Beginning of the End, or End of the Beginning?

REVIEW ESSAY
The End of the End of History:
Politics in the Twenty-First Century
by Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Philip Cunliffe
Zero Books, 2021, 208 pages

The End of History has ended, but History is yet to resume. So argue Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Philip Cunliffe in The End of the End of History, published by Zero Books last June.

For those familiar with Hegel and his post–Cold War reinterpretation by Francis Fukuyama, the paradox of the “end of history” assertion is only too apparent. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, according to Fukuyama, had definitively answered the question of which modern political ideology, communism or liberal-democratic capitalism, would be vindicated as fulfilling the Enlightenment’s promise of a rational and free method of social organization. This question being settled, History, in the dialectical sense, had come to a close. Events would continue to occur, time would continue to pass, and individuals and perhaps entire nations would flee into escapism and nihilism, but no new challenger to liberal-democratic capitalism would emerge. This implied, in turn, that there would no longer be any politics, at least in the sense of conflict over competing visions of the good. There would be “post-politics”—tinkering, management, technocracy—or what Marx called, in a very different context, “the administration of things.”

How then, from within this framework, to explain the apparently significant political ruptures of the past decade? The global financial crisis, the European sovereign debt crisis, the rise of “populism,” Brexit, the elections of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the mass mobilizations against racism and police violence, the pandemic itself? For consumers of U.S. news media, it can seem as though each day brings a new world-historical crisis. “Every Day Is January 6,” warned the New York Times editorial board,¹ which, if we are to believe Vice President Kamala Harris, means that every day is a new Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Even for those inclined to treat such pronouncements skeptically, does it not feel like we are living through something significant, epochal, historical? That Gramsci’s time of monsters is approaching?

For Hochuli et al., what we are witnessing is the death rattle of the technocratic—or “neoliberal”—consensus, which has reigned hegemonic in the West since the end of the Cold War. As this was the archetypal political formation of the “End of History,” its dissolution can be said to mark the End of History’s end. But what is replacing it cannot yet be called “History,” since no new comprehensive ideology has arisen that could challenge neoliberal dominance; what has arisen stands in a purely negative, negational relationship to the mainstream. Nor, in the authors’ view, do the forces of this dissolution really count as “political,” in the (questionable) sense they define as “the demand for reordering statuses and upending hierarchies,” which must operate through representational institutions such as mass-membership political parties and, ultimately, the state.

Our contemporary disruptions instead herald the rise of “anti-politics”: a wholesale, somewhat inchoate revolt of those “outside” the neoliberal consensus directed at those on the “inside”: the political class, the elites, the winners, the “Swamp,” la casta, the system. Anti-politics is, as the authors put it, “the illegitimate, rejected child of the current political order,” which expresses a “desire for the return of politics.” It is politicizing, in that rejects the tendency to treat major sectors of collective life as beyond the realm of democratic debate, and could therefore, in theory, pave the way for a future revival of politics. At the same time, it is depoliticizing, in that it rejects the legitimacy of the political system tout court, breeding cynicism and undercutting attempts to translate popular anger into formal politics. Thus the now familiar phenomenon of populist movements, whether of a nominally left-wing (Greece, Spain, Bernie Sanders) or right-wing (Brazil, Donald Trump) variety, managing to strike a symbolic blow or two against the “establishment,” only to collapse or be co-opted by the system they nominally oppose.

The End of the End of History is deflationary on two fronts. On the one hand, it attempts to soothe left-wing and liberal panic about rising “fascism” on the right. However vulgar or distasteful, a figure like Trump, the authors argue, is more akin to a Silvio Burlesconi than to a Mussolini or Hitler—a mediagenic political celebrity who, though not without some “authoritarian” personal proclivities, succeeds mostly by channeling popular resentment of elites into highly charged symbolic conflicts while leaving the basic political and economic structures of the neoliberal consensus intact. Attempts to mobilize the Left by conjuring images of interwar street battles are not merely ridiculous; they miss the more prosaic danger for the Left, which is that a more visionary and administratively competent Trump figure might move the center-right in a more economically statist, “post-neoliberal” direction that could define a new political center in the future. By offering popular social-welfare and national-developmentalist policies shorn of the Left’s increasingly weighty cultural baggage, this New Right might be able to peel off enough working-class support to establish near-term hegemony.

Second, the authors, although they sympathize with the “radical” socialist or social-democratic Left, wish to pour cold water on its recent revival, the most visible manifestations of which include the 2016 and 2020 Bernie Sanders campaigns in the United States and the Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. They note that the millennial socialist Left, as represented in the United States by organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America, is largely an affair of the educated professional-managerial class (PMC), made up of “salaried mental workers” (Ehrenreich) squeezed by the rising costs of maintaining an upper-middle-class lifestyle. Often, as in the case of NGO workers, academics, and (increasingly) journalists, these white-collar Leftists depend more or less directly upon oligarch largesse to put food on their table, which may help to explain their relatively toothless anticapitalism and inordinate focus on the sorts of “social issues” comfortably endorsed by the global .01 percent.² Whatever the reasons for PMC cultural radicalism, it is indisputable that, without much of a real working-class base, the socialist Left in the United States is a car with no engine — a “grin without a cat,” to borrow the title of Chris Marker’s documentary on the student Left of the 1960s.

