The day after the 2016 election, Barack Obama gave a speech that encouraged his supporters to be optimistic about Donald Trump's presidency.

We have to remember that we're actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmage... We all want what's best for this country. That's what I heard in Mr. Trump's remarks last night. That's what I heard when I spoke to him directly... That's what the country needs -- a sense of unity; a sense of inclusion; a respect for our institutions, our way of life, rule of law; and a respect for each other. I hope that he maintains that spirit throughout this transition, and I certainly hope that's how his presidency has a chance to begin... The path that this country has taken has never been a straight line. We zig and zag, and sometimes we move in ways that some people think is forward and others think is moving back. And that's okay... The point, though, is that we all go forward, with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens -- because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy. That's how this country has moved forward for 240 years... That's how we've expanded the rights of our founding to reach all of our citizens.

Obama here was affirming a certain strain of US historiography. The average American would probably have no objection to the idea that the jostling between differing viewpoints on the same team has propelled the country forward; they may not know how this view would even be controversial. But there is a history to this view of history. Looking at it critically can help reveal the powerful forces that maintain this ostensibly neutral paradigm while they operate outside of it.

Consensus History

The view that Obama espoused in his speech bears the hallmarks of "consensus history." John Higham, in his 1959 article titled "The Cult of the American Consensus," identified a trend in the 1950s, characterized by appeals to "homogeneity, continuity, and national character." Historians of a previous generation wrote about conflict: between classes, sections of the country, or warring ideologies. Consensus history, by contrast, depicted "most American political debate [as] shadow-boxing."

According to Higham, this historiography came out of a desire to write conservatism into US history. With historians unable to identify a convincing lineage of homegrown conservative thought, they blurred the lines between opposing factions and emphasized a supposedly non-ideological pragmatic tendency that has defined Americans. Higham drew attention to the tendency, and in the 1960s, historians associated with the New Left sealed its fate in the academy. When Americanists invoke the term "consensus history" today, it is an unequivocal dismissal. While historians usually use the label for overly jingoistic work, it is not necessarily any ideological valence that condemns it; Higham and others identified liberal authors writing in the vein of consensus history. What makes it so unappealing to historians is that it is bad history. The discipline has never yet looked back to the time when historians "smooth[ed] over America's social convulsions." Instead, the field has been occupied with fruitful new areas of study and new problematics that have come out of the new social history since the 1960s.

But consensus history remains enticing to many. Some of this certainly has to do with the dire state of history education in the country through most of the twentieth century, the contents of which have long been subjected to conservative scrutiny and censorship. An educator named Harold Rugg was a social studies pioneer who authored a popular textbook series that integrated history, economics, political science, and geography, first published in 1929. Rugg's approach came out of a Progressive tradition that believed in the power of harnessing institutions, like schools, to tackle social problems. Accordingly, his textbooks were geared toward identifying those problems in the hopes of solving them. But starting in the late 1930s, the American Legion and other conservative groups saw the books as unpatriotic and objected to their use. The firestorm resulted in a sharp decline in sales for Rugg's textbooks. In recent years, the importance to publishers of supplying inoffensive textbooks to a national market has given the ultraconservative Texas State Board of Education outsize influence in determining the curriculum of students across the country. Focusing on conflict and strife in our history is unprofitable and, to many, unpatriotic.

In place of a more critical view of US history, general audiences tend to prefer veneration of the founders and our institutions. H. W. Brands identified a trend in the 1990s that he called "Founders Chic" in which Americans renewed their interest in the lives of the country's founding generation. For Brands, "In revering the Founders we undervalue ourselves and sabotage our own efforts to make improvements--necessary improvements--in the republican experiment they began." (According to legal scholar Aziz Rana, liberals in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement affiremd their commitment to the Constitution because it offered a way to deal with a corrupt executive like Richard Nixon and because of era-defining Supreme Court rulings under liberal chief justice Earl Warren.)

The Hamilton musical is perhaps the apotheosis of Founders Chic, and I think there is a compelling connection between the popularity of this trend and a twenty-first century Democratic agenda determined to tinker as little as possible with the structures of American governance. Paired with the long influence of consensus history and censored textbooks, liberals tend to believe that the best bet for progress is to keep a steady hand on the rudder and let the moral arc of the universe bend toward justice. This is whig history--a glorious narrative of progress and enlightenment.

The Civil Rights Movement is (improbably) supposed to be the proof of this concept. In this telling, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., through civil disobedience and the power of his oratory, awakened the country to the better angels of its nature. White Southerners wallowed in the original sin of the country's past: racism, narrowly defined as racial prejudice. They simply needed to be shown the way through protest marches and, importantly, a campaign of nonviolence. Invoking the Civil Rights Movement in this way does two things: chastens the South and condemns inappropriate demonstrations like riots--and in some oblivious cases, any illegal activity!--as counterproductive.

Jacqueline Dowd Hall in her article "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past" speaks to the inadequacy of this version of the movement. "By confining the civil rights struggle to the South, to bowdlerized heroes, to a single halcyon decade, and to limited, noneconomic objects, the master narrative simultaneously elevates and diminishes the movement... It prevents one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history from speaking effectively to the challenges of our time." For Hall, the political purposes of the New Right distorted the movement to fit their political goals. Yet it is clear that, as with consensus history, contemporary liberals have failed to recognize their own history rewritten out from under them. But Hall also notes the difficulty of confronting the actual history of the movement. In studying it properly, it becomes "harder to celebrate as a natural progression of American values. Harder to cast as a satisfying morality tale. Most of all, harder to simplify, appropriate, and contain."

