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Age of Exhaustion
JOSHUA MITCHELL
This paradigm emerged as a political force after 1989 and the end of
the Cold War, but its rst formulation arrived much earlier. Its more
humble antecedentsLiberal without the adjective triumphal
can be coherently traced to Locke in the 1680s, to Kant in the 1780s,
to Tocqueville in the 1830s, to Mill in the 1860s, and to a host of
other important gures before and after. The focus below is on the
more humble Liberal understanding; only after considering that can
we consider how it morphed into Liberal Triumphalism, and on what
basis its appeal rests.
The two central ideas of Liberal thought are that reason and freedom
are coterminous, and that the individualrather than the family,
tribe, or community of which the individual is a partis sovereign.
The Liberal account is that the meaning of history is the slow,
halting, and perhaps impermanent emergence of the sovereign
individual, in whom reason dwells and for whom freedom cannot be
alienated.
Liberals believe that politics is not a venue for glory, oratory,
magnanimity, or heroic virtuesas it was in the ancient world, say,
for Aristotle. Rather, politics is that forum through which the
sacrosanct votes of sovereign rational individualsattenuated by
institutional arrangements that meliorate the dangers of democratic
excessestablish plausible wagers about possible futures toward
which the polity legitimately aims. All this until the next election
cycle, when that wager is reaf rmed, modi ed, or rejected. Being
weight of history, and asks, What might the next step be in order to
improve our lot, to help us achieve a sovereignty for which we often
long, yet which eludes us.
The Liberal vision is aspirational, to be sure, but it is not con dent; it
offers a wager, not a proof. It rests on hope, not on certainty. Liberal
Triumphalism emerges onto the scene when aspiration gives way to
con dence, when wager gives way to proof, when hope gives way to
certainty. Tocqueville thought this need for a comprehensive, certain,
and unitary theory-of-everything was one of the great scourges of the
democratic age.5 The world is ineluctably plural and nonparsimonious, and will not yield to efforts to make it pure and stainfree. The democratic self, Tocqueville thought, would demand that it
be otherwise. Liberal Triumphalism is in this sense a democratic
version of the more modest Liberal vision. Not content that the
worlds troubles can, at best, be ameliorated, Tocqueville thought
that in the democratic age, we would come to see the world before us
in terms of problems that need and can have solutionsand
simple, unequivocal ones at that. Liberal Triumphalism is, or rather
was, the conservative Republican iteration of this democratic demand
for parsimony and certainty.
The Politics of Identity
procedure, the long labor by which merit distinguishes some from the
restthese are but obstructions on the way to a more equitable
world. The anti-Liberal today does not destroy Liberal institutions
from without, but rather uses those institutions to undermine the
Liberal political order from within.
Anti-Liberals do not all have an explicit plan for commerce; what
they share in common, however, is a dubiety about the supposedly
rational and free sovereign individual who would want to engage in it.
Where anti-Liberals do have a plan for commerce, they begin, not as
Liberals do, from the supposition that scarcity can only be
diminished when the tyranny of man is checked by market commerce
operating within the framework of the rule of law; but rather from
the supposition that scarcity can be overcome only if we attend to the
tyranny of need. For the Liberal, we are not only free; we are, in
addition, disposed to abuse that freedom. For that reason, Liberals
argue, market commerce, in which no entrepreneur can be a
permanent winner, is less tyrannical than is a command economy, in
which a permanent 1 percent always seems to hover over the
remaining 99 percent. The anti-Liberal believes that freedom is a
class prejudice, perhaps even a racial prejudice; therefore the Liberal
warning about the tyranny of crony capitalism and corporatism must
be dismissed as a bourgeois prejudice or, more recently, a white
prejudicehence the palpable sentiment among some anti-Liberals
that only white Tea Party Republicans could believe in free
markets.
