If we flounder, it is not because the old order is strong, but because the new one is weak.
—Walter Lippmann
Western politics has seen a shift in values and assumptions. We have reached the end of the end of history. Alternatives await. Whether in the form of conservative populism or economic progressivism, they often appear more creative and compelling than the status quo. Though insurgent movements of the Right and the Left have met with varying degrees of success, the pressures they have exerted on the establishment, in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, and elsewhere, have led to a reorientation away from yesterday’s certainties.
There is also, however, a sense that this revolution remains incomplete or illusory. The status quo—often referred to as neoliberalism—has proved its resiliency in the past. A financial crisis in 2008, the election of a populist American president in 2016, a global pandemic beginning in 2020 have all, in their own ways, weakened its authority. But no one can be sure that it is indeed on its way out. The logic of what critic Fredric Jameson has called “co-optation” is an ever-present threat.
Yesterday’s certainties remain certainties: clear, consistent, and fully-formed beliefs whose adherents benefit from the inertia of established institutions. By contrast, the advocates of change are disorganized and divided, held back by the often crude, contradictory, and inarticulate nature of their worldviews.
Some voices clamor for a reaffirmation of sovereignty in the face of a homogenizing globalism, yet lack serious interest in the state capacities which alone can defend sovereignty. Others combine plans to rebuild the welfare state with minoritarian appeals to an ever-multiplying complex of subaltern identities, ignoring the latter’s balkanizing effect on the social cohesion required to sustain the former. Uniting these currents is a disregard for institutions, indifference toward everyday governance, and overemphasis on the performative expression of moral and cultural affiliations. With enemies like these, neoliberalism scarcely needs friends.
What is missing, therefore, is a conceptual shorthand to delineate the old politics and the new; a standard to determine whether a particular political phenomenon contributes to the turn against the status quo or merely distracts from it. Not a purity test but a test of practicality in relation to a single goal that exists beyond the quarrels of the Left and Right: the consolidation of a different kind of politics for the post-neoliberal era.
Drawing on the political language of the early twentieth century—a time, we will show, with significant parallels to our own era—we see the goal as the establishment of a new “politics of mastery.” It may sound archaic or even offensive to present sensibilities; the term “master” and its derivatives have recently been removed from many contexts, including real estate listings, lest they be seen to harken back to the era of chattel slavery. With even less of a sense of political correctness, we call the orthodoxy to be overcome “the politics of emancipation.” With its connotations of liberation from enslavement, this phrase may seem to be as much an unalloyed good as “mastery” seems like a signifier for the evil of the whip hand.
As we will argue, however, such rigid associations merely show the extent to which our moral imaginations have stagnated. Throughout the history of modern Western political thought, but with a particularly perverse emphasis since the 1960s, an “emancipatory” vision of freedom has been used (by both right- and left-wing actors) to lend credence to the notion that all constraining norms, rules, and institutions, whether cultural or economic, amount to nothing less than tyranny—and that liberation from tyranny consists in license to act on all manner of desires. This shallow understanding of freedom, however, has little do with the historical processes of emancipation from slavery or tyranny which marked the experiences of previous generations of Americans. Rather, what remains to be done once freedom is grasped is to provide for its intelligent and purposeful exercise, precisely what we call the pursuit of “mastery.”
Walter Lippmann’s World and Our Own
History is full of guides who may assist in this task. One who stands out in the clarity of his analysis and the audacity of his prescriptions is the young Walter Lippmann of 1914. Barely out of Harvard, the wunderkind intellectual had just published Drift and Mastery, praised by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Oliver Wendell Holmes for offering a new organizing principle that gave direction to the inchoate political tendencies of America’s Progressive Era.
The 1910s, like the 2010s, were years of disillusionment and anticipation. The classical liberal settlement of the preceding Gilded Age had been discredited by the inequality that grew alongside rapid industrialization. But the forces that stood in opposition to the great trusts often lacked political unity as well as philosophical coherence. There were agrarian romantics like William Jennings Bryan, labor militants like “Big Bill” Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”), as well as technocratic reformers like President Woodrow Wilson.
Lippmann demanded a larger, more realistic view. As he saw it, not even Wilson could grasp this, for his New Freedom, though a far more advanced program than Bryan’s, was still anchored in the ideals of the Jeffersonian age: “A freedom for the little profiteer, but no freedom for the nation from the narrowness, the poor incentives, the limited vision of small competitors.”1 Only a politics that embraced the new scale of the industrial era could succeed. Anything less would perpetuate the aimless “drift” of American society. Lippmann argued for a politics of “mastery,” defined as “the substitution of conscious intention for unconscious striving . . . to introduce plan where there has been clash, and purpose into the jungles of disordered growth.”2
From this premise, Lippman issued prescriptions on a range of issues: everything from regulating trusts (rather than breaking them up—hewing to the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism as opposed to Wilson’s New Freedom); to strengthening the labor and consumer movements (which he believed would strengthen the capitalist system by giving the masses a greater stake in it); to the cultivation of a public-spirited science of administration and management that would allow society to enjoy the benefits of industrial scale and concentration.
More important than the book’s specific prescriptions, however, was the larger picture sketched in its pages of a democracy with the will and means to master its fate. Lippmann could almost prophesy the half-century of activist government to follow when Americans would set ambitious collective goals—the winning of wars, the exploration of the stars, the creation of an affluent mass middle class—and mobilize the nation’s resources toward their fulfillment.
The problems of the 2020s are, of course, unique. But Lippmann’s faith that a self-governing people could devise the economic order under which they would live is a no less appropriate first principle to adopt in the face of the ravages of contemporary globalization. What would such a politics of mastery look like today? Where Lippmann sought to tame the uncoordinated dynamism of an industrializing nation, Americans now confront the opposite problem. The country’s industrial capacities, and along with it, the economic strength and security they granted, have been dismantled and redeployed across borders and transnational production chains in line with the logic of free market globalization.
Lippmann could at least envision ways that the law might be brought to bear upon the trusts or made an instrument of social justice for the working class. But such scenarios escape the imaginations of even the most astute populist candidates of today, who may promise to tax the rich or control immigration but struggle at explaining how they would do it. (Invariably, they fall back on aesthetic signaling through, for instance, slogans on trucker hats or gala dresses.)
Deprived of the ability to assert the powers of the state over the most important economic actors, the United States, for all its weight in the global economy, appears to be at the mercy of global flows of capital, goods, and labor. A new politics of mastery would make regaining control over these transnational forces and redirecting them toward certain ends, like reindustrialization and broad-based prosperity, the primary aims of policy. It would cast the central question of political economy as this: how to restore the practical sovereignty and self-determination of the national state in a post-globalized era?
In this senescent neoliberal moment, the powerlessness of the state trickles down into an analogous sense of powerlessness among individuals. Politics invites them to convert their frustrations into fuel for the culture war—the intensity of which is matched only by its inefficacy as a means for catalyzing material change. As if the empty moralism that motivates the toppling of statues or the cheap thrill of “owning the libs” is meant to compensate for the collapse of the middle class or the cratering of economic opportunity for anyone under forty.
Lippmann’s analysis may have something to say about this as well, as he drew attention to the deleterious effects that a dysfunctional economy would have on people at the psychic level. Even then, Americans exhibited the symptoms of rage and restlessness that now would be most recognizable among culture warriors of the Right and Left: “what the rebels are rebelling against is not a classical authority: none exists today that has any compelling force. They are in rebellion against something within themselves . . . what their own disharmony will never let them find.”3
Rather than asking Americans to pity themselves as persecuted members of a victim group—a posture that includes equity-obsessed progressives and elite-resenting conservatives alike—the politics of mastery would dare them to become the agents of their own empowerment. Instead of self-expression or identity affirmation, it would demand restraint and discipline over one’s passions as the price of true moral, political, and economic agency: the self-determination of the individual as a natural corollary to the self-determination of the state.
If the status quo is an objective system of political economy (free market globalization) and a set of subjective dispositions (culture war) that reinforce each other, the politics of mastery must provide both an alternative system and an alternative sensibility. Thus, the second question that the politics of mastery will seek to answer is: what psychological traits constitute this new sensibility that individuals must acquire in order to achieve self-mastery over their lives?
Beyond Emancipation
A common thread between the atomizing free market capitalism of the neoliberal era and the discordant culture of self-expression that flourished alongside it is the promise of individual “emancipation.” The politics of emancipation encompasses both the political economy of a Milton Friedman and the cultural outlook of a Michel Foucault (or at least, in the latter’s case, the vulgarized versions of his ideas that proliferate in popular discourse). It is premised on a particular understanding of freedom, and its basic assumptions have, in one form or another, served as the default setting for much of the policy orthodoxy and political rhetoric of the last half century.
