Neoliberalism and neoconservatism are two distinct political rationalities in the contemporary United States. They have few overlapping formal characteristics, and even appear contradictory in many respects. Yet they converge not only in the current presidential administration but also in their de-democratizing effects. Their respective devaluation of political liberty, equality, substantive citizenship, and the rule of law in favor of governance according to market criteria on the one side, and valorization of state power for putatively moral ends on the other, undermines both the culture and institutions of constitutional democracy. Above all, the two rationalities work symbiotically to produce a subject relatively indifferent to veracity and accountability in government and to political freedom and equality among the citizenry.

Stuart Hall, remarks on the occasion of the launch of the Center for Citizenship, Identity and Governance (CIGS) at the Open University, Milton Keynes, UK, March 2005.

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William Connolly has offered a different metaphor, that of the “resonance machine,” for capturing the relations or imbrication of different rationalities that together construct the contemporary political landscape, and especially for doing so without resorting to causality, crude materialism, theories of manipulation, or meta-theory. See William Connolly, “The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine,” Political Theory 33, no. 6 (December 2005): 869-86.

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In his Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), David Harvey also explores the political and analytic relationship between neoliberalism and neo-conservatism. But he regards them as largely issuing from the same source (the corporate class) and serving the same function, namely, restoration and consolidation of upper-class political and economic power from the dilution and crises it suffered in the third quarter of the twentieth century. And even as the two “isms” vary on matters such as individualism and morality, he identifies the open state authoritarianism and militarism of neoconservatism with the prospect of rescuing neoliberalism from its contradictory relationship to the state and to freedom (see 78-86). Harvey's account is quite useful for debunking the common view of neoliberalism as anti-statist and also for linking neoliberalism to the imperial discourse of freedom promulgated in U.S. post–Cold War foreign policy (see chs. 3 and 7). It is less useful for understanding the distinctions between neoliberal and neoconservative rationalities, their different sources of promulgation, and the chafing between them.

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Wendy Brown , “ Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy ,” Theory and Event 7, no. 1 (Fall 2003 ): http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_&_event/.

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It is not strictly accurate to denote neoliberalism as amoral. There is both its availability to utilization for governance aims such as law-abiding behavior or protection of the traditional family form, and there is its figuration of the subject as entrepreneur and normative promulgation of entrepreneurship itself. However, neoliberalism takes distance from conventional moral discourse in its affirmation of a wholly instrumental rationality: it affirms market strategies across all fields of life and is formally indifferent to the ends for which these strategies are employed.

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Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.”

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Michel Foucault , “ Politics and Reason ,” in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-84, ed. L. Kritzman ( New York : Routledge ), ( 1988 ).

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This discussion is a summary of the longer account of neoliberal rationality and democracy in Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.”

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Bush's precise words were as follows: “Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.” G. W. Bush, White House press conference, November 4, 2004, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/11/20041104-5.html.

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“Size of protest—it's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group,” Bush said. See “Antiwar Protests Fail to Sway Bush on Plans for Iraq” New York Times, February 19, 2003. p. 1.

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Michel Foucault , “ Governmentality ,” in The Foucault Effect, ed. Graham Burchell , Colin Gordon , and Peter Miller ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , ( 1991 ), 95 - 95 .

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See Jürgen Habermas , “Learning from Catastrophe? ” in Postnational Constellations, trans . and ed. Max Pensky ( Cambridge, Mass .: MIT Press ,( 2001 ), 51 - 52 .

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“Of course, the democratic process protects equal private liberties, but for neoliberalism it does not add political autonomy as a further dimension of freedom. ” Habermas, Postnational Constellations, 94 - 94 .

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Georgio Agamben , State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , ( 2005 ).

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Even as neoconservatives carry on about “strict constructionism” in constitutional adjudication, constructionism itself becomes a contingent cover for the tacticalization, an irony that was nowhere more evident than in the spring 2005 neoconservative campaign to eliminate the filibuster for judicial appointments in the United States.

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Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet , L'Amerique messianique Paris : Editions de Seuil , 2004 . For other accounts, see, inter alia, Irwin Stelzer, ed., The Neocon Reader (New York: Grove, 2005);Norman Podhoretz, “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” in Norman Podhoretz, The Norman Podhoretz Reader (New York: Free Press, 1995); James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004); Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clark, America Alone: The Neo-conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004); Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin's, 1988); Joseph Dorman, Arguing the World: New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neo-conservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2004); and Mark Lilla, “The Closing of the Straussian Mind,” New York Review of Books, November 4, 2004.

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Although Fukuyama insists on four founding principles of neoconservatism, he also says this:



Google Scholar America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 39; see also Grant Smith, Deadly Dogma: How Neoconservatives Broke the Law to Deceive America (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, 2006).

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Those who insist on the Christian fundamentalist core of neoconservatism today do not reckon with this complex ensemble.

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Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire, 178. Norton's description specifically aims to reveal the affinities of neoconservatism with Nazism.

