Manchin’s rejection of the Democrats has been a long time coming. His voting record is complex, diverging from the party line on numerous occasions. A lifetime member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), Manchin opposed the more progressive elements of his party after Sandy Hook. And as one of the few anti-abortion Democrats in Congress, he has consistently voted in favour of restrictions on abortion access. Meanwhile, his support for the coal industry — an important economic driver in his home state and the industry that made him a millionaire before he entered politics — has often put him at odds with their green agenda. He was also the only Democrat to vote in favour of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination in 2018, drawing the ire of many within his party, and he voted with Donald Trump more than 50% of the time.

Manchin’s ideology is consistent, though. It’s grounded in the history of West Virginia, a former Democrat stronghold that has become solidly Republican in recent years. And his conservative bent could be perceived as a survival strategy. After all, he is currently staring down a 55% disapproval rating in West Virginia, as he contemplates seeking another term in the Senate. His opponent is likely to be the state’s Republican governor, Jim Justice, a former conservative Democrat who switched parties. And one does wonder: why doesn’t Manchin jump ship to the Republican Party, given his voting patterns seem slightly more aligned with theirs? Trump, in 2022, actually suggested on Truth Social that Manchin be brought into the GOP.

But Manchin’s comments signal a desire to reject both major parties. In America, there is a large cadre of “politically homeless” voters: roughly 49% of the electorate according to some polling. Where once they might have been drawn to candidates who could see the other side’s point of view, these voters now seem disenchanted with party politics altogether, put off by the extreme fringes of the Republicans and Democrats alike. Manchin is appealing to them.

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While polls show dissatisfaction with candidates within both parties, Manchin’s potential candidacy would inevitably benefit one of them. He could appeal to a critical 1% or 2% in Rust Belt swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, which would probably be enough to tilt the scales in favour of the GOP.

More broadly, his rhetoric is a sign of a shift in American politics. Bipartisanship and consensus decision-making, celebrated ideals for nearly three decades after the end of the Second World War, have lost their lustre, ceasing to animate the base of either party. Marginal struggles currently define internal and external political battles. But Manchin and allies, such as former Democrat Krysten Sinema — now representing Arizona in the Senate as an independent — believe there’s still a silent majority to be found in the centre, one that is indifferent to the culture war that drives the loudest political engagement. 

Manchin’s paradox is that, while the most active voters are increasingly drawn towards the extremes of their respective parties, he is gambling on the centre. While his voting record paints a picture of a moderate Democrat — often erring on the conservative side — this suggestion of a third-party candidacy implies a critical redefinition of his political stance. Instead of being the swing vote within his party, Manchin would be a fulcrum between the two major political forces. Would he survive it?

Much of Manchin’s political career has been characterised by his unusual resilience in the face of the onrushing deep-red political tides in West Virginia. His endurance owes much to his somewhat unconventional stances, which resonate with a Rust Belt populace disenchanted by what they perceive as the Democratic Party’s preoccupation with identity politics at the expense of working-class concerns relevant to their area, such as the protection of jobs in fossil fuel industries.

But is there a national appetite for this brand of centrism? The country is polarised. The Pew Research Center has found that twice as many members of the two main American parties now view their opponents unfavourably, compared to 1994. In a sociopolitical environment where labels — LGBTQIA, America First, MAGA, they/them — have become essential to the identities of young people, not to mention their self-marketing, will there be significant support for a “No Labels” campaign?

Third-party bids have gained some traction in America’s political history. Billionaire Ross Perot’s Reform Party campaign racked up some impressive numbers in 1992 and 1996. But while Perot aimed to transcend partisan politics in order to win, Manchin appears more focused on exerting influence to create a moderate shift in policy. If he runs, he’s more likely to follow in the footsteps of activists such as Green Party nominee Ralph Nader, remembered more for inadvertently tipping the scales in favour of Republican George W. Bush in 2000 than for his actual campaign. And since America today is even more polarised than in the Nineties, ultimately the implications of a third-party bid are more dangerous.

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The mooted “No Labels” party does seem like a hurried experiment in political transcendence, a far too simple answer to the broad discontent with the current political binary. But if Manchin wants to be remembered as the man who shed the shackles of partisanship, this move may tarnish the legacy he has already created for himself. His bold attempt to coax the country towards the centre could end up deepening the divisions he has exposed.

