Introduction

To find the meaning of our apocalyptic times we need to look at the economics of the last five decades, from the end of the postwar boom. After historian Robert Brenner, I call this the long downturn. The economics of the long downturn worked interfered with the most intimate experiences of everyday life, and inspired the fear that there would be no tomorrow. This fear takes the form of what I call neoliberal apocalypse. The varieties neoliberal apocalypse—horror at the nation’s commitment to a racist, exclusionary economic system; resentment about threats to white supremacy; apprehension that the nation has unleashed a violence that will consume it; claustrophobia within the limited scripts of neoliberalism; suffocation under the weight of debt—together form the discordant chord that hums under American life in the twenty-first century.

Conclusion

Giovanni Arrighi ends The Long Twentieth Century with a vision of “capitalism burning up humanity ‘in the horrors (or glories) of…escalating violence’” (Chakrabarty 200). This is a tidy summary of the worldview shared by the texts studied in this book. Thirteen years later, in Adam Smith in Beijing...

Almost Magic

As a teenager growing up in the Minneapolis suburbs in the 1990s, I believed the economy was strong, that liberal democracy, after the Cold War, was the final governmental form, and that the future was a place of unlimited growth. But this self-congratulation obscured the persistence of the long downturn and capitalism’s structural limits. Finance was an engine for creating personal debt and harvesting profits from America’s debtors. Neoliberalism collapsed the citizen into the consumer. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest satirizes this America. It reveals addiction as a general condition within the debt economy. In anticipation of collective self-destruction, it hopes to save its readers from the pains of addiction and loneliness, but proves incapable of resolving the tension between the personal (addiction) and the structural (the economy), and so, instead, spills out toward infinity.

Human Capital

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead describes characters struggling to survive amid the wreckage of finance and neoliberalism in the borderlands between the United States and Mexico. These characters live according to scripts provided for them, above all, by “human capital,” the neoliberal concept that people are inseparable from the knowledge, skills, health, and values that comprise their market value or capacity to earn. Characters extend the logic of privatizing public goods to its limit: they monetize state policing (via insurance); human bodies (via black markets); torture (via snuff films); suicide (via art). In the tradition of syncretic indigenous apocalypticism, best known through the Ghost Dance religion, Silko imagines the novel’s eponymous almanac as an enigmatic indigenous object that incites the apocalypse and prepares a life after neoliberalism.

Evening in America

James Baldwin’s observation that “American investments cannot be considered safe wherever the population cannot be considered tractable” could serve as a précis for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I show how McCarthy’s novel traces US scalp hunters in northern Mexico in the aftermath of the US-Mexican War as they clear the land of intractable Indians—i.e. slaughter them for cash—so the United States can pivot from settler colonialism to economic imperialism. The scalp hunters prove as bad for capital as the Indians they decimate, debauching cities, taking Mexican scalps that might pass as Indian, and destroying the means of production. Writing from late twentieth-century capitalist crisis, McCarthy depicts a constitutive violence that capitalism has unleashed, but cannot control. What remains, for McCarthy, beyond capitalism is the excess that fells it, a drive to violence.

White Rage, White Rapture

The racial and sexual politics of the 1960s incited a sense of crisis among a subset of white Americans, whom Richard Nixon called his “silent majority.” The beginning of the long downturn limited the scope of governmental allocation at the same time that wages began to stagnate. Nixon encouraged his silent majority to see the racial other as a threat to white well-being in this new, economically constrained America. Two cultures of whiteness, and two apocalyptic discourses, emerged: white supremacy and Christian evangelicalism. Anxieties over globalization, finance capitalism, lost manufacturing, and rising wealth inequality become transfigured in these discourses into a wounded white masculinity that performs a violent recuperation of manliness.

James Baldwin’s Apocalypse

In the 1970s, critics asked, what happened to James Baldwin? In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin called for a moral revolution in which each American would radically transform and save America from racial warfare. A decade later, in No Name in the Street, Baldwin delivered an analysis of the failures of economic liberalism that heralded a generic shift in his literary career, transforming him from a prophet of the jeremiad—the nationalist holding out hope for American exceptionalism through individual reformation—to an apocalyptic visionary. The chapter shows how Baldwin’s apocalyptic turn—yet unregistered in the scholarship—emerged from a milieu of apocalypticism among black writers and artists in the mid- to late 1960s, including Amiri Baraka, Sun Ra, Ishmael Reed, and Malcolm X, all searching for an aesthetic form to solve a problem of political agency for black Americans in the wake of the civil rights movement.