For the American Left, the wake of 9/11, the War on Terrorism, practices
of "homeland security," and the recent invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq together produce a complex set of questions about what to think,
what to stand for, and what to organize. These questions are contoured both
by our diagnosis of the current orders of power and rule and by our vision
of alternatives to these orders. This essay aims to contribute to our necessarily
collaborative intellectual effort -- no single analysis can be comprehensive
-- at diagnosing the present and formulating alternatives by reflecting on
the political rationality taking shape in the U.S. over the past quarter century.
1
It is commonplace to speak of the present regime in the United States as
a neo-conservative one, and to cast as a consolidated "neo-con"
project present efforts to intensify U.S. military capacity, increase U.S.
global hegemony, dismantle the welfare state, retrench civil liberties, eliminate
the right to abortion and affirmative action, re-Christianize the state, de-regulate
corporations, gut environmental protections, reverse progressive taxation,
reduce education spending while increasing prison budgets, and feather the
nests of the rich while criminalizing the poor. I do not contest the existence
of a religious-political project known as neo-conservatism nor challenge the
appropriateness of understanding many of the links between these objectives
in terms of a neo-conservative agenda. However, I want to background this
agenda in order to consider our current predicament in terms of a neo-liberal
political rationality, a rationality that exceeds particular positions on
particular issues, and one that undergirds important features of the Clinton
decade as well as the Reagan-Bush years. Further, I want to consider the way
that this rationality is emerging as governmentality -- a mode of governance
encompassing but not limited to the state, and one which produces subjects,
forms of citizenship and behavior, and a new organization of the social.
2
In ordinary parlance, neo-liberalism refers to the repudiation of Keynesian
welfare state economics and the ascendance of the Chicago School of political
economy -- von Hayek, Friedman, et al. In popular usage, neo-liberalism is
equated with a radically free market: maximized competition and free trade
achieved through economic de-regulation, elimination of tariffs, and a range
of monetary and social policies favorable to business and indifferent toward
poverty, social deracination, cultural decimation, long term resource depletion
and environmental destruction. Neo-liberalism is most often invoked in relation
to the Third World, referring either to NAFTA-like schemes that increase the
vulnerability of poor nations to the vicissitudes of globalization or to International
Monetary Fund and World Bank policies which, through financing packages attached
to "restructuring" requirements, yank the chains of every aspect
of Third World existence, including political institutions and social formations.
For progressives, neo-liberalism is thus a pejorative not only because it
conjures economic policies which sustain or deepen local poverty and the subordination
of peripheral to core nations, but also because it is compatible with, and
sometimes even productive of, authoritarian, despotic, paramilitaristic, and/or
corrupt state forms and agents within civil society.
While these referents capture an important effect of neo-liberalism, they
also reduce neo-liberalism to a bundle of economic policies with inadvertent
political and social consequences: they eschew the
political rationality
that both organizes these policies and reaches beyond the market. Moreover,
these referents do not capture the
neo in neo-liberalism, tending instead
to treat the contemporary phenomenon as little more than a revival of classical
liberal political economy. Finally, they obscure the specifically political
register of neo-liberalism in the First World, that is, its powerful erosion
of liberal democratic institutions and practices in places like the United
States. My concern in this essay is with these neglected dimensions of neo-liberalism.
One of the more incisive accounts of neo-liberal
political rationality
comes from a surprising quarter: Michel Foucault is not generally heralded
as a theorist of liberalism or of political economy. Yet Foucault's 1978 and
1979
College de France lectures, still untranscribed and unpublished,
consisted of presentations of his critical analysis of two groups of neo-liberal
economists: the
Ordo-liberal school in postwar Germany (so named because
its members, originally members of the "Freiburg School," published
primarily in the journal,
Ordo), and the Chicago School arising mid-century
in the United States. Thanks to German sociologist Thomas Lemke, we have an
excellent summary and interpretation of Foucault's lectures on neo-liberalism;
in what follows I will draw extensively from Lemke's work.
3
It may be helpful, before beginning a consideration of neo-liberalism as
a political rationality, to mark the conventional difference between political
and economic liberalism, a difference especially confusing for Americans where
"liberal" tends to signify a progressive political viewpoint and,
in particular, support for the welfare state and other New Deal institutions,
along with relatively high levels of political and legal intervention in the
social sphere.
4 In addition,
given the contemporary phenomena of both neo-conservativism and neo-liberalism,
and the association of both with the political right, ours is a time of often
bewildering political nomenclature.
5
Briefly, then, in
economic thought, liberalism contrasts with mercantilism
on one side and Keynsianism or socialism on the other; its classical version
refers to a maximization of free trade and competition achieved by minimum
interference from political institutions. In the history of
political
thought, while individual liberty remains a touchstone, liberalism signifies
an order in which the state exists to secure the freedom of individuals on
a formally egalitarian basis. A liberal political order may harbor either
liberal or Keynesian economic policies -- it may lean more in the direction
of maximizing liberty (its politically "conservative" tilt) or maximizing
equality (its politically "liberal" tilt) but in contemporary political
parlance, it is no more or less a liberal democracy because of one leaning
or the other. Indeed, the American convention of referring to advocates of
the welfare state as political liberals is especially peculiar given that
American conservatives generally hew more closely to both the classical economic
and political doctrines of liberalism -- it turns the meaning of liberalism
in the direction of
liberality rather than
liberty.
For our purposes what is crucial is that
the liberalism in what has come
to be called neo-liberalism refers to liberalism's economic variant, recuperating
selected pre-Keynsian assumptions about the generation of wealth and its distribution,
rather than to liberalism as a political doctrine, set of political institutions,
or political practices. The "neo" in neo-liberalism, however, establishes
these principles on a significantly different analytic basis from those set
forth by Adam Smith, as will become clear below. Moreover, neo-liberalism
is not simply a set of economic policies; it is not only about facilitating
free trade, maximizing corporate profits, and challenging welfarism. Rather,
neo-liberalism carries a social analysis which, when deployed as a form of
governmentality, reaches from the soul of the citizen-subject to education
policy to practices of empire. Neo-liberal rationality, while foregrounding
the market, is not only or even primarily focused on the economy; rather it
involves
extending and disseminating market values to all institutions
and social action, even as the market itself remains a distinctive player.