This has been the case with his prior attempts to preserve or create a “centre” on controversial issues. On gun control, Manchin co-sponsored the bipartisan Manchin-Toomey bill following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, which proposed expanded background checks for gun sales. Seen by much of the Left as an inadequate middle-ground solution, it failed to gain traction. As a result, the United States has been unable to make even minor changes related to background checks, and the two sides have only become more entrenched.

On energy policy, Manchin’s support for the fossil fuel industry is out of step with his party’s support for a progressive “Green New Deal”, while his reluctance to fully endorse the coal industry’s unregulated expansion has drawn ire from the Right. Manchin has recently joined with Republicans to oppose the climate legislation to which he had added a degree of moderation. But in general, seeking the centrist position in America does not lead to a union of the factions; rather, it leaves the centrist isolated, at odds with both sides.

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His campaign would simply highlight the structural flaws of America’s political system, in which centrism can empower extremism. Part of the problem is the dynamics of party primaries. Candidates often find themselves compelled to pander to the ideological extremes to gain the nomination, pushing them away from the centre. Even if they later shift, their original stances are remembered; in the long run, this discourages bipartisan cooperation.

Here is a lesson for moderates, if they really want to effect change: instead of conforming to extremism, they should look to their long-term influence on political norms and the policy-making process, as Manchin at least tried to do prior to signalling his frustration with the Democrats. They need to somehow communicate the importance of pragmatic governance, and the necessity of compromise in a democracy — ideally through political advertising that emphasises the value of bipartisan dealmaking over ideological purity, of “fighting gridlock” and “getting things done”.

It won’t be easy. Divide and conquer has always been a potent strategy for generating enthusiasm, and centrists such as Manchin are working in an atmosphere where both parties are cynically leveraging polarisation. Democrats have recently started funding extreme Republican primary candidates, whom they believe will be easy to beat in the general election. It’s a manoeuvre that, while it may yield short-term electoral gains, could backfire, by enabling candidates with more extreme views to gain power. And, if moderates abandon the major parties, they will only empower these extreme candidates, driving the Democrats and Republicans further and further apart. It would be an ironic outcome for Manchin, who claims to want the parties to come together.

So what is Manchin really trying to achieve? He has been a self-avowed independent within the Democratic Party for years; his last-ditch embrace of a potential “No Labels” movement, then, could be characterised as an act of egoism. At the age of 75, Manchin is probably not seeking political longevity. Rather, “No Labels” feels like a legacy move. Manchin might just be looking back at his long career of crossing party lines, and making a final, and perhaps sincere, plea for American politics to move back to the centre. 

Then again, if he is against the erosion of collective solidarity by personal politics, there would be an irony in him launching a highly individual campaign. There’s no point standing in the ideological centre if you’re there all by yourself.

Only two weeks ago, Manchin, citing concerns about inflation, seemingly killed the package of clean energy investments in the Democrats’ Build Back Better proposal, leading John Podesta of the Center for American Progress to declare that the senator had “single-handedly doomed humanity”. Then, last week, Manchin brought that package back to life, now rebranded as The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The reaction of the American press, which until recently had been mulling kicking Manchin out of the Democratic Party, has been exuberant. Writing in the New Yorker, environmental activist Bill McKibben praised the bill as a “triumph”,  while Time deemed it “the most significant climate legislation in US history”.

This follows over a year in which Manchin, cast in the role of Hamlet, has seemingly held the fate of the planet in his hands. Media hysteria aside, however, Biden’s climate plan was never going to be the difference between apocalypse and salvation.

From its origins during the 2020 primary campaign, Biden’s climate and clean energy package was explicitly positioned as an alternative to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s expansive Green New Deal, which Senate Democrats had refused to vote on. As his rivals sought to outdo one another with sweeping climate policies, most especially Bernie Sanders’ preposterous $14 trillion climate proposal, Biden backed a $1.7 trillion plan that his campaign explicitly characterised as moderate. Whereas other proposal promised to transform American society, the Biden plan focused on infrastructure, reshoring manufacturing, an “all of the above” commitment to clean energy, and technological innovation.

Despite criticism from environmentalists and progressives, Biden never budged from that approach. Upon securing the nomination, Biden rebranded his package “Build Back Better”, and upon winning the presidency, his administration and allies in Congress moved forward to enact it. And while Manchin’s “will he or won’t he” act has transfixed the national media, most of what Biden proposed during his campaign under the banner of “Build Back Better” has already passed into law. A trillion dollars of that $1.7 trillion pledge became law with the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law last November, including almost $200 billion for clean electricity transmission, electric vehicle charging, public transit, and climate adaptation. Other elements were included in the Endless Frontier Act, passed in June of 2021, and in the just-enacted CHIPS Act.