In this Long Civil Rights Movement, racial barriers written into the New Deal (redlining, lack of labor protections for predominantly Black and Latino industries) helped lead to spatial segregation. However, this was only one aspect of the Jim Crow era, which wielded economic inequality with particular force against Black people. Hall notes that segregation's "basic doctrines... dovetailed seamlessly with an ethic of laissez-faire capitalism." Accordingly, "civil rights unionism" lent purpose and structure to the movement. The coalition of civil rights activists and labor has all but been written out of popular history, but there is no realistic way to conceive of the Civil Rights Movement without unions. Beyond that, a powerful Popular Front made up of Black workers, leftists, liberals, Jews, feminists, and anticolonial activists found power in working together. Rather than viewing this activist front as a hindrance to the superior strategy of working within the system, Hall faults "Cold War racial liberalism" with failing "to deliver on its promise of reform (with the partial exception of the judiciary, the federal government took no effective action throughout the 1950s) and... collud[ing] with the right-wing red scare to narrow the ideological ground on which civil rights activists could stand." (A recent book also looks at civil rights demonstrators' opposition to the police.)

The dominant narrative, according to Hall, depicts a sharp declension in the movement after the successes marked by the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The Long Civil Rights Movement, properly understood, should include its profound legacy on continuing desegregation efforts as well as its influence on the anti-war movement, feminism, the Chicano Movement, the American Indian Movement, and so on. The middle decades of the twentieth century were full of hard work, violence, suppression, and setbacks, but the power of ordinary people organized and working together still frightens elites. I am more sympathetic to the radicals, but the Civil Rights Movement is evidence that liberals in a popular front working across several different layers of society can help realize the goals of liberal democracy. I can only imagine, had I been alive in 1970, that I would have been a proud liberal optimistic about the prospects of continued social change.

But with the left in retreat since the 1980s, liberals have shown a tepid commitment at best to the civil rights of all people, judging by the difficulty of LGBTQ people's achieving dignity and full participation in society. When considered distinct from human rights or legal rights, civil rights specifically refer to the ability of people to participate in public life. Guaranteeing that right for Black people required a direct confrontation with the sacrosanct category of property rights. The owner of public accommodations, such as a lunch counter or bus line, can no longer deny service to someone on the basis of a protected identity as a result of the provocative trespassing of activists in the 1950s and '60s. Yet contemporary liberals either wring their hands about what to do about gay marriage or the public existence of trans people or, worse, supply bigots with arguments against trans civil rights.

In the words of Dr. King's famous 1963 letter from Birmingham Jail, "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice... who constantly says, 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action.'" The white moderate has a penchant for eschewing direct action and upholding the law despite the fact that the most egregious injustices in our history were legal. Breaking, bending, and challenging the law have been necessary for liberation struggles.

All this is to say: the narrative of inexorable American progress, inherent in its vaunted institutions and threatened by radicalism, is a fabrication. We cannot excise the role of radicals in the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, nor can we properly understand them without a global context. The USSR and China advertised the injustices of American capitalism, embarrassing the country that had set itself up to the world as a shining city on a hill. Going back earlier, the threat of Soviet communism helped convince American capitalists to acquiesce to the high taxes and labor protections of the New Deal. In addition to organizing for social justice, radicals on the left have kept liberals honest. To claim otherwise is to take credit for the developments that supposedly make the US exceptional while obstructing any further progress on those fronts.

Progress of this sort is not just an ideal for liberalism; it is a fundamental element in its claim to legitimacy. Yet despite the clear value of a left flank to liberals, the twenty-first century has seen liberal institutions turn on leftists and progressives while catering to reactionaries. Liberalism is highly contingent--a potentially powerful force for change as well as a mechanism for legitimating capitalist political economy.

This alternate view of progress, while more sound than consensus historiography, is also a bit of a trap. The progress narrative centers and celebrates those within the metropole, giving inadequate attention to how liberals have frequently exported injustice, not simply abolished it. Whig history will always have a tendency to turn to fable, to unmoor its subject from any specific historical context, to escape contradictions through abstraction. Only a history of this sort, for example, could imagine an ethnically Puerto Rican Alexander Hamilton.

One of the most consequential of these abstractions is the idea that early United States republicanism, which popular liberal history continues to look upon so fondly, was not a product of its distasteful historical context but a kind of transcendent ideal that needed time to realize. This view admits that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder but that he also set the country up to expand "the rights of our founding to reach all our citizens," in Obama's words. Despite its genocidal origins and dependence on slavery, the real US that always existed in the ether, from its founding, was a temporarily embarrassed multi-cultural democracy. Obama said in a 2009 interview, "We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power." It is a view that is teleological and ahistorical at the same time, like religion.

Domenico Losurdo, in Liberalism: A Counter-History, is right to question this pervasive narrative. Losurdo identifies a paradox in histories of (transatlantic) liberalism: slavery expanded significantly following revolutions based on Enlightenment ideas about all individuals' natural right to liberty. Taking this counter-history seriously results in, for Losurdo, a "tangle of emancipation and dis-emancipation." In liberal democracies, emancipation (or the greater guarantee of rights) only comes through struggle and tends to slip back into dis-emancipation. Arriving at this view requires a turn toward history, away from (literal) hagiography: focusing on the "community of the free" only concerns itself with the "restricted sacred space" of the imperial core.

