“Quixotic socialism”: An interview with Benjamin Studebaker
Erin Hagood and Evan Rodgers
Platypus Review 170 | October 2024
On August 17, 2023, Platypus Affiliated Society members Erin Hagood and Evan Rodgers interviewed Benjamin Studebaker, a political theorist and author of The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way is Shut (2023)[1] as well as the forthcoming Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies. An edited transcript follows.
Evan Rodgers: Your book is titled The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way is Shut. Not many would disagree that American democracy is in crisis, but it is possible to point to several moments in recent history as paradigmatic: the debacle of the Iraq War, the Great Recession of 2008, or the 2016 election of Donald Trump. So, in the broadest terms, why did you write this book, and why now? What does the world need to know about the crisis of American democracy in 2023?
Benjamin Studebaker: Right now there is this perception that democracy in the United States is in danger of collapsing in favor of an authoritarian regime, and that is a total misreading of the character of this crisis. At the same time, I am not somebody who says that everything is fine and normal, and we don’t have any problems. We have gotten away from a lot of what we had started to learn after 2008. This economic system is producing a lot of stress; it’s making people unhappy, and when people are unhappy they do crazy stuff that doesn’t make sense, and that makes things worse for everybody. We started getting away from that lesson after Trump was elected. It became important to the political establishment to say that Trump is not caused by economic factors, but rather that Trump has exclusively cultural or psycho-historical causes having to do with the American Civil War. The only appropriate response, to them, is a cultural response, and anybody who starts talking about economic stuff is suggesting that the Trump people have legitimate grievances, and since they’re suggesting that Trump people have legitimate grievances, they’re aiding and abetting the far Right, which is this authoritarian movement, and therefore we have to completely exclude from the discussion everything to do with the economy. This has produced a situation where anybody who has any kind of economic critique is being pushed into becoming part of the Right, and then pushed into picking up all the cultural discourse, which of course floats around — it’s the sea on the Right.
Erin Hagood: How is this book an intervention in the politics of the Left? For example, in the book you talk a lot about the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Bernie Sanders. How did that experience affect your own politics but also inform the book?
BS: Before Bernie in 2016 I had a negative view about what we could do with American democracy. Bernie did a lot better than I thought he was going to do that year, and I thought, if I can be wrong about how well Bernie can do in a Democratic primary, maybe there are other things I’ve been wrong about, and maybe I should question my premises and assumptions, and give this whole a try. At the same time I was writing my PhD, and in the course of writing, I kept running into the following problem: there are major problems with the democratic system in the U.S., but people are afraid of those alternatives to the system; they are afraid of anything that reminds them in any way of the Soviet Union. This makes it very difficult to get people to talk about what would be an alternative to our political system. I thought, if our imaginarium is restricted in such a way that we can’t imagine an alternative to the democratic system, but Bernie is doing well in the polls, maybe it’s not as bad as I thought it was. The trouble is that after 2016, the conclusion on the Left seems to have been that Bernie lost the primary because of the “Bernie bros,” that the Sanders campaign was not culturally progressive enough, that it didn’t cater enough to college-educated and professional voters, who make up the Democratic Party primary base. The move in the campaign was to get those people on side by having a more cultural emphasis: to pivot from what it was talking about to talk more about race, gender, and guns.
In the book I characterize this as McGovernization[2] — this tendency for Left-wing movements to gradually become more focused on the cultural sensibilities of college-educated voters at the expense of the economic issues that, in principle, should be able to unite them and non-college-educated voters as part of an all-inclusive working class. The tendency to McGovernize eventually creates an antagonism between the non-educated traditional working class and the college-educated professions, and that effectively splits Left-wing movements. The insistence of the Hillary people in 2016, that the Bernie campaign had to be more culturally progressive was at the same time a concealed insistence that it had to alienate working-class voters more than it was doing. The acquiescence to that insistence in 2020 meant that the campaign was no longer a mass movement in the way it had been in 2016, and did not have the same kind of potential.
I was criticizing this, and trying to get the Left to not do these things. But the argument in response is, “How do you win a Democratic primary if you don’t do this stuff? The Democratic primary base does not look like the general electorate.” This becomes overwhelmingly clear when we look at which Congressional races the Left is competing in. The Left only really tries to compete in heavily gerry-mandered, Democratic safe seats in blue cities where Hillary Clinton often won 70% or more of the vote. In the book, there is a table where we go through all of the DSA and Justice Democrat-endorsed candidates who have won, what the Hillary Clinton vote was in the district, and there is no possibility right now of this version of the Left winning seats in Congress in districts where Hillary Clinton isn’t popular. How can the Left, which is ostensibly critiquing Hillary Clinton and the center of the Party, win power within the Party or nationally if it only competes in districts where that part of the Party is popular and wins easily? It’s no longer effectively representing a critique. Even if the strategy were working, the consequence of trying to win in those seats is that the Left constantly acquires McGovernite baggage from running those campaigns, which then makes it impossible to compete anywhere else in the country.
