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.

homilies to the free market

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.