This book addresses these issues by theorizing how neoliberal rationality prepared the ground for the mobilization and legitimacy of ferocious antidemocratic forces in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The argument is not that neoliberalism by itself caused the hard-right insurgency in the West today or that every dimension of the present, from the catastrophes generating great flows of refugees to Europe and North America to the political siloization and polarization generated by digital media can be reduced to neoliberalism.8 Rather, the argument is that nothing is untouched by a neoliberal mode of reason and valuation and that neoliberalism’s attack on democracy has everywhere inflected law, political culture, and political subjectivity. 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. It means appreciating the rise of white nationalist authoritarian political formations as animated by the mobilized anger of the economically abandoned and racially resentful, but as contoured by more than three decades of neoliberal assaults on democracy, equality, and society. White working-class and middle-class economic suffering and racialized rancor, far from distinct from these assaults, acquire voice and shape from them. These assaults also fuel (though they do not by themselves cause) the Christian nationalist ambition to (re)conquer the West. They also intermix with an intensifying nihilism manifesting as broken faith in truth, facticity, and foundational values.

[...] Forged in the crucible of European fascism, neoliberalism aimed at permanent inoculation of market liberal orders against the regrowth of fascistic sentiments and totalitarian powers. Eager to separate politics from markets, the original neoliberals would have loathed both the crony capitalism and international oligarchical power spawned by finance that yanks the chains of states today. Seeking to get politics out of markets and concentrated economic interests out of policy making, they would have deplored the manipulation of public policy by major industries and capital sectors and would have hated, too, the politicization of enterprise. Above all, they dreaded political mobilizations of an ignorant, aroused citizenry and looked to market and moral discipline and a severely leashed democracy to pacify and contain it. They would be horrified by the contemporary phenomenon of leaders at once authoritarian and reckless riding to power on this tide. In short, while the book will argue that the constellation of principles, policies, practices, and forms of governing reason that may be gathered under the sign of neoliberalism has importantly constituted the catastrophic present, this was not neoliberalism’s intended spawn, but its Frankensteinian creation. Fathoming how that creation came to be requires examining the imminent failures and occlusions of neoliberal principles and policy, as well as their admixture with other powers and energies, including those of racism, nihilism, fatalism, and ressentiment.

The fifth chapter also develops a leitmotif running through the others: as I have already noted, neoliberalism yielded effects very different from those imagined and sought by its architects. The reasons for this are several. There is, first, a kind of return of the repressed in neoliberalism reason—a ferocious eruption of the social and political forces that the neoliberals at once opposed, underestimated, and deformed with their dedemocratizing project. What this means is that actually existing neoliberalism now features what Sheldon Wolin characterizes as an “enraged” form of majority rule (often termed “populism” by pundits) arising from the society that neoliberals aimed to disintegrate, but failed to vanquish, and thus left without common civil norms or commitments. There is, second, neoliberalism’s accidental unleashing of the financial sector and the ways that financialization profoundly undermined neoliberal dreams of a competitive global order lightly tended by supranational institutions, on the one hand, and facilitated by states fully autonomous of economic interests and manipulation, on the other.19 Third, there are the ways that markets and morals twisted as they were submitted to the grammars and spirit of one another—that is, as morality was marketized and markets were moralized. Through this process, both became politicized as fighting creeds, thus losing the “organic, spontaneous” character and mode of organizing conduct for which Hayek and his colleagues cherished them. Finally, neoliberalism intensified the nihilism, fatalism, and rancorous resentment already present in late modern culture. Together, these developments and effects generated something radically different from the neoliberal utopia of an inegalitarian liberal order in which individuals and families would be politically pacified by markets and morals and subtended by an autonomous authoritative, but depoliticized state. Instead, neoliberalism produced a monster its founders would abhor.

