Political theory in the Twenty-First Century is very old fashioned because it engages in the kind of theorizing that took place in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, when Marxism was in vogue. That means that Wendy Brown, among others, is still mired in the attempt to separate illusion from reality, the ruling classes and the working class engaged in a dialogue whereby the ruling class is trying to foist upon the workers and the poor a distorted view of their real economic condition. For Marx, that meant that religion served as an opiate of the people. Racist ideology and a moronic popular culture would also serve as ways to keep the poor, the working class, and even part of the middle class, from recognizing the true root of the evils that befell them, which was a social structure controlled, as the contemporary argot has it, by the upper one-percent of the population. Ideology and cultural superstructure keep the exploitative economic and social system in place.
The Wendy Brown iteration of this dynamic is provided in her exposition of the idea of “Neoliberalism”, a term that has caught on in such publications as “The New Yorker” and “The New York Review of Books”, but perhaps is best stated by Brown. What she means by the term is that the capitalist system is in charge of contemporary society but that the dialectic between those who control and those who are exploited is continued by the rich making some concessions to those who are exploited so as to allow the capitalists to remain in power through democratic mechanisms. This is done by providing a number of social services that do no injury to the idea that people are basically economic actors, which is, in fact, the essence of their unfreedom. Capitalism, at this late stage in its development, is thereby able to draw blinkers over the eyes of the exploited so that they think they are a bit better off even if their spiritual need for freedom from economic woe has only been partly met. Workers will settle for the crumbs, just as students at Ivy League universities will settle for the pittance of university funds that allows them to pursue their social and political extra-curricular activities and so be distracted from the larger fact that the university could afford to suspend tuition for decades by only using up the interest on its endowments.
Brown gives away her Marxist roots by defining Neoliberalism not as a political or economic system but as a mode of thought that is pervasive throughout a society. So she exemplifies it by education as having come to be understood as what it is that creates the value of a human’s work in the marketplace, the success of an education being the amount of money that person will earn, the economic metric replacing all other ways of recognizing what is accomplished by education, such as the ability to appreciate poetry. Brown is therefore reminiscent of Adorno and the other Frankfurt School philosophers who said that the Twentieth Century saw the eclipse of reason and its substitution with a very different form of reasoning that was necessarily constricting and not really reason at all. Brown is given to that sort of apocalyptic thinking.
The problem with the condemnation of global and ubiquitous Neoliberalism is, among other things, that it does not, first of all, explain the rise of Trumpian populism, which should be the easiest and most direct of its tasks. One way to explain how Neoliberalism might explain the present is that the rising middle class does not have the prosperity that would be thought to come from better jobs because they have more debt, lessened career opportunities, and so, in their minds, are disadvantaged in relation to the privileges that people of color now enjoy. And so their real economic circumstances lead them to strike out for an out of the box figure. But the facts of the matter also make it possible to say, to the contrary, that those who fall for Trump Populism are being sold a bill of goods because they are economically better off than their parents but do not get the kind of respect they deserve, always being ridiculed by the coastal elites, and so they are in a cultural malaise rather than an economic one, and so the rise of Trump Populism is a disorder of the cultural superstructure rather than what is wrong with the economic system. Neoliberals can have it either way because the important thing is that those who follow Trump have become troubled by their economic or cultural condition and so are victims of it, no longer capable of seeing what is in their own economic or cultural interests and so following a pipsqueak would be dictator because nothing better has come along, which just makes the Trump supporters the more pathetic despite their own taste for racist and nihilistic rhetoric.
Is there a more constructive way of taking their measure, that treats the Trump Populists as agents in their own lives, however much an observer such as myself disapproves of where their venom has gotten them? A simple alternative is that the 2016 race was so close that there is no point in reading anything into it, unless one wants to blame the russians. Or that Hillary was simply not very magnetic. Or that the public can simply misread its interests or suffer a bad day emotionally without that making them always unable to read their interests or their better emotions. These are straightforward matters that do not depend on the dialectic between structure and culture.
