Professor Wendy Brown is an American political theorist, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and an author.
Professor Brown’s bibliography includes what we refer to as ‘the Trump trilogy' - three books that span the political career of President Donald Trump. Given Trump’s return to the White House we felt it was the perfect time to speak to her about how a new blueprint for authoritarian leaders seems to be materialising before us.
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In Solidarity is openDemocracy’s podcast about people, power, and politics. The show is hosted by openDemocracy journalists including Aman Sethi, an award-winning journalist, Editor-in-Chief of openDemocracy and author of A Free Man. Support the show by visiting openDemcoracy.net/donate.
Credits
Presented by Aman Sethi
Edited and produced by Nandini Archer & James Battershill
Theme song ‘Odyssey performed by Edward Abela
Featuring audio clips from CSPAN
Transcript
Welcome to In Solidarity, the openDemocracy podcast about people, power, politics and everything in between. I'm your host, Aman Sethi. The return of Trump got me thinking, are we looking at a new model for the authoritarian strongman, or have we seen this movie before?
So I decided to call up Professor Wendy Brown, an American political theorist and the UPS foundation professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton. Professor Brown is the author of several books, but also what I like to call her trump trilogy, Undoing the Demos, The Ruins Of Neoliberalism and most recently Nihilistic Times. Professor Brown, welcome to the show. I guess, let's just start with, were you surprised by Trump's victory in November?
No, I wasn't surprised by it. I was hoping I would be wrong in imagining that not only was it possible, but it was in fact likely. It seemed quite clear after the little bump that the Democrats had - as Biden stepped away and Harris stepped in - that little bump was obviously mostly a tremendous relief that the choice was no longer between Trump and Biden, each with their deep, deep faults.
It was all about joy, that little bump, a kind of pleasure in this vivacious, capable, intelligent, well-spoken politician who obviously offered relief to a lot of people. But in no time, it became clear that the Democrats did not learn much from the rise of Trump about the sources of that rise. They had not learned much about how to suture together a quite well mobilised left, a left that was deeply concerned about issues ranging from Palestine to climate change to racism to the gross inequalities produced by neoliberal capitalism, and how to stitch that together with attracting a more mainstream set of Democrats.
Instead, what the Harris campaign did was move hard to the center and even to the center-right on occasion, imagining that there were voters they could collect from Trump, rather than what they needed to do, which was mobilise a Democratic base. What they missed, obviously, was Trump's economic populism, and it was not about wrenching a few voters away from their distaste for his racism and other things to bring them over to the first African American female candidate. The strategy had to be one that promised what Trump promised, not at the level of anti-immigration, xenophobia, hardcore racism, but simply making a better life for working and middle class Americans. And that vanished from the Harris campaign very rapidly.
There were little gestures, like a tiny bit of money going toward down payments for first time home buyers, some commitment to securing health care and reduced costs in that domain, some commitment to college-bound students, but nothing significant and not enough to make a difference.
And then the big issues just went by the way for the left and for liberal Democrats. And meanwhile, Trump promised lower gas prices, lower bread prices, greater availability of decently remunerated jobs. He won't be able to deliver on it, but it was the right message.
In a piece for Dissent Magazine that you wrote almost immediately after Trump’s victory, you kind of said there were three reasons behind it, the economic populism, which you've talked about, the exhaustion of liberal democracy, which I would love to kind of dig into more with you, and the destruction of education in the US.
You've talked a bit about economic populism as to the Democrat party. You would think that this would be pretty easy for them to do, right? In the sense they’re allegedly the party of the left, so it should be easy for them to do the economic populism piece. It's usually the conservatives who are like, “how are you going to pay for all of this? These are irresponsible promises. What about the fiscal debt?”
The Democratic Party has been moving away from being the party of the working class since the 70s. But of course, the rise of neoliberalism and Bill Clinton as its first big loud speaker put that steering away from the working class on steroids, with the embrace of neoliberal policies more generally, the stripping out of the welfare state, various kinds of deregulation, lining the pockets of the wealthy.
So with Clinton, you get a big transformation in who the Democratic Party is addressing, and that's where you get the hard downward tilt in the fortunes of working middle class people as they suffer the loss of union protections and the loss of union-based jobs. That's what Trump identified that he didn't need to actually give it a hand. He needed to declare that he was going to give it a hand. He needed to declare that he was with these people who felt cast off, both socially and culturally and economically.
