I am grateful to Thomas Biebricher for his thoughtful consideration of In the Ruins. Certainly he is right that many of the immediate referents and touchstones of the book are American, even as the work also aims to limn characteristics of contemporary politics elsewhere. To some degree, this accidental provincialism besets every work of contemporary political theory: we risk universalizing the tendencies we tacitly or explicitly draw from our immediate milieu. But it also indexes a problem peculiar to theorizing both neoliberalism and contemporary right-wing authoritarianism. On the one hand, these are transnational developments—the late twentieth-century neoliberal revolution was global, and the eruption of ethnonationalist and authoritarian responses to some of its effects extends across South Asia and South America, the EU and the near East, and the United States. Yet the specific instantiation of neoliberalism; the cultural and political traditions it intersects, displaces, or builds on; and even the crises to which it responds and foments are specific to each national and even subnational setting. There is no universal architecture of actually existing neoliberalism or actually existing right-wing authoritarianism, even as both are global phenomena. Efforts to politically theorize our conjuncture must navigate this paradox and will inevitably fail.

This brings me to the centrality of Hayek to my account of the antidemocratic force of neoliberalism. There are two reasons for this. Hayek, on my reading, offers the most systematic and far-reaching theory of a neoliberal order, replete with an epistemology, ontology, cosmology, and political theory. This theory displaces the “capitalism on steroids” stereotype of neoliberal economic policy to feature the novel account of the social, the political, the moral, and the economic at the heart of the program. If, as Biebricher’s book makes vivid, the other founding neoliberals do not agree with Hayek on everything, they largely share his critique of robust democracy, popular sovereignty, and social justice; his formulation of liberty as the absence of political coercion; and his concern with supplementing economic competition with a strong family-based moral order. Moreover, Hayek identifies the importance of getting the state out of the social-provision and social-justice business, tarring both with the label of error and totalitarianism. In this respect, he gives us the fullest and most profound account of neoliberalism’s transmogrification of liberal democracy tout court, which has in turn transformed everything from the social imaginary to the soul of the neoliberal subject.

As for Hayek’s account of morality, although it is true that he distanced himself from Burkean-style conservativism in affirming the evolutionary dynamic of tradition, he did not regard all traditions as equal; nor did he think they had an equal chance of winning an evolutionary competition for survival among them. Rather, he insisted, only those religions and traditions survive that center family, property and individual liberty. Moreover, he believed that all traditions embody spontaneously developed and evolved orders of hierarchy and authority to which we voluntarily conform, while state social programs represent the opposite: rationalistic and coercive principles of egalitarianism; in short, social engineering that violates the spirit and ordering principles of human tradition. It is this opposition (and its legitimized antagonism to social justice and state mandates of provision or protection) that has been unleashed in neoliberalized societies from Bolsonaro’s Brazil to Trump’s United States. Tradition, freedom, patriarchy, religion, and authority are bundled and hoisted to demonize and defeat state-secured social justice, equality, “gender ideology,” secularism, and democracy. Just ask William Barr.

Finally I want to turn to the nihilism, both facilitating and intensified by neoliberalism, that unleashes a de-sublimated will to power and a spurning of obligation to society and futurity in contemporary subjects. Here, Biebricher simply misunderstands me. This phenomenon, especially evident in the alt-right, was no more a part of the neoliberal blueprint than are the plutocracies, irresponsible political demagogues, or resentful ethnonationalists and Brexiteers populating contemporary Western politics. Rather my argument is that a condition of nihilism more than a century in the making (cf. Nietzsche) both has blended with key features of neoliberalism, including its libertarian version of freedom and assault on the social, and responds to key neoliberal effects—including deindustrialization, union busting, and mass migration—to produce political formations of no one’s aim or design. This kind of analysis, which Stuart Hall identifies as conjunctural and Foucault would call genealogical, aims to identify some of the political energies, especially those of a reactionary white working class, roaring about in the ruins of neoliberalism. Discerning how to transform these energies is surely an important part of answering Biebricher’s final query to me: What is to be done?