowledge of the US Constitution, democratic norms and procedures, and judicial principles reveals the extent to which neoliberalism has captured the political rationality of citizens and recast the function of the state in primarily economic terms.

Trump’s presidency represents the most thoroughgoing economization of the state to date, as evidenced by a few examples. First, Trump’s constant refrain that previous politicians have made “bad deals”—NAFTA, the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal, and so on—and that as a businessperson he is uniquely qualified to replace these deals with better deals betrays the extent to which he and many Americans view democracy as little more than business conduct. This approach extends to his tendency to punish critics as those on the losing side of the deal. Business conduct mandates that there are winners and losers and as a “good CEO, he will reward supporters and punish detractors or competitors, whether these are cities or states, groups or individuals, nations or international organizations.”65

Second, Trump’s presidency reveals the degree to which neoliberalism has successfully recast the political realm as an unhelpful and unnecessary intrusion into the market. An approach to politics rooted in a commitment to equality, fairness, and social justice is at best viewed as hostile to competition and unfettered market logic and at worst as leading to “tyrannical social justice programs and totalitarianism.” Politics is viewed by neoliberals as a hindrance or obstacle to market rule. In this sense, Trump’s call to “drain the swamp” was not a demand to restrain Wall Street or restrict the influence of monied interests on politics. Instead, it was a call to purge Washington of politicians, to “get politics and politicians out of politics.” Politics now recast in market terms is best left to businesspeople, who need not be bothered by democratic procedures and norms as they focus exclusively on generating economic growth. As Brown suggests, this is an anti-political posture and not an anti-state posture that opposes a view of politics in which the state regulates commerce, provides labor protections, redistributes wealth, and so on. Neoliberalism is often presented as anti-state tout court, opposed to it because it disrupts the sovereign logic of the market. But this is inaccurate, because it fails to present the entire picture. Neoliberalism approves of a state that intervenes on behalf of markets.66 Trump, as a quintessential neoliberal, is perfectly happy to employ the power of the state to eliminate those things that present a barrier to a friendly business climate: “regulations, procedures, checks and balances, separation of powers, internal opposition or disloyalty, demands for transparency, an independent press.”67

These two examples describe the ways that the election of Trump points to the economization of politics through which the fundamental commitments of democracy (freedom, equality, popular sovereignty) are transposed into market terms (economic freedom, inequality, market sovereignty). But in addition to this assault on the fundamentals of democracy, the Trump administration has implemented what amounts to an undiluted neoliberal policy package: elimination of labor protections, deregulation, cuts to public funding for education, health care, and the arts, removal of the United States from climate treaties, and enormous tax cuts for the affluent.68 Trump, as a businessman, is the embodiment of a neoliberalization of politics just as his policies serve to deepen and solidify the processes of neoliberalization that led to his presidency.

The examples of Obama and Trump raise a number of important points about the relation between neoliberalism and the state. First, as noted above, the neoliberalization of the state is a bipartisan affair. The foundational neoliberal commitment to economic growth represents the normative basis for consensus in American politics. Democrats and Republicans inflect their neoliberalism differently, with Democrats offering what Nancy Fraser describes as a “progressive” form by blending a politics of cultural emancipation (feminism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights) with financialization and neoliberal economic policies, and Republicans increasingly offering ethno-racial, reactionary, and punitive forms.69 But they converge in their view of the state as a firm that is responsive to the market above all else. This reality lies beneath the oft-voiced sentiment that while there exist two political parties in the United States, both pledge their most basic allegiance to the party of Wall Street. Related to this point, neoliberalism transforms the scope of the state’s responsibilities from a political to an economic register. As Brown notes, the state is now viewed as a firm and so its strategic focus is to facilitate economic growth and attract investors. Traditional concerns about equality, justice, and the well-being of citizens are now demoted, viewed as marginal to the primary responsibility of government, and useful only as instruments that can be deployed to sell neoliberal economic policies to the public.70

Despite their different approaches to neoliberalism, Harvey and Brown converge in their assessment that neoliberalism represents a frontal attack on democracy.71 Harvey claims that the antidemocratic consequences of neoliberalism are most evident in its attempt to unleash the power of capital from the countervailing forces of the state, labor, and other structures of accountability and control. The liberation of capital from these limiting forces not only deepens inequality in society but also intensifies the coordination between financial elites and political representatives.72 Brown also criticizes neoliberalism for intensifying inequality in society and creating conditions for democracy to devolve into plutocracy.73 However, Brown argues that neoliberalism’s challenge to democracy is both deeper and broader than the consolidation of political and economic power by elites. Neoliberalism’s effects are not limited to the corporate takeover of liberal democratic institutions; its influence has spilled over into the spheres of education, culture, and everyday life. Thus, even if it were possible to roll back neoliberal public policies, the effects of neoliberalism would continue to undo democracy because of its presence in diverse social fields, from business and law to education and cultural life.74 This is why Brown refers to neoliberalism as a reality principle: “With neoliberalism, the market becomes the, rather than a site of veridiction and becomes so for every arena and type of human activity.”75 Because “the market is itself true” it “represents the true form of all activity.” It follows that insofar as persons are rational they “accept these truths” and thereby accept “reality.” To refuse to act in accordance with economic rationality in every domain of existence is to refuse reality. As a result, any proposal to organize the political order or even one’s life according to principles that differ from economic rationality is quite simply unintelligible within the neoliberal imaginary.76