EH: Why did you choose George McGovern as the historical analogy for this?
BS: The post-1968 turn was to say that it is no longer possible for everyone to be a worker. According to this view, the working class has become a labor aristocracy; it’s no longer emancipatory, not sufficiently opposed to Vietnam, not sufficiently pro-Civil Rights, not sufficiently culturally progressive. Therefore, the revolutionary subject is the one that took to the streets in Paris in 1968: the student, the college-educated person. That was the major pivot in Left-wing thinking, after 1968, and it’s most clearly expressed in the U.S. in McGovern’s campaign in 1972.
ER: In the book you say that we suffer from a disagreement about the meaning of democracy, but that we are stuck with democracy, whether we like it or not. Why is this the case? Why is democracy upheld as a positive value or end today?
BS: My big concept is the notion of embedded democracy, the democracy that’s been around so long that nobody can think outside of it. It has become the whole framework in which you think. The fact that some democracies have been around a long time induces people to think, “this must be a good system, or at least better than other systems, because other systems that have been tried in other places, like the Soviet Union, or Nazi Germany, or the Ayatollah in Iran, haven’t lasted as long. They haven’t produced the same standard of living.” Democracy in the U.S., the UK, and maybe in a few other places where it has been around for a long time is associated with higher living standards than alternative regime types, and it’s associated with outliving or outlasting these alternative regimes. Older democracies have a more overpowering effect on the imagination than younger democracies.
For instance, France is a rich country, but a country where the Communist Party won pluralities of the vote. France has had five different republics, two empires, and multiple periods of monarchies since the U.S. was created. It’s a country where you can be a French Monarchist, a French Republican, a French Gaullist, or even a French person who pines for the fourth Republic or thinks that a sixth Republic is necessary. All these are compatible with the way that people in France think of what it is to be a part of France. In the U.S., this commitment is more avowedly political to the Constitution and to a set of founding fathers. When you poll people about the founding fathers, everybody, with few exceptions, still loves them. The positive view of Thomas Jefferson, of George Washington, the view of the “slave-owning, bad founders” that everybody is criticizing is enormously high — 90% plus. The consensus is that anything wrong with this system is our failure to live up to what the founders had given to us. All of the efforts of so many people to try to interrogate that narrative have been unsuccessful in terms of affecting the general public’s views about these questions.
ER: Where in history do you think this problem of democracy comes from?
BS: When you have a class of people that had been disenfranchised while there have been changes in the economic structure that put them in a more important position, they will make demands to be included in the political system. There will need to be some way of including them but at minimal cost to the people who are making the concession. The hope for those trying to be included is that these will be non-reformist reforms, that the procedural change will welcome them in, will allow them to make more change over time, and that this will enable them to take on a bigger role in the political system, eventually dominate it, and kick out the class that has been making these concessions.
The paradigmatic model of this working is for the bourgeoisie in a country like the UK, where the power of the landed aristocracy was diminished over time through a series of concessions, and world wars annihilated most of the wealth they had enjoyed. But landowners are still significant players in the UK relative to other places, and if you look at how the British government makes policy, it focuses on landowners more than governments do in places where there’s been revolutionary shocks or fiery class conflict.
In the case of the workers, the model is to do the same thing in places where reformism was tried. It was to try to get concessions for the working class, get the working class brought into the system, and hopefully, by using the concessions, to increase the scope. A distinction is generally drawn among reformists between non-reformist reforms, which are meant to change the balance of class power within the system and improve the position of the workers, and palliative reforms, which are meant to keep people pacified, to keep them from engaging in revolutionary action. The problem with democracy is that these reforms are easily confused. It’s easy for something that is a palliative reform to be presented as a non-reformist reform. Much of what we might believe to be non-reformist reform will turn out to not have performed the function we thought it would.
There’s an assumption in the U.S. that if we update our democratic system with procedural reforms — similar to political systems we created in post-war Europe, like Germany or the Netherlands with proportional representation, a unicameral legislature, a weaker judicial review, more democratic control over the courts, a politicized central bank, or eliminating the central bank — that this will unlock all of this stuff. This view assumes that the only thing that separates us from European social democracy or democratic socialism is having procedural reforms that would be non-reformist in character. The trouble is that in these European countries, those reforms are compatible with a gradual slide into the same kind of economic policies that we ourselves are trying to resist. It’s not as if proportional representation in Germany, the Netherlands, or the Scandinavian countries protects the welfare state. Not only does it not extend these things and produce socialism over time, it does not protect them effectively. It slows relative to, say, the UK where Thatcher gets in with a plurality that is not a majority of the vote and can quickly gut a lot of different things. Proportional representation slows that process by making it harder for Right-wingers to get big coalitions that could enable them to make dramatic reforms, but it doesn’t prevent this from happening. Wealth inequality is still growing in places like France and Germany. The reason we have all these protests and demonstrations in France is due to the slow, losing position that the working class finds itself in.
EH: Has democracy in America changed since its founding in any fundamental way?