Included in the tangle: there is a set of competing discourses within liberalism. Those attached to "English proto-liberalism" promoted "true liberty" as "untrammelled control by the master over his family, as well as his servants and his goods." In the Civil War era, for example, John C. Calhoun made appeals to liberal ideals, and Abraham Lincoln's critics accused him of despotism for such things as (illiberally) suspending habeas corpus. Another discourse came from the struggles of servants. To resolve this conflict, some liberals "sought to acquire a good conscience by repressing slavery to the colonies and changing or masking the politico-social relations that most blatantly gave the lie to their proclaimed attachment to the cause of liberty." The era of the War of Independence in the US includes a good deal of this sort of rhetorical cover from within the sacred space of liberalism, along with a considerable amount dedicated toward the legitimation of slavery. In fact, the prospects of liberty for white men in the US hinged on the oppression of Black people and Native Americans: "Precisely because they established a marked superiority over blacks and Indians, the colonists felt themselves completely equal to gentlemen and property-owners residing in London, and demanded that such equality be recognized and consecrated at every level." (If you prefer a less polemical history, Losurdo could have very well cribbed this from an old classic, Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom.)

Accordingly, one motivation for the War of Independence, laid out in the Declaration of Independence, was the king's supposed collusion with the "merciless Indian savages." England, having recently fought the Seven Years War on behalf of its ability to exploit the North American colonies, could not afford to provoke any more fighting with powerful Native nations, whose alliance with the crown was already tenuous. But Thomas Jefferson's "Empire of Liberty" required the dispossession of Indigenous lands in order to create a stable foundation of yeoman farmers for his vision of republican democracy.

Settler colonists have long used retaliatory frontier violence as a pretext for the acquisition of additional land. Characterizing "savages" as inherently violent serves to facilitate this process. Liberalism emerged partially out of European colonialism's response to the threat of barbarians at the gates, whether real or imagined, and so it will always maintain an exterior zone in which liberal ideals--liberty, rule of law, legal rights--can and must be suspended for the good of the metropole. Of necessity, there is a distinction between savages, who are violent because of their nature, and the civilized, who are violent only because they are defending an enlightened vision of society. But the dividing line between civilization and savagery is and has always been an ideological construction without basis in the historical record. Thus it shifts according to the agendas of the powerful.

Lying on the perimeter of liberal institutions is the state of exception. In the twentieth century, this articulation comes from Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, who upheld the ability of a sovereign to transcend the rule of law in the name of security during an emergency. But Losurdo points out that some eighteenth-century liberals also endorsed this principle. Montesquieu felt that it was proper of a Roman dictatorship in a state of emergency to "violently return the state to liberty." The Federalist also argued for a strong executive that could operate without "constitutional shackles." (Here is another tangle: one of the revolutionary principles that motivated republicans in the eighteenth century was the inherent sovereignty of the people, who permit governmental authority on the condition that individual rights not be infringed upon. How could a government ever assume dictatorial power in that case?)

Palestinian-American legal scholar Noura Erakat has argued that Israel's blatant trespasses of international law mark a paradoxical attempt to enshrine its own permanent state of exception into that very corpus of law. (Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics also identifies Gaza as an example of how exception, when considered spatially, creates zones where people exist in a state of living death.) Since the establishment of the "international rules-based order" following World War II, the US has similarly upheld this international order without being bound by it. The US, for example, is not a member of the International Criminal Court. In fact, a bill passed in 2002, nicknamed "The Hague Invasion Act," authorizes the president to intervene on behalf of any military member threatened with ICC action by "all means necessary." Guantanamo Bay is a prime example of how a liberal democracy/global superpower reconciles its quasi-legitimate use of force: siting the problem in one of its colonies. But the legal framework for the "enemy combatants" detained there without rights does not come from outside of the US. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz points out that the infamous "torture memo" that John Yoo authored in support of the military black site at Guantanamo Bay cites legal opinions from the Indian Wars of the 1860s and 1870s.

The neoliberal era, defined in part by the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 and the normalization of China's relations with Western powers, was famously supposed to mark the end of history, to borrow Francis Fukuyama's term. This period, for Fukuyama, marked "the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." I don't intend to rehash the debates over The End of History and the Last Man; I only mean to point out that an ideological paradigm of social evolution, with liberal democracy at its apex, continues its dominance through an era marked by continuing struggle in the Global South and the Global North's turn towards fascism. On that latter point: did we in the First World collectively fail to uphold our liberal institutions? did some exogenous, illiberal force overwhelm our defenses? or is Fukuyama's Last Man struggling out of a certain boredom? struggling for the sake of struggle?

No. Those are notions cooked up in the hagiography of Western liberal democracy. Fukuyama's work reflects a "discourse of depoliticization," in the words of neoliberalism scholar Wendy Brown. As the global influence of the USSR waned, liberal discourse began to reconfigure its view of global conflict from one of ideological difference toward a set of battles for and against liberalism's supposedly universal values. Borrowing from Mahmood Mamdani, Brown identifies this as the "culturalization of politics," a "reduction of political motivations and causes to essentialized culture." Liberal discourse views itself and its principles as existing outside of culture--in fact, liberalism elevates its own project as the only thing that can contain culture--foregrounding cultural difference in explanations of opposition to the politics of the First World. Brown writes, "It is a basic premise of liberal secularism and liberal universalism that neither culture nor religion are permitted to govern publicly; both are tolerated on the condition that they are privately and individually enjoyed." Liberals, then, must maintain an affect of being outside and above history and culture, beings of pure intellect rather than creatures shaped by the churn of political economy.