This essay explores the
political implications of neo-liberal rationality
for liberal democracy, the implications of the political rationality corresponding
to, legitimating, and legitimated by the neo-liberal turn.
While Lemke, following Foucault, is careful to mark some of the differences
between
Ordo-liberal thought and its successor and radicalizer, the
Chicago School, I shall be treating contemporary neo-liberal political rationality
without attending to these differences in some of its source material (See
footnote 3). A rich genealogy of neo-liberalism as it is currently practiced
would be quite useful, one that mapped and contextualized the contributions
of the two schools of political economy, traced the ways that rational choice
theory differentially adhered and evolved in the various social sciences and
their governmental applications, and the interplay of all these currents with
developments in capital over the last half century. But this essay is not
such a genealogy. Rather, my aim is to consider our current political predicament
in terms of neo-liberal political rationality, the chief characteristics of
which are the following:
1) The political sphere, along with every other dimension of contemporary
existence, is submitted to an economic rationality, or put the other way around,
not only is the human being configured exhaustively as
homo oeconomicus,
all dimensions of human life are cast in terms of a market rationality. While
this entails submitting every action and policy to considerations of profitability,
equally important is the production of all human and institutional action
as rational entrepreneurial action, conducted according to a calculus of utility,
benefit, or satisfaction against a micro-economic grid of scarcity, supply
and demand, and moral value-neutrality. Neo-liberalism does not simply assume
that all aspects of social, cultural and political life can be reduced to
such a calculus, rather it develops institutional practices and rewards for
enacting this vision. That is, through discourse and policy promulgating its
criteria, neo-liberalism produces rational actors and imposes market rationale
for decision-making in all spheres. Importantly then, neo-liberalism involves
a normative rather than ontological claim about the pervasiveness of economic
rationality and advocates the institution building, policies, and discourse
development appropriate to such a claim. Neo-liberalism is a constructivist
project: it does not presume the ontological givenness of a thoroughgoing
economic rationality for all domains of society but rather takes as its task
the development, dissemination, and institutionalization of such a rationality.
This point is further developed in (2) below.
2) In contrast with the notorious
laissez faire and human propensity
to "truck and barter" of classical economic liberalism, neo-liberalism
does not conceive either the market itself or rational economic behavior as
purely natural. Both are constructed -- organized by law and political institutions,
and requiring political intervention and orchestration. Far from flourishing
when left alone, the economy must be directed, buttressed, and protected by
law and policy as well as by the dissemination of social norms designed to
facilitate competition, free trade, and rational economic action on the part
of every member and institution of society. In Lemke's account, "In the
Ordo-liberal scheme, the market does not amount to a natural economic reality,
with intrinsic laws that the art of government must bear in mind and respect;
instead, the market can be constituted and kept alive only by dint of political
interventions . . . competition, too, is not a natural fact . . . this fundamental
economic mechanism can function only if support is forthcoming to bolster
a series of conditions, and adherence to the latter must consistently be guaranteed
by legal measures" (193).
The neo-liberal formulation of the state and especially specific legal arrangements
and decisions as the pre- and ongoing condition of the market does not mean
that the market is controlled by the state but precisely the opposite, that
the market is the organizing and regulative principle of the state and society
and this along four different lines:
a)The state openly responds to needs of the market, whether through monetary
and fiscal policy, immigration policy, the treatment of criminals, or the
structure of public education. In so doing, the state is no longer encumbered
by the danger of incurring the legitimation deficits predicted by 1970s social
theorists and political economists such as Nicos Poulantzas, Jurgen Habermas,
or James O'Connor.
6 Rather, neo-liberal
rationality extended to the state itself indexes state success according to
its ability to sustain and foster the market and ties state legitimacy to
such success. This is a new form of legitimation, one that "founds a
state" according to Lemke, and contrasts with the Hegelian and French
revolutionary notion of the constitutional state as the emergent universal
representative of the people. As Lemke describes Foucault's account of
Ordo-liberal
thinking, "economic liberty produces the legitimacy for a form of sovereignty
limited to guaranteeing economic activity . . . .a state that was no longer
defined in terms of an historical mission but legitimated itself with reference
to economic growth" (196).
b)The state itself is enfolded and animated by market rationality, not simply
profitability, but a generalized calculation of cost and benefit becomes the
measure of all state practices. Political discourse on all matters is framed
in entrepreneurial terms;
the state must not simply concern itself with
the market but think and behave like a market actor across all of its
functions, including law.
7
c)Putting (a) and (b) together, the health and growth of the economy is
the
basis of state legitimacy both because the state is forthrightly responsible
for the health of the economy and because of the economic rationality to which
state practices have been submitted. Thus, "It's the economy, stupid"
becomes more than a campaign principle; rather, it expresses the legitimacy
principle of the state and the basis for state action -- from Constitutional
adjudication and campaign finance reform to welfare policy to
foreign policy, including warfare and the organization of "homeland security."
3)The extension of economic rationality to formerly non-economic domains
and institutions extends to individual conduct, or more precisely, prescribes
citizen-subject conduct in a neo-liberal order. Whereas classical liberalism
articulated a distinction, and at times even a tension, among the criteria
for individual moral, associational, and economic actions (hence the striking
differences in tone, subject matter and even prescription between Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations and
his
Theory of Moral Sentiments),
neo-liberalism normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial
actors in every sphere of life. It figures individuals as rational, calculating
creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for "self-care"
-- the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions.