Embodying most faithfully the values and experiences of the boomer generation, who lived through and led both the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and the advance of globalization in the 1980s–2000s, the politics of emancipation has nonetheless been unwittingly internalized by every generation since. So much so that even the millennials and Gen Zs, to say nothing of Gen X, who claim to detest everything that the boomers stood for (“OK, boomer”), can hardly conceive of or articulate their aspirations in anything other than the expressive and emancipatory idioms they have inherited. One of us has referred to this phenomenon as “protracted boomerism.”4
The scope of this critique goes beyond a conception of the emancipatory configuration of politics as “right in economics, left in culture,” which may (misleadingly) suggest that the solution is to simply reverse these coordinates and build an order that is “left in economics, right in culture.” Rather, the “post-boomer” critique must go deeper in perceiving how constitutive political traits and sensibilities originating on one end of the ideological spectrum have since migrated to and metastasized on the other end, creating seamless symbiotic continuities between contemporary Left and Right in both the cultural and economic dimensions. Most obviously, this trend was evident in the economic neoliberalization of the Left by the 2000s, in which progressives embraced and legitimated the pro-globalization policy dogmas of the free market Right. No less significant but perhaps less well-understood (as it is a more recent development) is the cultural postmodernization of the Right by the late 2010s and early 2020s, in which conservatives appropriated the critical and transgressive subjectivities introduced by the post-1960s Left.
If a properly post-boomer, post-emancipatory political consciousness is to take shape, it must, therefore, be defined against these material and subjective correspondences, which capture nearly the whole of our era’s political common sense across partisan cleavages. This entrenched worldview was described by sociologist Benjamin H. Bratton as “the ’68 Boomer generation’s last revenge.” As he put it, “[their] final violence—is the enforcement of the idea that verticality and structure are always suspect. The way forward for them was in the deterritorialized proliferation of viewpoints in a relativistic sense, and the subsequent dismantling of all forms of rationality.”5 The reach of this politics of emancipation can today be discerned in the following positions which span nearly every inch of the ideological spectrum: freedom from taxes, bureaucracy, and regulation; freedom from the constraints of traditional authority or the dictates of political correctness; freedom from racism, sexism, and transphobia; freedom from CRT, censorship, and vaccine mandates; freedom from the state, the elites, and established institutions—whether it be the local police department or the national security state or the central bank; always the freedom of the individual against society and constituted authority; always the aggrandizement of one’s rights and personal preferences over any duties and responsibilities owed to the polity as a whole.
Some of these formulations (having to do with economics) will rightly seem antiquated to many millennials and Gen Zs, while some (having to do with culture war) will seem all too relevant. None of these points of focus, however, suffice to address the structural economic and psychic deficiencies that are at the heart of the sense of drift that afflicts American society. The politics of emancipation, with its incessant privileging of negative liberty for the individual, plainly cannot be applied to the positive and intricate long-term, collective task of constructing a whole new system of political economy. Nor is it likely to be conducive to any from of individual self-mastery, having produced instead a grotesque “anti-culture” of endless grievance, narcissism, and impulsive self-expression on either side of the partisan divide.
A new post-boomer politics of mastery would mean not just a reprioritization of issues but a change in the ways politics is conceptualized: no longer beginning with freedom from but with freedom to; moving away from resistance to power and toward the embrace of it; trading in conspiracy theories and persecution complexes—and the states of powerlessness they imply—for concrete plans of action that entail rational coordination between individuals and institutions.
Millennial and Gen Z politics is, after all, at its most promising and telling when young Americans hint at those things which they and their peers yearn to do but are not able to: the freedom to start a family, the freedom to own a home, the freedom to assume the middle-class trappings which their parents had taken for granted, the freedom to reorder society and its ossified institutions according to their generational visions of the good life.
Of course, this is more than a question of semantics: the freedom to own a home could mean freedom from local regulations that artificially limit the supply of new houses, while the anxiety many young people feel about climate change might be rendered as desiring freedom from the threat of environmental collapse or the freedom to do something about it. Either way, what is important is the understanding that these are issues that can only be solved through the conscious, concerted effort of citizens working together to master common problems—whether this means rolling back regulations in one case or introducing new ones in another. The very recognition that a decision can be made between more or less regulation, or whether to utilize the state or the market and in what ways, would already constitute a mark of self-determination and mastery, as well as a leap beyond the reflexive emancipatory idiom.
By the same token, the last thing that should concern practitioners of the new paradigm is taking sides in the culture war: for their purpose should be to transcend the petty social tribalisms which structure that conflict and to subsume them once and for all in a grander vision of politics, one grounded in a revolutionary enterprise of national rebirth and rebuilding.
Contesting the politics of emancipation today does not entail opposing the emancipatory ideal as such but rather overcoming its current hyper-saturated state—really the putrefied afterlife of previous liberatory projects in culture as well as in economics that have long since outlived the circumstances that gave rise to them. Lippman’s words6 about the consequences of being set free ring just as true: “What nonsense it is, then, to talk of liberty as if it were a happy-go-lucky breaking of chains. It is with emancipation that real tasks begin, and liberty is a searching challenge, for it takes away the guardianship of the master and the comfort of the priest. The iconoclasts didn’t free us. They threw us into the water, and now we have to swim.”7
This choice between mastery and emancipation is the conceptual shorthand needed to distinguish between the old politics and the new. What contributes to the pursuit of mastery (i.e., what can restore a measure of the structure, verticality, and rational purpose that were lost to boomer-era deconstruction) may be seen as continuous with the revolution against neoliberalism and the creation of a new order. What smacks of the exhausted tropes of emancipation in economics or culture (i.e., what works to further dissolve the functional cohesion of society’s institutions) may be regarded as perpetuating the boomer regime.
The Return of Political Economy
The most indelible legacy of the neoliberal era has been the almost total depoliticization of the economy. Where the preceding “short twentieth century” was characterized by intense, violent disagreement over which economic and social systems would prevail, both throughout the world and within nations, the ideologues of the free market were able to cloak their political hegemony at the end of the Cold War with the veneer of scientific and teleological finality. In this, they did not differ from their foes in the socialist world, who also believed themselves to be acting in accord with the laws of science. But such a comparison merely illustrates how the Western capitalist world was, in the end, no less intoxicated by its own unquestionable orthodoxies.
At the very least, as the conservative Canadian philosopher George Grant once observed, the imperialism of the Soviets, with its tanks and jackboots, was stark and, therefore, unmistakable in its “brutal injustice.”8 The imperialism of global capital, on the other hand, with its capacity for endless aesthetic malleability and reinvention, along with its pretensions to being the sole progenitor of freedom—whether economic, political, or personal—is infinitely more “subtle and amazing,” and in this way, far more permanent and immovable. If communism was the god that failed, neoliberal capitalism is the god that failed but wouldn’t go away.
Beneath its appearance of dynamic formlessness, however, it is important to remember that neoliberalism, like all other forms of political economy, is still reducible to a single objective material framework: it is one where the nation-state surrenders most of its economic decision-making powers and prerogatives in exchange for integration into a unified global marketplace. In practice, this means the enforcement of one universal policy rulebook: financial deregulation and low taxes to facilitate the free flow of capital; global trade liberalization and supply-chain integration to facilitate the free flow of goods; “flexible” labor markets and some form of open borders to facilitate the free flow of labor—all of which have been depicted as normal and necessary arrangements, without which no modern society can thrive. Or as Tony Blair put it: “globalisation is a force of nature, not a policy: it is a fact”9—a belief shared by his boomer contemporaries across the Atlantic among both Clinton Democrats and Bush Republicans.
Those who wish to overturn neoliberalism must be able to point to a single alternative with the same ironclad unity as the regime they wish to replace. The goal is not just to alter policy but to supplant the very logic that conditions policymaking across all three of the aforementioned components of political economy.
First, then, is the question of mastery over capital. At the tail end of the long era of deregulation and “shareholder primacy,” finance in the United States has long since ceased to be a productivity-enhancing sector of the economy. The hallmarks of the stagnant, late neoliberal financial system have been its compulsive reliance on intensive rent extraction; manipulative financial engineering (such as through stock buybacks); the inflation of asset bubbles; and global capital and labor arbitrage, or the wholesale outsourcing of production to economic and geopolitical rivals; and it is only with respect to these perverse incentives that American finance can be said to have displayed any creativity or imagination in the last forty years.10
Turning to the work of thinkers like Hyman Minsky and Joseph Schumpeter can help to restore some sense as to what the functional relationships between finance, innovation, and the real economy ought to look like. Minsky put forward the concept of capital development as “a broad measure of investment that goes beyond privately owned capital equipment and to include technology, human capital, and public infrastructure,”11 and it may be taken as an indication of the health of the real economy relative to the financial sector. Schumpeter’s insights on innovation center on the oft-invoked notion of “creative destruction,” by which innovations displace the incumbent means of production in the process of economic development. The concept encompassed not just capital expenditure on physical assets, but also investment that results in novel forms and modes of production, such as can be found in the widespread application of new innovations, the creation of new markets and commodities, and the emergence of new configurations of industry competition and monopoly power.12
In their 2015 evaluation of the U.S. economy in light of these and related criteria, economists Mariana Mazzucato and L. Randall Wray found its performance over the preceding decades (particularly from the 1980s onward) severely lacking. At around the turn of the millennium, growth in the size of the financial sector had outstripped that of the nonfinancial sector, “rising from about 10 percent of value added and a 10 percent share of corporate profits to 20 percent of value added and 40 percent of corporate profits.”13 They have documented as well how debt ratios under this hyper-financialized economy had exceeded their 1930 peak of 300 percent of GDP, reaching 500 percent of GDP just before the global financial crisis.14
Research by William Lazonick has shown that “from 2007 through 2016, stock repurchases by 461 companies listed on the S&P 500 totaled $4 trillion, equal to 54 percent of profits.”15 In the same period, “these companies declared $2.9 trillion in dividends, which were 39 percent of profits.” As Lazonick has pointed out, these sums could have been spent not just on capital expenditure and innovation, but on raising wages or investing in workforce development. These choices made under shareholder primacy have led not only to a decline in dynamism but to polarization in wealth and income distribution between capital holders and labor, accounting for the steep inequality between classes and generations in the United States today.
