Abstract
Nancy Fraser’s essay ‘From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond’ is an important intervention in current discussions of Trumpism and how the left, broadly, should understand and respond to it. Fraser’s piece is an admirable effort to situate Trumpism in a broader and deeper political–economic context. At the same time, her argument suffers from a kind of reductionism and takes comfort from a questionable grand narrative of emancipation that is difficult any longer to take seriously. It thus warrants both careful attention and serious criticism. My basic political point: Fraser’s version of ‘socialism or barbarism’ is unconvincing, and the adamant and principled defence of liberal democracy, and its further reform, ought to be a priority for left liberals and leftists more generally who are serious about countering right-wing populist authoritarianism.
Nancy Fraser is an important political theorist, and her essay ‘From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond’ is an important intervention in current discussions of Trumpism and how the left, broadly, should understand and respond to it. Much current discussion – my own included – has remained at what might be called the political ‘surface’, focusing on the many disturbing statements and actions of Trump and his Republican enablers, and expressing particular concern for the effects of Trumpism on public culture and political institutions. Fraser seeks to go beneath the surface and to situate Trumpism in a broader and deeper political–economic context. This is admirable, and so Fraser’s piece is to be welcomed. At the same time, I believe that her argument suffers from a kind of reductionism and also takes comfort from a questionable grand narrative of emancipation that is difficult any longer to take seriously. It thus warrants both careful attention and serious criticism.
In what follows I will situate Fraser’s intervention; outline her core argument; identify its signal strength, which lies in its periodization; and then subject it to careful criticism, focusing both on its analytic reductionism and its political vagueness. My basic political point: that Fraser’s version of ‘socialism or barbarism’ is unconvincing, and the adamant and principled defence of liberal democracy, and its further reform, ought to be a priority for left liberals and leftists more generally who are serious about countering right-wing populist authoritarianism. In the United States, this means proceeding from an understanding of the important differences that separate the two major parties and support for efforts to deepen and expand the small-d democratic features of the Democratic Party, not because this party represents any kind of agent of emancipation, but because it represents the only viable party–political vehicle for resisting right-wing authoritarianism and advancing broadly left liberal values.
I Fraser’s perspective in context
Fraser is well known as a major ‘critical theorist’ whose work has centred on the complex intersections of ‘the politics of redistribution’ and ‘the politics of recognition’. Fraser has criticized both the class reductionism of neo-Marxist ‘materialists’ and the essentialism of feminists and critical race theorists focused on identity but uninterested in political economy and especially the injustices associated with capitalism. And she has sought to articulate a radical democratic political perspective capable of synthesizing what is best in each of these approaches. As a scholar, public intellectual, teacher and long-time (former) co-editor of the journal Constellations, Fraser has engaged, and indeed stimulated, a number of important theoretical controversies that go well beyond the scope of my concern here.
At the same time, these theoretical interventions have always been in the service of a version of left politics. And in recent years, she has been increasingly vocal in her criticism of ‘neoliberalism’, and of the ways that she sees the Democratic Party under Barack Obama and especially during the Hillary Clinton candidacy as complicit in a neoliberal politics of inequality and exploitation. She was thus a vociferous critic of Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign. In an April 2016 interview, she expressed her support for Bernie Sanders and her strong opposition to Clinton, declaring that Clinton embodies a certain kind of neoliberal feminism that is focused on cracking the glass ceiling, leaning in. That means removing barriers that would prevent rather privileged, highly educated women who already have a high amount of cultural and other forms of capital to rise in the hierarchies of government and business. This is a feminism whose main beneficiaries are rather privileged women, whose ability to rise in a sense relies on this huge pool of very low-paid precarious, often racialized precarious service work, which is also very feminized that provide all the care work.
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the contest between Clinton and Trump…is a contest, in my view, between a ‘reactionary’ party of social protection, on the one side, and a ‘progressive’ party that covers an orgy of debt-fueled marketization with a truncated, meritocratic version of emancipation, on the other…In my view, the Left should not take sides in this fight! Rather than accepting the terms presented to us by the two-party system, we should be working to redefine them by drawing on the vast and growing fund of social revulsion against the present order. In a nutshell: rather than siding with marketization-cum-emancipation against social protection, we should be focused on forging a new alliance of emancipation and social protection against runaway marketization. And we cannot do that by working to defeat Trump and to elect Clinton. Far from ‘pushing her to the left’, that ‘honorable’ interpretation of ‘critical support’ only reinforces the current constellation, while placing our long-term objectives on the backburner.