Because freedom is a ction of the class or the racial mind, antiLiberals think they can ignore it, and get down to the real business of
overcoming scarcity. Here, too, the post-World War II anti-Liberal
fatigue with the project of violent overthrow is instructive. Who,
today, among anti-Liberals, has the stomach for Marxs revolutionary
fervor? Instead, polite anti-Liberal company converses about
sustainability, food security, and the like, with the intention not
to overthrow global commerce but to coopt it.6 If freedom is a class or
a racial ction, then there is no need to worry about the tyranny of
check its abuses, the anti-Liberal believes that the tyranny of need
authorizes a post-Liberal order, in which the Liberal (and probably
irreducibly white) ction of freedom that has immiserated a vast
swath of humanity is nally and fully repudiated.
Anti-Liberals do not view society as a fragile domain through which
families, churches and synagogues, local schools, a free press, and
civic associations bring forth citizens and entrepreneurs. Rather, they
argue that these institutions have produced the prejudices that must
be eradicated in order for a full-throated anti-Liberal politics and
commerce to prevail. Society, for anti-Liberals, is not fragile, it is too
strong; it stands in the way of the needed political and commercial
transformation that will save Liberals from their prejudices, and save
the rest of the world from Liberals. To the great and central question
of our day, does society lead or does it follow politics and
commerce, the Liberal gives one answer and the anti-Liberal gives
another. For the Liberal, society must lead; for the anti-Liberal,
society must follow.
The Soviet Union sought to reshape society through political means
during the Cold War. Commerce never having approached the
independent power it achieved in America, it could neither forcefully
act in concert with politics against society, or with society against
politics. Politics alone was the vanguard. In America, for better and
for worse, commerce did achieve a certain independence from
politics. Anti-Liberals in America who believe society should follow
politics have therefore been able to enlist the commercial sector to
bring society in line with anti-Liberal sentiments in ways that were
unavailable to the Soviet Union. In America today, politics and
commerce are the vanguard. The Soviets would have been envious.
Whatever your views of gay marriage and the Confederate ag, if you
are a Liberal you are bound to be uneasy that both political and
commercial pressures have been brought to bear against
longstanding sentiments in society. The issue, for the Liberal who is
ever concerned with procedure, is not the substance of the matter,
but the implication of the two-fold attack on society. You may like
the result at the moment; but what happens later, when you happen
to believe in things that political and commercial pressure tells you
are ruled out? Where will you go when politics and commerce are
allied against you?
As crony capitalist collusion between politics and commerce
increases at the national level in America, society will be under
increasing attack from both politics and commerce. The Liberal who
defends limited national government and market commerce (rather
than crony capitalism) knows that only through diminished political
and commercial power does society have a chance to be relatively
independent. The anti-Liberal who is currently gleeful that
longstanding sentiments of society have been for the moment
silenced does not know what trouble lies ahead. The Liberal idea of
checks and balances between politics, commerce, and society may
not help you and your cause today, but because it will help you
tomorrow, the far-seeing Liberal argues that you must defend the
idea today.
Before turning to The Great Exhaustion, there is something to be said
for the better sentiments that underlie the anti-Liberal politics of
identity. Anyone who has taken the time to carefully read Rousseau,
Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger knows that whatever their
failings may have been, they sought to illuminate those domains of
human experience that many Liberals did not, or could not, explore.
While the most subtle Liberals understood that reason, freedom, and
the sovereign individual were aspirations, set against the backdrop of
an intransigent world that often militated against them, Liberal
Triumphalism was, and is, an easy temptation for those looking for a
parsimonious world. It is against this certaintythat we are
reasonable, that we are free, and that we are sovereignthat AntiLiberal thought achieves its purchase.
Indeed, anti-Liberalisms formidable power lies in reminding us that
Liberal Triumphalism is not the nal word about who we are. Allied
against a triumphalist view of reason, freedom, and the sovereign
individual are the insights of Rousseau (that in society, especially the
As for the third paradigm that vies for our allegiance, Tocqueville saw
it coming already in 1840:
our boys). Having arrived at the place where no further great leaps
forward are possible or even desirable, what purpose do those
distinctions serve? In the time of The Great Exhaustion, EQ, not IQ,
matters. Sharing and caring become paramount; Big Bird and
Barney become our philosophers. Everybody gets an A because
everybody is special in their own way. If we feel good about
ourselves, isnt that enough? Preparation for a hostile and everchanging external world gives way to the celebration of a selfsatis ed inner world. Finding ourselves becomes more important
than building a world. The long chain of generations has already
done that for us. Now let us play.