These circumstances help to explain the prevalence of radical and redistributionist tendencies in millennial and Gen Z politics.16 Much will depend, however, on whether these sentiments are translated into concrete regulatory and fiscal measures that can reorient the overall direction of capital allocation toward reinvestment in the real economy.17
Once fundamental structural issues around the misallocation of capital in the financial system are addressed through a combination of carrots and sticks, the task of restoring accessibility to industries distorted by hyper-financialization, like housing, becomes more straightforward. Under these conditions, proposed policy solutions to the affordability crisis, such as boosting supply and reforming zoning regulations at local levels of government, gain a much better chance of succeeding.
Starting from the premise of a newly de-financialized economy, the United States can establish avenues through which private capital may be channeled toward economic reconstruction and the revival of manufacturing (i.e., the domestic production of goods). America still has the remnants of previous iterations of its developmental state, notably institutions like the famed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (darpa) or Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR), not to mention the country’s still unrivalled network of top research universities. But relying on these legacy institutions alone will not suffice. Much work needs to be done to revitalize the country’s aging developmental infrastructure.18
The demands of our post-globalized moment require a level of programmatic imagination capable of generating entirely new institutional forms, such as, for instance, large-scale internal development and infrastructure banks—and what would essentially be a provisional auxiliary financial system on top of the existing one, with the aim of mobilizing capital in more aggressive and impactful ways than what the present mechanisms of market and state can deliver.19 Building this system and developing the requisite administrative competence to direct it would constitute an endeavor so monumental as to occupy the energies of an entire generation of leaders, managers, and workers. Here is the task which may remedy the current predominance of “bullshit jobs” in the services economy that so tragically squanders the talents of America’s best and brightest.
There is also the no less vital question of how a new political economy should upend the neoliberal status quo with respect to the free flow of labor. In addition to the benefits that a properly selective, skills-based immigration system would bring to any U.S. industrial policy, the social and economic arguments for regulating the movement of labor are well known. The wage-depressing effects of uncontrolled immigration and its propensity to dilute the solidarity that sustains welfare states (the so-called progressive’s dilemma) have been cited by both the free market Right and the historic labor Left to support their agendas of open borders globalization20 and labor market regulation, respectively.21
Perhaps even more significant than any immediate economic utility that systematic immigration control would bring will be its essential role in completing the unified logic of a genuinely post-neoliberal model of political economy, one that can exert mastery over the free flows of capital, goods, and labor that define neoliberal globalization. This would not be a recipe for rigid isolationism or autarky: on the contrary, it could give rise to far more fruitful modes of international cooperation and exchange based on a mutual respect for the sovereignty of states as opposed to the indiscriminate global integration demanded by neoliberalism.22
The technical details of the program may change, but so long as this overriding policy logic holds, the implementation of such a model would herald the long overdue re-politicization of the economy and the emergence of that alternative to neoliberalism which the “end of history” narrative presumed could not exist. It would mean a reassertion of national self-determination and a final rebuke to the rule of global capital; it would amount as well to a lesson on the full meaning and value of state sovereignty—for those on the right who routinely vulgarize and misapprehend the concept and for those on the left who have either rejected or forgotten its importance altogether.
The Promise of a Post-Boomer Order
It is also worth noting the implications of this political economy for the new generational politics envisioned at the outset: a master plan for national redevelopment would fill the programmatic gap in the often stirring but generally vacuous ideological visions espoused by both the millennial Left and the millennial Right, and it would do much to give concrete material expression to their respective moral commitments.
The millennial Left talks of transitioning to a sustainable future yet can barely go beyond the most abstract discussions around a “Green New Deal.” A program such as ours would put meat on the bones of the slogan by enabling the prodigious research and development efforts needed to produce the technologies and innovations which can mitigate the threat of climate change. “Green New Deal” (or whatever slogan replaces it) understood as a plan for national redevelopment would allow the Left to act on its environmental concerns while going beyond characteristic pathologies, as documented by Ruy Texeira, like “growthophobia” and “technopessimism,”23 taking it closer to the creative industrial progressivism of the original New Deal and away from the sterile performative doomsaying of outfits like Extinction Rebellion. Those in the center-left may need less convincing as the intellectual currents in that part of the political spectrum have begun to shift from a traditional redistributionist focus and toward a more promising “supply‑side progressivism.”24 Likewise, the racial equity concerns so central to the broader Left’s worldview could be better addressed through an instrumental focus on the material gains that restructuring would bring—by which racial groups may obtain benefits like jobs and higher standards of living—rather than the ultra-subjective identitarian micropolitics that suffocates today’s campus and NGO leftism.25
The millennial Right harbors similarly far-reaching ambitions, but its adherents struggle just as much at translating their sentiments into a coherent program (despite rising support for heterodox economics in parts of the intellectual Right). Instead, they retreat into cultural and aesthetic contrarianism (being “trad” or “based”), which is as ineffective a method of political resistance as the Left’s own pseudo-radical identity politics.26 There is a way, however, for conservatives to realize their aspirations for rebuilding America’s heartlands and restoring national greatness: to deemphasize their endless cultural ressentiment against elites in favor of a more constructive push to build the post-neoliberal political economy described here, which alone can deliver material change and abolish the economic status quo that maintains America’s current elites.
The objects of a right-wing industrial policy will be different. Rather than environmental or social justice, it is likely to be oriented toward such things as competition with strategic rivals, rural and regional redevelopment, etc. The left-behind working-class constituencies that the Right aspires to represent may similarly benefit more from material redevelopment than from merely rhetorical and symbolic recognition, which is all that conservative intellectuals seem to know how to do. But whatever the focus, the elements of a successful industrial policy will be no different from those outlined above, whether the U.S. adopts right or left-wing rationales.
The two halves of millennial politics also converge on a renewed interest in the welfare state amid America’s descent into extreme economic inequality, something which animates liberals, democratic socialists, and growing cadres of conservative postliberals. As with the original welfare state of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, realizing the prospect of a new welfare system of whatever design will be conditional on the technology and innovation-driven growth of a reindustrializing economy, which is, after all, what will generate both the wealth and the externalities that a welfare state is meant to redistribute.
These millennial movements and their continuations in Gen Z, whatever their cultural and aesthetic differences, are essentially a response to a common generational condition of downward economic mobility, atomization, dislocation, and despair27 experienced by a cohort that is on track to be the first in American history to be materially worse off than their parents.28 Furthermore, these cohorts must endure such adversities while having less access to those fundamental bedrocks that have sustained previous generations and made the good life possible: family, community, and thick social bonds. In a collapsing economy and society in which family formation,29 home ownership,30 quality of life,31 and psychological balance32 among young Americans are in severe decline, the imperative of building a post-neoliberal political economy and reestablishing material security (through which families and communities may flourish again) should be paramount in millennial and Gen Z politics of whatever stripe—the endeavor around which the politically engaged must consolidate their efforts.33
In reshaping the country’s institutions to fit their vision of the good life and a decent society, these cohorts would do well to remember Lippman’s words: “To escape from barren routine and vain fantasy in order to leaven reality with its possibilities: this must be the endless effort of a democratic people. To stand pat on whatever happens to exist is to put yourself at the mercy of all the blind mutterings and brute forces that move beneath the surface of events.”34
The responsibility for advancing a vision of a post-boomer order should rest on what one of us has described as a vanguard of “young people in their twenties or thirties—the same hypnotized millennials and Gen Zs—found in junior and mid-level positions in government, law, politics, business, media, academia, and civil society across the Left and Right.”35
This generational leadership must necessarily develop enough of the requisite binding political consciousness among themselves before they can attempt to build a critical mass of support across the broader society. Once they set about doing this, they may appeal to any number of distinct practical rationales and interest groups, from forging coalitions of donors that would benefit under reindustrialization to harnessing anxiety over climate change to win support for ambitious technological solutions to invoking discipline in the face of a geopolitical rival like China. At bottom, however, there should be the recognition that nothing less than a serious and comprehensive institutional overhaul of this kind will save these generational cohorts from their predicted fate: a lifetime of ever-worsening personal and societal immiseration. This fact alone should provide all the unifying force and animating spirit to guide and sustain the endeavor.