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The problem is that, seen analytically, (neo)liberalism and fascism are not really two different things, one of which is good and the other bad, but two deeply interconnected faces of the capitalist world system. Although they are by no means normatively equivalent, both are products of unrestrained capitalism, which everywhere destabilizes lifeworlds and habitats, bringing in its wake both individual liberation and untold suffering.
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I, for one, shed no tears for the defeat of progressive neoliberalism. Certainly, there is much to fear from a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-ecological Trump administration. But we should mourn neither the implosion of neoliberal hegemony nor the shattering of Clintonism’s iron grip on the Democratic Party. Trump’s victory marked a defeat for the alliance of emancipation and financialization. But his presidency offers no resolution of the present crisis, no promise of a new regime, no secure hegemony. What we face, rather, is an interregnum, an open and unstable situation in which hearts and minds are up for grabs. In this situation, there is not only danger but also opportunity: the chance to build a new left.
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II Fraser’s argument: A ‘counter-hegemonic’ struggle against neoliberalism
Fraser acknowledges that the Trump administration represents a political crisis of liberal democracy, and that Trump’s ‘regressive’ policies promise real harm to vulnerable populations. At the same time, she refuses to regard Trump as in any sense ‘exceptional’ or particularly ‘noxious’ or authoritarian, and she rejects the focus of many liberals (of which I am one) on Trump’s populist rhetoric of resentment and his hostility towards the rule of law, state regulatory institutions or political opponents. Instead, she insists, deeper and more profound forces are at work: the political crisis cannot be understood apart from the blockages to which it is responding in other, ostensibly nonpolitical, institutions. In the United States, those blockages include the metastasization of finance; the proliferation of precarious service-sector McJobs; ballooning consumer debt to enable the purchase of cheap stuff produced elsewhere; conjoint increases in carbon emissions, extreme weather, and climate denialism; racialized mass incarceration and systemic police violence; and mounting stresses on family and community life thanks in part to lengthened working hours and diminished social supports. Together, these forces have been grinding away at our social order for quite some time without producing a political earthquake. Now, however, all bets are off. In today’s widespread rejection of politics as usual, an objective systemwide crisis has found its subjective political voice. The political strand of our general crisis is a crisis of hegemony.
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Her account of this synthesis is strikingly functionalist, suggesting that the primary importance of such identity-based concerns lies in their effects for class politics, and perhaps even implying that the explanation of these concerns themselves lies in the ‘needs’ of ‘progressive neoliberalism’: For the neoliberal project to triumph, it had to be repackaged, given a broader appeal, linked to other, noneconomic aspirations for emancipation. Only when decked out as progressive could a deeply regressive political economy become the dynamic center of a new hegemonic bloc…. It fell, accordingly, to the ‘New Democrats’ to contribute the essential ingredient: a progressive politics of recognition. Drawing on progressive forces from civil society, they diffused a recognition ethos that was superficially egalitarian and emancipatory. At the core of this ethos were ideals of ‘diversity’, women’s ‘empowerment’, and LGBTQ rights; post-racialism, multiculturalism, and environmentalism. a gap in the American political universe: an empty, unoccupied zone, where anti-neoliberal, pro-working-family politics might have taken root. Given the accelerating pace of deindustrialization, the proliferation of precarious, low-wage McJobs, the rise of predatory debt, and the consequent decline in living standards for the bottom two-thirds of Americans, it was only a matter of time before someone would proceed to occupy that empty space and fill the gap.
