My chapter makes the provocative argument that liberalism renews itself by feeding on the alternatives to it. The problems that have emerged with liberalism have emerged precisely because the alternatives are in such a sorry state. If the opponents of liberalism cannot credibly threaten to overcome liberalism, liberal institutions become excessively stable. I characterize postliberalism as a demand by the critics of liberalism to be taken seriously. But without the political capacity to threaten liberalism, postliberalism makes toothless demands; it issues bluffs that can be called. Beneath the bluster, what I call “postliberal liberalism” remains bound to operate within liberal institutions, never escaping them. I therefore suggest postliberalism is a kind of liberal democratic excrement rather than a true alternative. I make this point explicitly:

the question is not “how long can democracy hold out against authoritarianism,” it is “how long can democracy swim in its own filth?”

If you read German, I hope you’ll consider the book! Maybe, if it does well enough, Suhrkamp will partner with translators, and the chapter will appear in additional languages.

Ironist vs. Enclavist

Ironists don’t take the abstractions they appear to espouse seriously, treating them as pragmatic tools. Ironists instrumentalize or commodify abstractions. They do not take them fully seriously. This cuts ironists off from the inspirational force of abstractions, and they tend to suffer from a commitment deficit. Ironists are not ultimately willing to make major sacrifices on behalf of their abstractions, because they do not genuinely love what they purport to care about. Instead, ironists are motivated by fear of pain or shame, a desire for pleasure or status.

Enclavists take their abstractions extremely seriously, to the point of having to recognize that there is no immediate possibility of realizing them through political action. Enclavists therefore retreat from the political, looking for a less ambitious way to realize their aims. In my previous work, I’ve described these enclaves in terms of the “Four F’s”: Faith, Family, Fandoms, and Futurism.1

Idiosyncratism vs Slopulism

Idiosyncratists develop baroque conceptualizations of their abstractions that are too particular to have a wide appeal. Sometimes, idiosyncratists become quixotic devotees of anachronistic worldviews. Other times, idiosyncratists adopt highly contemporary perspectives, but in an illegible, personalistic, or niche way.

Slopulists underconceptualize their abstractions, treating their abstractions as vague floating signifiers. They change what the abstractions mean depending on who is around in a bid to widen their appeal.

In a hypermodern embedded democracy, there will be deep pluralism.2 Deep pluralism reduces the moderate space that might otherwise exist between ironism and enclavism and between idiosyncratism and slopulism, so that it becomes extremely hard to find a moderate path and impossible to sustain a moderate path across any large number of domains for any great length of time. This results in a crisis of prudence, in which there is no prudent course of action available, no way of actualizing our abstractions outside of the enclaves. And, because the enclaves are inevitably affected by the collapse of political possibility, even they quickly cease to be safe.

All of this is pretty standard stuff, things I’ve said before, if perhaps not precisely in this way. The new idea today is that these two cleavages can be combined into four distinct positions:

I name this the “Matrix of Rubbish,” but I say this with no moral opprobrium. It is nobody’s fault that we end up operating within the Matrix of Rubbish—it is a consequence of hypermodernity and democratic embeddedness.

Let’s run through these four positions and demonstrate that they are, indeed, distinct:

1. The slopulist ironist (SI) is trying to get a large number of people to follow them, but their motivation is fear rather than love. They can build up significant followings, but these followings never become large enough or sincere enough to be political. They can, however, be enough to supply the SI with the things the SI is seeking (usually income or recognition).

2. The idiosyncratic ironist (II) is seeking the same things as the SI, but from a narrow niche. So, the II develops what might look like an avant garde aesthetic, but for the purposes of promoting something highly particular that has limited potential and to which they are not sincerely committed. Unlike the SI, the II is willing to get specific and adopt positions that will alienate many people, in the hopes that those who remain will be more committed. Unlike enclavists, the II gets particular purely for instrumental purposes.

3. The idiosyncratic enclavist (IE) is trying to protect sincerely treasured abstractions, but has recognized the limited appeal of their baroque conceptual schemes. The IE has given up on the idea that these abstractions can be politically actualized, but believes the abstractions can be actualized at lower levels.

4. The slopulist enclavist (SE) is trying to protect sincerely treasured abstractions that they have under-theorized. Sometimes this is a consequence of immaturity—the SE may not yet understand their own view well enough to give it idiosyncratic character. But often it is a minoritarian strategy, aimed at generating syncretism with neighboring enclavists. There is a kind of sub-political popular frontism that is often practiced by enclavists who believe they need allies to protect their enclaves. Consider, for instance, the way different Christian denominations in the United States work together to protect their churches from secular liberalism. They can only do this by becoming so ecumenical that their Christian commitment begins to look meaningless. When enclaves are threatened, slopulist enclavism arises in response. It is a symptom of decline, because it involves reducing the level of ambition of enclavist projects for the purposes of saving them from destruction. Opponents of these enclavist projects frequently misrecognize slopulist enclavism as aggressive or threatening, but slopulist enclavism arises precisely because the enclavists are struggling to maintain their projects and have been pushed to the brink.

Particular persons move from one of these modes to another at different points in life. Ironists can become sincere, enclavists can lose their commitment, slopulists can become idiosyncratic, and idiosyncratists can attempt syncretic fusion. But none of these people actualize abstractions at the political level, even if there are periods of time in which some of them are nominally politically reactivated (i.e., they vote in elections, donate to candidates, or even run for and hold office). Even when slopulists win elections and hold state offices, they are then forced to take particular courses of action, which cause their appeal to become increasingly idiosyncratic, reducing its width. Or, to avoid this, they reveal themselves to be insincere about abstractions, draining the support base of its energy and enthusiasm. If slopulist enclavists win elections, they do stuff that upsets too many people. If slopulist ironists win elections, they try to avoid upsetting people and end up doing very little. Prudent politicians change their approach from time to time. But it’s getting very difficult for politicians to be prudent, because a hypermodern context is increasingly difficult to prudently evaluate.

The four types do not ideologically discriminate—they can be found across all tendencies.

Here’s the abstract:

Winston Churchill’s line—that democracy is “the worst form of Government” except all other forms that have been tried—concedes that liberal democracy cannot normatively satisfy us. In the absence of compelling positive arguments, liberals retreat to the Churchill line. But the Churchill line operates by comparing democracy with other, even worse forms of government. In the older embedded democracies, there is no recent direct experience of other forms of government. The Churchill line therefore requires a “specter regime”—a repugnant, yet viable foreign authoritarian regime that can serve as a foil. Without the USSR, it is difficult to find such regimes. Efforts to make China, Russia, and Iran into specter regimes carry enormous costs. But without positive arguments, these costs become hard to avoid.

But here’s the rub—national demoi no longer exist. In modern liberal political theory, the unity of the nation is grounded on the participation of the citizens in labor and exchange. Labor and exchange generate a common moral sensibility, and the state then reflects that moral sensibility. This allows the state to represent the nation even though most of the citizens are only marginally participatory in its politics, particularly when compared with ancient republics. The supranationalization that has occurred since 1945 has not produced a supranational demos, but it has had other effects. Since 1945, it has become much less clear that labor and exchange are sufficient to generate the common moral sensibility that sustains the appearance of a national demos. What’s more, the civil-social organizations that previously helped to supplement labor and exchange now increasingly seem to contribute to the fragmentation of the national demos.

Now it might be argued that national demoi need to be grounded on something that goes beyond labor and exchange. Conservative nationalists often argue that there must be additional civic, linguistic, religious or ethnic criteria. If we need agreement on these further things, then it is even harder to substantiate the existence of a national demos. For our purposes today, I will assume it would be enough to have a common moral sensibility grounded on labor and exchange. This is to the advantage of the nationalists—if a national demos only requires a common moral sensibility, then it can be had even if there is substantial divergence at other levels. My claim is quite strong. I am arguing that even if a national demos requires only a common moral sensibility grounded in shared participation in labor and exchange (and nothing else), it is no longer possible. From the standpoint of Marxism, it might even be said that I am arguing not only that the nation is washed, but that society is washed. By “washed,” I mean that these abstractions are exhausted and no longer functional.

This might sound a little abstract. Here are a few of the concrete reasons I think nationalism doesn’t work anymore:

1. The labor force participation rate has stalled out and begun declining. There is now a large part of the population in rich countries that does not participate in the labor force and which is unemployable, in the sense that employers see nothing to gain from hiring this part of the population. As these people do not participate in labor, they do not fully enter into national common sense. Attempts to force these people back into the labor force are unsuccessful (and often quite seriously inhumane). These people can still participate in exchange through their consumption, contributing price signals to markets, but this consumptive activity does not seem to lead to nationalist commitment.

2. The percentage of the global population that receives university socialization has increased dramatically. The university-socialized population has much weaker national commitment. At the same time, it does not constitute a viable supranational demos. It is too large to sustain national demoi, but too small to be the basis for a supranational demos. There are now attempts underway to reform university systems to produce university-educated people who are more nationalistic in outlook, but there is no reason to believe this will be particularly successful.

3. New technology has created digital subjects who are considerably more atomized and more skeptical of national and religious authorities. This includes many people who have not received university socialization, and its effects are felt particularly strongly by those who are no longer in the labor force. Many of these subjects are extremely online, in the sense that they are more committed to niche fandoms than they are to the nation. These fandoms often involve quite serious interest in other parts of the world that cannot be blithely dismissed. Such interests are not enough to give rise to a supranational demos, but they do weaken national commitment. Digital subjectivity also weakens civil-social organizing, further contributing to the NGO-ification of the third sector (it corporatizes and becomes dependent on donors rather than members).

4. The collapse of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union deprived opponents of liberalism with a credible positive politics. This prevents these critics from posing a credible revolutionary threat. Without this threat, it ceased to be politically necessary to curate a common national culture. Indeed, from the standpoint of many political actors, it became strategic to engage in activity that is divisive and which further fragments the culture. This results in something I call “deep pluralism,” the spread of disagreement into more and more areas of life, resulting in deep disagreements not merely about morality and politics but also about epistemology and aesthetics. It becomes impossible to agree on a common set of facts, and public culture is riven with disgust interactions—everyone is always finding everyone else to be cringe, to be painfully uncool. And yet no one is able to substantiate new shared norms. This has contributed, for instance, to the breakdown in the ability of people all over the world to successfully date one another and reproduce. It also makes a thick national identity impossible for many parts of the population, which become painfully estranged from national symbology.

5. New technology also allows politics to operate with an increasing speed, making it difficult for political events to be processed through a deliberative mode or remembered. It becomes difficult to distinguish which events are meaningful, and even journalists and academics struggle to meaningfully curate events. Often, the news that matters and the news that can be profitably covered have nothing to do with each other. Citizens are made into passive consumers of news entertainment, reducing their epistemic capabilities and making it more difficult for them to form a coherent democratic will. Content creators no longer try to form a coherent democratic will, because this cannot be done and there’s no money in it, anyway. Instead, they contribute to deep pluralism, cultivating niche fanbases.

6. A system of global trade has developed that imposes enormous costs on any political actor who tries to break free from supranational institutions, in the form of increased bond yields, runs on currency, elevated inflation, or elevated unemployment. Attempts by the United States to reconfigure the trade relationship with China via unilateral activity have not been successful, and attempts to exit organizations like the European Union quickly become associated with economic malaise. This not only undermines nationalism, it also undermines attempts to restructure the international system on a national basis. It generates a felt sense that national identity is anachronistic.

So, while it might readily be acknowledged that supranational structures are not democratic in important senses, this does not mean there is a national demos to which we may return. During the period in which supranational structures have been in operation, the national demoi have been considerably fractured and weakened. Moreover, this has happened in and through the process of modernization. The same forces that brought about the appearance of viable national demoi have, over time, destroyed that appearance. The forces we’re talking about—trade, atomization, collapse of retrograde alternative regimes, new technology, the growth of higher education—all of these things are quintessentially modern. We are not in postmodernity, we are in a kind of hypermodernity in which the political and social structures associated with high modernity no longer function.

Hypermodernity cannot be undone or reversed. A way forward would have to be compatible with hypermodern conditions. And, this means, very centrally, deep pluralism—there will be no return to the functional level of homogeneity necessary for national demoi. That means that there will be no return to modern democracy. We are in a period where the term “democracy” can only be used to describe our form of regime if it is reduced to something like “competitive multiparty elections” where “multiparty” means “there are at least two parties that can win, so incumbents fear defeat”. Such a regime has certain negative advantages (you can use the elections to let off steam or to peacefully eject a government that makes very blatant mistakes). But it cannot be used to emancipate people or to promote fairness or justice. It makes it very difficult to build a new international system, because its electoral mechanisms prevent serious, sustained experimentation.

Of course, Tony is right to point out that we do, nonetheless, live in a world of states. These states may not be able to credibly claim to be operating on the basis of the will of national demoi, but they are the preponderant political actors in the world today. This should be grappled with—states should be closely studied, and the no one should imagine that they will just disappear. Indeed, most of the activity that drives change in the world today is still state activity. But this state activity is defined primarily by its limits—by what it cannot do, rather than by what it can do. The most significant events, each year, are the moments that reveal the incapacities of states.

There are several things that can happen when states are unable to act:

1. Social organizations can step in to fill the gap. But these organizations are increasingly NGO-ified, as citizens become atomized and less capable of socially intervening. So, often, they prove insufficient.

2. States can create (or permit others to create) new supranational structures to perform the functions they are unable to perform. But because there is no supranational demos, there is no enthusiasm for further supranationalization, and it proves very difficult to legitimate it. I still think there’s a case for supranationalization that would support the return of local politics, but it’s very difficult to motivate people to support these kinds of proposals, because people understandably suspect that these proposals will be authoritarian, despite sincere reassurances from very educated people.

3. States can attempt to change their internal structures to increase their capacity. They can concentrate power in their executive branches to make it easier to take decisions, or they can centralize power to ensure these decisions are rapidly rolled out across the whole of their territories. But often, national commitment is too weak to support these moves, and states are pushed instead to decentralize power (see, e.g., British PM Andy Burnham’s devolution plans— “Manchesterism”) or accept checks on executive preferences from technocratic central banks, judicial bodies, legislatures, regional or local governments, etc.

4. States can use war to break constraints. For instance, they can reconfigure supply chains it would otherwise be difficult to disrupt, or they can use war to push through procedural reforms that would otherwise face considerable domestic resistance.

5. States can simply fail to act, and the consequences of not doing things can pile up and create a complicated mess, analogous to the mess faced by traditional regimes that were unable to adapt to modernity (e.g., imperial China).

I think we are going to mostly get #5, with a little bit of #4 at the margins (see, e.g., Ukraine, Iran). Right now, I am studying these cases of inaction to sort out how these different approaches might be combined in different areas.

But one thing I am quite sure of at this stage is that, as far as modern democracy goes, the way is shut—there is no possibility that modern democracy will make any kind of comeback. That form of regime is too anachronistic to compete in hypermodernity. Democracy only continues in a pathetic, debilitated form.2

Nationalism is still invoked from time to time, but it appeals to an increasingly narrow niche and takes on the character of something subcultural. Often, expressions of nationalism are now ironic or post-ironic in character. Most of the people who express nationalist sentiments are no longer willing to make major life sacrifices for the sake of the nation, because it is increasingly impossible to sincerely believe (in the way that people did in the 20th century) that the concept of the nation still has meaningful content for which one ought to be willing to fight and die.

For these reasons it is important to states that they find ways to reduce reliance on mass mobilization armies, in favor of a more automated military that can draw upon the minor, idiosyncratic or impoverished parts of the population that can still be persuaded to serve. Manufacturing consent becomes increasingly unnecessary, as the military can operate without the support of increasingly broad sections of the population. It’s for this reason that 20th century theories of the role of the media in legitimating military conflict have become vestigial.

I sympathize with people who hold the kind of position Tony holds. Certainly, it’s very understandable to want there to be a demos at some level or other. But this is gone now—the 21st century will be marked not by the presence of nations or of demoi, but by their absence. It has been one of the central goals of my work to get people to recognize this aspect of our situation and tarry with it. If there is a return to states, it will be a return to states. There won’t be any democratic consolation. We must create a new alternative to modern democracy. If we do not, there will be more war, and we will end up like the Ming.

