In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future. Citizens of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations, many of them will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time. For them, the future will have arrived too soon.
—Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970)
As this project went through draft after draft, one person’s words grew in saliency with each pass: John Carson-Parker, writer for Business Week and Fortune magazine. As an articulation of neoliberal policies before neoliberalism ascended to its position of dominance in the Reagan era, Carson-Parker’s words appear as a fever dream premonition. In the October 12, 1974, issue of Business Week, Carson-Parker prophesized the arrival of neoliberal austerity for the vast majority of Americans. Conceptually mapping out the post-1970s economic path of the United States, Carson-Parker presciently noted the radical changes the nation would make as it shifted from the Keynesian welfare state to the supply-side, neoliberal policies of the 1980s:
Some people will obviously have to do with less, or with substitutes, so that the economy as a whole can get the most mileage out of available capital. There will be fewer homes and more apartment houses built.… It will be harder to launch risky new ventures because the needs of existing businesses will be so great.… Indeed, cities and states, the home mortgage market, small business, and the consumer, will all get less than they want because the basic health of the U.S. is based on the basic health of its corporations and banks: the biggest borrowers and the biggest lenders. Compromises, in terms of who gets and who does without, that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago will be made in coming years because the economic future not only of the U.S. but also of the whole world is on the line today.1
Underlining the stakes involved, Carson-Parker imagined a difficult struggle in convincing citizens to vote away the welfare state and implement an economic policy geared more toward the wealthy and big business than working- and middle-class Americans: “It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow—the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more. Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares in difficulty with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept this new reality.”2 The unraveling historical conjuncture between the 1960s and 1980s made this seemingly difficult job easier, as the transformation of the American political economy drew much of its popular momentum from the cultural anxiety many white Americans experienced under the specter of legislated social equality with historically marginalized groups they had long treated and understood as second-class citizens or inhuman objects whose lives did not matter. Culturally accustomed to the longue durée legacies and practices of settler colonialism, slavery and Jim Crow, and patriarchy, resentment toward legislated social equality regenerated the American tradition of populist-conservative sentiment in white voters, gracing the sale of neoliberal policies with a populist veneer designating the economic system as representing ordinary people and not just the wealthy and powerful.
As a set of economic ideas conceived in reaction to the economically populist and social democratic Jim Crow welfare state arising out of the New Deal and World War II, intellectuals such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek propagated neoliberalism within two protected spaces. Culturally, the centuries of anti-Blackness, racial science, and eugenics continued to firmly embed conceptions of liberty and freedom within the realm of whiteness, a material and psychological outcome based on settler colonial practices and the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow. The other protected space included, ironically, the welfare state itself, which fashioned the very economic setting that not only molded the prosperity of white working- and middle-class people, but more importantly, facilitated the ascent of multinationals and finance within the United States and abroad. Finally, the welfare state gave meaning to the neoliberal project, acting as a binary from which neoliberal economists could define their ideas against, allowing neoliberalism to be a viable alternative once the welfare state lost legitimacy. For white working- and middle-class people, particularly men, an artificially insulated space of prosperity arose across the 1950s and 1960s. Reflected in the content of images consumed as nostalgia after the 1960s, this protective bubble fostered a delusion of expectations from government and society, provoking a populist-conservative reaction against the inclusion of people of color and women after social equality legislation deemed this delusion both racist and sexist. As the white nationalist traditions of the welfare state faced censure and found itself challenged by social justice movements, the language of neoliberalism and the conservative culture war against the disruption of this postwar ideal began appealing to weary white voters who longed for the era of unquestioned white male dominance. The market for pre-1960s nostalgia expanded dramatically in the 1970s, selling images and sounds of simpler, less complicated, times, before federal intervention through civil rights legislation dismantled the exclusivity of the federally subsidized American dream.
