Kamala’s Vengeful Neoliberalism | Compact

Paul Glastris made an interesting case for Kamala Harris when I debated him at the Center for the National Interest last week. Glastris, the editor of the Washington Monthly, presented his argument in terms of neoliberalism—GDP is up, inflation is declining, voters should be happy. But, he acknowledged, they aren’t happy. The good news is taking too long to register with too many of them. 

Yet there was something more. Harris is the candidate of confidence in America’s power and the resilience of the liberal international order. Donald Trump, by contrast, reminded Glastris of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader, eventually tried for war crimes, during the ethnic strife that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. Glastris had reported from the Balkans, and he saw in the Serbs who backed Milosevic resentments similar to those he now perceived in Trump’s supporters. The Serbs proved willing to stand behind Milosevic even though he didn’t make them richer and only led them to defeat.

Trump voters aren’t, in fact, the American equivalent of Milosevic supporters. But my debate opponent’s argument confirmed my sense that the 2024 election, much more than the 2020 contest, ought to be thought of as “neoliberalism strikes back.” For Harris, Trump is indeed Milosevic, and whether or not Serb-like Americans are “deplorables,” they are economically irrational. That irrationality is the root of their perverse politics; if they were rational, they would also be liberal. Although Glastris would be appalled by the analogy, in my eyes the neoliberal hope is that a Harris victory will do for the benighted Trump voter what NATO’s bombs did for Serbia. Defeat would bring enlightenment—or at least, more rewarding economics—and thus curtail irrational politics.

I countered by arguing that Trump voters aren’t irrational if they prioritize a demand for dignity as citizens over the maximization of GDP—though really, I believe Trump will be better for GDP than Harris anyway. Yet I had to admit that Glastris was right to point out that inflation has consistently been the highest-polling concern in this election. Are we, then, back in 1992—not in war-torn Serbia, but in a US election defined by a maxim of Bill Clinton’s campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid?”

The irony is that when Clinton ran on the economy in 1992, he was campaigning as a quasi-populist against George H.W. Bush. But by the end of Clinton’s presidency, that line about the economy had taken on a new meaning: A booming tech sector and stock market could win elections for a leader who had been rebuked as too socially radical by the voters who handed Republicans control of Congress in 1994. Clinton was an alchemist as well as an opportunist. His social radicalism had once been wedded to a semblance of populism (if only a semblance), but now he found it could amalgamate just as well with economic neoliberalism. And that’s the formula to which Harris has returned, casting off the progressive pandering of her 2019 presidential campaign to embrace hawkish Republicans like Liz and Dick Cheney and neoliberal mega-donors like Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban.

“Harris has restored the coalition that bombed Serbia.”

Harris has restored the coalition that bombed Serbia: Clintonite Democrats and John McCain-loving Republicans. Indeed, she could practically have been lab-grown in 1999 by the Project for a New American Century. Barack Obama departed somewhat from liberal maximalism in foreign policy, after the debacles of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. And Joe Biden won in 2020 in part because working-class Americans thought of him as a regular Joe, an old-fashioned Irish Catholic labor Democrat. Trump’s underperformance with working-class white voters in the industrial heartland in 2020, relative to his 2016 share of their vote, doomed his re-election. Those voters are almost certainly Trump’s best chance of returning to office now. But Harris is trying to build a new coalition, one that eschews whatever antiwar appeal Obama had while also de-emphasizing Biden’s class politics.

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‘Neoliberalism” as I use the term is not “classical liberalism” or straightforward free-market economics. It’s a compound of 20th-century statist liberalism with market liberalism—a hybrid. It also includes social liberalism, whose imperatives are to be pursued through markets and government action alike, each shaping the functions of the other. And in foreign policy it means a commitment to the “liberal international order.” In the Clinton and George W. Bush eras, some of us already believed that neoconservatism was simply neoliberalism in Republican drag, with neoconservatives’ purported concerns for the right to life or traditional marriage being mere outerwear. The Trump era proved us correct, as neoconservatives steadily mutated into members of what is now the Kamala Harris coalition.

Harris has campaigned as a consummate neoliberal—in her foreign policy, her economics, her social values. By promoting Liz Cheney in the final weeks of her campaign, Harris made the contours of her anti-populist coalition as plain as possible. Harris may enjoy the endorsement of a social democrat like Bernie Sanders, but the future of the Democratic Party as Harris envisions it is closer to the politics of Cheney, minus her social-conservative pretenses. Harris wants to win working-class Biden-voting men, of course. But she is creating something very different from Biden’s attempt at reviving the Democratic coalition of the mid-20th century.

Conservatives such as Robert Nisbet criticized that midcentury Democratic coalition for fostering dependency on the welfare state at the cost of individual responsibility and weakening the family, religion, and local community. But New Deal Democrats thought they could preserve families even while building a comprehensive social safety net. Harris Democrats, on the other hand, have a much more radical and hostile view of the family. They want to neutralize it, reducing—ideally to the vanishing point—the differences between single and married women. They want to liberate wives from their husbands, starting at the ballot box.

