In Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos, neoliberalism brings the tyranny of the market and the death of the democratic project
Rex, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, 1909
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Oh boy, another issue being written right as our Diarrhea Country kicks into full gear, in this case the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, which we honestly all knew was going to turn out this way, after all it is A-OK in many states to kill racial justice protestors with a car, so why not with an AR-15? In fact I fully expect Spotify to tee up a $100 million exclusive podcast contract with Rittenhouse and a Dancing with the Stars appearance is likely on the horizon. In other news it looks like Build Back Better just barely passed the House and now will go to the Senate which will further gut it and then back to the House and maybe back to the Senate and back to the House. Also the COP26 agreement was signed, including all the stupid watered down language I mentioned. That’s the news, now here’s the weather.
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Have you ever been in the shower or trying to fall asleep or something and thought to yourself, you know, it’s kind of weird that the single most important thing in the whole world is to be good at business, and if you aren’t, you don’t get a place to live or healthcare and a lot of the time you just die?
One way to describe this state of affairs is neoliberalism, a term I’ve had a hard time with in the past because it feels kind of overused to the point that it feels like it’s losing meaning. It always felt to me like people were using it to describe libertarianism, or capitalism, or the Democratic Party, or whatever thing they were mad about. There’s that funny scene in White Lotus, where two disaffected teens are idly complaining about Hillary Clinton, “She was a neolib and a neocon.”
Neoliberalism does have a specific meaning though—it’s a mode of reason that applies economic principles to all aspects of existence—but it’s kind of a slippery idea to get a hold of, I would say because it engulfs everything around us. In Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson describes this effect through a metaphor of the global market as a character:
“My body worked so well that eventually all things everywhere were swallowed and digested by me. I grew so large that I ate the world, and all the blood in the world is mine. What am I? You know, even though you are like everything else, and see me from the inside. I am the market.”
All the blood in the world is mine. You see me from the inside. That goes a long way toward explaining how, while everywhere all the time, neoliberalism becomes a kind of ambient noise that we only really notice every once in a while, in the shower or trying to fall asleep and thinking, why is the world like this?
After reading political theorist Wendy Brown’s 2017 book Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, I’ve come around to the term as a necessary way to name this problem. Brown not only gives a powerful explanation of what neoliberalism is and how it’s causing economic and political systems to fail, she also outlines the full extent of its harms—the reshaping of how we see ourselves as humans and how we interact with each other. Brown argues that it’s a world view that has seeped so deeply into the crevices of our minds and our culture that after just a few decades living under its reign, we have a hard time seeing any other possibilities outside of it.
Brown’s argument centers on how neoliberalism robs us of our lives as democratic actors working toward principles of common good. But I find one of the most disturbing aspects of her argument to be the way in which neoliberalism robs us of our imagination. It’s a form of giving up, spiritually and practically, on the project of working toward an ethical existence.
What exactly is neoliberalism?
Undoing the Demos is not a light read, and it builds on a lot of previous works of political philosophy, mostly by revising Michel Foucault’s assessment of the concept from his lectures in the late 1970s. But Brown updates and revises the definition based on how it has unfolded in the decades to follow, and her own added concerns of how deeply it threatens democracy.
I will skip over a lot of this, but basically if classical liberalism (as opposed to social liberalism as we typically use the term today) is characterized by democratic governance and free markets, Foucault describes neoliberalism as a “reprogramming” of liberalism that installs the market as the core principle of government and, eventually, all areas of life. Even in the eyes of Adam Smith, the market was seen as one tool for liberating the subject, but never the guiding principle it becomes in neoliberalism.
“Neoliberalism is not about the state leaving the economy alone. Rather, neoliberalism activates the state on behalf of the economy… to facilitate economic competition and growth and to economize the social, or, as Foucault puts it, to ‘regulate society by the market.'”
The concept emerged in postwar Germany and in the 1970s characterized the way the Global North began imposing markets on the Global South, absorbing and transforming nations for their cheap labor and resources. But the end result of neoliberalism is the complete dominance of homo oeconomicus, human as a market actor, who eventually becomes not just someone merely exchanging goods and services, but a unit of “human capital,” operating in the world as a company would.
Brown describes how this unfolds in our lives, where education is merely an investment in future earning potential, dating is an act of marketing oneself to a potential partner (now contracted out to tech companies), families are managed like firms, and our credit ratings determine the security and happiness we can achieve: “both persons and states are construed on the model of the contemporary firm, both persons and states are expected to comport themselves in ways that maximize their capital value in the present and enhance their future value, and both persons and states do so through practices of entrepreneurialism, self-investment, and/or attracting investors.”