The possession of history conjured by nostalgia consisted of a pre–civil rights movement U.S. dominated by white male heroes from the ostensibly ordered Jim Crow era. Draped in the cloaks of rugged individualism, these heroes performed feats of American innocence with the racist fury captured by photography, film, and polls across the twentieth century removed from the story. Hardly unique, this disavowal of unseemly ideas and policies in American life aligned neatly with previous generations’ histories of settler colonialism and slavery, where atrocities were scraped clean to provide justification for the politics of the present. From settler colonialism emerged the insistent suspicion of government intervention into the settlers’ desire to extend their liberty on the frontier by obtaining land previously occupied by Native Americans or Mexicans. Liberty, in this sense, was the freedom to “do as one pleases” in territory newly conquered from groups deemed inferior, and in need of—or doomed toward—extinction.3 From the perspective of Native Americans and Mexicans, of course, this liberty and freedom equaled invasion and ethnic cleansing, underlining the value of the possession of history and the ability to define and articulate one’s history (in other words, James Baldwin’s idea of the victim articulating their situation). From the 1960s to the present, the conservative culture war has taken aim at “history from below”—and the denouncement of “revisionist history”—that unveiled the politically incorrect narratives of violence and racist sentiment traditionally scrubbed clean from school textbooks. An honest and blunt history of the U.S. underscores the zero-sum process of white American settler colonialism, which constructed an identity through the appropriation of land in the name of liberty and freedom while reserving the right to administer violence toward those resisting these claims to space or government representatives seeking to regulate the settlers’ use of land. Meanwhile, the possession of history safely characterized these policies as “settlement” and virtuous defensive measures protecting the liberty and freedom of the settlers. For the institution of slavery and its Jim Crow aftermath, the white settler derived another possession of history: the anchoring concept of freedom imagined and conditioned through the institution of slavery and the ongoing post-Emancipation oppression and violence targeting people of African descent. If settler colonialism embedded a xenophobic distaste for people deemed foreign and who were not white—and, thus, unable to assimilate—slavery firmly embedded social death upon the Blackness of the enslaved, emboldening a simmering anti-Blackness marking African Americans as enemies within the United States, and convenient targets for new immigrants seeking assimilation into whiteness. Enhancing ideas of race through violent antagonism, these processes cultivated a white American masculinity, setting the foundations for the triumphal framework of Western civilization and its transnational white racial superiority.4
Patriarchy, long a part of human history, found a peculiar renewal through North American settler colonialism and slavery as well. By highlighting the masculine power of white male guidance in leading the settlers/invaders across the continent (and overseas) and defending against resisting Indigenous peoples (whether it was Tecumseh, Geronimo, or the American Indian movement in the 1970s), frontier threats and vilification of people of African descent helped inscribe a white paternal community leadership whose rule over women (including possession of their bodies) was branded as protection from Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Black Americans—all of whom, it was imagined, zealously sought to rape white women. The experience of these antagonisms produced heroic stories of rugged individualism and manhood defined against Black or Native American laziness, cowardice, or treachery, while liberty and freedom translated into the aggressive expression of white community violence against enemies on the frontier and within—from white vigilante policing of “sundown towns” to racial mob violence such as the Tulsa massacre of 1921. These markings of race were hardwired into cultural assumptions, laws, institutions, and economic opportunity. The possession of history evoked by William F. Buckley and John Wayne translated the omnipresence of this white nationalism into an invisible coincidence of white male domination of American life—with the historical baggage of white violence removed from the histories and popular culture consumed by the public. The civil rights era legislatively ended this entitlement, unsettling the delusion of universal freedom and liberty bound to the legacies of white nationalism. This disruption of the traditionally wholesome stories of brave frontiersmen, innocent settlers, and benevolent slave owners provoked a bitter reaction. An existential crisis flared up in this vacuum of uncertainty as the long dependence on an often unacknowledged white supremacy for identity and opportunity felt the pangs of withdrawal, particularly anxiety and irritability, as the age of legislated social equality unfolded. For James Baldwin, this sobering era of the 1960s lay bare the longue durée consequences of an identity based off subjugation: “when the prisoner is free, the jailer faces the void of himself.”5
Neoliberals, conservatives, the writers of Business Week, and John Wayne, among many others, filled this desperate void with a nostalgic renewal of an older possession of history. The archive of this constructed past lay in the popular media memories of the golden age of Jim Crow mass culture between the 1870s and 1950s, when white men dominated popular culture, Black Americans were either marginalized in media representation or made to play the fool or servant, assertive men could virtuously brutalize overemotional women, and Native Americans appeared as ghosts from a primeval past or embodied threats to “peaceful” settlements. While the social justice zeitgeist of the 1960s exposed these myths of innocence, the backlash of nostalgia provided a desperately needed balm for white Americans still pondering the haunting question of the Baldwin-Buckley debate and the larger meanings of the civil rights movement: did the American dream come at the expense of African Americans; or was the reassuring pre-1960s history books and popular culture correct in suggesting that anyone working hard in