But the question remains, how can young conservatives and progressives sublimate their polarized subjectivities for the sake of this larger goal? For the long-term instrumental rationality needed to comprehend and sustain, much less create, large complex institutions of the kind proposed here is all but unknown to the vast majority of America’s political and intellectual classes—whether on the right or left—and it would, in any case, entail a level of collective discipline that seems unimaginable among them (at least under present circumstances). After all, their boomer-derived conception of politics is limited to indulging in an endless culture war and the facile pursuit of the individual and tribal self-expression it fosters, while denigrating any and all institutions that do not meet their immediate personal or partisan desires.
In approaching the second half of the politics of mastery, we may realize that as daunting a task as it will be to reactivate the sovereignty and self-determination of the state, an even more foreboding challenge will be that of reconstituting an ideal of individual self-mastery and psychological balance as the basis of a new post-boomer cultural ethos. For it will involve nothing less than the conquest and taming of the emancipated self.
The End of Micropolitics
The new politics of mastery is not only worth pursuing because of its possible contributions to our material well-being. It is vital for our psychological health (to put it in a more old-fashioned way, the good of our souls). We need a form of politics that—by restoring to citizens a sense that the world can be mastered, and by embedding their desires within rational, strategic plans that transcend mere adjustments to the exigencies of the present or irrational resistance to them—models for individuals the internalization of moral authority and thus the possibility of self-mastery. To thus realize mastery as understood by Lippmann, in its intertwined political and psychological dimensions, requires a break with the political thinking that has predominated over the last half century. Intellectuals and activists of the Right and Left have tended to either sever the connection between mastery in its political form (state sovereignty) and psychological form (self-mastery)—or have acknowledged the connection only to affirm that both, in our era of global capital, are impossible.
Of the former tendency, the French philosopher Michel Foucault was one of the most important exponents. In his work, under the (only apparently contradictory) influences of radical, Maoist-aligned groups like the Proletarian Left and the neoliberal-aligned Second Left, aspirations for using the state as an instrument for remaking the economy that had been central to the historical mainstream of the French Left, informed by Marxist and Jacobin traditions, narrowed to a micropolitics of spontaneous resistance to specific abuses. This reorientation of the Left signaled a shift from “emancipation” in its earlier Marxist conception as a collective seizure of power to flashes of opposition against contingent injustices unlinked, in the minds of those resisting them, by any theory of history or economy.
Foucault argued that the pursuit of state sovereignty, the premise of the old Left, had become impossible. In his 1976 lecture series at the Collège de France, “Society Must be Defended,” Foucault traced the emergence of the modern paradigm of sovereignty. In both its authoritarian variant, defended by Thomas Hobbes, and in the democratic variant expressed in the French Revolution, sovereignty was bound to the idea that politics meant imposing law. Foucault insisted, however, that just as sovereignty was becoming the keynote of Western political theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was already being eroded by a new kind of power, which now dominates our era. A metastasizing network of institutions inside and outside the state, he warned, increasingly regulate our behavior in ways that escape law-based sovereignty. The most salient uses of power to shape our characters (or in Foucault’s terms, to “subjectify” us) do not flow from the height of collective political life. Rather, they are enacted through a “micro-physics of power,” in the practices of institutions that oversee our education and health, and produce knowledge about us.
It was against these institutions—hospitals, universities, schools, prisons—that Foucault’s critiques and calls to resistance were issued and to which they most effectively apply today. Against the old Marxist Left, Foucault argued that, given the diversity of “subjectifying” powers, it was not possible to imagine a restoration of political sovereignty that might master these various forms of unfreedom (by, for example, asserting the power of the state—and behind it a collective will—over the networks of medical bureaucracies, universities, or corporations that shape so much of our everyday lives and orientations toward the world). In the last years of his life, his horizons constricted still further, to a narcissistic micropolitics in which individuals preserve a margin of freedom from the institutions around them by creatively developing particular lifestyles through practices of “care of the self.”
Inspired by Nietzsche and the Stoics, this transition saw the ambition for personal freedom decoupled from political freedom understood as participation in collective sovereignty. Countless anti-“woke” polemics draw attention to how these and related intellectual trends catalyzed a shift in the political style and substance of the post-’60s Left, which caused it to embrace various forms of post-materialism and identity-centered micropolitics. But what is perhaps more worthy of investigation at this point is how these same trends have lately found a home on the political right, leading to a conservative appropriation of the Foucauldian sensibility, and illustrating how the emancipatory mode of politics embodied by the late French theorist has become ubiquitous.
Over the last two years, one of us (Smith) and Geoff Shullenberger have argued that Foucault’s work—particularly his concept of biopower and critiques of identity politics and sexual liberation—have made him politically useful for conservatives in their attempts to oppose Covid-era public health restrictions and the agenda of the cultural Left.36 This expression of what Ross Douthat characterized as a “strange, right-wing respect” for Foucault should not be taken as an endorsement of his fatalism about the decline of political sovereignty, which is emblematic of political theory from both Right and Left since the 1970s.37 Indeed, it is not so much the case that the American Right has something to learn from Foucault, as that it is already too Foucauldian. The Right lacks, as does the Left, a substitute for the supposedly antiquated Marxist “grand narrative,” through which (whatever its failures) local tactics of political resistance could be coordinated by intellectuals and activists into a strategy aiming at the takeover of state power and the transformation of political economy.
The Right’s unconscious Foucauldianism appears in its choice of struggles, as it aligns itself with discontent against the educational system, temporary public health mandates, or the excesses of corporate HR departments. This miscellany of reactive causes, however urgent or compelling it may seem to its proponents, does not, and indeed, cannot cohere around a larger transformative vision for society or the state—anymore than did the coalition of political marginals who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an expression of rage unbridled by any rational or actionable plan. Efforts by right-wing thinkers to supply such a constructive understanding often descend into the pseudo-sociological, with reductive invocations of the detestable “professional managerial class,” or into the realms of the theological or conspiratorial, which can only serve as hollow stand-ins for theory and program. (The parallels between both January 6 and the summer riots of 2020 with the events of May 1968 are instructive.)
The Right has followed Foucault’s (and the post-1960s Left’s) narrowing of horizons from general political economy to localized resistance against very specific forms of institutional power, which often seem to have more to do with the expression of protestors’ identities than the transformation of any institutions. The Right has also to a large extent followed Foucault’s embrace of lifestyle politics. Whether in appeals for a re-masculinization of culture or calls for the return of “character” and “values,” usually defined against a prevailing, decadent adversary culture of the Left, diverse schools of conservatives and would‑be “reactionaries” express wishes for a small-stakes politics of virtuous self-fashioning. Properly political ambitions are lost amid trite ethical exhortations and garish hyper-aestheticized visions of a good life—all myopically disassociated from any agenda of material transformation that might actually produce the preconditions by which good lives become possible. Unknown to them is the difference between politics and the genre of self-help.
This retreat into micropolitics, characterized by loudly expressive self‑manifestation pitted against vague overarching cultural ills, was noted as a dominant feature of a new style of politics as early as the 1960s by observers like Philip Rieff. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), the sociologist warned that Americans’ political ambitions were retreating from the elaboration of common goals and the enforcement of shared norms toward individual itineraries of self-creation, usually presented as rebellion against the increasingly imaginary power of the formerly dominant collective ethos.38
In particular, the transgressive bent of this politics, once a signature of the post-’60s Left, has been emulated with enthusiasm by the Right. As a result, political discourse is now drowning in the noise of two competing pseudo-rebellions across the realms of culture and morality. Each one tries to “out-transgress” the other while claiming underdog status against the presumed hegemony of the enemy in an intractable dynamic that defines the present culture war (the rival persecution complexes that animate this conflict are all-consuming and perfectly complimentary—what one of us has called “kratophobia”).39 Both tendencies are, in fact, left tearing at the already frayed fabric of a mortally fragmented society that has long since ceased to have any functional or legitimate moral center. Consequently, Americans now live in a condition that matches Rieff’s description of a remissive “anti-culture,” where the prevailing ethic is premised on the release of impulse rather than its repression.40
Ironically, Rieff, particularly in his 1987 preface to a new edition of the book, echoed Foucault’s own warnings, in such texts as The History of Sexuality, volume 1, and Society Must Be Defended (both 1976), that such pseudo-rebellions could become the platform for the development of a new kind of unaccountable elite power.41 Both suggested that what Foucault called the “repressive hypothesis” (the false belief that our contemporary social and psychological ills are primarily the result of legacies of past repressions that must be revealed and overcome) was becoming an instrument by which elites, waging an endless, spectral struggle over a waning normative morality, could burnish their moral authority without having to articulate, as in the past, standards against which their rule could be measured. Neither Rieff nor Foucault, however, evinced any optimism about the possible return of such standards, or offered tools by which to discern a new morality beyond such supposedly transgressive resistance.