So Trump gave them someone to identify with, you know, a big guy who's not hyper-intellectual, but a doer, and also somebody who's full of grievance and complaint. But he also made promises to attack the financiers and more generally the economic elite that he identified with these people's misfortunes. Whatever we think of his diagnosis and his actual complicity with the very class that he's attacking, he sent the right message. It was genius in a way. That same story has been repeated throughout Europe and through many other parts of the world. So this redress of neoliberal effects through a politics of populism, meaning attacks on the elite control that has been the story of the reaction to neoliberalism and its effects on working and middle class people around the world.
I do think that Trump is, of course, part of the economic elite, but he is part of almost a pre-financialisation elite, right? He's like a real estate guy, an old school robber baron style guy, and he's not the tech lobby, as it were. If you look at the Trump movement right now, and you see the first big fight, which is about H-1B visas. So you have Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on the one hand, and on the other hand you have Steve Bannon, who routinely says that he has more in common with the ‘crazy leftists’ than with the center.
Trump almost seems to be sitting across a really interesting economic configuration of, literally, the richest man in the world who's making his money across pretty much every single sector, and the Steve Bannon world of: ‘let's have this throwdown, Let's stop these visas’. How are you going to actually make America great again if you keep giving jobs to H-1Bs? So do you think his populism, in some ways, is insufficiently analysed by the kind of pundit classes in that sense?
Absolutely. There was a recent op-ed saying Trump is a small guy, Musk is a big guy. Musk is real wealth, Trump is faux wealth. Musk really has the goods across a variety of industries today and all Trump has is show biz. I think that's a misreading, because part of Trump's appeal, I believe, to those who actually pay attention to more than simply the promise of racist attacks on immigrants or the promise of lower bread and milk and egg prices.
Those who pay attention to him marvel not at the fact that he is super wealthy, but the fact that he has massive debt, but still can live a life that is lavish and powerful and just keeps getting more lavish and more powerful. There’s that famous line of Trumps, that taxes are for losers. He knows how to work the system for his own. I think what mainstream punditry is missing is an appreciation of how attractive this fraudster is, this old fashioned real estate developer is, compared to the sophisticated financiers.
Now, as you rightly identify, there is a series of collisions coming inside the Trump regime, and we've already seen the one that's materialising as the tech bros versus the MAGA people, but I don't want us to make the mistake that I think the left, generally and especially mainstream Democrats, have been making for a long time, which is to imagine that the contradictions are going to do them in because Project 2025 takes all of these different threads. It packs them into a single project very effectively for taking and holding power and using it well. It figures out what instruments of law, what levers can genuinely undermine or subvert liberal democratic protections against extreme executive power, and they're going to roll that out.
I think you're very right that it is a mistake, because one of the things that I often think about when I think of Trump version one, versus India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is that Modi, from day one, was extremely organised. Immediately after Modi was elected, I met a low-level functionary of his, who I had known over the years. We were sitting and chatting, and he said, ‘We can't imagine how the previous administration lost, because democracy always favors the incumbent. All you have to do is fix the system’.
It's been 15 years now where the progressive left in India is waiting to get the ball back, being like, it's our turn to serve, but Modi’s government has just changed all the rules of the game, right? They've literally gone in and done what Project 2025 imagines, which is fix the system. So, in that sense, I think you're very right about the fact that, assuming that the fundamental contradictions will do them in will, I don't think that'll happen. And I think there's also a huge amount of damage that will be done to people and their lives, even as they're kind of flailing about.
Without question, and particularly to our undocumented immigrants. You know, 13 million at current count, it may well be more, and all 13 million, obviously, will not be rounded up and deported for many reasons, logistical, technical, but also what it would do to the economy. However, the terror that will be wielded over those 13 million lives is incalculable, and there will be many deported, and there will be family separations, and there will be ICE raids on chicken processing plants and apple orchards and schools and other places. So that kind of damage is unquestionable to human beings.
But in addition, the damage to the courts we've already seen, you know, we no longer have a Supreme Court that operates as a Supreme Court in this country, which, you know, it's a political arm of the administrative state in every field, from science to welfare, education, agriculture. The plan there is to replace career employees with political employees. And once those political employees replace career employees. The course of these agencies that basically administer everything about the United States will take a radical right turn, and will be done in for a very long time. So you're right, the damage that can be done even with chaos. I mean, I have suggested at times that I think what we're in for is not a clean authoritarian state, but authoritarian chaos, or we could say chaotic authoritarianism.
I want to take this moment to kind of move to this idea that you've written about extensively, you've talked about, which is this sense of the exhaustion of liberal democracy. And you're not alone in a lot of us kind of feeling this sense of exhaustion. But I think what, what I'm very interested in, and what I actually really admire about your writing, is that you are someone who has spent a lot of time really mapping what this exhaustion actually looks and feels like, but also why it has come.
