http://www.the-american-interest.

com/2015/10/10/age-of-exhaustion/

Appeared in: Volume 11, Number 2

Published on: October 10, 2015
HISTORIES PARSED

Age of Exhaustion
JOSHUA MITCHELL

How the triumphalist mutation of liberalism and the anti-liberal politics

of identity have together brought us to the age of exhaustion.
In watching the ow of events since the turn of the century, even the
casual observer cannot help but be struck by the divergence of
opinion about their meaning. The title of this essay gives the reader
notice of the direction of my thinking, namely, that these several
decades constitute the serial unfolding of two competing party
understandingsone from conservative Republicans, the other from
progressive Democrats, of the meaning of history, each of which
guides domestic politics and foreign policy into de nitive and
sometimes procrustean channels. While the conservative version has
recently foundered and its adherents are seeking to nd their voice
anew, progressives celebrate the seeming inevitability of their vision
(as did conservatives after 1989). But they approach a shipwreck of
their own.
The conservative version failed because it was predicated on a xed
and unwavering understanding of human nature that was supposed
to be true for all peoples, at all times, in all places: Liberal
Triumphalism. The historical task, many conservatives thought, was
to order politics and commerce in accordance with that vision. At
home, this vision has not prevailed, and what remains of it is under
escalating attack by progressives who have been emboldened by their
hold on political power and nearly all the other institutions in
society. Abroad, the failureideational, not militaryin Iraq and

Afghanistan to transform authoritarian regimes into liberty-loving

ones has raised deep and troubling questions about how universal
this particular conservative vision of human nature really is.
The conservative end of historyended. In the progressive moment
that is now upon us, progressives argue for a new version of the end
of history. Categorically opposed to Liberal Trimphalism,
progressives offer up a vision that is nevertheless naive, unworkable,
and dangerous. Where conservatives largely sought to extend their
own xed understanding of human nature abroad, progressives have
sought, with some success, to overwhelm longstanding political,
commercial, and societal understandings at home. Divided by what
they oppose, conservative Republicans at the end of the Cold War and
progressive Democrats today have nevertheless been united in their
belief that an end of history of their own devising is, in principle,
possible to engineer and to manage.
This brief sketch has a certain heuristic elegance. It does not,
however, fully canvas the facts and ideas that swirl about us like
mental dust, as Alexis de Tocqueville called them, when describing
the status of ideas in the democratic age.1 A more nuanced reading of
the contemporary moment and describes three different paradigms
that organize the facts and ideas around us and vie for our allegiance.
The reason is that not all conservatives, and not all progressives, t
neatly within one or another of the two basic paradigms; the Venn
diagram overlapswithin the minds of conservatives and
progressives, and within the parties of which they are members
complicate matters. This is especially true today for conservatives,
because recent failures have brought certain background strands of
thought to the forefront,2 whose proponents now seek to offer them
up as the organizing center for the next generation of conservative
thinkers and politicians. But this is true also of progressives, whose
recent victories have prompted some to wonder, as E.J. Dionne
recently put it,3 whether we are witnessing an acceleration of
history. This question, unthinkable while conservatives dominated
the eld after 1989, will invariably set modest progressives against

the more emboldened sorts, and divide a now ascendant progressive

party over the question: Just how fast is America as we have known it,
and the world beyond its borders, bending to the will of progressives
or, rather, to the will of history itself?
The three paradigms that vie for our allegiance, therefore, are:
Liberal Triumphalism; the anti-Liberal Politics of Identity; and The
Great Exhaustion.
Liberal Triumphalism

