In the first issue of The Drift, we kicked off our interview series with Wendy Brown, one of the foremost political theorists in the United States. That conversation, which took place in between the onset of Covid and the eruption of the George Floyd uprising, largely centered on the role of neoliberal ideology — as articulated by Brown in books like Undoing the Demos (2015) and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism (2019) — in constraining and undermining our collective response to the virus. Brown also posed a remarkably prescient series of questions about the issues that seemed to be falling off our collective radar during the chaos of the pandemic. “What is Israel doing in Gaza and the West Bank? What’s happening to Ukraine?” she asked. “And, ye gods, what’s happening to the remains of the American electoral system?” 

The past five years have produced painful new answers to those inquiries — and have seen the emergence of unanticipated new crises as well. We returned to Brown to talk about the lasting consequences of the pandemic, the future of feminist and anti-racist politics, and the ways in which state power is weaponized from Washington, D.C. to Jerusalem. 

The last time we spoke, in June 2020, we were reckoning with Covid and its disruptions. Amid the collective determination to move on, there’s been relatively little reflection about that time: what we got wrong, what we got right, and what it all revealed. From this vantage point, how do you assess the pandemic response and its consequences? 

It’s telling that I haven’t thought very much about the pandemic lately. I think that’s partly because so many other political events — the movement for black lives, Gaza, the Trump election, and neofascism — have pushed it off the page. And most of the world wanted to forget about it. I want to say a couple of things about that forgetting.

The first is that there are millions of people with long Covid who can’t forget. Their lives have been permanently transformed by the disease. Long Covid is quite literally a negation of the possibility of forgetting. This presence among us is largely ignored, even disavowed.

The second thing I would say is that one of the exciting things about Covid was the slowdown in consumption. People’s lives got simpler as we stayed in place, and took care of ourselves and others. Carbon emissions dropped radically, the skies were clearer, the birds more audible. There was a brief hope that this slowdown might produce a shift in thinking toward community and connection, along with recognition of the importance of care work. But all that vanished quite quickly, even among those who cherished it. This is worth mulling.

Of course, we can fault a million things about the state response to Covid, which I think is what you were asking about. But I find it remarkable that a clunky state and a profit-driven economy turned as rapidly and well as it did toward the crisis. And remember, from that, many of us thought that if a whole state, economy, and population could turn on a dime that way, maybe we could bring that intense focus to other things, like climate change, or the housing crisis. Alas, that too has been an opportunity lost.

In our last conversation, we also discussed the idea of shared sacrifice — the mutual pact that we were making to keep each other safe from the virus. The Trump administration is now using similar language to prepare us for the cost of tariffs. How do you parse the return of this rhetoric and the differences between the way that collectivity is invoked on the left and the right?

Most people imagine neoliberalism to primarily be about individual entrepreneurial conduct and capital enhancement of the self. But it is also a discourse of austerity, one that runs from states to markets. I argued at the ends of both Undoing the Demos and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism that neoliberalism culminates in sacrifice and here we are. Milei, Trump, and Starmer are all explicitly calling for it now. And of course there’s a wartime ethos here, where we sacrifice for some greater national good, one that exceeds the well-being of individual citizens. But now that war is an economic one. 

Trump sees every economic competitor and every rival power as a potential enemy. Trump will likely succeed to some degree in convincing at least his MAGA base that sacrifice is patriotic, even though he once promised immediate drops in prices and increased prosperity. The sacrifice claim, though, is already embedded in “Make America Great Again,” which identifies a nation that needs rescuing. When you have to rescue something, you may have to put your well-being on the line.

You’ve written extensively about border walls and their symbolism. The wall was a major fixation for Trump during his 2016 campaign and first term. Now, his focus is on detentions and deportations — removing people from the country rather than keeping them out. What do you make of that shift in both rhetoric and policy?

I’m surprised that more punditry hasn’t been dedicated to this point. As you say, in 2016 Trump was all about building the wall; now Trump is all about purging the nation of its “illegals,” as he puts it. Trump appreciates the need to escalate his rhetoric in order to keep his audience excited. After all, construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall began in the 1990s. Trump was not the first person to build or fortify it. He had grand plans of extending it, but that’s an extremely expensive and slow and ultimately unexciting project. “Build the wall!” is more exciting as a chant than as a yearslong project. He’s already taken pictures in front of it. Now he needs different pictures: of ICE rounding up migrants, plucking protesters out of universities, and detaining people at airports. This is a much more viscerally and theatrically satisfying activity, and also more fascist, of course.

How do you read recent debates about the meaning of citizenship and belonging in this country? Help us contextualize the right’s recent efforts to redefine those terms.

This is an effort to whiten America. The attempts to denaturalize the naturalized, get rid of birthright citizenship, and call green cards into question is a direct response to the feeling among some white Americans that they’ve lost their country, and their supremacy. Trump was extremely savvy about tapping into that feeling and then amplifying it. The message is: This is your country. We’re going to give it back to you. Even if those other people are here, you should be on top. Still, this language and these practices, as scholars like Aziz Rana and Jefferson Cowie teach us, have been happening on the right for a long time. What’s new about Trump, Vance, and the rest of them is the bluntness. We used to talk about racist dog whistles. Now, they’re using megaphones.

How much are we still living through the reaction to the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020? Was backlash inevitable? 

My own historical framework for thinking about this takes us back further than Black Lives Matter. Certainly, there was a response to that movement, a very orchestrated and organized response.

But the question of what legitimates and animates the attacks on DEI, universities, and the social state has to take us back further. 

