This interview was conducted by Fulvia Giachetti.
With no clear vision for a lasting peace in Palestine, and private interests winding ever deeper into the fabric of public life, there appear to be no real bulwarks left to counter the dangers threatening our shared future. Liberal democracy no longer seems to possess the vitality needed to protect the very institutions that once sustained it. Between war and accelerating climate breakdown, how can we place people—rather than markets or power blocs—back at the center of democracy? Wendy Brown, of the Institute for Advanced Studies, spoke with Reset DOC about her idea of reparative democracy—a post-liberal vision for renewing democracy in the face of rising authoritarianism, ecological collapse, and the exhaustion of the liberal order.
“They have made a desert and called it peace”: Tacitus’ words seem to echo today as Israel and Hamas sign the US peace plan. Can there be any true reckoning or repair after what has happened?
There will be tremendous relief if the bombing stops—if the deliberate starvation ends, if the genocide ceases. But what kind of peace can exist amidst the rubble? What prospects are there for Palestinians to thrive and regenerate—let alone achieve justice and independence? Even if the fighting does not resume‒and there is no guarantee of that—will Palestinians be able to regain control over their own lives and future, to restore the conditions for Palestinian culture, education, and a decent existence?
As you know, the bombing targeted not only Hamas but the very infrastructure of Gaza—destroying everything from hospitals and neighborhoods to educational institutions. One of Israel’s first actions after October 7th was to ban UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for providing social services and education in Palestine, from operating in the occupied territories. With that ban—combined with the bombing and closure of schools in Gaza—Israel effectively eliminated the prospect of an educated public, and with it, for the possibility of Palestinian self-determination.
These are among the issues that must now be addressed. Food and health care are, of course, the immediate priorities, but questions of cultural and educational institutions—and of sovereignty, in whatever form it may take, must follow. Those questions remain, at best, unanswered; at worst, foreclosed.
The current plan aims to permanently colonize and subordinate—if not eliminate—Palestine. Continued support for Palestinians must therefore mean supporting a future of Palestinian self-rule and wellbeing. These goals are absent from the so-called peace plans of Trump or Blair, and they are certainly not part of Israeli aims.
A real peace-through-reconstruction plan would require political will—free, as far as possible, from private interests. Yet nothing of the sort seems on the horizon. Transnational capital looks increasingly ruthless and unchecked. Has the state lost all autonomy? And in the Euro-Atlantic world, has neoliberal de-democratization already reached its endpoint?
Each time we imagine it has run its course, neoliberalism produces another iteration of de-democratization. We are now in an era in which private finance is taking over core state functions—and of course, of an authoritarian neoliberal turn.
As Marx taught us, capital always finds something new to colonize—it must constantly seek new markets, new sites of investment, new ways to cheapen labor; in short, new domains of profit. Today, finance capital extracts from states themselves even as it invests in them. Across the world, public funds are being replaced by private capital in state projects. The supposed autonomy of states—always something of a fiction—is fading fast. States are buffeted by global capital flows, yet they have also become sites of investability and instruments of control for capital.
This means that even well-intentioned projects—green transitions, housing, healthcare, or social protection for displaced workers—have become opportunities for private investment. But, private finance will never deliver a genuine green transition; it will deliver one dressed in “greenwashing” and designed to serve capital’s interests. The same is true of every sphere of infrastructure in which capital is now embedded.
Biden did try to harness capital and give it a political direction. His Inflation Reduction Act, was initially designed to create publicly funded infrastructure of all kinds—from highways to childcare. But capital quickly seized the project, redirecting it toward its own interest, and then Trump rolled back much of what remained. Still, Biden made the attempt. In Spain, the government raised the minimum wage quite substantially a few years ago—a move widely predicted to tank the economy, yet did not.
There is a continual interplay between states facilitating capital accumulation and capital’s political power to steer states. That is the cycle that must be broken—and one that some figures on the Left have at least begun to challenge.
Some scholars, however, have argued that “Bidenomics”—and similar political-economic experiments, amounted to a temporary form of emergency Keynesianism: a stopgap designed to preserve the system during the COVID-19 crisis, before reverting to neoliberal “normality” once the emergency had passed.
I don’t think that analysis is quite right. COVID-19 revealed how essential the state is in providing for and protecting populations, and in acting for the public interest. COVID-19 changed the very terms of that discussion. “Bidenomics” seized the opportunity opened by COVID-19 to overcome the neoliberal paradigm, but it didn’t have the strategies and tactics—or the will—to break it.
So, the left has failed, while the global Right now threatens to deliver the coup de grâce to liberal democracy. How do you explain the rise? In The Ruins of Neoliberalism, you described it as a “Frankenstein mutation” of neoliberalism. Are we still within that mutation, or in a post-neoliberal phase?
I think those who speak of post-neoliberalism are entirely focused on the economic policies of neoliberalism, which they still imagine characterized by states committed to deregulation, reduced taxation, privatization of formerly public goods, and of course unrestricted global capital flows. Trump’s tariff policy seems to them to be heading in a different direction. Yet, there is continued privatization of formerly public goods or social services. ranging from privatized highways, health care, to pensions. Then there is the way in which the state itself is increasingly not a public entity, but an investable entity for private finance. In that sense, we’re still operating in the neoliberal era, and not beyond it.
But the other aspect of neoliberalism that I’ve focused on, both in Undoing the Demos and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism involves grasping it as a form of governing reason –one that subordinates all human activity is to a set of economic metrics and thus becomes an economic form of conduct. That, to me, has not broken apart at all.
So, to speak of post-neoliberalism is to ignore all this. How we understand someone like Trump is crucial here. What is Trump after all? He’s a particular kind of businessman—a real-estate developer—who interprets everything in terms of deals, contracts, and bargaining, including extortion and manipulation. That is also how he governs. In this sense, too, we are not in a post-neoliberal era: everything remains framed in terms of economic maneuvering or economic conduct.
