Containing Precarity

the new authoritarian playbook

Greetings from Prague. This coming Saturday July 5, I’m running a panel at the International Society of Political Psychology meeting here on the rising authoritarian tide in the USA. In this short contribution, I will walk through how neo-liberalism generates precarity, how authoritarianism offers promises to contain the anxiety that results, and some initial thoughts on how to work through these troubles.

Generating Precarity: what neoliberalism does

Today neoliberal reason and politics and tactics have become signature themes of modern life. As Wendy Brown puts it, “neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities – even where money is not at issue – and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo economicus (Undoing, p.31).

In lieu of a political process that calls for questioning and tarries with ambiguity, disagreement, and uncertainty, neoliberalism offers up economic “truths” that should settle any matters (McAfee 2015). In lieu of gathering in public to deliberate and decide together, a private market promises to quietly have the last word. Instead of public space and public power punctuated by human reality, neoliberalism reduces any suffering to employment rates and return on investment.

“Neoliberal rationality is productive, world-making: it economizes every sphere and human endeavour, and it replaces a model of society based on the justice-producing social contract with a conception of society organized as market and of states oriented by market requirements” (Brown 2018, 12). This rationality naturalizes a market economy that leaves people hung out to dry, vulnerable to any chance misfortune, adding economic anxiety to the existential anxiety endemic to a world in which god and truth are dead. Neoliberalism has created a new precariat, from the gig worker to the elite college graduate unsure about how they will fare in the world.

Now something else now seems to be afoot: a bewildering right-angle turn from a politics that is laissez-faire, globalized, and individualistic to one that is chauvinistic, statist, and moralistic, in short, authoritarianism and the many elements of its playbook, including a web of lies to shield the neoliberal order from scrutiny. Today that web of lies includes things like weaponizing and completely distorting the meaning of antisemitism, the facts of racism, colonialism, and genocide; a politics that demands withdrawal from the world as well as obedience to the law. Where the hallmark of neoliberalism was the banishing of borders, the call of the current moment is to build a wall. This is a world of ontological insecurity where seemingly only a Trump or Marie Le Pen might save us.

Containing Precarity: what authoritarianism offers

There is an entire history behind this scene, a confluence of social and political and economic forces at work, many set in motion decades ago as global capital set about undoing the social safety nets of the welfare state, making the world ripe for global flows of power, data, money, and now bitcoin and AI. Neoliberalism was an attempt to discredit social justice policies, and now the new authoritarianism is a vicissitude of that same aim. Neoliberalism led to precarity, unease, and fear. The new authoritarianism offers neoliberalism’s phobic subjects a promise of safe havens. But instead of providing safety from the real threat, namely unfettered global capitalism, which has turned the working class into the abject poor, the new authoritarianism, what Wendy Brown calls “neoliberalism’s Frankenstein,” displaces danger from its actual source to its invented ones: immigrants, trans people, and any other supposed dangers to the state. Trying to call out and pin down these displacements is exhausting and unending, for the process of displacement can continue without end. There is always someone else to blame. So long as there is precarity, the promise of salvation is, for many, too tantalizing to resist.

In short, authoritarianism is a containment vessel.

While it might be tempting to see this moment as radically different from neoliberalism and to say that we are in a post-neoliberal era, this would be a mistake. What we are seeing now is a vicissitude of what gave rise to neoliberalism in the first place: an attempt to completely discredit any attention to shared, collective social life, including social-welfare and social-justice politics, and to disincentivize political action. Not only does neoliberalism attempt to eviscerate the political, it has steadily colonized the public realm with private values. With the new authoritarian turn it is now introducing patriarchal ones: family, god, bible, religion, unity (no divisive words, no books that question prevailing words, no acknowledgment of race and its terrible history).

Rather than being a reversal of neoliberalism, the new authoritarianism is a vicissitude of it. Both are de-political phenomena that largely eviscerate any rich conception of democratic public life in service to the same thing: a globalized, economic capitalist order free from political accountability. Where neoliberalism generates precarity, the new authoritarianism rushes in to offer comfort and solace against the anxieties unleashed by precarity. Both operate by emptying the metaphorical and actual public square, but authoritarianism does this to assuage the anxiety that neoliberalism generates. The root causes of insecurity unleashed by precarity are systematically both disavowed and contained by the new authoritarian and now fascist playbook, which includes moves of (1) fomenting fear, (2) scapegoating vulnerable populations, (3) consolidating executive power, (4) curtailing democratic assembly, (5) normalizing police violence, and (6) truncating thinking.