And one of the things that I actually found very revelatory in Nihilistic Times is early on where you talk about this age of chasms and divides and hyper-partisanship and the kind of crumbling of a lot of institutions, and you write that what the rest of us see as the causes of the destruction of liberal democracy are actually the effects of a deeper unraveling. Can you talk to me about this a little more and maybe in the context of Trump, because I think it's a really interesting inversion of how the rest of us actually read the world.
Neoliberalism as a form of reason, not just a form of policy, was always aiming, if not, to eliminate democracy in a substantive sense. At least, to radically reduce it simply to voting and a peaceful transition of power. Why? Because neoliberalism, especially as the original neoliberals, Hayek and others, understood it, lofted markets and morality as orders that naturally and spontaneously organised human life, and featured politics as mostly intervening inappropriately in those two orders, in the order of markets and in the order of morality, understood as traditional morality.
Hayek's argument is both of these things: markets and traditional morality evolve over centuries through what he basically treats as practices of evolution, trial and error, survival of the fittest, in this case, the survival of the fittest form of morals and the fittest form of economic organisation. And the argument implicit and explicit of neoliberals is that intervention in those spheres by politics is always wrong-headed. Wrong-headed because it comes out of some belief that one person or a million people can better understand what we need than this natural and spontaneous order could produce. Hence Hayek's famous title, The Road to Serfdom, which is too much state intervention.
So what does that mean? The challenge here to democracy is a challenge to legislative enactment of the good. It's a belief that the political ought to take the back seat, the way back seat to the naturalness of markets and morals. And that also means an implicit belief in whatever the social order is. If it's left alone, the attack on diversity, equity and inclusion, the attack on social justice, any legislative interference, and the attack on taxes, the attack on regulation, all of these things are interferences in the natural order that are both wrong-headed on their face and also dangerous. So that corrosive assault on democracy has been with us for 40 years, as long as neoliberalism has been rolled out. And it's more significant than it may sound. You know, I'm making it sound like an intellectual problem, but it's saturated everything you know, the idea that everything is better off marketised we know now as our reality, ever since neoliberalism began, from ideas to schools to dating life to podcasts, everything needs to be built on a market model.
And for those reasons, I want to suggest that what the right has been able to do is accept that and move on. They're anticipating another form. It's not easy to say what that form is, because of the contradictions in the right, but they are perfectly willing to say, "ah!" They use the language "crisis of democracy", because it has a popular ring. But they are building a new market and a new form of authoritarianism blended with capitalism, blended with a certain liberalism that does not look anything like democracy.
Meanwhile, the liberals are wailing about our corroded democratic institutions and the assaults on them. But nobody cares. Nobody cares because they learn not to care over 40 years. And nobody cares because it doesn't seem to be a form that solves problems anyway. And for me, that is part of why the right has been so successful, is that it is anticipating another form. I think a lot of people are. I think there are many people experimenting with ideas and practices that would retain let's call it the promise of democracy, which is that we govern the powers that we generate, rather than just letting those powers have their way with us. And we do it together.
But now we also know we have to do it in relation to the non-human. It can't just be a human practice, and it can't just be concerned with human beings, and we know we have to do it in some way that exceeds or redresses the limitations of nation states. We have to do it in a way that repairs, does not just promise infinite satisfaction of interest, but repairs past violences, imperial violence, violence in relationship to the non-human. We call it nature, violence along lines of race and gender and class inequality. So democracy, in my understanding, has a potential remaking ahead of it.
I want to think about this a little more, because when we actually think about the fact that this current form, at least from my perspective, as someone who grew up in India, the idea of the Indian nation state. Of course, there was the colonial nation state before that, but the Republic is, you know, younger than many people's grandparents still. So it doesn't feel as deeply embedded as, say, in a place like the United States or the United Kingdom where I am at this moment. But what I also do think about is that a lot of this was the consequence of fairly cataclysmic World Wars, right at some point in these giant ruptures that result in these new forms, because it's otherwise entirely possible.
And this is in no way to take away from the incredible sacrifices that were made by those who fought for freedom in the colonies. But without World War Two, it's possible that colonies could have persisted for another 50 years, another 60 years, we don't know right. And I suppose that when you talk about the fact that the right is already preparing for the new world that will come beyond, and in many ways, is trying to shape it, and the rest of us have to start thinking about that as well. I suppose the worry that produces in me is, what are the sort of hard boundary conditions that will actually result in this transformation, right? Is it that we will see an incremental way in? Because I do not see incremental ways in which the state will lose in control.