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While Manchin has been villainised for his ever-changing bottom line on climate action, far too little attention has been paid to progressives’ own ever-changing lines in the sand, which have obscured America’s real accomplishments on climate change while exaggerating the importance of the ill-conceived policies favoured by the environmentalist Left.

Take the Clean Electricity Payment Program (CEPP), a torturous effort to use tax-and-transfer mechanisms to eliminate carbon emissions in the power sector by 2035. From the moment that CEPP was proposed in the spring of 2021, progressive climate advocates claimed that it was central to any credible package to address climate change. Their slogan, “No Climate, No Deal,” meant that Democrats should pass neither the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law nor a budget reconciliation package that failed to include the CEPP. Manchin, for his part, countered that it was an expensive policy that would pay utilities to do things that they would likely do anyway.

Manchin was, in reality, largely correct. Most analyses concluded that the CEPP, even if it worked as advertised, was at best a secondary or tertiary policy lever — the vast majority of the actual emissions reductions in any bill would come from direct investments in clean energy technology. And progressive demands ultimately fell upon deaf ears, with the Left failing to either enact CEPP or prevent passage of an infrastructure bill that lacked the mechanism. But the Left’s complaints, amplified by a compliant national media, succeeded in turning what should have been a popular and desperately needed victory for Biden administration into a footnote in a contentious battle over climate change.

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Since the passage of the infrastructure bill last year, Manchin has haggled with the White House and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer over the size and composition of the Build Back Better package, as both the national economic picture and Biden’s political fortunes have deteriorated. Now it appears Manchin has engineered a package that includes $386 million in climate and energy spending, as well as an apparent commitment from Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to allow federal permitting reforms that would allow for the speedy deployment of new energy infrastructure. No less significantly, he has repositioned the entire package as a response to inflation, not climate change.

All that haggling, however, does not appear to have shifted estimates of the reconciliation bill’s climate impact. Most models agree that current policies will result in US emissions in 2030 being 25% to 30% lower than at their peak in 2005. Depending on whose modeling you believe, passage of the reconciliation bill, together with other investments already committed into law, could result in emissions being 40% to 50% below 2005 instead.

But one need not spend much time perusing models to conclude that these projections are best taken with a pinch of salt. They are based upon a range of assumptions about how quickly the economy will grow, how much fossil fuels will cost, how quickly the cost of renewable energy will fall, and much else besides. Meanwhile, the track record of these sorts of estimates is not very good. US emissions today, for instance, remain well below levels that would have been mandated by either the last major Democratic effort to pass sweeping climate legislation — the doomed Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation in 2009 — or by the Obama administration’s short-lived Clean Power Plan. On the other side of the ledger, the European Emissions Trading System, established in 2005, has dramatically underperformed.

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Ironically, given the intense media focus on CEPP and other now-defunct items on the progressive wishlist, the most important parts of the new climate package may turn out to be reforms to permitting that Manchin demanded in return for green lighting the deal. Throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at clean tech will do little to reduce emissions if utilities and clean energy developers are unable to build it in a timely fashion.

The same is likely the case with regard to seperate and ongoing efforts to reform licensing of advanced nuclear reactors. Recent modeling by my colleagues at the Breakthrough Institute finds that if the US were able to license and build the first advanced nuclear reactors by the early 2030’s, there would be huge market demand for them even if they are relatively expensive. This is because nuclear reactors provide clean energy around the clock, as opposed to just when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

If there is a lesson here, it is that climate policy of the sort that is actually politically viable is at best a weak tool for change. Energy use and emissions are much more strongly influenced by macroeconomic factors and long-term technological trends than they are by federal climate policy. Bottom-up policies to encourage innovation and deployment of clean energy technologies are difficult to square with top-down emissions targets. The former, though helpful, bring highly uncertain emissions benefits. The latter are unenforceable should the necessary technological solutions fail to materialise — and unnecessary if they do.

From Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s original invocation of a Green New Deal, to the empty threats by progressive members of Congress to walk away from any reconciliation package that failed to meet green purity tests, the maximalist demands of the climate movement — and Democratic pandering to them — were always at best political theatre and at worst self-destructive.