Tolerance

Tolerance plays an important role here. Tolerance purports to be a neutral, universal value, when in fact it is a crucial way for liberalism to mediate and organize conflict in a supposedly post-ideological/political world. Brown notes the rise of appeals to tolerance in global liberal discourse since about the mid-1980s. Aside from using tolerance to delineate who is "Us" (tolerant) and who is "Them" (intolerant), this discourse creates a contingent category on the margins: the tolerated. "Tolerance conferred on 'foreign' practices shores up the normative standing of the tolerant and the liminal standing of the tolerated--a standing somewhere between civilization and barbarism," according to Brown. This analysis resolves the seeming paradox of a political economy that bases its legitimacy on its ability to produce a pluralistic society with its prerequisite of disinterested secularism for those who wish to participate in the civic sphere. Liberal democracy will tolerate cultural difference, in line with its commitment to individual liberty, but the tolerated must abandon those peculiarities at some point in order to enjoy full fellowship in the community of the free.

Mahmood Mamdani, in Neither Settler nor Native, traces this problem of tolerance back to the origins of the nation-state--in his view, the Reconquista of Spain, concluded in 1492. Without the permanent separation of the ethnic or religious majority and minority, "the nation-state collapses." The nation-state concept contains an "essential incoherence:" "the nation, a political community whose boundaries are determined by its members" is necessarily incompatible with "the state, a legal form in which membership (citizenship) is determined by law." Mamdani continues, "The purpose of the state is to apply law equally to all members, while the purpose of the nation is to protect and valorize only members of the nation." Mamdani's reading of John Locke's 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration shows that the compromise was toleration: "The state agrees not to enact the national prejudice against the inhabitants of the state who are not also of the nation, as long as these minorities accept their minority status. Minority status boils down to the forgoing of sovereignty." In the context of US history, "sovereignty" frequently comes up as a persistent issue in Indian Law: persistent because the plain reading of the Constitution's treatment of Native American nations as sovereign foreign powers is practically a fiction in light of the subsequent redefinition as "domestic dependent nations" (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia) and the creep of Congress's "plenary power" over them.

It is a rather banal observation that liberal democracy has never existed without a civilizing mission, and it continues to hold true in the twenty-first century. President George W. Bush coaxed the country into invading Iraq partly on the grounds that the US would bring democracy to a region suffering under authoritarian rule. Along with the barbarous rhetorical construction of Islamist terrorists, the US spun narratives of the liminal tolerated looking for a liberator--victims of Oriental despotism, oppressed women required to wear burqas, persecuted queer people, etc. This discourse is not unique to the neoliberal era. For one example, during what US historians used to call the country's "Imperial Period" (before realizing that there is no satisfactory answer as to when exactly this "imperial" period is supposed to have begun or ended), the US fought the Spanish over the Philippines, then fought the Philippines, then fought the Moros, in a series of wars that may have killed as many as 750,000 Filipinos. With a domestic population ambivalent about the thought of having colonies, US leaders emphasized the modernizing program offered to the Philippines--advancements in education, sanitation, infrastructure. But US leaders refused to hear Filipino demands for independence until after World War II; for the US, the country was in a state of childlike infancy. In other words, the US disguised its imperial nature in this discourse of civilizational uplift for the contingent category of those who remained mired in culture--the tolerated.

The tolerated can only enter the community of the free under certain conditions. In Mamdani's reading of Locke, the condition is that "they renounce rival allegiance and support the state." Jean Paul Sartre, in his essay "Anti-Semite and Jew," wrote that, for the democrat (meaning, supporter of liberal democracy) "defence of the Jew saves the latter as man and annihilates him as Jew... he fears the awakening of a 'Jewish consciousness' in the Jew; that is, he fears that the Jew will acquire a consciousness of the Jewish collectivity." In addition to noting how liberalism seeks to separate and contain culture, Sartre gets at the way that the universality of secular liberalism is used to manage collective consciousness--to reinforce the individualism of those in the community of the free.

Intentionally or not, Sartre's phrasing here bears a strong resemblance to Indian policy in the US during the reservation era. Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle School for Native American children, famously articulated his desire for assimilation in this way: "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man." I cannot overemphasize that this was the viewpoint of the self-styled Friends of the Indians, who believed themselves exemplars of tolerance toward "savages" whose way of life was destined for extinction. Liberal colonialism will necessarily create a recipient for its charity if none already exists, just as the Puritans in the Plymouth Colony set up Praying Towns to teach agriculture to the people who fed them with their corn. But, should the tolerated begin to acquire a consciousness of collectivity and liberation, the tolerant civilization will begin to treat it "as hostile, both internally oppressive and externally dangerous, and... externally dangerous because internally oppressive," according to Wendy Brown. "Without liberalism, culture is conceived by liberals as oppressive and dangerous not only because of its disregard for individual rights and liberties and for the rule of law, but also because the inextricability of cultural principles from power."

Liberalism mystifies these relationships of power and property by mapping them onto a temporal trajectory of progress. This has been the case since European settlement in the Americas--the colonists were "modern," defined against the "traditional" Indigenous people. "Progress" connotes something good, while bad or illiberal ideas are "regressive." Within the US, many liberals in recent years tend to look right past the fascism of ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley moguls to place the blame for Trump on poorly educated people from economically depressed areas. Rather than viewing the world as one system, this narrative places liberal democracy in the most advanced tier of humanity; as such, it carries the responsibility (or burden) of showing others the way as they "develop." The articulation of the Third World in the post-colonial era was decolonizing nations' self-applied identifier that charted their relationship (specifically, non-alignment) to the First and Second Worlds. Liberalism distorted this original meaning into a ranking system. The term "Third World" now suggests a country that has been left behind--not because of the history of colonialism or the country's relationship to global superpowers but because of their cultures.