Building the Beautiful City: The Possibility of Actualizing Plato’s Philosophy at the Level of Politics

In the Republic, Plato describes a “beautiful city” in which philosophers become kings and kings become philosophers. Many readers treat the beautiful city as an impractical fantasy. Often it is alleged that the beautiful city is a pedagogical device, introduced to caution Glaucon against the luxurious life. But what if the beautiful city is something we are actually supposed to attempt to build? Plato himself is said to have gone to Syracuse seeking to persuade a tyrant to take up philosophy. Neoplatonists even attempted to divinize the Roman Empire. How can we make sense of Plato’s political interventions? And how did the Neoplatonists understand their political activity to be meaningfully Platonic? In this talk, Benjamin Studebaker will explore the possibility of taking the beautiful city seriously as the basis for a practical politics. He’ll discuss historical attempts to actualize Plato’s politics, contemporary political readings, and the consequences of a more political interpretation for our understanding of the rest of Plato’s corpus.

1. Eco-Austerity: an ecological turn that affirms that the technological utopias of the New Left are not compatible with the maintenance of life on earth.

2. Essentializing Intraclass Antagonism: a tendency to treat the antagonism between the old and new working classes as an expression of ancient hatreds to do with racism, ethnicity, sexism, religion, or civilizational difference, explaining Old Left residue in these terms.

3. Harm Reduction: rather than attempt to socialize production or emancipate workers from labor, the aim is to reduce the amount of suffering inflicted by global economic competition, even if this means helping workers adapt to neoliberal structures and opposing efforts to transform or overcome these same structures.

4. Populism: acknowledging the problems with prior left organizational modes, a commitment to a politics built around elite discourse mages who create alliances and coalitions through the clever use of floating signifiers. These signifiers are conceptualized through a mix of individualized charisma and bureaucratized social science.

5. The Technocratic International: fearing postliberal efforts to revive the nation-state and believing there is no alternative to structures like the European Union and the World Trade Organization, a reflexive tendency to defend these structures whenever they are challenged, to oppose them in rhetoric while defending them in practice.

6. Mandatory Agency: an insistence that everyone be regarded as a responsible agent, that all social problems must be treated as having been caused by responsible agents, and that identifying the blameworthy agents and blaming them is constructive activity.

Now, the “hard” neoleft is degrowth, but the “soft” neoleft recognizes that to do harm reduction within the framework of liberal democracy, you must be able to win elections. Winning elections requires growth, so harm reduction implies not degrowth, but a reduction in the harmfulness of growth. It generates a sustainability politics.

Ed Miliband is soft neoleft. His aim is to generate growth by accelerating the development of green energy technology. The plan is to make energy expensive in the UK. When you drive up the cost of something, you create an incentive to invest in making that thing cheaper. If you use the power of the state to block fossil fuel investment (e.g., North Sea drilling) while simultaneously encouraging green investment, you create a situation where private firms face heavy incentives to invest in the green transition. The state can top this up with its own investment, but the aim is to get the private sector to do the bulk of the work, by punishing the private sector with expensive energy until the private sector solves the problem.

The punishment is the process, because it creates a situation in which the UK develops competitive green technology many years earlier than other states. It can then export this technology abroad, stifling the development of competing green industry. This is meant to facilitate UK economic growth and give the UK a clear role to play in the global economy. The state effectively forces the private sector to pay for climate change adaptation ahead of time. It provokes the private sector into accelerating the investment timeline, and then it uses the resultant technology to secure a competitive advantage. In the long-run, the private sector can benefit from this, but only in the long-run, after it submits to the state’s injunctions.

The soft neoleft strategy is opposed by the neoliberal Blairites, who believe that the UK should instead focus on creating a business-friendly environment for tech companies, particularly those focused on artificial intelligence, and especially on those that use artificial intelligence for defense applications. The Blairites want to attract firms like Palantir and Anduril. They want the UK to become the NATO hub for American military technology. This seems to require making energy cheap right away, so that data centers are not expensive to operate.

Both the neoleft and the Blairites are interested in returning to the EU, but each thinks the UK needs to develop something it can contribute to Europe so as to secure favorable terms of re-entry. The neoleft envisions a powerful green sector that can assist Europe with the green transition, while the Blairites want Britain to lead in AI and military so that Britain can assist in European rearmament and internet regulation.

Both the neoleft and the Blairites take it for granted that the UK cannot recommit to the welfare state or to the NHS, because growth requires tax rates that are too low to finance this recommitment. The neoleft wants to make cuts as slowly and as rarely as possible, while the neoliberals believe in reducing the fiscal load on the state so as to facilitate tax cuts. Hence there is a shared commitment to the “austerity” part of “eco-austerity,” but since the neoleft pursues neoliberal policies for leftist reasons, it prefers a slower pace and intensity.

Starmer attempted to lead a government that had the support of both the neoleft and neoliberal factions. To do this, he tried to pursue the green transition and AI rearmament concurrently. But over the course of the last year, the tensions between these factions have grown too severe to contain. Starmer insisted that he was needed for popular front reasons—Labour must stay united to defeat Reform or to keep out potentially resurgent Tories. But the neoleft and the neoliberals both believed that Starmer’s compromise was rudderless, that it would not produce sufficiently robust growth to ensure electoral competitiveness in 2029. Therefore, there must be a change not merely in leadership but in the orientation of the government. Andy Burnham is expected to make a choice, one way or the other.

The choice has crystallized in the question of whether to make Ed Miliband chancellor. If Ed Miliband is the chancellor, the Labour government will be neoleft, and if he is not the chancellor, the Labour government will probably be neoliberal. If it is neoliberal, this will be confirmed through the explicit abandonment of the net zero pledge and/or a return to North Sea drilling. It’s also possible that Andy Burnham will try to have it both ways, imagining that he can salvage Starmerism through populist rhetoric. This would involve making someone else chancellor and then quietly allowing Ed Miliband to continue influencing policy behind the scenes. A cabinet source recently claimed that this is what Starmerism involved in practice. But this source seems to be pro-Reeves. I imagine Miliband believes he could do much more from no. 11 than he can presently do as energy secretary. It was for this reason that Miliband participated in Starmer’s ousting.

The Aesthetic of the Future

I think there will also be an aesthetic dimension to this. We are swiftly approaching the 20-year anniversary of the global economic crisis of 2008. Nostalgia goes in something like 20-year cycles. During the 2010s, there was nostalgia for the 1990s, often expressed at the level of a kind of retrofuturism around the emergence of the internet. There was vaporwave music, and there were attempts to use the internet as an emancipatory political technology, motivated by 1990s utopian thinking about the power of the digital. During the 2020s, we have seen nostalgia for the 2000s—the canonization of the Shrek films, the rehabilitation of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, the resumption of war in the Middle East. As we approach 2030, there will be an attempt to render the post-2008 period one of nostalgia. This will be difficult, because the post-2008 period is clearly worse, in so many respects, than the 1990s and 2000s. However, it will be facilitated by the many ways in which things got even worse in the 2020s (COVID, Ukraine, Iran). So, this will be a nostalgia for a period that is aware of its own decline but exists at an earlier point in the decline process. Such a nostalgia will emphasize the unstoppable character of the decline, its relentlessness, while still championing the relative freedom of the period in comparison with now.

I contend that we have already begun to see what this nostalgia looks like, in the form of TikTok edits that take pop songs from 20 years ago and make them both dark and euphoric through the addition of hardstyle elements. The neoleft/neoliberal valence is especially evident when the pop song was originally produced by Katy Perry, because today she is literally dating Justin Trudeau, the former Liberal prime minister of Canada. There is a YouTube channel called LXMINAL that has already produced one of these:

“Hot N Cold” came out in 2008. Right now, Andy Burnham is “Hot N Cold” about making Ed Miliband chancellor. But if he can choose between neoleftism and neoliberalism, either decision will enable his government to constitute the “Teenage Dream,” the “Firework”. It will relentlessly preside over the decline, as human possibilities are further reduced in the name of harm reduction. This would be a kind of Eurocore, the relentless pounding of neoliberalism past the point at which it has lost its appeal at the level of ideology. The viewer is invited to revel in the state’s independence from all social units, including its own political class, which is rendered mere lubricant. One is offered the possibility of identifying with the state against a kind of social void, one into which even so-called elites are cast. Dark Brandon anticipated what is to come. This is the aesthetic of Hobbes’ state.

As we approach the 2029 UK general election, a neoleft or neoliberal Labour government will face parties that seek to Americanise the UK at the level of its public culture—Reform, Restore, the Greens. These parties not only advocate neoliberalisation at the level of the economy, they wish to expunge the decaying British establishment from public life, to make the UK into an overtly slopulist provincial dump. Even just a point or two of GDP growth will be precious to the British state in its effort to protect itself from the barbarity of its own populace. Its victory need not come in the form of an electoral win for the Labour Party—it could also come about through the revival of the Conservatives. But whichever form it takes, I suspect Katy Perry will have a role to play.

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.

Ever since Hillary Clinton said this, I have tried very hard not to have a basket of deplorables of my very own. This is remarkably difficult. There is a strong human tendency to create a basket of deplorables. The basket of deplorables emerges when we try to explain our own impotence in a way that makes us feel good about it. The people who go into the basket are inferior scapegoats. We think we are better than them, but we also think they are able to obstruct us. They obstruct us not through their quality, but through their inferiority. Their capacity is a form of incapacity.

Hillary Clinton wanted to be president. From her point of view, the deplorables are worse people, they are spiritually inferior, but this weakness enabled them to frustrate her. So, their weakness is their strength, and she can condemn them as both weak and strong at one and the same time. This lets her have it both ways—she is beyond their weakness and yet she is also a victim of their strength.

The basket of deplorables is a response to castration—Hillary Clinton could not make the electorate vote for her. In the face of the electorate, she was a dependent supplicant. She copes with this dependence by denigrating that which refuses to follow her lead. This denigration only makes those cast into the basket even more recalcitrant. They recognize her contempt not merely as contempt, but as a sign of her impotence—for if she was strong, she would not carry on in this way. But even though constructing a basket of deplorables is politically counterproductive, it makes Hillary Clinton feel better about herself. If she fails, she fails only because she is obstructed by the inferiority of that which is inferior.

Many people are able to see that it is wrong to create a basket of deplorables, but they respond by creating a basket of deplorables that contains those who create baskets of deplorables. This is what Hillary Clinton herself did. Who is in her basket of deplorables? People who have baskets of deplorables! They’re “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” i.e., they blame various inferior scapegoats for their own impotence. But she responded not by overcoming the conditions that give rise to their impotence, but by casting the impotent into a basket of deplorables of her very own. In this way, she attempted to raise her impotence above theirs, to ascend what I today name the “ladder of castration.”

So far, we have two rungs of castration:

1. Those who blame out-groups (i.e., the “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic”)

2. Those who blame those who blame out-groups (e.g., Hillary Clinton)

In class terms, we might put it this way:

1. The proletarians blame the lumpenproletariat for their own impotence (first-order basket-weavers)

2. The professionals blame the proletarians who blame the lumpenproletariat for their own impotence (second-order basket-weavers).

Now, I quickly noticed that, in my milieu, there emerged a third rung of castration. This consisted of those who blamed the “PMC” or the “symbolic capitalists” for blaming the proletariat for blaming the lumpenproletariat. These people created a basket of deplorables consisting of those who create baskets of deplorables containing those who create baskets of deplorables. They are third-order basket-weavers. For them, the woke liberals become the inferior scapegoat:

3. The petty bourgeois intellectuals blame the professionals who blame the proletarians who blame the lumpenproletariat for their own impotence (third-order basket-weavers).

Now, once I could see #3, there was a possibility of attempting to move into the fourth-order. This is an esoteric position, where you fancy yourself to be an aristos who has transcended modern society, who can see modernity for what it really is. Of course, there are very few people who could even plausibly claim to be in this position. Such people would have no possibility of making any largescale intervention. But they can cope with this by casting the petty bourgeois intellectuals into the basket of deplorables. The would-be aristoi can claim that if the petty bourgeois intellectuals were not so inferior, then it would be possible to create the kinds of educational institutions that could produce professionals who could cooperate with proletarians, even those proletarians who make the honest mistake of scapegoating the lumpenproletariat. This would give us a basket of deplorables consisting of those who create baskets of deplorables containing those who create baskets of deplorables for those who create baskets of deplorables:

4. The would-be aristoi blame the petty bourgeois intellectuals who blame the professionals who blame the proletarians who blame the lumpenproletariat for their own impotence (fourth-order basket-weavers).

This is a kind of hell. But I know a way out of hell—political despair.

When you go into political despair, you accept not just your own impotence, but the impotence of all layers of society. If all social layers are impotent, then the creation of baskets of deplorables is not an obstacle to our getting things done, it is a symptom of the universal impotence that, in modernity, comes to afflict all beings. We all, in moments where we feel this impotence in an acute way, have a tendency to react with basket-weaving. It takes incredible fortitude to refrain from this behavior. And, because all social layers are impotent, there is no political reward for refraining from basket-weaving. Developing the virtue of fortitude by organizing your life so that you are able to imitate the Good might enable you to sustainably desist from basket-weaving, but even this does not give you the ability to act politically with others, because our society is not structured in a manner that permits any social unit to overcome the basket-weaving tendency as a unit. It can only be done idiosyncratically, by individuals who enjoy fortuitous—and often ephemeral—material conditions.

So, it is possible to get off the ladder of castration. But getting off the ladder has no pragmatic benefit, because it does not, in itself, unlock politics. It is something that one can only be motivated to do for purely spiritual reasons. You have to be committed to the Good for its own sake, with no expectation of power, status, or financial reward. Indeed, in many cases, the decision to get off the ladder will be punished with a loss of social status and a loss of economic opportunities.

The only immediate benefit to getting off the ladder is that it allows you to see the world a bit more clearly. But since we remain unable to do politics, this clearer picture cannot be operationalized by us. Acquiring a clearer picture therefore underlines our own impotence, increasing the desire for a basket. I think it is for this reason that many of the people I have associated with over the years have ascended into a higher level of basket-weaving. In providing a clearer picture, my work often endangers people, spiritually. It is for this reason that I discourage people who are struggling in their personal lives from reading my work. The kind of despair I advocate is positive, in the sense that it clears away illusions and allows for the world to be looked at anew. But there are many people who need illusions to manage, because their experience of the world is too painful. These people are not to blame for the fact that the world is painful. They have not made the world painful through spiritual inferiority. They are just like the best of us, only they have encountered marginally more difficult conditions. I consider them to be the “distressed left.”

Elite theories arose when it became evident that the working class was not capable of doing politics. I regard them as an attempt to preserve the possibility of politics in the aftermath of this collapse. They involve positing an alternative social unit that is able to do politics. There are all sorts of candidates—the oligarchs, the professionals, the middle class, the students, the new social movements, et cetera.

Elite theories operate from the premise that politics still occurs, so someone must be doing it. The task of the theorist is to figure out how to best describe the social unit that does the politics that must somehow still be going on. But there is another possibility—politics itself may no longer occur, or its form may have changed, such that it is no longer appropriate to speak in this way.

To sort out the degree to which it is still appropriate to speak of politics as something that social units do, we need to have an operational understanding of what it means to be able to do politics. So, for our purposes today, let me suggest that politics involves three things.

First, there must be common abstractions about which there is intractable disagreement. We don’t agree about what these abstractions mean, but we can nonetheless cooperate with people on the basis of a shared commitment to them. In this way, we have an agreement that contains disagreement. And this agreement can only be had in and through the disagreement—if we try to abolish the disagreement, we can only do this by abolishing the agreement, too. Once we adopt concepts that exclude others outright, it becomes impossible to do politics with those who have been excluded. Their ideals become strange to us, and the possibility of hostility emerges. , if we insist on full agreement as a prerequisite for cooperative activity, our cooperation is not political in character. It remains limited to the terrain of the social.

Second, there must be deliberative institutions through which this disagreement can be processed. In any given situation, we have to decide how to operationalize our shared abstractions. But since we understand the abstractions differently, this operationalization will generate acrimony. The deliberation is not for the purposes of avoiding this acrimony, it is itself an acrimonious form of processing, in which the deliberants hear each other out and attempt to find a good way forward together.

The processing does not end in agreement. So, politics requires a third thing, a closure mechanism capable of ending the deliberation and issuing a decision. Unlike a social consensus or contract, political decisions bind even those who have not been convinced. Political decisions are not merely compromises or exchanges—a political decision makes an imposition. It generates reasonable resentment on the part of those who have not been persuaded. But the bearers of resentment nonetheless submit to the decision. Why do they submit? Perhaps they recognize that the political system is committed to their abstractions, even though it has interpreted them differently in this instance. Or perhaps they see no compelling alternative to the political system that they are capable of realizing. Either way, political decisions bind the recalcitrant. In this way, politics allows for decisions to be taken with a lower level of agreement than is required for social action. So, politics is a technology that expands our capacity for action. It is not military action, which involves the use of violence to overcome hostile opposition. Nor is it social activity, which operates by agreement and by exchange.