There is a larger issue, however. During this age of Neoliberalism, which has been said to be going on since the Reagan Administration, which means for forty years, there have been significant social advancements that belie the claim by those who propound Neoliberalism that nothing progressive has gone on in American social life, only a decrease in the power of unions, working people, and the poor. Progress of a revolutionary sort has occurred with regard to issues that concern equality of social status rather than matters of economic equality, and these social advances do provide economic benefits for people in those groups. In the centuries before Reagan, there was a broadening of equality to include more and more kinds of people into the American family. Those events included the extension of the franchise to all males in the 1820’s, the extension of freedom and voting to Black citizens in the mid Nineteenth Century (however delayed that was in the South until the 1960’s), and the expansion of the rights of women in the workplace, There has also been an expansion of human rights and economic rewards to other groups in American society during the age of Neoliberalism. Women gained considerable representation in the House of Representatives as well as better jobs and higher wages and also more secure reproductive rights, at least in Northern states. Gay rights went from verturally nothing (The Stonewall Riot occurred in 1969) to legal rights against discrimination and even to same sex marriage and even to an openly gay man now running for President, just as this era of Neo-liberalism also saw the election and reelection of the first Black President. These matters aren’t trivial. They move along the freedom agenda even if the Presidents of this period were either Conservative or, at best, Clinton and Obama, left leaning centrists. So Neoliberalism has not eliminated progress even though it has resulted in rich people getting richer while poor people are no better off than they were before.
It isn’t that Wendy Brown isn’t familiar with the social movements of the past forty years; it is only that she downplays their significance because these developments are not primarily economic even if they have economic significance and so, according to her Neomarxist lights, can’t be really, deep down, significant. She argues that women either become like male actors or else they are even more driven down by having to take on their female roles as caretakers of others, which means, I take it, that becoming Congresswomen is not progress because it means becoming part of the Neoliberal structure. Put that way, there is little way to measure female progress, either in having greater reproductive rights or more influence in boardrooms. There is no way you can make an impression on the global system of Neoliberalism. Many Blacks may be better off financially than they were before the Sixties civil rights bills, but only to be like everyone else in becoming cogs in the capitalist machine. Brown is very clever in that she is always able to label any sign of economic or social progress for minority groups as something that further imprisons them.
That sense of things points to the central theoretical fallacy of the Neoliberal theory, which is that it looks for the economic basis for motives or else it dismisses the non-economic basis for motives, such as those embodied in the status politics of women, gays and Blacks. Both types of motives play on the idea of “interest” which can mean what is useful to you economically or, more broadly, what is of interest to you, which means becomes a matter of concern. Economic interests are always about something other than yourself. They are conditions of your life which you may or may not appreciate and so there is always a problem about whether you are doing is in accord with your interests or contrary to them. Matters of concern, on the other hand, are right there, matters of awareness, and so one is aware that one cares about modern art while less aware that it is in your economic interest to vote for a candidate who will lower your taxes, which is perhaps less difficult to apprehend than whether you appreciate, as Jane Austen did, that renting your house to a retired naval officer means lesser debt even though it is an insult to your sense of the social order. Either you follow economics or you follow what are summarized as your cultural preferences.
The trouble with this opposition is, most generally, that the two paired sentiments, what we might call the economic and the cultural, exhaust the range of possibilities and are always available as alternatives to one another. When economic reasons don’t explain what people do, they somehow not apprehending what is obvious to the economic analyst, then they are pursuing their cultural interests. So not much is explained if you can always pivot from one to the other as the explanation for behavior. If Trumpites are not following their economic interests, then economic interests cannot be the sole or ultimate cause of human motivation. But then they are following deeply deceptive cultural interests. This either/or approach makes people always victims. The person answering his economic needs is the slave of those needs whether he wants to be or not, unless he follows the will of the wisp of culture, in which case he is subject to whatever wind wafts him one way or the other. In neither case, is he (or she) an agent of his (or her) own free will. Is that view of humanity what we want from social theory?