And a second point follows: ‘Trump’s hyper-reactionary neoliberalism does not constitute a new hegemonic bloc, however. It is, on the contrary, chaotic, unstable, and fragile’. Indeed, Fraser argues, all forms of neoliberalism – whether progressive, reactionary or hyper-reactionary – are fragile and unstable: neither a revived progressive neoliberalism nor a trumped-up hyper-reactionary neoliberalism is a good candidate for political hegemony in the near future. The bonds that united each of those blocs have badly frayed. In addition, neither is currently in a position to shape a new common sense. Neither is able to offer an authoritative picture of social reality, a narrative in which a broad spectrum of social actors can find themselves. Equally important, neither variant of neoliberalism can successfully resolve the objective system blockages that underlie our hegemonic crisis. Combining egalitarian redistribution with nonhierarchical recognition, this option has at least a fighting chance of uniting the whole working class. More than that, it could position that class, understood expansively, as the leading force in an alliance that also includes substantial segments of youth, the middle class, and the professional-managerial stratum. First, less-privileged women, immigrants, and people of color have to be wooed away from the lean-in feminists, the meritocratic anti-racists and anti-homophobes, and the corporate diversity and green-capitalism shills who hijacked their concerns, inflecting them in terms consistent with neoliberalism. Second, Rust Belt, southern, and rural working-class communities have to be persuaded to desert their current crypto-neoliberal allies. The trick is to convince them that the forces promoting militarism, xenophobia, and ethnonationalism cannot and will not provide them with the essential material prerequisites for good lives, whereas a progressive-populist bloc just might. Renouncing the progressive neoliberal stress on personal attitudes, it must focus its efforts on the structural-institutional bases of contemporary society. Especially important, it must highlight the shared roots of class and status injustices in financialized capitalism. Conceiving of that system as a single, integrated social totality, it must link the harms suffered by women, immigrants, people of color, and LGBTQ persons to those experienced by working-class strata now drawn to right-wing populism. In that way, it can lay the foundation for a powerful new coalition among all whom Trump and his counterparts elsewhere are now betraying – not just the immigrants, feminists, and people of color who already oppose his hyper-reactionary neoliberalism, but also the white working-class strata who have so far supported it. Rallying major segments of the entire working class, this strategy could conceivably win. Unlike every other option considered here, progressive populism has the potential, at least in principle, to become a relatively stable counterhegemonic bloc in the future.
III What’s wrong with Fraser’s argument?
Fraser’s argument is both theoretically elegant and politically ambitious. It is theoretically ambitious in the way that it seeks to regard society as a ‘single, integrated totality’, to understand the sources of distributive politics and identity politics in a way that at least hopes to avoid reducing one to the other, and to do this in a way that is sensitive to questions of historical periodization. And it is politically ambitious in the way that it claims to derive a ‘map’ of the political terrain, and a strategic route to social transformation, from this theoretical analysis.
The problem is that Fraser’s call for a new ‘counter-hegemony’ is too ambitious, too neat analytically and too credulous politically.
Taking recognition seriously?
Fraser writes that ‘we must break definitively both with neoliberal economics and with the various politics of recognition that have lately supported it – casting off not just exclusionary ethnonationalism but also liberal-meritocratic individualism’. Her essay is laced with the rhetorical denunciation of such ‘individualism’. But what exactly does she mean here, and what exactly is it that she proposes to cast off ‘definitively?’ Reproductive freedom? Equal pay for equal work? Domestic violence legislation? Equal employment opportunities and laws governing sexual harassment and racial and sexual discrimination? Equal standards for tenure for men and women? Civil rights law and voting rights enforcement? Many of these things can be regarded as achievements of what Fraser calls ‘progressive neoliberalism’. All of them have a strong juridical component, and all relate both to legal ‘classes’ of people and to ways of excluding or treating unfairly individuals understood as rights-bearing claimants for justice. While Fraser consistently maintains that she does not call for the ‘muting’ of concerns such as these, her own rhetoric seems to diminish their importance. This is obviously a political as well as a theoretical issue. During the 2016 Presidential contest between Clinton and Trump, virtually every major national feminist and civil rights organization supported Clinton, for reasons that were partly symbolic but also very practical: she had a history of strongly supporting those things, noted above, that Fraser seems to bundle together under the label of ‘liberal-meritocratic individualism’, while her opponent had a history of hating all of these things and was supported by groups dedicated to politically attacking them. Now, it is true that these themes do not exhaust the concerns of a politics of recognition, and that greater attention to the plight of poor and working women, for example, or to complex intersections between race and gender, surely ought to be accorded greater attention in our politics. It is also true that an ‘additive’ approach to identity politics has serious limits, especially when it offers insufficient attention to the identity politics of class. (Such limits have been treated with great care by some recent theorists of intersectionality that Fraser would do well to take more seriously.) 6 But Fraser does little to explain how her ‘counter-hegemonic’ progressive populisms seriously incorporates the broad range of concerns linked to recognition, and to autonomy, rather than simply calling on these concerns to be given subaltern status in a revived class-based politics.