BS: Of course, the role of government in the U.S. is different from what it was in the 18th century. The government does lots of things it didn’t do. Liberalism has changed a lot over the course of its lifespan as one of the dominant frames of reference for thinking about politics. At the same time, because the U.S. has consistently framed itself as a democratic system based on the Constitution, the ordinary person thinks that we have the same political system that we’ve always had. He thinks that this system evolved or changed in various ways, usually that it has grown or improved, but that it’s the same system.
Whereas in France, you make a distinction between the Republics, and between the two Empires. There’s a sense of regime change, system change, and a notion that if the system isn’t working, you go out into the street and you don’t cooperate with it until the military turns against the system and joins with the people. The revolutionary subject is always armed, and it’s ultimately the soldier who, when he’s told to make the people go back to work, refuses to do that. That is always forgotten in our contemporary discussions. It’s the soldier who doesn’t shoot the worker who is the hero. That guy is invoked in France, and there’s always the question of what that soldier will do. De Gaulle was that soldier, in a sense, in the context of Vichy France. Then, in 1968, he was on the opposite side of it.
We don’t have that kind of thing in the U.S. Our American Civil War doesn’t remotely resemble that. It’s individual states attempting to secede, which is a different kind of civil conflict fundamentally. Because we don’t have anything that looks to the ordinary citizen like a clean break, there’s a sense of continuity, even if you could say the system has changed. You might say we used to have a system where there were property requirements for voting in many states, where the senators weren’t directly elected, where African Americans were enslaved. For the ordinary American, the fact that these things have changed just shows that the fundamental system is sound, can evolve and develop over time, and that it would be a grave mistake to throw it out, because that would be betraying the founders.
EH: Your book begins with the “unsolvable problem” of economic inequality and crisis, but the bulk of your book actually focuses on political issues as opposed to economic ones. Why did you write a book about the political crisis in particular, as opposed to a critique of culture or economics, or even society?
BS: I wrote specifically about the political crisis because if we are to do anything about the economic situation, it will require a political response. I start with the “unsolvable problem” because it isn’t possible to do politics without understanding the central thing that you have to deal with. A political response is necessary because otherwise it would just continue, unless there is some possibility of people getting fed up with this. This is why I focus on legitimacy in my work. Legitimacy is the other face of ideology as a concept. Most of the time Marxists who talk about ideology mention ways in which people are pushed into acquiescing, but the way ideology works is by presenting itself as legitimacy, as an actual explanation that you might actually buy into. To understand why ideology sticks and why it’s so difficult to deal with, you have to approach it from the point of view of one who might go along with it.
If we need to overcome ideology to make fundamental changes, this also means figuring out how legitimacy works and how the state secures legitimacy for itself. We can be aided in thinking about this by reading liberal attempts to legitimate the state and being flexible in our perspective. We can view this two-faced concept from the ideology-critical theory standpoint and the standpoint of the legitimation of trying to build something. If we were to succeed in overcoming all of this, we would have to create some kind of system, and we would have to explain that system to people in such a way that they would go along with it. If we spend our time saying that every way of explaining a system is just ideology, just a way to force people to do things they don’t want to do, when it comes time to make something, we will not only be unable to legitimate it, we will feel that doing so is wrong.
This has afflicted the Left. There’s a discomfort with recognizing that stuff has to be legitimated. To do anything, to act in any way at scale collectively, it must be acknowledged that that will be experienced by some part of the population as coercive, unless you have complete control over how the whole population thinks. Anything coercive that involves taking property, moving property around, will be treated by some people as an act that conflicts with their fundamental values. If you want them to cooperate, it will help if you can explain the act to them in such a way that they will go along with it or at least not oppose it. That is why legitimacy is so important. Not only do we have to critique this system, we also have to formulate what would be our way of legitimating the alternative system. Concerning the alternative system, it’s important to think about what can be legitimated.
I spend a lot of time thinking about these liberal concepts that are invoked in liberal legitimation stories: freedom, equality, and representation. There are other, old concepts that have been invoked forever, like peace, order, and prosperity — terms associated with discrete performance, and so it’s easier for states to disappoint in those regards. There are also medieval concepts, like the single unitary Christian God, or nature. None of those concepts have gone away. Political actors use them to explain their acts, but liberal political actors don’t like using those concepts because they view them as unstable or unethical to use and prefer to use the liberal concepts of freedom, equality, and representation. When Marxists think about building a new society, they think of it as we’re evolving liberalism in new or more innovative ways that are more emancipatory than the previous conceptualizations. We change what freedom, equality, and representation mean to make them more demanding. Anarchists love to extend liberal concepts. In the history of Marxism there’s also a tradition of fundamentally modifying those concepts. For example, Marx took a lot of the Republican tradition and was interested in freedom as non-dependence; he saw structural dependence as a core way in which people are not free, not just that people are interfering with them, but because they depend on the economic system, on the market for a wage, they have to conduct themselves in such a way that they remain employable. These are things that shrink what we do and we can think, but they are not straightforward coercions from a state or a boss. This is a system where people will say, “of course you can do whatever you want — you just might not be able to keep your job if you do.”