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

reasonable, individuals can be persuaded through conversation;

being free, political legitimacy requires that persuasion occur
through those citizen conversations rather than by the threat of force
or its actual use.
Liberals believe that commerce should be set up so that there are no
permanent winners or losers established by law, as it was with
ancient slavery and with the medieval guild system. Rather, through
a market pricing mechanism, entrepreneurs and buyers make wagers
about possible futures. Strictly speaking, with market commerce
there is no such thing as The Economy, because the term supposes a
comprehensive and knowable whole that is anathema to the very idea
of market commerce.4 The task of those who oversee market
commerce is to assure citizen-participants that the national currency
is not debased, that lawful contracts are honored, and that price
discovery is possible. All this, so that citizens concerned with the real
needs of their households may make reasonable decisions about the
next purchase they make.
In a world characterized by scarcity, market commerce does not bring
suffering and deprivation to an end. Through it, however, suffering
and deprivation can become less extensive than they otherwise would
have been. Market commerce is not, therefore, an unmitigated
good. Rather, it is less bad than the alternativea top-down
command economy in which winners and losers are determined in
advance, often in the name of the common good, though seldom to
that effect. In commerce (as in politics), the Liberal always thinks in
terms of provisional answers, adequate for the moment, each sowing
the seeds of their own modi cation or destruction, each preparing
the way for the next set of provisional answers, ad in nitum. That is
why the Liberal is opposed to the slave economy, the guild economy
and, in our own day, why the Liberal is opposed to crony capitalism
and corporatism. Each of them arrests history, so to speak. Each
speci es in advance what the good is. The Liberal knows that our
reach always exceeds our grasp. We may know that there is a good,
but we can seldom agree with our neighbor about what it is. That is

why Liberal commerce (and politics) is set up to make only

provisional wagers about the future. Let us be satis ed with taking
the next step, and arrange a world were reasonable and free sovereign
individuals can contribute to deliberating what that next step might
be, says the Liberal.
Liberals believe that society must be ordered with a view to
encouraging sovereign individuals to develop their reason, so that
they may be free. Yet the Liberal knows just how mysterious and
ineffable are the invisible threads that hold society together. The
ordering that is needed is not always forthcoming, and it cannot be
easily managed even when it is. When that ordering is absent, it can
seldom be engineered from above. The hallowed institutions that
make such education unto reason and freedom possible are the
family, churches and synagogues, local schools, a free press, and civic
associationsall of which form citizens-in-training so that they
become t for self-governance. This, in turn, makes citizens
governable by a modest national power that understands that the
institutions of society accomplish vital pre-political and pre-economic
tasks necessary for Liberal politics and market commerce to work at
all. Nowhere is this more apparent than in that most fragile of
matters, verbal consentwithout which rational and free sovereign
individuals cannot take responsibility for themselves or for others.
Without the fragile third rail that is society, the political
manifestation of consent (the sacrosanct vote), and the economic
manifestation of consent (the transaction and the contract) cannot
fully develop, let alone become second nature.
The interlocking Liberal vision of politics, economics, and society
does not suppose that human beings and their institutions are
perfectible, only that they can be modestly improved. It does not
begin from the fugitive standard of perfection and measure its
successes and failures accordingly; it rather begins from the fact of
the violent passions of war, the darker allegiances of family name and
tribe, the propensity toward patronage, and the sometimes dead-

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

The anti-Liberal Politics of Identity is a response to the perceived

scandal of the two central ideas of Liberal thought: that reason and
freedom are coterminous, and that the individual is sovereign. The
intellectual roots of this attack on Liberal thought date to Rousseau
in the 1750s; the attack then develops on a number of differing
fronts: Marx in the 1840s; Nietzsche in the 1880s; Freud in the 1920s;
Heidegger in the 1930s; the Frankfurt School in the 1940s and 1950s;
and in the rest of the 20th century by postmodern derivatives of their
thinking. What if reason is the condition of our bondage, asks the
anti-Liberal. Might it be that freedom consists in our liberation from
reason, in the embrace of sentiments and desires that well up against
reason, the anti-Liberal wonders. Might the individual be but a
ction, invented for the dark political purpose of serving a speci c