If the Foucauldian Right at least maintains a certain capacity for resistance, however unstrategic, in the absence of a positive vision that could oppose the present order of things, the intellectual Left all but announces its submission to global capital—a natural consequence of the broader Left’s long-ago abdication of political economy in favor of cultural micropolitics. This has resulted in a mostly (though not entirely) implicit progressive consensus which holds that the nation-state cannot possibly (and indeed, should not) resist the pull of global integration, even as it continually entrenches the power of global capital.
This point of view appears with particular clarity in the work of Wendy Brown, whose Walled States, Waning Sovereignty was published in 2010 and republished in 2017, with a preface in which she congratulates herself for her prescient forewarning of Trump’s rise.42 Brown speaks for much of the contemporary Left in her analysis of wall-building on the U.S.-Mexican border, the frontiers of the Schengen Zone, Israel’s security perimeter, and elsewhere as futile and perverse attempts to reclaim sovereignty, which appears in her analysis as itself futile and perverse, appealing only to warped subjects who cannot psychologically accommodate themselves to the realities of our postmodern era.
Brown defines sovereignty, helpfully, as aiming “to subordinate and contain the economic and to defend political life from the demands and imperatives of the economic.”43 In a historical narrative that owes much to Foucault, but also mirrors that of thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, Brown argues that the modern state was premised on a capacity to dominate flows of capital, labor, and commodities. She insists, however, that this is no longer possible. The rule of global capital today “appears perpetual and absolute, increasingly unaccountable and primordial, the source of all commands, yet beyond the reach of the nomos.”44 Through multinational corporations, financial institutions, and credit rating agencies, global capital not only eludes the efforts of states to direct its movement, but imposes its own will on them, winding back regulations, protectionist measures, and organs of central planning.
Brown treats this new economic reality as irreversible; the nation-state is dying and nothing can or should be done about it. Such declarations may seem intellectually bold and revolutionary, but they are neither; they merely offer, with a pretense of accelerationist daring, an acquiescence to the material conditions of the last few decades, and an excuse to abandon the work of devising serious programmatic solutions geared toward a restoration of state sovereignty as a means of realizing democratic self-determination. It was this brew of defeatism and escapism cleverly disguised as radicalism that corroded the many tragic campaigns of the contemporary Left: from Occupy Wall Street to the wider European anti-austerity movement to the candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. It was this central flaw that left them all vulnerable to eventual co-optation.
While Foucault posited that sovereignty, expressed through law, was too general to master the multiplicity of contemporary forms of power, which could not be theoretically connected through any grand narrative, Brown finds the law-making capacity of states to be effectively invalidated by the singular omnipotence of capital, which subsumes all forms of power today. Where Foucault held out the possibility of local resistance and individual self-making as expressions of freedom that might be exercised after the collapse of sovereignty, Brown links the decline of state capacity and individual agency.
Such a move might be generative. It could be the first step to recovering Lippmann’s insights about the mutual imbrication of both forms of “mastery,” centered on the state at the collective level, and the superego at the individual. Yet for Brown, both now appear as irrational and ineffectual. She draws on psychoanalysis to characterize recent attempts by political actors to reassert state control over the flows of people, goods, and capital as neurotic defense mechanisms. Individuals’ desires for predictable, stable lives in economies protected from the fluctuations of the global economy appear, irredeemably, as condemnable fantasies, necessarily reactionary and xenophobic. In this psychologizing account, resistance to globalization is not only doomed by the decline of the modern state, but a symptom of disordered subjectivities.
In articulating such a fatalistic, anti-political stance, Brown speaks for much of the intellectual class across Left and Right—and for the material interests of the financial elite who, almost exclusively, benefit from our economic order. She gives an apparently sophisticated gloss on the neoliberal line that “there is no alternative” to the hollowing out of the state and the abandonment of individual aspirations to live in a contained, orderly, and comprehensible society subject to conscious human will rather than blind forces. While the accidental Foucauldians of the Right waste their energies in piecemeal, largely symbolic protests against the passing cultural epiphenomena of the neoliberal order (e.g., critical race theory, drag queen story hour), the inadvertent Brownians of the Left castigate as ignorant, reactionary, and doomed any expressions on the part of ordinary people for a recovery of collective sovereignty. Together, they accomplish the work of neoliberalism even as they claim to abhor it.
Repression and Re-Interiorization
If both the ostensibly anti-neoliberal politics of a post-Trump Right and post-Sanders Left continue to stick to such ineffective stances, it is not only, or even primarily, because of the influence of intellectuals. The latter can be understood, rather, as offering rationalizations for the affective and cognitive states—e.g., purposeless resistance, narcissistic self-fashioning, catatonic pessimism, barely disguised accommodation—that emanate from our everyday experiences of the neoliberal world.
If there is to be a genuine movement away from the status quo and toward a succeeding model of political economy, the leaders and instigators of such a movement must realize that their duty is to not only critique misorienting ideas, but to expose the material conditions that give rise to them. Their mission would neither be to emancipate individuals into unbounded self-expression or uncoordinated acts of resistance, nor to castigate their longings for security, but to provide a plan of action aimed at creating the conditions for them to wield mastery over themselves and their environments.
One of the most cogent analysts of the ways in which contemporary capitalism deprives individuals of such mastery, and of the need for a new kind of politics that would restore its possibility, is Benjamin Fong, a critical theorist in the vein of the Frankfurt School. The latter, unfortunately, often has a whiff of sulfur for conservatives, although there are glimmerings on the right of a productive new interest in its work. In his 2016 book, Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism, Fong posits that mastery, in a sense akin to that present in the work of Lippmann, was a central preoccupation of Marx and Freud, the primary influences on the Frankfurt School, and must be central to any serious politics today.45
Fong argues that the inhabitants of neoliberal societies lack the sorts of experiences through which they could develop themselves into masters of their environments and of their own desires, actions, and lives. Fong notes that figures of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse were concerned by what appeared to them as the “end of internalization” in psychic life.46 What they meant is that, under the pressures of the modern economy, it seemed that individuals could no longer be understood as assimilating their conduct and self-understanding to a preexisting moral code upheld by their parents, who acted as agents of a wider social order. As the family weakened and the disciplinary power, in particular, of fathers over their children slackened, displaced by a network of pedagogical institutions, media experts and influences, as well as the pressure of same‑age social groups, the Freudian account, in which growing boys and girls “interiorize” authority within the psyche as the superego, was becoming untenable.
This concerned the members of the Frankfurt School not because of its implications for traditional morality and the bourgeois nuclear family, of which they were, to varying extents, critics. Rather, they saw the superego not only as a voice of conscience and “executive of repression”—an internal watchman of the social order within the individual psyche—but also as the “seat of self-reflection” and thus, potentially, of social change. They argued that developing an independent ethical stance, and even rebelling against the existing familial and social order, was only possible for individuals to the extent that they had already taken up the notion that there is such a thing as moral authority, the foundation on which an ideal self, or superego, is constructed.
It is impossible to reflect critically on oneself and society, and to articulate new goals and ideals for them, if one has never been capacitated to organize one’s activity toward such an aim. Only by having an ideal that can be considered and changed, even altered according to standards opposed to those first received, can individuals pose rational, coherent, and conscious resistance to the prevailing social order. And such an ideal can only come, in the first instance, from outside oneself, from social forces (the family, religion, community, the state, etc.) that model for individuals what it is like to meaningfully organize one’s activities around norms and aims.
The apparently conservative force of moral authority in society, in this analysis, is not opposed to individual freedom or even to the possibility of revolution. Indeed, insofar as it is the basis of the superego and of rational subjectivity, moral authority is at once the condition of possibility for revolutionary action and resistance to the same. From such a vantage, both progressives and conservatives would have an interest in preserving authority from the trends that promote its dissolution. Whether we conceive of the proper sort of subject as one who obeys moral norms, follows his own freely chosen commitments, or revolutionizes society and overcomes unfreedom for himself and others, such apparently contradictory models have as their common basis a capacity for rational action, premised on self-mastery—a capacity that, in the analysis of the Frankfurt School, the structure of our economy erodes. Individuals, in the course of their lives, increasingly do not encounter forces, whether within or outside the family, that posit ideals and demonstrate how to order individual and collective efforts to achieve them.
Indeed, such ordering is increasingly understood as repressive—as the undesirable sacrifice of spontaneous desires and of opportunities for authentic self-expression—while the enforcement of binding ideals appears as a kind of violence to the self. Such binding ideals might have once come in the form of traditional religion, modern political correctness, or exhortations to practice “civility” toward one’s political adversaries. None of these ideals, however, can be called upon in the present circumstances to perform their repressive functions, for none enjoy universal moral legitimacy and are effectively “dead,” like Nietzsche’s God.
