Undoing the Oikos , Awakening Resistance?

Neoliberalism,
Democracy, and the Environment in 'Trump Country'

John Hultgren

Theory & Event, Volume 23, Number 1, January 2020, pp. 271-296 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/747106

Access provided at 7 Feb 2020 11:04 GMT from CNRS BiblioSHS

Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance?
Neoliberalism, Democracy, and the Environment
in ‘Trump Country’

John Hultgren

Abstract  How might we understand the intense and wide-

spread environmental activism emanating from communities that
staunchly supported Trump? I begin grappling with this question
by putting Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos and In the Ruins of
Neoliberalism into dialogue with the already voluminous literature
on Trumpism. Turning to environmental political theory, I then
make the case that whereas neoliberalism functions through the
depoliticization and economization of social life, the undoing of the
oikos—the socioecological place that we call home—is politicizing
subjects in the most unlikely of places, and creating resistance in
the process.

Introduction
In the small town of Stephenson, Michigan, opponents of a proposed
open-pit sulfide mine pack a high school gymnasium to address their
concerns to the state Department of Environmental Quality.1 In rural
Virginia, locals engage in tree-sits and protests in efforts to stop the
300-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline from being constructed.2 At an
EPA “Community Engagement” event in Exeter, New Hampshire,
residents of manufacturing towns—like Hoosick Falls, New York and
Merrimack, New Hampshire—forcefully condemn the agency’s insuf-
ficient response to drinking water contaminated by perfluoroalkyl
substances (PFAS).3 These recent examples of environmental activism
are indicative of a broader trend: as environmental crises increase in
scope and intensity, resistance is emerging in locales that have other-
wise served as strongholds of conservatism and emblems of anti-envi-
ronmentalism. And, far from reflecting the unpopular ideas of a loud
minority, there is reason to believe that—at least in some cases—the
activists’ views represent widespread public sentiment in the area.4
How might we understand the paradox of intense and widespread
environmental activism emanating from communities that staunchly

Theory & Event Vol. 23, No. 1, 271–296 © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press
272  Theory & Event

supported Trump, a candidate who brazenly embraced anti-envi-

ronmentalism and amped-up extractivism? And what might these
untimely outbursts have to teach us about the fate of democracy today?
I begin considering these questions by engaging with the litera-
ture on neoliberalism and democracy, focusing particular attention on
Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
(2015) and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic
Politics in the West (2019). I note that the victory of Trump was taken
by many commentators as evidence of the ultimate triumph, and per-
haps eclipse, of neoliberalism and the undoing of democratic subjec-
tivity. I then complicate this narrative, making the case that the power
of neoliberal rationality is contingent upon its resonance with the
material realities of everyday life; i.e. the social and ecological rela-
tions that comprise our households and habitats. While neoliberalism
does indeed threaten to undo the demos, its concomitant undoing of
the oikos, the socio-ecological place that we call home, is producing
reactions that are transforming political subjects in oft-cited “Trump
country.” What does it mean for our political strategies and ethics if
attachments to the oikos mediate—and have the potential to disrupt—
the relationship between neoliberalism and political subjectivity? I
suggest that, far from being irrevocably wedded to a reactionary poli-
tics, many residents of “Trump country” are outraged at the deteriora-
tion of their homeplace, but remain politically ambivalent, alienated,
and malleable. If this is correct, then a renewed Left focus on grass-
roots environmental politics could awaken political transformation in
the most unlikely of subjects.

Neoliberalism and Democracy: The Road to Trumpdom

Neoliberalism, here, refers to a political economic rationale that seeks
to extend the market to all domains of social life, including those
that have historically been governed by alternative social or environ-
mental logics. This line of thinking emerged in the 1940s as a reac-
tion to Keynesianism and the burgeoning social welfare programs of
the United States and Western Europe.5 It was later institutionalized
in the 1980s, in different ways, through Pinochet, Reagan, Thatcher
and international financial institutions governed by the Washington
Consensus.6 A growing literature has interrogated the relationship
between neoliberalism and democracy. While I do not have the space
to review this debate in its entirety, critically-oriented scholars have
made four interrelated assertions that are significant to my argument.
First, neoliberal policy prescriptions—privatization, deregulation,
austerity, tax cuts, and free trade—have amplified already existing
power asymmetries that constrain the participation and influence
of ordinary people in politics.7 Over the past 40 years, economic
 Hultgren | Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance?  273

inequality has intensified as the power of unions have declined along-

side globalization and shifts to a post-Fordist mode of production.8 At
the same time, in the United States, in particular, limits on the role of
money in politics have been stripped away, with the recent arrival of
“dark money” underscoring how billionaires and corporations alike
can shape political outcomes in unprecedented ways. In such a con-
juncture, sovereignty has been restructured in ways that render poli-
cy-makers less responsive and accountable to the demos.9
Second, in the United States, neoliberal theory has been success-
fully institutionalized not because of the deep ideological appeal of
Hayek, Mises, Friedman or Rand, but thanks to the discursive and
institutional resonance between neoliberal ideologues, organized
business, evangelical Christianity, and white supremacy.10 In American
politics, the cultural core of neoliberalism is identity politics, and its
path to power was forged through Cold War red-baiting, the Southern
Strategy, culture wars over “guns, god, and gays,” and post-9/11 anx-
ieties over immigrants and globalism. The result is a particular amal-
gamation of neoliberalism, racialized hyper-nationalism, and evangel-
ical Christianity that has deleterious impacts on efforts to cultivate an
inclusive demos.
Third, the cumulative effect of these reforms has been to create
a crisis of legitimacy for the state, by stripping away its capacity to
provide public goods to the majority of people.11 The twentieth cen-
tury social welfare state, characterized by workplace health and safety
regulations, labor standards, robust social safety nets, environmental
protections, and publicly funded education (not to mention more quo-
tidian services like parks, public television and radio, mail delivery,
subsidized school lunches, etc.), is being undone by austerity. Tax cuts,
codified in state constitutions and partisan pledges, have become qua-
si-permanent; continual increases to defense, prisons, and policing
budgets receive bipartisan support; and deficit hawks argue that
spending cuts “have to come from somewhere.” Crucially, the neolib-
eral state’s size hasn’t decreased, it has merely been reconfigured; the
result is a militarized form of neoliberalism that provides fewer public
goods to the demos.12 The state’s failure to provide these goods and its
resulting inability to respond to economic and ecological crises strip
it of its legitimacy, and strengthen the case for neoliberal ideologies
purporting that government is never the answer.13
Fourth, the neoliberal mode of governance creates political sub-
jects unable to think their way out of a neoliberal world; who are either
incapable of engaging in responsible dialogue over the common good,
or who perceive the common good through the metric of the market.14
Insofar as both state and societal institutions have been reconfigured
by neoliberalism, the political subjects who are socialized within their
purview are themselves put through something of a structural adjust-
274  Theory & Event

ment program. The subjects interpellated by neoliberal institutions are

“entrepreneurs of the self” laboring to increase their human capital
in a society structured by competition.15 These subjects are econom-
ic-minded actors, but their ability to participate in a democratic polis
is questionable. “What happens to rule by and for the people,” Wendy
Brown asks, “when neoliberal reason configures both soul and city as
contemporary firms, rather than as polities?”16 The following section
explores this question in further detail.