Establishing the market as truth, furthermore, provides cover for a set of actions that sacrifice the needs of citizens, those expelled from the neoliberal order, and the natural world itself. As Brown details in Undoing the Demos and a subsequent essay, “Sacrificial Citizenship,” neoliberalism’s austerity policies require the shared sacrifice of citizens in order to ensure the national economy’s competitiveness, the health of its credit rating, and continued economic growth.77 However, in contrast to Reagan’s discourse on trickle-down economics, which made the promise to citizens that economic growth would benefit everyone, neoliberalism dispenses entirely with this pretense and instead demands insecurity, austerity, and sacrifice as the price for economic growth.78 In addition to the elimination of job security, pensions, and public benefits in the name of economic competitiveness, globally neoliberalism authorizes the sacrifice of the environment, refugees, and the global poor. These represent the “collateral casualties” whose destruction and stunted lives are viewed as the price paid for development and progress.79

Neoliberalism, as a pervasive reality principle, deepens these interconnected crises in three ways. First, the public policy commitments of neoliberalism—deregulation, privatization, cuts to social spending—intensify the destruction of the natural world and exacerbate the social suffering of those judged as expendable within the neoliberal order. Second, neoliberalism largely has succeeded in reducing the human person to human capital whose sole responsibility is to compete with other human capital over scarce resources, the effect of which is that inequality now becomes “legitimate, even normative, in every sphere.”80 Life, now viewed as competition without remainder, inevitably generates winners and losers, and the losers deserve the punishment they receive. Furthermore, because one’s status in a neoliberal order is always precarious, threatened by downgrades, unemployment, and even expulsion, individuals are pressured constantly to pursue their individual self-interest in every activity. Because it is too great a risk to one’s future to pursue those activities that do not directly enhance one’s own value, individuals find it almost impossible to do anything other than passively deliver their lives over to the sovereignty of the market. Third, because neoliberalism constitutes a wholesale attack on the social—the common good, social solidarity, social welfare—it undermines many of the protections and securities necessary for a stable social order.81 In the absence of economic protections, many Americans have become increasingly attracted to authoritarian and antidemocratic leaders who promise protection from economic insecurity and racialized threats by castigating globalization, immigration, and multiculturalism.82 A felt sense of despair or nihilism lurks just beneath the surface of much of the populist anger on the right, which threatens to enact revenge on the perceived causes of its own insecurity and impotence. Wendy Brown has described the convergence between the experience of precarity generated by neoliberal reforms and the intensification of racist and misogynist impulses among those disempowered by these reforms as a form of apocalyptic populism. This strain of populism is apocalyptic because it would rather destroy the entire political and social order than experience further disempowerment.83 In this regard, Trump’s chaotic approach to politics serves as a fitting expression of the mood of a significant segment in the American electorate.

Neoconservatism

Following the American military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq a public debate emerged concerning the question of whether these actions represented a new form of imperialism. Discussion of American imperialism, often dismissed as a “rhetorical excess” of the left, became a focal point of the critical conversation in the 2000s.84 Those who defended the exercise of American power either celebrated the reemergence of American empire (Niall Ferguson) or employed the euphemism “hegemony” to defend the actions of the United States (Robert Kagan).85 Critics on both the right (Andrew Bacevich) and the left (Noam Chomsky) argued that the neoconservative policy orientation of the Bush administration in the Middle East had merely intensified the imperialist orientation of American foreign policy.86 American history is replete with violent foreign interventions, from settler colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade to the Monroe Doctrine and Cold War interventionism in Asia and Latin America. But from the 1980s to the present the neoconservative movement has served as the primary ideological system of legitimation of American interventionism abroad. And while the politics of American empire should not be viewed as coterminous with it, neoconservatism has represented the most bellicose carrier of the militarist features of American foreign policy over the past forty years.

As a distinctive approach to domestic and foreign policy neoconservatism has been a central fixture of the political hegemony on the right since Reagan and, much like neoliberalism, has influenced the policy commitments of politicians on both the left and the right. In what follows we will analyze neoconservatism as a potent manifestation of the politics of American empire that entails both domestic and foreign policy commitments.

As an ideological orientation, neoconservatism is notoriously difficult to define because it lacks ideological uniformity and has shifted over time from a movement on the left with a domestic focus in the 1960s to a movement on the right with a foreign policy focus in the 2000s.87 In broad terms, neoconservatism proposes a vision for the state in which the state sets a moral orientation for the world by utilizing political persuasion, legal enforcement, and military force to achieve its strategic aims.88 Neoconservatism emerged in the 1960s as a reaction to the New Left—the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the antiwar movement—and evaluated this new political formation as fundamentally anti-American.89 Jeane Kirkpatrick, the secretary of state during the Reagan administration, summarized this view when she argued that the New Left represented a frontal attack on American exceptionalism by claiming that “the United States was immoral—a ‘sick society’ guilty of racism, materialism, imperialism, and murder of Third World people in Vietnam.”90 Representative of the broader neoconservative response, Norman Podhoretz’s response to the New Left called for a “new nationalism” rooted in the fierce embrace of the moral purpose of the nation, a renewed effort to patrol cultural and national borders, a defense of the traditional family, and a celebration the values of Judeo-Christian civilization.91 While neoconservative opposition to multiculturalism and feminism is not distinctive in relation to the broader conservative movement, these commitments represent a critical piece of the broader neoconservative vision (a vision that often overlaps with the aims of neoliberalism).92

As an ideological orientation, neoconservatism became a flashpoint in the 2000s because of its foreign policy commitments, but the neoconservative response to the New Left in the 1970s and 1980s represents an important episode in its history and demonstrates that for neoconservatives the relationship between domestic and foreign policy is linked inextricably. Neoconservatives argue that absent the cultivation of healthy nationalism and patriotism at home it is impossible to sustain the project of American global hegemony abroad. In this regard, the left’s demand for deeper racial and gender equality and its criticisms of American militarism posed a unique threat to the neoconservative vision for America.