There is a clear material reason for maintaining a contingent category on the (spatial or racial or both) margins of empire, always lagging one step behind liberal democracy. Capital requires labor power. In fact, for Marx, labor power represents the variable portion of capital, a necessary component along with the fixed capital of tools; the labor of individuals is part of the machinery of production. Full individual liberty--self-determination--simply cannot be extended to every member of society if capitalism is to function, because capitalists are (literally) invested in the fiction that the bodies of subordinates are their property. Yet the legitimacy of liberal democracy depends on its ability to emancipate more segments of the population as time goes on. Recall Locke: a contingent process wherein some within the tolerated can gain property, according to the conditions of liberalism's dominant majority, meets both requirements, keeping most of the tolerated working for wages while holding out the dim promise of upward mobility. (The notion of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps was originally satirical, meant to evoke the impossibility of such a thing. Even Horatio Alger's famous rags-to-riches novels required a rich benefactor. But over time, this impossible task has become a required demonstration of fitness for those working for low wages.) Because of this, liberals' attitude toward the tolerated is one of charity, not solidarity--sustaining a gulf in material resources that nevertheless allows for liberals to view themselves as benevolent and tolerant.

As Brown notes, tolerance is a desirable value; no one is arguing that people should become more intolerant. The goals of liberal democracy are enticing, and it makes plenty of sense why people believe it to be a superior way of governing the world. But to depoliticize these values contributes to the obfuscation of the ways that tolerance and other supposedly universal values do political work.

In addition to these ideological developments in the neoliberal era, the US has (rather quietly, if one judges by press coverage) undergone a material counterrevolution in recent decades, according to sociologist Melinda Cooper. Fiscal and monetary policy have been the primary engines of this counterrevolution. (Fiscal policy refers to the use of the federal budget to address macroeconomic conditions, such as unemployment or inflation. Monetary policy is the use of the money supply or interest rates through a central bank like the Federal Reserve. Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist and critic of John Maynard Keynes's fiscal policy, is known as the architect of "monetarism," which calls for a shift away from New Deal-style fiscal policy toward a reliance on monetary policy.) Scholars trace the beginnings of global neoliberalism to the 1970s. Following the 1973 coup that deposed the socialist president Salvador Allende and installed Augusto Pinochet as a military dictator, a team of economists who studied under Milton Friedman known as the Chicago Boys became the architects of Chile's new laissez-faire, monetarist economic program.

In the US, President Jimmy Carter arguably laid the groundwork for the country's new priorities in the neoliberal era. ("Neoliberalism" is a contested term, but I consider it valuable as an identifier of an era marked by the normalization of relations between the West and China and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, a turn toward deregulation and free trade, and discursive emphasis on individual liberty--elements of a political program mapped out by "classical liberals" (libertarians) in the first half of the twentieth century.) In addition to a turn toward deregulation and away from social spending, Carter's appointment of Paul Volcker as the chair of the Federal Reserve in 1979 would prove extremely consequential due to the "Volcker Shock" of the early 1980s. In order to tackle inflation, Volcker sharply raised the interest rate of Federal Reserve funds, which dealt a blow to the country's manufacturing sector and drove up unemployment.

For Melinda Cooper, the domestic economic agenda under Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program built upon the New Deal to help raise the "social wage" of workers, or an income bolstered by public policies like safety net programs and government support of organized labor. This agenda carried over in some form into the turbulent 1970s. US political economy faced a series of challenges from foreign competition, a shock in oil prices due to OPEC intransigence, decolonizing nations' attempts to nationalize ownership of their raw materials, and a continuing contest at home over racial and gendered hierarchies. However, for Cooper, the threat to policymakers lay in the possibility that the social wage might increase to a revolutionary tipping point where capital would be subservient to workers. Summarizing the economist Michal Kalecki, Cooper writes, "Efforts by government to subsidize public services, welfare, and the wage might be beneficial in stimulating profits in the short term. But by releasing workers from the fear of unemployment and welfare dependents from poverty, they threatened the raison d'etre of capitalism itself. Absent the discipline of the market, there was nothing to stop workers from pushing up wages or politicians from redistributing wealth to win their votes."

Cooper also makes the vital point, in Counterrevolution as well as her previous book Family Values, that there can be no real separation of social hierachies from macroeconomic policy. Contributing to the counterrevolution (against a revolution which never actually materialized) was a disgruntled sense among those in the New Deal coalition who only ever envisioned a "family wage" for white, male heads of households. As benefits belatedly began to reach workers in domestic and agricultural sectors (predominantly women and people of color), conservatives began to clamor for clawing back the social wage, starting with these workers first. During the Reagan administration and continuing through the Clinton years, fiscal policy, through demands that states balance their budgets, became a tool for disciplining workers, specifically single mothers, in an ostensibly race- and gender-neutral way. The tactic borrowed from one used by Southern Democrats earlier in the century to discipline Black workers. Cooper also notes the rise of "dynastic capitalism," particularly during Trump's first administration; private and family-owned firms have been eclipsing the power and influence of public corporations run by a managerial elite.

At the same time, these developments took time and did not proceed according to any master plan. Monetarism contained competing schools of thought. That is, the Volcker Shock marked a transition into a new era, but plenty of policy problems remained for the Fed in the subsequent decades. With the US having finally moved away from the gold standard in 1971, questions remained about the ability of macroeconomic policy to impose fiscal discipline on spending. The Virginia school, which took a hard line against debt, existed in tension with the supply side school, which envisioned an active role for the state in exuberant private wealth creation. What we have ended up with after the 2008 financial crisis is a kind of hybrid which contains little fidelity to the stated principles of any monetarist school of thought. For Cooper, what holds together this "paradoxical arrangement" is "the mandate to combat (wage and price) inflation, which in turn dictates a permanent dampener on redistributive public spending." In this way, the state macroeconomic policy has created "the austere conditions of classical sound finance for mere wage earners and welfare beneficiaries while furnishing a world of unimaginable abundance for asset holders."