Reliance on a new Labour Metaphysic
At the core of Fraser’s strategy is the working class. ‘Rallying major segments of the entire working class’, she writes, ‘this strategy could conceivably win’. A lot here rests on the meaning of ‘conceivably’. But more rests on the notion that there exists an ‘entire working class’ that is ripe for new forms of radical left organizing. In her account of the economic conditions of the current crisis, she places particular attention on these things: ‘the metastasization of finance; the proliferation of precarious service-sector McJobs; ballooning consumer debt to enable the purchase of cheap stuff produced elsewhere’. But she doesn’t engage, in a serious way, the links between these things and the development of ‘post-Fordist’ forms of flexible accumulation that have dramatically transformed the entire social landscape. ‘Precarious service sector McJobs’ are increasingly prevalent in the emerging ‘gig economy’. And while the terms of employment are typically egregiously unfair, and while fewer and fewer workers are covered by long-term contracts that include retirement and health benefits, in a sociological sense the very conditions of work are in many ways atomizing. We no longer live in the industrial society of Marx and Engels, of Debs or of Walter Reuther, where the social character of labour was ever present, labour was for most people the defining human experience and the workplace was a site of real interaction, social solidarity and political mobilization. The ‘ballooning consumer debt to enable the purchase of cheap stuff produced elsewhere’ is linked to mass consumerism, and indeed to increasingly personalized and online forms of consumption, which constitute for most people a way of life. These conditions are obviously linked to the dramatic decline of unions and to the even more dramatic decline of the discourse of ‘the labour movement’. Labour is instead very divided; largely disorganized; and far from constituting a movement of its own, much less being the core of a broader ‘counter-hegemonic’ project of social transformation. None of this gainsays the importance of genuinely important union organizing drives (among janitors, or graduate students, or fast food workers) or so-called ‘alt-labor’ initiatives, or ‘fight for $15’, or the importance of supporting efforts to reform labour law and make union organizing easier. 7 These things are important, and progressive liberals, and the Democratic Party, have paid too little attention to these things for too long. And that is the real importance of the Bernie Sanders candidacy and of the ascendancy of Elizabeth Warren within the party. But it is one thing to say that the struggle for economic justice is important. It is another thing to insist that they are most important, and to downplay the economic and political importance of ‘flexible’ transformations of capitalism which cannot be turned back, and to imagine that somehow there can be mobilized and organized a mass movement centred on labour and on ‘the working class’. Where such a strategy to be successful, it could ‘conceivably win’. But that is almost a tautology. And the chances of such a strategy succeeding are exceedingly slim. Fraser’s a turning toward to its success thus sound less like ‘materialist analysis’ and more like the conception of left politics advanced by French philosopher Alain Badiou: ‘A politics is a hazardous, militant and always partially undivided fidelity to eventual singularity under a solely self-authorizing prescription’. 8
What about political parties?