The foreign policy vision of neoconservatism is rooted in several convictions about the American political experiment. First, and most importantly, neoconservatism proposes a distinctive understanding of the American state and its democratic form as exceptional in relation to other forms of political organization. Second, as a result of this commitment to American exceptionalism, neoconservatives maintain that the United States has been commissioned with the task of disseminating American values—particularly liberal democracy and capitalism—around the world. Neoconservatives describe a stark situation in which either the United States imposes its “universality” on the rest of the world or the world faces “global barbarism.”93 Third, neoconservatives link this messianic project of democratizing the world to a patriotic civil religion that views the role of the state in moral or even theological terms. At a foreign-policy level, neoconservative ideology organizes all of reality in terms of those committed to freedom, human rights, and democracy (the United States and its allies) and those who oppose these ideals (communists/socialists, terrorists, and other dissidents). Fourth, neoconservatism combines an idealist’s moralism about the significance of democracy in the world with a realist’s commitment to the exercise of power. Thus, neoconservatism prefers military solutions to peaceful negotiations and posits that the only way to provide security for Americans is by using both indirect (in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s) and direct force (in the Middle East from the 1980s to the present).94

As noted above, the sequence of events between 9/11 and the war on terror reignited the debate surrounding the politics of American empire. Much of the criticism focused on the problematic character of the neoconservative response to the attacks of 9/11. But to focus on neoconservatism as an aberration from an otherwise democratizing American foreign policy only obscures the continuities that exist between neoconservatism and the imperialist aims of the mainstream of US foreign policy. Greg Grandin, for instance, has argued that neoconservatism “is just the highly self-conscious core of a broader consensus that reaches out well beyond the Republican Party to capture ideologue and pragmatist alike.”95 Robert Kagan, a prominent neoconservative, makes a similar point in “Neocon Nation: Neoconservatism, c. 1776,” when he observes that the basic orientation of neoconservatism is consistent with the foreign policy ideals of the broad sweep of the American tradition.96 According to Kagan, neoconservative ideology is committed to “a potent moralism and idealism in world affairs, a belief in America’s exceptional role as a promoter of the principles of liberty and democracy, a belief in the preservation of American primacy and in the exercise of power, including military power, as a tool for defending and advancing moralistic and idealistic causes.” For Kagan, this orientation is consistent with the mainstream of American foreign policy from its founding in 1776. Of course, it is true that important differences exist between realists, liberal internationalists, and neoconservatives in terms of their willingness to intervene in foreign countries and to use military force. But the fact remains that a bipartisan consensus—which stretches from Kissinger’s realism and Albright’s liberal internationalism to the neoconservatism of the Bush administration and the liberal realism of the Obama administration—has supported a model of the state rooted in the defense of American exceptionalism and the commitment to the project of American hegemony. This bipartisan consensus is animated by what Andrew Bacevich describes as the foundational commitment of post–World War II American foreign policy to expand the “American imperium” and to create “an open and integrated international order on the principles of democratic capitalism, with the United States as the ultimate guarantor of order and enforcer of norms.”97 According to the Congressional Research Service, more than 80 percent of the United States’ interventions abroad since 1946 have taken place after 1989. This means that American interventionism abroad reached its peak during the period in which neoconservatism dominated American foreign policy.98

As with neoliberalism, neoconservatism is rooted in a reality principle that offers a vision of world affairs and America’s role within it. Henry Kissinger described the reality principle of American empire in 1963, and this same principle would be echoed by an official in the George W. Bush administration in 2004. Kissinger observed, “In the decades ahead, the West will have to lift its sights to encompass a more embracing concept of reality . . . There are two kinds of realists: those who manipulate facts and those who create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.” This statement about the power of a state to create reality is eerily bookmarked by a comment made by a Bush administration official, presumably Karl Rove, about the status of the United States as a global hegemon. The official observed that the United States is an “empire now . . . we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors.”99

American foreign policy from Kissinger to Bush and Obama has viewed its task as remaking reality in its own image and likeness.100 The principle that animates this approach to the world is American exceptionalism, which claims that the United States is a nation providentially ordained by God to spread freedom and democracy around the world. Madeline Albright, the secretary of state during the Clinton administration, summarized the logic of this position when she argued that “if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”101 This view serves to legitimate the United States’ exercise of power and its use of military force and, as the historical record demonstrates, often blinds the United States to the real motivations that drive its foreign policy.102

In view of this ideological distortion of America’s motivations, it is unsurprising that democracy is a central area of contradiction within neoconservative ideology and practice. The purported aim of neoconservatism is to defend democracy against its domestic detractors and foreign enemies, but the effects of its cultural politics and military interventions have served to undermine democracy.