The above account, hewing to a neo-Marxist approach, formulates neoliberalism as an opportunistic attack by capitalists and their political lackeys on Keynesian welfare states, social democracies, and state socialism. In Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian adds sophistication to this picture by emphasizing the extent to which neoliberalism was both intellectually conceived and practically unveiled as a global project in which nation-state economic sovereignty would be superseded by the rules and agreements set by supranational institutions such as the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund.22 In Slobodian’s telling, neoliberalism aimed simultaneously at dismantling barriers to capital flows (and hence to capital accumulation) posed by nation-states and at neutralizing redistributive demands from the recently decolonized South, such as those embodied in the New International Economic Order. Slobodian’s account also underscores the extent to which the neoliberal revolution was designed to quash working-class expectations in both the developed world and developing postcolonial regions as it produced a global race to the bottom. Put differently, releasing capital to chase cheap labor, resources, and tax havens around the world would inevitably generate lower standards of living for working-class and middle-class populations in the Global North and continued exploitation and limited sovereignty, accompanied by (uneven) development, in the Global South.

There is more. The economizing side of neoliberalism added force to the nihilism of the age and also quickened it, first in leaving nothing untouched by entrepreneurialization and monetization and then, with financialization, submitting every aspect of human existence to investor calculations about its future value. As we become human capital all the way down and all the way in, neoliberalism makes selling one’s soul quotidian, rather than scandalous. And it reduces the remains of virtue to branding, for capital large and small. But economization, with its effect on values, is not the only problem here. Nihilism also has its way with the moral values project in neoliberalization as it desublimates the will to power in morality.5 Here is how this goes.

Not quite a century after Nietzsche wrote, Herbert Marcuse considered desublimation from a different angle to theorize the nonliberatory release of instinctual energies in postwar capitalism. What Marcuse famously termed “repressive desublimation” occurs within an order of capitalist domination, exploitation, and “false needs” as technology reduces the demands of necessity and as desire is everywhere incorporated into a commodity culture enjoyed by a growing middle class. This order features plenty of pleasure, including that obtained by radically reduced strictures on sexuality (less grueling work requires less sublimation), but does not feature emancipation. Instinctual energies, no longer directly opposed by the mandates of society and economy and thus no longer requiring heavy repression and sublimation, are now co-opted by and for capitalist production and marketing. As pleasure and especially sexuality are everywhere incorporated into capitalist culture, the pleasure principle and the reality principle slip their ancient antagonism. Pleasure, instead of being an insurrectionary challenge to the drudgery and exploitation of labor, becomes capital’s tool and generates submission. Far from dangerous or oppositional, no longer sequestered in aesthetics or utopian fantasy, pleasure becomes part of the machinery.

Finally, there is Marcuse’s account of the role of the market in intensifying the nihilism theorized by Nietzsche. Writing well before the neoliberal revolution, Marcuse argues that the market has become both reality principle and moral truth: “The people are led to find in the productive apparatus”—the market—“the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered,” and “in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent. Conscience is absolved by reification, by the general necessity of things. In this general necessity, guilt has no place.”20 Already depleted by desublimation yielding a happy consciousness, the weak remains of conscience are taken over by market reason and market requirements. The real is both the rational and the moral. At once reality principle, imperative, and moral order, capitalism becomes necessity, authority, and truth rolled into one; suffusing every sphere and immune from criticism, despite its manifest devastations, incoherencies, and instabilities. There is no alternative.