the United States could obtain the American dream—regardless of race or gender? While many desperately clung to the sanitized history, the legacies of settler colonialism, slavery, and patriarchy continued to cast a large shadow over the language many white Americans used to dismiss claims of the past and press their shoulders to the wind: the liberty and freedom enjoyed in the postwar years was now under siege by those who were beneath them just a decade before. A failed foreign adventure in Vietnam, a resigning president on the verge of impeachment, and the worst economic crisis since the 1930s added even more confusion and disruption to the stability of the grade school stories gracefully recounted by Walt Disney—all of which were questioned by the supporters of social equality legislation. With white Americans no longer able to legally capitalize on their whiteness via the Jim Crow welfare state, the ascending color-blind mantra of neoliberal quantitative analysis and the coded racism of the New Right appeared as an answer to their dilemma. White resentment toward legislated social equality took solace in Nixon’s “southern strategy” (or Lassiter’s “suburban strategy”) and the arrival of a politics targeting Black people while never saying Black people.6 Urban crime dramas and actions films both regenerated the criminality of urban Blackness and reawakened the white masculine vigilante fantasies expressed through Dirty Harry (1971), Death Wish (1974), and Taxi Driver (1976). With overt racism no longer publicly acceptable, the quantitative analysis of neoliberalism re-created Jim Crow structures in business and higher education through standardized testing without standardized equalization of education—with the latter resulting from the geographic relationships related to the policies and material outcomes of the Jim Crow welfare state.7 The result: ideas of cultural pathology pontificated by conservatives and Hollywood replaced biological arguments legitimizing racist assumptions and policies.
Mirroring the settler colonial reclamation of freedom from government intervention, neoliberals, conservatives, and anxious white Americans fell within an ideological alliance with multinational conglomerates and finance who had for decades sought the deregulation of the welfare state. With the conjuncture of 1960s social equality legislation and the 1970s economic crisis, the stage was set for working- and middle-class white Americans to help dismantle the very economic system redistributing wealth toward their demographic by voting into place a system geared toward big business and the wealthy. In hindsight, Carson-Parker’s fear of the public’s resistance toward these policies now seems quaint. Adding to the irony, working- and middle-class white Americans found it hard to fully acknowledge the extent to which their economic fortunes were tied to the political economy of the Jim Crow welfare state’s government intervention on their behalf. Thus, it only took a mere promise of conservative moderation in the form of trickle-down economics and a defense of “traditional values” (coded as white, patriarchal, and heterosexual norms) to ease white working- and middle-class concerns as they voted their way down a road leading toward massive wealth inequality and a significant decline in their standard of living.
Although quantitative analysis seemed a rational, and ostensibly fair, route to follow, a vague promise continues to haunt the idea of lowering taxes on the wealthy so that the benefits might splash down upon the working and middle classes. In the 1960s, Hayek attempted to negotiate this thin line: how do you convince working and middle-class voters to replace the welfare state—which was responsible for their postwar prosperity—with an economic system that is expected to bring back pre-Great Depression wealth inequalities?
There is no practicable measure of the degree of inequality that is desirable here. We do not wish, of course, to see the position of individuals determined by arbitrary decision or a privilege conferred by human will on particular persons. It is difficult to see however, in what sense it could ever be legitimate to say that any one person is too far ahead of the rest or that it would be harmful to society if the progress of some greatly outstripped that of others. There might be justification for saying this if there appeared great gaps in the scale of advance; but, as long as the graduation is more or less continuous and all the steps in the income pyramid are reasonably occupied, it can scarcely be denied that those lower down profit materially from the fact that others are ahead.8
In asking for the removal of the redistributionist policies of the welfare state, Hayek’s discussion of the anticipated extremes of economic inequality neoliberal policies most likely would produce entered the uncharacteristically subjective arena of “we’ll know it when we see it—trust us.” Here, quantitative analysis cannot judge wealth inequality in the same way it might judge the economics of deregulation, cuts in social spending on the poor, or the legal separation of politics from economics. This vague sentiment—in some ways the inverse of the welfare state’s fairness and justness logic—would define the neoliberal defense of wealth inequality through the twentieth century. Is it fair that there is so much wealth inequality?—not according to the “rule of law” and free market capitalism. In their quantitative analysis studies on wealth inequality, economists such as Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez could not break this dogged faith, as their scholarship appeared to be (using Hayek’s words above) an impractical “measure of the degree of inequality,” especially for those on the receiving end of the benefits of neoliberalism.9 In the sixty years after Hayek’s promise of moderation, winter now appears permanent—with various avenues of resentment exploding in directions unanticipated by the architects of wealth inequality. Many of those formerly benefiting from the welfare state now find themselves safely locked outside the keep, as the last hopes for a thawing spring find refuge through the numbing escape of opioids, ever-increasing culture war resentments, and the mobilization of paramilitary militias—all of whom found catharsis on January 6, 2021, when conservative supporters of President Trump revisited the mob violence of previous eras of white nationalism and stormed the Capitol building in the hopes of stopping the Electoral College count—leading to five U.S. Capitol police officers killed during the siege, with scores injured.10