Now, critically, politics is also different from administration. Administration is not deliberative. Administration solves the problem of disagreement by creating a chain of individuals, each of whom has defined powers to advance, reject, or demand revisions to whatever is put before them. Sometimes an administrator’s decision can be appealed, but there is no possibility of having a deliberation with an administrator. Attempts to deliberate with administrators are socially awkward, they involve a misrecognition of the kind of activity in which one is engaged. It is also unclear whether administrators share common abstractions with those who are subject to their decisions. So, administrative decisions often appear opaque. They can be issued with no explanation. You apply for something, you get rejected, you don’t understand why, you demand feedback, you don’t get any. Indeed, in demanding feedback, you are being a Karen, asking for something to which you are not entitled. If you don’t like the decision, make an appeal through the proper channels. If there is no appeals process, then that’s it, it’s over. When you approach an administrator it is as a supplicant, not a citizen.

Elite theories conflate hostile activity, social activity, or administrative activity with politics. They claim that politics involves distinguishing between friend and enemy, making compromises and exchanges, or the administration of people. Marxism itself can become an elite theory, in so far as Marxists claim that the working class is doing politics when it is doing other things. In an important sense, an elite might be considered to be one who is capable of doing politics, and so to attribute political capacity to a social unit is to attribute eliteness to that unit.

The contemporary left conducts discussions among people who do not share common abstractions or do not have an effective closure mechanism. These discussions are misconstrued as deliberations. The organizations that hold these discussions are talking shops, not political organizations. The people who participate in them are not elites.

So, am I saying that politics does not occur at all today? No, I think it does happen. But I do not think elites are the principal political actors. Politics does not occur primarily among or within social units. It occurs among corporate persons.

An elite is a particular person. A corporate person is a person-by-fiction. Corporate persons are brought into being through the activity of particular people, but they are not reducible to the particular people who personate them. The personators are administrators, they have specific legal powers they gain through the occupying of offices they obtain through supplication. They receive these powers only in so far as they use them on behalf of the corporate entity that they personate. If they misuse these powers, they will be disciplined or terminated. Sometimes the personators come to identify with the entities they personate. This identification makes them feel as if corporate actions are their own actions. Very often, corporate actors insist that they are ones doing the things they are doing. And, if you haven’t thought about it very hard, it will seem as if this is true. If you simply use your eyes and ears, it will look and sound like they are indeed doing the things they are doing, that they are the elites, and that they are doing politics. But these people are only able to play the roles they play because they have conformed to the administrative incentive structure that distributes roles. Their identification with the roles they have submitted to is a palliative they use to protect themselves from the reality that, in accepting these corporate roles, they have become instruments of an impersonal power structure. They do not choose their own abstractions, deliberate about how to operationalize their abstractions, and act on the basis of these deliberations.

Have you ever seen Avatar: The Last Airbender? Do you remember Koh, the Face-Stealer? Koh is a spirit that wears the faces of particular people. It looks like those people are talking, but they can only speak on behalf of Koh. If you show emotion around Koh, if you become afraid, then he will steal your face. In Avatar, you can survive without a face, but you are caught between life and death, and this condition can persist for a long time. This is what happens to people who personate corporate entities. They are not elites, they are not ruling. They succumb to fear and make supplications to corporate entities. Because they succumb to fear, they are reduced to doing nothing other than enabling Koh to speak. And yet, their faces do all the talking and acting, and without their fear, Koh would be unable to speak through them. Elite theorists are deceived by faces. They don’t see Koh. Often, they do not even remember that Koh is there.

Corporate persons are really different from particular persons. The purpose of a corporate entity is not the subject of deliberation, it is stipulated in its charter. The structure of a corporate entity is prefigured in the law. It is not open to political revision. The laws that create corporations may have been instantiated through political action at some point in the past, but the purpose of these political acts was to depoliticize decision-making, to instantiate an impersonal, non-political mechanism that can issue decisions that previously would have been made through a social or political process. The citizens who made these decisions created the corporate persons as tools, as instruments for achieving their ends. In this sense, corporate persons may have been created by elites. But once they were brought into being, even very prestigious, high-income corporate roles came to be performed by supplicants.

It might even be said that corporations are a kind of artificial intelligence, a way of making decisions by a process that no particular person can properly identify with.2 In and through corporations, law is elevated above politics, and we get what is commonly called the “rule of law.” But the rule of law is not the rule of man—man can rule through the use of tools, but man cannot rule as a supplicant to his own tools.

The tools, however, can have a politics of their own. Corporate persons can do politics with each other. Indeed, corporate persons can, through politics, make themselves into supplicants to an even higher form of administration. This is how the United States was made. A set of corporate persons came together and, through politics, made a second-order corporate person. This compound corporation has gradually centralized administrative affairs. It turns first-order corporate persons into supplicants, in much the same way those corporate persons made supplicants out of particular persons. After the United States was made, we heard endless complaints about “sovereignty” and “states’ rights”, which were the complaints not of particular people but of the first-order corporate persons against the second-order.

Marxists misrecognize this process as the subordination of the social to politics and of the social classes to the Bonapartist state. Post-Marxists identify the state as the province of an elite class of one kind or another. But what we are really talking about here is first the subordination of politics to administration and then of administration to itself. This subordination was articulated more than 200 years before Marx wrote The 18^th Brumaire by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. There, Hobbes argues that, for the sake of a common abstraction—peace—we should create a corporate entity, the modern state, that administers formerly political affairs. Modern political thought is the attempt to preserve, in some sense or other, the possibility of reasserting the political against Hobbes’ machine. It is in this sense that elite theories fail to be instances of modern political thought—they fail to recognize the corporate character of modernity, attributing political capacities to social units that do not possess them. In so far as Marxism itself engages in this behavior, it regresses into that which it condemns.

We need to grasp what is new about now. After World War II, the United States joined together with other large compound corporations to create a set of international administrative institutions, such as the IMF and the WTO. These third-order corporate persons now make decisions that bind even second-order corporate persons. And the second-order corporate persons, who made the third-order corporations to serve as tools, are now expected to behave as supplicants before their own instruments.

If there is any possibility of the reemergence of politics by social units, it will come in and through a crisis of corporate personation. This crisis is best understood as a legitimacy crisis—a crisis in which corporate persons increasingly struggle to make decisions that successfully bind those subject to them. It is too hastily assumed that the audience for legitimation must consist of particular persons or social units. In some cases, legitimation crises are administrative all the way down. To grasp this dynamic, it is necessary to be able think in terms of corporate units. This involves a recognition that lamenting the need for a concept without changing the conditions that give rise to it accomplishes nothing. What is needed is not lamentations, it is a change in conditions such that the concepts can be overcome. We live in a time where there is no latent social unit that can politically assert itself. An insistence on the primacy of social concepts fails to tarry with this situation and constitutes a form of reaction. In so far as politics still occurs, it is obscure, not because it is done by elites in secret island hideaways, but because it is done by what are very appropriately called “political actors”—those who personate, who make by fiction that which acts in and through them.

For let me remind you: This is more than Consent, or Concord; it is a real Unity of all, in one and the same Person. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak less reverently, of Koh the Face-Stealer. For, through the faces given to Koh by every particular person, Koh comes to have the use of so much power and strength that Koh is able to strike terror into the hearts of all particular persons.3 This pervasive fear allows Koh even to form the wills of the particular persons, to create subjects who are dependent on the administrative mode, who are not just depoliticized but desocialized, too.

If you would seek to overcome Koh, you must not only create conditions in which it is possible to regain social and political capacities. You must even create conditions in which it is possible to show no fear. Corporate persons were invented to protect us from fear. So, a possibility of overcoming corporate personation cannot be generated through forms of naïve anti-statism, which plunge us back into the condition of fear that presses us to turn over our faces to Koh. Rather than negate or avoid Koh, you must find a way to create a form of life that enables you to do what Avatar Aang does in “The Siege of the North Part 2.” There, Aang purposefully seeks out Koh and engages with him. Because Aang does not show fear, Koh is unable to steal his face, and Aang is even able to learn something valuable from the encounter. You too can learn something from states, if you can discover a way to look at them without fear.

https://isonomiaquarterly.com/archive/volume-4-issue-2/trade-wars-are-social-wars-uniting-the-united-states-and-its-allies-through-conflict/

In other news, the paperback edition of Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies is now available for under $25 (under £20). You can get it from the publisher here or on Amazon here.

Blair’s Position

Tony Blair is concerned that the Starmer government is not doing enough to promote economic growth. In Blair’s piece, he asks:

Are we really prioritising economic growth, essential not just for prosperity but for social justice, if there is a slew of policies we’re implementing which might restrict it? Does our economy need right now the goal of clean energy or cheap energy? How do we justify adding to the welfare bill when it is already ballooning, taxes are high and getting higher, and we’re told we have to increase defence spending to prepare for the possibility of war?

The “slew” immediately begins to become concrete—it consists of the net zero pledge, welfare spending, high rates of taxation, and defence spending. For Blair, Britain can prioritize economic growth, but it can’t do this while doing all four of these things.

This suite of things is being pursued in a situation that has changed, for Blair, in two concrete ways:

1. Geopolitics—“America’s superpower status is now shared by China, in time to be joined by India”

2. Technology—“developments in artificial intelligence, which will change everything”

For Blair, the geopolitical change mandates that Britain maintain close ties to the United States, and that means Britain will have to spend on defense:

For the American relationship, that means building defence capability and being prepared politically to argue for the alliance even when controversial, of which Iran is the latest example.

So, Britain must prioritize both growth and defense, which is going to leave less room for net zero, welfare spending, and high tax rates.

The next move is to say that the EU is failing to take advantage of the technology opportunity—it is uncompetitive on AI. Outside the EU, Britain can make itself attractive to American tech companies. And, if the UK begins the process of coming back to the EU immediately, it can push the EU to be friendlier to those same companies:

if we negotiate from strength and begin the process of dialogue now with the EU, we are better placed to influence the direction of European policy, including on technology.

To be pro-American tech, Blair thinks it’s necessary to drop specific manifesto commitments: “the new workers’-rights laws; the net-zero acceleration and phasing out of the British oil and gas industry; the uplift in the minimum wage beyond inflation; and the non-dom changes.” He then says that, “to compound the problem, we chose a rise in National Insurance not VAT to plug the fiscal gap in the first Budget,” that this undermined “business confidence” and that the budget made it appear “as if we were increasing tax to pay for additional welfare spending, when the public already thinks welfare bills are too high.”

Blair then makes a sequence of suggestions, including “prioritising cheaper energy and electrification over net zero and use what is left of our North Sea oil and gas resources”, “a plan for fundamental reform, over time, of welfare” (including cutting disability benefits, pension reform, and “whole-system health-care reform”), and “a Reimagined State in which taxes and spending can be lower, productivity higher and government seen as enabling not directing, with political consensus behind such a radical restructuring of the state”.

So, Blair’s priorities are growth via AI and defense spending, and he thinks this requires that Labour abandon its commitments on net zero, welfare, and tax. And note the order and the intensity of the condemnations—Blair is most keen to abandon net zero, he thinks welfare reform must be done “over time” and taxes should be lowered “in the long term”. So, for Blair, Britain should concede on net zero now, make a plan to concede on welfare and healthcare in the medium-term, with an aim to eventually lower tax rates down the line.

Starmer’s Position

Starmer agrees with Blair about the United States and about the importance of defense spending:

the current President’s central demand of Europe – that we take more responsibility for our own defence – is not unique to him. It was the position of America before he was President and it will be the position of America after he ceases to be President. There is a good reason for this. It is right: it is long past time for Europe to strengthen its hard power and Britain must play a leading role. That is why we are introducing the highest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War.

The only difference here is on Iran—Starmer doesn’t think support for the Iran War is necessary to maintain the relationship with the United States.

Starmer also agrees with Blair about the importance of partnering with the tech sector to achieve growth. But whereas Blair thinks that the UK needs to give on net zero, welfare, and tax, Starmer thinks that the UK is already succeeding in attracting AI-driven growth:

far from being left behind on artificial intelligence, Britain is at the front of the pack. This isn’t rhetoric. Britain is widely recognised by the leading lights of that sector as being a growing and sovereign AI player. No less an authority than Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, has said we are on the cusp of becoming an AI superpower. Investment is flowing into the country and not just into London, also into building datacentres in places like Loughton in Essex, Blyth in Northumberland, and former industrial sites on the Castleford side of Leeds. It is improving our public services, particularly the NHS. And as we build this future, we are taking measures that strengthen our sovereignty; making sure we are an AI rule-maker, not a rule-taker.

Starmer acknowledges the possibility that it might be necessary to make more concessions to keep this growth going. And this is where it gets really interesting:

Is there more to do? Yes. Much, much more. Is our welfare system in need of reform? Yes. Is our economy in need of even more growth? Definitely. Do we need bolder policies on everything from the European Union, to protecting our children online, and the difference we can make now in preparation for higher global energy prices in the winter? Yes, and that is all coming.

Of the three major issues Blair mentions—net zero, welfare, and tax—Starmer only mentions one on which he would make further changes. Welfare. If a concession is needed it will be on welfare. The net zero commitment and the existing tax system are to be protected, for the time being.

A Neoliberal-Neoleft Debate

So, in British politics, there is agreement about the need to draw closer to the United States, with more defense spending and a more favorable environment for tech companies. The disagreement is about how much must be conceded to achieve these things and how to prioritize the areas of potential concession. For Starmer, the way to keep the left on board with neoliberal reforms is to stick with the net zero pledge. The net zero pledge will play the role of making the Labour government seem radical. It is his strategy for incorporating the neoleft, for preventing defections to the slopulist Green Party.

For Blair, the radicality should come from the neoliberal reforms themselves, which should be openly championed in public. Rather than worry about the Greens, Labour should worry about the right, which will take up the growth mantle if Labour does not.

Neither side is committed to protecting the welfare system. There is no fight from Starmer on benefits, pensions, or the NHS. All of that is treated by both deliberants as dead weight. And so, as Labour considers a leadership contest, it is increasingly clear that this contest will be about net zero rather than about the fate of the NHS or the triple-lock. People on the left will be invited to care about net zero rather than these things and to accept, at most, a win on net zero as adequate evidence of Labour’s leftist bona fides. In retaining net zero, the Labour Party will claim to have seen off Blairism. And if it ultimately gives on net zero, this will be because the party’s grand old man was proven right after all.

I anticipate something very similar will happen in the Democratic Party in 2028. All of the demands of the Berniecrats will be abandoned apart from the Green New Deal, which will become the central campaign object. Democratic Party politicians will be asked about their positions on AI data centers and on the regulation of big tech, and there will be nothing about healthcare. Indeed, if there are any reforms made to the welfare system, it will be in the direction of further cuts. As this happens, the neoleft will claim not only that this does not constitute a defeat, but that it ought to be regarded as a victory. Yet the workers, who will be squeezed both by higher energy prices and by the spread of the LLMs, will only grow more miserable and wretched. Their political and social capacities will only be further diminished.

1. In so far as the working class still existed, it had become substantially less interested in socialism.

2. In so far as interest in socialism still existed, it seemed to be coming from the new social movements, rather than the working class.

3. By 1985, the repeated electoral victories of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the “austerity turn” of François Mitterand had clearly illustrated the political limits of the labor movement, even as a mere vehicle for electing democratic socialists or social democrats.

In the 1970s, the first two phenomena were observable in seed form. But the major defeat suffered by George McGovern in 1972 put off, for more than a decade, the idea that a viable political movement could be built around an alliance of educated people with marginalized groups. The door could only be reopened once other approaches had repeatedly failed.

In the hands of Laclau and Mouffe, the aim of left populism is still socialism. But the experience of the late 1970s and early 1980s has taught that socialism cannot be achieved principally by appealing to the material interests of the working class. There is, therefore, a need for a kind of discourse management that can construct the sort of alliance that will not arise through the social use of democratic reason. This discourse management involves the use of floating signifiers, abstractions with unspecified content. By leaving the content of the signifier unspecified, each citizen who encounters the signifier can fill it with whatever they like. Values, such as “emancipation” and “equity” can be floating signifiers. So too can individuals—the leader of a left populist movement must be many things to many people. The messaging of the left populist leader is produced by educated elites, who use social science techniques to study the voters and grasp what moves them. In this way, left populism creates a role for the “scholar-activist” whose research is politically engaged, and whose political engagement is scientific.