As is well known, Gramsci’s entire approach to ‘hegemony’ and ‘war of position’ was linked to his belief that the Italian Communist Party was ‘the modern Prince’. In this regard, Gramsci was one with both Lenin and Kautsky and indeed with a long tradition of Marxist thinking about left politics. Perhaps the most striking thing about Fraser’s essay espousing the ‘beyond’ of a new ‘progressive populism’ is that it says nothing about left party politics at all. Consistent with some of Fraser’s other recent discussions, cited above, the essay does indicate that the Republican and Democratic Parties both represent forms of neoliberalism that are predatory, unstable and outmoded. But Fraser does not say anything about how the ‘counter-hegemonic bloc’ she prescribes – which is essentially a coalition of social forces ‘led’ by the working class – will take a party form, or will relate to the existing parties, or will work towards achieving some kind of political influence much less governing power. The closest she comes is her statement, in her penultimate paragraph, that ‘the sort of change we require can only come from elsewhere, from a project that is at the very least anti-neoliberal, if not anti-capitalist’. But she offers no word on from where this might come, or how it might proceed. This is a stunning lacuna in the piece. Now, she might perhaps reply that it follows from what she has already argued that both major US parties are mere shells of effective political parties. And indeed, such a statement would be true. But hollowed out political parties are still political parties. And in the US political system, the paradigm case of a ‘two-party system’, the existing parties possess extraordinary mobilizations of bias in their favour, in spite of their real deficiencies. On rare occasions in American history, a national party has been either destroyed (the Whig Party) or dramatically reconfigured (the Democrats after WWII). Such reconfigurations and realignments are surely possible, if rare. And at certain rare moments, such realignments can be fuelled by the emergence and activism of ‘third parties’ or smaller parties that are capable of running candidates at local levels, or participating in ‘fusion’ or cross-ballot endorsements, or sometimes, or, rarely, in winning a substantial number of popular votes – but never enough to obtain an Electoral College victory in a Presidential election. These are no doubt very complicated questions, and there are indeed serious debates going on within Democratic Socialists of America – which is not a party – and elsewhere on the US left about what this means for left participation in party politics. There might be a long-term strategy beyond the current two parties worth pursuing, though I am sceptical, and Fraser offers little reason for anything but scepticism. But even then, there remains the question of what to do now. Fraser’s view from ‘elsewhere’ seems to recommend either abstention from electoral politics, at least at the national level, or support for ‘third-party’ candidates such as the Green Party’s Jill Stein, whose likely effect is the effect it had in 2016 – to maximize the electoral chances of the so-called ‘hyper-reactionary neoliberals’ represented by Trumpism. (Note: A European friend has pointed out to me that even in Europe Green Parties have grown haltingly and over time, and that it would be wrong to offer political judgements based on a single election. This seems true to me. But the American two-party context is distinctive, and in the United States the Greens, which have been around for decades, have never been a serious electoral force, especially in national politics, though their two most significant candidates, Ralph Nader in 2000 and Stein in 2016, helped to ‘spoil’ national Presidential elections. But that is my own political judgement. It might be possible to make a strong, theoretically grounded argument on behalf of the claim that the Jill Stein-Green Party represents the core of a new ‘counter-hegemonic bloc’. But Fraser does not make this claim, or offer any serious analysis of parties.)
It is hard to take seriously, especially in retrospect, the view there really is no difference worth fighting for between the ‘progressive neoliberalism’ of the Democrats and the Republican Party of Trump. Liberal ‘diversity’ and ‘meritocratic individualism’ versus exultant sexism, racism and xenophobia; the Affordable Care Act versus unregulated health care markets; environmental regulation and civil rights enforcement staffed by professionals versus the gutting of federal bureaucracies through malign neglect. These differences matter politically. Some of them matter a lot. ‘A plague on both your houses’ is a questionable ethical stance. But it is an utterly irresponsible political stance in a two-party system.
Leftist bad faith?
Fraser writes very harshly about both neoliberalism in general and the things with which she associates this neoliberalism: the preoccupation with the values of autonomy, respect and individual achievement; the supposedly arrogant valorization of higher education and professional values; a globalist elitism; and condescension towards the concerns and the values of ordinary Americans. Such neoliberal attitudes, she insists, help to explain why so many liberals supported Clinton, and disparaged Trump’s populist supporters, and thus fuelled Trump’s power. There is a striking affinity between this view of liberalism and the view of liberalism put forth by Trump, and his Breitbart-based ideologues, and his most vocal supporters and enthusiastic rally attendees. This affinity ought to give some pause. Of course, pointing it out does not constitute an argument of any kind. It might simply be that this characterization of liberalism is true, and that the convergence of some on the left with many of the right about this truth is a mere coincidence. But one would imagine that from the vantage point of left advocacy, there might at least be reason to be troubled by this convergence. And indeed, there is something of a performative contradiction involved when an internationally renowned academic long-associated with a major international institution of graduate study sets about disparaging liberals for their globalism and elitism. For what are successful American academics if not members of a cosmopolitan republic of letters for whom the free circulation of ideas and people is essential, who enjoy the benefits of world travel and hospitality, who derive great prestige and even monetary reward from the extensive citation of their work and the inclination of others elsewhere to extend invitations to join them in conversation, often for a substantial fee? Is ‘individual merit’ so despicable a value? Is mobility and neoliberal flexibility and ‘individualism’ such a bad thing? Is there a route to a more free and fair society that does not pass through liberal individualism and the cosmopolitan discourses of human rights and porous borders? I do not think so, and I doubt that Fraser really thinks so either, even though her rhetoric suggests otherwise.