racial (white), class (bourgeois), or gendered (male) interest, the

anti-Liberal asserts. To come to its central thesis today: Might pre- or
supra-rational identity be the answer to every vexing question of
domestic politics, of commerce, and of society?
Anti-Liberals do not all have an explicit politics; some anti-Liberals
are expressly anti-political. Insofar as anti-Liberals do have a politics,
they do not begin, as Liberals do, from the presumption of a plurality
of individuals who are capable of exercising their reason (even if they
do not always or often do so), with a view to representing their will in
policy and in action. Their politics begins with the suspicion that
reason is a subterfuge, a veil, a self-deception. Early anti-Liberals
sought to show that merely rational, individuated selves could nd
themselves only by being lifted up beyond their small and eviscerated
lives, and that politics was the venue for doing that. However
different, the anti-Liberal political project of Rousseau and of Marx
both propose that we are lost to ourselves unless politics
reformulates who we are, unless it shows us, through force, that we
are more than merely rational individuals. Anti-Liberal politics
doesnt represent us, as Liberal politics does; it saves us from our
diminutive and alienated selves.
Later anti-Liberals, fatigued by the violence of the two Great Wars of
the rst half of the 20th century, have worked relentlessly within
Liberal regimes to undermine the Liberal belief in the sovereign
individual within whom both reason and freedom reside. Anti-Liberal
politics after World War II does not seek to lift us up, through
violence, beyond our shallow Liberal selves; it moves in the other
direction, and incessantly reminds us that beneath our much vaunted
reason and freedom lies our identity in race, class, and gender. The
task of politics, therefore, is not to adjudicate rational interests
within the constraints of a constitutional framework; rather, its task
is that of bean-counting, of making sure that all identities are
equality represented, so that justice may prevail. There are no
sovereign individuals, only bearers of this or that identity. The
Liberal constitutional framework, the rule of law, the xation on

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

transnational agencies whose task it would be to assure that our

resources are well-used and that everyone is fed, no need to worry
that powerful corporations will coopt them so that just their products,
their procedures, their ways of doing business, become the global
standard through which their competitors are hobbled and
eliminated. There is, in a word, no need to worry about the abuse of
power that always seems to emerge when commerce is guided from
above, by a visible hand.
Commerce based on slavery, the Liberal notes, was set up so that a
few would pro t at the expense of the many; the medieval guild
system was also set up so that the few would pro t at the expense of
the many. And, so, the Liberal asks, Why would it be different this
time? How do we know that the establishment of transnational
agencies who will offer the 99 percent the right to food and water and
shelter will not do so by establishing a 1 percent class of winners,
who, in stabilizing the economy, will destroy the market
competition that leads to the improvements and to the increases in
the standard of living that the 99 percent actually need?
The anti-Liberal answers: Because the tyranny of need, not the
tyranny of man, is the singular problem we face. If compromises
have to be made along the waysay, by allowing corporate pharmacy
and hospital giants to have a strong hand in writing the Affordable
Care Actthese inconveniences must be borne in order solve the
problem of the tyranny of need, from which every other problem
ows. Crony capitalism and corporatism need not worry us, really,
because we stand on the precipice of a post-market-commerce-stageof-history. We who have seen this future (and who bene t from crony
capitalism and corporatism now, or who will when we graduate from
our elite, anti-Liberal, universities), have something higher and
nobler in mind than unsavory market commerce, which is based only
on the lowest common denominator of human greed. We have in
mind the eradication of the scarcity and sel shness that market
commerce itself has caused. Unwilling to believe either in individual
freedom or in the institutional arrangements that must be in place to