Neoliberalism posits that the only forces that distribute things and organize us effectively are the market and traditional morality. Those are the two systems that arise spontaneously, and when the government intervenes in them, it missteps. It will engage in unfair redistributions and challenge the hierarchies and structures of authority that both are natural and keep society running well.

That form of thinking and governing has been hegemonic for the past forty years, even among so-called liberals. The attack on DEI is an attack on what is understood to be an interference in the natural order of things. Neoliberalism named and tried to destroy this package of wrongs. The Trump regime is finishing the job. 

Does that create any openings for the left? 

Many left organizations and left movement leaders, even as Trump is trying to destroy them, are putting their heads together and asking questions like: How did we let the white working class go over there? How did we let feminism and anti-racism get turned into thin naming practices as opposed to the serious politics that they are? We still risk sectarianism. But there are signs that people on the left are realizing that it’s a really good time to figure out how to develop a compelling vision of local — not state-centered — democracy; of an ecological politics that’s appealing, not moralistic; of a socialist politics that’s compelling and not punitive to the majority. This is a tall order, but I don’t think it’s impossible. Building this kind of a vision is way overdue. It has to have magic in it, and passion. It cannot be grim. And it cannot be Ezra Klein’s “abundance,” which is just soft neoliberalism. 

How do you assess the current state of feminism? Gender was a more prominent vector of resistance during the first Trump term, and we haven’t seen anything like the Women’s March, for all its flaws, this time around. 

The first Trump election was shocking to feminists because they assumed that the country as a whole would reject somebody who had a past of sexual assault and talked about pussy-grabbing. That shock is over; now, we’re looking at a regime as opposed to an individual. We’re looking at the manosphere. We’re looking at the dismantling of reproductive rights. We’re looking at attacks on DEI that concern both gender and race.

But I think feminism is actually quite robust. Younger generations have a more productive version of it than mine does, precisely because your cohort easily links feminism with LGBTQ politics, avoiding the TERF problem that is ubiquitous — even if quieter here than in the UK — in my generation. I think the potential for a feminist, anti-racist, pro-LGBTQ left led by young people is very strong. 

This presidential administration and those backing it are ratcheting up reactionary sentiment around gender roles and the traditional family — is this regime’s gender politics new, or something old that’s coming to the fore?

The president himself stays away from the trad wife world; that’s not his orbit. Trump’s previous vice president, who called his wife “mother” and wouldn’t have dinner alone with another woman, came closer. But Trump has always walked an interesting line because he’s such a vulgar casino dude. However, these days, he’s not doing quite as much of the hyper-macho posturing at the bodily level, as opposed to at the economic bargaining level. You see the braggadocio and the bravado in his dealings with Zelenskyy or with China. His great pleasure in making countries or companies cave is where the machismo is on display these days. He doesn’t talk so much about beating people up as he does about his power to dominate.

That comports with something else about this round of the Trump presidency, namely that he is using power politics much more effectively than last time, slicing through the Constitution, defying the judiciary, ignoring mandates and setting aside legislation, abolishing agencies. I don’t think he needs to do the same personal dick-waving that he did the first time. The state has become his dick. 

What do you make of the unwillingness of political leaders in both parties to acknowledge Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, much less rein them in?

The failure to say anything about the most atrocious genocide we have seen since World War II is a testimony to the power of the Israel lobby. There are many politicians who know what’s really going on, but they’re not going to say a word. They don’t want to lose voters, money, or the support of that lobby.

The failure is also testimony to the incredible racism in the U.S. against Arabs. This racism allows otherwise educated people to identify Israel with European culture and Palestinians as non-humans. And, of course there is still Holocaust guilt — in both Europe and the U.S. So, ignorance, racism, guilt, power: that combination is wiping Gaza off the map.

If Trump is “waving the state,” as you say, are Netanyahu and Putin doing the same thing? In light of these strongmen, should we revise our understanding of the project of the nation-state?

We’re seeing a revival of state power emerging from the ash heap of liberal democracy. Trump keeps reminding us that this is what his voters asked for, and they did. They were perfectly willing to see him mobilize undemocratic political power to purge migrants and destroy all left-ish policy. They endorse violence and extralegal means for this.

With Orbán, Erdoğan, Milei, Modi, and Trump, what we’re seeing is not just the wielding of state power against liberal democratic institutions but a popular authorization of that wielding. Fascism, yes, but a novel form.

We might ask: How is it that the right, instead of the left, is seizing the state and transforming society and culture? That was supposed to be our project, the left’s project. I wrote a piece for the Critical Times blog about whether and how the left could and should still think about the state in this way. Should we stop worrying so much about these liberal democratic principles and processes — let go of liberal democracy the way the right did — and figure out how to seize the state to stem climate change, build affordable housing, make educational institutions free and accessible again, build beautiful mass transit everywhere, and revitalize urban infrastructure? We could do all of this if we weren’t trying to move through the slow-grinding machinery of liberal democratic institutions. 

So I mean this as a provocation; it’s a question we need to be asking right now. Should we do a version of what the right’s doing to roll out our agenda?

The worst-case scenario might be if the left is forced into the position of defending institutions and norms just because Trump is trying to dismantle them. 

I’ve been criticizing liberal democracy my whole life for the way that it subtends capitalism, racism, sexism, and the rest of it. I can’t stand this desire to resurrect it. It’s old; it’s exhausted. We need a new form. The question for the left is: How do we consolidate into a force that can actually do things? That’s what the right has figured out. The Trump administration may crash and burn on the positive program (as opposed to the program to attack us) because they’re staffed up with idiots. But the idea of wielding state power in this way should interest us.