In the domestic realm, the assessment of democracy published by Samuel Huntington and his coauthors in 1975 is representative of the contradictions of this approach to democracy. In The Crisis of Democracy Huntington responded to civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s by arguing that these movements threatened democracy by demanding too much democratization. He warned that the emergence of a “democratic surge” in the 1960s had made the United States “ungovernable” by allowing democracy to spill over from a system of governance monitored by elites into the cultural life of the United States.103 Huntington argued that the proper response to the “excess of democracy” demanded by labor, feminism, and African-Americans was to advocate for “a greater degree of moderation in democracy.” Huntington’s evaluation of grassroots democratic movements is representative of a broader conservative attempt to undermine feminism, civil rights, affirmative action, and the LGBTQ movement in the name of the traditional family, a commitment to nationalism, and the cultivation of a patriotic culture. For neoconservatives, democracy should be affirmed if it serves to defend established hierarchies and to reanimate “aristocratic and traditional values” in society, while those forms of democratic action that upend established orders should be viewed as “excessive” and perceived as a threat to a stable democratic order.

Similarly, while the putative aim of neoconservatism in foreign policy is democratization, neoconservatives evaluate only certain forms of democracy as legitimate. Those forms of democracy not responsive to the political and economic interests of the United States have been dismissed as illegitimate by the architects of neoconservative foreign policy. Furthermore, these architects have supported diverse methods for ousting democracies not responsive to American interests. It is true, of course, that this project of political delegitimization predates neoconservatism and represented a central plank of American foreign policy during the Cold War, as evidenced in the clandestine coup d’états orchestrated by the United States to oust democratically elected leaders in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and Chile (1973).104 Henry Kissinger summarized the antidemocratic orientation of US foreign policy when he argued that supporting the Chilean coup in 1973 was necessary because “the issues” at stake “are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”105 The Reagan administration intensified this policy in Latin America in the 1980s, and the Bush administration pursued this policy in the Middle East in the 2000s.106

Trump has breathed new life into elements of neoconservatism after its collapse in the aftermath of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has subtly rehabilitated its foreign policy commitments by rejecting the “old rationale of liberal world-ordering” and reanimating it by “tap[ping] existing reserves of cultural chauvinism and nationalist animus.”107 Where neoconservatives advocate for a muscular and interventionist foreign policy rooted in the ideological commitment to freedom and democracy, Trump has little interest in democratic norms or democracy promotion abroad. Trump instead draws close to the nativist, Jacksonian tradition of American foreign policy in which self-interest serves as the motivation and rationale for American foreign policy.108 Trump justifies the use of military power to assert American dominance around the world in order to take things from other countries. The façade of exceptionalism as the ideological framework that legitimates US militarism has been eliminated, and so what remains is a commitment to the use of brute military force to intimidate and subdue foreign (and domestic) enemies. To this end, Trump has increased the American military budget in 2019 to $750 billion (a record level in the past seventy years). Additionally, even as neoconservatives have distanced themselves from the vulgar racism and xenophobia of Trumpism, subtle forms of “dog whistle” xenophobia and Islamophobia have long served as central features of neoconservative rhetoric. Trump draws from the xenophobic cultural climate cultivated by neoconservatives after 9/11 even as his appeal to belligerent nationalism has become more overt in its Islamophobic rhetoric.109

Overall, Trump has reframed the rhetoric of neoconservatism and reset its foreign policy vision while retaining the neoconservative hostility to (racialized) foreign threats and its commitment to American military hegemony.

Political Assemblages

The relationship between neoliberalism and neoconservatism is complicated insofar as neoliberals celebrate open markets and free trade and so have little patience for the nationalistic preoccupation with borders and territorial boundaries of proponents of neoconservatism. Furthermore, where neoliberalism severs bonds of mutuality and solidarity by placing the logic of competitive individualism at the center of society, neoconservatism constructs an order of values rooted in a commitment to the traditional family and nationalism. Remarkably, despite these differences, advocates of neoliberalism and neoconservatism have entered into a strategic alliance over the past forty years to form a durable political coalition on the right.

In view of these tensions, the question that remains is how these ideologies converge to form a political bloc on the right. A number of theorists (Stuart Hall, Sheldon Wolin, David Harvey, and Wendy Brown) have offered an interpretation of this relation that suggests, in effect, that what neoliberalism tears apart with its commitment to competitive individualism, neoconservatism restores with its focus on family, tradition, and nation.110 A second approach has been offered by Melinda Cooper in Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, in which she argues that neoliberals entered into a strategic alliance with neoconservatives in defense of the traditional family as a means of offering a moral critique of the welfare state.111 On this reading, social conservatives emphasized the importance of a small, limited government because it allowed them to preserve the white patriarchal family structure and its gendered and racial hierarchies. Neoliberals, like Gary Becker and Milton Friedman, valued the family for different reasons, viewing it as a means to justify small, limited government (at least with respect to taxation, redistribution, and welfare). Neoliberals did not share the specific moral critique of welfare offered by neoconservatives, but they viewed the alliance with the neoconservatives as an opportunity to replace the welfare state with the private sector. The defense of the family thus emerged as a practical means of extending the broader project of privatization. Third, as noted above, historically, neoconservatism has provided neoliberalism with the ideological framework needed to justify the use of military power to open up new markets around the world. While American military intervention on behalf of capitalism precedes the neoconservative-neoliberal connection (for example, with the coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954), scholars point to Chile in 1973 and Iraq in 2003 as the bookends of the military imposition of neoliberalism on foreign countries.112

William Connolly offers a position that converges with these three previous accounts. But he supplements them by analyzing the assemblage on the right through the lens of affect theory.113 Connolly maintains that the most effective means to comprehend the political assemblage on the right is to shift from a discursive mode of analysis to a description of how these ideologies operate at a visceral level. He argues that political commitments interact as a set of affective sensibilities that resonate together and which have produced an assemblage on the right comprised of neoliberals, neoconservatives/militarists, and religious/social conservatives.