In the light of last week’s change of fortune, Democrats can thank none other than Joe Manchin for saving them from their own worst impulses and reorienting their reconciliation package toward the priorities of an electorate that is far more concerned about inflation and energy prices than climate change, all while finding a way to do right by his state, his party, his country, and the climate.

But even those who disapprove of BBB’s fate must surely see that this is America’s political system functioning as it is supposed to function. Biden’s legislation can’t even get the support of half of the Senate — and so it won’t become law. This is standard Washington fare. It is politics as it always has been.

However, to listen to Democrats in the days since Manchin delivered his fatal blow is to be left with a very different impression. According to their version of events, the senator’s decision is tantamount to a crisis for American democracy. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said that “our entire democracy is on the line”; to fix this, she wants to “crack down” on the “very privileged, very entitled and very protected” Senate. Chuck Schumer, notionally in charge of Senate Democrats, responded to Manchin’s decision with a promise that the upper chamber will vote on a bill that would overhaul US voting laws as soon as it is back from a Christmas recess.

Even before Manchin doomed Biden’s agenda, calls for changes to the rules governing America’s system of government — some small, others profound — had grown louder as the prospects of Build Back Better faded. Last week, Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices. “The current court,” she argued, “threatens the democratic foundations of our nation.”

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In Democratic-supporting parts of the media, the tone is no less alarmist. Jennifer Rubin, the West Wing’s favourite columnist, argued in the Washington Post that the failure of Build Back Better puts “democracy itself in a precarious position”. She emphasised: “the Democrats’ hopes for 2022 and the fate of our democracy depend on the President’s ability to reconstruct an agenda he can actually deliver.”

In one sense, she’s right. Their legislative disappointment is a chance for Democrats to face a banal, if frustrating, reality: that Biden was not elected with a mandate for transformative legislation, that the party has only the loosest grip on the legislative branch, and that America simply isn’t crying out for the progressive reforms that most of the party favours.

But facing unpleasant facts isn’t fun. Hence why Democrats appear to be slipping further into their own delusions, processing Manchin’s obstinance as a crisis that imperils not just their own electoral fortunes but the future of the republic. And hence why what should be a moderating moment looks likely to have a radicalising effect: their own legislative impotence persuading a party already comfortable with an apocalyptic register to dial up the doom and gloom to eleven.

Such a response can, of course, be understood on an emotional level: you’re more likely to complain about the quality of the refereeing when you’re losing. But it is also worth appreciating on a political level. The Democrats’ 2020 victory was built on the unpopularity of Donald Trump. Without that, it is far from clear they can put together a coalition of voters broad enough to hold on to both chambers of Congress and the White House. And so, with a legislative agenda foundering, it’s time to return to something they can all agree on: the wickedness of the other side.

None of this is to say there aren’t threats to American democracy from the Trumpist Right. The last President spent the months between the election and Biden’s inauguration doing everything he could to stay in power. Any sensible reforms to the rules governing Washington would safeguard against something similar happening again.

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But that danger to America’s electoral system only makes the Democrats’ focus on the largely unrelated question of voting rights — and their overblown rhetoric of voter suppression and “Jim Crow 2.0” — more baffling, and less excusable. Instead of tailoring their pro-democracy agenda to the dangers that surround post-election certification, the party is ploughing ahead with a bill that would federalise voting rules in response to some mostly inane changes at a state level.

Elsewhere, Democrats want to overturn the rules that govern the Senate and, if Warren is anything to go by, take the extraordinary step of rebalancing the Supreme Court simply because progressives aren’t satisfied by its current composition. As the centre-left commentator Matthew Yglesias has observed, Democrats certainly aren’t acting as though they believe that the future of democracy is in peril. If they did, they’d surely shelve party-political concerns and build as broad a coalition as possible to combat the Trumpist threat.

The dark irony of the Democrats’ predicament is that they could end up being right for the wrong reasons. There’s a chance, after all, that the failure of Build Back Better really is bad news for American democracy — but only because it radicalises their own side.

A universe in which Biden and other Democratic lawmakers listen to Manchin’s complaints about the legislation, attempt to understand the concerns of the voters he represents (without whom the Senate would be in Republican hands), and steer themselves back towards the centre feels a long way away. Biden, for his part, has taken a tough line all along: according to the Washington Post, the White House rejected an offer from Manchin that included the vast majority of the bill’s provisions.