The Neoliberal Subject

In his 1978–9 lectures at the College de France, captured in The Birth
of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault noted a distinction between classical
liberalism and neoliberalism, the emergent rationality laid out by the
German ordoliberals, and Chicago and Austrian school economists.
Whereas classical liberals conceived of the market as a sphere of
exchange that arose naturally, neoliberals viewed market society as the
product of a rationality that needed to be cultivated in order to max-
imize competition. Classical liberalism thus rested on a “naïve natu-
ralism”; in actuality, market society was a precarious achievement that
required state intervention (of the right sort) to sustain. For this reason,
“the relation between an economy of competition and a state [could]
no longer be one of the reciprocal delimitation of different domains;”
rather, “[g]overnment must accompany the market economy from
start to finish.”17 As Foucault famously put it, for the neoliberals:

Government must not form a counterpoint or a screen… between

society and economic processes. It has to intervene on society as
such, in its fabric and depth. Basically, it has to intervene on soci-
ety so that competitive mechanisms can play a regulatory role at
every moment and every point in society and by intervening in
this way its objective will become possible, that is to say, a general
regulation of society by the market.18

The foundation of this neoliberal rationality is the enterprise; with

institutions—prisons, hospitals, schools, bureaucratic agencies, etc.—
operating as firms, and citizens acting and thinking as “entrepreneurs
of the self.”19 Foucault observes that, “[t]he individual’s life itself—
with his relationships to his private property, for example, with his
family, household, insurance and retirement—must make him into a
sort of permanent and multiple enterprise.”20 As Brown argues:

both persons and states are construed on the model of the con-
temporary firm, both persons and states are expected to comport
themselves in ways that maximize their capital value in the pres-
 Hultgren | Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance?  275

ent and enhance their future value, and both persons and states do
so through practices of entrepreneurialism, self-investment, and/
or attracting investors.21

Central to this enterprise form is the concept of human capital, and its
entrance into the rationalities of the state and citizen alike. Foucault
claims that the goal of the neoliberals is “to bring labor into the field of
economic analysis… to put [themselves] in the position of the person
who works.”22 Contra Marx, this does not mean considering how labor
power is sold and surplus value is wrested away by the owners of the
means of production; rather, neoliberalism views income as a return
on one’s own capital investment. Human capital is “the set of all those
physical and psychological factors which make someone able to earn
this or that wage.”23 This is not, Foucault underscores, a conception
of labor power but of capital-ability; if flourishing personally and pro-
fessionally depends upon one’s skill set, over time, “the worker him-
self appears as a sort of enterprise for himself.”24 The political effect is
an erasure of labor as a social concept: “[w]hen everything is capital,
labor disappears as a category, as does its collective form, class, taking
with it the analytic basis for alienation, exploitation, and association
among laborers.”25 The role of the state is no longer to mediate rela-
tions between labor and capital, but to increase human capital; “[t]hus
all the problems of health care and public hygiene must, or at any rate,
can be rethought as elements which may or may not improve human
capital.”26
According to Brown, Foucault correctly outlines the shifts from
a classical liberal to a neoliberal subject (the gradual expansion and
intensification of homo oeconomicus), but was unable to foresee the cen-
trality of finance capital to contemporary political economic relations.
“Today, homo oeconomicus… has been significantly reshaped as finan-
cialized human capital: its project is to self-invest in ways that enhance
its value or to attract investors through constant attention to its actual
or figurative credit rating, and to do this across every sphere of exis-
tence.”27 The neoliberal subject, Phillip Mirowski concurs, “is a jumble
of assets to be invested, nurtured, managed, and developed; but
equally an offsetting inventory of liabilities to be pruned, outsourced,
shorted, hedged against, and minimized.”28
Brown believes that liberalism has long been a struggle between
homo oeconomicus (man as an economic actor) and homo politicus (man
as a collective participant in the polis). But for the first four centuries
it was a fair fight: “the prominence of man’s economic features in
modern thought and practice reconfigures without extinguishing his
political features—again, these include deliberation, belonging, aspi-
rational sovereignty, concern with the common and with one’s rela-
tion to justice in the common.”29 Today, however, it appears that homo
276  Theory & Event

oeconomicus has won, once and for all: “neoliberal reason, ubiquitous
today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, cul-
ture, and a vast range of quotidian activity, is converting the distinctly
political character, meaning, and operation of democracy’s constituent
elements into economic ones.”30
In such a context, she asks,“[h]ow do subjects reduced to human
capital reach for or even wish for popular power?” The answer, per-
haps, is through support for popular demagogues driven by exclu-
sionary nationalisms. There exists a lengthy line of non-neoliberal
impulses that have emerged in the efforts to institutionalize the neo-
liberal project; the neoliberals’ recognition that the state must actively
cultivate neoliberal subjects, and their opposition to democracy, has
routinely lead to a willingness to use coercive force of the state in
the service of the market. Two core problems for neoliberals are 1)
what to do with “non-productive” subjects and 2) how to manage
those instances where the majority refuses to accede to the rule of
the market. In the abstract, neoliberal thinkers resolve this—Hayek,
by making a case for the market’s promotion of the Rule of Law and
contrasting them both (the market and the rule of law) to democracy,
and Friedman, by arguing that consumer sovereignty is the most dem-
ocratic form of expression, one that helps mediate factionalism and
maximize freedom conceived as individual choice.31 In practice, neo-
liberals’ frequent support for authoritarian regimes suggests that rhe-
torical nods to democracy are mere smokescreens to cover adherents’
market fundamentalism. This anti-democratic tendency reflects not an
incidental commitment of a few neoliberals led astray but a constitu-
tive component of the neoliberal logic: “[t]he replacement of citizen-
ship defined as concern with the public good by citizenship reduced
to the citizen as homo oeconomicus also eliminates the very idea of a
people, a demos asserting its collective political sovereignty.”32

The Demos Undone?

Is Trump’s election proof that homo oeconomicus has triumphed and the
demos has come undone? Brown asserts that “[n]eoliberalism generates
a condition of politics absent democratic institutions that would sup-
port a democratic public and all that such a public represents at its best:
informed passion, respectful deliberation, aspirational sovereignty,
sharp containment of powers that would overrule or undermine it.”33
It is difficult to argue that our current political order is comprised of
any of these vital elements of a democratic public; rather, uninformed
passion, angry discord, and anxious apathy appear to reign. And yet,
Trump is an ambivalent neoliberal. In terms of policy, his administra-
tion is for tax cuts, deregulation and privatization, but against free
trade, opposed to immigration, and in support of unabashed jingoism
 Hultgren | Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance?  277

(all of which are inconsistent with, say, Friedman or Hayek). In terms

of subjectivity, however, he is the embodiment of an entrepreneur of
the self.
Regardless of whether or not Trumpism is itself neoliberal, many
commentators have argued that neoliberalism laid the foundation for
a Trump victory. As Cornel West put it, “[t]he neoliberal era in the
United States ended with a neofascist bang.”34 George Monbiot con-
tends that “the backlash against neoliberalism’s crushing of political
choice has elevated just the kind of man that Hayek worshipped.”35
Brown asserts that:

The ground for Trump’s rise was tilled not just by neoliberal-
ism’s destruction of viable lives and futures for working and
middle-class populations through the global outsourcing of jobs,
the race to the bottom in wages and taxes, and the destruction of
public goods, including education. This ground was also tilled by
neoliberalism’s valorization of markets and morals and its deval-
uation of democracy and politics, Constitutionalism and social
justice.36