The idea that management is necessary to produce socialism does not originate with Laclau and Mouffe. It’s in Habermas’ Legitimation Crisis, which came out in 1973. But for Habermas, the function of the management is to produce a felt contradiction between the promise of democracy and the reality of post-war Keynesian economic managerialism. That felt contradiction then leads to demands for substantive democratization, which are meant to ultimately overcome the managerialism through which they were produced. By contrast, for Laclau and Mouffe, socialism must be directly produced through the management of the discussion. The form socialism takes must therefore be compatible with the managerial method by which it is to be pursued. Left populism is therefore much more overtly nationalist than Habermasian constitutional patriotism, because left populism operates on the premise that the nation-state is a permanent feature rather than something that is to be eventually subsumed into a post-national project. It is for this reason that left populism is sometimes described pejoratively as a kind of Stalinism—it has the overtly national horizons consistent with its managerial form.

Now, as it happened, the people who were the most successful in using the left populist strategy were not the socialists for whom it was designed. Instead, the centrists of the third-way had the most success with it. They had the money to pay the social scientists, and they had no qualms about influencing the workers from above. Rather than speak in terms of emancipation or equity, they frequently spoke in terms of hope, change, or the future. Leaders such as Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and François Hollande all used these techniques far more effectively than the socialists for whom they were designed. And, as these figures used these techniques to persuade voters to allow them to pursue neoliberal structural reforms, socialists who attempted to use the same techniques became associated with the same substantive politics.

After 2008, socialists attempted to reclaim left populism from the neoliberal center. But this was made difficult in part by the very techniques of left populism. When leaders position themselves as floating signifiers, it becomes difficult to adjudicate what particular politicians really believe. And, because the left populist techniques are used to bring people who are not interested in socialism into socialist movements, it becomes easy to turn significant parts of a left populist base against a socialist candidate who offends against the pet causes of particular marginalized constituencies. So, in the 2010s, socialists struggled to take control of the left populist apparatus, and even in so far as they did gain control, their hold was precarious and easily challenged by new iterations of the liberal centrism they hoped to overcome.

By 2020, the socialist attempts had not only failed, they had resulted in purges. The socialists within the left populist parties were driven out. By 2024, Kamala Harris and Keir Starmer were both deploying the techniques of left populism on behalf of liberal centrism once again. Consider, for instance, Harris’ extensive deployment of freedom as a floating signifier:

However, by this point, large parts of the public have become inured to these techniques, because they have been deployed so many times without producing much in the way of tangible benefits. Political leaders who use populist techniques struggle to achieve high favorability ratings or to maintain them for any great length of time. The honeymoons grow ever shorter, as increasingly cynical voters turn against those they take to be deceivers with ever greater speed.

So, in the UK, Keir Starmer now has an incredibly poor approval rating. But this has not created an opportunity for socialists in Britain. There are no longer any significant number of socialists in the Labour Party, so there is no possibility of capturing the party. The demise of Starmer therefore compels the British left to create alternative party forms. These alternatives all take up left populism, but place it in different roles.

The Workers Party of Britain

George Galloway’s party attempts to remain committed to the working class at the level of language, while strategically deploying left populism in a bid to win over marginalized demographics, particularly Muslim immigrants. However, at this point, many British workers have objections to immigration from the Islamic world. And, because Galloway eschews conventional identity politics, there are many other interest groups for whom he’s persona non grata. And, because the Workers Party remains a populist endeavour, it can only go as far as its leader’s reputation permits. Galloway is not particularly good at being a floating signifier, because he has too many idiosyncratic positions that he takes too consistently to wave away. So, a populism based around Galloway cannot grow to a competitive size.

Your Party

Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana attempted to make a party that could be led democratically by its members. The problem is that young members have been politically educated by decades of left populism to follow leaders who operate as floating signifiers. These members have not been taught the political virtues necessary to take prudent political decisions. When leftists constituted by left populism get an opportunity to deliberate about what to do, they ultimately decide to adopt left populist rhetorical modes. This results in a kind of left populism that is guided not by social science, but by the underdeveloped opinions of the confused offspring of managerialism. Consider, for instance, the party’s name—the name “Your Party” has no substantive content and is clearly a floating signifier. The members of Your Party demanded that Your Party be populist, and so, despite the attempt to adopt a bottom-up procedural structure, Your Party quickly collapsed into disputes over whether Corbyn or Sultana ought to be regarded as its symbolic figurehead. Because Your Party was, from the start, deeply confused about what it is on a quite fundamental level, it immediately descended into farce and now polls at zero. A similar fate awaits anyone who tries to pretend populism did not happen, who imagines that young people can simply hop into the saddle when they have never been taught how to ride.

The Green Party

Unlike the Workers Party and Your Party, the Green Party does not make a pretense of being socialist or belonging to the workers or to the people. Its campaign materials use floating signifiers that directly reference those of Barack Obama—“hope” and “change”. Its leader, Zack Polanski, is a former supporter of the Liberal Democrats who backed tuition fee hikes and accused Jeremy Corbyn of tolerating antisemitism in the Labour Party in the late 2010s. Its policies are vaguely enumerated and, in so far as they have been specified, make no plan to emancipate Britain from the bond markets that have scuppered experiments of every kind over the past fifty years. When Corbyn was leading the Labour Party, there were at least talks of monetary experiments—such as People’s Quantitative Easing—that were marginally plausible in the post-2008 era, when interest rates were stuck near zero and government borrowing costs were at historic lows. Today, the politics around spending are shaped by supply chain disruptions (COVID, Ukraine, Iran) that have resulted in substantially higher rates, greatly reducing the scope for national experiments. Yet, because left populism is grounded on the hope that meaningful national experimentation remains possible, this new political environment is never acknowledged. Instead, we get even less rigor with regard to the policy discussion than was customary during the 2010s. The result is a kind of populism that can, in practice, only be in the service of the sort of policies that would have been attractive to the Liberal Democrats in the era of Nick Clegg.

This neoleft populism is not merely post-Marxist, it is now post-socialist, too.2 It’s a kind of slopulism, and it is only attractive to very young people who have been systematically denied a proper political education. Its function, in practice, will be to split the Labour Party vote share, facilitating the further Americanization of the UK under the next right-wing government. Those who imagine it can have any other result can only be pitied at this stage.

In a society where there is a moral consensus, those who are sincerely committed to the consensus inspire a real, concrete following. Exhibiting moral virtues has political effects, and it becomes possible to argue that someone should be followed on the basis of ethos, on the basis of how that person lives. A person who is sincerely committed to the moral values that are widely affirmed is someone who will be widely regarded as leadership material. Provided such a person is sufficiently competent, they will go far.

When there is social fragmentation, there is proliferation of moralities. It becomes impossible to establish a consensus on which moral principles are important or how moral principles ought to be understood. This disagreement operates not merely at the level of argument, it is baked into the structure of the society. It is consequently intractable—it is not responsive to social techniques for its resolution. So, when people give each other arguments and try to persuade one another to adopt different moral principles or to understand moral principles in different ways, these attempts at persuasion are unsuccessful. No one agrees on who is admirable, so ethos no longer persuades.

As ethos declines, there is a renewed focus on logos and pathos. But as the disagreement spreads deeper into the social fabric, it attacks epistemology and aesthetics. No one agrees on what counts as a reasonable argument, and no one agrees on what is disgusting and what is attractive. There comes to be a widespread sense that the whole field of rhetoric is in crisis.

When this happens, there is, for a time, a renewed focus on sincerity. If we cannot agree on moral principles or on epistemology and aesthetics, perhaps we can at least demand sincerity from one another. At the very least, when we speak to each other, we should speak in terms of what we really believe. Since we have no chance of persuading one another, we start to focus on whether people really believe what they purport to believe—are they hypocrites?1

In this way, sincerity appears at two different stages in the process of fragmentation:

1. Initially, the sincere person is committed to principles that are widely affirmed, and this commitment has obvious real benefits for that person (as it attracts a committed following).

2. Subsequently, the sincere person is not a hypocrite, and so is at least regarded as a good faith discussant.

The trouble is that once the discussion does not produce a consensus, it is not clear that it confers any real benefit on a person to be regarded as a good faith discussant. After all, the discussion doesn’t go anywhere or have any real effects on the social structure, which has fragmented for reasons that the devices of rhetoric cannot reach. So, why shouldn’t the discussion be entertaining or profitable?

Once the purpose of the discussion is entertainment or profit, sincerity is an active impediment to success. The sincere person might be regarded as good faith, but nobody is going to watch, because the sincere person will not change what they discuss on the basis of what viewers find entertaining or profitable.

So, this gives us a third image of efficacy:

3. The entertaining ironic clown, who has a lot of followers on the internet, but cannot motivate any of these people to do anything that requires a major sacrifice on their part.

The ironic clown receives a superficial kind of recognition and perhaps does well financially, but they are not even regarded as a good faith actor, let alone as a leader who ought to be followed.

Most of the people who are called “influencers” are not leaders or good faith actors, they are ironic clowns. But this is not to accuse them of hypocrisy. You see, there are two types of sincere ironists:

1. The person who is sincerely committed to ironism, who is genuinely committed to being an entertainer.

2. The person who lacks self-awareness, who has lapsed into ironism without meaning to do so. This person is objectively an ironist but remains sincere at the level of subjectivity.

This means there are two types of ironic clown—the ironic clown who is genuinely committed to being a clown, and the ironic clown who has lapsed into being an ironic clown.

In the 2010s, there was, I think, a Millennial fixation on sincerity. The Millennial left believed that it was possible to create an moral consensus on the basis of which it would then make a political intervention. So, for the Millennials, it was possible to become a leader through one’s participation on the internet. It was only after Bernie Sanders was repeatedly defeated that it became clear to many Millennials that this is not possible, that the internet cannot produce leaders given the current level of social fragmentation.

Near the end of this period, there was a brief moment in which Millennials used the term “grifting” in a morally charged way. The “grifter” becomes a genuinely committed ironic clown, but attempts to conceal this change from the viewers, who are invited to follow the grifter. This obsession with grifting came from our generation’s inability to recognize that people become ironic clowns not as a means of leading but because they recognize on some level that there is no opportunity to lead. We do not have to worry that people will follow ironic clowns. Ironic clowns are a symptom of a crisis of rhetoric, they emerge when leadership has become impossible.

Once leadership is off the table, why bother with the sincerity? Millennials did not want to admit that leadership was off the table. But if you’re just a good faith actor, your following declines, and you run out of money. To maintain the illusion that leadership is possible, it is necessary to become an ironic clown who lacks self-awareness. This is the fate of Millennials who continue to try to have followings after the failure of the 2010s. They think their followers regard them as leaders, when really, their followers enjoy their content.

So, we have two kinds of Millennials now:

1. Good faith Millennials, with diminished followings, most of whom cannot make a living by writing and talking about politics, because no one really cares anymore about the moral principles to which Millennials are sincerely committed.

2. Ironic clown Millennials, most of whom are not self-aware, who still believe that they are leading people they are actually entertaining.

Gen-X, which never received even the chimera of an opportunity to lead, never became absorbed with sincerity in this way. Instead, Gen-X was, from an early point, committed to ironism. The same goes for the Zoomers—during the pandemic, they were trapped inside their homes, unable even to demand an opportunity to have ordinary teenage social experiences. It is obvious to them that they cannot shape social mores, that they are subject to a confusing mix of conflicting moral evaluations. So, for them, there has never been a real alternative to ironism. Most Xers and Zoomers are trying to be entertainers. They hope for fame and wealth, not for a fundamental social or political transformation. They are self-aware, genuinely committed ironic clowns.2

So, what do you do if you actually want to contribute to meaningful social and political change? You can’t be an ironic clown, but good faith discussants don’t seem to accomplish anything, either.

In my work, I have tried to advance the view that political and social change must occur in a manner that is immanent to the social fragmentation that has, in fact, occurred. The “vulture socialist” is meant to watch the fragmentation from a perch, to try to grasp its dynamic without intervening until the dynamic is understood in such a way that an effective intervention appears plausible. But how is the perch to be sustained? Traditionally, my answer is the four P’s—parents, partners, patrons, and professional institutions.

But here’s the problem. Often, the four P’s want you to entertain them, or they want you to obtain certain worldly goods that you can only obtain in our form of society by entertaining somebody else.

Suppose a vulture is on a perch, looking at the trouble down below, when all of the sudden, there is loud shrieking and the perch starts to rock back and forth. The vulture looks down, and there are a bunch of little babies, crying out for the vulture’s attention. If the vulture appeases the babies by giving them attention and making silly vulture faces at them, the babies will stop crying. But if the vulture looks away, they will once again begin to shriek and shake the perch.

What do you do about that?

In other forms of society, there would be a way to satisfy the babies without being an entertainer. But our society’s focus on entertainment itself stems from the fracturing process that the vulture is attempting to study. If theory birds could lead, then they would be expected to do so. It is only because theory birds cannot lead that they are expected to put on a show. And they can’t lead because there is too much fracturing for any of them to inspire more than a narrow handful of people.

You see, if the moral principles are the muses, and the theorists who are inspired by the principles become exemplars, then the people who are inspired by the exemplars can deliver social and political change. But if no one agrees about what constitutes a muse, then no one agrees on who constitutes an exemplar, and there is no concentration of energy. No one agrees which birds are beautiful. And why should disgusting birds get perches? There are only so many perches to go around, after all. So, in many cases, the perches become conditional on a willingness to entertain. Once that happens, do they remain perches in the relevant sense?

Charitably, we might say that they remain limited instantiations. But this may be a way of avoiding the issue, of engaging in precisely the sort of self-deception that mars many Millennial projects. More rigorously, this grave threat to the quality of intellectual output must be recognized, and prudent steps must be taken to protect against it.

Morality and real politics do not have to be opposed in this way. If the people who write about politics and the people who do politics share moral values, political actors will be motivated to attempt to uphold the writers’ moral principles. Debates about the good and about justice will then have an obvious relevance to real politics. It becomes possible to critique political actors in so far as their actions fail to live up to the principles to which those actors are themselves committed.

For instance, in Ming China, where all the officials were schooled on an established canon of Confucian texts, arguments about morality had obvious political implications. The struggle to be politically effective and the struggle to be morally good were one and the same struggle. But because this unity was grounded on memorizing a canon of classical texts, it proved undynamic. In the West, modernists believed the classical canon was no longer suitable. They attempted to author a new canon, built around the new moral theories of Kant, Smith, and Bentham. Polities that operated with these new theories outcompeted polities that maintained fidelity to classical texts. But there was a reluctance to permanently establish a new canon. What if there was a need for more dynamism and adaptation? So, modern universities have a dual mandate. They are tasked with maintaining a unity between morality and politics, but they are also supposed to ensure this unity is dynamic and progressive. It is hard to do both of these things at once—change tends to produce disagreement, while agreement tends to stifle change. And, because liberal democracies have universal suffrage but do not have universal tertiary education, there is always moral conflict between those who go to university and those who do not.

One simple solution is to increase the number of people who receive tertiary education. But the bureaucracy does not generate enough jobs to sustain this. The university system can be enlarged, but only at the cost of creating many educated people who do not participate in the bureaucracy.

This gives us three moral constituencies:

1. Rump professionals: Those who go to university and participate in the bureaucracy.

2. Fallen professionals: Those who go to university but do not participate in the bureaucracy.

3. Traditional workers: Those who do not go to university and do not participate in the bureaucracy.1

However, because of universal suffrage, the fallen professionals and the traditional workers still vote. This means that the rump professionals are always having to worry about them. If democracy worked, and there were a functioning public discourse in some Habermasian sense, the fallen professionals and the traditional workers would be able to organize and use the elections to force the rump professionals into a dialogue with them. This could then be used to generate a moral consensus of sufficient thickness to ground the political in the moral.

But democracy doesn’t work, at least not anymore. There is no functioning public discourse. So, instead, the people who write and talk about politics have little in common with the people who do it, and these disagreements not only do not get resolved—they deepen over time. A split opens up between morality and real politics.

This forces the people who write and talk to make a choice—they can judge what is taking place on the basis of their own idiosyncratic (and politically irrelevant) morality, or they can confine themselves to description. If they try to do both of these things at the same time, their output deteriorates and becomes very stupid.