In making the individual fully responsible for her/himself, neo-liberalism
equates moral responsibility with rational action; it relieves the discrepancy
between economic and moral behavior by configuring morality entirely as a
matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences. In
so doing, it also carries responsibility for the self to new heights: the
rationally calculating individual bears full responsibility for the consequences
of his or her action no matter how severe the constraints on this action,
e.g., lack of skills, education, and childcare in a period of high unemployment
and limited welfare benefits. Correspondingly, a "mismanaged life"
becomes a new mode of depoliticizing social and economic powers and at the
same time reduces political citizenship to an unprecedented degree of passivity
and political complacency. The model neo-liberal citizen is one who strategizes
for her/ himself among various social, political and economic options, not
one who strives with others to alter or organize these options. A fully realized
neo-liberal citizenry would be the opposite of public-minded, indeed it would
barely exist as a public. The body politic ceases to be a body but is, rather,
a group of individual entrepreneurs and consumers . . . which is, of course,
exactly the way voters are addressed in most American campaign discourse.
8
Other evidence for progress in the development of such a citizenry is not
far from hand: consider the market rationality permeating universities today,
from admissions and recruiting to the relentless consumer mentality of students
in relationship to university brand names, courses, and services, from faculty
raiding and pay scales to promotion criteria.
9
Or consider the way in which consequential moral lapses (of a sexual or criminal
nature) by politicians, business executives, or church and university administrators
are so often apologized for as "mistakes in judgement," implying
that it was the calculation that was wrong, not the act, actor, or rationale.
The state is not without a project in the making of the neo-liberal subject.
The state attempts to construct prudent subjects through policies that organize
such prudence: this is the basis of a range of welfare reforms such as workfare
and single-parent penalties, changes in the criminal code such as the "three
strikes law," and educational voucher schemes. Because neo-liberalism
casts rational action as a norm rather than an ontology, social policy is
the means by which the state produces subjects whose compass is set by their
rational assessment of the costs and benefits of certain acts, whether teen
pregnancy, tax cheating, or retirement planning. The neo-liberal citizen is
calculating rather than rule-abiding, a Benthamite rather than a Hobbesian.
The state is one of many sites framing the calculations leading to social
behaviors that keep costs low and productivity high.
This mode of governmentality (techniques of governing that exceed express
state action and orchestrate the subject's conduct toward him or herself)
convenes a "free" subject who rationally deliberates about alternative
courses of action, makes choices, and bears responsibility for the consequences
of these choices. In this way, Lemke argues, "the state leads and controls
subjects without being responsible for them;" as individual 'entrepreneurs'
in every aspect of life, subjects become wholly responsible for their well-being
and citizenship is reduced to success in this entrepreneurship (201). Neo-liberal
subjects are controlled
through their freedom -- not simply, as thinkers
from the Frankfurt School through Foucault have argued, because freedom within
an order of domination can be an instrument of that domination -- but because
of neo-liberalism's
moralization of the consequences of this freedom.
This also means that the withdrawal of the state from certain domains and
the privatization of certain state functions does not amount to a dismantling
of government but, rather, constitutes a technique of governing, indeed the
signature technique of neo-liberal governance in which rational economic action
suffused throughout society replaces express state rule or provision. Neo-liberalism
shifts "the regulatory competence of the state onto 'responsible,' 'rational'
individuals [with the aim of] encourag[ing] individuals to give their lives
a specific entrepreneurial form" (Lemke 202).
4)Finally, the suffusion of both the state and the subject with economic
rationality has the effect of radically transforming and narrowing the criteria
for good social policy
vis a vis classical liberal democracy. Not only
must social policy meet profitability tests, incite and unblock competition,
and produce rational subjects, it obeys the entrepreneurial principle of "equal
inequality for all" as it "multiplies and expands entrepreneurial
forms within the body social" (Lemke 195). This is the principle that
links the neo-liberal governmentalization of the state with the development
of a neo-liberal social sphere and neo-liberal subjects.
Taken together, the extension of economic rationality to all aspects of thought
and activity, the placement of the state in forthright and direct service
to the economy, the rendering of the state
tout court as an enterprise
organized by market rationality, the production of the moral subject as an
entrepreneurial subject, and the construction of social policy according to
these criteria, might appear as a more intensive rather than fundamentally
new form of the saturation of social and political realms by capital. That
is, the political rationality of neo-liberalism might be read as issuing from
a stage of capitalism which simply underscores Marx's argument that capital
penetrates and transforms every aspect of life -- remaking everything in its
image and reducing every value and activity to its cold rationale. All that
would be new here is the flagrant and relentless submission of the state and
the individual, the church and the university, morality, sex, marriage, and
leisure practices to this rationale. Or better, the only novelty would be
the recently achieved hegemony of rational choice theory in the human sciences,
self-represented as an independent and objective branch of knowledge rather
than an expression of the dominance of capital.
Another reading that would figure neo-liberalism as continuous with the past
would theorize it through Weber's rationalization thesis rather than Marx's
argument about capital. The extension of market rationality to every sphere,
and especially the reduction of moral and political judgement to a cost/benefit
calculus, would represent precisely the evisceration of substantive values
by instrumental rationality that Weber predicted as the future of a disenchanted
world. Thinking and judging are reduced to instrumental calculation in this
'polar night of icy darkness" -- there is no morality, no faith, no heroism,
indeed no meaning outside the market.
However, invaluable as Marx's theory of capital and Weber's theory of rationalization
are in theorizing aspects of neo-liberalism, neither brings into view the
historical-institutional rupture it signifies, the form of governmentality
it replaces and the form it inaugurates, and hence, the modalities of resistance
it outmodes and those that must be developed if it is to be effectively challenged.
Neo-liberalism is not an inevitable historical development of capital and
instrumental rationality; it is not the unfolding of laws of capital or of
instrumental rationality suggested by a Marxist or Weberian analysis but represents
instead a new and contingent organization and operation of both. Moreover,
neither analysis articulates the shift neo-liberalism heralds from relatively
differentiated moral, economic, and political rationalities and venues
in liberal democratic orders to their discursive and practical integration.