The neoliberal project of “reducing freedom to unregulated personal

license… anoints as free expression every historically and political
generated sentiment of (lost) entitlement based in whiteness, maleness
or nativism while denying these to be socially produced, releasing
them from any connection to social conscience, compromise or con-
sequence.”37 The end result of neoliberalism is not the entrepreneurial
subject dreamt of from the heights of Mont Pèlerin, but the authoritar-
ian-minded zealot of Trump rallies.
Analyses of Trumpism provide no shortage of support for the ero-
sion of democratic subjectivity thesis. Throughout the 2016 campaign
and in the aftermath of the election, journalists reporting from “Trump
country”—Main Street in Logan County, West Virginia,38 Main Street
in McDowell County, West Virginia,39 a diner in Pikeville, Kentucky,40
and so on—have continually profiled the rise of reactionary politics
among the residents of Appalachian coal country and, to a lesser
extent, the Rust Belt.41 The dominant framing, in both conservative
and liberal outlets, is of a white working class facing economic hard-
ship, the deterioration of communal ties, and the plague of addiction.
Scholarly work has similarly interrogated the shifting form and social
purpose of the conservative social bloc, finding Trump voters to be less
educated than most, more authoritarian, and more racist, sexist, and
xenophobic.42
Accompanying the near ubiquity of depictions of coal miners
holding Trump banners and oil workers in “Make America Great
Again” hats, several notable analyses of Trumpism also pick up on
278  Theory & Event

a deep-seated anti-environmentalism that resides within the Trump

voter.43 This is particularly evident in Arlie Hochschild’s celebrated
ethnography of Louisiana Tea Partiers, Strangers in Their Own Land.
Many of Hochschild’s interviewees are threatened by water contam-
ination due to the area’s close proximity to the oil and gas and chem-
ical industry. They love their bayou environment for both its aesthetic
beauty and material sustenance; it is integral to their livelihood and
leisure, and is a part of their deeply rooted attachment to place. The
conservative state of Louisiana has responded to the widespread pol-
lution by emphasizing end-of-pipe fixes, like a pamphlet on “how to
trim, grill and eat mercury-soaked fish.”44 The residents find them-
selves saddened by what has occurred but nonetheless voting for Tea
Partiers who want to abolish the EPA.
The socio-ecological implications of the neoliberal transformation
of subjectivity are myriad: jobs and environmental protection appear
as a zero-sum game (“Bring Back Coal!”); nature is reduced to a pool
of resources to be commodified and put to use (“Drill, Baby, Drill!”);
environmental regulations are purported to harm nature and society
alike by removing incentives provided by private property; regulatory
agencies themselves are viewed as bloated and self-serving; environ-
mentalists are assumed to be in cahoots with the urban elites against
the “real America;” and the acceptance of environmental risks is the
expected cost of living in post-industrial modernity. As one Hochschild
interviewee, unhappy about contaminated air and water but unwilling
to support strengthened environmental regulations, put it: “pollution
is the sacrifice we make for capitalism.”45 From this perspective, the
hegemony of neoliberalism seems near total, and the hope for democ-
racy appears bleak.

Where the Subject Calls Home: The Oikos

There is ample evidence that neoliberal subjectivity is wreaking havoc
on democracy, with profound social and environmental implications.
In this section, however, I contend that the promise of homo politicus
remains. Brown examines how governmental policies, legal decisions,
and institutions of higher education deploy neoliberal rationales, but
she makes only passing reference to how people experience these insti-
tutional changes, and locate them within the context of their lives. This
results in an under-appreciation of the variegated terrain on which
political rationalities are formed, neglecting crucial socio-ecological
sites that may render neoliberalism vulnerable.46 In beginning to build
this argument, this section provides a brief historical outline of the
evolving relationship between the polis and the oikos.
“In the beginning,” Brown writes, “there was homo politicus.”47 The
Aristotelian conception of “man” as a political animal (zoon politikon)
 Hultgren | Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance?  279

is contingent upon the structuring of life into two distinct zones: zoē
(the state of living common to all sentient beings) and bios (political
qualified life or life in the polis). Buttressing this distinction is a sharp
dichotomy between oikos and the polis. The oikos refers to the household,
while the polis is where humans commit to “living together in a delib-
erately governed fashion, to self-rule in a settled association that com-
prises yet exceeds basic needs, and to the location of human freedom
and human perfectibility in political life.”48 The oikos is the space of
necessity, ruled by the patriarch and filled with natural inequalities
and power asymmetries; the polis is the space of appearance, where
free debate among equals over the proper way of living together and
achieving “the good life” reigns.49 The polis is ontologically prior to the
oikos, but participation in the polis requires that one is first freed from
the necessities of the oikos. “Status in the polis,” Habermas writes, was
“based upon status as the unlimited master of an oikos (oikodespotes).”50
The oikos, as many have noted, is the original Greek root of the
words economy (oikonomia) and ecology (oekologie), but the former
was conceived of differently, and the latter was outside of the purview
of ancient concept of the household. The Greek household was com-
prised of “relations of rule and relations of production,”51 and oikonomia
simply referred to the proper husbanding of material resources for the
household.52 Moreover, economic affairs were limited by Aristotelian
morality. “Wealth is never to become its own end” and “wealth that is
accumulated for its own sake is unnatural.”53 Trading was only accept-
able insofar as it was necessary for a household’s self-sufficiency and
the maintenance of a community.54 Karl Polanyi observed that Aristotle
offered a critique of “incipient market trading at its very first appear-
ance in the history of civilization.”55 The important point here is that
the Ancient philosophers, despite their many flaws,56 put limits on the
development of homo oeconomicus, and indeed, privileged homo polit-
icus.
As liberal modernity emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, the oikos/polis dichotomy was transposed onto the private/
public divide—with all the exclusionary baggage that entailed. The
public sphere, where citizens discuss and debate pressing issues, was
constructed as the locus of civilization, rationality, masculinity, and
progress, while the private, or “domestic,” sphere was taken to be gov-
erned by the laws of nature, emotion, femininity, and tradition. It is at
this moment where economic activities, which had previously been
confined to the space of necessity, “are permitted to appear in public,”57
and political economy—“the knowledge and practice required for gov-
erning the state and managing its population and resources”—enters
into existence.58 As Habermas notes:
280  Theory & Event

the term “economic” itself, which until the seventeenth century

was limited to the sphere of tasks proper to the oikodespotes…
now, in the context of a practice of running a business in accord
with principles of profitability, took on its modern meaning. The
duties of the household head were narrowed and “economizing”
became more closely associated with thriftiness. Modern econom-
ics was no longer oriented to the oikos; the market had replaced the
household, and it became “commercial economics.59