EH: Historical Marxism at least claimed that the working-class struggle for socialism would create alternative forms of legitimacy through their social organization. For instance, the soviets, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the socialist party were thought to have taken part in this. At the same time historical Marxism has a taboo on the more straightforward utopias, or positing alternative systems. Both of these seem different from the Left we have been discussing, which is based on a type of permanent protest position. Why is that? And do you think that this historical Marxist claim to the ability to create other forms of legitimacy is true?
BS: The main reason that people don’t like to do legitimation in the West is that, if you imagine that you are explaining or legitimating power, this leads to the kind of thinking that went on in communist states, where there were people on the Left in power trying to legitimize power arrangements. Those states are widely considered to have failed, and the stuff that seemed to work in those states for the period of time couldn’t be used in the U.S. Anything that comes out of Soviet political theory is associated with failure. There’s a desperate attempt to get away from the Soviet project in Western Marxism, which takes the form of being unwilling to even imagine oneself in power, legitimating a state in a new way. The only way that the Western Left today can imagine themselves legitimating is through extending liberal abstractions to emphasize that they are not this bad, authoritarian other.
There are tools we can use to try to build something new, but there is an exhaustion of the liberal legitimating abstractions, and attempts to capture freedom, equality, and representation for the Left don’t have a good track record. In the book I make the case that the trouble is that money tends to control the way that terms are defined; the way our language works comes out of the material conditions. If you have a capitalist system in which workers are in a weak position, and you have a set of oligarchs, foundations, corporations, etc. that are sponsoring academic research, this constrains the kind of research that can be done, even in cases where new concepts develop that seem to have an emancipatory character. Equity, at its inception, was such a concept; it was developed for an emancipatory purpose. But those concepts can be captured and reconceptualized in a way that makes them fit with the existing system. When we try to get around all of this in a purely theoretical way, we don’t engage with the material conditions.
ER: Are you saying that our concepts and ideas have become a tool of the ruling class?
BS: Yes, that happens easily because of the distribution of economic power. For instance, Quentin Skinner and Raymond Geuss have really wonderful and interesting discussions on the concept of liberty that have been in the literature for more than 20 years. In an American university setting, if you ask people what they read about liberty, they’ll mention Benjamin Constant or Isaiah Berlin. But Skinner and Geuss have been around — they aren’t flaming Marxists or critical theorists; theirs are some of the most exalted names in contemporary political theory, but the undergraduate doesn’t get to hear about them. Why is that?
ER: I’m sympathetic to this idea that our schools indoctrinate us. In the history of socialism, the idea was that intellectuals would bring these ideas, historical consciousness, to the workers, but that now appears to be absent. Is the problem that universities or oligarchs manipulate or distort our understanding of freedom? Are there other obstacles?
BS: That is one of the things happening, and there are others. My book is so full of things that make it difficult. For example, the fact that university students don’t graduate with the tools to actually help workers is a major issue. When students think they have emancipatory concepts — which are not emancipatory, and don’t speak to the workers’ material situation — try to meet with workers, they do it with concepts that are not tractable. Over the last 20 years we’ve seen the liberal college student who wants to become a community organizer get increasingly frustrated with the communities they are organizing. The student thinks you have to have a two-level discourse: what goes on in the university and what you tell people. There is an increasing lack of confidence on the part of the liberal intelligentsia in the capacities of the ordinary person. This stems from the fact that the liberal doesn’t have an emancipatory doctrine but something else instead.
In the book I talk about this through the balloonist metaphor. You have these professionals who come to the university and they’re given a balloon, and the balloon lets them go up into the sky, and they think, “I’m going to be able to help everyone on the ground, because I’m going to be able to see what’s going on.” And initially when you’re just a little bit off the ground you can see what’s going on, and you can even give some useful advice to people, and people think, “Wow, this person’s got it; they’re with me.” The trouble is that there’s an incentive to get higher and influence more people, and the larger the number of people you influence, the nicer your balloon becomes; they give you all these amenities, and so there’s a tendency to go higher, to talk to more people, and to call out of your bullhorn. But, with the bullhorn, people on the ground might be able to hear you, but you can’t hear them; you’re too busy shouting over them with your bullhorn. Additionally you can’t really see their situation anymore in detail. So, what you tell them to do is increasingly not motivated by an accurate appraisal of their material situation; it’s motivated by your need to get more people to follow you so you get a cooler balloon. Gradually, the only people you see are the other balloonists in the sky. At that point people lose touch; they lose their ability to influence anybody on the ground. But that’s not a problem for the system. The out-of-touch balloonist can be just given a pension and shuffled off, and you go find a new person on the ground. The system doesn’t need it to work for any particular person. It just needs new people all the time who think it will work, who will perform this role for a time.