Just as the state, since the 1970s, has been deprived of its capacities to impose a trajectory on economic flows in accordance with a publicly expressed plan (for much of the previous part of the century, the very essence of domestic politics), so too has subjectivity been deprived of its capacities, lodged in the superego, to impose an order on the solicitations to desire and attention that bombard it from both within and without. Neoliberal ideology consists of discourses that have made us imagine this double deprivation as emancipation (from state planning and from moral restraints) that supposedly empowers individuals to pursue their economic interests and to express their identities. It is actually, however, a genuine loss of autonomy, that is, of the ability to give ourselves the law (the literal meaning of “autonomy”) collectively through the state and individually through a robust superego.
Against this erosion of autonomy, Fong calls for a “politics that makes politics possible” by restoring the social conditions that would revive superego function. Following Adorno, he emphasizes the place of “education” in such a pre-political politics. This, however, lapses into the same sort of error that has afflicted the anti-neoliberal radical Right in Europe. Since the 1970s, the “New Right” in France and throughout the continent articulated a strategy of “metapolitics” that, with nods to Gramsci’s notion of a “march through the institutions,” focused on reshaping the broader society’s worldview through gradually amassing cultural influence. This stance, which has since also been adopted by the contemporary U.S. New Right (which frequently appeals to Gramsci), is merely a conservative rationale for imitating the sort of impotent identity politics practiced by the Left,47 premised as it is on obtaining culture-industry jobs for political allies and using the organs of that industry to propagate the expression of desired moral sentiments and aesthetics. It is a superficially audacious strategy that leaves the material economic base or substructure of society untouched.48
From a materialist viewpoint informed by Lippmann, however, the true task of a “politics that makes politics possible” is not one of providing any specific ethical content (whether in the form of left- or right-wing appeals to “inclusion,” “tradition,” “authenticity,” “critical thinking,” etc.) to subjects who are still deprived of opportunities for the development of a proper superego that could grasp that content and internalize it as an ideal. Rather, the task must first be formulated and oriented externally: for this purpose, we can describe it as the restoration of a state capable of counteracting the forces of globalization and providing the material economic security through which families, communities, and socially grounded identities may flourish.
Only through such a technique of conscious psychological “re-interiorization” can hyperpolarized conservatives and progressives overcome their engorged ids (what we might call their “pride”) and reinstate their superegos (what we might call their “reasonableness”) in order to work together for any sustained period of time.
Given the disintegration of traditional authority and universally accepted norms, it is imperative, for Americans’ psychological as well as their political flourishing, that they be able to reconstitute among themselves an effective substitute source of moral authority, which would provide the supports and restraints needed for the cultivation of a robust superego. This functional moral authority would be characterized by an articulable ideal towards which action can be directed, for the sake of which contingent desires or impulses can be subordinated—and by an authority imposing that ideal as law. The supreme task of returning economic sovereignty to the state is that ideal and the precondition for returning superego strength to postmodern subjectivities.
In this view, the liberal disposition, encompassing traits like civility, tolerance, and respect for differing lifestyles and value systems, along with the behavioral norms that go along with them, is understood not as an open-ended, freestanding moral command (i.e., the inherited wisdom exemplified by U.S. elites which treats civility as a good in itself) but is rather seen for what it is: a necessary contrivance (a “restraining device” for the id). Through this approach, citizens with polarized subjectivities must subsume otherwise irreconcilable moral disagreements (accomplishing the regulatory actions of the superego) in the name of realizing instrumental purposes grounded in the need to sustain one’s material security and that of society’s—an account not at all different from liberalism’s origins in response to the sectarian religious upheavals of early modern history.
Of course, this was also a time when the imperatives of state-building and sovereign consolidation were paramount among statesmen and political thinkers, notably Thomas Hobbes. A rededication to liberal norms among the culturally variegated opposition to the present status quo would not be an imitation of or submission to their primary enemies (i.e., the elite defenders of the status quo); it would rather amount to an acknowledgement that, in this historical moment, the goal of overthrowing that status quo in order to restore sovereignty and security to the American polity is a far more pressing and consequential pursuit than litigating the endless moral disputes which exist between the members of the opposition coalition.
Conversely, any agenda that assumes “politics is downstream from culture” will fall into the trap of micropolitics based on clamorous self-expression and narcissistic demands for attention from, and sinecures within, the culture industry. Culture (that is, the constitution of subjects) is downstream from politics (that is, the organization of the economic patterns of everyday life).
The Self and the State
A politics that makes politics possible again would have as its two-fold mission the restoration of the superego to psychic life and the restoration of planning to political economy; these are indeed the same mission. This is a matter of altering economic arrangements such that individuals experience, in their quotidian material circumstances, the existence of authorities whose commands are not pious wishes, but compel obedience understood as contributing to a publicly enunciated and agreed-upon vision of the future. Binding its own actions to the latter, such a state and society model for its citizens a good life, one in which an actionable ideal orients future-directed desires and efforts.
In other words, for the “pursuit of happiness” to be meaningful, individuals must have a robust capacity to pursue temporally distant goals, sacrificing or sublimating more proximal desires. Because this capacity is derived from one’s assent and participation in the necessarily impersonal collective institutions which undergird the functioning of society and the state, individuals must look to rediscovering the merits of a blanket depoliticization in matters of identity and moral conviction. In a reversal of Carol Hanisch’s famous dictum, the politics of mastery would propose that “the personal is not the political” but rather that “the political is the impersonal.”
In practice, this would mean, for conservatives and progressives alike, playing down one’s moral, cultural, and aesthetic commitments in the political arena. Their compensation would be that the newfound material security delivered by the succeeding political economy would open up new possibilities for fulfilling those commitments within the autonomous world of one’s own private individual, family, or communal life, through which citizens may then recover that measure of moral grounding and psychic balance which our emancipatory anti-culture has failed to provide. Under this settlement, the various identifiers which we now read as political labels (e.g., “traditionalist Christian,” “LGBT,” “rural white Appalachian,” “person of color,” “gun owner,” “vegan”) may instead find new and far richer expressions in the domestic, social, cultural, aesthetic, and spiritual spheres of life. In other words, these identities are to be “re-interiorized” back into the realm of private life, even as they are eventually drained of their present partisan connotations.
Political leaders may still, to an extent, avow their particular moral identities and affiliations, whether of a religious or secular character, and may even acknowledge how these inform or motivate their involvement in public life, but such expressions must nonetheless be muted to a degree and subject always to prudent self-regulation in the public square, if any settlement is to be tenable. Just as the political can be reclaimed from the undue influence of the personal, so too can the personal be reclaimed—as well as reinvigorated—by its delimitation from the political. But the full realization of this possibility would rest on a recommitment to the cultivation of such things as the private self, sociability, domesticity, civil society, organic (as opposed to virtual or abstract) community—all admittedly antiquated notions, which for young Americans in the era of social media and the culture war have practically lost their meaning. (In any event, there is far more to this dimension of the challenge than can be said here.)
As opposed to the inherently agonistic and atavistic conceptions of identity embedded in the current politics of emancipation, which must constantly define all personal and cultural identities against a hostile external force from which it must be liberated (freedom from popular prejudices, freedom from contemptuous elites, etc.), the promise of freedom offered by the politics of mastery is the freedom simply to be. If, under the politics of emancipation, as Lippman put it, “Men will do almost anything but govern themselves [since they] don’t want the responsibility,”49 this can serve as a more honest and complete account of a free existence, as it entails both the pleasures of liberty and personal discretion as well as the perils of responsibility and self-government—and this time, without those convenient “tyrants” to which to attribute the shortcomings and misfortunes that naturally come with the condition of freedom.
Even such a fierce critic of liberalism as Carl Schmitt came to see the tactical value of the liberal conceit that there should be a wall between an ostensibly neutral public sphere and a private domain of ethical and religious commitments.50 But to maintain, or ever desire, such a wall, individuals must possess a hierarchized psychic interiority within which some desires (e.g., for a safe, decent life) can take precedence over others (e.g., for gratification or self-expression). In turn, this interiority arises only from an encounter with, and an interiorization of, authority. For the public sphere to be a relatively “neutral” (that is, free of especially polarizing expressions of values) space in which the exchange of ideas can generate the basis for rational collective action, the state must, like a superego writ large, demonstrate its power to plan, act, and order.
An appeal to restraint and self-discipline is a reaffirmation of the possibility and, indeed, the necessity of the difference between private and public life as traditionally understood in the mainstream of liberal political theory. An authoritative neutral state—as thinkers from Hobbes to Lippmann to contemporary scholars like Paul du Gay51 have discovered—is not the antithesis of but the precondition for the possibility of individuals with different values and desires living together peacefully. Not only because, as such thinkers emphasize, such a state restrains their otherwise violent clashes over different ideals of the good life, but because, as we, with half a century of neoliberal disorder behind us, can easily observe, in the absence of a state powerful enough to exert control over economic flows it is impossible for individuals even to pursue such ideals. Too materially and psychologically insecure to shape a private sphere—or even to understand the difference between “private” and “public”—such individuals are released not quite into a war of all against all feared by Hobbes, but into futile, noisily expressed power-fantasies.
