Topics in Political Strategy

What Comes Next?

June 16, 2026

The Choice of Civil War: Neoliberal Strategy and the Politics of the Enemy, Pierre Dardot , Haud Guéguen, Christian Laval, Pierre Sauvêtre (Verso; 2026). Chapters 12 and conclusion

• Final thoughts on this lovely if controversial study of the 100 year march of European and US governing policy.
• Chapter 12 “Neoliberalism and Authoritarianism”
  • This chapter–very related to our own discussions!–insists that neoliberalism helps explain a lot about the exercise of class power in the modern era. We should keep it separate from authoritarianism, neofascism or old school liberalism. While fine to call Trump a fascist, the authors believe we will not know what we’re up against in its full power if we don’t acknowledge and assess the other team’s neoliberal strand of political strategy.
  • We need to consider examples and struggles in the US present, as we heard loud and clear at our last session. Lets consider the rising exercise of state violence, how its organized, and what it seeks to comply, and what organizing against it has worked best. To what extent does the frame of neoliberalism help or hurt?
  • I found the two sections of “Authoritarian liberalism” and
    “The singular role of the law in neoliberalism” eminently skippable. Just sayin.’
• Conclusion “From Civil War to Revolution”
  • About the conclusion
• Final judgments
  • What did this book change your thoughts on? What did it get right? What did it miss?

June 9, 2026

The Choice of Civil War: Neoliberal Strategy and the Politics of the Enemy, Pierre Dardot , Haud Guéguen, Christian Laval, Pierre Sauvêtre (Verso; 2026). Chapters 9, 10, 11.

• This week, read three chapters, short, 40 pages total with the aim of finishing the book a week later on the 16th.
• Chapter 9 “On the Workplace Front Line”
  • Did a thirty years neoliberal “war” displace the “Fordist” era of labor-management peace, or maybe peaceful co-existence, or at best cold war? Our guides suggest that war means more than just labor and management. It encompasses removing social (civil society) responsibility for basic supports in favor of individual responsibilities, in this country, everything from 401k’s succeeding pensions to private responsibility for day care. And they reference a workplace “‘war of all against all’ management style” reflected in the rise of the “precariat,” annual performance reviews and all the rest. How have you experienced this, personally, or via parents or children? Have you experienced as what the authors assess as neoliberalism even if you denounced it as something else? And as you read, reflect on how has it affected your sense of self?
• Chapter 10 “Governing Against the People”
  • This chapter seems like a good place to consider some of the buzz in and around our sessions together. Do you feel pressured to label everything as neoliberalism. If neoliberalism helps to understand the liberal state resort to violence, what doesn’t it help explain? What else is there? Is everything rising since World War II neoliberalism?
  • Did the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, and others who reintroduced the terminology of fascism see it this way? The book references Bernard Harcourt on “a new governing paradigm [of] “counterrevolution without revolution,” Alberto Toscano quotes Langston Hughes (at the 1937 anti-fascist International Writers Conference in Paris), “”‘In America, Negroes do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know.'” Do we draw back from painting things fascist with too broad a brush only to contend with everything’s neoliberalism? Does this book, which barely mentions fascism, do that?
  • How about this for starters: we don’t need to say who earned the neoliberalism PhD merit badge, we just need to probe how the ocean current of neoliberalism to how capitalism has navigated class struggle in state and civil society in the modern era.
  • Exercise: reflect on the excellent, yet also troubling video on the right.
• Chapter 11 “The Law as a Neoliberal War Machine”
  • This chapter barely mentions the U.S. Yet its themes of federal court stepping all over national politics seem very familiar–stepping on civil liberties, “new constitutionalism,” limiting suffrage, and more. More Euro-oversightedness? In our own analysis, has the Supreme Court carried out a neoliberal program, or some other kind of badness?

The Choice of Civil War: Neoliberal Strategy and the Politics of the Enemy, Pierre Dardot , Haud Guéguen, Christian Laval, Pierre Sauvêtre (Verso; 2026). Chapters 7 and 8

• Chapter 7 “The False Choice Between Globalism and Nationalism” We encounter another reversal of commonplace historical assumptions: that “America First” and other traditional conservative nationalisms could not co-exist with corporate globalism.
• Chapter 8 “Culture Wars and Dividing the People”: The cultural counter-revolution, still rolling on, and how it encounters and reframes liberty and freedom.

The Choice of Civil War: Neoliberal Strategy and the Politics of the Enemy, Pierre Dardot , Haud Guéguen, Christian Laval, Pierre Sauvêtre (Verso; 2026). Chapters 5 and 6

• Chapter 5 “Political Constitutions and Constitutionalizing the Market” analyzes how neoliberalism evolved from free markets to political guarantees for free markets by way of crushing socialism, trade unions and more. Let’s consider this transition from theory and philosophy to practical politics–in the hands of Thatcher and Reagan no less–and who else?
• Chapter 6 “Neoliberal Strategies for Social Evolution” explores three practical political strategies that neoliberalism offered to achieve its goals. In the course of adopting one or another of these strategies, neoliberalism forever split with traditional conservatism and liberalism, in the authors’ views–or did it?

• The Choice of Civil War: Neoliberal Strategy and the Politics of the Enemy, Pierre Dardot , Haud Guéguen, Christian Laval, Pierre Sauvêtre (Verso; 2026). Chapters 3 and 4

• The Choice of Civil War: Neoliberal Strategy and the Politics of the Enemy, Pierre Dardot , Haud Guéguen, Christian Laval, Pierre Sauvêtre (Verso; 2026). Introduction
  • “A trenchant and provocative study of the symbolic, legal and material violence that has been deployed over the past half-century to secure the rule of capital across the planet” (Alberto Toscano).