According to Connolly, an assemblage allows groups with divergent beliefs to build a coalition around a set of resonating “spiritual dispositions” that operate at an affective register.114 He observes, “When one part of the assemblage pushes beliefs with which you do not identify, you minimize or ignore the difference because they too exude the existential resentment with which your military dogma, economic creed or religious faith is infused.”115 The connective tissue that stitches these ideologies together is an affective ethos of existential resentment directed toward those groups perceived to be enemies of the free market, American exceptionalism, and Christian exclusivism. Connolly observes, “Today resentment against cultural diversity, economic egalitarianism, and the future whirl together in the same resonance machine. That is why its participants identify similar targets of hatred and marginalization, such as gay marriage; women who seek equal status in work, family and business; secularists, those of Islamic faith, and atheists; and African American residents of the inner city who do not appreciate the abstract beauty of cowboy capitalism.”116 Thus, while neoliberals, proponents of American military hegemony, and religious conservatives have different creedal commitments that generate different targets of resentment, they coalesce to form a “resonance machine” that assembles the right on the basis of overlapping grievances.

Melinda Cooper’s analysis provides one example of this phenomenon through which divergent movements align to dismantle welfare. Another example is the way in which the Christian belief in the providence of God and the neoliberal belief in the sovereignty of the market resonate at an affective level despite their divergence at a discursive level. This resonance plays out in terms of how these ideologies approach the future. Evangelical Christians interpret history apocalyptically and insist that the time that remains for the earth is brief. It follows that political and economic projects devoted to environmental protection and sustainability are viewed as a waste of time. Neoliberals adopt a contemporocentric view of the world in which the enhancement of immediate market value is the central imperative of their economic activity. Accordingly, the sacrifice of the planet for short-term financial gains is a rational course of action. In this example, each bloc rejects responsibility for the future for a different reason, but their overlapping commitments resonate in such a way that they create a larger and more powerful political assemblage than would be possible on the basis of the particular interests of each individual bloc. Connolly observes,

The bellicosity and corresponding sense of extreme entitlement of those consumed by economic greed reverberates with the transcendental resentment of those visualizing the righteous violence of Christ. Across these modest differentiations, the two parties are bound by similar orientations to the future. One party discounts its responsibilities to the future of the earth to vindicate extreme economic entitlement now, while the other does so to prepare for the day of judgment against nonbelievers. These electrical charges resonate back and forth, generating a political machine much more potent than the aggregation of its parts.117

This resonance machine also includes nationalists, neoconservatives, and militarists who align with the evangelical-capitalist political assemblage to enact revenge on the nonbelievers of their respective religions: those who fail to believe in Jesus Christ (secular persons, Muslims, etc.), those who fail to believe in the sovereignty of the market (socialists, leftists, etc.), and those who resist the hegemony of American power (terrorists, dissidents, etc.).

Of course, authoritarian populism has reset the basic contours of this resonance machine by reorienting its evangelical-capitalist elements in a more overtly authoritarian and explicitly white nationalist direction. Trump’s 2016 coalition included the traditional elements of a Republican coalition, but the white working-class constituency without a college degree proved decisive in elevating him to the presidency. Just as religious conservatives (particularly, white evangelicals) served as the populist base for the neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony, these same voters (Trump received 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016) as well as other disaffected white working-class voters now serve as the base for the reconfiguration of the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine under Trump (an astonishing 57 percent of Trump’s overall vote in 2016 came from whites without a college degree).118 Trump’s capacity to draw overwhelming support from the evangelical Christian base is one of the most remarkable features of this assemblage insofar as Trump seems to embody the very antithesis of the commitment to moral rectitude and family values that Christian evangelicals promote.119

As noted in the introduction, Trump has assembled this constituency on the basis of economic and status anxieties. Neoliberal policy has eroded the economic fortunes of significant segments of the working class in the United States (and, more broadly, this same population throughout the Euro-Atlantic world). Branko Milanovic’s analysis of the distribution of wealth generated by globalization from 1988 to 2008 provides a clear representation of this reality. He observes that while there was relative growth among the poor in Africa and South Asia (up to 50 percent growth), the emerging middle class in China, India, and Brazil (up to 80 percent growth), and an explosion of wealth among the top 1 percent globally, the middle class in the developed world has grown a grand total of 1 percent over the past thirty years. Virtually every segment of the global population has benefited from globalization.120 Concretely, from 1935 to 1960 the average income in the United States doubled, and from 1960 to 1985 it doubled again.121 Since the 1980s income growth has been flat for the middle class, while the emerging middle class in the global South and the global 1 percent have experienced extraordinary gains. While this is a direct result of globalization (free trade policies), the situation has been amplified by other neoliberal policies: privatization and financialization (the repeal of Glass-Steagall), tax cuts, cuts to social spending, and attacks on redistribution and unionization.

At least two responses are possible to this situation. As we shall see, the response on the left is to demand a political confrontation between the working class and economic elites and to push for more extensive redistribution of wealth, greater economic protections for the working class (e.g., labor unions), and the expansion of educational opportunities for working-class constituencies. Authoritarian populism offers an alternative by advocating for economic nationalism (“America first”) and the creation of antagonisms between the white working class and workers in emerging economies (Mexico, China, etc.). Trump’s specific style of populism has transformed the rhetoric of neoliberalism by arguing that the state should use its power to serve the needs of the working class (renegotiating free-trade agreements and restoring manufacturing in the United States). During the first three years of his presidency, his signature legislative achievement was a tax reform bill that delivered a tax cut that almost exclusively benefited the top 1 percent. And while Trump has escalated trade wars with China and other countries by imposing tariffs on a variety of goods, there is little evidence that his other policy priorities have uplifted the working-class populations who have been devastated by more than forty years of deindustrialization, globalization, and neoliberal policies.