Even assuming there are people who know what they’re doing and who try to get involved in American politics, you still have all the issues that I talk about in the last chapter. What if you tried to build an organization based on the best possible view at this juncture? Even then, you run into a series of institutional and structural blocks that are difficult to overcome. If you’re running in the Democratic primaries, as Bernie Sanders did, you’ll be pressured to take on these McGovernizing positions that will make it harder for you to attract working-class voters. If you try to run in the Republican primary — all of the money in the Republican primaries comes from very rich people; it’s difficult to get money for a working-class campaign in a Republican primary. Those trying to realign the Republican Party have completely failed, and at this point they admit that it doesn’t work. Sohrab Ahmari wrote a piece recently that admits that it hasn’t worked and it was a mistake.[3] The primary system forces you to go after voters who don’t look like the general public, to have a campaign that is less accessible to the workers. The force of that incentive will drag you into a more conventional campaign.
The electoral system is a bit Darwinian: there are certain behaviors that give you an advantage, and if you refuse to use those behaviors because you think they are wrong, you just become uncompetitive. The trap for many movements on the Left and Right is that the means of becoming competitive kill their ability to grow long-term. They might win some elections, but this also puts them into a permanently marginal role. Once they’re in a permanently marginal role, then the individual political actors become focused mainly on survival. The members of “the Squad,” the DSA, and the Justice Democratic-endorsed candidates find they can’t do anything other than what is necessary to win. That means just playing the same cultural game that the people they criticize play, and it means trying to pass off their petty, symbolic victories as substantial, which is the same thing that the establishment Democrats already do. Their radical position is merely rhetorical or intellectual; it’s not one that they can actually practice while winning elections, while continuing to be in Congress.
The trouble is that it takes years for people to figure this out, and by that time, it’s too late. Who could admit, after having spent years of their life to get into Congress, that it was a mistake to do all that, and that they should just leave? What else would someone do with their life? The longer one is in this position, the less they are able to actually speak to the ordinary concerns of people. Once upon a time, Nancy Pelosi was not so different from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). In the same way that AOC becomes Nancy Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi was at one point in time AOC, with all the positives that people once attached to AOC.
EH: Wasn’t Hillary —
BS: Yeah, Hillary once went to the 1968 Republican primary, where she supported Nelson Rockefeller. She cried when Nixon won. Hillary Clinton was never as good as Nancy Pelosi.
ER: Why are we stuck with democracy? You talk about the limits of practice today, and the structural and institutional obstacles to politics. Are these things merely structural or institutional? In your book you suggest that it also has to do with the concepts that we get, with our education or miseducation at university. Why are we stuck with that miseducation?
BS: The fundamental issue is that capital mobility is increasing. States are not mobile; they’re territorially trapped. They have to attract money; that makes the state a customer for money. The ordinary person has some level of mobility, but not as much as this money, and so is also more limited in their power and scope, and this extends even to people who are relatively educated and can in theory move to another country. It’s harder for you to move to another country than it is for a rich person to move their money around the world. The more mobile capital becomes, the more powerful the rich become vis-à-vis everybody else.
This expresses itself in every institution, including the university, which is not immune to the material changes in society. The major mistake is that post-1968, an entire generation was convinced that the student was the revolutionary subject, that the university is the institution that can produce the revolution, and that just by struggling within the university you could accomplish something. The trouble with this is that as they were doing this, the universities became much more Right-wing institutions. All the concepts and theories that seemed emancipatory in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s did not issue anything genuinely emancipatory, because it could all be re-processed through the university system that brings everything back into alignment.
The function of critical theory in the last quarter of the 20th century was to advise the rulers of society on running it in a more effective and totalizing way — ways of overcoming the resistance that would otherwise arise. The academic offers an early instance of a kind of resistance which will appear in a larger form later on, and in calling attention to that possible site of resistance, the academic gives the state a mechanism by which it can begin the process of dealing with that site. We’ve been flying our strategies through the academy in front of everybody in such a way that anyone can see what it is that we might think to do. All of these questions like, “what about power?,” and “can you really trust the truth?” — they were prefigured in post-structuralist literature decades earlier by figures who thought of themselves as genuinely emancipatory: people like Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, et al. All it does is put the state in a better position to deal with that stuff when it manifests.
EH: What is the role of critical theory supposed to be for the Left? Does it have a role?
BS: Originally, the role of critical theory made sense in a society where if you de-legitimate the institutions by highlighting contradictions, it produces revolutionary activity. But for this to happen, you have to believe that’s how it works: if there’s a contradiction that will de-legitimate, and if you de-legitimate, you will get revolution. But it doesn’t work that way because contradictions do not necessarily de-legitimate anymore. At this point, many contradictions are functional, and many forms of hypocrisy contribute in some way to the legitimation of the state. Some of the theorists of hypocrisy in the realist canon, such as Judith Shklar and David Runciman, have done wonderful work on how hypocrisy and contradiction can strengthen the state. All of that is overlooked by Marxists who assume that if you heighten a contradiction it will bring on de-legitimation.