Suppose you think that the government is acting in a repugnant manner. Nevertheless, the political actors who are making the decisions think their course of action is justified. But the justifications they offer are so alien to your moral principles that they seem to you to be overtly ridiculous. To remain within the standpoint of your own moral principles, you must regard the justifications offered by the actors to be stupid, evil, or insane. Once you regard political actors as stupid, evil, or insane, it becomes impossible to take the actors seriously as rational people. So, commentators who remain within their own moral point of view begin to have an increasingly unstable understanding of events. Slowly but surely, they come to think the government may be capable of anything—after all, it is run by people who are stupid or evil or insane.

You will never be able to understand what is motivating the political actors unless you can set your own moral principles to the side. But once you set your own principles to the side, there is an irreverence that creeps into the commentary. Since you are making an active effort to avoid judging the activity, you have to distance yourself from what you are describing. You have to attempt to enter into the subjectivity of political actors whose values are fundamentally different from your own. This can only be done ironically. Ironism is corrosive to the soul—it erodes sincerity. Without sincerity, we lose our capacity to move in devotion. We become cut off from higher kinds of love and become stuck in pragmatism, in the means-ends thinking we use to analyse and map the activities of the political actors.

So, this means that we have:

1. Moralists who are foaming at the mouth with rage at a government they regard as stupid, evil, or insane, posting screeds where they rant about how the world is going to end.

2. Realists who are hiding from their own moral principles, incased in irony, smiling and laughing as they describe events they themselves regard as incredibly horrific.

Now, you might still want to say por qué no los dos. Why can’t political writers find a way to be moralists and realists at the same time? But I think you have to bear in mind that it’s psychologically very difficult for a commentator to continuously engage in full sincerity with moral principles from which they feel utterly alienated. It is possible to oscillate—to be at one point in the moralism and at another point in the realism. I like to think of it as putting on hats. I can change hats, and I can remember what I said or did while I was wearing a hat I am no longer wearing. But I cannot wear both hats at one and the same time. I cannot individually transcend the objective split that now exists between morality and real politics.

What I can do is seek a politics that is capable of substantively overcoming the conditions that give rise to the split. The post-war international system gave rise to forms of morality that cannot be meaningfully politicized so long as we remain within the framework of the nation-state. And because the post-war international system operates on the premise that the nation-state is the basic political unit, the post-war international system generates moral principles it cannot politically take up. So, I explore the possibility of going beyond the nation-state in my work on supranational federalism.

But this exploration is, so far, sub-political. There is no actual movement in real politics toward it. The rulers are increasingly absorbed with nationalist security competition (e.g., American elites or the Euro-Gaullists). The people who are not ruling are not organized effectively, and many of them respond to the crisis of the nation-state by retreating into the national form. They demand national sovereignty (e.g., Canadians or Euroskeptics), or they champion the national projects of foreign states that they hope will reform the post-war international system (e.g., BRICSters, third worldists).

All I have been able to do is articulate, at a moral level, a case for a politics. If no one takes that case up, it can hardly be regarded as political. There is a danger of wearing the moralist hat for pragmatic reasons. If I wear the moralist hat so that I can produce realist works without drowning in irony and losing conviction, the moralist hat operates as a kind of palliative.

It is not good to wear the moralist hat for realist reasons. But it might be good to wear the realist hat for moralist reasons. To find a way to a good politics, it would be necessary to have a clear sense of what is really going on. If it is possible to speak or write meaningfully of morality, that possibility can be unearthed only in and through the careful examination of what is real.

This is the spirit in which I try to be a realist—in ultimate service to a possibility of a mode of discourse that points beyond realism. Sometimes you have to step away from God, but always in his service. Of course, there is a price.

Although elections are regularly held and are generally free of massive fraud, incumbents routinely abuse state resources, deny the opposition adequate media coverage, harass opposition candidates and their supporters, and in some cases manipulate electoral results. Journalists, opposition politicians, and other government critics may be spied on, threatened, harassed, or arrested. Members of the opposition may be jailed, exiled, or—less frequently—even assaulted or murdered. Regimes characterized by such abuses cannot be called democratic.

The countries they identified as “competitive authoritarian” in 2002 included many post-Soviet and post-colonial states. Most were authoritarian states that had undergone partial democratization. A few were younger democracies that had backslid. Levitsky and Way argued that it was not inevitable that these countries would fully democratize—competitive authoritarianism might itself be a stable regime form.

But if a regime is genuinely competitive, this implies some real possibility that opposition forces will win elections. If opposition forces sometimes win elections, then incumbents have to be concerned about electoral defeat. If incumbents fear electoral defeat, they do not have authority over the electorate—it remains the case that they are subject to the electoral procedures.

So, over time, states that are framed as instances of “competitive authoritarianism” usually prove to be one or the other. Either they have genuinely competitive elections, in which case the state struggles to be robustly authoritarian for any great length of time, or they are robustly authoritarian, in which case the elections eventually cease to appear competitive.

Indeed, Levitsky and Way themselves admitted that, in the 1990s, “four out of five competitive authoritarian regimes in Central Europe democratized (Croatia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Romania, but not Albania)” but that, in the former Soviet Union, “only one competitive authoritarian regime (Moldova) democratized”.

Today, it would be implausible to label most of those former SSRs “competitive”. Vladimir Putin, for instance, has been in power in Russia for more than 25 years now. The V-Dem Institute now prefers to classify most of these countries as “electoral autocracies”. They are autocratic regimes that have elections, but it has been proven over time that these elections are not meaningfully competitive. Most of the time, “competitive authoritarianism” is a liminal category, best applied to newer democracies with unproven procedures. The V-Dem Survey classifies some states as operating within a “grey zone”:

Yet it has increasingly become fashionable to use the language of “competitive authoritarianism” to describe the United States. But even the V-Dem Survey—which accuses the United States of democratic backsliding in direct, explicit terms—puts the United States in the “electoral democracy” category. It doesn’t even place the United States within the grey zone.

A close look at what democratic theorists actually say about the United States reveals that there is no real effort to deny that it still has competitive elections, with substantial freedom of expression and association by contemporary standards. Almost all of the criticism focuses on the weakening of checks on the executive from the legislature, the judiciary, and the civil service.

What is the appropriate relationship between elected officials and technocrats—judges, bureaucrats, and military and intelligence officers? What is the appropriate relationship between party leaders and rank-and-file legislators? Does democracy require that heads of government be challenged by their backbenchers, or for elected officials to defer to the expertise of permanent officials?

These questions don’t have obvious answers, but many democratic theorists have nonetheless built answers into their models for assessing the quality of democracy. They will significantly downgrade the quality of democracy in a country if that country concentrates power around an elected leader, regardless of the quality of the elections.

If you think about these models a little bit, methodological problems become clear. Let’s take a look at just two examples.

Are Europeans Heads of Government More Autocratic than the American President?

For instance, in most European democracies, the leader of the government must control a majority in the legislature so that the leader of the government is able to pass money bills. In these systems, the failure of a money bill in the legislature constitutes a political crisis—it necessitates an election to ensure the executive always enjoys a governing majority in the legislature.

But in the United States, the executive still does not control the power of the purse. Instead, government shutdowns are threatened all the time. When the legislature defies the executive, the executive cannot call a new election to try to win a majority in support of the budget. Elections are on a fixed timetable, forcing the executive into dialogue with the legislature. The president does not lead his own party caucus and cannot whip votes in the legislature. So, many members of his own party often vote against him, and there is nothing he can do to punish them, apart from campaigning against them in future elections. Nor can the president construct a permanent coalition of parties. Instead, each time there is a new money bill, the president must construct a fresh coalition to obtain support for that bill. Sometimes the president must even rely on members of the opposition party to get money bills passed. This very frequently forces the president to seek to persuade individual members of congress and to make concessions not for the purposes of forming a government, but even for the purposes of passing just one money bill. And this is not the exception, it’s the norm—party line votes, of the kind that occur routinely in European political systems, are viewed in the United States as “partisan” in a pejorative sense.

Is the executive stronger in the United States? That doesn’t seem clear. But European countries where the head of government has a strong legislative majority are consistently ranked higher than the United States on the V-Dem.

Is It Really Undemocratic to Make Civil Servants Worry about Elections?

In the United States, an independent civil service is a relatively recent development—for much of American history, the bureaucracy consisted of overtly political appointees. It has always been debated whether the civil service ought to be independent, because it has long been recognized that a politically independent civil service is also independent of the elections, and the elections are, in the American system, the principal way officials are made responsible to the public. In the United States, even county sheriffs and many judges are elected. For many Americans, these elections make the United States more democratic than European states in which these offices are occupied by permanent officials. But in metrics that evaluate democracy, these elements are not counted or even count against the democratic standing of the United States. You’re considered more democratic if there are permanent, unelected officials that can constrain what the democratically elected officials can do.

Right now, European democratic theorists are highly disposed to downgrade the United States on these rankings, because they don’t value the elements of American democracy that are distinctive. And because American democratic theorists are sharply opposed to the administration’s cuts to research funding and attempts to influence university curricula, they are very happy to lend support to these efforts.

But the United States still has competitive elections. Even as I write this, the president is having to fight Gulf War III in a manner that conforms to the War Powers Resolution. He’s had to restructure his tariff policy in response to a Supreme Court ruling. He’s had to get rid of his Homeland Security Secretary in a bid to persuade the legislature to continue funding that department. And remember, the decision to strip the permanent officials of the deference they previously received in legal disputes was not an executive decision—it was taken by the Supreme Court, to assert the judiciary’s right to challenge civil servants’ claims to expertise.

The Trump administration makes all kinds of decisions that are objectionable from a wide variety of normative points of view. But that does not mean that the United States is a “competitive authoritarian” regime. Democratic procedures often produce bad decisions, particularly in atomised, individualistic consumer societies where the quality of public discussion is poor, where it’s hard to argue that a demos meaningfully exists. Yet the procedures are still, in an important sense, democratic, even if they are operating in a social context that contradicts what we had hoped we might get out of them.

It has to be possible to criticize these procedures without pretending that they are authoritarian. Otherwise, there’s no possibility of figuring out what’s really wrong with them. But for many democratic theorists, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the democratic procedures. As far as they are concerned, all would be well if Trump were gone. So, they try to persuade the public that Trump threatens democracy, so as to frighten voters into showing up for the Democratic Party in November. That doesn’t help people think, and it doesn’t help us solve problems.

He then raises Aristotle — if the Good is to do with one’s natural purpose or telos, and if for Aristotle the abstraction of nature is not historicized, then, for Marxists, it would be necessary to recognize Aristotle’s conceptualization of nature as the product of a particular set of social relations. Once this is done, it then becomes possible to describe how different social relations give rise to different conceptualizations of nature (and therefore of the Good). In capitalism, we understand our nature such that we take the overcoming of alienation to be associated with the Good. We also interpret history through this understanding of the Good, such that when we examine other stages of history, we tend to conceptualize the problems others have faced in terms of alienation. This allows us to develop a theory of history in which different stages are marked by different iterations of alienation, each of which is overcome in its own way.

The theory of history is thus itself a product of the way we conceptualize the Good, and yet this theory of history then appears to tell us how the Good ought to be conceptualized at the stages it elucidates. This opens up a danger — that the theory of history might consume the abstraction on which it relies, subordinating that abstraction to itself. This is the danger I have been repeatedly warning Platypus about. In so far as there are people in Platypus who deny the relevance or importance of the Good, these people are locking themselves in the theory of history. It becomes a cage for them, rather than a means of overcoming alienation.

Aristotle himself does the same thing with nature. For Aristotle, the Good has to be derived from an account of Nature. In making this move, Aristotle subordinates the Good to Nature. In trying to explain the Good in terms of another abstraction, Aristotle subordinates the Good to that abstraction. This ties the Good down, preventing it from being conceptualized in new ways that would go beyond Aristotle’s theory of nature. In this way, Aristotelian naturalism becomes a cage, rather than a way forward. At best it becomes a playpen — a delightful place to hang out, but not a place in which one can develop.

To be able to develop, one needs not just an account of Nature or History but a conviction that there is an unrealized principle that we must move toward. That principle cannot, in itself, be bound by Nature or History. Indeed, we must only use the terms ‘Nature’ and ‘History’ in so far as those terms seem to us to be helpful in moving toward it. Even if Marxists insist that Nature has to be historicized, that just kicks Aristotle’s the problem up another level. Once Nature has to be thought in terms of History, History takes the place of Nature in the conceptual scheme, and Aristotelianism is reproduced by alternative means.

Now, once Nature or History becomes a cage, it starts to look deterministic. If this determinism is allowed to run its course, it results in structuralism. To get out of determinism or structuralism, theorists of Nature and History posit the will. But the will does not get you back to the principle — it does not provide you with any specific basis for overcoming the limits of Nature or History. Rather, it is an arbitrary assertion, of the kind made by Stoics and existentialists. Its function is to encourage irrationalism.

Freedom should not be identified with the will. It should be identified with the overcoming of limit. In the Philebus, Plato has Socrates suggest that, for anything to come into being, it is necessary that unlimited abstractions be limited. For instance, you cannot have an unlimited tall person, you can only have, e.g., Victor Wenbanyama. Victor Wenbanyama is very tall (at least 7’5”), but he’s not unlimited tall. If he were unlimited tall, he could not come into existence.

What limits the tallness of Wenbanyama? There may be natural limits, to do with his genetics. But there may also be historical limits, to do with the quality of nutrition in his society. A person with Wenbanyama’s genetics would not have been as tall if he were born in 1200, and most people in our society lack the genetic profile to become as tall as Wenbanyama, regardless of social circumstances. Maybe in 1200, Wenbanyama would be just 6’7”. Maybe, without his genetics, he would be 6’0” today. These natural and historical limits can be overcome, but even when these limits are overcome, we discover new limits — Victor Wenbanyama is a brilliant instantiation of tallness, but it still remains impossible to bring into being a person who is unlimited tall.

The same is true for the Good. No one can point to anything in existence that is perfectly good. It is for this reason that there is always a danger of making “the perfect the enemy of the Good”. Indeed, unlimited things cannot even be grasped by the mind — you and I cannot imagine unlimited tall, and we cannot imagine unlimited Good. So, if you are asked to define the Good, your definition will never be identical to unlimited Good — it will always seem to fall short. When you are asked to define the Good, you can offer a flawed definition, or you can be silent.

In the Philebus, the mixture of limit with unlimit must be decided upon by “the cause of the mixture”. What is the cause of the mixture? It could be God, Love, Nature, History, whatever. But the cause, whatever it is, cannot produce a mixture without interfacing with both limit and unlimit. And, if the cause itself is a mixture, then the cause is itself always already limited. That which is limited always already interfaces with unlimit in a limited way.

Do you see what I’m driving at? Let me say a little more, in case it helps. Human beings are always already limited, in the sense that they are always already a mixture. The kind of person you are is always already conditioned by various limits — both natural and historical. So, we not only create limited things, we ourselves embody limit, and we replicate our own limits in the things we create. So, our creations are limited in both a first-order and second-order sense:

1. The impossibility of having pure unlimit in the first instance.

2. The limitations on the understanding of unlimit imposed by the fact that man is always already both a mixture and a cause of mixture.

Hence, we can derive from Plato what Marx says in the Critique of the Gotha Programme:

defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society

The limits of capitalist society limit the kinds of people we can be and thereby limit the kind of socialism we can make. However, in making a limited iteration of socialism, we overcome the specific limits we previously faced. This does not give us pure unlimit, but it does give us something that is better, that is, in certain valuable respects, emancipated relative to what came before.

So, what is Freedom? Freedom is the overcoming of limit in the service of that which is unlimited. And what is the Good, in itself, unmediated? We cannot really say, but we might make an attempt: that which is unlimited.

We only bother to overcome limits in so far as we think it is good to do so. If we do not believe it is good to overcome limits, we either:

1. Adopt a conservative attitude and attempt to preserve what already exists.

2. Adopt a gnostic or nihilistic attitude and become mere vandals.

We cannot try to make better things if we do not recognize the ways in which the things we have made are insufficiently good. That doesn’t mean the things we make are evil — they are just less good than they could be. They are limited attempts, and we want to try again.

At least, that’s what my sort of left wants to do. The actual, existing left has descended into vandalism. And what happens when you meet the Vandals? You seek to defend the good in what already exists. In this way, sustained engagement with the actual, existing left does not promote emancipation — it promotes conservatism. It leads people back to America, back to the Soviet Union, and, of course, back to Rome.