And I think one of the things that potentially unites those who might be supporting Trump and those who might not be supporting Trump, is, as you said, this sense that a form of life has been produced where, whether you call it the swamp, or whether you call it the new liberal market, there is a sense of profound unfreedom. I think that the large numbers of people feel because they feel like every single action of theirs is in some way either going to affect their credit score, or it's going to affect their health insurance, or it's going to affect the kind of school that their child will go to. It is, in many ways, a world where no one can actually move without in some way being pulled into these networks of data that necessarily keep wrapping oneself or themselves around one.
It's interesting, the profound sense of unfreedom that you depict. I was just reflecting as you spoke on the ways that it's now, the ways that you filled out the content, the sense of being the subject of a constant scoring or valuation metrics that govern our lives and the feeling that you can't actually make choices in a free way without constantly looking to the left and the right and this up and down to see what the implications of those actions might be, I think you're right. I think you've tapped something of the unfreedom Zeitgeist in our time.
But I think there's also another dimension to unfreedom today, which is the sense of no future. And I think we have to talk about that a bit Aman in order to also understand something about the turn to the right. Because whether or not you avow climate change, declining biodiversity, the imminent collapse of earthly life as we know it, and whether or not you avow the extent to which finance capital has developed a set of tentacles that exceed the capacity of any sovereign to control them, there is still, I want to suggest, a knowingness about this foreclosed future that has to do with both the state of the planet and the machineries, or the systems that have been unleashed in human life that now exceed our control.
And you know, AI is the specter of that. In a way, it's the thing people point to when they say, oh, someday it will be controlling us and we will be its servants. But I think it's more that it is a specter of something that is already present and already experienced. And I understand part of the attraction to right-wing rhetoric, political rhetoric and promises, not just to be a turning away from that possible future, but an embrace of it that says, "okay, well, at least my people can be the final survivors, and there's not room for the whole planet, and there's not even room for everybody in my neighborhood or my school or anything else. So enough with all of this DEI and integration and all of that." I think part of the attraction, I think you can see that from Modi to Bolsonaro to Trump to Nigel Farage, I think that being drawn into what is, yes, it's a promise of making things good again. But the good again is really about, you know, you can go back to just being for the few and for yourselves, because that's your best bet for another generation or two.
I actually deeply understand and viscerally have experienced this sense when I moved from Delhi to London. Because in Delhi, you cannot breathe the air for six months of the year, and many a time, I think I want to write about this, but it's very hard to actually convey this experience. You have to be there, as they say, to realise the profound sense of sadness that it produces in you, where you essentially have, you know, children on steroids at the age of whatever, three or four, because their lungs are essentially not growing fast enough because of the pollution. You have a terrible day, but then you can't exercise, because to exercise would be to make yourself sicker, because you would be breathing more and in some ways, if you were to think about this from the perspective of the market, I often find myself asking my friends, at what point are property prices in Delhi going to fall because the wealthy are like, what's the point of buying real estate in a place where you can't breathe, but everyone's like, you know, location, location, location.
And you know, scarcity will always exist. It is the national capital and you realise, as you were saying, that there is a way that environmental catastrophe really brings home a lot of what, as you pointed out, could seem like very abstract conversations about markets to a way where you realise that the market is fine if you can't breathe. I was talking to a friend of mine who was like, you know, we really need to think about the message that the Democrats need to give to win. And you know, the Democrats should have said this, and they should have said that. And it struck me as a sort of focus group approach to politics, where you try and find out what everyone's interested in, and then you try and design a product that appeals to them.
And I found myself saying that if you want to be the President of the United States of America, you need to be the sort of person who actually tells people, “forget what you think, I am telling you what's actually important”. And so you do have to be a once in a generation, charismatic individual and I was thinking of Obama because I went back and I read some of his speeches, and there's not a lot of detail there, let me just be honest, like I was in America in 2008 when he won, and every speech was as they said, soaring, soaring oratory, right?
I was in the Apollo Theater when one of the debates was happening, so it was like a screening in Harlem, and it was like being in a church. You felt lifted, you felt uplifted. You walked out feeling radiant. You weren't entirely sure of all the things he said, but you were just like, this is messianic politics, and I love it, right? And I watched a lot of the Trump stuff. At some point I started reading the liberal press. And every article was like, Trump went on stage and acted like an insane person. And I was like, it cannot be. So I actually started watching, and he is basically authoritarian stand up comedy, right? And you come out, you find yourself, even against your best instincts, sort of occasionally chuckling. There's a moment where he's like, let's just play some music. And you're like, cool, let's just sit through this.