In addition to heightening contradictions not necessarily bringing on de-legitimation, even when there is de-legitimation, it doesn’t produce revolution in the embedded democracy, in the democracy that does not have the imaginary to conceive of a compelling political system. And insofar as you can conceive of it, people don’t believe they could actually do it. They think that any means that they might use would not work. They think, “if I do a revolution and it involves any kind of violence, it must produce a debased, deformed state that won’t be any good, and therefore I have to completely square off that.” And if you start looking at non-violent strategies, those tend to be more reformist in character.
EH: The unsolvable problem you describe in your book seems to be what is often called neoliberalism, the specific form of capitalism from the last half century or so. Despite desires to undo the changes that led to neoliberalism, to return to Fordism-Keynesianism — a desire held by many in the DSA but also elsewhere — your book suggests that that is not possible. Why isn’t such a return possible? Why do people want to do it anyway?
BS: The people on the Left who want to return to the 1950s and 60s are often accused of being racist or sexist for wanting something like that time. It should be acknowledged that those people believe that in the 50s and 60s, instead of pivoting to the students, the excluded group should have been included in the worker movement. Instead of abandoning workers in favor of these other groups, those issues should have been assimilated into the workers’ movement. And certainly there were people then who made arguments like that. I want to be charitable in recognizing that this is not a purely cultural issue; it’s an economic problem. The economic problem is that the model of the 50s and 60s is based on restricting capital mobility, on capital controls, and on trade controls. It’s only over the course of the 50s and 60s that these trade controls were relaxed. As you relax the trade controls, you expose the workers in the rich countries to more competition from workers in poorer countries, where the wages, labor laws, and union rights aren’t as good. That puts the worker in a weaker position structurally, even if you expand the unions and labor rights. Internally within the society, the fact that the worker is subject to this competition will weaken the worker’s structural position in a way that is more fundamental than any kind of playing around with rights. In all these countries in the 50s and 60s there was an expansion of rights, while the foundation for those rights was undermined through the rise of capital mobility. If you want to get back to something like that, you would have to find a way to dissuade capital mobility.
Now, the event that severed capital mobility and made that stuff possible was World War II. So, anyone who wants to do this has to explain how you would diminish capital mobility without a world war or they have to advocate for a world war. In my book I discuss Walter Scheidel, who does a wonderful job of laying out the actual moments when there has been major redistribution of wealth or collapse in the power of a particular class of wealthy people. These moments tend to be cataclysmic events rather than things that are achieved through a political system. They tend to be violent revolutions and wars. These wars, by the way, are not like Iraq, Vietnam, or Ukraine, but big, giant interstate wars that last multiple years, kill very large numbers of people, destroy a lot of physical wealth, and require huge increases in tax rates to fund them. There are also pandemics — but not something like COVID — something like the Bubonic plague that kills maybe a third of the population. Finally there is state collapse that is caused by natural disasters like an asteroid strike or an eruption of a supervolcano. Even the Soviet project begins in a world war that disrupts things to such a degree that certain things are no longer politically possible.
We have to recognize that the 50s and 60s are the legacy of the World War era. Those wars were straightforwardly paid for with the blood of millions of people. Many will say that we’re trying to be edgy, that we’re saying, “of course we have to water the tree of liberty with the blood of millions of people.” But what would that involve now? To sever this amount of trade, you need a very sizable war among the great powers, probably between the U.S. and China.
EH: In the 18th century, people like Constant, Kant, or Jefferson thought that modern liberty is not based on political participation, but based on a social freedom, a freedom that must be protected from any form of government, even a good one, or one that you might endorse. This is why Jefferson supported the Bill of Rights. In the 20th century, people like Hannah Arendt looked at Marxism and fascism, and said that it seems as though Hobbes was right to say that social freedom can’t have its own basis, but needs to be based on a form of political freedom. What you have described throughout this interview and what comes up again and again in your book is that today the horizon seems to be really limited to politics. Participation in politics seems to be an end in itself. What is the relationship between political freedom and social freedom, or political action and social action? Why does it seem that politics is a value today, that society wants to uphold political participation as a good?
BS: Part of why I like to highlight Constant as a bit of a propagandist is because of what Constant does in drawing this distinction between modern and premodern, or in another form Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment.[4] This distinction has this mystical effect on everybody. Almost everyone affirms it. There’s some disagreement about where you draw the line. Who’s the first modern thinker? Is it Hobbes? Is it Machiavelli? Is it Locke? There is a presumption that the line is in some way real, which reifies it. The brilliance of Constant is that he was able to get people to do this by drawing the line in this way. When you are trying to get people to pivot in the way that they understand the concept so that you can legitimate a new, fundamentally different political project, the most effective way is to say, “here’s how we used to understand this concept.” You flatten out any variation in how it was understood. You say, this is the old way, then we have the new way; the old way no longer works because it doesn’t fit with the conditions — the new way fits the conditions better. But don’t worry, we still need a little bit of the old way. We can’t completely disregard the old way, we just have to subordinate the old way to the new way. So, yes, there still needs to be a certain amount of political participation, otherwise you could get despotism, you could get tyranny, so you need a population that is vigilant enough. But the population does not need to have an expansive set of virtues, nor the civic education and political involvement that ancient or medieval populations presumed was necessary. Since it does not need all of these things, you can include the merchant class, which was not very educated regarding the Western tradition. You can include that class in politics — even though it might have all these defects and not be virtuous and not be mature as Max Weber says — because they don’t have to do all of the things that someone one would have needed to do to be involved in politics in an ancient or medieval society. The expectation for them is much lower; they just need to play this kind of vigilant role.