Where neoliberalism generates precarity because of the very material consequences of its policies, by (1) fomenting fear authoritarianism offers something else to blame, usually something very convenient because it is already being (2) scapegoated, perhaps a population that is already deemed to be a dispensable irritant. With this fantasy of a dangerous outsider in place, authoritarians can then justify, because of such “exceptional” circumstances, (3) consolidating executive power and (4) curtailing democratic assemblies. Now what were previously seen as peaceful demonstrations are suddenly rendered dangerous mobs who need to be contained, perhaps best through (5) highly militarized police forces, necessary to contain and protect the good “we” from dangerous outsiders. And lest one stop to think through the ridiculousness of all this for one moment, authoritarians will use their newfound unchecked power to (6) demonize and ban alternative ideas, you know, like the truth; to spin a web of lies, and to delegitimize the usual alternative sources of knowledge of the courts, the press, and the academy.

Sound familiar?

Working Through Precarity

If the root cause of authoritarianism is a free-floating anxiety that demands containment, then the antidote is two-fold: one is to change the material conditions that give rise to this precarity, basically capitalism run amok; and the other is to help people face dead on what is causing this situation, to be able to look it in the eye rather than try to magically wish it away, to be able to tolerate, to sit even for a moment, with the terrible feeling. Defenses like authoritarianism rise up precisely when and where people cannot bear terrible thoughts. Surely the thought of being completely hung out to dry by neoliberalism’s callous disregard for one’s own life is terrible, producing what many at ISPP term ontological insecurity. But the thought itself will not kill us; and developing the capacity to sit with it is key to becoming able to look in the eye the conditions that give rise to it. So, addressing the two-fold nature of the problem requires first the capacity to think.

Yet, cleverly, this is exactly what defense mechanisms foreclose. Imagine that at the center of our being are any such terrible thoughts. Then, like the walls of a garrison, defenses rise up, slam shut, and lock into place to protect against thinking them. Fantastical thoughts come to replace real ones: ergo that under unfettered capitalism I will become a millionaire rather than a pauper. What we cannot tolerate is not outside us but inside us: perhaps the thought that under unfettered capitalism I could end up homeless, hungry, and alone. We are not defending against intruders from the outside but from what Arendt called the “two-in-one of thinking,” questioning ourselves, of our own thinking about what is going on inside us. We are protecting ourselves from internal dread and foreboding. This is why projections and projective identifications are so enticing. If we can locate the problem not just “out there” but out there in that (maybe those Haitians who Trump told us are eating our pets), then the anxiety gets a nice container. A container feels good because then the anxiety is not free-floating but localized somewhere. And then we can imagine or entertain a fantasy of destroying that terrible thing out there and finally getting some relief. If only they were destroyed, we will be fine.

The solution to this fantastical container of authoritarianism, to whatever extent there is a solution, begins with developing the capacity to think and to sit with such thoughts. This can come in small doses. A good analyst or a good friend or a good journal can be a guide, prodding us to think about what is so terrible about that? What are you afraid of? How real is that? Once we start sitting with a terrible thought for even a minute and find that it doesn’t destroy us, we might be able to sit with it for two minutes. We might develop a certain curiosity and even disinterest about why we find that thought to be so terrifying. We might gradually become the kind of person who is no longer terrified by it but finds instead that it is kind of funny that we were ever so afraid.

Politically this happens all the time. It happens when people encounter others they previously thought were monsters and find that they are not so horrible after all: people marked as others, depending on the context, perhaps queers, immigrants, and other foreigners. If we avoid them at all costs they become demonized and retain their imagined malevolent force, but if we encounter them in a more humane manner we can see that they are just other human beings. This is why densely populated urban areas tend to be more left-leaning that rural areas. Familiarity with foreignness tames the anxiety.

Conclusion

Briefly here I have laid out how neoliberalism generated precarity; how authoritarianism (in the service of neoliberalism) offers to contain it, including through all the familiar elements of its playbook; and some initial directions for working through the primary defense of not thinking. By “thinking” I do not mean just cognition and logic but more the capacity to mentalize affective experiences, to be able to put into words and so reflect on the effect of capitalism run amok. There is much more I have to say, but alas no time left here.