If we started with this position of “there is no future”, which I agree with you that most and many people on all sides of the political spectrum are feeling the way out of this. The path out of this is where one is looking for a charismatic leader. And you have written about the tensions between charisma, demagoguery, populism, like these kinds of nodes, right, and can you talk us through kind of like, say, the last 10, 15 years of American politics has seen through these ideas that you've written about.
So let me start by just very, very briefly giving a sense of what Weber means by a charismatic leader. Because I think it's important. People very easily move to thinking about charisma and relationship to demagoguery and worse. You know, people say, "but Hitler was charismatic".
And, you know, Trump is charismatic, Putin, all of these guys, the specification that Weber offers has several features the the most important are that the charismatic leader is somebody who breaks with the ordinary. And by ordinary in Weber's time, he meant the kind of party machinery, the humdrum, the bureaucratic nature of politics, all of that. But today we could say the ordinary can have many different features, including irresponsible demagoguery, but also, you know, hollow politicking, which is what I'm suggesting Harris ended up doing, you know, trying to kind of get on the Obama coattails with the freedom mantra and a lot of joy, but not much substance, and not really breaking with the present. So what does it mean to break with the ordinary now? It means breaking with what we have come to accept as absolute reality, and that includes the world being run by markets, everything feeling out of control, states being radically discredited and politics being radically discredited for all kinds of reasons.
So we in the US saw a bit of this with Bernie. We saw quite a bit of this with somebody like Elizabeth Warren, not a broad breaking with the ordinary on her part, but certainly trying to suggest that what we had come to accept in the world of asset manager capitalism and private equity and all of the rest of it was unacceptable and didn't need to be accepted. But that involves teaching, having the capacity to have even a certain spiritual dimension to politics, not religious. But he's talking about something that's less than secular to less than rational. It's about holding out a vision and being able to do that brings us to the other important element of charisma, and favors understanding in leadership, which is being responsible, not just making a bunch of promises to get a following to satisfy one's own narcissism, but having a serious vision I think rightly represented in Trump's speeches, kind of stand up comedy, making a mockery of political life, but also just being entertainment.
So the charismatic thing that I think the Democratic Party and more generally, the left has been missing requires first of all accepting that leadership itself is a powerful political mobiliser. It has to be more than just having a good program, but it also has to be much more than being a demagogue. It has to have this substance, this responsibility, this depth, even this capacity for popular pedagogy. It need not be authoritarian. It need not center on the leader as a project.
There's all kinds of ways, as we know, that leadership can mobilise grass roots endeavors and projects of all kinds, themselves potentially new experiments in democracy that go well beyond whatever a leadership represents or embodies or enacts. But this is the thing. I think that liberal Democrats of all sorts are very wary of. They're very wary of charisma. They're very wary of charismatic leadership. They're very wary of bold breaking with the present visions of the future, because they're so bound up with, first of all, the encomiums and requirements of capitalism, but second of all, procedural rules, all the details of a democratic state that are not nothing. I'm not saying we throw them out if we get a better arrangement of things, but they're after the fact of the vision.
The vision is what breaks open a new set of possibilities in this world. And we cannot stand our current trajectory. We know that we are headed for the dark in every possible way, with massive eruptions of human violence, with consuming the last bits of the planet, with what you described so beautifully as the conditions in Delhi for everyday life, not just for extreme moments. And there are conditions that are rapidly moving to the rest of the world. I mean, I would say, you know, we saw a big shift about half a decade ago from many people in the world thinking, "okay, we're still going to do mitigation on climate change". To most of the world, saying, "no, it's adaptation". And adaptation used to be the bad language of the capitalists, and now it's the language of everybody. “Yep, need an air conditioner. That's how we're going to survive this excessive heat. Yep, we need an air purifier. That's how we're going to survive the crap in the air. Yep, more steroids for the kids, so that their lungs can carry them, with luck, into young adulthood.” And that's all adaptation, not mitigation, and that is not breaking with the present to make a different future.
I am suggesting that charisma is a neglected feature of the left, a robust feature of the right, even if it takes a very tawdry and I would even say boglerised form, where it's more often demagoguery and narcissism, which are for Weber, the opposite of genuine charisma. But the left needs to get its charismatic program together, and that also means movement charisma. Our movements need to be more charismatic.
We need to be more concerned with compelling followers than with speaking to ourselves. And that's what charismatic politics fundamentally is. It's about a compelling following. And right now, so many of our social movements are all bound up internally with our own views and values and virtues and so forth. And I'm not saying that they're bad across the board. I'm a supporter of almost all of them, but that failure to be outward looking to be recruiting, to be charismatic toward a broad public, is our only hope I think at this point.