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

more civilized it becomes, we may still be lost to ourselves), of Marx

(that human alienation is deeper than market commerce can solve),
of Nietzsche (that deeper than our rationality may lie resentment and
smallness of soul), of Freud (that there are upwelling and unnamable desires that reason wishes to suppress), and of Heidegger
(that in our restless and never-ending activity we are closed off to a
deeper dimension of existence). Not by accident do all of these
writers except Rousseau write in the aftermath and shadow of Hegel,
the rst Liberal Triumphalist. And Rousseau, notwithstanding his
many failings, saw it coming before Hegel penned it.
We must nevertheless ask how successful these various anti-Liberal
projects to remake politics, commerce, and society have been.
Without exception, they have been disastrous. Liberal thought,
whatever its limitationsor rather precisely because it conceives of
the human situation in terms of limitationsdoes not offer a
program that promises to end human alienation, nor does it bestow
the bliss of trans- or sub-rational ecstasy. It does not promise to
bring an end to human suffering, or to fully solve the riddle of human
inequality. It does not promise complete justice in our time and it
does not seek to transform politics, commerce, and society in the
name of fairness. All these things are promised by one or another
strand of anti-Liberal thought.7 When Liberal thought goes rogue, so
to speak, when it morphs into Liberal Triumphalism, it becomes, as
Fukuyama noted at the conclusion of his seminal essay, boring.
Brought to bear in parts of the world that have little familiarity with
the vast set of preconditions necessary for Liberal politics, commerce,
and society to work together, Liberal Triumphalism is far less benign,
as we have painfully discovered in the Middle East. It will never,
however, produce true believers of the sort that anti-Liberal thought
routinely does.
The Great Exhaustion

As for the third paradigm that vies for our allegiance, Tocqueville saw
it coming already in 1840:

If citizens continue to shut themselves up more and more

narrowly in the little circle of petty domestic interest and
keep themselves constantly busy therein, there is a danger
that they may in the end become practically out of reach of
those great and powerful public emotions which do indeed
perturb peoples but which also make them grow and refresh
them. . . . I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point
where they look on every new theory as a danger, every
innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a
rst step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely
refuse to move at all for fear of being carried off their feet.8
What Tocqueville understood over and above his contemporaries was
that while the transition to democratic social conditions is always
tumultuous, once they have settled in, a new sort of problem
emerges: Citizens will lose faith in liberty and no longer labor to
maintain and defend it. Instead, they will prefer a quiet, purportedly
bene cent equality in servitude, a despotism that assures them that
they have security and adolescent entertainment: Facebook, Twitter,
never-ending video games, and the titillation of ever more
mesmerizing gadgets. This delivers them from the specter of anxiety
and the burden of freedom. The democratic age ends, neither with
robust Liberals striving in a forever imperfect world, nor with de ant
anti-Liberals striving to perfect the world, but rather with The Great
Exhaustion. Striving, uncertainty, risk, labor, suffering, insultthese
become too much for our fragile constitutions to bear. Above all, in
the time of The Great Exhaustion, no one wants to feel
uncomfortable and, so, we conspire to organize the world so that it
is without duress or hardship. The 1 percent political and commercial
classes are happy to oblige.
The Great Exhaustion appears today in many guises, some subtle and
some overt. In our primary schools, the attempt to make distinctions
based on merit and intelligence, so that our children may be better
equipped for the long, dif cult, civilizational labor ahead, is
superseded by the attempt to socialize and domesticate (especially

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.

Suffering, he wrote, is not an argument against life; but in the time of

The Great Exhaustion, suffering is an argument against life, and must
be completely eradicated by the coordinated efforts of politics and
commerce. We read Marx; yet we are bourgeois socialists. We read
Nietzsche; yet we do so from the comfort of our living room couch. In
our colleges and universities, we invoke Marx and Nietzsche to
critique the Liberal world that still nominally surrounds us; but our
interest is to use it, not to overthrow it. To build a world from scratch
that requires that we believe in something worth laboring to build.
In our domestic politics, citizens become the folks. With this
fundamental transformation, we concede that the long labor of
political contestation has become a sideshow, mere entertainment, or
a costly distraction. Whereas citizens elect legislators whose laws
move the levers of politics, the folks idly stand by as bureaucracies
and executive orders move the political levers without their mediated
participation or concern.
In our daily lives, we dwell on gadgets. Distractions have always been
with us. In the time of The Great Exhaustion, it is their scope and
place in the ecology of daily life that is new. For the Liberal, the
future is secured through property and the generative family. If any
time or money remains after property and family have been secured,
distractions can be eetingly entertained. In the time of The Great
Exhaustion, however, this relationship is reversed: property being a
burden, we rent; the generative family being an archaism, we have
fewer children or none at all. Neither is thinkable unless the present
takes precedent over the futurea thought that can only seriously
enter the mind when we are convinced that the bene cent state will
provide for our security and care for us in illness and in our dotage.
The gadget, once a distraction, now becomes the center of gravity
around which those other, once-central, concerns distantly orbit.
Here is the urban life of 400 square foot apartments built for the
folks who do not own a car or a bicycle, but may rent one from timeto-time. They look up to the state, whose power grows as property