Neo-liberal governmentality undermines the relative autonomy of certain institutions
from one another and from the market -- law, elections, the police, the public
sphere -- an independence that formerly sustained an interval and a tension
between a capitalist political economy and a liberal democratic political
system. The implications of this transformation are significant. If Marcuse
worried about the loss of a dialectical opposition
within capitalism
when it "delivers the goods," that is, when, by mid-twentieth century,
a relatively complacent middle class had taken the place of the hard-laboring
impoverished masses Marx depicted as the negating contradiction to the concentrated
wealth of capital, neo-liberalism entails the erosion of oppositional political,
moral, or subjective claims located
outside capitalist rationality
but inside liberal democratic society, that is, the erosion of institutions,
venues, and values organized by non-market rationalities in democracies. When
democratic principles of governance, civil codes, and even religious morality
are submitted to economic calculation, when no value or good stands outside
of this calculus, sources of opposition to, and mere modulation of, capitalist
rationality disappear. This reminds us that however much a Left analysis has
identified a liberal political order with legitimating, cloaking, and mystifying
the stratifications of society achieved by capitalism and achieved as well
by racial, sexual, and gender superordinations, it is also the case that liberal
democratic principles of governance -- liberalism as a political doctrine
-- have functioned as something of an antagonism to these stratifications.
As Marx himself argued in "On the Jewish Question," formal political
principles of equality and freedom (with their attendant promises of individual
autonomy and dignity) figure an alternative vision of humanity and alternative
social and moral referents to those of the capitalist order within which they
are asserted. This is the Janus-face or at least Janus-potential of liberal
democracy
vis a vis a capitalist economy: while liberal democracy encodes,
reflects, and legitimates capitalist social relations, it simultaneously resists,
counters, and tempers them.
Put simply, what liberal democracy has provided over the last two centuries
is a modest ethical gap between economy and polity. Even as liberal democracy
converges with many capitalist values (property rights, individualism, Hobbesian
assumptions underneath all contract, etc.) the formal distinction it establishes
between moral and political principles on the one hand and the economic order
on the other has also served as insulation against the ghastliness of life
exhaustively ordered by the market and measured by market values. It is this
gap that a neo-liberal political rationality closes as it submits every aspect
of political and social life to economic calculation: asking not, for example,
what does liberal constitutionalism stand for, what moral or political values
does it protect and preserve, but rather what efficacy or profitability does
constitutionalism promote . . . .or interdict?
Liberal democracy cannot be submitted to neo-liberal political governmentality
and survive. There is nothing in liberal democracy's basic institutions or
values -- from free elections, representative democracy, and individual liberties
equally distributed, to modest power-sharing or even more substantive political
participation -- that inherently meets the test of serving economic competitiveness
or inherently withstands a cost-benefit analysis. And it is liberal democracy
that is going under in the present moment, even as the flag of American "democracy"
is being planted everywhere it finds or creates soft ground. (The fact that
"democracy" is the rubric under which so much anti-democratic imperial
and domestic policy is enacted suggests that we are in an inter-regnum, or
more precisely, that neo-liberalism borrows extensively from the old regime
to legitimate itself even as it also develops and disseminates new codes of
legitimacy. More about this below.)
Nor is liberal democracy simply a temporary casualty of recent events or
of a neo-conservative agenda. As the foregoing account of neo-liberal governmentality
suggests, while post 9/11 international and domestic policy may have both
hastened and highlighted the erosion of liberal democratic institutions and
principles, this erosion is not simply the result of a national security strategy
or even of the Bush administration's unprecedented indifference to the plight
of the poor, civil liberties, law valued as principle rather than tactic,
or conventional liberal democratic criteria for legitimate foreign policy.
10
My argument here is twofold. First, neo-liberal rationality has not caused
but rather has facilitated the dismantling of democracy during the current
national security crisis. Democratic values and institutions are trumped by
a cost-benefit and efficiency rationale for practices ranging from government
secrecy, even government lying, to the curtailment of civil liberties. Second,
the post-9/11 period has brought the ramifications of neo-liberal rationality
clearly into focus, largely through practices and policies that progressives
assail as hypocrisies, lies, or contradictions but which may be better understood
as neo-liberal policies and actions taking shape under the legitimating cloth
of a liberal democratic discourse increasingly void of substance.
The Bush Administration's imperial adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq clearly
borrowed extensively from the legitimating rhetoric of democracy. Not only
were both wars conducted as battles for "our way of life" against
regimes said to harbor enemies (terrorists) or dangers (weapons of mass destruction)
to that way of life, both violations of national sovereignty were justified
by the argument that democracy could and ought to take shape in those places
-- each nation was said to need liberation from brutal and despotic rule.
The standard Left criticism of the first justification is that "our way
of life" is more seriously threatened by a politics of imperialism and
policies of homeland security than by these small nations. But this criticism
ignores the extent to which "our way of life" is being figured in
a neo-liberal rather than classically liberal democratic idiom, that is, as
the ability of the entrepreneurial subject and state to rationally plot means
and ends and the ability of the state to secure the conditions, at home and
abroad, for a market rationality and subjectivity by removing impediments
to them (whether Islamic fundamentalism or excessive and arbitrary state sovereignty
in the figure of Saddam Hussein). Civil liberties are perfectly expendable
within this conception of "our way of life;" unlike property rights,
they are largely irrelevant to
homo oeconomicus. Their attenuation
or elimination does not falsify the project of protecting democracy in its
neo-liberal mode.
The Left criticized the second justification, that the U.S. could or ought
to liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban and Iraq from Hussein as both hypocritical
(the U.S. had previously funded and otherwise propped both regimes) and disingenuous
(U.S. foreign policy has never rested on the principle of developing democracy
and was not serious about the project in these settings). Again, however,
translated into neo-liberal terms, "democracy," here or there, does
not signify a set of independent political institutions and civic practices
comprising equality, freedom, autonomy and the principle of popular sovereignty
but rather, indicates only a state and subjects organized by market rationality.