This turn toward the self-regulating market locked into a place a series
of tensions—between democracy and capitalism, politics and eco-
nomics, and market society and nature—that changed the location and
function of the oikos within social relations.60
The maturation of industrial capitalism over the course of the
nineteenth century unchained the economy from both the oikos and
the “excessive” interventions of the state; a reality enabled by the ideo-
logical naturalization of the economy as an autonomous sphere of
life, and the reduction of nature to a resource to be used in pursuit of
human progress. The implications of this were myriad. The expansion
of factory life and industrial agriculture restructured relations between
men and women, with the former increasingly engaged in wage labor
in industrial production and the latter responsible for the unwaged
and unrecognized labor of social reproduction. The home, here, was
transformed into a “social factory,” sustained by women’s labor, on
which the size, health, and, ultimately, productivity of the population
of industrial workers depended.61 The emerging industrial economy
also intersected with the state-sanctioned racism of the post-Civil War
political terrain in ways that echoed into the home. In the US West,
speculators, railroads and industrial agriculture took control of the
frontier under the guise of Homestead Acts purportedly in the interest
of the (white) working class,62 while in the South, potentially transfor-
mative projects of land redistribution, education, and working class
mobilization cracked under the weight of the wages of whiteness and
collapsed into the violence of Jim Crow.63
At the same time, however, the exclusionary projects constitutive
of liberalism were contested by nineteenth- and twentieth-century
social movements seeking to expand the public sphere and deepen
democratic practice. Over time, the poor, racial minorities, and women
struggled for and received formal equality within the polis, but de facto
inequality in government, the workplace and the home persisted—
even throughout the heyday of the welfare state. The collision between
governmental efforts to prime housing markets and the “great migra-
tion” of African-Americans spurred white flight to the suburbs, trans-
forming both social (race, class, gender) relations and nature/society
relations in the process: people of color faced racially restrictive cov-
 Hultgren | Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance?  281

enants, redlining, and intimidation from neighbors and police alike;

the Fordist archetype of a “family wage” reinforced the gendered
dichotomy between domestic and public spheres;64 and industrial
and residential development paved over wilderness while recasting
the household “as a private space for the domestic consumption of
mass-produced objects of daily use.”65 It was in these white-washed
spaces of middle-class suburbia that the New Right—with its dreams
of negative freedom, Christian evangelism, and American military
hegemony—gained a foothold.66
With the gradual institutionalization of neoliberalism beginning in
the 1980s, women’s engagement in the formal economy has increased
but they continue to be compensated less for comparable jobs and
to do a disproportionate amount of the labor of social reproduction,
where it hasn’t been commodified and turned into low wage jobs.67 At
the same time, a crisis of masculinity has intensified as the decline of
manufacturing and certain extractive sectors (e.g. coal) has diminished
the earning prospects of working class men.68 The rise of neoliberalism
has also reinforced racial fault lines, particularly as globalization has
wreaked havoc on the working class. Today, Americans continue to
live in neighborhoods and communities profoundly segregated by
race,69 while the financialization of the oikos, as Saskia Sassen has
shown, is producing land grabs, toxic contamination and, ultimately,
dislocation, on a scale unprecedented in recent memory, outside of the
world wars.70
What do these shifts mean for the relationship between the oikos
and polis today? In many contemporary renderings of American poli-
tics, the oikos has been transformed into a space of vice, or one of insular
communalism. In terms of the former, the myriad exposés of opiate
addiction in the Rust Belt provide glimpses into an oikos where people
drink, do drugs, and play video games in attempts to escape their
gloomy lives;71 in terms of the latter, profiles from “Trump country”
depict an oikos where underemployed white workers rage against
immigrants while grasping at fraying communal ties and praying for
extractive jobs.72 The Trumpian subject, according to Brown, “cling[s] to
the soil, even if it is planted in suburban lawn devastated by droughts
and floods from global warming, littered with the paraphernalia of
addictive painkillers, and adjacent to crumbling schools, abandoned
factories, terminal futures.”73 In the following section, I make the case
that although the economization of the polis is undoing the oikos, it is
also remaking resistance in locales that on the surface appear to have
embraced the politics of neoliberalism and/or Trumpism.
282  Theory & Event

The Nature of the Oikos

As previously noted, the oikos also provides the root of the word
ecology (oecologie), a relationship first established by Aristotle’s stu-
dent, Theophrastus.74 Theophrastus coined the term oikeios topos to
refer to a “favorable place” where a plant grows best, its ecological
niche. “It is probable,” Donald Hughes writes, “that the classically
educated nineteenth-century German scientists who coined [ecology]
did so under the influence of the relevant passages in Aristotle and
Theophrastus.”75 As Jason Moore has argued, the two uses of oikos—
the economic and the ecological—have conventionally been treated as
separate objects of analysis, one belonging to the social sciences and
one to the natural. By contrast, Moore conceives of the oikeios (he fol-
lows Theophrastus in using the adjectival spelling) as a perspective that
“situates the creative and generative relation of species and environ-
ment as the ontological pivot—and methodological premise—of his-
torical change.”76 Moore argues that “the most elementary forms of
differentiation—let us say, class, race, and gender… unfold as bundles
of human and extra-human natures, interweaving biophysical and
symbolic natures at every scale.”77 For example, the notion that the
labor of social reproduction comes naturally to women, has resulted
in the devaluation of care work and the concomitant over-valuation
of hyper-masculine extractive labor. This environmentally and socially
destructive politics is enabled by the dualistic separation of nature
from society, and the reduction of the former to a standing reserve to
be put to use by “man.”78 The oikeios is deployed here to break down
nature/society dualisms and call attention to the entangled processes
through which world ecological history is made.
My theorization of the oikos is less sweeping than Moore’s, but
retains his emphasis on understanding political economy through a
socio-ecological lens. In my conceptualization, the oikos is tethered to
a physical space—the home and its immediate surroundings—but the
home is a site of myriad human and more-than-human lives, forces,
and flows. Our homes are comprised of our relationships with our
family, roommates, and neighbors; wood, cement and wires; electric
cables that link us to power grids; water lines that connect our commu-
nities to springs, lakes and reservoirs; the grass and trees in our yards
and neighborhoods; and the myriad non-human species (birds, rab-
bits, squirrels, etc.) that pass through these yards and neighborhoods
or share them with us. Put differently, I retain the referent object of the
classical usage of oikos, but situate it in a socio-ecological ontology, and
in doing so, extend its domain beyond a material household and the
human relations that comprise it, to the bundle of human and extra-
human relations, biophysical and symbolic, in which our homes are
enmeshed.
 Hultgren | Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance?  283

This conceptualization of the oikos that has its roots in environ-

mental justice and eco-feminist scholarship. For instance, Mary Mellor
observes:

it is interesting that while Haeckel chose a name based on the

Greek oikos, meaning household or dwelling, it was [late nine-
teenth-century American scientist] Ellen Swallow who showed
the direct connection between daily domestic life and the envi-
ronment… For Swallow, the importance of educating women was
that the home, even more than the workplace, was where primary
resources such as nutrition, water, sewage, and air could be mon-
itored.79