Harris leads in polls of single women, as Democrats typically do. Marriage is what turns women into Republicans, as Harris supporters see it, which means the influence of husbands—men—makes women Trump voters. Or at any rate, marriage makes them less likely Harris voters. What if these men could be removed from married women’s thoughts when they vote? Harris surrogates such as Michelle Obama have lately emphasized to women the principle that voting is private, and outside activists supporting Harris have likewise driven home this message.

As an election strategy, it’s diabolical. But it just might work. It’s more than a strategy, however. It’s an expression of one of neoliberalism’s roots, the removal of irrational barriers like “nations” or “traditions” that prevent individuals from advancing economically and hedonically. In many contexts, economic and hedonic advancement mean the same thing: More wealth means more goods and more pleasure to be had. Marriage may be good for economic advancement, but it is still irrational. Even if Milosevic had been able to make Serbia wealthier, he would still have been a monster who suppressed other people’s freedom. Trump might make America prosperous again, but that doesn’t mean neoliberals will embrace him. (Lest a malicious misinterpreter take advantage of what I have just written, let me note that husbands aren’t Milosevic any more than Trump is, but from a neoliberal point of view, Milosevic is an archetype of what’s wrong not only with Trump, but with the influence of men upon women.)

The logic of neoliberalism, as represented by the Harris movement, is clear enough. The American president has a duty to liberate women from the oppression of the men in their families, just as the president must maintain freedom worldwide by combating dictatorships and other irrational, illiberal powers. Yes, this sounds like polemical satire. It isn’t. Liberation is the immediate aim of the system, and that means individual liberation as well as the liberation of peoples. What they are being liberated from is irrationality, where rationality by contrast means economic and hedonic flourishing, according to the criteria of liberalism (GDP, unimpeded sexuality, etc.). The liberation of peoples—which are collections of individual atoms—means not only keeping the world safe for liberal democracy, but also keeping those who live within the arbitrary outlines of nations safe from tariffs and immigration restrictions and other irrationalities.

“Neoliberalism isn’t simply capitalism.”

Neoliberalism isn’t simply capitalism, however. Individuals may not know how to enjoy their freedom, or they might even find that the enjoyments they pursue wind up not being so pleasant, after all. Individuals may not have sufficient wealth to follow their desires. Women, in particular, are at a disadvantage. A woman liberated from men and marriage may not be able to conceive, either because she isn’t in a heterosexual relationship, or because her pursuit of education and career—the paths experts prescribe for economic and hedonic advancement—has pushed her past the age of easy childbearing. If she does conceive, her freedom is limited by pregnancy, but she can always abort the baby. (Note that Harris has never said at what point in gestation abortion might reasonably be banned.) If she bears a child, however, her economic (and hedonic) freedom is compromised, unless she turns to a man—which would also be a compromise of her freedom.

The only way women can really be free is if government and for-profit enterprise work together to free them from biology and economic constraints alike. Men and marriage become unnecessary and undesirable; government benefits and generous corporations can take the place of those oppressive influences, since government and corporations, in liberal theory, exist for the sake of the individual’s enjoyment. Women are only an especially clear example of market need, however. Men, too, require liberating, even when they think they are free—because they are never really free as long as they are irrational and unhappy.

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All of this might sound like something from an Aldous Huxley dystopia. Surely a mere politician like Harris can’t really imply all this? But she does, for the simple reason that the logic of neoliberalism is automatic. Huxley understood it, in an earlier form, in the 1930s, from his study of figures like H.G. Wells. Alex de Tocqueville recognized its embryo in his time, too, as his warnings about “democratic despotism” show. This is a despotism arrived at by the willing submission of needful people to an all-provident master. The more needful people feel themselves to be, the more readily they will submit—with the caveat that the system works best when they believe they are only fulfilling their own needs, simply with the invaluable help of government and markets.

“All of this might sound like something from an Aldous Huxley dystopia.”

The flaw in this, however, is that while the neoliberal system is aimed at the eradication of irrationality, its very operation produces irrationality—not in the old organized forms of nation, church, and family, but in chaotic and cult-like forms. Trump and the wild dreamers of the pagan right aren’t atavisms awaiting rational extinction; they are the products of rational liberalism’s unsuitability for human nature. This is the answer to the problem that perplexed Paul Glastris. Efficient liberal economies (which may not actually be so efficient) aren’t not leading to placid politics, but to entropy and the decay of all authority—including liberal authority. What emerges from this high-GDP wasteland are movements and personalities evolved to resist the environment.

In the more humane moments of the 20th century, the powers of rationality and pre-rationalist authority struck a balance. The neoliberalism that has evolved since the 1990s is not only incapable of sustaining that balance, it is antithetical in principle to such compromise. Kamala Harris’s supporters don’t seek a modus vivendi with Trump voters and the leaders they elect (like Trump). They see that as a compromise with fascism. So the liberalism that Harris embodies continues to fight an opposition that it not only can never defeat, but that it actually generates. If Trump loses, there will be another Trump—or someone liberals may like even less.