Winter in America offers a cutaway rendering of the cultural-economic transition into the neoliberal era. Whether popular culture, news media, academic works, or general public political discussions, the road to neoliberalism was strewn with various streams of language and knowledge caught in the conjuncture of massive social change and economic uncertainty between the 1960s and 1980s. In the face of legislated social equality, a rhetorically blunt systemic reset of history to “year zero” unfolded, a strategy designed to silence the decades, and centuries, of white nationalist policies related to the Jim Crow welfare state and the overall history of the nation. Unable to reckon with the past, this possession of history desperately sought to redeem a tattered American innocence stripped bare of its righteous “exceptionalism,” the comforting history Americans learned through the lens of twentieth century popular images of white Americans under siege. As participants in the culture war, conservatives became the settler family in television and film, under siege from Native Americans, and defending their homestead against the social justice movements seeking the legal enforcement of constitutional protections white Americans took for granted. The burden of history weighed heavily as the bills came due.
Beginning as a project in 2010, Winter in America took form as the children of the first recipients of the welfare state—the babyboomers, the last generation to come of age through legislated Jim Crow white nationalism—adopted the imagery of the founding fathers (the Tea Party) in reaction to the election of the first Black president. In 2016, they finally discovered a champion to restore their traditional status in the United States—enthusiastically embracing the hero’s promise to “make America great again,” forty years after voting away the very economic system responsible for their memories of the 1950s and 1960s. Grabbing the reins of populist conservatism (without asking establishment Republicans), Donald Trump intuitively understood the deep psychology fueling the festering resentment of those who formerly benefited from the Jim Crow welfare state and who dutifully voted for conservatives on cultural issues after the 1960s. Many, however, were unable to adapt to the swift changes characterizing the neoliberal economy. Rather than an appraisal of the neoliberal, trickle-down economic system, this constituency continued to knead the ever-evolving culture war resentments—immigration, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, criminal justice inequality, science, and sometimes just “the liberals”—into a bleak sustenance feeding their explanation of why their standard of living had declined since the 1980s. President Trump’s campaign strategy wove a tapestry of antagonisms, all rooted in the deep processes of settler colonialism, slavery, and patriarchy. He demonized people of Latin American descent, Muslims, and Black protesters while praising representatives of white supremacy (“very fine people, on both sides”)—even to the extent of refusing to condemn white nationalist groups when directly asked on national television.11 Trump also surrounded himself with white men who celebrated the white supremacist eugenics-based Immigration Act of 1924, including the idea that excluding the Chinese, Italians, and Jews was “good for America.”12 At the same time, Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security to downplay the growing threat of white nationalism while highlighting the violence of antifa and Black Lives Matter. For strong women opposed to him, misogynist arguments and blunt celebrations of his sexual assaults and conquests—the disciplinary anchors of patriarchy—drew applause from populist conservatives, particularly from white evangelical groups whose more fundamentalist subsets explicitly call for women to be submissive to men (“submission theology”).13
Viewed across the longue durée, this moment in history is hardly shocking. White masculine resentment steadily festered after the 1970s, the first decade in the nation’s history when white men, especially white men with property, were legislatively forced into social equality with women and people of color. Now entering the third decade of the twenty-first century, the contingent nature of this brief fifty years of legislated social equality staggers on, still suffering symptoms of withdrawal from the distant days of legislated white nationalism. From the language of those inheritors of the conservative culture war, it is clear that the 1970s presented an existential threat to white America, as legislated social equality interrupted the innocent possession of history populist conservatives grew up with during the Jim Crow era. As the opioid crisis and the armed rage of paramilitary groups underscore, winter in America continues to provoke a desperate need to numb the austerity of neoliberal economic policies, whose populist-conservative roots have since evolved into a resurgence of overt white nationalism derived from the centuries of settler colonialism, slavery and Jim Crow, and patriarchy.14
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The struggle over the possession of history continues to be a flashpoint of contention in the twenty-first century, a prize still sought to justify contemporary policies on ideas about the past. For conservatism, this is the function of the culture war: to defend and shelter a past built on rampant racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and other antagonisms, while rehabilitating an idealized history free of these trespasses. What is left is the simple story of American innocence with the complexities of settler colonialism, slavery, and patriarchy quarantined from view. Prior to the 1960s, these histories found divine sanction—an American exceptionalism, or manifest destiny glossing the official narratives spanning education, entertainment, and politics across the white nationalist era of Jim Crow (1870s–1950s). As the civil rights movement unfolded, scholars dug beneath this glossy history of the American past and started cataloging a less-celebratory history against the background of a contemporary present where women and people of color continued to struggle for social equality. For Americans experiencing the 1960s—from the Vietnam War to civil rights to the counterculture—the meanings of U.S. history came unmoored.
