The Backlash against the State
| DOI | 10.1111/j.2041-9066.2011.00049.x |
| Date | 01 April 2011 |
| Author | Patrick Dunleavy |
| Published date | 01 April 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Feature |
all government. Its most distinctive feature
is to link anti-statism directly to a harking
back to a distant pre-modern time when
individuals could be self-reliant and gov-
ernment could be minute. As J. M. Berstein
noted in the New York Times:
The implicit bargain that many Americans
struck with the state institutions supporting
modern life is that they would be politically
acceptable only to the degree to which they
remained invisible, and that for all intents
and purposes each citizen could continue
to believe that she was sovereign over her
life; she would, of course, pay taxes, use the
roads and schools, receive Medicare and So-
cial Security, but only so long as these could
be perceived not as radical dependencies,
but simply as the conditions for leading an
autonomous and self-sufficient life. Recent
events have left that bargain in tatters.
Forcibly having to confront the indispen-
sability of government in the aftermath
of the 2008–09 financial crash seems to
have bred an acute anxiety in sections of
the American public which perhaps func-
tions in a fashion akin to the growth of the
far right fringe and anti-foreigner move-
ments in modern European politics. The
extraordinary intensity and persistence
of anti-statist sentiment now regularly
voiced by the right in American politics
and the Tea Party movement, Fox News
etc., suggests that we might draw at least
some parallels between the recurring anti-
state backlashes there and Roger Griffin’s
1991 definition of fascism as ‘palingenetic
ultra-nationalism’, intoxicated with the
idea of national rebirth. In the same way
we might speak of the American far right
as embracing ‘palingenetic anti-statism’,
where the body politic seems repeatedly
to resurrect elements from its embryonic
development, even though their potential
The Backlash
against the State
In 1977 the libertarian American theorist
Murray Rothbard was trying to justify
his endless critiques of other far right
theorists. Contrasting himself with David
Friedman (author of the merely privatising
text Machinery of Freedom) he found that
what singled him out was this:
There runs through … most of … my work
… a deep and pervasive hatred of the State
and all of its works, based on the conviction
that the State is the enemy of mankind. In
contrast, it is evident that David does not
hate the State at all; that he has merely ar-
rived at the conviction that anarchism and
competing private police forces are a better
social and economic system than any other
alternative. [T]here is no sign that David
Friedman in any sense hates the existing
American State or the State per se, hates it
deep in his belly as a predatory gang of rob-
bers, enslavers, and murderers. No, there is
simply the cool conviction that anarchism
would be the best of all possible worlds, but
that our current set-up is pretty far up with
it in desirability.
In those days this kind of rhetoric put Roth-
bard beyond even the neo-liberal pale. But
not anymore. The overall American drift
towards the right over the last three dec-
ades has regularly legitimated a violence
of political rhetoric that has few parallels
in European politics. ‘Government is not
good’, said Jeb Bush in his first bid to run
Florida: ‘This campaign is about clubbing the
government into submission’.
Anti-statism in the US
Since the financial crash of 2008–09 and
the onset of recession, the growth of the Tea
Party has been a populist phenomenon, re-
flecting a fierce but simplistic anger against
In 2008, western states stepped in to prevent the collapse of the global financial system. Yet despite averting
economic catastrophe, we are witnessing a dramatic rise in intense anti-statism, beginning in the US and now
spreading to the UK and Europe. Patrick Dunleavy investigates.
environmental relevance has long since
lapsed.
Of course, American politics has many
strong counterbalancing elements, and these
have worked to pull citizens at large back
from dangerous pathways at key turning
points in US history. From the pushback
against McCarthyism, through the civil
rights movement, to the impeachment of
Richard Nixon, Newt Gingrich’s three-week
shutdown of the federal government in
1995 and the Oklahoma bombings in the
same year, events linked in different ways
to right-wing excesses have often prompted
something of a resiling from anti-statist or
strong right-wing approaches across the wid-
er political system. Perhaps the most recent
link in this chain will be the 2011 shooting
of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and
many innocent bystanders at a constituency
‘meet and greet’ in Tucson, Arizona.
Yet the days are also long gone when
the United States was a bastion of pluralist
theory, in political science as in practical
politics. In Theories of the Democratic State,
John Dryzek and I noted some key long-
run trends of political thought during the
last 30 years, including:
• the apparent advent of a stabilised,
technocratic capitalism;
• the disintegration of Marxist thought,
post-cold war;
• the failure of neo-liberalism; and
• the increasing centrality in pluralist
thought of the European welfare state
tradition and the EU’s external reliance
on ‘soft power’.
For the last two decades it is European so-
cial and political theory that has developed
pluralism in multiple practical ways, while
American liberalism veered off only into a
narrow backwater, focusing on deliberation
as (ideal, almost mythical) good process.
4Political Insight
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