One of the consequences of this way of thinking is that politics is — from the very start of Constant’s theory — an endangered thing. It’s been demoted, it’s no longer the case that being included in politics means being a noble. From this point forward everyone is included, but what it means to be included is increasingly diminishing, to the point at which being included and not being included come back together. In my book, I call this the “American subaltern,” the population which is included in the most nominal possible sense and which does not have any meaningful role in any movement of any political faction. Much of Left-wing thought is about activating this population, but what has happened over the last century is that the role of that part of the population has contracted to the point at which most of these people have dropped out and embraced the forms of enclavism, the four “F’s” I talk about in the later stages of the book — retreat-zones from politics.
This is how Constant frames the wonderful ways you exercise your modern, private liberty. You exercise them in the family, your faith, and getting involved in social organizations concerned with different things. The trouble is that these are no longer wonderful places to go because that public / private distinction was always false and misleading. All of those things considered to be private depend on there being a public realm that can sustain them. It’s never been the case that the private realm exists totally independently of the public. All of these zones are affected by the malaise that afflicts the public realm. The supposition in somebody like Adam Smith is that this private realm will give people an appropriate level of civic education, so that they will be able to participate in politics effectively enough that the political system will at least be able to sustain the private realm and a civil society that can produce people who will then be politically talented enough to then continue it.
The state serves freedom by creating and protecting civil society. The civil society organizations are in shambles now; they are no longer functional. The state has failed to protect them. All of these zones are collapsing. Now people don’t have civil liberty, because the state is no longer able to create a functioning space for churches, families, or even more contemporary forms of civil society like fandoms on the internet devoted to particular entertainment franchises or to particular tech billionaires. These are the kinds of ersatz substitutions where a corporation acts as a mediating figure. All of this stuff is in shambles, and it’s all being politicized in destructive and unhelpful ways. At this point, every fandom is divided along whether they believe the content is too progressive or too conservative. Every tech billionaire is asked what side of the cultural divide they are on, and they can no longer stay out of it. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have to be political whether they want to or not; they must acquire some kind of cultural valence.
In this situation the most effective thing to do would be to draw a similar kind of line, just like Constant. It wouldn’t be totally right, because everything always builds on what came before, and what we call “Enlightenment” or “modernity” is shot through with pre-Enlightenment, pre-modern stuff. It’s always been overstated the degree to which the modern era is a clean break. We need to act as if we can do the same thing now. People make these comparisons to different time periods in history: “is this like 1848, 1917, or the 1980 in the USSR?,” etc. I don’t like any of these historical comparisons. We should look at the situation on its own terms, but if you were to make a comparison, I would say today is like the 18th century, where we need to draw a new line between the paradigm that was used in that period and what we’re doing now. Of course, the concepts of that period like liberty, freedom, equality, and representation will still be around, but they need to be demoted in favor of something new. They need to take on a more subordinate, subsidiary role, in the same way in which God and Nature did in the Enlightenment.
We need to come up with something new and different, and it will take me a long time to sort out exactly what that is. I’m very interested in it. I think that it will involve working on stuff older than the Enlightenment, just as the Enlightenment was involved with older things and mixing them together in new ways. That’s what Constant did; he took the ancient concept of freedom and played with it in a new way, while at the same time drawing a sharp line between his freedom and that freedom. We’re going to have to do something similar, and it’s going to have to be just as fundamental. It’s going to go beyond just evolving freedom. It will involve creating a conceptual space in which the liberal concepts are like God or Nature, where they seem to be firmly of another epoch but are still with us, and will turn the liberals into actual reactionaries, in the sense that their concepts belong to a different time. I can try to do that in theoretical terms, but it’s not workable as a purely theoretical project, which is in evidence in the academy. I cannot pretend that I can just have an academic project that will accomplish something, and in the book I am trying to help those who are doing non-theoretical work, outside of the university setting, something that can actually take any of my ideas and make them tractable. I want these people to get a better strategy, so that if I spend my life theorizing, there’s somebody who can do something with it. Otherwise, I’ll end up in the same position as all those post-structuralist theorists, as Lyotard and Deleuze, where they die and their work is appropriated by liberals.