To help us conceptualize this collapse in meaning, we might revisit the work of historian Hans Kellner, who focused on the intricacies of language and text and its structuring of ontology.15 Writing in the late 1980s, Kellner asserts, “Historians mistrust language; to speak of it is disturbing.… It is tempting to reject this strain of criticism as old-fashioned, resistant to change, or just lazy, but that would be to miss an important point. Conservatives (as Eugene Genovese has shown of slaveholders) foresee the consequences of change more clearly than others because their ‘antennae’ sense things before they can articulate them. This uneasiness before ‘the language thing’ is a genuine fear of losing the heavy but comforting ‘burden of history’ that has told us Westerners who we are for quite a while.”16 This passage offers some insight into the neoliberal era’s existential crisis for white America and its relationship to history. Kellner suggests that as new threats arose (the foreseeing of “the consequences of change”) from previously subjugated people, the conservative’s “antennae” sensed the ramifications of this liberation, especially those whose subjugation defined the very identity of people benefiting from their oppression. A conservative reaction targets this new threat, as the subjugated is able to articulate their situation as “subjugated”—and thus, as James Baldwin notes, they “become a threat.”17 This is the context for the reinforcement of one’s possession of history “that has told us Westerners who we are for quite a while.”18 If Michel-Rolph Trouillot is correct in describing ontological universals as “not describ[ing] the world” but “offer[ing] visions of the world,” then this act of ontological salvaging engages in a struggle over the possession of history: it attacks the new language and knowledge describing the subjugated and their historical relationship to a nation-state defined by a legacy of white nationalism.19 This reaction simultaneously continues to celebrate an American history made possible only through the subjugation of those designated to be naturally inferior—and calls the critics of this whitewashed past “unpatriotic” to invalidate histories documenting the words and deeds of white nationalism. This is not, of course, a contradiction in American history: the conservative’s concept of social “order”—going back to at least John Adams—found root in the naturalization of hierarchy at the very moment when liberty and freedom justified a new republic governed by white men whose property often included enslaved people of African descent. For centuries, this cultural contradiction normalized the meanings and material outcomes of American economics. As a norm, the white nationalist character of the nation became obscured in American minds through the stories and histories told about liberty and freedom.
Culture provides purpose for humanity. It makes sense of a chaotic world through an exchange of symbols, language, and gestures that, through acceptance and repetition, embeds itself into a “traditional” way of interpreting reality. Anything interrupting this familiar signal becomes a disrupting noise—a threat to social order demanding containment. Culture also interprets the economic world, and economic policies often cohere through ideas inspired by various understandings of humanity and tradition. When the innocence surrounding the prosperous postwar socioeconomic world found itself under siege by the very targets of oppression helping to shape that prosperity, a powerful culture war phalanx not only pushed back against the disruption of innocence and exceptionalism but also obliterated from popular memory the economic structures framing the prosperity of postwar Jim Crow America: the welfare state. As the burden of the past was dumped into an unmarked grave at the dawn of neoliberalism, a new historical memory surfaced through the conservative culture war to delegitimize economic avenues leading back to a time of less-capital concentration while simultaneously—and ironically—highlighting the simple and refreshing moments of this golden age of welfare state white nationalism, when, ostensibly, “America was great.” Looking back from the twenty-first century, this dynamic appears as a tragic paradox, a downward spiral of the American public screaming “Why?” as the nation desperately continues tightening the vise of its own making with the expectation of breaking free.