In environmental justice struggles, which are disproportionately led

by women, entrance into the public sphere via collective action fre-
quently occurs because of threats to the home. Rachel Stein observes
that “because environmental ills strike home for vulnerable communi-
ties, and because women have often been responsible for that domain,
women engage in these movements in order to protect and restore the
well-being of families and communities threatened by environmental
hazards or deprived of natural resources needed to sustain life and
culture.”80 Robert Gottlieb similarly details how environmental jus-
tice activists have often referred to themselves as “home-makers” in
their efforts to achieve clean air and water, health food, and access to
environmental amenities.81 Insofar as home-making is a practice and
a process, comprised of “securing food, clothing, and shelter, caring
cooking, cleaning, making, provisioning, nurturing, teaching, wel-
coming, excluding, fighting, living, and dying,”82 the home is a pow-
erful site in which our lived realities and ideologies collide. As John
Meyer argues, “our material experiences as home dwellers are an
important subject of citizenship in general and of citizen action to pro-
mote sustainability in particular.”83
There is ample evidence today that the oikos is being undone. For
many residents of the United States, our homes—and the neighbor-
hoods and communities in which they are embedded—are threatened
by addiction, gentrification, violence, toxic contamination, and/or cli-
mate change. There is also ample evidence that the undoing of the oikos
generates political activism. The direction of this activism, however,
is an open question. It is abundantly clear that a politics constructed
around protection of the home can be depoliticizing or exclusionary.
In terms of the former, one can conceive of the oikos as a “political” site
through a neoliberal lens, and attempt to consume one’s way out of
its destruction. To ameliorate environmental threats, we take shorter
showers, eat less meat, and ride our bikes to work. To ward off unhap-
piness, addiction, or loneliness, we exercise more and meditate, or per-
284  Theory & Event

haps buy ourselves new entertainment systems. To deal with rising

costs of living, we work both more efficiently and longer. These per-
sonal acts are not necessarily negative (in fact some are undoubtedly
good for the self and planet); the point is that they fail to lead us into
collective action, and indeed only reinforce the political economy that
we should be aiming to resist. In terms of the latter, the anxieties sur-
rounding the home have often been conjured into exclusionary forms
of political community. The rise of eco-fascism reminds us that cli-
mate-induced threats to the homeland (heimat) are rapidly being trans-
lated into a language of “blood and soil.”84 More frequently, however,
they work alongside more banal (and anthropocentric) commitments
to nationalism that aim to shore up supposedly declining wages of
whiteness by doubling down on dreams of fossil-fueled flourishing
amid industrial transformation and demographic shifts.
Has neoliberalism infiltrated and remade the oikos in ways that
bind contemporary subjectivity to reactionary politics? On one hand,
a dominant narrative of the past election suggests that the decline
of “white working class” households gave rise to Trumpism. Trump
voters are far more likely to live in or near the town in which they
were born.85 And while the median Trump voter is comfortably middle
class in economic terms,86 they often live in areas that are downwardly
mobile.87 There is a correlation between counties with high opiate use
and support for Trump,88 as well as counties where life expectancy has
declined in recent years and support for Trump.89 On the other hand,
however, most of the poorest and most environmentally ravaged com-
munities didn’t vote for Trump.90 And, even among those in which a
majority of voters did, “the myth that Trump voters are inscrutable
and monolithic”91 veils a much more complex and interesting reality.
Further, among a portion of the communities that did vote for Trump,
the extraction of natural resources and pollution of water and air—
whether already occurring or looming—are provoking forms of resis-
tance that are neither hyper-nationalist nor neoliberal.
Take, for example, opposition to the proposed Back Forty Mine, an
open-pit sulfide mine along the Menominee River of Upper Michigan
and northeast Wisconsin. Although the vast majority of potentially
impacted areas voted resoundingly for Trump, the mine is wildly
unpopular, and has engendered frequent protests, demonstrations,
and the formation of new coalitions between Native Americans from
the Menominee Nation and the predominantly white, working-class
communities nearby.92 Opposition to the mine is grounded in a
desire to protect the home and the community in which it is irrevo-
cably enmeshed. The stories of the community activists nearly always
start at home—one family bought a retirement home on the river,
another farms nearby, another has a family cottage on the banks of
 Hultgren | Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance?  285

the Menominee, etc.—but this initial concern for the oikos is conjoined
to concern over the human and non-human inhabitants of nearby
areas, including the Menominee Reservation.93 Far from an individu-
alistic or an exclusionary conception of home, the campaign to “save
the Menominee” is reinvigorating communal attachments, and even
pushing some residents to grapple with the area’s settler colonial
legacy.94
While anecdotal, the example is illustrative of a broader trend:
as the decline of unionization and closure of factories has decreased
the extant strength of workplace activism, and as institutional bar-
riers (voting restrictions, the rise of corporate money, etc.) to full par-
ticipation and influence in the de jure public sphere have increased,
the home—the oikos—has become a more vital site of politics. To be
clear, I am not suggesting here that the oikos is the sole locus of polit-
ical hope today, or that residents of conservative communities are full
of undeclared environmentalists—there are complex political, histor-
ical, economic and cultural reasons why some communities support
resource extraction and some resist it.95 My argument, rather, is that the
oikos, properly conceived, functions as a material and symbolic bridge
linking ideology to subjectivity; a sphere of life that the literature on
democracy and neoliberalism has tended to neglect.

The Work (of Resistance) Begins at Home

How does the oikos intervene in the relationship between a neoliberal
subjectivity and democracy? Political ideologies are mediated by lived
experiences, and we spend a lot of time in and around our homes. We
may be ensnared in the realities of Fox News and Facebook, but we
spend much of our lives preparing and enjoying meals, playing with
our pets, cleaning our rooms, reading to our kids, looking at animals
in our backyards, sitting on our porches and watching it rain, chatting
with neighbors, and so on. In order to understand what makes neolib-
eralism resonant and what gives rise to resistance, we need to engage
carefully with the quotidian—and that means engaging with the oikos.
This is particularly true if we’re interested in environmental politics
and ethics. As Meyer writes:

awareness cultivated by attention to the materiality of the home—

how and how much energy and water is consumed and for what
purposes, what products are brought into the home and how
much of it is regenerated as waste, how this waste is disposed of—
can lead not only to changes in household practices but to the sort
of intimate and experiential understanding of these material flows
that can inform and prompt broader collective action.96
286  Theory & Event

This collective action is most likely at moments when the oikos is

imperiled; threats to the oikos lead people into the public sphere.
Reflecting on Marx’s statement that “revolutions are the locomotives
of world history,” Benjamin once mused: “perhaps revolutions are not
the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.”97
The oikos, we might say, is the emergency brake on what Moore terms
capitalist world-ecological history. The home—the place where we
reside, whether we own, rent, camp, or squat—is one that we have
deep attachments to; our most intense and meaningful relationships
are often formed and enacted close to home. Environmental activism,
in its various iterations, has often been a response to threats facing the
home. From the Diné and Hopi struggling to save their homes from
strip mining,98 to white middle-class suburbanites organizing in oppo-
sition to the bulldozing of open space,99 from Love Canal and Warren
County to Standing Rock and Flint, the undoing of the oikos has long
given rise to resistance.100
These examples suggest that the forms of resistance emanating
from the oikos have the potential to lead to broader political transfor-
mation. Romand Coles, for instance, highlights the role of the home
within grassroots movements attempting to contest neoliberalism. The
meetings of concerned community-members often take place in the
homes of activists themselves, before eventually moving into larger
venues like schools, workplaces, public libraries, and community cen-
ters:

there are one-on-one meetings in which listening to and sharing

profound narratives about our sources of inspiration and aspi-
ration begins to generate powerful new connections, senses, and
possibilities.101

