Liberalism’s Death Has No Afterlife. Perhaps That’s a Good Thing.

The day after Kamala Harris’s resounding election loss, I attended a talk with Judith Butler. They were ostensibly there to discuss a colleague’s book about Greek tragedy, but spent the majority of their time laying out a postmortem of the previous night’s election (tragic in and of itself). A postmortem was needed in a near-literal sense: it was abundantly clear to everyone in the room that something had, indeed, died the night before. Sitting before someone who’s written extensively on grief and mourning, we in the audience clung to Butler’s every word for much needed guidance.

Butler offered something somewhat unexpected: they portrayed not merely a death, but rather a murder. They described an enemy constituted by moral sadism, who kills under the rubric of moral justification, and who treats the law as a pure instrument for the amplification of power. The question thus became, what to do in the face of a murderer who uses our own weapons against us?

In the face of such an enemy, Butler appealed not to ethics and institutional order – these foundational tools of liberal democratic life were sure to fail, too easily co-opted in the enemy’s hands – but to something far more effervescent. This moment, they said, calls for the production of “an irresistible imaginary.” Most needed was not merely the solidarity, organizing, support and radical care that most left of center have discursively avowed since Trump’s ascent – though these might be essential, too. Out of the death of liberalism marked by Harris’s loss, what’s needed is a genuine vision for the afterlife.

Thought of the afterlife is decidedly religious, and it tacitly abounded during the lifetime of American liberalism. This is what philosopher Giorgio Agamben argued in his widely cited book The Time That Remains, published in 2005, at the peak of U.S. hegemonic power. There, Agamben paints a picture of turn-of-the-century Western liberalism characterized by what he calls the “messianic,” a quality he finds reflected in early Christianity. In contrast to Judaism, which distinguishes between this world and the world to come, early Christianity carved out a third space – the messianic time of the present – between the two. In the in-between time, Agamben explains, the Christ-messiah has already come and revealed the path to eternal justice, making it accessible to all. But, until everyone universally embraces belief in the messianic message, we are all – believers and non-believers alike – precluded from reaching the utopic peace that the messiah’s arrival promised. The present, Agamben claims, is thus “the time that remains between time and its end,” where the imagined “end” is a messianic, just utopia (66).

The problem, though, is the promised utopian “end” never seems to arrive. Instead, the in-between time is prolonged indefinitely, its messianic promise serving to spread and entrench the power of its (Christian) adherents. Any who resist are either deemed heretics for rushing God’s plan for salvatory justice, or made to convert to belief in His message, for the sake of universal redemption.

Agamben’s argument reflected a scathing critique of the liberal ideology that’s ruled the last three decades. After the horrors of the Holocaust and the defeat of global Communism, American liberalism similarly projected a sense that the secrets of eternal justice had likewise been revealed to us: globalized capitalism paired with widespread liberal democracy were professed to yield a worldwide peace as good as Christ’s Parousia, if not better. In the words of Francis Fukuyama, we had reached “the end of history.” All that remained to be done was to spread the message far and wide, like modern-day apostles. With this in mind, Americans and our allies spent much of the early twenty-first century bombarding the globe to “make the world safe for democracy.” Any who refused our embrace, we argued, simply needed the veil of illiberal unfreedom lifted, after which the liberal promise could become global.

This attitude was as much domestically projected as it was internationally-oriented. At home, any imperfections of liberal democratic life were deemed a bug, not a feature, of a constitutively solid political-ethical framework. The near universal consensus was that liberalism’s ideals needed to be extended to an ever-growing list of identity categories, from race to sex, to gender and religion. The efforts of justice-minded movements, it was thought, were best used to earn these groups “recognition,” such that they might be included under the purview of the liberal system. The eventual mantra of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion came to represent the idea that American liberal ideology bore the utopic potential it advertised, it was simply inequitably applied, and needed to include a more diverse swath of the citizenry.