In lieu of transformative economic policies, Trump offered charged white nationalist rhetoric coupled with the promise of violence toward racialized domestic and foreign enemies. Wendy Brown observes that this is how contemporary forms of authoritarian populism function: “Right-wing and plutocratic politicians can get away with doing nothing substantive for their constituencies as long as they verbally anoint their wounds with anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-globalization rhetoric.”122 Trump’s politics are rooted in the dog-whistle racism of the Southern strategy but take form as a more overtly racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, and Islamophobic set of attacks on vulnerable populations. This is evident in terms of the pivotal role that Trump played in amplifying the birther controversy (which raised questions about Obama’s birthplace and thereby suggested that he is “foreign” and “unfit” for the presidency); his campaign announcement in 2015 in which he proclaimed that Mexicans were rapists and criminals and as such represented a grave threat to (white) Americans; his claim that he is entitled to grab women by “the pussy”; and the deployment of white male grievance politics in response to the accusation of sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh (for example, Trump proclaimed that “it’s a very scary time for young men in America” in response to the accusation of sexual assault made by Christine Blasey Ford).

The policy objectives he offered on the campaign trail follow directly from this overt use of racism to assemble a white base of supporters, from the call to “build a wall” to enacting a “Muslim ban” to prevent citizens from seven countries in the Middle East from visiting the United States. Trump’s ethnonational, anti-immigrant, and transactional form of Christian identity politics draws the white working class, Christian evangelicals, and Southern and rural Americans into a political assemblage driven by resentment toward elites and racialized “others” and the promise of overt violence toward the proclaimed enemies of this identity. As Connolly observes of Trump, “His style is not designed first and foremost to articulate a policy agenda. It draws energy from the anger of its audience as it channels it. It draws into a collage dispersed anxieties and resentments about deindustrialization, race, border issues, immigration, working-class insecurities, trade policies, pluralizing drives, the new place of the United States in the global economy, and tacit uncertainty about the shaky place of neoliberal culture on this planet.”123 This form of politics on the right is performed at the visceral register of cultural life in which various economic, status anxieties, and resentments are assembled into a resonance machine that promises to enact retributive violence on the privileged targets of white male rage: immigrants, Muslims, persons of color in urban centers, feminists, and the LGBTQ+ community.

Again, it is important to emphasize here that while Trumpism represents a vulgar form of right-wing resentment politics, the ground was prepared for the ascendency of this politics by sustained economic disempowerment of the working class (neoliberalism), xenophobic (specifically Islamophobic) militarism (neoconservatism), the dog-whistle politics of the Southern strategy, and misogynistic assaults on women.124 For Connolly, these structural dynamics, which have been perpetuated by successive political assemblages on the right (from the evangelical-capitalist machine with Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush to the authoritarian machine with Trump), represent the most grave threat to American democracy.125 He argues that the most effective means to confront the multifaceted attack on democracy from the right is to create a counter-political assemblage on the left.126 Just as the right cultivates and directs the sensibilities of neoliberals, militarists, evangelical Christians, and white nationalists toward particular political ends, the left must cultivate the sensibilities of a diverse coalition toward democratic ends. He observes, “A new movement on the democratic left, if it emerges, will be organized across religious, class, gender, ethnic, and generational lines without trying to pretend that citizens can leave their faiths entirely behind them when they enter public life.”127 Connolly imagines this assemblage as pluralist and comprised of persons from a diverse range of experiences, social locations, and commitments.128 Some might join the movement out of “desperate need” or “economic self-interest,” while others participate “because of religious or nontheistic ethical commitments that inspire them to extend beyond their constituency needs, interests, and identities.”129 Each component of the assemblage would contest the dominant political alliances and institutional structures that oppose the values of inclusion, egalitarianism, and rule by the people. Although this opposition would emerge from different subject positions, Connolly maintains that it is necessary for this pluralism to coalesce into a larger assemblage. He argues, “Hegemony thus can be resisted by a variety of tactics; but it can be overcome only if it is countered by an opposing coalition establishing a degree of hegemony through alternative articulations of identity, interests, freedom, equality, and the human relation to the earth.”130 The history of the left in the twentieth century offers a cautionary tale about the failure of various identity groups—labor, environmentalists, feminists, civil rights advocates, anticapitalists, LGBTQ advocates, antiwar activists—to form an organized bloc of power.