Indeed, democracy could even be understood as a code word for availability
to this rationality; removal of the Taliban and Baath party pave the way to
that availability and democracy is simply the name of the regime, conforming
to neo-liberal requirements, that must replace them. When Paul Bremer, U.S.-appointed
interim governor of Iraq, declared on May 26 (just weeks after the sacking
of Baghdad and four days after the UN lifted economic sanctions), that Iraq
was "open for business," he made clear exactly how democracy would
take shape in post-Saddam Iraq. A flood of duty-free imported goods poured
into the country, finishing off many already war-damaged local Iraqi businesses.
Mulitinationals tumbled over themselves to get a piece of the action in Iraq,
and foreign direct investment to replace and privatize state industry was
described by the corporate executives advising the Bush administration as
the "answer to all of Iraq's problems."
11
The question of democratic institutions, Bremer made clear by scrapping early
plans to form an interim Iraqi government in favor of installing his own team
of advisors, was at best secondary to the project of privatizing large portions
of the economy and outsourcing the business of policing a society in rubble,
chaos, and terror occasioned by the combination of ongoing military skirmishes
and armed local gangs.
12
It is no news that replacements for the Taliban and the Baath regimes need
not be rights-based, formally egalitarian, representative, or otherwise democratic
in order to serve the purposes of global capitalism or the particular geopolitical
interests of the United States. Nor is it news that replacements of these
regimes need not be administered by the Afghans or Iraqis themselves to satisfy
these purposes and interests, though the residues of old-fashioned democracy
inside the legitimation project of neo-liberalism make even puppet rule by
local elites or faux rule by a governing council ideologically preferable
to full-fledged American occupation. What is striking, however, is the boldness
of a raw market approach to political problem solving, the extent to which
a flourishing market economy built on foreign investment and radical privatization
schemes are offered not simply as the path to democracy but as the name and
the measure of democracy in these nations, a naming and measuring first appearing
in post-89 Eastern Europe a decade earlier. Not only are democratic institutions
largely irrelevant -- and at times even impediments -- to neo-liberal governmentality,
the success of such governmentality does not depend on the question of whether
it is locally administered or externally imposed. Market rationality knows
no culture or country and administrators are, as the economists say, fungible.
Indeed, at this juncture in the displacement of liberal democracy by neo-liberal
governmentality, the question is how much legitimacy neo-liberal governance
requires from a democratic vocabulary, that is, how much does neo-liberalism
have to cloak itself in liberal democratic discourse and work with liberal
democratic institutions. This is less a theoretical question than a historical
empirical one about how deeply and extensively neo-liberal rationality has
taken hold as ideology, that is, how much and where neo-liberal governance
can legitimate itself in its own terms, without borrowing from other discourses.
(Neo-liberalism can become dominant as governmentality without being dominant
as ideology -- the former refers to governing practices and the latter to
a popular order of belief that may or may not be fully in line with the former,
indeed may even be a site of resistance to it.) Clearly, a rhetoric of democracy
and the shell of liberal democratic institutions remain more important in
the imperial heartland than in recently "liberated"/conquered societies
with little or no democratic traditions of legitimacy. However, the fact that
G. W. Bush retains the support of the majority of the American people, despite
his open flaunting of democratic principles amidst a failing economy and despite,
too, evidence that the public justification for invading Iraq was based on
cooked intelligence, suggests that neo-liberalism has taken deep hold in the
homeland. Particularly striking is the number of pundits who have characterized
this willful deceit of the people as necessary rather than criminal, a means
to a rational end, reminding us that one of the more dangerous features of
neo-liberal evisceration of a non-market morality lies in undercutting the
basis for judging government actions by criteria other than expedience.
13
Just as neo-liberal governmentality reduces the tension historically borne
by the state between democratic values and the needs of capital as it openly
weds the state to capital and resignifies democracy as ubiquitous entrepreneurialism,
neo-liberalism also smooths an old wrinkle in the fabric of liberal democratic
foreign policy between domestic political values and international interests.
During the Cold War, political progressives could use American sanctimoniousness
about democracy to condemn international actions that propped or installed
authoritarian regimes and overthrew popularly elected leaders in the Third
World. The divergence between strategic international interests and democratic
ideology produced a potential legitimation problem for foreign policy, especially
that pertaining to Southeast Asia and Central and Latin America. Neo-liberalism,
by redefining democracy as thoroughgoing market rationality in state and society,
a redefinition abetted by the postcommunist "democratization" process
in eastern Europe, largely eliminates this legitimation problem.
2. Mourning Liberal Democracy
An assault on liberal democratic values and institutions has been plenty
evident in particular recent events: civil liberties undermined by the USA
Patriot Acts and Total Information Awareness (later renamed Total Terror Awareness)
scheme, Oakland police shooting wood and rubber bullets at peaceful anti-war
protesters, a proposed Oregon law to punish all civil disobedience as terrorism
(replete with 25 year jail terms), and McCarthyite deployments of patriotism
to suppress ordinary dissent and its iconography. It is evident as well in
the staging of aggressive imperial wars and ensuing occupations along with
the continued dismantling of the welfare state and progressive taxation schemes
already stripped by the Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations. It has
been more subtly apparent in "softer" events: the de-funding of
public education that led 84 Oregon school districts to sheer almost a month
off of the school year in spring 2003 and delivered provisional pink slips
to thousands of California teachers at the end of the 2002-03 academic year.
14
Or the debate about whether anti-war protests constituted unacceptable costs
for a financially strapped cities -- even many critics of current U.S. foreign
policy expressed anger at peaceful civil disobedients for the expense and
disruption they caused, implying that the value of public opinion and protest
should be measured against its dollar cost.
15
Together these phenomena suggest a transformation of American liberal democracy
into a political and social form for which we do not yet have a name, a form
organized by a combination of neo-liberal governmentality and imperial world
politics, contoured in the short run by conditions of global economic and
global security crises. They indicate a form in which the contemporary imperial
agenda is able to take hold precisely because the domestic soil has been loosened
for it by neo-liberal rationality.