On our playgrounds, everybody gets a trophy. The great and
unresolvable tension within a democracybetween the permanent
equality that the democratic self wants and the impermanent
inequalities of success and failure that alone allow market commerce
to bring about improvementis decided in favor of equality. When
on the playground everyone gets a trophy so that no ones feelings
are hurt, it is but an easy step to adult sensibilities that insist on
holding together a world that is too big to fail. Mal-investment
(which is to say, failure) not having been allowed to clear, the
economic growth needed to support the middle class nowhere
appears, no matter how much central bank bond-buying drives
money into now crash-prone equity markets. The intention to save us
from suffering prolongs and deepens itexcept for wealthy investors
whose net worth continues to rise. The growing disparity brings forth
the call for yet more governmental intervention so that fairness
can be achieved.
In our colleges and universities, the very stones cry out9 for social
justice, and for the elimination of suffering. The long, hard,
civilizational journey ahead was but a Liberal ction. We have solved
the problem of scarcitywe just need to redistribute the wealth that
we already know how to produce. Marx wrote of the need for
revolution to end alienation and scarcity. But thats too hard. We are
all bourgeois socialists now. Nietzsche, too, is too hard for us to bear.
10
and family recede.10 And they look down to browse on their mobile
phones and tablets, whose unit sales proliferate in proportion as they
do not.
In our thinking, we are either pro- or anti- with respect to all
things. In the time of The Great Exhaustion, there are no longer any
serious questions about which reasonable citizens can disagree, no
merely provisional answers in a plural and non-parsimonious world
with which we must be content. Once, both Liberals and anti-Liberals
believed that we live in a world where good and evil are mixed
together, and which required labor and suffering to separate. The
Liberal labored to shift the balance between the two; the anti-Liberal
thought that through the agonizing work of revolution, the balance
might nally tip to the side of the good, however conceived. In the
time of The Great Exhaustion, the balance has been tipped (though
without the revolution), and woe to those who disagree or have even
the slightest doubt about wherein righteousness lies. The folks
with un-reconstructed minds are not sent off to the Gulag, as they
were in the former Soviet Union; they are publically shamed, and
then have the good sense to disappear. When you do not accord with
public opinion in America, Tocqueville writes, you can keep your life
and property and all; but from this day you are a stranger among
us.11
Those who still believe we live in a world where good and evil are
mixed together, and who raise doubts about any univocal position
that the righteous declareconcerning af rmative action, abortion,
gay marriage, Islam and, most recently, transgenderism or the
Confederate agare said to have phobias, or to suffer from some
other sickness of mind. The much-needed conversation about these
dif cult issues that have no easy resolution, to which this Liberalminded group could contribute immensely, therefore never occurs.
Most interesting of all, however, are those who want to be among the
righteous, but who suffer from micro-aggressions they themselves
seek to expose and correct. Through the online tutorials their
universities and corporations bene cently provide, they hope to be
saved. The time of The Great Exhaustion is the time of the harvest,
where the wheat and the tares have been nally separated. And not
God, but rather the righteous, are the harvesters.12
In our conscience, we demand cleanliness. Nowhere does this occur
more prominently today than with the issue of climate change.
There are good reasons to reduce our reliance of fossil fuels, which
borders on addiction: In the Middle East, the rentier economies
underwritten by them have produced a hyper-modernity that is
unsustainable and which promulgates Islamic re-enchantment
movements in response to it; at home we are a nation whose
movements are measured almost exclusively by automobile
odometers. What kind of civilization can we build if we must rely on
4,000 pounds of steel, aluminum, plastic, and glass to move our
increasingly obese frames everywhere we think we need to go?