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

systems (fortunately outsourced to the Third World so we dont have

to be troubled); green biofuels that increase the price of food
stocks, made possible by unsavory political arrangements; the
development of Smart Grid technology that leads to energy
ef ciencies, but which are vulnerable to cyber-attack, to name but a
few.
A clean conscience, the Liberal notes, is not possible. To be human is
always to wrestle with trade-offs, with the agonizing choices that
should prompt us to ask if the lives to which we aspire warrant the
use of natures bounty that such lives would entail. In the time of The
Great Exhaustion, however, we are not stewards of the earth, daily
faced with the burden of our freedom amidst nature; we are
environmentalists looking for a clean conscience. This we will
achieve through transnational agreements that bind the hands of
nations and every sub-unit below them. In short, this we will achieve
by rendering sovereignty and human freedom obsolete.
In international relations, there are no more alliances, only
partners. Alliances presume a dangerous world in which war will
break out, even if we know not when. A nation, to protect itself,
forms alliances with other nations. Because alliances suppose that
one nations blood and treasure will be spent on behalf of another,
they require a regular show of good will, preferential treatment, and
other evidence that when strife does appear, their ally will not
disappear. In the time of The Great Exhaustion, however, there will
be no more wars and untidy aggressions. This is, after all, the 21st
century.13 History itself has conspired to eliminate war; therefore in
international relations we only have partners.
And because in the time of The Great Exhaustion there are neither
great loves nor great hatreds, not only are alliances obsolete, but so,
too, are enemies. When there are no enemies, there is no need to
encourage dissidents within regimes that have openly declared us to
be their enemy.14 When there are no enemies, national borders and
immigration policies predicated on rule of law become
inconvenient anachronisms. When there are no enemies, a merit-

based domestic polity that rewards competence rather than

encourages fairness is no longer needed. Without enemies, after
all, what goad is there that would require the former? When there are
no enemies, nally, there is no longer international politicsthat use
and abuse of power between nations. In the time of The Great
Exhaustion, the task set for international relations has moved beyond
politics and the human freedom to abuse power that it presupposes.
Freedom, that Liberal prejudice, is behind us, even if a few cleanup
projects remain from the mess it has produced. The biggest threat to
humanity now, to which those concerned with international relations
must give their utmost attention, is the Planetary Necessity that is
climate change.15
The Liberal Triumphalism of conservative Republicans is behind us.
Into the breach have stepped progressive Democrats who have a
different version of the end of history. Liberal Triumphalism occurred
because the need, in the democratic age, for a comprehensive,
certain, and unitary theory-of-everything transmuted the modest
aspirations of Liberal thought into certainties about the end of
history. The progressive Democratic version, it may be said, emerges
out of a similar democratic need for a comprehensive, certain, and
unitary theory-of-everything. It is constructed, however, not out of
modest Liberal thought, but rather out of immodest anti-Liberal
thought. The result, the discerning reader will have already
intimated, is The Great Exhaustion. As with Liberal Triumphalism,
the presumption is that here, at the end of history, the answers we
need are self-evident, and plainly given for all to see.
Understanding the past several decades as the serial unfolding of two
competing party understandings of the end of history allows us to
make sense of a number of the developments we have witnessed.
Because Liberal thought labors over politics and commerce, but
leaves society alone, when conservative Republicans held the
Executive Branch, domestic society was not the object of their labor,
but rather international affairsfor there, after 9/11, the Middle East
provided the most obvious challenge to Liberal Triumphalist

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.