The failures of the radical Left, however, pale in comparison to the histrionics of the left-liberal center. One strains for adjectives to describe the overwrought quality of mainstream political coverage over the past half decade, which has lately reached its apotheosis in fevered predictions of an impending civil war.³ Perhaps sensing that this discourse is ripe for mockery, the authors spend a chapter on what they refer to as “neoliberal order breakdown syndrome” (NOBS), which they jokingly treat as a form of mental disorder. The main symptom of NOBS is the “inability . . . to accept, explain or respond to political change,” falling instead into conspiracy theories (Russiagate) and adolescent morality plays. Although the results are at times amusing, this authorial decision means that one of the more consequential developments of the last five years—the radicalization of the American political elite—is here reduced to individual psychosis, or at best to a naïve and overly ideological understanding of politics.

But while the authors are right to point to the potential success of a post-neoliberal Right, and to warn of the Left’s co-optation by the center, they appear to underrate the prospects for a full-blown revival of neoliberal power. Near the end of the book, they write that the Covid-19 pandemic has “destroyed the legitimacy of technocracy” while prompting the Right to “assimilat[e] the political terrain of dirigisme,” as seen in Trump’s emergency assistance payments and Boris Johnson’s temporary renationalization of the UK’s railways. Their book, to be fair, was published in June 2021, at a time when it looked as if the Western world, with the help of the vaccines, might finally be emerging from the pandemic. And if current public opinion polling is to be believed, the Biden administration is deeply unpopular, its Covid policies in particular. The 2022 midterms, and eventually the 2024 election, may well deliver a crushing repudiation of the center-Left establishment.

It would be a mistake, however, to take the morbid symptoms of the liberal center as signs of its impending collapse. Put differently, NOBS can be functional as well as farcical. “Woke” hysteria reinforces class cohesion through purges and loyalty tests and raises the costs of defection from the left-liberal program, including among corporations subject to ever-more expansive interpretations of antidiscrimination law;⁴ elite professional schools have even begun to experiment with withholding credentials from students openly critical of liberal shibboleths.⁵ Propaganda about the irredeemable racism of white America rationalizes unaccountable government by casting the demos as morally compromised while legitimizing the transfer of sovereignty to socially progressive judges, experts, activists, NGOs, and corporations. The conviction that anti-political movements represent assaults on democracy justifies extraordinary measures in democracy’s defense, including the weaponization of the security state and intelligence apparatus against political foes.⁶ Fear of “misinformation” justifies online censorship, both of genuine conspiracy theories and of true but politically inconvenient facts, the distinctions between which are continually elided. At each stage, spurious “experts” are summoned to lend a gloss of scientific legitimacy to nakedly political actions.

Covid has only accelerated these trends, providing the liberal-technocratic governing class with a permanent emergency that calls for arbitrary and unaccountable expert rule, even as their expertise is revealed to be more mythical than real. As independent observers have noted throughout the pandemic, many of the sweeping restrictions imposed upon Americans in order to curb the spread of the virus have very little science to support them. Remote schooling and the masking of schoolchildren have inflicted grievous harm on young people for no real benefit; indeed, there is still no clear evidence that the masking of adults significantly curbs community spread of the virus, especially now, with high rates of vaccination and after the emergence of the far more communicable Omicron variant.⁷ In their campaign to promote universal boosters, even among already vaccinated young people at minimal risk of serious illness, the Biden administration and public health authorities have overruled the recommendations of the FDA’s outside advisory panel⁸ and ignored mounting evidence of the risk in young men of adverse reactions to mRNA vaccines.⁹ More generally, the CDC, in its public pronouncements, has become a font of junk studies seemingly reverse-engineered to support whatever policy is currently in favor.¹⁰

With Covid, as with the so-called “Great Awokening,” we have seen the liberal center, newly radicalized in the face of political threats from without, capturing the leading institutions of the state and civil society and enlisting them for the purposes of political warfare. In his recent book, Scott Atlas described the current state of U.S. scientific debate over Covid:

We have seen silencing, censoring, and slandering of scientists whose interpretations differed from the desired narrative. Prestigious journals are now openly contaminated with politics. Academia and the research community, dominated by a single viewpoint, actively engage in intimidation and false declarations of consensus, as well as through abuse of the peer-review system. That intolerance has fostered a climate of fear and inhibited other scientists and health experts from contributing to the discussion, effectively inducing self-censorship.¹¹

Politicized pseudo-knowledge laundered as “science” through the intimidation of dissenters—one can imagine the same being written of almost any profession or field of study at any point since 2016.

In other words, we have seen, as Geoff Shullenberger argues, the emergence of “a new mode of liberal technocratic governance, driven by moralising fervour and partisan animus rather than calm neutrality and rational calculation.”¹² The liberal center has evolved and adapted, marrying its own claims to technical competence with the quasi-religious mythology of the bourgeois Left for the “conservative” purpose of defending its own power. Hochuli, Hoare, and Cunliffe are aware of this dynamic, noting in a final chapter on the “political ideologies of the future” that the professional-managerial Left, lacking any organic connection to the working class, may find itself conscripted into the defense of the ailing status quo against spurious threats of fascism from the Right. The result would be a political formation the authors refer to as “progressive technocracy,” which would fuse rational-managerial and humanitarian impulses with hostility to democracy, cast as a reservoir of irrationalism and “hate.” Far from a distant possibility, this is a passable description of present-day liberal governance.

Whether the progressive-technocratic establishment can survive the end of the pandemic—or the next election cycle—remains an open question, though it has shown remarkable ingenuity in summoning existential threats ex nihilo as the situation demands. And whether what emerges to challenge it can properly be labeled “political” is a question for the philosophers. What we can say with some confidence is that any resistance which does emerge is unlikely to come from the Left.

This article is an American Affairs online exclusive, published February 20, 2022.

Notes