I think it’s important to see that part of Trump’s appeal rests precisely on this. People trust business figures but not politicians. Trump ran as a non-politician—a businessman who could make the US itself a better business and strike better deals for the country. Countless Trump voters, when asked why they trust him, say something like: “Look, he lies, he makes things up, he’s boorish—but he’s a businessman, he knows what he’s doing”.
However, we haven’t yet addressed the authoritarian dimension. Large corporations are not democratic institutions; they are run through strict hierarchies, with decisionism at their core and authorities flowing from the top down. Accepting this as a proper model for politics is part of the neoliberal legacy.
Of course, hard borders, the expulsion of migrants, and the demonization of globalization have all come into play in the right-wing turn—a kind of backlash against neoliberal globalization. But globalization is only one facet of neoliberalism. If we focus solely on that, we miss the neoliberal elements that persist in the present.
Neoliberal theorists themselves wouldn’t have wanted this ideological turn against globalization, would they?
They never wanted mass political mobilization or populism—quite the opposite-. They envisioned complete political pacification, reducing citizens to economic actors. Nor did they want the kind of strong, heavily militarized, and highly policed, neo-fascist states that we see today. Some neoliberal thinkers were, in fact, ardent anti-fascists, trying to design a political-economic order that would prevent the return of fascism or totalitarianism.
But their theories overlooked political power and collective mobilization—partly because they harbored the fantasy that these forces would simply be extinguished by a free market society.
You’ve recently theorized a post-liberal reparative democracy as an alternative way of rethinking democracy itself. What are the core principles of this political form? How might political reparative democracy address the current situation? And since “post-liberalism” is such a loose term, what do you mean by it?
I’ll begin with the last question, about “post-liberalism.” Liberalism—even though it originally emerged to contain state or monarchical power and to secure bourgeois freedoms—has, as a doctrine and a form of state and governmentality, exhausted itself.
Liberalism was always hand in glove with capitalism, but it is now completely colonized by it. It has brought us to the brink of ecological collapse. As a mode of governance and a way of understanding ourselves, liberalism is fundamentally incompatible with confronting the ecological crisis. It can neither grasp the crisis ontologically nor resolve it politically. It remains too human-centered and too individualistic. Without a democratic form capable of containing or transforming capitalism—and without a political form able to confront the ecological crisis—we are doomed.
The need for a post-liberal democracy arises from the need to address the twin crises we face today: a crisis of democracy—collapsing into authoritarianism or fascism—and a crisis of planetary life. I don’t believe liberalism has the resources to confront either. It cannot rein in capitalism, which has captured and corrupted whatever was worthy in liberal democracy, nor can it bring us into a relation with nature that transcends the methodological individualism at its core. That individualism not only centers the human but also licenses us to do whatever we wish in the name of the freedom it enshrines. It produced the ecological crisis—and it cannot lead us out if it.
Reparative democracy must center both a political economy and a political ecology that envision a different kind of human—and a different democracy. The fundamental elements of democracy—political freedom and political equality—must be rearticulated beyond the human-nature dichotomy of modernity.
You describe reparative democracy as a form of left-wing statism that is not state-centric. But how could such a model address transnational and global challenges?
States themselves are not the site for reparative democracy. The democratic form I have in mind—and that is emerging in many parts of the world—builds on the original principles of democracy as the Greeks conceived them: political equality, meaning equal shares of power among citizens, and political freedom, meaning collective self-rule. Both are essential – though both are non-liberal notions.
States, however, remain crucial for enacting decisions, organizing and enforcing regulations and limits, and producing general welfare. The challenge is how to keep states subordinated to democracy, rather than functioning as the de-democratizing forces they have become. The task before us is how to fragment state powers—to ensure that states do not monopolize all political authority in society but instead devolve part of it back to the people and local communities. We must do this without abandoning the state as an instrument for collecting and channeling resources, and for limiting certain forms of power and conduct.
The Left needs to shed what Foucault called our state-phobia—the fear of the state, the conviction that it is always policing, violent, and repressive. At the same time, states are hardly the best providers of what human and non-human life requires. They are distant, removed from the problems faced on the ground. They are inevitably bureaucratic and rule-bound; they are not nimble. One reason people distrust them so deeply is that they see states as clumsy and uncomprehending in addressing the real problems that people face—and they are not wrong.
The question, then, is how to use states as platforms for green transitions—as sites for directing resources and enforcing certain kinds of regulation—while leaving vast spaces for democracy to flourish beyond them. To put it differently: states can never be democratic, but they serve as instruments of democracy.
Liberalism classically has tried to locate democracy within the state, managing the state’s anti-democratic tendencies by balancing its branches and powers against one another. Post-liberals or anti-liberal democrats, by contrast, aim to subordinate the state to democracy. This is what we should be thinking about today: where does democracy reside? What can it do? How can we enfranchise both humans and nature so that participation in shaping better futures is something people feel is in their own hands and feel responsible for?
This is both a theoretical task and a field for political experimentation.
Can today’s existing states still be transformed in the direction you described, or should we instead imagine the creation of new state formations?
The Right has done a remarkable job of transforming states—doing so rapidly and profoundly. It is making them into new instruments of repression through novel combinations of military and police power, and through systematic rights-stripping. It is also spearheading new economic orders and constructing new national cultures and education systems. The transformed—and transformative state—the Right is bringing into being is formidable. The Left should be able to rival that.
Cover photo: Protest signs demand climate action, equality, peace, and justice on wooden sticks indoors. Brussels, Belgium (Photo by LB Studios / Connect Images via AFP)
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