For both Foucault and Brown, neoliberalism is not merely one economic system, or even an array of systems and policies. “As a normative order of reason developed over three decades into a widely and deeply disseminated governing rationality, neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic. All conduct is economic conduct.”
That’s why it can’t be looked at as, say, a particular flaw in the US government, or the politics of the Reagan years. In fact, while Reagan and Thatcher are often associated with the rise of neoliberalism, its dominance comes with the Clinton years, when the political party nominally concerned with justice under the law solidified consensus that the market is synonymous with truth (as Thatcher liked to say, “there is no alternative”), and the role of the state and individual alike is to serve the market—but never interfere with it—because only therein lies prosperity.
In fact, one of Brown’s damning pieces of evidence of neoliberalism’s reign is a State of the Union address by President Obama following his reelection in 2012, in which it was widely believed that his progressive ideals had been reignited with his renewed political capital. But Brown points out that, one by one, every ideal he professes in the speech—from raising wages to ending domestic violence—is framed as a way to advance the competitiveness of America as an economic firm.
“A growing economy that creates good, middle-class jobs — that must be the North Star that guides our efforts” the president intoned. “Every day,” he added, “we must ask ourselves three questions as a nation…. How do we attract more jobs to our shores? How do we equip our people with the skills needed to do those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?”
Attracting investors and developing an adequately remunerated skilled workforce—these are the goals of the world’s oldest democracy led by a justice-minded president in the twenty-first century.
This attitude is going strong today, as a vapid Democratic Party offers few values to speak of, because the values that undergird the party in theory—equality, a social safety net, regulation of industry—conflict with neoliberal reason. They are off the table. As a result, when pressed on what DNC leaders stand for, they can only meekly respond with “…jobs?” Even on climate change, an issue in which millions of lives and untold suffering hang in the balance, the Biden administration can only ever discuss the issue in the context of creating jobs and competing with China, our rival firm. Build those solar panels, get that paper.
What’s so bad about neoliberalism?
Maybe you are all about the rise and grind and wondering, well, what is so bad about all this? Well there are a bunch of concrete reasons the populous is turning against neoliberalism, although Brown sees these as tangential to the core problem.
Among the popular criticisms of neoliberalism is that it requires government to exist only to facilitate the free market, which means deregulation of industry and a shrinking welfare sate. With this comes gross inequality and suffering for people who are not winners in the market. Related to this is the coziness between corporations and government and the corruption that breeds (in fact, Brown points out that there is no such thing as corruption under neoliberalism, because private sector prosperity is inseparable from public interest). Then there is the crass commercialization of everything as a potential product, from education to organ transplants. And finally, neoliberalism deliciously ends in economic destabilization, as a financial sector that produces nothing but investment products becomes an engorged portion of the economy.
And yet. For Wendy Brown, the main reason neoliberalism is so bad for us is that it “is quietly undoing basic elements of democracy. These elements include vocabularies, principles of justice, political cultures, habits of citizenship, practices of rule, and above all, democratic imaginaries.”
She describes this as a battle between two versions of humanity: homo oeconomicus and homo politicus—the former an actor in an economic market, the latter an agent participating in self-governance. Under neoliberalism, homo oeconomicus eclipses homo politicus. “The vanquishing of homo politicus by contemporary neoliberal rationality, the insistence that there are only rational market actors in every sphere of human existence, is novel, indeed, revolutionary, in the history of the West.”
Brown describes this as a “turning inside out” of the social contract, in which we are each only responsible for ourselves, and there is no guarantee of security or even survival, unless it’s perceived as good for the firm’s competitiveness. “When there is only homo oeconomicus… the foundation vanishes for citizenship concerned with public things and the common good.”
Further, when competitiveness eclipses all other values, the pursuit of justice and equality inherently recedes. After all, while corporations frequently speak of “win-win scenarios,” the marketplace is defined by winners and losers, not equal treatment and protection.
Brown also presents the loss of homo politicus as a loss of freedom. This may sound contradictory considering a dominant idea of freedom is that of a free market—which in itself reflects what neoliberalism has done to our brains, fusing liberty with capitalism—but the idea here is that only through popular sovereignty do we achieve the freedom to decide our values and how we want to live, and without it we are living under the tyranny of the market.
“The neoliberal revolution takes place in the name of freedom—free markets, free countries, free men—but tears up freedom’s grounding in sovereignty for states and subjects alike. States are subordinated to the market, govern for the market, and gain or lose legitimacy according to the market’s vicissitudes.”
