Nancy Fraser - The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born

Nancy Fraser

With an Interview by Bhaskar Sunkara

First published by Verso 2019
Nancy Fraser 2019
The Populist Cat Is Out of the Bag Nancy
Fraser and Bhaskar Sunkara 2019
The essay by Nancy Fraser originally appeared as
From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trumpand
Beyond in American Affairs I, no. 4 (Winter 2017):
4664, and is reprinted here with permission.

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-272-7
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-273-4 (UK EBK)

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The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born
by Nancy Fraser

The Populist Cat Is Out of the Bag
Nancy Fraser Interviewed by Bhaskar Sunkara

Whoever speaks of crisis today risks being dismissed as a bloviator, given the terms banalization through endless loose talk. But there is a precise sense in which we do face a crisis today. If we characterize it precisely and identify its distinctive dynamics, we can better determine what is needed to resolve it. On that basis, too, we might glimpse a path that leads beyond the current impassethrough political realignment to societal transformation.

At first sight, todays crisis appears to be political. Its most spectacular expression is right here in the United States: Donald Trumphis election, his presidency, and the contention surrounding it. But there is no shortage of analogues elsewhere: the UKs Brexit debacle; the waning legitimacy of the European Union and the disintegration of the social-democratic and center-right parties that championed it; the waxing fortunes of racist, anti-immigrant parties throughout northern and east-central Europe; and the upsurge of authoritarian forces, some qualifying as proto-fascist, in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific. Our political crisis, if thats what it is, is not just American, but global.

What makes that claim plausible is that, notwithstanding their differences, all these phenomena share a common feature. All involve a dramatic weakening, if not a simple breakdown, of the authority of the established political classes and parties. It is as if masses of people throughout the world had stopped believing in the reigning common sense that has underpinned political domination for the last several decades. It is as if they had lost confidence in the bona fides of the elites and were searching for new ideologies, organizations, and leadership. Given the scale of the breakdown, its unlikely that this is a coincidence. Let us assume, accordingly, that we face a global political crisis.

As big as that sounds, it is only part of the story. The phenomena just evoked constitute the specifically political strand of a broader, multifaceted crisis that also has other strandseconomic, ecological, and socialall of which, taken together, add up to a general crisis. Far from being merely sectoral, the political crisis cannot be understood apart from the blockages to which it is responding in other, ostensibly nonpolitical, institutions. In the United States, those blockages include the metastasis of finance; the proliferation of precarious service-sector McJobs; ballooning consumer debt to enable the purchase of cheap stuff produced elsewhere; conjoint increases in carbon emissions, extreme weather, and climate denialism; racialized mass incarceration and systemic police violence; and mounting stresses on family and community life, thanks in part to lengthened working hours and diminished social supports. Together, these forces have been grinding away at our social order for quite some time without producing a political earthquake. Now, however, all bets are off. In todays widespread rejection of politics as usual, an objective systemwide crisis has found its subjective political voice. The political strand of our general crisis is a crisis of hegemony.

Donald Trump is the poster child for this hegemonic crisis. But we cannot understand his ascent unless we clarify the conditions that enabled it. That means identifying the worldview that Trumpism displaced and charting the process through which it unraveled. The indispensable ideas for this purpose come from Antonio Gramsci. Hegemony is his term for the process by which a ruling class makes its domination appear natural by installing the presuppositions of its own worldview as the common sense of society as a whole. Its organizational counterpart is the hegemonic bloc: a coalition of disparate social forces that the ruling class assembles and through which it asserts its leadership. If they hope to challenge these arrangements, the dominated classes must construct a new, more persuasive common sense, or counterhegemony, and a new, more powerful political alliance, or counterhegemonic bloc.

To these ideas of Gramscis we must add one more. Every hegemonic bloc embodies a set of assumptions about what is just and right and what is not. Since at least the mid-twentieth century in the United States and Europe, capitalist hegemony has been forged by combining two different aspects of right and justice one focused on distribution, the other on recognition. The distributive aspect conveys a view about how society should allocate divisible goods, especially income. This aspect speaks to the economic structure of society and, however obliquely, to its class divisions. The recognition aspect expresses a sense of how society should apportion respect and esteem, the moral marks of membership and belonging. Focused on the status order of society, this aspect refers to its status hierarchies.

Together, distribution and recognition constitute the essential normative components out of which hegemonies are constructed. Putting this idea together with Gramscis, we can say that what made Trump and Trumpism possible was the breakup of a previous hegemonic blocand the discrediting of its distinctive normative nexus of distribution and recognition. By parsing the construction and breakup of that nexus, we can clarify not only Trumpism but also the prospects after Trump for a counterhegemonic bloc that could resolve the crisis. Let me explain.

The Hegemony of Progressive Neoliberalism

Prior to Trump, the hegemonic bloc that dominated American politics was progressive neoliberalism. That may sound like an oxymoron, but it was a real and powerful alliance of two unlikely bedfellows: on the one hand, mainstream liberal currents of the new social movements (feminism, antiracism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, and LGBTQ+ rights); on the other hand, the most dynamic, high-end, symbolic, and financial sectors of the US economy (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood). What held this odd couple together was a distinctive combination of views about distribution and recognition.