If in international affairs progressive Democrats believe the lion is on

the verge of lying down with the lamb, at home they are
contemptuous of a society that still obstinately clings to the Liberal
idea of autonomous individuals who are reasonable and free. The
relentless invocation of identity is the heavy artillery with which
they batter down all Liberal walls. Identity is, rst and foremost, a
strategy of resistance against reason: I am this or I am that; and
therefore no reasoned discussion or argument you might offer need
trouble me, for deeper than my capacity to reason is who I am, and
who you arewhite, black, male, female, heterosexual,
homosexual, ad in nitum.
To this declaration by which we remain self-enclosed is added the
fateful moral vocabulary of purity and stain, which is nowhere more
excelled than in still-Puritan America. Thus, the conclusion: because
I am this and you are that, I am pure and innocent and you are guilty
and stained. John Dewey, the great 20th-century progressive, would
have been dumbfounded. The experience of suffering, he wrote,
drives us onward to create a world together. Through identity
politics, however, the spur of suffering is supplanted by the
satisfactions of innocence, which provide a warrant to remain
unmoved. Together, then, are gathered a Coalition of Innocents,
which tallies the moral debt points each member is owed by their
common enemy.18 The Liberal often counts money. The progressive
Democratic always counts unpayable moral debt, which is the
currency of justice in the time of The Great Exhaustion. Because
purity and stain are linked to identity itself, there can be neither
penance nor forgiveness, which are (mere) changes of heart that in
no way bear on who we irremediably are. The progressive Democrat
proclaims that by this calculus of debt, justice shall be measured. The
modest Liberal replies that however ineffable they may be, if
individual acts of repentance, forgiveness, charity, trust, goodwill,
neighborliness, and hospitality are not our measures, we will live in a
world that verges, not on justice, but on retribution.

And so we come to the central paradox of the progressive Democrat

in the time of The Great Exhaustion: The purpose of politics is to put
an end to politics as the Liberal understands it. In the time of The
Great Exhaustion, human freedom, which only leads us astray, is too
large a burden to bear, hence the need to nally and fully repudiate
it. In international affairs, the nal political task is to act with a view
to Planetary Necessity; in domestic affairs, the nal political task is
to act with a view to identity. The progressive Democrat purports
thereby to redeem the world (to save it, as we now say), and to justly
order domestic affairs around the identities from which we, in fact,
cannot be redeemed. The progressive Democrat frees us from the
burden of freedom in international affairs and in domestic affairs
alike, with the hammer of Planetary Necessity and the sickle of
identity. To the modest Liberal, the progressive Democrat says, let
us earnestly and singularly attend to just these two things, for they
are the nal tasks of human history, which now stand self-evidently
before us.
To this declaration, the now incredulous Liberal gently replies, it
was not within the purview of Liberal Triumphalists to bring about
the universal reign of freedom; and neither is it within yours, antiLiberals in the time of The Great Exhaustion, to declare and to
oversee freedoms end. Our world is more mysteriously constituted
than we can know; and it will no more accommodate your progressive
Democratic pride than it accommodated the pride you mock and
deride in the conservative Republicans who came immediately before
you.
1Democracy
2After

in America, Vol. II, Part I, Chapter 1.