There is one game to be played under neoliberalism, and we have no choice but to play it. As a result, all of the elements of a rich life that have been valued throughout history, learning for learning’s sake, working in community toward common good, creative expression, pondering our existence, are all replaced by the need to constantly increase our competitive advantage.
“Indeed, no capital, save a suicidal one, can freely choose its activities and life course or be indifferent to the innovations of its competitors or parameters of success in a world of scarcity and inequality.”
Expressions of neoliberalism
This is just a broad outline of the argument in Undoing the Demos, and the book puts forth several examples of how it plays out. There’s an analysis of how gender inequality is intensified, as the market actor is disproportionately seen as a male role, and the labor of caregiving ignored as the unpaid work of women.
“The persistent responsibility of women for provisioning care of every sort, in and out of the household, means that women both require the visible social infrastructure that neoliberalism aims to dismantle through privatization and are the invisible infrastructure sustaining a world of putatively self-investing human capitals.”
At the state level, governing is replaced with a version of corporate management that delegates responsibility to the individual, demands personal sacrifice from its employees, and brings industry to the table as “stakeholders” to decide the nation’s fate. Rote replication of corporate “best practices” replaces the democratic process.
In the courts, she discusses how Citizens United, which is primarily criticized for introducing a flood of money into elections, is actually more sinister than that—it degrades the participation in politics to the crude exchange of money for a service. In his majority opinion, Justice Kennedy legally entrenches not only corporations as people, but people as corporations, defining free expression as an economic marketplace instead of a precious equal right held by all.
Being an academic herself, higher education is of particular concern to Brown, who has watched state funding shrink, business schools and fundraising departments at her university swell, and liberal arts and humanities wither away as societal capital. The democratization of learning, while we have never delivered on its promise, was a radical act of equality, one that is unraveling as schooling is reduced to an investment in human capital (and in future donations from alumni).
Where do we go from here?
That point about education having always fallen short of its ideals is an important one for Brown. She makes clear toward the end of the book that democracy itself is not an end goal that always produces common good, quite the contrary. We don’t even agree on what proper democracy looks like.
She also notes that liberalism was failing homo politicus long before neoliberalism cemented its hold, and markets exploited and accumulated before neoliberalism. But liberal democracy at least offered the tools to create something that we could one day call true democracy, one that could potentially deliver justice. The economization of everything has taken those tools away, giving us only the ceaseless burden of competition in return.
This feels super relevant to our capacity to respond to climate change, especially if we seek to create a more just economy post-fossil fuels. As climate change finally becomes a top tier issue globally and nationally, we see it absorbed into neoliberalism, with corporations co-opting the idea of just transition as a “win-win” for economic growth, the rise of hollow net zero pledges and the primacy of private finance solutions. The only passable (maybe!) climate legislation is new tax incentives, and our primary global channel for collective decision-making has become little more than a way for world leaders to humbly ask industry lobbyists how states might best serve their firms during the crisis.
This is a depressing diagnosis, but one that names the disease in a way that is rarely so well articulated. In the conclusion, Brown points out that her goal was not to set out to find a cure for this problem, and she doesn’t offer much of one. But she does pose what such a cure might require of us, and it is no small task.
Merely passing policies to counter neoliberalism may not be enough. For example, you could restore regulations that market logic has rolled back, but that wouldn’t necessarily eliminate the dominance of market logic that governs our lives and institutions. City councils, schools, NGOs, community groups, these institutions that may “understand themselves as opposing neoliberal economic policies may nonetheless be organized by neoliberal rationality.”
The task left before us then is nothing short of creating a new order of dominant reasoning, and that often leads to despair and submission to this monster of our own creation. But we must cling to the idea that we can elevate ourselves beyond rote self-interest. “In letting markets decide our present and future, neoliberalism wholly abandons the project of individual or collective mastery of existence.”
Brown writes that reviving that project “is incalculably difficult, bears no immediate reward, and carries no guarantee of success.” Here, however, I think she is perhaps a bit too grim. We can find hope in her well-taken point that neoliberalism is not, in fact, all humanity has ever been. She only puts its reign at around 30 years. In other words, all the blood in the world belongs to the market, but that wasn’t always how it was! Neoliberalism’s installation was “novel and revolutionary,” remember, and we may already be seeing its cracks.
