Target Practice

Harris reviews Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. The optimistic book posits that clean energy and a practical sweeping away of over-regulation will clear a path to solve the West’s political crisis with an increase in supplies of necessary goods: housing, clean transportation, lab grown meat. The argument, according to Harris, is a programmatic response to a degrowth-oriented progressive movement, and a conservative movement that detests government intervention. The problem is that the authors don’t grapple with the structural class conflicts that also play a role in blocking the rosy future of abundance.

“It’s one thing to advocate for class compromise, but another to exclude discussion of class conflict altogether. The book’s single mention of Bernie Sanders is in the sentence, ‘In 2016, the rise of Bernie Sanders on the left and the rise of Donald Trump on the right revealed how many Americans had stopped believing that the life they had been promised was achievable.’ Abundance is the prefab, catch-all alternative to these forms of scarcity-thinking on ‘both the socialist left and the populist authoritarian right.’ Large increases in material output, we are assured, can save liberalism from the civilizational choice between socialism and barbarism. I disagree; refusing to be forthright about society’s structural antagonisms opens the door to demagogues who peddle false conflicts that still ring truer than the liberals’ false peace.”

Ghana appears to be a stable, neoliberal bastion of democracy in West Africa, but this narrative is belied by spiraling inequality, recurrent debt crises and growing civic unrest. Ghanaian social activist and political economist Gyekye Tanoh contrasts the current situation to the turbulent post-colonial period, which was shaped by clashes between Kwame Nkrumah’s modernizing project and vested interests, both domestic and international. Under Nkrumah, economic growth, though uneven, put the country’s poor on an upward trend, while the current system is structurally dependent on the degradation of workers.

“…The real issue in Ghana is not the resilience of the ruling political parties. It’s the absence of an alternative force that can challenge them in a meaningful way. Now, there is something else happening—a growing disillusionment with electoral democracy itself. Of course, there has always been opposition to governments—that’s why elections exist. But this is different. For the first time, there is a much more widespread critique of the entire political class—a sense that they are all the same and that the system itself is broken. This sentiment has always existed, but today, it is more pronounced, more organized, and more widespread than before.” 

A review of three books, each offering a different interpretation of neoliberalism in today’s era of surging and exclusionary nationalism: Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance; Tehila Sasson’s The Solidarity Economy: Nonprofits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire; and Jennifer Burns’s Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. Read together, the three “make for an insightful guide to how its historians are thinking through neoliberalism’s hegemonic crisis from the outside and from the inside.”

“Neoliberalism is neither dead nor dying but mutating, as one excellent volume put it. Yet this does not mean that neoliberalism remains as secure in its hegemony as it was before the global financial recession. If it has survived successive crises, both economic and ideological, it has not done so unscathed. For some time now, neoliberalism has faced a profound hegemonic crisis in which the commonsense appeal it once had, at least in some electoral corners, has notably waned. For at least a decade now, this hegemonic crisis has defined the terrain on which much research on neoliberalism operates. Scholars have been in search of an analytical perspective that is adequate to our present conjuncture. The task is to offer an interpretation of resurgent nationalism that can account for points of tension with previous articulations of neoliberal politics without prematurely declaring neoliberalism dead.”

A flourishing democracy requires strong and motivating beliefs about the future. Future-oriented visions have historically empowered social movements by providing a critical lens on the present, fostering collective political identity, and sustaining commitment through adversity. These visions can also play a role in strengthening the legitimacy of democratic institutions, which rely on imagined futures to bridge dissatisfaction and maintain representation—without them, democracy risks losing its vitality and public trust.

“The political significance of the future tends to be approached in contemporary democratic theory as a matter of what the living may bestow on their descendants. The focus is on cross-generational relations and, more generally, on the futures one can plausibly expect. As this article has argued, at least as important as how things ultimately unfold is how ideas of the future shape politics in the moving present. Hopes, fears, dreams and expectations matter, whether they are fulfilled or not. As politically consequential as how people evaluate the present is how they sense the direction of travel and their degree of control over the future. For both empirical and normative reasons, the study of politics and democracy needs to pay more attention to the ways in which the future is imagined and engaged.”

Habermas’ three volume Also a History of Philosophy offers a sprawling and meditative defense of the ideals of modernity. In these books, Habermas traces the evolution of rational thought from mythic and religious understandings of the world toward philosophical reason, highlighting Christianity’s emphasis on human finitude as a turning point that redirected attention inward and laid the groundwork for Enlightenment individualism. He ultimately sees socialism, liberalism, and democracy as rational heirs to this intellectual tradition—secular projects aimed at achieving justice in this world through reason, rather than through transcendence or divine authority.

“At the level of metaphysics and post-metaphysics Habermas’ story is very convincing.  It undercuts the bifurcations upon which critics of modernity often lie. The mirror image of the reactionary’s one-sided condemnation of modernity as a great leap down from the past is Stephen Pinker’s one-sided proclamation of modernity as a great leap up. By showing in exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) detail how modernity was birthed out of antiquity and so carries its genetic stamp, Habermas quietly but radically subverts the reactionary who wants to describe it as an aberrational cataclysm. Moreover by describing modernity as not only developing out of antiquity but improving on it, Habermas shows why modernity should be accepted by critics. If it is the case that modern thought is more rational, more just – a kind of ethical growth as Charles Taylor would put it in Cosmic Connections – and simply more true, then it must be accepted and defended by any who remain sincerely committed to Plato, Aristotle and Augustine’s love of truth, beauty, and wisdom.“