In the aftermath of our disastrous experience of neoliberalism in both its cultural and economic forms, a return to the intellectual tradition behind the modern state will doubtless appear jarring to many. To insist that liberalism is consonant with the supreme authority of the state and the public muting of individual “identities” may seem like a naked endorsement of authoritarianism, no less disturbing than to reject emancipation in favor of mastery. Yet the idea is expressed perfectly in the strain of a standard patriotic hymn, which might attest to its continuity with the American tradition: “Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”
Freedom through Mastery
The politics of emancipation have failed us, and distracted us from the vital connection between individual autonomy and state power. Personal freedom, understood not negatively as the absence of obligations to others but as the capacity to make a coherent, chosen life by resisting internal and external pressures to the contrary, requires an authoritative economic and social order sanctioned by a powerful state. In the context of a post-globalized world, this entails finding the means for the state to exert mastery over borderless flows of capital, goods, and labor in order to enact a common project of economic reconstruction. The state, however, must in turn rest on a strong citizenry capable of exercising freedom and autonomy, properly understood, through self-mastery. It depends upon the ability of the superego to resist the otherwise irrational whims of the id, or the ego’s shallowly “rational” demands to adjust comportment to the world as it is.
If the old paradigm was built on “the depoliticization of the economic and the hyper-politicization of the personal,” the new one must effect the opposite course, “a radical repoliticization of the economy and a no less radical depoliticization of identity.”52 This essay may serve as a blueprint for how to bring about such a change.
The post-boomer critique and the programmatic conception of politics detailed here might, at first, seem quite foreign, strange, and airless to most millennials and Gen Zs, who have, after all, been raised in the image of their boomer predecessors, conditioned by both the culture around them and the technology they hold in their hands to satisfy their base individual whims and cares above all. But the potential significance of the politics of mastery, as we have described it, is worth bearing in mind.
If young Americans adopted its imperatives as their own, it would represent a radical inversion of the priorities set by the politics of emancipation. It would relegate the cult of self-expression in favor of a larger and more profound collective purpose. As such, it would amount to a final repudiation of the boomer sensibility and—with no small measure of poetic justice—a rediscovery of those forgotten values that the boomers had rebelled against in their own youth, namely the heroic, self‑disciplined ethos of their parents, the Greatest Generation. It was during their period of ascendancy in the wartime and postwar eras that many of the broad prescriptions of Lippman’s Drift and Mastery were given their fullest expression in the institutional arrangements that governed the nation. If, armed with such values, the young generations of today could aspire to and achieve even a fraction of what the builders of the American Century had achieved, they may look forward to the gratitude and esteem of their posterity.
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VII, Number 1 (Spring 2023): 186–220.
Notes
1 Walter Lippmann,
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (New York: Mitchell Kennerly, 1914), 137.
2 Lippmann, Drift and Mastery, 269
3 Lippmann, Drift and Mastery, 195
4 Michael Cuenco, “‘Victory Is Not Possible’: A Theory of the Culture War,” American Affairs 6, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 206.
5 Marko Bauer, “Benjamin H. Bratton on Terraforming the World Order,” Palladium, January 11, 2021.
6 While the Lippman of 1914 gave spirited expression to the Progressive Era’s reformist ethos, he would, by the middle of the 1930s, appear to veer in the direction of classical liberalism, just as the outline of the mixed economy was coming into view under the New Deal. It was this Lippman, author of The Good Society (1937), who lent his name to the Colloque Walter Lippmann of 1938, a conference held in Paris to rethink liberalism; it was attended by Austrian school thinkers Ludwig von Misses and Friedrich Hayek, as well as social market theorist Alexander Rüstow, who coined the term “neoliberalism,” though with a meaning quite different from the one associated with it today. Many of its attendees, notably Mises and Hayek, would go on to found the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947; the output of this much more cohesive forum served as the basis of the militant free market ideology that is now known as neoliberalism, which forms the economic basis of the politics of emancipation discussed here.
What then to make of Lippmann’s apparent association with the genesis of neoliberalism? Taking a closer look at his commentary in the time he wrote The Good Society will reveal not so much a convert to laissez-faire as an analyst of world events reacting to the spread of communism and fascism and concerned with the global rise of totalitarianism. Nevertheless, the thrust of his prescriptions for domestic economic policy remained largely consistent with the interventionism of the New Deal. See: “Walter Lippman: Unlikely Conservative” in Robert Lacey, Pragmatic Conservatism: Edmund Burke and His American Heirs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 68–70.
7 Lippman, Drift and Mastery, 197.
8 Impressions, “George Grant, Canadian Philosopher,” CBC Archives, August 5, 1973.
9 Ryan Bourne, “Tony Blair Is Right—Globalisation Is a Fact Not a Choice,” Cato Institute, March 1, 2019.
10 See Mariana Mazzucato and L. Randall Wray, “Financing the Capital Development of the Economy: A Keynes-Schumpeter-Minsky Synthesis,” Levy Economics Institute Working Paper Collection, no. 837 (May 2015); William Lazonick, “Stock Buybacks Hurt Workers and the Economy. We Should Ban Them,” Institute for New Economic Thinking, February 27, 2018.
11 Mazzucato and Wray, “Financing the Capital Development,” 2.
12 Mazzucato and Wray, “Financing the Capital Development,” 4–5.
13 Mazzucato and Wray, “Financing the Capital Development,” 52.
14 Mazzucato and Wray, “Financing the Capital Development,” 53.
15 William Lazonick, “Stock Buybacks Hurt Workers and the Economy.”
16 For details on the intergenerational dynamics that would motivate this prospective future contest to determine the shape of the American political economy, see: Eric Levitz, “Will ‘the Great Wealth Transfer’ Trigger a Millennial Civil War?,” New York Magazine, July 18, 2021; Alicia Adamczyk, “Millennials Own Less Than 5% of All U.S. Wealth,” CNBC, October 9, 2020; Jim Reid, Luke Templeman, and Henry Allen, “Intergenerational Conflict: The Next Dividing Line,” Deutsche Bank, September 16, 2020; Rupert Steiner and Steve Goldstein, “Millennials to Redistribute Wealth from Older Generations to the Young in New ‘Age of Disorder,’ Warns Deutsche Strategist,” MarketWatch, September 12, 2020.
These trends may produce one of two scenarios: the first is the “revenge of the millennials,” an intergenerational reckoning along the lines of what Deutsche Bank described, where the radical tendencies long evident in millennial politics are expressed through a major “shift in the balance of power [involving] greater income and corporate taxes . . . and all-round more redistributive policies.” The program outlined here would rest on the realization of this particular scenario. The second is the “Great Wealth Transfer”/“Millennial Civil War” described by Eric Levitz and others, in which no attempt is made to wrest power and wealth from the boomers, who simply die and pass on their assets as inheritance to Gen Xers and millennials, who would then be too old to do much with it anyway. If this is the case, the same dramatic material inequities, severe political dysfunctions, culture war squabbles, etc. of the boomer era would persist among millennials and Gen Zs long after the boomers themselves have died out, and the country would continue on its downward trajectory in a perpetual state of “protracted boomerism.”
17 The goal of restraining global capital should go beyond mere taxing and spending and center on using the state’s fiscal and regulatory powers as a means of compelling finance to cease its prolific hoarding and mismanagement of wealth and to resume productive investment. Among the available policy options for pursuing this course would be the measures included in Elizabeth Warren’s proposed “Accountable Capitalism Act,” which could be built on and expanded. See Matthew Yglesias, “Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan to Save Capitalism,” Vox, August 15, 2018; “Warren Introduces Accountable Capitalism Act,” Office of Senator Elizabeth Warren, August 15, 2018. This goal of taxing multinationals has also been modestly advanced in recent months by the minimum corporate tax provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. See Servaas Storm, “The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA): A Brief Assessment,” Institute for New Economic Thinking, September 15, 2022.
Further policy blueprints include: Michael Cuenco, “Tax Sovereignty in the Age of Global Capital,” American Affairs 3, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 54–81; Chris Griswold, “No Need to Speculate: The Empirical Case for a Financial Transaction Tax,” American Compass, July 14, 2022; Antonio Weiss and Laura Kawano, “A Proposal to Tax Financial Transactions,” Hamilton Project, January 28, 2020; Josh Bivens and Hunter Blair, “A Financial Transaction Tax Would Help Ensure Wall Street Works for Main Street,” Economic Policy Institute, July 28, 2016.
18 There is the example provided by Chinese-style “guidance funds” geared toward advanced manufacturing, which was the subject of a detailed essay by David Adler in American Affairs. Given the vastly different political contexts, Adler notes that, from the U.S. perspective, China’s elaborate system of state-sponsored funds may seem “un-American,” but he also points out how similarly ambitious government-directed investments were essential to America’s own economic progress, in everything from building the railroads to creating the internet and the iPhone, as well as the research on mRNA vaccines that came in handy when Covid-19 struck.