Connolly specifically highlights the need for the left to attract a significant segment of the white working class away from the right’s new authoritarianism. Where both the right and the left have failed to offer economic policies that ameliorate the social suffering of this population, the right has appealed to the cultural and religious sensibilities of this constituency in order to draw it into the assemblage on the right.131 Some members of this constituency have embraced the authoritarianism of the populism on the right and, in all likelihood, cannot be convinced to join other political assemblages. Others in this constituency could abandon the populist turn on the right if they come to see that Trump has not delivered on his economic agenda and if they hear from other political blocs that speak convincingly to their grievances.132 Connolly concludes that “a social democratic agenda is now an essential preliminary to any more transformative practices because the Left can go nowhere until the pluralizing Left and the working class have been drawn closer together. Had such programs been actively pursued earlier there would have been no turn to the radical right by a large section of the white working class.”133 As with other thinkers on the left (Stuart Hall, Chantal Mouffe, Nancy Fraser, Wendy Brown), Connolly rejects any attempt to dichotomize struggles for recognition and efforts to build a more egalitarian economic order. The divide between those on the left who prioritize various recognition claims (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) and those focused on pursuing a class-based strategy should be eliminated so that the left can push forward with a pluralist project that draws links between distinctive social movements. Connolly observes, “The idea is to call out expressions of racism, militarism, climate denialism, and misogyny whenever you encounter them as you simultaneously support positive responses to real working-class grievances and point out how reasonable solutions to them are compatible with a pluralizing, more egalitarian culture.”134

This chapter has argued that in order to comprehend the emergent political assemblage on the right, it is necessary to examine the political formation that preceded it: the neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony. We have explored how this hegemony has undermined democracy and amplified political projects of economic disempowerment and belligerent nationalism. We also have examined its link to cultural politics of dog-whistle racism, an anti-feminist gender politics, and Christian conservatism. The emergent political formation on the right departs in subtle ways from the standard neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony while pushing forward its plutocratic and militarist elements and its cultural politics of overt xenophobia, racism, and misogyny. In conclusion, we described the broad contours of a politics that serves as a radical democratic alternative both to neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony and its mutation into authoritarian populism. In the next chapter we explore this alternative in greater detail.

31. We use the term “empire” here in a manner consistent with its use by the Christian thinkers examined in chapters 3–6. While they differ with regard to particulars, West, Schüssler Fiorenza, Ellacuría/Sobrino, and Hauerwas all approach empire as the exercise of American power as figured by neoliberal globalization, US militarism, and a conservative cultural politics. The broader literature on “empire” and “imperialism” is extensive. Generally, there exist four streams of analysis of empire: the New Left, cultural, Marxist, and postcolonial. For historiographical overviews of these trajectories, see Kramer, “Power and Connection”; Wolfe, “History and Imperialism”; and Cooper, “Decolonizing Situations.”

32. See, for instance, Barkan, “The Fascism to Come.”

33. Some of this discussion of neoliberalism is taken from my book on the topic, coauthored by Peter Fritz, titled Send Lazarus.

34. Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste.

35. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 151.

36. As Wendy Brown describes the process, “Law was mobilized to privatize state industries, seduce foreign ownership and investment, secure profit retention, and reduce trade restrictions. On the other hand, popular assemblies and Left parties were outlawed, strikes were criminalized, unions banned.” One exception is the way in which neoliberalism spread in response to natural and human-made disasters. See Klein, The Shock Doctrine.

37. The autonomist Marxism of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri—which will be examined below—is a third approach that combines Marxism with features of Foucault’s and Deleuze’s work.

38. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 19.

39. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2.

40. Harvey, “Neoliberalism Is a Political Project.”

41. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 39.

42. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 40.

43. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 21.

44. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 44.

45. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 40.

46. Quoted in Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 23.

47. This is the central thesis of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. See also Loewenstein, Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe.

48. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 39.

49. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 7.

50. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 6.

51. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 7.

52. Overall, Harvey observes, “Almost all states, from those newly minted after the collapse of the Soviet Union to old-style social democracies and welfare states such as New Zealand and Sweden, have embraced, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes in response to coercive pressures, some version of neoliberal theory” (Brief History of Neoliberalism, 3).

53. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 29.

54. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 65.

55. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 159.

56. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 35.

57. Brown, “Sacrificial Citizenship,” 12.

58. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 24.

59. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 24–25.

60. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 25–26.

61. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 26.

62. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 27.

63. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 27.

64. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 25.

65. Brown, “Apocalyptic Populism.”

66. Jamie Peck calls this feature of neoliberalism “a self-contradictory form of regulation-in-denial.” Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, xiii.

67. Brown, “Apocalyptic Populism.”

68. Bessner and Sparke, “Don’t Let His Trade Policy Fool You.”

69. See Fraser, “The End of Progressive Neoliberalism.”

70. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 40.

71. MacLean, Democracy in Chains, and Slobodian, Globalists.

72. Harvey concludes that it is the “profoundly anti-democratic nature of neoliberalism backed by the authoritarianism of the neoconservatives that should surely be the main focus of political struggle” (Brief History of Neoliberalism, 205).

73. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 17.

74. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 201–2.

75. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 67. Emphasis original.

76. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 68.

77. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 213.

78. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 83, and Brown, “Sacrificial Citizenship,” 9.

79. Slavoj Žižek, for instance, argues that slum-dwellers constitute the “systematically generated ‘living dead’ of global capitalism.” Žižek, Parallax View, 425. See also Žižek, Living in the End Times, 456.

80. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 64 and 38.

81. This argument is developed at length by Wendy Brown in In the Ruins of Neoliberalism.

82. Brown, “Interview: Where the Fires Are.” As we noted above, a number of authors have explored the link between neoliberalism and political commitments that are antidemocratic (MacLean, Democracy in Chains; Slobodian, Globalists). Additionally, there have been a number of important studies published on the relationship between neoliberalism and neofascism—see Connolly, Aspirational Fascism; Brown, “Apocalyptic Populism”; Brown, “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein”; and Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism.

83. Brown, “Apocalyptic Populism.”

84. Rosen, Empire and Dissent, 1.

85. Ferguson, Colossus, and Kagan, Of Paradise and Power.

86. Bacevich, American Empire, and Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival.

87. Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 4.

