The Predation of the “Post-Neoliberal” Paradigm
Quinn Slobodian had a post this week about the flaccid (and possibly cynical) imagination of elites who think in terms of “post-neoliberalism”—a term that demarcates recent history in a manner that masks just how much the newer forms of exploitation, wealth-hoarding, and repression are a permissive rebranding of the previous form.
Slobodian’s frontline reportage came from an elite conference about “post-neoliberalism” that was populated by what sounded like so many Bidenistas. Though an excellent read, it aroused in me some difficult memories and observations.
During the Biden years, most of my policymaker friends quickly became former friends as I began critiquing their stewardship of an elite project that rewards financiers, rentiers, and military contractors…and seemingly nobody else. They were in charge of the state, and the state was openly working for the upper ten-percent of society, which required (to my horror) strengthening the repressive apparatus of the US security state and turning it against dissenting Americans.
The terror of the Capitol Insurrection fresh in my mind, I became unsparing in my criticism of the Biden administration. I thought we had one chance to foreclose on counter-revolution and we were blowing it. By a Covid miracle, we got ahold of the power of the state and our mission was simple: Confront American militarism, weaken capital’s stranglehold on labor, and bridle the power of the imperial presidency. We fucked it up on all three fronts, pissing away our 8-Mile moment by doing what we’ve always done in my lifetime—expand surveillance powers, grow the military budget, concentrate still more authority in the hands of the president, and reward the wealthy while allowing society to rot.
But there was a personal angle, too.
One of my closest friends—who ended up becoming a senior official in the Biden administration—called me one day to warn me off of public criticism. He explicitly said he was speaking only for himself. It was obviously not true, both in a “Doth protest too much” sort of way but also, in the context of our friendship, there was no precedent for him calling me specifically to caution me about anything.
I told him I had been pulling my punches out of respect for my relationships with everyone, but I had a duty to speak truth, especially because we were squandering a crucial chance to change things. He responded with something like, “I love what you do. But I’m telling you as a friend, people are starting to see you as radical. If you write things that make the administration look bad, you’re going to be iced out.”
I lost my shit. I accused him of being dispatched by the Bidenistas to give me a mafia-like warning, which he didn’t deny. I told him I wasn’t going to become a propagandist for power just so I could have insider conversations with my old brunch friends. He lauded my candor, comparing me to Holden Caulfield. But if you know Salinger’s fictional character, that’s really a literary slap in the face. He was praising me as an idealist yet interpreted idealism as self-righteous naïveté about power.
We ended the call with a friendly tone, but it would be the last time I spoke with him. I drifted further from his now extremely powerful crowd with each passing month, coping mostly by reading and writing (and podcasting) my ass off. I felt an urgency to explain the Biden administration’s well-intended misuse of state power, doubly motivated by my indignation. And that was all pre-genocide.
But as I entered this street-preacher phase of life, I was realizing that my indictments of Biden for continuing with so much Trump policy amounted to a rethink-and-rebuke of every president in my lifetime, including much of what I had been part of during the Obama administration. A tremendous gush of productive warnings, contrarian sharp elbows, and alternative analyses emerged from this interplay of the personal and the political, including not just this newsletter, but also a trio of books in as many years—Pacific Power Paradox, Grand Strategies of the Left, and The Rivalry Peril.
And this is where my path intersects with Slobodian’s chronicles. One of the things I’ve been astounded by throughout this period has been the way that the ruling-class hive-mind has adapted to the criticisms of people like me. Gramsci might’ve called it passive revolution, but it looks like plain old rhetorical cooptation.
The problem of American empire was a problem of militarism and oligarchy, but to speak in policy language about it meant drawing on concrete policy concepts. The forever wars, US primacy, and neoliberalism were a vocabulary of what was not to be done any longer. And yet, in the 2020s, Washington continued the policies that occurred under these labels, transforming only their rhetorical packaging.
They claimed to have ended the forever wars—a global phenomenon undergirded by excessive presidential authority—because the US withdrew from Afghanistan, even though nothing else had changed. As a result of that non-change, the US is currently at war in more places and in more ways than it was even during the peak of the War on Terror. And Trump’s recent national security strategy positions the US for a new generation of forever wars in the Western Hemisphere without winding down the previous generation of forever wars.
Speaking of, they replaced references to the Global War on Terror with “great-power competition,” a much more suitable basis for arms buildups and geopolitical scaremongering that could at once shed baggage associated with the first two inglorious decades of the 21st century. Amid so much global warmaking, the US doesn’t talk about great-power competition as much as it did under Biden. But great-power competition persists all the same, including in Trump’s new imperialist grand strategy.
Eventually, they also denied that the US was pursuing global primacy at all, even though their choices—including their emphasis on great-power competition—were definitive expressions of what primacy is. It’s not primacy, they say; it’s overmatch, a favorable balance of power, global leadership. We’re just fixated on containing and out-arms-racing the next greatest power in the world-system…but not primacy. Either they’re stupid or they think we are.
Most galling of all, they insisted on a new paradigm for political economy that rejected something they referred to as neoliberalism, blaming it for not only causing so much American suffering but also for being a key source of strength for China, its chosen great-power rival. There is at least some truth in this. China has been neoliberalism’s greatest beneficiary. And the US working class has been obliterated by the key historical processes we associate with neoliberalism—not just de-industrialization but also the financialization of the economy as capitalists relocated production overseas.
The trouble is what our politicians do with such fractal insights. The Biden administration and MAGA both villainized China while becoming self-consciously “post-neoliberal.” But what did that mean?
Slobodian rightly comments on its hollowness. My hot take is that none of this—post-forever-war, post-primacy, post-neoliberalism—is about a new analysis of our conjuncture. It’s not even conjunctural thinking. Rather, it’s about rhetorical adaptation to deflect the most powerful critiques against their program, with the aim of preserving the existing imbalance of forces in capitalist society. And until recently, that has required treating the permanent war economy as the future of industry while peddling rhetoric intended to sap the strength of critics. That’s where I’ve ended up in all this—a critic of both an unsustainable status quo and the far right’s emerging radical revision of it.
The conditions of crisis will not be denied, nor will they be remedied with new words. The MAGA counter-revolution of the past year could be understood as the fascistic response to a long-running crisis that Biden made worse (and that MAGA too is obviously making worse). The elites who run this country right now have ideas that are meant to upend the existing social order. Goodbye multiethnic society. Goodbye multiracial democracy. Goodbye gender equality.
But as ambitious as the counter-revolution’s identity politics may be, its ideas aim to consolidate rather than disrupt the stark imbalance between the forces of capital and the forces of labor. The various crackups within the MAGA movement at this very moment are being contained by a consensus in favor of a flourishing project of repressive state violence. Without that there is nothing.
Is that post-neoliberal? In a frustratingly unenlightening way, sure. We have long opposed neoliberalism as a specific shape of hegemonic capitalism. Today, the shape of capitalism is changing in a way that outmodes the word neoliberalism. But the obsolescence of a term does not mean we are “post-” the idea the term was meant to convey.
What made neoliberalism worthy of our scorn is that it described ways of using the power of the state to enforce the primacy of capital over labor. No sane person would say we’ve transcended that.
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