Such an everyday politics—starting at home and then moving out into

the community—sometimes even leads to the explosions of untimeli-
ness, of shock politics (mass protests, general strikes, etc.), that we retro-
spectively view as important historical events.102 Indeed, it is through
the “call and response” between the everyday politics of the oikos and
the evanescent politics of the mass demonstration that the potential for
transformation is heightened. Insofar as threats to the oikos politicize
neoliberal subjects—turning home-makers into community-makers—
this is a politics “teeming with natality,”103 which can lead to the recon-
figuration of the polis and the revitalization of the demos. Out of the
oikos, “[a] thawing demos is stimulated and begins to move.”104
In order to bend this movement toward an emancipatory politics,
activists must intervene to highlight the material connections between
the home, the workplace, and the world beyond. Silvia Federici sug-
gests that cultivating macropolitical transformation:
 Hultgren | Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance?  287

requires first a profound transformation in our everyday life, in

order to recombine what the social division of labor in capitalism
has separated. For the distancing of production from reproduction
and consumption leads us to ignore the conditions under which
what we eat, wear, or work with have been produced, their social
and environmental cost, and the fate of the population on whom
the waste we produce is unloaded.105

Linking together struggles in the spheres of commodity production,

social reproduction, and environmental protection is a prominent
focus of ecofeminists and ecosocialists interested in coalition-building
across scales and constituencies. Nancy Fraser, for example, suggests
that financialized capitalism has externalized the care work upon
which capital accumulation depends “onto families and communities
while…diminish[ing] their capacity to perform it.”106 The resulting
social reproductive crisis intersects with the economic, political, and
ecological contradictions of capitalism to produce a perfect planetary
storm whose confrontation requires attention to movements and insti-
tutional forms that transgress traditional organizational and geopo-
litical boundaries. From such a perspective, it is no surprise that the
commodified sectors of social reproductive labor—e.g. the service
industry, teachers, nurses, and flight attendants—are also hotbeds of
contemporary labor activism and among the most progressive unions
on climate policy.107 So called “pink-collar labor” not only provides
a material bridge for connecting the oikos to the workplace, it offers
a pathway to a more sustainable global political economic order. As
Alyssa Battistoni argues:

the kind of work that we’ll need more of in a climate-stable future

is work that’s oriented toward sustaining and improving human
life as well as the lives of other species who share our world.
That means teaching, gardening, cooking, and nursing: work that
makes people’s lives better without consuming vast amounts of
resources, generating significant carbon emissions, or producing
huge amounts of stuff.108

Attention to what Battistoni calls oikos work—the undervalued labor

done by those engaged in social reproduction and by non-human
lives and forces—challenges the continued prevalence of a work-
ing-class iconography that emphasizes white male workers in resource
extraction and heavy manufacturing, while also underscoring the need
for a more ethical relationship with the non-human lives that have his-
torically been reduced to the material substratum propelling human
advancement.109
Efforts to reclaim and rebuild the oikos, however, face organized
opposition. American conservatives recognize the power of home and
288  Theory & Event

have anchored their politics in denunciations of the looming threats

facing the “traditional” oikos (like gay marriage, non-traditional
gender roles, neighborhood and school integration, immigration, and,
increasingly, environmentalism).110 By contrast, “third way” liberals
have focused on the home only insofar as it has aligned with their
“suburban strategy,” lavishing attention on middle-class swing voters,
embracing the knowledge produced by the professional class, and
seeking to bolster entrepreneurialism through the increase of human
capital.111 Such a politics, “entrusts the virtue of the ‘political good’ to
governmental oligarchies enlightened by experts,”112 and positions the
working-class home as the sphere of particularism, parochialism, and
tradition. In doing so, liberals frequently advance their own insular
modes of communalism; e.g. supporting land use regulations that
drive up housing prices in order to keep out undesirables.
The task of the Left is to recognize the political potential dwelling
in the oikos (e.g. the angry and alienated voters who stayed home
during the 2016 presidential election as a political statement), and put
forward a governmental rationale that meshes with the experiences
of the demos as conceived by Sheldon Wolin: ordinary people, partic-
ularly “those who must work, who cannot hire proxies to promote
their interests, and for whom participation, as distinguished from
voting, is necessarily a sacrifice.”113 This requires attention to working
class expressions of oikos-angst and -anger, both within and outside
of “Trump country.” A politics built from the home-on-up can work
to reconfigure existing social antagonisms. The undoing of the oikos is
steadily forging a shared set of material interests between working and
middle class communities, across lines of race, gender, and nationality,
who lack the resources to distance themselves from contemporary
environmental threats. The adherence of working and middle-class
whites to the racial and class interests constitutive of fossil capitalism
has widened inequality and diminished opportunities for living the
good life in an increasingly warming and toxic world. The moment is
ripe moment for a Leftist intervention around an alternative vision of
a flourishing oikos: where high-quality housing, child-care, education,
healthcare, and access to clean air and water are communal rights;
where non-human lives occupy a central place in dialogues over form
and purpose of growth and development; and where living beings are
valued not on the basis of wages or place of origin, but on their multi-
faceted contributions to the socio-ecological community.
Protecting the oikos is emerging as an organizing principle—a
nodal point—around which to orient a new social formation. In dif-
ferent ways, environmental justice, anti-gentrification, immigrants’
rights, indigenous rights, and racial justice activists are all fighting to
safeguard a sustainable and just oikos. As Naomi Klein has argued, the
linking of these local struggles to protect home—their convergence in
 Hultgren | Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance?  289

movements, party platforms, and proposed policies —is one promising

pathway beyond neoliberalism.114 Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor similarly
notes that throughout American history “various battles over land
rights and citizenship; the right to work and housing; the right to vote,
speak, and organize have all been in an effort to reshape or reform the
injustice and oppression that shapes the daily lives of most people in
this country.”115 “Home,” she asserts, “is the crucible of struggle.”

Conclusion
To draw too close a connection between a political economic ratio-
nale—neoliberalism—and a mode of subjectivity, misreads the social
terrain on which political struggles unfurl. It draws a direct equivalence
between governmental rationality and subjectivity with little attention
to the lived realities of everyday life. Governmental rationalities reso-
nate because of their embeddedness in our lives—the extent to which
they proffer plausible explanations for the realities in which we find
ourselves, and provide compelling visions for making our day-to-day
lives better. Anti-environmentalism, for instance, is cultivated both by
subjecting talk radio listeners to neoliberal talking points, and through
lived experiences—e.g. the forms of recreation that we engage in, the
food we consume, the design of our neighborhoods, and the transpor-
tation options available to us. Conversely, environmental ethics are
not merely passed down to subjects by environmental groups and the
Nature Channel, but also by backpacking in the mountains, digging
through the dirt in a garden, seeing a neighborhood park developed,
or recognizing that your relatives and friends are breathing toxic fumes
or drinking tainted water. The home isn’t the only locus where gov-
ernmental rationalities intersect with the material realities of everyday
life, but it is an increasingly important one. Attention to the undoing
of the oikos suggest that neoliberal rationality isn’t as deep-seated as
Brown fears; nor is the transition from neoliberal to neo-fascist subjec-
tivity quite as automatic.
None of this is to undercut Brown’s central thesis—as the spread
of neoliberalism “evacuates the content from liberal democracy and
transforms the meaning of democracy tout court, it subdues democratic
desires and imperils democratic dreams.”116 Neoliberalism creates
numerous points of blockage in efforts to cultivate a flourishing, just,
and sustainable democracy: making it more difficult to get accurate,
trustworthy information; transforming liberal arts education into job
training; decimating organized labor and making workplace struggles
more difficult to wage; stripping the state of its capacity to check cor-
porate power; and so on, and so on. Further, many people, like some
of those interviewed by Hochschild, have been transformed into neo-
liberal subjects. But the field of political ideologies to which we’re
290  Theory & Event

exposed is complex, and people often adopt ideologies in ways that

are partial, inconsistent, and—in some cases—subject to change.
In the examples that I’ve alluded to, many residents of the com-
munities aren’t homo oeconomicus; at least not all the way down. The
oikos—the socio-ecological place that we call home—interrupts this ide-
ology-subjectivity feedback loop, even if only periodically or momen-
tarily. It is where the deepest socio-ecological connective tissue resides,
frustrating neoliberal efforts to individualize and instrumentalize it.
Indeed, the undoing of the oikos is already leading to promising polit-
ical action. The challenge for the Left today is to capitalize on these
fractured yet multiplying moments of “fugitive democracy,”117 and
bring them together in the service of political transformation. In the
ruins of the oikos, a reinvigorated and radicalized demos could emerge.

