Abstract

This essay reads Democracy and Empire as an intervention into contemporary debates regarding the fate of the Western left in the age of neoliberalism. The left often explains (figures like) Trump by pointing out that the ravages of neoliberalism – weakening of the welfare state, stagnating social mobility, concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands – have made it easy to mobilize white working-class voters by scapegoating racialized others. Hillary Clinton infamously dismissed these voters as deplorables; it has since become more popular to try to understand their anger. Neither approach is sufficient without further specification. What is lost in the contours of this debate is that the racism called forth by the extreme right is not the resurgence of an obsolete force but simply the newest expression of an excessive attachment to wealth that defined even the apparent golden age of post-war welfare capitalism. A failure to generate a truly emancipatory, pluralistic democratic imaginary has led the left to fall into its own ‘make America great again’ narrative in its romanticization of this ‘golden age.’ Without a sufficient political-economic analysis of the conditions of possibility of wealth and an explicit commitment to anti-imperial sovereignty, the left risks reproducing – though disavowing – regimes of racialized labour exploitation. This raises the question of possibility and strategy: in a polity flanked by a left complicit in, a right indifferent to, and an extreme right actively pursuing injustice, can the way forward pass through a commitment to an imagined, desirable, radical, but improbable alternative?