This form is not fascism or totalitarian as we have known them historically
nor are these appellations likely to be most helpful identifying or criticizing
it.
16 Rather, this is a political
condition in which the substance of many of the significant features of constitutional
and representative democracy have been gutted, jettisoned, or end-run, even
as they continue to be promulgated ideologically, serving as a foil and shield
for their undoing and for the doing of death elsewhere. These features include
civil liberties equally distributed and protected; a press and other journalistic
media minimally free from corporate ownership on one side and state control
on the other; uncorrupted and unbought elections; quality public education
oriented,
inter alia, to producing the literacies relevant to informed
and active citizenship; government openness, honesty and accountability; a
judiciary modestly insulated from political and commercial influence; separation
of church and state; and a foreign policy guided at least in part by the rationale
of protecting these domestic values. None of these constitutive elements of
liberal democracy was ever fully realized in its short history -- they have
always been compromised by a variety of economic and social powers from white
supremacy to capitalism. And liberal democracies in the First World have always
required other peoples to pay -- politically, socially, and economically --
for what these societies have enjoyed, that is, there has always been a colonially
and imperially inflected gap between what has been valued in the core and
what has been required from the periphery. So it is important to be precise
here. Ours is not the first time in which elections have been bought, manipulated
and even engineered by the courts, the first time the press has been slavish
to state and corporate power, the first time the U.S. has launched an aggressive
assault on a sovereign nation or threatened the entire world with its own
weapons of mass destruction. What is unprecedented about this time is the
extent to which basic principles and institutions of democracy are becoming
anything other than ideological shells for their opposite as well as the extent
to which these principles and institutions are being abandoned even as values
by large parts of the American population. This includes the development of
the most secretive government in 50 years (the gutting of the Freedom of Information
Act was one of the quiet early accomplishments of the current Administration,
the "classified" status of its more than 1000 contracts with Halliburton
one of its more recent); the plumping of corporate wealth combined with the
elimination of social spending reducing the economic vulnerability of the
poor and middle classes; a bought, consolidated, and muffled press that willingly
cooperates in its servitude (emblematic in this regard is the Judith Miller
(non)scandal, in which the star
New York Times journalist wittingly
reported Pentagon propaganda about Iraqi WMDs as journalistically discovered
fact); and intensified policing in every corner of American life -- airports,
university admissions offices, mosques, libraries, workplaces -- a policing
undertaken both by official agents of the state and by an interpellated citizenry.
A potentially permanent "state of emergency" combined with an infinitely
expandable rhetoric of patriotism overtly legitimates undercutting the Bill
of Rights and legitimates as well abrogation of conventional democratic principles
in setting foreign policy, principles that include respect for nation state
sovereignty and reasoned justifications for war. But behind these rhetorics
there is another layer of discourse facilitating the dismantling of liberal
democratic institutions and practices, a govermentality of neo-liberalism
that eviscerates non-market morality and thus erodes the root of democracy
in principle at the same time that it raises the status of profit and expediency
as the criteria for policy making.
There is much that is disturbing in the emergence of neo-liberal governmentality
and a great deal more work to do in theorizing it. In particular, as I suggested
at the outset of this essay, filling in the contemporary political picture
would require mapping the convergences and tensions between a (non-partisan)
neo-liberal governmentality on the one hand and the specific agendas of Clintonian
centrists and Reagan-Bush neo-conservatives on the other. It would require
exploring the continued efficacy of political rhetorics of morality and principle
as neo-liberalism voids the substance of and undercuts the need for extra-market
morality. It would require discerning what distinguishes neo-liberalism from
old-fashioned corporatism and old-fashioned political realism. It would require
examining the contradictory political imperatives delivered by the market
and set as well by the tensions between nation state interests and globalized
capitalism indifferent to states and sovereignty. Above all, it would require
examining the points at which U.S. imperial policies converge with and diverge
from or even conflict with neo-liberal governmentality.
By way of conclusion, however, I leave aside these questions to reflect briefly
on the implications of losing liberal democracy for the Left. While leftists
of the last quarter century were rarely as antagonistic to liberal democracy
as the Old Left, neither did we fully embrace it; at times we resented and
railed against it and certainly we harbored an aim to transform it into something
else -- social democracy or some form of radical democracy. So the Left is
losing something it never loved, or at best was highly ambivalent about. We
are also losing a site of criticism and political agitation -- we criticized
liberal democracy not only for its hypocrisy and ideological trickery but
also for its institutional and rhetorical embedding of bourgeois, white, masculinist
and heterosexual superordination at the heart of humanism. Whatever loose
identity we had as a Left took shape in terms of a differentiation from liberalism's
willful obliviousness to social stratification and injury glossed and hence
secured by its formal juridical categories of liberty and equality.
Still, liberalism, as Gayatri Spivak once wrote in a very different context,
is also that which one "cannot not want" (given the other historical
possibilities, given the current historical meaning of its deprivation). Even
here, though, the desire and attachment is framed as roundabout and against
itself, as Spivak's artful double negative indicates. It indicates a dependency
we are not altogether happy about, an organization of desire we wish were
otherwise. What might be the psychic/social/intellectual implications for
Leftists of losing this vexed object of attachment? What are the possible
trajectories for a melancholic incorporation of that toward which one is,
at best, openly ambivalent, at worst, hostile, resentful, rebellious?
Freud posits melancholy as occasioned by ambivalence, though the ambivalence
may be more unconsciously sustained than I am suggesting is the case for the
Left's relationship to liberal democracy. More precisely, Freud's focus in
theorizing melancholy is love that does not know or want to avow its hostility
whereas the task before us is to consider hostility that does not know or
want to avow its love or dependency. Still, Freud's thinking about melancholia
remains useful here as a theory of loss amidst ambivalent attachment and dependence,
and a theory of identity formation at the site of an ungrievable passion or
attachment. It reminds us to consider how Left melancholia about liberal democracy
would not just be a problematic affect but constitute a formation of the Left
itself.