Acknowledgements
An early version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the
American Political Science Association, September 1, 2018, in Boston, MA.
The author would like to thank Em Ray, Sean Parson, Robert Kirsch, Michael
Lipscomb, and David Bond for helpful feedback. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes
1. John Engel, “Coalition to Save the Menominee River,” [n.d.], http://
savethewildup.org/2018/03/coalition-to-save-the-menominee-river/
2. See, for example, “‘The Fire is Catching’: Mountain Valley Pipeline Faces
Fierce Opposition in the Virginias,” Earth First Journal, May 18, 2018,
https://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2018/05/18/the-fire-is-catching-moun-
tain-valley-pipeline-faces-fierce-opposition-in-the-virginias/
3. Author’s attendance at event. For a recap, see Jim Therrien, “Bennington’s
PFOA Story Among Those Highlighted at EPA Summit,” Bennington
Banner, June 25, 2018. https://www.benningtonbanner.com/stories/bennington-
expert-speaks-at-pfoa-summit-in-new-hampshire,543172
4. For example, seven counties, two cities, two towns, and dozens of tribal
governments and inter-tribal organizations in Upper Michigan and north-
east Wisconsin have passed resolutions opposing the aforementioned
mine. Out of the eleven counties, cities, and towns, all but one were car-
ried by Trump in the 2016 presidential election. At the recent DEQ hear-
ing, 300 concerned citizens packed the gym—84 residents testified against
the mine, while four people spoke in support. See, River Alliance of
Wisconsin, “Back 40 Mine Update and Action Alert,” May 10, 2018, https://
www.wisconsinrivers.org/back-40-contact-investors/; Engel, “Coalition to
Save the Menominee River.”
5. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and
the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); David Harvey, A
Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005); Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How
 Hultgren | Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance?  291

Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London and New York:

Verso, 2013).
6. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The
Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007); Mirowski, Never Let a
Serious Crisis.
7. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism; Klein, Shock Doctrine.
8. See, for example, Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
9. Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000); Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations
in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2006).
10. Duggan, Twilight of Equality; Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas
(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004); William Connolly, “The Evangelical-
Capitalist Resonance Machine,” Political Theory 33, no. 6 (2005): 896–886;
Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism
and De-Democratization,” Political Theory 34, no. 6 (2006): 690–714.
11. See for example Fred Block and Margaret Somers, The Power of Market
Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (Cambridge, MA and London:
Harvard University Press, 2014).
12. Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books,
2010).
13. A neoliberal state is nonetheless able to secure its legitimacy among a
reactionary portion of its populace by providing protection from the myr-
iad “threats,” internal and external, that purportedly plague a globalized
world (see Brown 2010).
14. Henry Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse
of Democracy (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004); Michel Foucault,
The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–79 (New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2008); William Connolly, “Steps Toward an Ecology
of Late Capitalism,” Theory & Event 15, no. 1 (2012); Wendy Brown, Undoing
the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2012);
Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic
Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
15. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics.
16. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 27.
17. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 121.
18. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 145.
19. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 226.
20. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 241.
21. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 22.
22. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 223.
23. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 224.
24. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 225.
292  Theory & Event

25. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 38.

26. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 230.
27. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 33.
28. Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 108.
29. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 94.
30. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 17.
31. See, e.g., chapters 5–6 in Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1944) and Ch. 1–2 in Milton Friedman’s
Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). See
also Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 65–76.
32. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 39.
33. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 39.
34. Cornel West, “Goodbye, American neoliberalism. A new era is here,” The
Guardian, November 17, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentis-
free/2016/nov/17/american-neoliberalism-cornel-west-2016-election
35. George Monbiot, “Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our prob-
lems,” The Guardian, April 15, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/
apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot?CMP=share_btn_tw
36. Wendy Brown, ‘Who is Not a Neoliberal Today’, Tocqueville21, Democracy
and Politics blog, January 18, 2018, https://tocqueville21.com/interviews/wen-
dy-brown-not-neoliberal-today/
37. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 45.
38. Larissa MacFarquhar, “In the Heart of Trump Country,” The New Yorker,
October 16, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/in-the-
heart-of-trump-country
39. Paul Lewis, Tom Silverstone, and Adithya Sambamurthy, “Why the
Poorest County in West Virginia Has Faith in Trump, The Guardian,
October 13, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2016/oct/12/
west-virginia-donald-trump-supporters-mcdowell-county-poverty-video
40. Lois Beckett, “Is there a Neo-Nazi Storm Brewing in Trump Country?,”
The Guardian, June 4, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/04/
national-socialism-neo-nazis-america-donald-trump
41.
Edward McLelland, “The Rust Belt Was Turning Red Already,”
Washington Post, November 9, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/
posteverything/wp/2016/11/09/the-rust-belt-was-turning-red-already-donald-
trump-just-pushed-it-along/; David Von Drehle, “Folks in the Midwest
Have Trump All Figured Out,” Washington Post, April 6, 2018, https://www.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/folks-in-the-midwest-have-trump-all-figured-out
/2018/04/06/52c7e9ce-39b9–11e8–8fd2–49fe3c675a89_story.html
42. See Katherine Cramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in
Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2016); Justin Gest, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in
an Age of Immigration and Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press,
2016); Matthew MacWilliams, “The One Weird Trait that Predicts Whether
You’re a Trump Supporter, Politico, January 17, 2016, https://www.polit-
 Hultgren | Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance?  293

ico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533;
Cynthia Weber, “The Trump Presidency: Episode 1,” Theory & Event 20, S1
(2017): 132–142.
43. Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on
the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016); Cramer, Politics of
Resentment, 155–158; Gest, The New Minority, 83–4.
44. Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land, 110–11.
45. Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land, 179.
46. For a sympathetic critique in this vein, see Annie McClanahan, “Becoming
Non-Economic: Human Capital Theory and Wendy Brown’s Undoing the
Demos,” Theory & Event 20, no. 2 (2017): 510–519.
47. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 87.
48. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 87.
49. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1958 [1998]), 36–7.
50. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1989 [1962]), 3.
51. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 88.
52. Timothy Mitchell, “Rethinking Economy,” Geoforum 39, 3 (2008): 1116–
1121.
53. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 89.
54. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of
Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1944 [2001]), 56–7; see also Benjamin
Jowett, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1885), xxii-
xxv.
55. Karl Polanyi, “Aristotle Discovers the Economy,” in Polanyi, Arensberg,
and Pearson (eds.), Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Chicago: Henry
Regnery Co., 1957), 67.
56. The flaws of the Ancient polis/oikos are numerous. Aristotle naturalized the
exclusion of women, the poor and slaves from political life, and viewed
democracy as a debased mode of government, ruled by the passions and
interests of the propertyless masses.
57. Arendt, The Human Condition, 46.
58. Mitchell, “Rethinking Economy,” 1116.
59. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 20.
60. Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
61. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the
Subversion of Community (Bristol, UK: Falling Wall Press, 1972).
62. Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American
West (London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1987).
63. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: The
Free Press, 1935 [1992]).
294  Theory & Event