Indeed, the overarching aim of these hybrid funding systems will be to deploy the country’s underutilized capital toward developing comparable future breakthroughs and see them through to the market entry and commercialization stages. But safeguards must be taken to ensure that innovations are ultimately applied and translated into manufacturing growth and eventual reindustrialization in the U.S., which will be a big part of the challenge. See David Adler, “Guiding Finance: China’s Strategy for Funding Advanced Manufacturing,” American Affairs 6, no. 2 (Summer 2022): 17–40; Rana Foroohar, “Why You Can Thank the Government for Your iPhone,” Time, October 27, 2015; Michael Moyer, “Yes, Government Researchers Really Did Invent the Internet,” Scientific American, July 23, 2012.
19 For ideas on what such developmental financial institutions could look like, see: Sadek Wahba, “The US Needs an Infrastructure Bank That Models the World Bank,” Hill, August 4, 2021; Sadek Wahba, “America Needs an Infrastructure Bank,” Barron’s, June 24, 2021; Lillianna Byington, “Infrastructure Bank Back in Play as Idea in Search of Its Time,” Bloomberg Government, June 22, 2021; Stanley R. Forczek, “OP-ED: A National Infrastructure Bank Could Solve the U.S.’s Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure Investment Challenge,” Mass Transit, June 8, 2021; Mazzucato and Wray, “Financing the Capital Development,” 32–36. These new institutions can be made to partner with existing state investment banks, which could also be expanded in accord with the needs of state and local governments.
20 Angela Nagle, “The Left Case Against Open Borders,” American Affairs 2, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 17–30.
21 One of us has also previously written in these pages of how such dynamics actually play out in practice. Though the populist Right has ratcheted up its rhetoric on immigration and exploited the issue as an immersive media spectacle, it has done this to the almost total exclusion of any attempt at serious policy and structural reform, which actually grants the political Left an opportunity to regulate immigration on its own terms and settle the issue once and for all. Michael Cuenco, “Immigration and Citizenship: The Canadian Model and the American Dream,” American Affairs 5, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 73–78; Michael Cuenco, “A Tale of Two Immigration Systems: Canada and the United States,” American Affairs 5, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 183–212.
22 For examples of the kind of positive-sum cooperation between states that becomes possible under this model, see; “Tax Cooperation” in Cuenco, “Tax Sovereignty,” 67–76, and “New Alliance for Progress” in Cuenco, “Immigration and Citizenship,” 83–87. With respect to trade, however, the results of the new model are necessarily going to be less positive-sum, since it would involve significant readjustments in long-standing trade relationships between America and its economic and strategic competitors (some of whom, like Japan, South Korea and Germany, may be both strategic/military allies and economic competitors). For more on what a new trade consensus could look like, see Robert D. Atkinson and Michael Lind, “National Developmentalism: From Forgotten Tradition to New Consensus,” American Affairs 3, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 165–91.
23 Ruy Texeira, “The Five Deadly Sins of the Left,” American Compass, October 13, 2020.
24 Ezra Klein, “The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting,” New York Times, September 19, 2021. Nevertheless, the rupture with status quo thinking is still partial as evidenced by the persistence of neoliberal assumptions in the industrial policy measures of the Inflation Reduction Act (a yardstick for center-left policy ambition), which rely too much on decentralized market coordination in spurring investment in green technologies. See Storm, “The Inflation Reduction Act.”
25 Ryan Grim, “Elephant in the Zoom,” Intercept, June 13, 2022.
26 Park MacDougald, “Is the New Right a Grift?,” UnHerd, January 12, 2022.
27 Chloe Garnham, “The Gen Z Mental Health Wave—What Is Causing the Surge?,” Health Match, September 2, 2022; Hillary Hoffower and Allana Akhtar, “Lonely, Burned Out, and Depressed: The State of Millennials’ Mental Health in 2020,” Business Insider, October 10, 2020; Jean M. Twenge, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?,” Atlantic, September 2017.
28 Charlotte Cowles, “Why Millennials Are Facing More Economy Anxiety than Ever,” New York Times, July 11, 2022; Andrew Van Dam, “The Unluckiest Generation In U.S. History,” Washington Post, June 5, 2020; William G. Gale, Hilary Gelfond, Jason Fichtner, and Benjamin H. Harris, “The Wealth of Generations, with Special Attention to the Millennials,” Economic Studies at Brookings, May 2020.
29 Brett Fawley, “Millennials and Declining Fertility Rates: Sink or Surge for Single-Family Rentals in the Decade Ahead?,” CBRE Investment Management, June 30, 2022; Amanda Barroso, Kim Parker, and Jesse Bennett, “As Millennials Near 40, They’re Approaching Family Life Differently than Previous Generations,” Pew Research Center, May 27, 2020; Wendy Wang, “One-in-Four Millennials in Their 30s Are Unmoored from the Institution of Family,” Institute for Family Studies, September 27, 2017.
30 Tom Huddleston, “Millennials and Gen Zers Do Want to Buy Homes—They Just Can’t Afford It, Even as Adults,” CNBC, June 12, 2022; Paul Bergeron, “The Share of Millennials Owning Homes Is Dwindling,” GlobeSt.com, April 26, 2022; Nigel Wilson, “U.S. Millennials: Home Ownership and the Growing Chasm Between Aspiration and Reality,” Forbes, August 18, 2021.
31 Michael Hobbes, “Millennials Are Screwed,” Huffington Post, December 15, 2017.
32 “Young Americans Continue to Struggle,” American Psychological Association, March 11, 2021.
33 If a movement such as this is to take shape, it should be known by a positive designation rather than a purely oppositional one like “post-neoliberalism” or “post-boomerism.”
One possibility is “consolidationism,” as it calls for the decisive consolidation of all constructive anti–status quo currents across Right and Left behind a single program of economic and political reformation. A “consolidationist” politics would evoke the essence of what makes it distinct from neoliberalism and the boomer era, namely its conscious, rational pursuit of transformation in the objective world of the material and the concrete as opposed to the prevailing fixation on all manner of liquid, subjective, cultural, moral, and symbolic concerns: it would also be a reminder of the need to break the present digital-mediatic captivity of our politics before restoring it in reality.
Indeed, the name might even lend itself to the era and regime that succeeds globalization, which may be known as “the Consolidation,” focused as it will be on the fateful reconsolidation of American sovereignty in the face of globally mobile flows of capital, goods, and labor. Admittedly, such talk may sound a bit grandiose and fanciful, but it is more useful at this point as a conceptual tool to aid would-be proponents in thinking through the implications of the program in historical and teleological terms—perhaps even leading to the rediscovery of the universal metanarrative that the postmodern, post-’68 boomer paradigm has all but rendered inconceivable.
34 Lippman, Drift and Mastery, 327.
35 Cuenco, “Victory Is Not Possible,” 207.
36 Geoff Shullenberger, “How We Forgot Foucault,” American Affairs 5, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 225–40; Blake Smith, “The Unwoke Foucault,” Washington Examiner, March 4, 2021.
37 Ross Douthat, “How Michel Foucault Lost the Left and Won the Right,” New York Times, May 25, 2021.
38 Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (1966; reiss., Wilmington, Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2006).
39 For more on the interplay between these entrenched persecution complexes as a symptom of the generalized fear of power and responsibility among America’s elites across both the liberal and conservative milieux, see “kratophobia” in Cuenco, “Victory Is Not Possible,” 204–6.
40 Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 17.
41 Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, xxvii–xxxi; Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (1976; reiss., New York: Vintage, 1990).
42 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 2nd edition (New York: Zone Books, 2017).
43 Brown, Walled States, 70
44 Brown, Walled States, 76.
45 Benjamin Fong, Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (2016; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
46 Fong, Death and Mastery, 86.
47 There is no more revealing (and frankly, pathetic) expression of this sentiment on the right than a recent article: N.S. Lyons, “A New Counterculture?,” City Journal, September 21, 2022. Here, the author argues that all the same transgressive, relativistic, narcissistic, and post-materialist sensibilities that came out of the post-1960s Left (i.e., the very pathologies that caused the Western Left to stagnate beyond repair and become utterly impotent before the advance of global capital) should today be adopted and internalized by the New Right as a model—this, more than half a century after the defeat and total co-optation of the original counterculture!
48 Lyons, “A New Counterculture.” It is a wonder as well that this author, who wrote about the conflict between so-called “Physicals” and “Virtuals,” should now be so preoccupied with seizing (symbolic and immaterial) cultural power from the Left, with seemingly no accompanying concern for the underlying material realities and political-economic structures that define the status quo he claims to despise. Lyons’s article is, in any event, still useful as a summation of all that is decidedly wrong and degenerate with American political thought in this long era of protracted boomerism.
49 Lippman, Drift and Mastery, 195.
50 Blake Smith, “Liberalism for Losers: Carl Schmitt’s ‘The Tyranny of Values’,” American Affairs 5, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 222–40.
51 Blake Smith, “Only an Absolute Bureaucracy Can Save Us,” Foreign Policy, November 13, 2022.
52 Cuenco, “Victory Is Not Possible,” 208.