These are political reasons to reduce our use of fossil fuel; they
presume that citizens can ask, and provisionally answer, the question
about how they should live. Climate change arguments, however,
are not based on the uncleanliness of our dif cult freedom, but rather
on necessity. They presume that the use of our liberty can only lead
us astray. In the time of The Great Exhaustion, what need is there,
really, for freedom? Our conscience can now nally be clean, if only
we live in accordance with necessity. And that necessityPlanetary
Necessity, lets call itis the reduction of our carbon footprint.
Therein lies the path to a clean conscience.
In the 1970s, we were told that ever-increasing particulate matter in
industrial smokestacks would diminish the solar radiation getting
through to the earths surface and bring about a new ice age. The
development of electrostatic precipitators put an end to that
problem, but laid the groundwork for the one currently on our minds:
carbon dioxide emissions. The alternative technology solutions to
that problem, however, only sew the seeds of further crises:
windmills that decimate birds-of-prey populations on a level that not
even the wide-scale use of DDT in the 20th century could; solar panel
and battery use of exotic materials that wreck havoc on biological
certainty that reason and freedom are coterminous and that the
individual is sovereign. In short, the real labor of Liberal
Triumphalism occurred abroad. Progressive Democrats now hold the
Executive Branch. Because the anti-Liberal thought that orients them
supposes that society must be transformed in order to fall in line with
its political and commercial program, the focus has been more
domestic than international. The recent rainbow illumination of the
White House after the Supreme Court Obergefell v. Hodges gay
marriage ruling is only conceivable within the anti-Liberal universe,
wherein the business of politics is the business of fundamentally
transforming domestic society.
In international affairs, progressive Democrats have sought, rst and
foremost, to assure the world that the Liberal Triumphalist agenda
abroad has come to an end. The modest Liberal would, in part,
welcome this; for the modest Liberal understands that the reach of
Liberal Triumphalism exceeded its grasp. The anti-Liberal political
vision, however, is a post-Westphalian vision, where no one nationstate leads. The legitimate form of international action for the
progressive Democrat therefore consists only of coalition partners.16
In the time of The Great Exhaustion, there is, at best, an
uncomfortable recognition17 of a national burden to shape the
international order, not least through naval power, so that the
worlds shipping lanes remain open for commerce and legal
migration. That burden fell to the British Empire prior to 1945;
afterward, it has fallen to America. In the time of The Great
Exhaustion, it should fall to no one. Where Liberal Triumphalism
overextended America abroad, the corrective action of progressive
Democrats suffers a serious, indeed grave, aw: It presumes that
history itself is now on the side of peace; that allies and enemies are
antiquated categories; that the burden of leadership can be shared or
avoided; and that an outstretched hand and an American apology will
give the nal nudge that history needs to arrive at world peace.
the New Deal, American conservatives did not return to preNew Deal sources in America for their ideas, but rather turned to
European sources, notably Edmund Burke, whose Re ections on the
Revolution in France (1790) sets up the opposition between
tradition and the Jacobin forces of equality. William Buckleys God
and Man at Yale (1951) and Russell Kirks The Conservative Mind
(1953) provided the Burkean cohesion for the nascent post-New Deal
4In
The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith never uses the term
the economy.
5Democracy
6If
19:40.
10In
13: 24-30.
13As
15
15See
tidy ledger where The Pure are on one side and The Stained
are on the other has already started to unravel, as it must. Just under
the veneer of unanimity, members of the Coalition of Innocents are
tallying the moral debt points one member owes another. Who, for
example, is the Innocent with greater purity: the white homosexual
male or the African-American heterosexual female; the Hispanic
lesbian or the African-American homosexual; the white
transgendered or the Asian heterosexual female? And what of the
white female who self-identi es as African-American; does she
receive debt points or does she owe them? Do black lives matter
more than the lives of progressive white female Democrats or
Hispanic male Republicans?