88. See Brown, “American Nightmare.”

89. Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 3.

90. Kirkpatrick, “Neoconservatism as a Response to the Counter-Culture,” 239.

91. Podhoretz, Present Danger, 86–89.

92. On this, see Cooper, Family Values.

93. MacDonald, Overreach, 101.

94. Bacevich, New American Militarism, 73–79.

95. Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow, 191. Others, like Tony Smith and Samuel Moyn, maintain that liberal internationalism veers dangerously close to the imperialism of neoconservatism. See Smith, A Pact with the Devil, and Moyn, “Beyond Liberal Internationalism.”

96. Kagan, “Neocon Nation: Neoconservatism, c. 1776.”

97. Bacevich, American Empire, 3.

98. Moyn and Wertheim, “The Infinity War.”

99. Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow, 15.

100. Jon Sobrino characterizes this feature of American foreign policy as a metaphysical commitment, observing of the United States, “The empire decides where and when time is something real, what dates should be recognized as benchmarks in human history. It says: ‘Time is real when we say it is.’ And the reason for this is ultimately metaphysical: ‘Reality is us.’” Sobrino, Where Is God?, xi. See also Sobrino, No Salvation, 18.

101. Quoted in the preface to Bacevich, American Empire.

102. In the name of democratization neoconservatives have invoked states of “exception” that override democratic protections and procedures and have created both “spaces of exception” geographically (Guantanamo Bay; Iraq) as well as “practices of exception” (coercive interrogation, torture, and now drones). More broadly on this contradiction in American foreign policy, see Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, and Bacevich, The Limits of Power. Both Drolet and Maria Ryan make this argument: neoconservatism employs an idealist cover to legitimate its desire for American hegemony in a unipolar world. See Drolet, American Neoconservatism, and Ryan, Neoconservatism and the New American Century.

103. Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy.

104. This is not to mention the countless other military interventions, covert operations, and clandestine coup d’états—Nicaragua, El Salvador, Haiti, and now the broader Middle East. On this point, see Kinzer, Overthrow.

105. Quoted in Williams, Understanding U.S.-Latin America Relations, 222.

106. Grandin, Empire’s Workshop.

107. Wertheim, “Return of the Neocons.”

108. Mead, “The Jacksonian Revolt: American Populism and the Liberal Order”; Mead, “Donald Trump’s Jacksonian Revolt”; Clarke and Ricketts, “Donald Trump and American Foreign Policy.”

109. Heilbrunn, “Neocons Paved the Way for Trump.”

110. Wendy Brown has expressed two different views of the relationship in her writings. First, in “American Nightmare,” Brown offered a version of the approach proposed by Hall, Harvey, and Wolin by arguing that neoliberalism and neoconservatism serve as two distinct political rationalities that converge as a politics of de-democratization. But, more recently, in In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, Brown endorses Cooper’s analysis by analyzing Hayek’s assault on social justice and the regulatory and distributive functions of the state as linked to his defense of traditional morality. More broadly, see Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, 58. See also Wolin, Democracy Incorporated.

111. Cooper, Family Values.

112. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 7.

113. Connolly, Christianity and Capitalism; Connolly, Aspirational Fascism; and Connolly, “Trump, the Working Class, and Fascist Rhetoric,” 34n1.

114. Connolly, “Ethos of Democratization,” 168–69, and Connolly, Christianity and Capitalism, 8.

115. Connolly, “Wolin, Superpower, and Christianity.”

116. Connolly, “Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine,” 879.

117. Connolly, Christianity and Capitalism, 48–49.

118. McGill, “The Trump Bloc,” and Kriner and Shen, “Battlefield Causalities and Ballot Box Defeat.”

119. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 10. See also Brown, “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein,” 75.

120. Milanovic, Global Inequality.

121. Mounk, People vs. Democracy, 154.

122. Nancy Fraser argues the same point, observing that “having abandoned the populist politics of distribution, Trump proceeded to double down on the reactionary politics of recognition, hugely intensified and ever more vicious.” Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond.”

123. Connolly, Aspirational Fascism, 12.

124. Connolly identifies the common drive of much of the politics on the right as a form of Nietzschean ressentiment that directs its frustrated desires at its own impotence toward others. Often ressentiment is cultivated among constituencies with a sense of entitlement who experience a series of rapid changes that threaten their privilege and social standing. Connolly maintains that “the feelings of ressentiment are likely to be aimed at those constituencies and forces who have injured you most and/or opened a wound in your creed. Carriers of ressentiment typically look for vulnerable constituencies to castigate, punish, or attack” (“World of Becoming,” 228).

125. Connolly, “Wolin, Superpower, and Christianity.”

126. Connolly, Christianity and Capitalism, 15.

127. Connolly, Christianity and Capitalism, x.

128. Connolly, “Ethos of Democratization,” 167.

129. Connolly’s political assemblage is similar to Mouffe and Laclau’s “chain of equivalence,” Enrique Dussel’s “analogical hegemon,” and Romand Coles’s “a politics of countershock.” See Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy; Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics, 72; and Coles, Visionary Pragmatism.

130. Connolly, Identity/Difference, 214.

131. Connolly, “Trump, the Working Class, and Fascist Rhetoric,” 32.

132. Connolly, “Trump, the Working Class, and Fascist Rhetoric,” 33.

133. Connolly, “Trump, the Working Class, and Fascist Rhetoric,” 33.

134. “Trump, the Working Class, and Fascist Rhetoric,” 33.