But you know we can’t go back. We can only try again.

Trying again requires both a love of that which is unlimited and a capacity to prudently evaluate the context, to discern what limits we face and how we can effectively maneuver. You have to be able to go both up and down, from unlimit to limit and from limit to unlimit, to come to an understanding of what you should do in a particular situation. It is the love for unlimit that moves us to think seriously about the limits, and it is in and through the limits that we pursue that which is unlimited. But this love and this prudence are both totally absent on the left, and until they have been generated the left will not be in position even to make an attempt. Its activity should not even be regarded as trying, but as mere vandalism.

There is no possibility of subjecting vandalism to immanent critique. You fight the Vandals with the gladius — with conservatism — or you ignore them and do something new somewhere else, if you have somewhere else to be. This is the question that organizations like Platypus face. Do you fight the Vandals, or do you attempt something new? Stuck in American universities, which are crawling with vandals, it is tempting to fight what should be ignored.

As the universities decline and the conditions for thinking within them further deteriorate, there is a powerful impulse to take out the sword, to defend a theory of history the same way the Catholics once sought to defend a theory of nature. Such a defense only succeeds by subordinating the principle to a mere theory of cause-and-effect. It makes nothing other than a cage.

So, while I enjoyed reading Canel’s piece, I must hasten to add that it is not enough for the Good to be historicized as well as naturalized. Theories of history and of nature must also be made better. If we love our own theories of history and nature more than we love the Good, because we have decided that conceptions of the Good are mere products of history or of nature, or because we feel proud of what we take to be our knowledge of cause-and-effect, we retreat behind bulwarks wrought of limits we must overcome. These are castles in the air, every bit as disconnected from prudent activity as the forms of idealism their proponents decry.

You know about bipedal robot choreography, don’t you? There are these robots, and they stand on two legs, and they dance, and they box, and then they force even the little children to run around with them. Westerners go mad when they see the bipedal robot choreography. When they see the dancing robots, they imagine tens of thousands of the little buggers going over the top at Verdun.

But Verdun happened a long time ago. Two legs are an inefficient way to move a thing that goes kaboom from place to place. It was for this reason that our ancestors invented tanks, then planes, then missiles, and now even little drones and other strange things you and I don’t know about.

Yes, I’ve seen Star Wars. I know that in Star Wars, there are bipedal robots. There are even quadrupedal robots. But those are movies. Does your image of war come from the movies?

Even so, the Chinese military has always been all about bipeds. In the 1980s, the People’s Liberation Army had around four million bipeds. Today, it’s down to somewhere around two million. Those bipeds were, inconveniently, human—to make human bipeds, you have to have families that make babies, and sustaining a society in which people can have babies and want to have them at one and the same time is difficult. There are societies where people can have babies but don’t want them, and there are societies where people want to have babies but can’t have them, but there are very few societies where people both want babies and can have them. So, why not make the bipeds out of metal instead?

Now the Chinese have metal bipeds, and the Chancellor of Germany has laid eyes upon them. And you know what he said about it?

We are simply no longer productive enough. Each individual will say to themselves: ‘I’m already doing a lot.’ That may be true. But if you come back from China, ladies and gentlemen, then you feel even more clearly that work-life balance and a four-day week will not sustain prosperity in our country in the long-term. We simply have to do a little more now.

This spells trouble.

You see, for a long time, Germany has had a policy of industrial physiocracy. What do I mean by that?

In the 18th century, the French physiocrats scoffed at British industrialization. Don’t the British realize that if they commit to free trade and to the production of machines, they will be dependent on la France to supply them avec food? How will les Anglais feed their bipeds avec des machines? They’ll be at the mercy de la France, no doubt about it. Indeed, la France should keep buying as many British tools as possible, to lull les Anglais into neglecting their agricultural secteur. Oui, oui!

But before long, industrialization made the world a much wealthier place. The agricultural production that, at one time, was enough to make France a great power, instead became a hallmark of French backwardness. The French eventually caught on, and they tried to catch up. But it was difficult to make up the distance.

Germany got on board with industrialization. But, unfortunately, it found a new way to replicate France’s mistake. The Germans are not agricultural physiocrats, but they are industrial physiocrats. Don’t other countries realize that if they don’t build maschinen, they will be dependent on others to build maschinen for them? What if those people are baddies? Then the Deutschen would be at the mercy of the baddies. No, the Deutschen have to keep building maschinen, even if now nearly everyone can build maschinen. Because you know, manufacturing is not that hard. Really! They could do this sort of thing in Manchester in 1830 using a bunch of illiterate children who kept dying of cholera and tuberculosis and God knows what else.

Back in the 1970s—half a century ago—the Americans figured something out. As industrial engineering continued to advance, it became much easier to move production quickly from place to place. And, as more countries looked to modernize their economies, there emerged an enormous number of countries interested in manufacturing. These countries were willing to do anything to industrialize. They would offer companies low tax rates, low wages, and a disciplined, pliable labor force. With so many countries itching to engage in manufacturing, it would become increasingly difficult to use the manufacturing sector to sustain high wages. And, without high wages, it would be difficult to continue to grow the size of the American consumer economy.

So, the Americans tried something different. They deindustrialized. They got the rest of the world hooked on manufacturing. Instead of making machines, the Americans turned large parts of their economy into advertising. More and more Americans got paid to convince other Americans to buy rubbish. The Americans built great big McMansions, and they filled these giant houses made of vinyl and asphalt with refuse from all over the world. Vast mausoleums made of shit, full of shit, built for the sake people with shit taste.

When the Americans ran out of money, they came up with ever more clever ways to borrow it or print it. They invented quantitative easing, and they started selling financial products that exist on the computer. People say it’s disgusting and horrible, but it works. Today, the United States has a final consumption per capita more than five times higher than China, even with the purchasing power parity adjustment. Because the Americans can and will buy anything, no matter how wretched it is, they have become indispensable. The United States is the only country capable of consuming in such a blisteringly stupid, vulgar way—its power is tied not to its virtues, but to its vices. This is what makes America a great terror, an apparent harbinger of the fate of man.

Britain tried to follow the American example. It closed down its coal mines and financialized its economy. But the UK has never been able generate the same level of per capita consumption. America still consumes nearly twice as much per head. The British houses are too small to hold much crap. The university educated professionals don’t get paid enough to buy enough of it. And the blitz mentality still holds sway—if the war generation could get by on canned beans, why should you feel entitled to a dryer, to air conditioning? The British lack the profound sense of entitlement. Their schools still teach them humility and moderation. They don’t believe they deserve unlimited plastics. And if you don’t believe you deserve unlimited plastics, you shan’t have them.

Germany, on the other hand, has tried to keep building machines. The Germans passed reforms to make the labor force more “flexible”. They imported French nuclear energy and Russian natural gas, to keep production costs down. They used the European Union to secure favorable access to the markets of Southern Europe. When the Southern European countries got into financial trouble because they were importing so much from Germany, the Germans did not invent cool financial products to help the Southern European countries find clever ways to continue consuming. Instead, the Germans said that the Southern Europeans are lazy wretches who failed to work hard enough to compete. If they don’t like the European Union they can leave and see how they like it out there. Faced with that ultimatum, the Southern Europeans opted to stay and follow the fiscal rules. But they got poorer, and that meant they couldn’t buy as much German stuff going forward.

Then the Russians invaded Ukraine, and the Americans insisted the Germans stop buying Russian gas and start importing expensive North American liquefied natural gas. And all the while, the developing countries built up their industrial bases and got really good at making large piles of rubbish for very low prices.

Soon President Trump returned, and he threatened to stop arming the Ukrainians unless the Europeans spent more on defense. And the Europeans agreed to spend more money on defense, but they said they were doing it to make themselves independent of the Americans. And this convinced many Europeans who oppose militarism and Atlanticism to support both of these things, because this militarism and Atlanticism was ostensibly anti-militarist or anti-Atlanticist or whatever. So, Germany is trying to rearm, so that it can stimulate its manufacturing sector. And everyone else in Europe has to buy more guns, too, in part because German manufacturing needs customers. To facilitate this, the European fiscal rules now allow a little Keynesianism, as a treat, but only if you use the stimulus money to build machines that deliver kabooms.

It should come as no surprise that when the American President started in on Iran, the German Chancellor had his back:

This is not the moment to lecture our partners and allies. Despite our reservations, we share many of their objectives.

But does the German Chancellor understand that manufacturing no longer guarantees wealth, that Europe will never experience competitive levels of economic growth as long as its consumers are subordinated to its producers? He may share American objectives, but he does not share in American reason.

That, in itself, would be a good thing, if he could articulate a viable alternative vision for Europe. But if European “prosperity” means German human beings working longer hours for lower wages to compete with bipedal robots in developing countries, why even bother? It’s the sort of vision for humanity that makes a three-car garage full to bursting with Halloween inflatables sound relatively compelling. At least when Americans waste their lives, they get to drown in goofy plastic. Europe is supposed to offer something else.

The cancellation of the future will not go down that easily. There will be resistance to this notion that Europeans have to give up everything good and interesting about their form of life to compete with China. The dream of the 90s still lives in Millennial hearts.

But resistance is not an alternative—it’s just resistance. Eheu!

There were reasons for this. The judges in speech and debate are usually the parents of the students. So, they have a specific class background and a particular media diet. If you make middle-class arguments grounded in an understanding of middle-class culture, you win. Most high school students would consider themselves to be successful in life if they achieved the same class position as these parents. If you learn to think like the lawyers, doctors, and engineers who served as debate judges, you would be able to go to college and get a degree and work in these fields. In time, you would acquire the things these people possessed - houses and spouses and kidlets and so on.

Now, there were plenty of people who struggled to figure out how to make arguments that were compelling to the middle-class parents. For these people, becoming a lawyer, doctor, or engineer was a difficult challenge. Because speech and debate helped these people to achieve normal, everyday success, they love speech and debate. They think it’s great, because it trained them to think and act more like a successful middle-class person. They worked hard to be what they are, and they feel they’ve earned everything that they’ve got.

But if you were able to succeed in speech and debate at a relatively early point, then there’s an opportunity to experiment, to try to push past this level of consciousness. Now, when most people do this and start to lose debate matches, they think they’ve made a mistake. They assume that because they are losing, this must mean that they’re going crazy. So, to protect themselves from going crazy, they begin limiting their own intellectual development. They stay within the guard-rails of the arguments that win. This becomes their blueprint for life - they can be lawyers, doctors, or engineers, but only by intellectually restraining themselves, by recoding intellectualism as a kind of madness. They become professional class successes, but they become aware of the sense in which they have compromised to achieve this. This adds a melancholic element to their life. No matter how successful they become on a material level, this melancholic element never goes away. Sometimes it rises to the surface and destroys middle-class life. Many of my favorite films are about this - they are warnings against taking a bad deal.1

And yet, what’s the alternative? In antiquity, Roman elites often said that a little Greek philosophy is essential, but too much makes you crazy. Too much Greek philosophy makes you into the sort of person who cannot function as a Roman elite, who won’t tolerate the limitations of the kinds of conversations that shape real-world decisions.

But here’s the tricky thing - in the world today, the middle-class conversation is not the sort of conversation that shapes real-world decisions. The lawyers, doctors, and engineers mostly don’t understand how the international political system works. They have a functional education that allows them to operate within legalist, corporatist systems. Their media sources cover world news in a superficial way. The kinds of jobs they do never force them to confront this superficiality, because most of the important things that happen in the world have little direct effect on the work lives of lawyers, doctors, and engineers operating in western countries.

Yet the middle-class conversation cannot be ignored either, because the electoral mechanism allows the middle-class conversation to constrain what can be done. Political actors therefore have to participate in this middle-class conversation while also, at the same time, participating in other conversations. The trouble is that these conversations don’t fit together. To be well-adapted to talk to the middle-class, you have to limit your ability to have an elite conversation about the world, and to have an elite conversation about the world, you have to limit your ability to talk to the middle-class. And, of course, if you are interested in having a conversation with the traditional working class (how old-fashioned of you!), that will only further complicate matters.

Since, in democracy, any project that can succeed politically requires combining these conversations together, the further apart they become, the harder it is to have a viable political project.

We have already discussed three types of speech and debate kids:

1. The kids who never succeed at joining the middle-class conversation.

2. The kids who, through hard work, manage to join the middle-class conversation.

3. The kids who are able to move past the middle-class conversation, but return to it to avoid becoming maladapted to middle-class life.

But then there is the next kind - the kind that quits speech and debate so as to overcome the limits it imposes. These kids want to be unfettered intellectuals. But if you become an unfettered intellectual, if you abandon your ability to talk to the middle class or the working class out of contempt for the quality of these conversations, your iteration of elite discourse will not actually be compatible with democracy. Elite discourse has to actually result in decisions, and since in democracy elite discourse has to be in dialogue with at least middle-class discourse, an elite discourse that rejects middle-class discourse cannot be elite discourse.

When I was in undergrad, I found myself trying to make increasingly complex normative arguments. I was trying to participate in normative political theory, the kind of political theory that results in high-quality publications in the most prestigious academic journals. But whenever I tried to discuss normative political theory with people from home, I realized you cannot actually do anything with this discourse. Arguing about what freedom is, or what equality or justice requires, at what seems to be the highest possible level, produces a kind of conversation that is totally impotent.

And yet, in the university system, you can be heavily rewarded for engaging in this. In this respect, the university system is another iteration of speech and debate. So, this gives us three more types of speech and debate kid:

4. The kids who never succeed in joining the pseudo-elite conversation.

5. The kids who, through hard work, manage to join the pseudo-elite conversation.

6. The kids who are able to move past the pseudo-elite conversation, but return to it to avoid becoming maladapted to pseudo-elite life.

This last category is particularly interesting - you have a strong incentive to limit yourself to the pseudo-elite discourse. It’s your success in the pseudo-elite discourse that secures your academic career. Many academics see that they could go beyond this conversation, but they restrain themselves.2

What happens if you try to go beyond it? The next group are the public intellectuals and influencers, the academics who try to exit the pseudo-elite conversation. In some countries where the political culture allows it, a small number of these people get into government. The bulk of them, however, become grifters. Now, when I say that they are grifters, I don’t mean that they are deliberately or intentionally deceiving anybody. But they are entering into middle-class and working-class conversations from outside, descending on them from above. They are not immanent to the middle-class or the working-class, they represent a top-down effort to manage these classes. I like to call these people “discourse mages,” they are people who try to subjectivize those they consider to be inferior through the manipulation of signs.

The discourse mages think they stand above the middle-class and working-class conversations. But this isn’t really true. In fact, coming back down into the middle-class and working-class conversations causes these people to become obsessed with public opinion, with finding the correct take. They are trying to win, and that means they have to persuade, at minimum, the lawyers, doctors, and engineers. They have, unwittingly, returned to speech and debate and to the limits that the speech and debate conversation imposes. Instead of controlling or elevating the conversations they are in, they are gradually deformed by their participation in this heavily stultifying discussion, losing their ability to think independently.

So, we have three more types of speech and debate kids:

7. The kids who never succeed in becoming discourse mages.

8. The kids who, through hard effort, become successful discourse mages with large online followings.

9. The kids who are able to move past the discourse mage conversation, but return to it to avoid becoming maladapted to influencer life.

Again, this last category is particularly interesting - you have a strong incentive to limit yourself to the grifting activity, because the grifting activity is compatible with making a living. If you refuse to make content that follows the algorithms, you simply aren’t going to develop a large enough audience to sustain your operation.

This gives us three different types of highly conscious kids, type #3, type #6, and type #9. It’s not obvious which of these is best, because none of these three groups really succeed in making the world a better place. They are just three different ways of surviving, economically, as a person with strong verbal reasoning skills.

In the 10s, I moved away from making normative arguments, embracing a more diagnostic style of political theory. This kind of political theory is less well-adapted for pseudo-elite success. I have some good journal articles, but it’s harder to publish a large number of competitive journal articles in the style I have adopted.

At the same time, I got involved in trying to help Bernie Sanders and in podcasting.

So, I had a foot in both the academic conversation and in the discourse sorcery. At the time, I thought this was a good way of splitting the difference, in trying to find a genuinely elite mode in which to operate. But increasingly, I don’t think there is a way of splitting the difference. I suspect these are just three different ways to prioritize becoming middle-class over having a good conversation.