The Clinton administration was crucial for this project. His "welfare reform" policies were sufficient to convince Fed chair Alan Greenspan by the end of the 1990s that the threat of wage inflation was adequately contained, allowing for a more relaxed approach to public debt. But because the limits to these policies were political rather than technical, the "challenge for neoliberal technocrats has been to turn these institutional possibilities [collective spending on things such as education, health care, welfare, renewable energy] into political dead ends while doing all in their power to accommodate the interests of private wealth."

One of the primary tools for neoliberals in creating these political dead ends has been the constant refrain to rein in spending. Tax cuts do important political work in this regard. Reductions in taxes for asset holders appear on balance sheets as "tax expenditures." That is, from an accounting perspective, there is no difference between a tax cut and a social program that costs an equivalent amount. Tax cuts break budgets while pretending to represent sound finance and responsible spending. Then, facing deficits, policymakers renew their calls for fiscal discipline--increasing the urgency of a renewed cycle of wealth transfers from welfare recipients to asset holders. Republicans flog this tactic for all it's worth, but neoliberal Democrats also readily cede ground on social spending, having been harangued by their opponents since the New Deal. (Clinton famously left office with a budget surplus; contrast with Reagan's exploded federal budget.)

Where We Are Now

If you'll allow me a bit of my own analysis by way of personal observation, the Clinton administration charted the path for the last generation of elected Democrats: promote the inflation of private assets through bipartisanship and use the limits of the federal government to constrain social spending that might benefit wage earners. Clinton's signature strategy, "triangulation"--or tacking toward the political "center" to capture disaffected, moderate Republicans--makes a certain amount of strategic sense in context. The Reagan Revolution put Democrats on their back foot, and a tactical retreat has its merits.

But "triangulation," which is a euphemism for horse trading segments of the base with the opposition, has been reproduced as supremely savvy politics, even during the mini-resurgence of liberalism in the Obama years. For one, this (deliberately) overlooks the spoiler role that Ross Perot played in 1992. But more importantly, it implicitly places the center of political power within the Republican coalition, leaving Democrats to beg and barter. For neoliberal Democrats, the whole premise of building power has gone out the window. Improbably, this was done in the name of winning elections.

One way of thinking about recent developments in partisan politics in the US is through a political science notion of a succession of party systems. We are arguably in the Sixth Party System era, following a period of Democratic dealignment due to the Civil Rights Movement. The New Deal coalition was based in part on regional interests, local systems of patronage (think machine politics), and cultural identity. Without the New Deal at its core, these various (geographic and ideological) factions began to disidentify from the national party, especially as civil rights moved closer to the core of the Democratic agenda. Arguably, in the late twentieth century, party affiliation became increasingly divorced from regional or industry/labor ties, making the ideological policy preference of individuals increasingly important as voters realigned. One benefit to neoliberal Democrats is that policy preferences are more malleable than material interests and can be steered in directions that are favorable for the party.

Within the Democratic Party, there has been a concerted push to continue this trajectory--further dealigning voters, in so many words. Recently, the centrist group Third Way has advised the party to reject the demands of what it characterizes as "the groups"--ostensibly because these special interests diminish the appeal of Democratic candidates in general elections. But another way of thinking about "the groups" is "the base." These types of strategy memos are essentially arguing that Democrats should not be beholden to their most loyal voters. Open the front door; block the exit. This is presented as sophisticated strategy for winning elections! Third Way and aligned pundits are practically rephrasing the question in Bertolt Brecht's satirical poem "The Solution". After "the people / Had forfeited the confidence of the government," the poem asks, "Would it not be easier / In that case for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?" These types of well-funded strategies are in fact a recipe for curating a new base--and managing whatever is left of the existing one--that will embrace a neoliberal agenda compatible with wealthy patronage.

It should be more suspicious that this strategy remains the same whether Democrats are powerful or on the defensive. "Demographics is destiny" was the catch phrase during the Obama years. In other words, identity politics will carry the day; no need to take action. In fact, the influential theory of thermostatic public opinion suggests that voters will punish the party for too much "policy activity." Best to lay low. When Democrats lose, on the other hand, it means that the party cannot afford to further alienate "moderates." Once again, passivity and inaction are the smart move. Facing the threat of Bernie Sanders and the promise of expanding the base, the chattering class developed "horseshoe theory" and talked about "populism" to draw parallels between the rude, allegedly illiberal behaviors of Bernie and Trump supporters. Reinforcing the philosophy of neoliberalism, commentators wondered whether it was even appropriate for the party to wield the power of the state to benefit its voters, and prominent candidates mocked demands for social spending while on the campaign trail.

The press has proved an ideal vehicle for a (broadly) liberal, depoliticized discourse in which values can trump culture. The press ostensibly represents "both sides" while actively maintaining boundaries between the free, the tolerated, and the barbarous. In the twenty-first century, this type of ideological work finds expression in a horse race idiom shared between journalists/pundits, political candidates, and consultants/lobbyists. Albert Burneko wrote in 2025, "My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners, in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is going to come out on top, and align with it." This discursive complex has expanded to inform the way that ordinary people online look up crosstabs in polls and survey the demographics of congressional districts. We're all just playing the odds. In the absence of real democracy, civic engagement looks like Capitol Hill fantasy football.