So the trick, as hokey as it sounds, is not giving up on the project, and I’d also add recognizing that, while the solution requires a change in the primary way we view the world, it’s not a pass/fail exam. I’m reminded of Cadwell Turnbull’s essay on the folly of seeking utopia as perfection:
“I’d argue that everyone would benefit if we defined utopia as a move toward justice and equity, and not just the state of perfection. But in America, especially in discussions about social justice, “just” and “perfect” are treated as synonymous objectives. And because perfect is never attainable, justice, too, becomes out of reach. … By failing to recognize the dystopia, and dismissing the possibility of a utopia, America has resigned itself to its current, dark narrative.”
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Links
- The Biden administration cast itself as a climate hero in Glasgow, then opened the largest oil and gas lease in U.S. history. Kate Aronoff explains how this is a perfect example of how climate treaties are failing in that they don’t STOP EXTRACTING AND BURNING FOSSIL FUELS.
- I love this profile of Dana Tizya-Tramm, the youngest known chief in the history of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, which lies 80 miles north of the Arctic Circle. He has emerged as a climate champion, declaring a climate emergency and pioneering sovereign renewable energy for his nation.
- Boston’s broken zoning process rejected a popular development proposal in my neighborhood that would have offered 40% affordable units, specifically because by including those units it reduced the amount of parking.
- Urban freeways displaced Black and Latino homeowners and eradicated entire neighborhoods during the 1960s. We have since moved away from building such freeways, but we do keep expanding them and an LA Times investigation found this work is ~still~ displacing people of color.
- Miami issued a bold plan to slash carbon emissions, including an end to natural gas hookups in new buildings. Then the gas company emailed the city and said this will be “problematic for our industry” and the city reversed its decision.
- New York Times‘ The Daily draws millions of listeners, and it recently subjected all of them to filthy lies from ExxonMobil. Emily Atkin explains how the Times got played like fools.
- From Hot Take — Why all COPs are bad, and why being polite to fossil fuel companies and shitty politicians gets us nowhere.
- You might gather from right wing media that Joe Biden is singlehandedly making everything more expensive but inflation is actually happening worldwide mainly because the economy has recovered faster than expected post-COVID and also oil industry manipulation.
- Just a generation after the first Thanksgiving we idealize this time of year, New Englanders hunted and killed Native children for bounties offered by government decree. Dawn Neptune Adams, Maulian Dana and Adam Mazo suggest: “In this season, as families and friends gather to share gratitude, let us seek new opportunities to learn about our collective history, in all its complexity, and embrace a future built upon mutual understanding and respect for our neighbors.”
- Lots more people are identifying as Evangelical Christians but it turns out they don’t actually worship Jesus Christ they worship the Republican Party.
- I don’t know why David Sedaris has to be such an asshole.
- “Stomp, clap, hey” you know what I’m talking about is the music of gentrification, according to this theory I don’t entirely believe but like to entertain.
- The seven day week is fake af.
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Comics
I first read Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles in the early 2000s, maybe 2002, checked out from the Multnomah County Library, trade paperback by trade paperback and was obsessed with it. I’ve been rereading it and have spent the last month or so on volume 2. That’s a long time, but a comic unlike a novel can be judged by how slowly it makes you read instead of how fast it makes you read, and by that metric, The Invisibles has few peers. It is so dense and confusing and weird but also so fun that you really need to sit with every panel.
It was so edgy when it came out that I was a little worried about how it would hold up, and it does have a fair amount of language that would not be acceptable if it came out today, and it is deeply, profoundly 90s, but still feels surprisingly fresh and ahead of its time, bursting with anarchist politics, street magic, violent satire, anti-authoritarian rage, and gender and sexual rebellion. It remains provocative in the best way in that it expands and challenges your assumptions about the world and expands your empathy instead of stoking your worst impulses. I loved volume 2 and can’t wait to read the rest. I even ordered a little blank badge on the internet.
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Listening
Starting with Red I have been fully on board with Taylor Swift’s music, despite the occasional internal conflict over that fandom. I like the new stuff but Red is still my favorite, and she just put out a 30-TRACK rerelease as part of her legal reclaiming of her catalog. The new songs are good and the original songs are still great. Everyone is talking about All Too Well, but for my money, State of Grace is the real banger on this record.
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Phew, long one this week. Thanks for sticking with it. Let’s keep the ending short this week but have a wonderful Thanksgiving enjoy your time with family and loved ones, have a wonderful meal, and “let us seek new opportunities to learn about our collective history, in all its complexity, and embrace a future built upon mutual understanding and respect for our neighbors.”
Gobble gobble my bros.
Tate