Incorporating the death of a loathed object to which one was nonetheless
attached often takes the form of acting out the loathed qualities of the object.
I once had an acquaintance whose much despised and abusive father died. While
my friend overtly rejoiced at his passing, in the ensuing months she engaged
in extraordinary outbursts of verbal and physical abuse toward friends and
colleagues, even throwing things at them as she had described her father throwing
household objects during her childhood. Another friend buried, after years
of illness, a childish, hysterical, histrionic and demanding mother, one who
relentlessly produced herself as a victim amidst her own aggressive demands.
Relieved as my friend was to have done with this parent, what should emerge
over the following year but exactly such tendencies in her own relationships?
So this is one danger: that we would act out to keep alive those aspects of
the political formation we are losing, that we would take up and perform liberal
democracy's cruelties or duplicities, stage them in our own work and thinking.
This would issue in part from the need to preserve the Left identity and project
that took shape at the site of liberal democracy, and in part from ambivalence
about liberal democracy itself. In response to the loss of an object both
loved and loathed, in which only the loathing or contempt is avowed, melancholy
sustains the loved object, and continues to provide a cover for the love --
a continued means of disavowing it -- by incorporating and performing the
loathsomeness.
There are other ways ambivalently structured loss can take shape as melancholic,
including the straightforward possibility of idealizing a lost object as it
was never idealized when alive. Straightforward, perhaps, but not simple,
for this affect also involves remorse for a past of not loving the object
well enough and self-reproach for ever having wished for its death or replacement.
As idealization fueled by guilt, this affect also entails heightened aggression
toward challenges or challengers to the idealization. (Consider the seemingly
interminable intra-Left condemnation of those progressives who did not vote
for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election.) In this guilt, anxiety and
defensiveness over the loss of liberal democracy, we would feel compelled
to defend basic principles of liberalism or defend liberalism tout court
in a liberal way, that is, we would give up being critical of liberalism
and in doing so, give up being left. Freud identifies this surrender of identity
upon the death of an ambivalent object as the suicidal wish in melancholia,
a wish abetted in our case by a more general disorientation about what the
Left is or stands for today.
17
Evidence for such a surrender in the present extends from our strikingly unnuanced
defenses of free speech, privacy, and other civil liberties, to the staging
of anti-war protests as "patriotic" through the iconography of the
American flag. Often accounted as what the Left must do when public discourse
moves rightward, such accounts presume a single political continuum, ranged
from extreme Left to extreme Right, in which liberals and conservatives are
nothing more than the moderate versions of the extremes (communists and fascists).
Not only does the model of the continuum reduce the variety of political possibility
in modernity to matters of degree rather than kind, it erases the distinctiveness
of a Left critique and vision. Just as today's neo-liberals bear little in
common with traditional conservatives, the Left has traditionally stood for
a set of values and possibilities qualitatively different from those of welfare
state liberals. Of course, there are times of alliance and spheres of overlap,
but a continuum does not capture the nature of these convergences and tactical
linkages any better than it captures the differences between, for example,
a liberal commitment to rights-based equality and a Left commitment to emancipating
the realm of production, or between a liberal enthusiasm for the welfare state
and a Left critique of its ideological and regulatory dimensions. So the idea
that Leftists must automatically defend liberal political values when they
are on the ropes, while sensible from a liberal perspective, does not facilitate
a Left challenge to neo-liberalism if the Left still aims at something other
than liberal democracy in a capitalist socio-economic order.
Of course there are aspects of liberal democracy that the Left has come to
value and incorporate into its own vision of the good society, e.g., an array
of individual liberties that are to one side of achieving freedom from domination
promised by transforming the realm of production. But articulating this renewed
Left vision differs from defending civil liberties in liberal terms, a defense
that itself erases a Left project as it consigns it to something outside those
terms. Similarly, patriotism and flag waving are surely at odds with a Left
formulation of justice, even as love of America, represented through icons
other than the flag or narratives other than "supporting the troops,"
might well have a part in this formulation. Finally, not only does defending
liberal democracy in liberal terms sacrifice a Left vision, this sacrifice
discredits the Left by tacitly reducing it to nothing more than a permanent
objection to the existing regime. It renders the Left a party of complaint
rather than a party with an alternative political, social and economic vision.
Still, if we are slipping from liberalism to fascism, and if radical democracy
or socialism is nowhere on the political horizon, don't we have to defend
liberal democratic institutions and values? Isn't this the lesson of Weimar?
I have labored to suggest that this is not the right diagnosis of our predicament:
it does not grasp what is at stake in neo-liberal governmentality -- which
is not fascism -- nor on what grounds it might be challenged. Indeed, the
Left defense of the welfare state in the 1980s, which seemed to stem from
precisely such an analysis -- 'if we can't have socialism, at least we should
preserve welfare state capitalism' -- backfired from such a misdiagnosis.
On one hand, rather than articulating an emancipatory vision that included
the eradication rather than regulation of poverty, the Left appeared aligned
with big government, big spending, and misplaced compassion for those construed
as failing to give their lives proper entrepreneurial shape. On the other
hand, the welfare state was dismantled on grounds that had almost nothing
to do with the terms of liberal democracy and everything to do with neo-liberal
economic and political rationality. We are not simply in the throes of a right-wing
or conservative positioning within liberal democracy but rather at the threshold
of a different political formation, one that conducts and legitimates itself
on different grounds from liberal democracy even as it does not immediately
divest itself of the name. It is a formation that is developing a domestic
imperium correlative with a global one, achieved through a secretive and remarkably
agentic state; corporatized media, schools and prisons; and a variety of technologies
for intensified local administrative, regulatory and police powers. It is
a formation made possible by the production of citizens as individual entrepreneurial
actors across all dimensions of their lives, reduction of civil society to
a domain for exercising this entrepreneurship, and figuration of the state
as a firm whose products are rational individual subjects, an expanding economy,
national security, and global power.