Now, with all of this in mind, how do we make sense of recent developments in the second Trump administration? More specifically, how do we resolve the stated aims of liberalism--to beat back authoritarianism in defense of pluralism and individual liberty--with its utter inability to stand up to Trump and his brand of Christian nationalism? Pundits have contorted themselves to include reactionaries in their project of liberal democracy, even as the latter become increasingly brazen about their lack of obligation to liberal values. Reactionaries have corroded the good-faith exchange of ideas and institutional bulwarks against dictatorship--not in spite of liberals but with their active participation. So what is really going on?

With regard to good-faith debate: Ezra Klein, following Charlie Kirk's murder, insisted that "Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way." This high-mindedness is supposed to be an appeal for us all to avoid "political violence," which is ostensibly a greater threat to our liberal democracy than the type of organized harassment and bad-faith debate that Klein pretended not to know was Charlie Kirk's stock in trade. Kirk was part of the most well-funded and organized attack on knowledge and thoughtful discourse perhaps in all of US history, yet his perspective, we are told, must necessarily be included in the vaunted marketplace of ideas.

One explanation for this perverse accord between centrists and reactionaries lies in the shared incentive of both parties to communicate the power of the liberal project. In both worldviews, liberal initiatives do not stem from cynical realpolitik but from an earnest desire to remake the world according to liberal democratic principles. For liberals this is good, for reactionaries, bad. But for both, liberal ideas and institutions are the main drivers of recent history. Liberal leaders dole out foreign aid, corporations display pride flags, and the federal government funds the study of sexual characteristics in lizards because of a sincere dedication to wokeness. We lost Vietnam and Afghanistan not because our unjust invasions met a determined counterinsurgency but because we were too gay and soft. (This reflects the reactionary view, but it lines up with a liberal desire to portray the occupation of Afghanistan as altruistic.) It is beside the point to wonder whether reactionary pundits actually believe this, but Curtis Yarvin, for example, is actually stupid enough. In his inexplicably influential monarchist philosophy, Yarvin espouses the notion of "The Cathedral:" a hegemonic cultural force centered in the media and academia. This cultural hegemony, for the fevered, reactionary mind, is so powerful that ordinary people who know better in their hearts must sway to the ideological demands of their purple-haired barista. Am I crazy for thinking that the media class and a certain type of academic can't resist the flattery of being put at the center of this world?

The contradictions became unsustainable during Israel's protracted genocidal campaign against Gaza. The backdrop for Ezra Klein's warning about political violence was the most well-documented genocide in history. Political violence! Lord help us if political violence finds its way into the workings of the US state. Pundits fret about political violence not because it is violent but because it is political. Mass incarceration, law enforcement, homelessness, domestic abuse, missing and murdered Indigenous relatives--these are not political issues, not social murder, but the natural state of things. Attempting to move them into the realm of the political transgresses the boundaries of the liberal project. Thus, according to Wendy Brown, "A justice project is replaced with a therapeutic or behavioral one... Substituting a tolerant attitude or ethos for political redress of inequality or violent exclusions not only reifies politically produced differences but reduces political action and justice projects to sensitivity training."

The discussion of antisemitism in the media has been especially galling. The press, following the lead of a radicalized ADL, has smeared prominent Muslims with no basis while essentially refusing to report on the rank antisemitism of Trumpist reactionaries, including that of their martyr, Charlie Kirk. "Double standard" fails to communicate the extent to which the press actively covers for the right wing's sins. And it is the opposition party that constantly tells us the Christian nationalist Republican Party is not really like this, that the fever will break soon.

Jean Paul Sartre famously said of antisemites, "Never believe that [they] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies... It is their adversary who is obligated to use words responsibly, since he believes in words... They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert." It is a perfectly apt description of the bottomless well of hate speech that makes up the reactionary content industry. But Sartre also has criticisms for "the democrat": "Naive and full of good will, it is inevitably, the democrat who makes all the concessions; the anti-Semite doesn't make any... The democrat professes moderation; blames or admonishes while synagogues are being on fire. He is tolerant by profession; he is, indeed, snobbish about tolerance and even extends it to the enemy of democracy" (emphasis added).

Because of the importance of the appearance of cultural neutrality in liberalism, any ties to one's identity group is considered suspicious. In the age of identity politics, simply existing in the world in a politicized body invites scrutiny. Here again we see an accord between liberals and reactionaries, even though the reasons are oppositional. A journalist or a university president with a marginalized identity must necessarily be a biased activist. Meanwhile, capital's place in the community of the free is always assured, and no one need answer for the bias that comes with class interests. Liberals frequently make excuses for capital's most dedicated servants to include them in the community of the free--even to their own abasement at times. But the tolerated must constantly perform their loyalty.

Another cherished pillar of American liberalism is formed of the checks and balances written into the Constitution. Yet here again we see a seeming paradox. In my lifetime, a week has not gone by in which I'm not reminded in some form of how our unique institutions are a virtual guarantee against the rise of a hypothetical dictator. Children are taught in schools, as I was, that the balance of power between three branches of government, along with constitutional provisions designed expressly to prevent the consolidation of power by one individual, would prevent the likes of Donald Trump. The whole thing, essentially, was designed to do one thing.

