Inside You Are Two Demons: Minority Rights, Majority Government, and Neoliberalism's Demons by Adam Kotsko

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This Question was posted by u/chocholatecakelover on r/Critical theory. The original post can be found Here [https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/s/PSiQHBLXCO].

Question:

Is the liberal goal of individual rights incompatible with popularitarianism ?

Is it even possible to effectively enforce individual or minority rights if they fundamentally conflict with what the majority wants ? The majority can usurp those rights violently and unlawfully because they can and can put peer pressure on people who are supposed to enforce those rights to stop their enforcement.

But assuming there are things that are ethically wrong/or right who's moral properties don't depend on some utilitarian/majoritarian framework. How does one enforce them ?

Response:

I don't know what you mean by popularitarianism, is it the same as majoritarianism?

if so, I've text I've been thinking about since autumn of 2024 is far right theorist and Nazi party member Carl Schmitt's Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, one of his lesser but more historically focused works which examines the internal contractions of liberal democracy (his major works including Concept of the Political and Political Theology are of course also relevant here) as well as a recent response to Schmitt, a theory of late capitalist political theology called Neoliberalism's Demons by Adam Kotsko.

rather than summarize all these works, some of which I haven't opened in many months, I'll say for now that majoritarian projects and the kinds of powers majorities seek to wield (and conversely the kinds of individual rights that come under their threat or protection) are always contextual, specific to the kind of majority and the kind of institutions by which it is organized which may have little to do with numbers alone.

Viz. the individual rights of billionaires, despite being a miniscule majority, are in no way threatened and regularly expanded by a mobilized majority in the United States. in contrast, the rights of women and people capable of becoming pregnant are routinely under assault, even though supporters of abortion rights, for example, number a super majority in the US, but make up a smaller and less dedicated faction within the current ruling blocs which choose to prioritize tax cuts, government subsidies for corporations, etc in no small part because the democratically elected figures are constantly held hostage to the same companies lest they lose their funding and lest the corporations engage in capital flight and lay off the politician's constituents.

in short, we cannot simply speak abstractly of minorities versus majorities, but just always bear in mind which minorities are integrated into the leadership of the ruling clique and how the clique's functioning majority is produced through a matrix of socio economic forces.

for Kotsko, one of the key elements of this structure is the process of demonization, which both refers to people (be they minorities such as Black people or majorities such as downwardly mobile working class people) whose interests are rendered illegitimate and seen as corrupting and thereby excluded from the process of prioritization which always comes with coalition building and also refers to a more abstract process of accounting for the problems of society in general and capitalism in particular through both externalizing and internalizing ideas of greed, transgression, failure, and poverty to legitimize the state and private property.

I highly recommend Neoliberalism's Demons to anyone who is interested in this topic and/or who is dissatisfied with my very brief summary, I think it's a major development in the field of political theology worth engaging with for any anti capitalist.