In light of Agamben’s critique, it becomes clear that these pillars of American liberalism – global capitalist democracy paired with diverse politics of recognition – would never yield the utopic justice they promised. Instead, this ideology and the politics that follow served to forcibly spread the liberal state’s own hegemonic power, both at home and abroad. Any concerted effort at resistance – of which there have been many – has generally been quashed, or transmuted into terms palatable to liberal language and thought, in service of an imagined just future that perpetually lay right around the corner.

On November 5th, 2024, it was this ideology that was on the ballot, and emphatically lost. The stunned devastation expressed by many in the face of Harris’s colossal defeat reflects an implicit understanding that – as Harris put it – “we are not going back,” where, “back,” rather, refers to a time in the recent past when many believed the comfort of America’s liberal promise would save all. As we learn from Agamben, though, this veil of comfort was fallacious from the start: the continued hegemony of American liberalism, with Harris at its helm, would have staved off its messianic promise for another day, while U.S. power spread. Harris’s loss, then, more than anything, signaled a definitive change in Americans’ willingness to believe in the liberal imaginary. And, as Agamben points out, our contemporary liberalism – like early Christianity – hinges upon our belief in order to garner the just future it pledges. Absent our faith, universal salvation is also precluded.

This helps explain the despondency with which those left of center have searched for answers at this moment, and why Butler’s alternative, “irresistible imaginary,” feels so necessary. Until now, liberalism’s image of its own afterlife – expressed in Agamben’s “end” of messianic time – was assumed to be positive. “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” most were trained to believe. Liberalism taught that, in the present, we are not yet in a utopic future but we know how to get there: we must heed the lessons revealed to us about injustices of the past in order to ethically act “as if” we are already in a more just future. In practicality that meant learning from the ills of authoritarianism to, instead, protect democracy going forward; learning from the genocidal violence of the Nazi regime to, rather, protect Jews’ and others’ lives from now on; learning from communism’s ideological rigidity to henceforth protect individual freedom of choice and access to truthful information

Now it’s as though the veil of our own ignorance has been lifted. Not only has the liberal promise eluded us, but also, as Butler aptly pointed out, Trump and his ilk use precisely these lessons to destroy the order they profess to represent: democratic elections are now deployed to erode democratic governance, histories of genocidal violence are now used to excuse their renewed execution, and appeals to individual freedom are utilized in service of fabricated truths and to limit others’ choices. If liberalism is dead and we’re now in the afterlife, the arc of the moral universe seems to have bent more toward hell than heaven. We have been thrust into a world – into a time – we don’t recognize, precisely because it uses liberalism’s own language and ideals against itself.

What might it mean to learn from the past now that (despite Fukuyama’s admonition) time has moved on and “the past” now refers to a bygone era of liberal hegemony? One possibility is that we finally break free of the illusion that our notions of the just are to be universally believed. Liberalism’s underlying adherence to the messianic – to the notion that we already have the answers – has, until now, precluded imagination or action toward something genuinely different than what we’ve been told is good and true. If nothing else, we might now finally explore the heretical terms that our newfound lack of faith makes possible.

As I walked out of Butler’s post-election talk, I ran into a professor with whom I’m acquainted. “How are you doing?” I asked him, expecting the melancholic shrug most friends and colleagues gave that day. When, instead, he replied, “I’m great,” I peered back, confused. “No, really,” he said, “I’m glad. It’s the definitive end of neoliberalism.”

Although it’s right to fear the likely devastation to come, there is also a profound, Derridian intoxication to the notion that we are now in a time when the future – and notions of the just embedded in it – is genuinely uncertain rather than predetermined. My colleague’s optimism – which I share – expressed that for the first time in my lifetime, there is genuine space for novelty of thought, innovation of image, and alternate (potentially “irresistible”) frames of engagement. This isn’t to say that we don’t have where to look: collective endeavors toward alternate frames abound. And yet, these endeavors have operated in a totally ubiquitous and relatively-immovable context of liberal power. It is this context that’s now changed. And, here, in its afterlife, there is finally space to think.