IV What then?
At the heart of Fraser’s argument is a once-venerable idea that is traceable to Marx and perhaps even to Hegel: the idea that the instabilities and contradictions of a given social or normative order will only intensify in the absence of a definitive resolution; that an unstable equilibrium cannot long last, and that the only politics worth supporting is one that can, in Fraser’s words, ‘successfully resolve the objective system blockages that underlie our hegemonic crisis’. This, of course, is the idea behind the much-quoted aphorism from Gramsci that also animates her essay: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’. There is, of course, a more tragic and perhaps even melancholic, subterranean way of thinking within Marxism. Marx and Engels’s comment in the Communist Manifesto about ‘the contending ruin’ of classes is one example; Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ is another. But the dominant way of thinking about this within Marx-inspired left traditions is that at the very least, while there is no necessity to the ‘bursting asunder’ of contradictions and their transcendence by something more ‘progressive’, it is more or less a necessity that absent some such a fundamental transformation, we are simply fated to endure protracted misery. Thus the other oft-quoted aphorism, this one from Rosa Luxemburg: ‘socialism or barbarism’.
But what reason do we have to believe that these are or only choices? And, more importantly, what if it is quite likely that acting as if they are our only choices, and then choosing the ‘progressive populist’ option, is self-defeating, and likely to intensify or at least reproduce rather than to mitigate the ‘barbarism’ in our midst? Fraser proposes that ‘progressive neoliberalism’ is an inherently ‘unstable’ option. But what if there is no alternative to ‘instability’, and the choice is not between ‘instability’ and ‘transformation’, but instead the terms under which the instabilities of our world will be negotiated, regulated and rendered more free and fair? In his recent book The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Edward Luce offers this diagnosis, which seems both bracing and true: the forces working against stability are too overwhelming to imagine we can reverse the clock. Rising disorder, the growing randomness of events and the exponential rate of technological change are making erratic particles of us all. We are moving into a Brownian world…This also describes our digital age. The surge of bytes in a networked world favours cyber-chaos. In short, we are entering a period where instability is growing and the centre will struggle to hold.
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In such a situation, it is the height of political irresponsibility to declare that ‘the left should not take sides’ in the contest between ‘progressive neoliberalism’ and Trumpism. Progressive neoliberalism does not promise a deeper and more edifying form of participatory democracy, but it does represent an unambiguous commitment to the basic institutions of liberal democracy rather than an attack upon them. It does not promise the end of injustice, but it does promise some ongoing concern with justice, rather than an utter contempt for it. These things matter to many millions of fellow citizens, including most of those who Fraser imagines to be the ultimate constituents of a new populist ‘counter-hegemony’. The kinds of ‘progressive populist’ initiatives and struggles that Fraser supports represent important efforts to challenge progressive neoliberalism to take more seriously its own promises and to deepen and extend a politics of social justice and environmental sustainability. But there is no reason to think that they represent a ‘new hegemonic bloc’ and much reason to be sceptical of this. Progressive neoliberalism warrants criticism and challenge. But it does not warrant hostility.
Trumpism, on the other hand, is dangerous, in its policies, its destructive approach to governance, its cynical approach to press freedom and to the elementary standards of truth and its toxic forms of public rhetoric and mass mobilization. There are futures beyond Trumpism, futures both good and bad. But we will not help to bring about a better future by refusing to resist the bad that is directly before our eyes.