Against Empire. Matthew T. Eggemeier
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as neoconservatives have distanced themselves from the vulgar racism and xenophobia of Trumpism, subtle forms of “dog whistle” xenophobia and Islamophobia have long served as central features of neoconservative rhetoric. Trump draws from the xenophobic cultural climate cultivated by neoconservatives after 9/11 even as his appeal to belligerent nationalism has become more overt in its Islamophobic rhetoric.109
Overall, Trump has reframed the rhetoric of neoconservatism and reset its foreign policy vision while retaining the neoconservative hostility to (racialized) foreign threats and its commitment to American military hegemony.
Political Assemblages
The relationship between neoliberalism and neoconservatism is complicated insofar as neoliberals celebrate open markets and free trade and so have little patience for the nationalistic preoccupation with borders and territorial boundaries of proponents of neoconservatism. Furthermore, where neoliberalism severs bonds of mutuality and solidarity by placing the logic of competitive individualism at the center of society, neoconservatism constructs an order of values rooted in a commitment to the traditional family and nationalism. Remarkably, despite these differences, advocates of neoliberalism and neoconservatism have entered into a strategic alliance over the past forty years to form a durable political coalition on the right.
In view of these tensions, the question that remains is how these ideologies converge to form a political bloc on the right. A number of theorists (Stuart Hall, Sheldon Wolin, David Harvey, and Wendy Brown) have offered an interpretation of this relation that suggests, in effect, that what neoliberalism tears apart with its commitment to competitive individualism, neoconservatism restores with its focus on family, tradition, and nation.110 A second approach has been offered by Melinda Cooper in Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, in which she argues that neoliberals entered into a strategic alliance with neoconservatives in defense of the traditional family as a means of offering a moral critique of the welfare state.111 On this reading, social conservatives emphasized the importance of a small, limited government because it allowed them to preserve the white patriarchal family structure and its gendered and racial hierarchies. Neoliberals, like Gary Becker and Milton Friedman, valued the family for different reasons, viewing it as a means to justify small, limited government (at least with respect to taxation, redistribution, and welfare). Neoliberals did not share the specific moral critique of welfare offered by neoconservatives, but they viewed the alliance with the neoconservatives as an opportunity to replace the welfare state with the private sector. The defense of the family thus emerged as a practical means of extending the broader project of privatization. Third, as noted above, historically, neoconservatism has provided neoliberalism with the ideological framework needed to justify the use of military power to open up new markets around the world. While American military intervention on behalf of capitalism precedes the neoconservative-neoliberal connection (for example, with the coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954), scholars point to Chile in 1973 and Iraq in 2003 as the bookends of the military imposition of neoliberalism on foreign countries.112
William Connolly offers a position that converges with these three previous accounts. But he supplements them by analyzing the assemblage on the right through the lens of affect theory.113 Connolly maintains that the most effective means to comprehend the political assemblage on the right is to shift from a discursive mode of analysis to a description of how these ideologies operate at a visceral level. He argues that political commitments interact as a set of affective sensibilities that resonate together and which have produced an assemblage on the right comprised of neoliberals, neoconservatives/militarists, and religious/social conservatives.
According to Connolly, an assemblage allows groups with divergent beliefs to build a coalition around a set of resonating “spiritual dispositions” that operate at an affective register.114 He observes, “When one part of the assemblage pushes beliefs with which you do not identify, you minimize or ignore the difference because they too exude the existential resentment with which your military dogma, economic creed or religious faith is infused.”115 The connective tissue that stitches these ideologies together is an affective ethos of existential resentment directed toward those groups perceived to be enemies of the free market, American exceptionalism, and Christian exclusivism. Connolly observes, “Today resentment against cultural diversity, economic egalitarianism, and the future whirl together in the same resonance machine. That is why its participants identify similar targets of hatred and marginalization, such as gay marriage; women who seek equal status in work, family and business; secularists, those of Islamic faith, and atheists; and African American residents of the inner city who do not appreciate the abstract beauty of cowboy capitalism.”116 Thus, while neoliberals, proponents of American military hegemony, and religious conservatives have different creedal commitments that generate different targets of resentment, they coalesce to form a “resonance machine” that assembles the right on the basis of overlapping grievances.
Melinda Cooper’s analysis provides one example of this phenomenon through which divergent movements align to dismantle welfare. Another example is the way in which the Christian belief in the providence of God and the neoliberal belief in the sovereignty of the market resonate at an affective level despite their divergence at a discursive level. This resonance plays out in terms of how these ideologies approach the future. Evangelical Christians interpret history apocalyptically and insist that the time that remains for the earth is brief. It follows that political and economic projects devoted to environmental protection and sustainability are viewed as a waste of time. Neoliberals adopt a contemporocentric view of the world in which the enhancement of immediate market value is the central imperative of their economic activity. Accordingly, the sacrifice of the planet for short-term financial gains is a rational course of action. In this example, each bloc rejects responsibility for the future for a different reason, but their overlapping commitments resonate in such a way that they create a larger and more powerful political assemblage than would be possible on the basis of the particular interests of each individual bloc. Connolly observes,
The bellicosity and corresponding sense of extreme entitlement of those consumed by economic greed reverberates with the transcendental resentment of those visualizing the righteous violence of Christ. Across these modest differentiations, the two parties are bound by similar orientations to the future. One party discounts its responsibilities to the future of the earth to vindicate extreme economic entitlement now, while the other does so to prepare for the day of judgment against nonbelievers. These electrical charges resonate back and forth, generating a political machine much more potent than the aggregation of its parts.117
This resonance machine also includes nationalists, neoconservatives, and militarists who align with the evangelical-capitalist political assemblage to enact revenge on the nonbelievers of their respective religions: those who fail to believe in Jesus Christ (secular persons, Muslims, etc.), those who fail to believe in the sovereignty of the market (socialists, leftists, etc.), and those who resist the hegemony of American power (terrorists, dissidents, etc.).
Of course, authoritarian populism has reset the basic contours of this resonance machine by reorienting its evangelical-capitalist elements in a more overtly authoritarian and explicitly white nationalist direction. Trump’s 2016 coalition included the traditional elements of a Republican coalition, but the white working-class constituency without a college degree proved decisive in elevating him to the presidency. Just as religious conservatives (particularly, white evangelicals) served as the populist base for the neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony, these same voters (Trump received 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016) as well as other disaffected white working-class voters now serve as the base for the reconfiguration of the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine under Trump (an astonishing 57 percent of Trump’s overall vote in 2016 came from whites without a college degree).118 Trump’s capacity to draw overwhelming support from the evangelical Christian base is one of the most remarkable features of this assemblage insofar as Trump seems to embody the very antithesis of the commitment to moral rectitude and family values that Christian evangelicals promote.119
As noted in the introduction, Trump has assembled this constituency on the basis of economic and status anxieties. Neoliberal policy has eroded the economic fortunes of significant segments of the working class in the United States (and, more