There has to be a better way. I will keep looking.

A Just-So Story About the History of the Left

Let’s suppose there are four different periods of leftism:

1. The time of commercial society, but before capitalism (c. 1688 - c. 1819)

2. The time of capitalism, but before managerialism (c. 1819 - c. 1919)

3. The time of managerialism, but before neoliberalism (c. 1919 - c. 1979)

4. The time of neoliberalism (c. 1979 - present)

Each of these periods generates its own, distinctive type of left.

Commercial society produced a liberal left that demanded various liberal freedoms (speech, religion, assembly, etc.) as well as political equality between the nobility and the bourgeoisie.

Capitalism produced an old socialist left grounded on the social organizations of the proletariat - on labor unions and on political parties. These unions and parties demanded not just better working conditions but even the socialization of production.

In capitalism, the liberal left continued to exist, but it became comparatively conservative. The liberal left and the socialist left became opposed to one another - Mill or Bastiat could be juxtaposed with Marx or Bakunin. But all of these people would have been on the left in the context of commercial society. They only become differentiated in capitalism, in the period in which the proletariat emerges as a class.

Capitalism was disgraced by the monopolies, by the First World War, and by the Great Depression. In response to these disgraces, there were numerous attempts to replace it or fix it. But throughout this period, socialists were repeatedly defeated by bureaucratic organizations - by armies, by corporations, by the new agencies of the state. The German Revolution failed to bring socialism to the heart of Europe, and the Soviet Union survived by adopting new forms of managerialism - by bureaucratizing and militarizing the party.

Managerialism produced a new democratic left that understood society as having been fundamentally transformed by technocratic and technological innovations. In light of these innovations, labor unions and political parties lose much of their effectiveness. Instead of demanding the socialization of production via the social organizations of the proletariat, the New Left demanded emancipatory forms of management. It called for the democratization of the state and the use of the democratic state to emancipate the proletariat from labor via programs like universal basic income. This demand for democratization was expressed not just in Keynesian liberal states, but also in the Soviet Union and in Maoist China - there was an effort in all of these places to revolutionize the bureaucracy.

In the managerial period, the Old Left continued to exist, but it became comparatively conservative. The New Left and the Old Left became opposed to one another - university students entering the professions increasingly found themselves estranged from industrial unionism, and political parties increasingly struggled to win the votes of both educated professionals and workers in the trades. Increasingly the left looked to operate through the new managerial structures, focusing on the legal system, the civil service, the culture industry, and so on. Where the Old Left was workerist, the New Left was post-work. Where the Old Left focused on production, the New Left focused on consumption. Where the Old Left retained a sympathy with bourgeois social mores and structures, the New Left emphasized the erotic and the libidinal.

In the 1970s, managerialism seemed to stall out. Technological development and economic growth slowed in the rich countries, shifting to the global periphery. The expansion of the universities slowed. A rough parity emerged between the new and old working classes, creating an antagonism between the two. The apparent failure of managerialism generated nostalgia for the pre-managerial period. But managerialism could not be undone, for three reasons:

1. Transformation of the Subject: By the 1970s, large parts of the population had been socialized in and through managerial structures - schools, corporations, and so on. The professionals were adept at operating within these structures but could not be effective in pre-managerial organizations.

2. Transformation of the Proletarian Organizations: The pre-managerial organizations had themselves been transformed by their integration into corporate law. Labor unions and political parties were no longer what they had been, and so no longer operated in the way they once did.

3. Continuing Efficacy of Corporate Forms: While the bureaucracies had failed to live up to retrofuturist dreams, they remained more efficient and more effective than previous organizational types. They made decisions more quickly and were able to make decisions in the face of intractable disagreement, while social organizations took too long to make decisions and often disintegrated in the face of intractable disagreement. Corporations continued to prevail in the market because they were better at generating a profit than non-corporatist organizational types. The bureaucratized political parties continued to defeat old-fashioned parties organized around socialism or around labor.

Instead of undoing managerialism, there were various attempts to free corporate actors from democratic interference. This was called “neoliberalism” and it included:

• The integration of nation-states into regional and global institutions (e.g., the European Union, the World Trade Organization), that compel them to compete with one another to attract jobs and investment.

• Removing monetary policy from democratic control, by making the central bank independent.

• Deregulation, which in practice involved re-regulating markets so as to empower corporate actors.

• The creation of flexible labor markets, in which employees can be easily fired or hired on a more casual basis.

• Reductions in effective tax rates.

• The elimination of capital controls.

The New Left could not plausibly tell a story about how neoliberal management could lead to democratization. Indeed, in so far as the effect of managerialism was to bring about a period of neoliberalism, it seemed that managerialism had not only failed to produce the New Left’s vision - it produced its opposite. So, neoliberalism had a discrediting effect on the New Left.

Some on the left attempted to return to the modes of the old socialist left. But because neoliberalism developed the managerial forms instead of negating those forms, attempts to return to Old Left methods remained hopelessly quixotic. It was still the case that the managerial period had transformed the proletariat, splitting it into new and old working classes. Neoliberalism did not put an end to this split. Instead, it concretized this distinction as a chronic, long-term feature of its form of society. It then set about barbarizing both of these classes. It deprived both democratic and socialist structures of their efficacy. Without an effective means of acting, it became irrational for the two working classes to develop an accurate understanding of what was going on. Public discourse degraded into a form of entertainment, as the news ceased to inform rational action and instead became a purely consumptive object.

This resulted in a New Left that clung onto the democratic nation-state, even though it was evident that the nation-state could not overcome neoliberalism and had instead become its vehicle, and an Old Left that clung onto quixotic structures that were deeply anachronistic or had long since been penetrated by the managerial mode. Reasonable people abandoned both the New Left and the Old Left, because it was evident to them that neither was seaworthy. But once the left is abandoned, there is no longer any reason to understand what is going on for the purpose of changing anything. Instead, everything that happens must be transformed into a mechanism for adapting to an apparent reality that has to be accepted, even affirmed. One must have a positive attitude to whatever occurs, lest one lose one’s capacity to affirm the form of life to which there is no alternative.

So, in this period of high neoliberalism, the left became politically incapacitated. This incapacity was emphasized repeatedly, in the failures of strike action during the 1980s, in the electoral defeats suffered by leftists, in the increasingly irrelevant protests, declining publications, and surge in sectarian cults and mental illnesses within left organizations. The only way the organizations of the left could be in any way relevant during this period was by acquiescing to neoliberalism, by running neoliberal candidates in elections and by pandering to neoliberal actors - HR departments, tech companies, NGOs, etc.

After the Global Economic Crisis of 2008, neoliberalism was disgraced. Like the previous managerial mode, neoliberalism ceased to be able to consistently deliver the level of economic growth expected of it. Those who had accepted neoliberalism because it seemed to be the only way to attract jobs and investment increasingly felt that these jobs had become so degraded by neoliberalism that they could no longer be regarded as proper jobs, that the benefits of investment were too concentrated in the hands of a narrow oligarchy based primarily in the tech sector.

In the years immediately following 2008, the New Left and the Old Left both thought that perhaps the loss of confidence in neoliberalism would lead to a return to their methods and structures. But the need for something new does not breathe new life into what was already old. Attempts to return to the democratic nation-state or to social organizing only repeatedly demonstrate the impotence of these forms. The primary effect of these attempts has been to create a left that seeks to defend neoliberalism from them.

Behold, the Neoleft

This is what I call the “neoleft” - a left that is neoliberal for leftist reasons. The neoleft accepts that, in the global economic system, the demands of the Old Left and New Left are no longer realistic. It views residual elements of these two lefts as right-wing, and it is determined to oppose what it considers to be forms of reaction. This acceptance and this opposition are articulated in several ways:

1. Eco-Austerity: an ecological turn that affirms that the technological utopias of the New Left are not compatible with the maintenance of life on earth.

2. Essentializing Intraclass Antagonism: a tendency to treat the antagonism between the old and new working classes as an expression of ancient hatreds to do with racism, ethnicity, sexism, religion, or civilizational difference, explaining Old Left residue in these terms.

3. Harm Reduction: rather than attempt to socialize production or emancipate workers from labor, the aim is to reduce the amount of suffering inflicted by global economic competition, even if this means helping workers adapt to neoliberal structures and opposing efforts to transform or overcome these same structures.

4. Populism: acknowledging the problems with prior left organizational modes, a commitment to a politics built around elite discourse mages who create alliances and coalitions through the clever use of floating signifiers. These signifiers are conceptualized through a mix of individualized charisma and bureaucratized social science.

5. The Technocratic International: fearing postliberal efforts to revive the nation-state and believing there is no alternative to structures like the European Union and the World Trade Organization, a reflexive tendency to defend these structures whenever they are challenged, to oppose them in rhetoric while defending them in practice.

6. Mandatory Agency: an insistence that everyone be regarded as a responsible agent, that all social problems must be treated as having been caused by responsible agents, and that identifying the blameworthy agents and blaming them is constructive activity.

There is an important difference between the neoleftist and the neoliberal. The neoleftist still thinks there is an emancipatory horizon to this project. Neoleftists think harm reduction empowers workers to organize. They think an emphasis on agency allows workers to consolidate a politics around opposing specific, concrete billionaire actors. They think populism is the only way to get the two working classes to work together, and that this populism has to overcome the various forms of transhistorical bigotry and hatred that would otherwise drive the workers apart. Ecological limits are just scientific facts - denying them can only lead to disaster. And if, in response to ecological limits, the suburbs are rewilded and further urbanization occurs, this will produce a form of life that is more conducive to the politics of the neoleft, which has always been most successful in metropolitan areas.

The primary aim of the neoleftist is to overcome the tech oligarchs, to produce a more sustainable form of life that is gentler and kinder - a rainbow coalition behind an eco-populist who remains deeply committed to international law. Because the neoleftists have this radical aim, they are hostile to the tech oligarchs. For them, the tech oligarchs are linked to postliberalism and to the forms of reaction they associate with projects based around the nation-state or dreams of automation. Neoliberals are concerned with sustainable development, but they are liberals, so they remain interested in using new technology to push against ecological limits on individual freedom. So, neoliberals look to empower tech companies to experiment - they support the development of large language models and the building of the data centers. Neoleftists oppose these things, but they support the technocratic international institutions that, in practice, put the tech oligarchs in position to win the fight. For this reason, their opposition to the tech oligarchs is toothless. But it does exist in their minds, and this distinguishes them, at the level of subjectivity, from the neoliberals who actively seek to work with the tech sector to expand what they take to be the realm of human freedom.

The Antichrist

Many tech oligarchs recognize the pliability of neoleftism, but not Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel thinks the neoleft may produce the antichrist, an eco-populist who is able to unite the planet against technological development. For him, neoliberalism is in danger of being taken over by neoleftists. So, he has supported postliberalism in an effort to hedge against this possibility. Perhaps, for Thiel, the purpose of postliberalism is not to end neoliberalism, but to ensure that neoliberalism cannot become neoleftist. If there seem to be nationalist, religious, and civilizational antagonisms, this appearance creates security concerns, and these security concerns force states to commit to the development of new technology, whatever its ecological consequences. Out of fear of American postliberalism, many neoleftists support increasing military spending in the allied states. This military spending seems to give these allies more autonomy from the United States, but it forces them to invest in the development of technology that precludes neoleftist ecological commitments. The effect is to further reduce the radicality of a kind of left that could already hardly be described as radical. It binds the territories that are friendliest to neoleftism to a development model that neuters neoleftism’s ecological content.

Without the ecological content, neoleftism becomes nothing other than a new ideological gloss for neoliberalism. This happens at a time when neoliberalism is badly in need of a new ideological gloss. In this way, postliberalism revives neoliberalism; it recasts neoliberalism in leftist terms, so that those who would oppose neoliberalism not only do not oppose it but tell new legitimation stories in its service. This new ideological carapace seems costly, in so far as it seems to promote insecurity at the level of international politics. But if the nation-state has become a genuinely backward structure, it will not be possible for nation-states to successfully defy the technocratic international system. The appearance of security risk will perform an ideological function without any real possibility of becoming concrete in, for instance, a war between the United States and China. Perhaps the function of, for instance, Trump, is to create an appearance that the United States is no longer neoliberal so as to ensure that everyone else remains neoliberal for always and always and always.

Just a thought. That’s what Substack is for, right?

The Epstein scandal largely doesn’t interest me, because it is principally a criminal rather than political matter. Most of the people involved are over 70 years old. Few of them are still in politics. Even if all of these people had been removed from politics in the 2000s, nothing would fundamentally change. The major events of this century - The War on Terror, The Global Economic Crisis, COVID-19, and the Ukraine War - all would have happened. Liberal democracy would be embedded and debilitated and in a chronic legitimation crisis. All the major issues would be with us - healthcare, housing, higher education, climate change, automation, globalization, capitalism, the rise of China, yada yada yada. We can say that the laws should be enforced or that justice should be done, but this is a trivial thing to say. It also does not need to be said, because there are plenty of powerful people who have plenty to gain from going after the old fogies who stand accused. Yes, the president of the United States is among those accused - but if he were impeached and replaced with the vice president, what would really change?

Disinterest in Chomsky

I am particularly uninterested in the row about Noam Chomsky. For me, Gandhi was the last interesting anarchist.1 Since the middle of the 20th century, we have lived in a heavily corporatized world in which anarchist modes of organizing are clearly non-viable. People born in the last 75 years or so have been constituted by corporate structures and have internalized managerial modes. They are not capable of operating effectively within the framework of anything like the Panchayat Raj, nor are they really interested in operating within that kind of structure. People who attempt to do anarchism in the 21st century have two primary motivations:

1. Some anarchists are disgusted with the politics of the nation-state. But they don’t offer an alternative politics. Instead, they retreat from the political into a quixotic, bourgeois form of socialism. They then ennoble this form of madness by calling it “social organizing.” But in so far as this activity can be sustained, it remains extremely limited in scope. As soon as an effort is made to expand it, the inability to manage intractable disagreements via political modes leads to infighting, incompetence, and collapse.

2. Some anarchists have a pathological relationship with authority stemming from dysfunction in their family environment. This manifests as an aversion to the political as such in favor of an unreasonable obsession with horizontalism and operating by consensus.

The Chomsky thing is mainly a row about moral hypocrisy - Chomsky was a moralistic liberatarian socialist, rather than an amoral or anti-moralist Marxist, and therefore he’s expected to have had nothing to do with those rotten elites. People are drawn to Chomsky because they sympathize with his anarchism. They like to think and operate on a purely social level, so of course they think it’s appropriate to judge Chomsky on the basis of social associations rather than political or criminal acts. Anarchists don’t recognize the political or the legal as even potentially having legitimacy, so when someone does something they think is wrong, they resort immediately to social techniques - shunning, blacklisting, being very mean and gossipy about the person, and so on. This is just what anarchists do, and because 21st century anarchists are often mentally unwell, you can’t argue with them. It’s a waste of time. I say this as someone who has some regard for historical anarchism - in the 19th and early 20th century contexts, someone like Bakunin or Tolstoy or Gandhi comes across very differently, because they are intervening in a fundamentally different situation. But today’s anarchists are like modern subjects who pretend we can all be peasants or knights - they don’t make any sense and live in a language palace that is shorn of any contact with concrete instantiations.

They will have their silly fight about Chomsky and there is no point trying to stop them.

No, I’m not interested in Chomsky, but I do think the Peter Mandelson thing can teach us something.

What is Mandelson?

Peter Mandelson is the third man in the New Labour triad - Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Peter Mandelson. Both Blair and Brown were prime ministers. But Mandelson was always there, contributing to political strategy and hobnobbing with rich people. He was a Minister without Portfolio, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, European Commissioner, a life peer, Secretary of State for Business and Trade, First Secretary of State, President of the Privy Council, President of the Board of Trade, and, most recently, ambassador to the United States. He was first elected to parliament in 1992, the year I was born.

Mandelson was repeatedly dogged by various scandals, often involving questionable dealings with other elites. He was forced to resign from the cabinet on two separate occasions, but he always came back.

Why did Mandelson always come back? New Labour distinguished itself by making an explicit commitment to modernizing the Labour Party. New Labour accepted the need for a competitive, business-friendly economic policy. This acceptance was embodied in Mandelson, someone who was not just polite to elites, but who always seemed to genuinely respect and admire them. The presence of Mandelson, and of Mandelson’s protégés or preferred candidates, signalled to the markets that this was a Labour government they could trust. But the presence of Mandelson also signalled to Labour’s traditional working-class base that this was not the party they or their ancestors supported in the post-war era.