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Fukuyama , America at the Crossroads, 63 , 48 .

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Norton , Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire, 168 - 178 .

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For Fukuyama , this description of neoconservatism is already the corruption of it by the “Kristol-Kagan agenda,” the “expansive, interventionist, democracy-promoting position” that overextends the idea of activist foreign policy and especially “regime change . ” Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 40 - 44 .

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Irving Kristol , “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” Weekly Standard, August 25, 2003 , http:///www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=3000&R=EC72321FB.

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Thomas Frank , What's the Matter with Kansas ( New York : Henry Holt , ( 2005 ).

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Frank's depiction of the neoconservative strategy renders it brilliant and (overly) complete, one which is explicitly aimed at duping the working and middle classes about their “real” social and economic interests and using their resentment of liberals and concern with morality to do so. In brief, he argues that by setting up an antagonism between an image of the little guy who is upright, moral, and hardworking, and an image of liberals characterized as elitist and profligate in every way, the neocons use a moral language (Bush's 2004 campaign theme of “We share values”) to link the interests of the corporate class and those of the workers. This language makes liberals rather than capitalism responsible for the vulgarity of culture and moral degradation, and identifies liberals primarily with support for gay marriage, abortion, women's rights, secularism, and a free speech defense of pornography. As this strategy thoroughly moralizes both the left and the right agendas, it metonymically associates all that each side stands for and gives everything from war, taxation, free trade, and welfare to the UN a moral valence. This tactic also links the right with godliness, and positions God for the unborn and against homosexuality, and as a free market capitalist, an American, and a freedom fighter in the Islamic world.

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Habermas , The Postnational Constellation, 94 - 94 .

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T. W. Adorno , Else Frenkel-Brunswik , and Daniel J. Levinson , The Authoritarian Personality New York : Harper , ( 1950 ); Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964); Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Henry Holt, 1941); and Plato, The Republic, see especially the critique of democracy.

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See dissertation in progress by Elisabeth Anker, “The Venomous Eye: Melodrama in the Making of National Identity and State Power,” Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley.

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Carl Schmitt , On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, ed. G. Schwaab , trans. J. Bendersky Westport, Conn. : Greenwood , 2004 . I am indebted to David Bates, “Political Theology and the Nazi State: Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Institution,” Modern Intellectual History (forthcoming), for drawing my attention to Three Types of Juristic Thought and to this aspect of Schmitt's theory of the state.

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Irving Kristol writes that “statesmen should, above all, have the ability to distinguish friends from enemies,” and Bush routinely defends his approach to foreign policy by arguing for the importance of decisiveness and strength, and the inappropriateness of public deliberation. See Kristol, “The Neoconservative Persuasion.”

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For a more fully developed version of this argument, see Wendy Brown, “The Return of the Repressed: Sovereignty, Capital, Theology” in The New Pluralism: William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition, ed. David Campbell and Morton Schoolman ( Durham, N.C .: Duke University Press , forthcoming in ( 2007 ).

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See Ron Suskind , “ Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush ,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004 , http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17Bush.html?ex=1, for an extended discussion of G. W. Bush's eschewal of facts, even those delivered by his closest advisors, in favor of truth from the “gut” or “instinct” and decisions based on views that collide with the facts but that he made after he “prayed over them. ” Importantly, however, this eschewal would not be viable unless it was shared by a substantial part of the electorate. See Timothy Egan, “All Polls Aside, Utah Is Keeping Faith in Bush,” New York Times, June 4, 2006, p. 1.

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An anonymous reader of this manuscript underscored the significance of this message being attached to cars by magnets rather than adhesives. In the scheme of neoliberal culture, s/he noted, “showing commitment to our boys (and girls) in uniform is one thing; tarnishing the car with sticky stuff is another. ”

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More than a few have argued for the language of fascism to describe the current conjuncture. In an otherwise incisive and informative essay on the global imperial design of American foreign policy, Falk argues for its fascist dimensions without exploring what actually constitutes fascism or what resonance the term carries. See Richard Falk, “Will the Empire Be Fascist?” http://www.transnational.org/forum/meet/2003/Falk_FascistEmpire.html. At the 2005 American Political Science Association annual meeting, Washington, D.C., August, an entire panel was devoted to the question “Is It Time to Call It Fascism?” See also Sheldon Wolin, “Inverted Totalitarianism,” The Nation, May 19, 2003, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030519/wolin; and Sheldon Wolin, “A Kind of Fascism Is Replacing Our Democracy,” http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0718-07.htm. While I am sympathetic to the content of these analyses, my worry about the move to use an old name (especially one super-saturated with a particular history and signification) for a new configuration of power is, first, that the novel aspects of this configuration may be insufficiently grasped and analyzed, and, second, that focus on the fascist dimensions of rule eclipses the importance of the faceless social and cultural forces of de-democratization I have emphasized in this essay. In short, the nomenclature threatens to keep the focus on an oppressive “them” rather than a subjective “us.”

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