And yet, in 2024, Colorado kicked off a debate among liberals when the state attempted to keep Trump off the ballot under the 14th Amendment due to his support for an insurrection. Jonathan Chait, argued that following the plain meaning of the amendment, as Colorado attempted to do, would be a political mistake. On the topic of insurrection, he hair-splits into incoherence. Viewing the term "insurrection" as inaccurate, Chait claims, "I generally say that Trump attempted to secure an unelected second term in office... Trump was not trying to seize or hold the Capitol nor declare a breakaway republic." What? Chait continues, "To deny the voters the chance to elect the candidate of their choice is a Rubicon-crossing event for the judiciary." This is the tack that President Biden ended up taking, punting on the role of the institutions in order to put the election of a dictator up to the people, the one thing I was told my whole life that the Constitution would not allow. With Trump in power for a second time, liberal institutions, the supposed bulwarks of our precious, unique democracy--the vaunted fourth estate, universities, NGOs--folded one after another.

One incomplete way to understand the bizarre behavior of liberals in light of Trump's consolidation of power is through the lens of scandal. The word derives from the Greek skandalon, meaning stumbling block. In that original sense, a scandal is something that throws up a stumbling block for an institution's believers. One natural response for an institution in the throes of a scandal is to try to cover it up or otherwise finesse the narrative so that believers do not lose their faith--think of the Catholic Church's transfers of child-abusing priests. It is more difficult for those in power to address the problem directly, opening the institution up to criticism that they hope could be otherwise avoided or mitigated. Liberals, the last lonely believers in the American civil religion, have faced a gradually unfolding constitutional crisis since the stolen presidential election of 2000. Their instinct is to step in and reassure the faithful. This helps explain Obama's intervention in the NBA players' strike in 2020 during the George Floyd protests or his reassuring speech about an "intramural scrimmage" or Biden greeting Trump at the White House at the beginning of his term in 2025 by saying "Welcome home" with big smiles. Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor did speaking engagements with Amy Coney Barrett to prop up the legitimacy of the corrupt Supreme Court, stressing the importance of civility in disagreement. Rather than face the prospect of a country fully losing faith in its clearly inadequate institutions, many powerful liberals preferred that the presidential election proceed with no interruption. People could go to the polls in a familiar ritual, something that many conceive of as a moral test of the country's soul, even as voters braced for a potentially punishing result.

We as a society uphold this idealistic, religious vision of the political process because one of the core purposes of liberalism is to mystify the workings of capitalist political economy. The Trump era exhibits much continuity with the previous decades of neoliberalism. During that time, the ideological superstructure propped up the legitimacy of a political process in which the ordinary person had no say, in which the legal redefinition of money as speech had once again disenfranchised the poor in favor of property owners. The late Michael Parenti succinctly stated in his famous "yellow" lecture from 1986, "It is the heart of US policy, ladies and gentlemen, to use fascism to preserve capitalism while claiming to be saving democracy from communism."

Liberalism, as I've used the term in this essay, consists of competing discourses and an array of institutions. It can be a vehicle for the emancipation of some of society's marginalized peoples, as US history demonstrates. But without strong, organized anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, liberation movements, liberalism continues to fold in on itself, making for an increasingly smaller community of the free. Those remaining within that sacred space are the ones with the most secure relationships to capital, and the discourse increasingly caters to their "freedom" to exercise dominion over what they see as their property. The charity of this group of liberals, who fear for their own position, curdles into bitter chastisement of the tolerated: "Enjoy the camps." More and more of the world appears to them as barbarous. Liberal discourse's contradictions twist into absurdity--yet those who labor within it are not at liberty to remark on this. Doing so will place one in a vulnerable position. Over the top of all of this--seismic movements of capital, violent imperialism, institutional decay--leaders lay a narrative of an intramural scrimmage, defending the legitimacy of the system and relying on the class position of its adherents to perpetuate its mythology.

Barack Obama's metaphor of an "intramural scrimmage" is unintentionally revealing. The outcome of a scrimmage is meaningless. It is an exercise for the team, not a struggle for power. Twenty-first century campaign rhetoric about the most meaningful election of one's life, about a struggle between good and evil, Harry Potter and Voldemort, readily gives way to this sanguine view after the votes are tallied. Kamala Harris belatedly called Trump a fascist during her 2024 campaign, but no one in her party ever acted as if it was true. Instead, the message for voters is to observe the American civil religion. Participate in the rituals, pay your indulgences, cultivate personal virtue, and exercise faith in the perfection of liberal democracy in due time. All the important stuff is sorted out; don't mess that up with your incivility.

As Wendy Brown writes in Undoing the Demos:

The properly interpellated neoliberal citizen makes no claims for protection against capitalism’s suddenly burst bubbles, job-shedding recessions, credit crunches, and housing market collapses, its appetites for outsourcing or the discovery of pleasure and profit in betting against itself or betting on catastrophe. This citizen also accepts neoliberalism’s intensification of inequalities as basic to capitalism’s health — comprising the subpoverty wages of the many and the bloated compensation of bankers, CEOs, and even managers of public institutions and comprising as well reduced access of the poor and middle class to formerly public goods, now privatized. This citizen releases state, law, and economy from responsibility for and responsiveness to its own condition and predicaments and is ready when called to sacrifice to the cause of economic growth, competitive positioning and fiscal constraints.

History, properly understood, helps us resist the call of neoliberal ideology. This is not all that politics are or have ever been.

References:

Aziz Rana, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Jacqueline Dowd Hall, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91 no 4 (2005): 1233-63.

Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (New York: Verso, 2011).

Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975).

Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).

Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014).

Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2015).

Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2022).

Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate (New York: Schocken Books, 1995).

Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024).

Melinda Cooper, Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2024).

Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2017).

Celeste McNamara, "Priests Behaving Badly: The Problem of Scandal in the Early Modern Catholic Church," The Journal of Modern History 96 no 1 (March 2004).