Over the years, Mandelson became thoroughly aestheticized. He developed into the avatar of New Labour - not Mandelson, but Mandelson. Whereas Tony Blair became associated with the Iraq War, and Gordon Brown became associated with the Global Economic Crisis, Mandelson came to embody the uncut, pure spirit of New Labour. Your attitude to Mandelson as an aesthetic object came to be indicative of your attitude to the New Labour project.

What is Mandelson?

Suppose you were a young British professional in the media or in the Labour Party. You have no substantive political record of your own, and you have yet to develop much in the way of a network. How do you make an impression? You make it, in part, by communicating your aesthetic sensibility, and you do this by articulating your attitude to symbolic totems like Mandelson.

Mandelson can be one of two things:

1. He is Oedipus, the tragic figure in a Greek play, a man who makes reasonable decisions anyone else could have made in his position, but who nonetheless encounters misfortune.

2. He is the Prince of Darkness, the villainous embodiment of the ruination of not just the Labour Party, but of the whole of post-war society.

Each of these needs the other - the impulse to regard Mandelson as tragic stems from the fact that others regard him as evil, and the need to regard Mandelson as evil stems from the fact that others regard him as tragic. Did Britain change because it had to change, or because it chose to become something worse? How did Mandelson become Mandelson? Is the nefarious air around Mandelson an unfortunate necessity, part of the price of modernizing Britain, or is it something he has wrought through wickedness? Has Mandelson sacrificed himself for Labour, or has Labour been sacrificed for men like Mandelson?

The bulk of the people who get caught up in these arguments have no way of meaningfully intervening in British politics. For them, Mandelson is a character in a drama - a tragic hero or a villain, but in either case more myth than man. They relate to him as spectators relate to a show. Even the people who now occupy political offices in Britain first encountered Mandelson in this way. The current Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, did not even become an MP until 2015. When he entered politics, Mandelson was already Mandelson. You don’t choose Mandelson to be ambassador simply because he has a lot of experience and a strong personal network. You choose Mandelson because you choose Mandelson.

So, for many years now, the function of Mandelson has been to sort people on the basis of their aesthetic tastes. So much so that, in 1996, Tony Blair said that the work of New Labour would not be complete until the party learned to love Mandelson. The function of New Labour is not simply to do politics or to govern the country, it is to reshape the aesthetic sensibilities of the British working class to the point at which it stops regarding Mandelson as the Prince of Darkness and comes to regard him as New Labour’s Oedipus.

Labour After Mandelson

What does it mean, then, for Mandelson to be not just associated with Epstein, or to have traded sexual inneundos with Epstein, but to have allegedly given Epstein lucrative government secrets? Mandelson is not just someone with bad friends or a sexual deviant, he is revealed to be a traitor, and not just to the working class, but to his own Labour government, to New Labour itself. Mandelson is alive, but Mandelson is dead.

All of the sudden there is a kind of aesthetic verdict - Mandelson was the Prince of Darkness all along. And all those who regarded him as a tragic hero are, in an aesthetic sense, now to be regarded as having been wrong. Jeremy Corbyn takes a victory lap, and Gordon Brown finally gets to have his revenge for past betrayals. Everyone in the Labour Party who has ties to Mandelson is hiding under a rock, hoping this will end. The same goes for everyone in the British press who has written puff pieces glazing the man. All fear political oblivion and the arbitrary social sanctions which the anarchists, in their madness, are always whipping up.

Yet this aesthetic verdict means nothing politically. It does not return Labour to its former state, nor does it return the UK to the 20th century. At most, it will speed up the process of getting rid of Keir Starmer and his gaggle, helping them to be replaced with another gaggle who can’t govern the country or solve its many intractable problems. The next Labour leader will have politics that are very much like Mandelson’s, but they will be careful not to have anything to do with the man. The New Labour show will go on, without its totemic figure. But the British left will be encouraged to treat this purge, when it comes, as a great victory. For a brief time, the lungs of the leftists will be filled with the song of false hope, until, in a few months or at most a few years, the absence of a viable politics in Britain becomes visible again. Eheu!

Why does basketball fascinate me? Basketball is extremely political. A group of people must cooperate with each other to be successful. But the shot clock limits the amount of time available for deliberation, making it impossible to operate by social consensus or by social bargaining. It becomes necessary to resort to political methods. Anarchism - which is practiced in pickup games and leads, inevitably, to violence - never allows a basketball team to operate at the highest possible level.

Basketball players struggle to cooperate for several reasons:

1. They do not agree about what to do and cannot come to agreement within an adequate time frame.

2. Even when they do agree about what to do, they struggle to communicate effectively with one another.

3. Even when they agree about what to do and are able to communicate effectively, there is an opposing team that seeks to disrupt their activity and sow conflict among them.

When you treat basketball like a game, and you try to score by the method that seems most efficient to you, this backfires. You end up alienating your teammates. You play in a predictable way, and the defense adjusts. But if you defer to everyone else, you never reach your potential as a player, and the team’s development is fettered by your lack of development.

So, to be successful at basketball, you can’t treat it like a game or like a social event. You have to treat it like politics. A basketball team is a community of knowers who aim at a common good. This good is not reducible to the score, and if you conflate it with the score you begin, already, to slide away from it. Yet, because basketball is scored, there is always a temptation to believe that the score tells the truth about whether you are playing well together.

The common good in basketball constantly demands new things from the players. The play you ran last possession will not operate the same on the next possession, for several reasons:

1. Each time you repeat the play, it becomes more predictable, making it easier for the defense to adjust.

2. The players who are most involved in the play become tired if they are overused. Eventually, you have to involve other people so that they can rest.

3. The players who are least involved in the play become demoralized if you continuously leave them out. They begin trying less hard and communicating less effectively.

This means that, very often, it is good to run plays that are less likely to work than the play that is statistically the best one. If, each play, you try your hardest to improve the score, you will lose the game.

The players understand all of this on an intellectual level. But if no one coaches them, they struggle to agree in good time, each possession, on the play they ought to run. For this reason, the players know they need to be coached. The coach helps the players come to agreement quickly in several ways:

1. Over the course of the season, the coach installs a “system” which predictably allows the players to act unpredictably. By following the system, they arrive at a sufficiently diverse set of plays without having to deliberate each possession about what to do.

2. In unusual situations that call for a specific course of action, the coach draws up a play. Even if the players disagree about this play, they run it because it’s the play the coach has drawn up.

3. The coach punishes players who defect from the system and from the plays, by benching them.

The players agree to be coached, but they want to be coached well. The coach has to be careful not to “lose” the players. The coach has authority to coach them, but only in so far as he can legitimate his coaching to them. If they are not persuaded that the coaching is legitimate, they disobey the coach. They break the play or the system. When they do that, the coach can punish them by benching them, but benching has clear limits:

1. The coach can bench all of the players some of the time, but the coach cannot bench all of the players at the same time.

2. Players who are benched too often become demoralized. Their conditioning deteriorates, or they begin complaining to the media or to the front office.

3. Since players who are benched often know that they can effectively oppose the coach if they can get others to agree with them, chronically discontented players plot against the coach. They look for opportunities to undermine the coach, enlisting teammates in schemes to get the coach fired.

So, coaches cannot rule by force but must secure political legitimacy. But there is only so much the coach can do to persuade the players to listen. The players must also be “coachable”, they have to allow the coach to coach. If the players were anarchists who believed they didn’t need a coach, that the coach embodies an illegitimate hierarchy, it wouldn’t be possible to coach them. The coach can only coach players who are not anarchists, who agree in principle that coaching is necessary.

The coach will also struggle if the team is sharply divided about how to play. For instance, in the early 2000s, the Los Angeles Lakers became split between Shaq and Kobe, each of whom wanted to be the first option on offense. Other players were forced to choose sides. Eventually, even the members of the media were forced to pick between them, because Shaq and Kobe would not talk to the journalists they associated with the other side. The coach, Phil Jackson, was known for his ability to manage conflicts among players and get them to support his system. But eventually, the factionalism within the team became so intense that there was no way to coach across it. A decision was made to trade Shaq so as to prevent Kobe from leaving the team. This emboldened Kobe to think that he could dictate terms to the coach. Kobe stopped playing within Phil Jackson’s system, and Phil Jackson quit.

Kobe spent one year without Phil Jackson. During that year, the Lakers lost a lot of games. These defeats eventually convinced Kobe to accept Phil Jackson’s system once more. Could this have been avoided? In late 2004, there was no way Phil Jackson could legitimate his system to Kobe - the only way for Kobe to accept the system was for him to see that he could not be successful without it.

Competitive multiparty elections often work this way. The public gets sick of a particular government. It wants to see if it can be successful without this government and its signature policies. So, it elects a new government. If that government is successful, it can win another election. If it is unable to be successful, the public becomes willing to vote for the previous party once more. In this way, replacing the coach and replacing the government can flush resentment and renew the possibility of legitimate political action.

Some teams are bad because the players are not talented at basketball. But it is much more interesting when a team is bad because it is ungovernable. No matter how many times you change the coach, the players remain uncoachable and internal conflicts within the team do not dissolve. In these cases, the team is often improved by trading away talented players who are political problems. Sometimes, when those players are on new teams, they are able to fit in, politically, and their talent becomes more visible. Other times, these players are repeatedly associated with political problems wherever they go. When this happens, they develop negative reputations and journalists begin writing moralist screeds against them.

Trash talk is an important part of basketball. It is an attempt to create a legitimation crisis within the opposing team. When trash talk is effective, talented players are provoked or baited into breaking the system or the plays. They become temporarily uncoachable, making irrational decisions. In the park, where there are no coaches and no referees, trash talk leads to violence. But referees can throw players out of games. Coaches can tell their players to ignore trash talk, they can complain at the referees on their players’ behalf, and they can bench players before things get out of hand. For all of these reasons, a fight during a real basketball game is a remarkable thing - it means many political techniques have been unsuccessful.

There is a conflict of interest between the players, who want to play good basketball, and the front office, which usually wants to win games and always wants to make a profit. The front office uses the players as instruments to achieve its ends, and it discards players when those players no longer seem useful. The coach is positioned in between the two. This puts the coach in an awkward mediating position. If the players believe that the coach views them as tools, they become much less coachable. If the front office believes that the coach cares more about the players than about the front office’s ends, the front office may fire the coach even if the coach is a good basketball coach.

This means that if the coach wants to stay employed, the coach has to be bad. And since bad coaches eventually lose their players, the path to staying employed usually leads to getting fired. Conversely, a good coach will get fired for being good.

In this way, capitalism undermines the functioning of the political. The same is true for national governments - they become mediators, sitting between the citizens and capital. The mediating position makes it very difficult for national governments to operate. If the citizens believe that the national government is trying to machine them into playing a particular role in the global economic system, they become much less governable. If the markets believe that the national government cares more about the citizens than about generating a business-friendly atmosphere, the markets punish national governments until they change course or are defeated at the next election. The national government cannot be fired by the markets - it is, in this very limited sense, sovereign - but it can be put in an unrecoverable electoral position.

NBA players play basketball better than anyone has ever played it. This is in part because the profit the NBA makes for wealthy oligarchs allows for high NBA salaries, incentivizing players to compete to be employed in the NBA and to keep their NBA jobs once they have them. But the profit the NBA makes for wealthy oligarchs also fetters the further development of the quality of the play, because it creates situations in which players have to pursue individual statistical impact to convince front offices to give them new contracts. The need for NBA players to demonstrate their individual quality makes them significantly harder to coach than they would otherwise be. For this reason, there are continuous legitimation crises within NBA teams. This political instability is managed by the NBA through several mechanisms:

1. Front offices fire coaches and trade or waive players who seem to be ineffective or uncoachable.

2. The league office disciplines players, coaches, and front offices with fines and suspensions, and it locks out the players if the players’ union makes demands that the league considers incompatible with profit-maximization.

3. The journalists who cover the NBA work for companies that make money from televising NBA games. These journalists therefore have a stake in helping the NBA manage the coaches and players.

Because the NBA fetters the further development of good basketball, many people oppose it and offer laments about how much better basketball used to be at the college or high school level, before college and high school athletes began competing with one another to be NBA players. But NBA basketball is much better than college or high school basketball, precisely because of the very mechanisms that fetter its further development. The NBA is not bad - it is just insufficiently good. It points at a possible level of basketball it cannot produce within the constraints of capitalism.

The critics of the NBA can be divided into three categories:

1. Reactionaries who want NBA teams to be like college or high school teams. These teams have extremely powerful coaches who can cut players they find troublesome. The coaches subjectivize their players to an inordinate degree, depriving them of political voice. Many players are neglected and fail to reach their potential.

2. Anarchists who want the NBA to be like pick-up basketball. Some of these people suggest that organized basketball is inherently racist, that coaching is a way for white men to dominate black men. They celebrate players who are uncoachable and they like it when basketball is violent and unruly.

3. Europeans who believe that EuroLeague is better, because EuroLeague is less optimized for profit maximization. But the NBA recognizes that EuroLeague has an uncompetitive business model and is preparing to create its own European league. This league will inevitably destroy EuroLeague. The best players and clubs will choose to play in the NBA’s league because this league will generate more revenue. Even though EuroLeague has good rules, it won’t have enough talent to compete. For EuroLeague to survive, it would be necessary for EuroLeague to be protected from American competition. In an increasingly globalized world, this would require overcoming capitalism itself.

These three tendencies also exist in real politics, where they operate in a similar way.

To make basketball better, we would have to qualify the senses in which basketball is a mere game. We would have to transform basketball into an activity that is done for its own sake. Players would have to play not for money, statistics, or even wins, but out of a devotion to basketball. To create socialism, you have to create conditions in which basketball is played better than it is in the NBA without recourse to the profit motive.

What about 2K? The NBA 2K games were, at one point in time, places where people tried to play the best basketball they could play, without any hope of getting paid for it. Ten people, five on each side, would play together online, each of them controlling a single player. When these people cooperated, games of extraordinary beauty were possible. But this cooperation was inconsistent, because of the lack of coaching. Inevitably someone would begin hogging the ball. In 2K, you can’t start fights, but you can rage quit or begin intentionally turning the ball over to register your dissatisfaction. Before long, 2K realized people would pay real money to play as a fictional version of themselves, and that it could monetize the games, turning them into a kind of E-Sports. People even bet on these games. And, to make them hypercompetitive, 2K increasingly made the games all about releasing the shot button at precisely the correct moment. You can make contested shots if you release the button at the right time, and you will miss open shots if you release the button at the wrong time. So, you don’t need to work together to get open shots. No one plays good basketball on 2K anymore, and playing online is a depressing, miserable experience. You can still play decent basketball on 2K with your friends, if you modify the settings in the game. But this is a form of enclavist retreat. You will never play the best basketball that can be played, because you will never play with the most talented, dedicated people.

Artistic interventions often produce glimpses of possibilities, but as artistic spaces become popular, the opportunity to monetize them and reassimilate them into capitalism reasserts. The only way to protect such things is have a political system that is capable of effectively intervening. But there is no political system that can do this for basketball. There is just the NBA and 2K. You can play the best basketball you can with your friends, in person or on 2K, but you have to accept that the quality of your basketball will be limited by your political incapacity.

Playing basketball - online or in-person - becomes a Sisyphean struggle against the gameification and commodification of what is, in our society, both a game and a commodity. Basketball is only a great game in so far as it is not played as a game, in so far as it is not played for money, status, statistics, or wins. And yet, to this point, we have not been able to make basketball better without the use of these incentives, the very incentives which limit and distort it. Were we to overcome these fetters on the goodness of basketball, we would be spiritually transformed in the process. But we must first believe that it is possible to do this, that basketball can be organized in such a way that it can and will be treated as an object of devotion. The game does not have to be a game, the commodity does not have to be a commodity - it can be something more.

It sounds ridiculous if you don’t care about basketball. But the same is true for the activities you care about. If you spend enough time thinking about any activity that you care about, you start to notice these things. And, once you see them, you can’t unsee them. But seeing them is not enough - it does not give you a politics that allows you to change the way things are done. The consciousness of this impotence is what gives rise to despair, and because despair is painful, people hide from it. They pretend basketball is fine, or that it can’t be any better than it is. To really do anything worthwhile in this life, it is necessary to pass through the dark places, guided by nothing other than the light of the principle, conceptualized in relation to a specific context. Next year, in Jerusalem, there will be Good Basketball