In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically
aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism's
multipronged assault on democratic values. From its inception neoliberalism flirted with
authoritarian liberalism as it warred against robust democracy. It repelled social-justice
claims through appeals to market freedom and morality. It sought to de-democratize the state
economy and society and re-secure the patriarchal family. In key works of the founding
neoliberal intellectuals Wendy Brown traces the ambition to replace democratic orders with
ones disciplined by markets and traditional morality and democratic states with technocratic
ones. Yet plutocracy white supremacy politicized mass affect indifference to truth and
extreme social disinhibition were no part of the neoliberal vision. Brown theorizes their
unintentional spurring by neoliberal reason from its attack on the value of society and its
fetish of individual freedom to its legitimation of inequality. Above all she argues
neoliberalism's intensification of nihilism coupled with its accidental wounding of white male
supremacy generates an apocalyptic populism willing to destroy the world rather than endure a
future in which this supremacy disappears.