ER: This is a good time to bring up the most mystifying part of your book in which you quote J. R. R. Tolkien. The quote reads, “The way is shut. It was made by those who are dead, and the dead keep it.” You write that we need new ideas and a new concept of freedom, and that we need to make a clean break with dead ideas — the founding fathers are dead; communism and fascism are dead ideologies; and liberalism and Marxism may also be dead. Despite this, what you call “musical people” may still be attracted to these dead ideologies. Why do these people exist? Why do people want to resurrect the dead?
BS: This is the Quixotism, and I’ve written a couple blog posts,[5] nothing very serious, about Quixotic socialism, which is the idea that we need to go back to some other time when there was potential that no longer exists, and that if we could get back there things would just be so great. If only we could not be the kinds of people that are produced by this context, and instead be people produced by a different context, the context where people were better and stronger, etc. It is a reactionary kind of thought, but it is shot through with the existing socialist movement, which loves imagining going back and being part of different dead contexts. It’s funny, because the most radical people are the most obsessed with trying to be the equivalent of Don Quixote, a knight in shining armor. They want to be on the streets in 1848, in 1917, just like Don Quixote wants to be a knight. And it’s not different from the person on the Right who goes and gets really into historical European martial arts with the swords, etc., and is all obsessed with integralism, stoicism, or whatever. People don’t see that it’s the same thing because it’s couched in radical terms that are familiar to us.
The difficulty is, what wouldn’t be a reaction? That is my starting point. What wouldn’t be nostalgia or some kind of Quixotism? That’s a doozy of a question to answer. I’m willing to spend all my time working on it, but I insist that the people who are building movements and making things go about it in a way that connects with working people, because if they don’t, there’s no possibility for theory. Theory can’t do anything without other kinds of people. There’s this bit in the book where I talk about Eric Hoffer, a conservative theorist. He says that to have any major kind of thing, you need a person of words, someone to theorize something new, you need crazy people who will destroy what exists, and you need sensible people who will put things back together on the basis of thinking. The thinking motivates both the crazy people and the practical people; it motivates both the critic who focuses on the sense in which the old system is an ideology, and the person who puts things together, who creates order, who is focused on legitimation. Those two people are generally different, and the person who theorizes is a separate person. No one person can do all of these things, and the delusion of the theorist is in thinking that he is not just the person of words but also the destroyer and the builder. These are different people, organizations, movements, and even different decades. But everyone wants to be the main character that does it all. They have to have the great idea, and wreck the old thing, and make the new thing. But nobody’s going to do that. We all have to accept that we have roles; there are things we’re good at and things we’re not. In that part of the book I’m trying to talk to people who are not me and aren’t theorists, people who need to act, who are completely fixated on the need to act. They cannot not act. It’s who they are, it’s what they are. For these people, there needs to be something for them to work with. The theorist’s job is to give these people something useful to work with, because if the theorist doesn’t perform this function, if the theorist only engages in critique, for instance, these people will not know what to do, and they’ll do things that don’t make any sense.
There’s got to be some possibility of making that transmission, but it becomes very difficult. Everybody is embedded in the university system and if everybody is dependent on it for their income, the incentives that govern the university system will govern the theories that come out. Most people in the academy aren’t able to perform the theorist’s role nor are they in an economic position where they can indulge in the theories that might be useful to workers. Academics have to do the kinds of theory that are compatible with moving up in a career, which is compatible with getting grant money, which is therefore compatible with rich people and their interests. Anything that is about grants or foundations is about rich people. Anything. Those terms are just ways that they convince an oligarch to give out money. The only way a theorist can do any of this is to be in some way immunized to all of that, to have some source of money that is independent of all that, which gives them the ability to criticize and stand outside of it. That’s what I’m trying to do.
I thank you for asking me about the Lord of the Rings, because nobody asks me about that bit. What I try to do there is use something which is very clearly an old, conservative text to say something different. This part of the reading is about the person who just wants to be Aragorn or Alexander the Great. This kind of person is useful, because they will do insane stuff that nobody else would be willing to do. You need this kind of person, and yet, if they have the wrong attitude or are inspired by the wrong things, it’s terrible. You need movements and organizations. It’s not just about the leader figure, the individual, and I try to emphasize that there’s a parallel here between the person and the form of organization. There are types of organizations that are good at doing different kinds of work. But I hope talking about that figure will make that part of the book charismatic and compelling. If you have your heart set on being the important political figure, here is what you have to grapple with and how you should think about the situation that you’re in. |P
[1] (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
[2] After George McGovern, a U.S. senator from South Dakota who ran a presidential campaign in 1972; he lost to the incumbent Richard Nixon.
[3] Sohrab Ahmari, “I Was Wrong: The GOP Will Never Be the Party of the Working Class,” Newsweek, August 14, 2023, <https://www.newsweek.com/i-was-wrong-gop-will-never-party-working-class-opinion-1819644/>.
[4] See Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns” (1819), in Political Writings, ed. and trans. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 307–28.
[5] See Benjamin Studebaker, “Nord Stream Deflections” (February 21, 2023), <https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2023/02/21/nord-stream-deflections/>.
