Calhoun is an analog to Marx, in other words, in the same way that public choice theory is an analog to the Marxist theory of the state. In the name of freedom, public choice theory would shackle the ninety-nine percent of us who exist in the lower orders of neoliberalism. Public choice theory is the Marxism of the master class.

In order to reclaim the mantle of freedom, we must reclaim the anti-statism of Marxism, the liberty embedded in a theory of freedom for all. It is perfectly understandable why liberals and leftists embraced elements of statism in the twentieth century. The state not only tamed the chaos of a market-based economy that left most people deeply insecure, it also protected the rights of people in dire need of such protection, namely black Americans.

But this is only half the story. If we only focus on this half, we will remain mystified as to why so many people are enthralled with libertarianism. For in addition to civil rights protections, the state is also Vietnam. It is drones, bank bailouts, tax cuts for the wealthy, prisons. The state is Trump. If we want to reclaim the mantle of liberty from the master class and their court intellectuals, we must also reclaim a theory of the state for the masses. And now that Trump is overseeing what looks to be the final capitalist enclosure of state power, the urgent project of democratic revival must hinge on nothing less than the full repudiation of libertarian fantasy in public life.

During the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, left and right shared a commitment to the value of the humanities as a crucial element of American higher education. What the antagonists then disagreed upon, often ferociously, was how to define the humanities. Conservatives contended that all American college students should read the Western canon as they defined it—limited to a core group of texts typically authored by dead white men. In contrast, academic leftists sought a more inclusive, multicultural humanities curriculum.

But now, a humanities education—designed to inculcate intellectual curiosity and humanistic empathy—serves no purpose, especially beside such plainly better-compensated and culturally respectable real-world pursuits as vocational and managerial training. In other words today’s neoliberal order is fine with revised canons, and with more inclusive, multicultural understandings of the world—but not with public money supporting something so seemingly useless as the humanities. In the age of neoliberalism, conservatives have briskly abandoned their traditionalist defense of the Western canon in favor of no canon at all. Culture warriors on both sides have been overtaken by events. A bipartisan neoliberal consensus that emphasizes job training as education’s sine qua non now dominates the landscape.

When young people flocked to the Bernie Sanders campaign, they responded enthusiastically to his offer to make free higher education a priority. But this ardor didn’t only stem from the ruinous impact that ballooning student debt will visit on their life prospects. They also yearn for a more human existence that transcends the soul-crushing neoliberal order. This new division, between the technocratic rulers of a deeply unequal society and the idealistic young Americans who want something better, hardly resembles the culture wars of yesteryear. It feels, rather, like a new kind of class struggle—and finds a strong echo of the Parkland survivors’ implacable dedication to a new approach to the politics of gun ownership, in defiance of the bitter fatalism of all too many of their political elders. Although the outcome of these inchoate struggles is far from certain, they furnish more than a modicum of hope to the exhausted culture-war conscientious objectors who are looking for a way out of the pinched and dispiriting trench-warfare of the American Kulturkampf.