This formation produces a twofold challenge for the Left. First, it compels
us to consider the implications of losing liberal democracy and especially
its implications for our own work by learning what the Left has depended upon
and demanded from liberal democracy, which aspects of it have formed the basis
of our critiques of it, rebellions against it, and identity based on differentiation
from it. We probably also need to mourn liberal democracy, avowing our ambivalent
attachment to it, our need for it, our mix of love and hostility toward it.
The aim of this work is framed by the second challenge, that of devising an
intelligent Left challenge to the neo-liberal political-economic formation
now taking shape and an intelligent left counter-vision to this formation.
A half-century ago, Herbert Marcuse argued that capitalism had eliminated
a revolutionary subject (the proletariat) representing the negation of capitalism;
consequently, he insisted, the Left had to derive and cultivate anti-capitalist
principles, possibilities, and agency from capitalism's constitutive
outside.
That is, the Left needed to tap the desires -- not for wealth or goods but
for beauty, love, mental and physical well-being, meaningful work, and peace
-- manifestly unmet within a capitalist order and to appeal to those desires
as the basis for rejecting and replacing the order. No longer could
economic
contradictions of capitalism inherently fuel opposition to it; rather opposition
had to be founded in an alternative table of values. Today, the problem Marcuse
diagnosed has expanded from capitalism to liberal democracy itself: oppositional
consciousness cannot be generated from liberal democracy's false promises
and hypocrisies. The space between liberal democratic ideals and lived realities
has ceased to be exploitable because liberal democracy itself is no longer
the most salient discourse of political legitimacy and the good life. Put
the other way around, the politically exploitable hollowness in formal promises
of freedom and equality has largely vanished to the extent that both freedom
and equality have been redefined by neo-liberalism. Similarly, revealed linkages
between political and economic actors -- not merely bought politicians but
arrangements of mutual profiteering between corporate America and its political
elite -- do not incite outrage at malfeasance, corruption, or injustice but
appear instead as a potentially rational set of linkages between state and
economy. Thus, from the "scandal" of Enron to the "scandal"
of Vice President Cheney delivering Iraq to Halliburton to clean up and rebuild,
there is no scandal. Rather, there is only market rationality, a rationality
that can encompass even a modest amount of criminality but also treats close
state-corporate ties as a potentially positive value -- maximizing the aims
of each -- rather than as a conflict of interest.
18
Similarly, even as the Bush Administration fails to come up with WMDs in Iraq
and fails to be able to install order let alone democracy there, this is irrelevant
to the neo-liberal criteria for success in that military episode. Indeed,
even the scandal of Bush's installation as president by a politicized Supreme
Court was more or less ingested by the American people as business as usual,
an ingestion that represents a shift from the expectation that the Supreme
Court is independent of political influence to one that tacitly accepts its
inclusion in the governmentality of neo-liberalism. Even John Poindexter,
a key figure in the Iran-Contra affair and director of the proposed "Terrorism
Information Awareness" program that would have put all Americans under
surveillance, continued to have power and legitimacy at the Pentagon until
the flap over the scheme to run a futures market on political violence in
the Middle East. All three projects are models of neo-liberalism's indifference
to democracy; only the last forced Poindexter into retirement.
These examples suggest that not only liberal democratic principles but democratic
morality has been largely eviscerated -- in neo-liberal terms, each
of these "scandals" is framed as a matter of miscalculation or political
maneuvering rather than by right and wrong, truth or falsehood, institutional
propriety or impropriety. Consequently, the Left cannot count upon revealed
deception, hypocrisies, interlocking directorates, featherbedding, or corruption
to stir opposition to the existing regime. It cannot count on the expectation
that moral principle undergirds political action or even on consistency as
a value by which to judge state practices or aims. Much of the American public
appeared indifferent to the fact that both the Afghan and Iraqi regimes targeted
by Bush had previously been supported or even built by earlier U.S. foreign
policy. It appeared indifferent as well to the fact that the "liberation"
of Afghan women was touted as one of the great immediate achievements of the
overthrow of the Taliban while overthrow of the Baath regime has set into
motion an immediately more oppressive regime of gender in Iraq. The inconsistency
does not matter much because political reasons and reasoning that exceed or
precede neo-liberal criteria has ceased to matter much. This is serious political
nihilism which no mere defense of free speech and privacy, let alone securing
gay marriage rights or an increase in the minimum wage will reverse.
What remains for the Left, then, is to challenge emerging neo-liberal governmentality
in EuroAtlantic states with an alternative vision of the good, one that rejects
homo oeconomicus as the norm of the human
and rejects this norm's
correlative formations of economy, society, state and (non)morality. In its
barest form, this would be a vision in which justice would not center upon
maximizing individual wealth or rights but on developing and enhancing the
capacity of citizens to share power and hence, collaboratively govern themselves.
In such an order, rights and elections would be the background rather than
token of democracy, or better, rights would function to safeguard the individual
against radical democratic enthusiasms but would not themselves signal the
presence nor constitute the central principle of democracy. Instead a left
vision of justice would focus on practices and institutions of shared popular
power; a modestly egalitarian distribution of wealth and access to institutions;
an incessant reckoning with all forms of power -- social, economic, political,
and even psychic; a long view of the fragility and finitude of non-human nature;
and the importance of both meaningful activity and hospitable dwellings to
human flourishing. However differently others might place the accent marks,
none of these values can be derived from neo-liberal rationality nor meet
neo-liberal criteria for the good. The development and promulgation of such
a counter rationality -- a different figuration of human beings, citizenship,
economic life, and the political -- is critical both to the long labor of
fashioning a more just future and to the immediate task of challenging the
deadly policies of the imperial U.S. state.
Thanks to Judith Butler, Thomas Dumm, Kathy Ferguson, and Paul Patton
for especially helpful criticisms of a first draft of this essay, and
to Robyn Marasco for research assistance.