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

conservative movement in Americawhich to this day remains in an

uneasy tension with what could be caricatured as the unbounded
optimism of The Chicago School of Economics, that other ank of the
Republican Party. Not to be ignored in this mix is that Buckley and
Kirk were both Roman Catholics, with a rather ambivalent
assessment of modernity. Roman Catholics today are a powerful force
within the conservative movement; some have pre-Vatican II
sympathies, and some found in Pope John Paul II and his successor,
Pope Benedict, a way to engage the modern world, though still from a
critical distance. (Pope Francis, with his social justice sensibilities,
is another matter altogether.) The end-of-history conservativism,
which I am calling Liberal Triumphalism, was not theirs. The
conservative Roman Catholic understanding of reason is grounded
in natural law, not on the Anglo-American tradition that discovers
and subsequently develops the eld of political economy.
3Washington

Post, June 27, 2015.

4In

The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith never uses the term
the economy.
5Democracy

in America, Volume II, Part I, Chapters 78, 20.

6If

television is the artistic idiom through which the real though

unarticulated crises in society are serialized, then the current, wildly
popular, zombie television series can be understood as the venue
through which this cooptation is being worked out. These series are a
forum for the catharsis that will be necessary for the cooptation of
Liberal institutions to be nally and fully publicly accepted.
7Anti-Liberal

promises of redemption invite comparisons to the

Christian understanding of promise, which comports more with
Liberal thought than with its adversary. Here, Martin Luther King, Jr.
is emblematic of the distinction. Among the most important events
in America in the 20th century, Kings August 28, 1963 I Have
Dream speech took the form of a Jeremiad that illuminated the
wound of injustice and implored that the people of the American

covenant not lose sight of Gods providential planthat we are,

nally, to be judged on the content of our character. King, the
Moses of the African-American community, knew that governmental
programs alone could not overcome the wound of slavery and its
aftermath. It is in society that the hard work begins, in the churches.
Government intervention may be also necessary, but as a supplement
to the work that must be done in society. In this sense, King remains
a Liberal. In the hands of anti-Liberals, King is presented each year,
on Martin Luther King Day, as an occasion to demand more
government programs, and more attention to race in America.
Nowhere does the mystery of Gods Providence, the problem of sin,
the need for prayer, the call for repentance and forgiveness, appear.
For the anti-Liberal, government alone is the Holy Fatherwho, alas,
judges the wound, but never heals it.
8Tocqueville,
9Luke

Democracy in America, Volume II, Part III, Chapter 21.

19:40.

10In

The Second Treatise of Government, Locke writes that we have a

natural right to life, liberty and property. Having and exercising this
pre-political right places a fence around the sovereign individual,
against which the state cannot encroach.
11Tocqueville,
12Matthew

Democracy in America, Volume I, Part II, Chapter 7.

13: 24-30.

13As

Secretary of State John Kerry put it with regard to Putins

annexation of the Crimea on Face the Nation, March 2, 2014: You
just dont in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by
invading another country on a completely trumped up pretext.
14Hence,

the deafening silence of the Obama Administration during

the Green Movement at the time of the Iranian national elections in
June 2009.

15

15See

Secretary of State John Kerry, Remarks at NYC Climate Week

Opening Event, Morgan Library, New York City, September 22, 2014:
Importantly, climate change, without being connected in that way
to everybodys daily thinking, in fact, ranks right up there with every
single one of the rest of those challenges. You can make a powerful
argument
that this
it may
be, in fact, the most serious challenge we face
This is your
free article
month.
on the planet because its about the planet itself. See also President
Barack Obama, Weekly Address, of April 18, 2015: Hi Everybody.
Wednesday is Earth Day, a day to appreciate and protect this precious
planet we call home. And today, theres no greater threat to our
planet than climate change.
16Because

coalition partners, rather than America alone, undertook

the military strikes in Libya in March 2011 that led to Qadda s
overthrow and death (in October of that year), progressive Democrats
feel no moral sting about the chaotic and violent aftermath of his
deposition.
17President

Obamas Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech of

December 10, 2009, is notable for its exploration of the ambiguous
place of war in human history: the instruments of war do have a role
to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with
anotherthat no matter how justi ed, war promises human
tragedy.
18This

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?

is professor of political theory in the government

department at Georgetown University. His latest book is Tocqueville in
Arabia (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

This is your free article this month.