64. Nancy Fraser, “Crisis of Care: On the Social Reproductive Contradictions of

Contemporary Capitalism,” in Tithi Bhattacharya (ed.) Social Reproduction
Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London: Pluto Press,
2017).
65. Fraser, “Crisis of Care,” 30; see also Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the
Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Christopher Sellers,
Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in
Twentieth Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 2012).
66. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001); Matthew
Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton
and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006).
67. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 100–106.
68. See, for example, Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man
(New York: William Morrow and Co., 1999).
69. Douglas Massey, “Residential Segregation is the Linchpin of Racial
Stratification,” City & Community 15, no. 1 (2016): 4–7.
70. Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy
(Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 2014).
71. See Joel Achenbach, “A Remote Virginia Valley has been Flooded by
Prescription Opioids,” Washington Post, July 18, 2019, https://www.wash-
ingtonpost.com/national/a-remote-virginia-valley-has-been-flooded-by-prescrip-
tion-opioids/2019/07/18/387bb074-a8ca-11e9–9214–246e594de5d5_story.html;
Mark Trent and Campbell Robertson, “Despair, Love and Loss: A Journey
Inside West Virginia’s Opioid Crisis,” New York Times, December 13, 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/us/west-virginia-opioids.html
72. MacFarquhar, “In the Heart of Trump Country;” Lewis et. al., “Why the
Poorest County in West Virginia Has Faith in Trump;” Chris Arnade,
“Pride and Pain in Trump Country,” The Guardian, Sept. 7, 2016, https://
www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/07/kentucky-trump-obama-unemploy-
ment-drugs
73. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 187.
74. J. Donald Hughes, “Theophrastus as Ecologist,” Environmental Review 9,
no. 4 (1985): 296–306.
75. Hughes, “Theophrastus as Ecologist,” 297.
76. Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of
Capital (New York: Verso, 2015), 35.
77. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 9.
78. See Mary Mellor, Feminism & Ecology (New York: New York University
Press, 1997); Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the
Postmodern (London: Zed Books, 1997).
79. Mellor, Feminism & Ecology, 14.
 Hultgren | Undoing the Oikos, Awakening Resistance?  295

80. Rachel Stein (ed.), New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender,

Sexuality, and Activism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2004), 2.
81. Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American
Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2005), 275.
82. John Meyer, Engaging the Everyday: Environmental Social Criticism and the
Resonance Dilemma (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 143.
83. Meyer, Engaging the Everyday, 158.
84. Susie Cagle, “‘Bees Not Refugees’: The Environmentalist Roots of Anti-
Immigrant Bigotry,” The Guardian, August 16, 2019, https://www.theguard-
ian.com/environment/2019/aug/15/anti
85. Daniel Cox and Robert Jones, “Still live near your hometown? If you’re
white, you’re more likely to support Trump.” PRII/The Atlantic Survey,
October 6, 2016, https://www.prri.org/research/prri-atlantic-oct-6-poll-politics-
election-clinton-trump/
86. Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu, “It’s time to bust the myth: Most Trump
voters were not working class,” Washington Post, Monkey Cage. June 5,
2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-
time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/?utm_ter-
m=.5a9732daad8b
87. Dante Chinni, “Trump County Voters Aren’t Downtrodden, but They
Are Being Left Behind,” NBC News, July 24, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.
com/politics/donald-trump/trump-county-voters-left-behind-not-downtrod-
den-n786056
88. James Goodwin, Yong-Fang Kuo, David Brown, David Juurlink, and
Mukaila Raji. “Association of Chronic Opioid Use With Presidential
Voting Patterns in US Counties in 2016,” Journal of the American Medical
Association Network Open, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworko-
pen/fullarticle/2685627
89. Jacob Bor, “Diverging Life Expectancies and Voting Patterns in the 2016
US Presidential Election,” American Journal of Public Health 107 (10): 1560–
1562, https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2017.303945
90. See Nate Silver, “The Mythology of Trump’s Working Class Support,
FiveThirtyEight, May 3, 2016, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythol-
ogy-of-trumps-working-class-support/
91. Elizabeth Catte, “Why Trump Country isn’t as Republican as you think,”
The Guardian, February 22, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/
feb/22/trump-country-republican-appalachia-virginia-activism
92. Al Gedicks, “Wisconsin’s Standing Rock: The Proposed Back Forty Mine,”
Race & Class 60, no. 2 (2018): 106–113.
93. Engel, “Coalition to Save the Menominee River.”
94. Author’s interview with activist, March 8, 2018.
95. See Stephanie Malin, “There’s no real choice but to sign: neoliberalisation
and normalization of hydraulic fracturing on Pennsylvania farmland,”
Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 4, no. 1 (2014): 17–27.
96. Meyer, Engaging the Everyday, 164.
296  Theory & Event

97. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, H. Eiland and M. W.

Jennings (eds.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 402,
cited by Coles in Visionary Pragmatism, 167.
98. Traci Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
99. Rome, Bulldozer in the Countryside, 119–152.
100. Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
101. Romand Coles, Visionary Pragmatism: Radical and Ecological Democracy in
Neoliberal Times (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 170.
102. Coles, Visionary Pragmatism, 172–3.
103. Coles, Visionary Pragmatism, 174.
104. Coles, Visionary Pragmatism, 170.
105. Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the
Commons (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019), 109; citing Maria Mies and
Veronica Bennholdt-Thomsen, The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the
Globalized Economy (London: Zed Books, 1999), 141ff.
106. Fraser, “Crisis of Care,” 32.
107. The Service Employees International Union, National Nurses Union, and
Association of Flight Attendants-CWA have all passed resolutions endors-
ing Green New Deal proposals. The American Federation of Teachers has
not, but has been active in union-environmentalist dialogues through the
BlueGreen Alliance.
108. Alyssa Battistoni, “Living, Not Just Surviving,” Jacobin, August 15, 2017,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/living-not-just-surviving/
109. Alyssa Battistoni, “Bringing in the Work of Nature: From Natural Capital
to Hybrid Labor,” Political Theory 45, no. 1 (2017): 5–31.
110. For example, conservative reactions to the Green New Deal have focused
on threats to “traditional” lifestyles and habits—like meat consump-
tion, and automobile and home energy use. See, e.g., Joshua Spect,
“Hamburgers Have Been Conscripted into Fights over the Green New
Deal,” Time, May 7, 2019, https://time.com/5583986/green-new-deal-beef-his-
tory/
111. Lily Geismer and Matthew Lassiter, “Turning Affluent Suburbs Blue
Isn’t Worth the Cost,” New York Times, June 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.
com/2018/06/09/opinion/sunday/affluent-suburbs-democrats.html
112. Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory & Event 5, no. 3 (2001),
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32639
113. Sheldon Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy.” Constellations 1, no. 1 (1994): 11–25,
11; see also Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2004), 602.
114. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).
115. Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, “Home is the Crucible of Struggle,” American
Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2017): 229.
116. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 44.
117. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy.”