[...] Refracting this politics of indifference through the nihilistic disintegration of a social compact and through lost faith in capacities to control human powers and arrangements takes us beyond Hochschild’s inclination to root this sentiment in her subjects’ experience of social and political neglect. It explains their attraction to leaders calling for aggressive door-slamming to “outsiders” and a humanly habitable future, leaders who build this sentiment into an affirmative political passion animated by a desublimated will to power. It explains why such policies are celebrated with gleeful, vengeful rallying cries. The wreckage that nihilism makes of conscience may also help explain the unprecedented aggression and viciousness emanating from right-wing cable and internet news, blogs, and tweets. This aggression and viciousness is fed by neoliberal valorization of libertarian freedom, by wounded, angry white maleness, and by nihilism’s radical depression of conscience and social obligation.23 It is discursively organized by neoliberal assaults on the social and the political and by neoliberal legitimation of indifference to the predicaments or fate of other humans, other species, or the planet. However, attacks on liberals and leftists, feminists, antiracists, and others are also a nihilistic form of action. The passion and pleasure in trolling and trashing are signs of what Nietzsche called “wreaking the will” simply to feel its power when world affirmation or world building are unavailable. Perhaps negation—whether crude or moralistic—is what remains when the powers shaping the world appear uncontrollable and uncontainable, and existential doom appears imminent. Again, however, it is important to register the active quality of this negation: right-wing spurning of ethical or political enjoinders to care for or repair the world is a form of “doing.” And, as Nietzsche points out, “there is so much that is festive” in it—especially in the pleasures of provocation and piling on, of humiliating others or making them suffer, of dancing at the bonfires of what one is burning down.

And yet there is an important aspect of the neoliberalization of everyday life that salts this wound: the deep inequality of access and hierarchies of status organizing every part of commerce and what remains of public life. As works such as Michael J. Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy argue, today there is hardly a contemporary activity or sphere of life unstriated by tiers or classes of access dependent on wealth: from boarding an airplane to the legroom and food inside it; from access to sports events to access to uncongested highway lanes; from who obtains family leave in a corporation to who obtains an MRI authorized by their health insurance; from how quickly you can renew a passport, get on to the rides at Disney World, or get your offspring into rehab.32 These stratifications are written so deeply into contemporary culture that they are an essential part of branding: the lousiest motel chains have “premier lounges,” and “upgrade” is a ubiquitous term in every industry and service. The more of public life that is privatized—national parks, education, roads, emergency, schools, and other city services—the more this inequality heaps up the have-nots into crowded underserved piles of misery while offering the haves (the top 30 percent, not the top 1 percent) every possible way to buy their way out of crowding, waiting, and suffering.

Above all, when neoliberalism is reduced to economic policy or rationality, it blinds us to three tectonic shifts in the organization and consciousness of space that both spur certain political reactions today and organize the theater in which they occur. The first of these shifts is the lost horizon of the nation-state consequent to globalization. From capital flows to immigrant flows, from digital networks to supply chains, the world has invaded the nation, weakening its borders and its sovereignty, redistributing production and consumption, and transforming the existential conditions and prospects of every kind of population—rural, suburban, and urban. If this shift has incited rancor against both new immigrants and the politics and politicians held responsible for allowing them into the West, it is also producing a divide between those accommodating the shift and those furiously rebelling against it.

The second spatial shift involves the neoliberal destruction of the social discussed in chapter 2. As neoliberalism dissolves that sphere into a market order, on the one hand, and a familial one, on the other, the space of civic equality and concern with the common good that democracy requires disappears. At the same time, the rise of the digital generates a novel, radically deterroritalized and dedemocratized sociality. This sociality features no clear protocols of power sharing, enfranchisement, or commitment to negotiating diverse views and needs, inclusion, or plurality. Whatever their merits, digitalized “societies” are detached from the challenge of sharing power equally in order to rule ourselves. They may have other democratizing potentials, but they are not themselves substitutes for democratic practices and the political equality they require.

The third spatial shift pertains to the rise of finance capital and the modality of value that it ushers into the world. Multinational corporations and global assembly lines of post-Fordism already challenged the visibility and tangibility of capital ownership and control. However, the vaporous powers of finance, which rule everything, but live nowhere, are akin to a Copernican revolution for subjectivity in relation to the powers making and governing the world. Indeed, just as the round earth cannot be seen, but can be known only deductively, through its effects, rule by finance involves a transformation of spatial consciousness that paradoxically hinges on the despatialization of power as such, not only the deterritorialization identified with globalization in its early decades.