Now the West Virginian has walked away, they appear to be pursuing a vindictive, scorched-earth strategy. Faced with Manchin’s exasperation, Democrats cry foul, accusing him of being a corrupt coal boss and choosing to ignore the obvious fact that the legislation would have been very unpopular in his home state. Again, the clear, normal, predictable explanation is spurned in favour of a more alarmist narrative.

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Biden himself is certainly capable of overblown rhetoric about the future of American democracy. But so far he has mostly resisted calls from Democrats to go nuclear and change the rules that govern Washington to favour his own party. That refusal grows harder by the day.

Many in his party are rightly concerned that their country is stuck in a downward spiral, but they cannot see their own part in the process. Increasingly, both sides view anything other than victory for themselves as illegitimate. A party that responds to its own perfectly normal legislative woes by doubling down on an all-out battle to rewrite the rules of the system in its favour is not serious about ending that descent into anarchy. And so, the more impotent the Democrats feel, the more dangerous they become.

But Sinema is more enigmatic. It was said that she demanded $100 billion in cuts to proposed climate programmes, though this was denied by her office. The package was trimmed to $2 trillion, but she still refused to support it. She was accused of being bent on the “destruction” of the Biden Presidency. She had, one commentator wrote, a “death grip” on the Democratic Party.

In public, Sinema was taciturn, even as she was trailed and harried by progressive activists, who followed her into public restrooms, or tried to confront her at a marathon. Nobody on the Left understands her thinking; to the Washington Post she is simply “inscrutable“. So fury, and theorising, is their response. (Hers was to tell them, somewhat cryptically on Instagram, to “fuck off”.)

Biden’s bill has been maimed by Sinema, regardless of what happens in the weeks ahead. Eventually, interest in her may begin to fade, or she might face a primary challenge that ends her career as a senator. But there is another way to look at Sinema, one with wider and much longer-lasting implications for politics and political theory than her obstructionism in the Senate.

In recent years there have been two major shifts in the relationship between politics and political theory. On the one hand, a number of important modern political thinkers, such as Michel Foucault, once perceived in American academic and activists circles as useful, even necessary, for ostensibly radical and critical Leftist politics, have begun to appeal to the Right, which long rejected them. On the other hand, adherence to a capitalism-friendly version of academics and activists’ politics, especially on matters of culture, race and sexuality, became a condition of membership in nearly every important institution in the United States. Ideas that once generated a thrilling frisson of subversion in college seminars among students and teachers, who at the time could see themselves as joined in a common project of Leftist critique, have now become the ever-more explicit moral centre of our regime — or are being taken up by its opponents on the Right.

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Such changes can perhaps be traced more easily through the writings of thinkers whose minds, because of their mediocrity, reflect rather than resist larger trends. One such thinker — a former activist and, technically, a scholar — is Sinema, who holds a PhD in “Justice Studies” from Arizona State University. Her 2012 dissertation Who Must Die: the State of Exception in Rwanda’s Genocide, and her 2015 book of almost the same title, are representative moments in the double shift by which Leftists once enamoured of certain strands of radical political theory repurposed it towards the consolidation of a new hegemonic political morality, discarding its subversive dimension — and making it available to the Right.

In her work on Rwanda, Sinema purports, through a handful of incompletely understood concepts drawn chiefly from the writings of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, to discover in the genocide committed in 1994 a generalisable lesson about the importance of the rule of law. In its absence, she argues, the worst sorts of barbarities are possible, and indeed likely.

Sinema’s work has no original insights, and hardly any grasp on the theory that supposedly informs it. It is, however, a useful document. It sheds, in the first place, some light on Sinema herself, a former anti-war radical who is now perhaps the most notorious centrist in Congress and who prides herself on upbeat bipartisanship (expounded in her 2009 book, Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions that Win and Last). For those who would rather dim the lights on Sinema, an already highly-visible political personage, her invocation of Schmitt and Agamben offers an opportunity to consider the strange transformation that these theorists’ work has undergone.

Schmitt and Agamben, in principle, should have been uncomfortable reading for Sinema. The former was an early 20th-century German legal theorist who attacked liberal democracy and supplied theoretical justification for the Nazi regime; the latter is a still-living Italian philosopher who used Schmitt’s ideas for his own critique of liberalism, launched from the radical Left rather than the far Right. But, given Sinema’s political and intellectual origins on the anti-war Left of the early 2000s, her choice is less surprising. The two thinkers were critical references for activist and academic critics of American power throughout the War on Terror.

Since the Eighties and Nineties, Schmitt had become first acceptable, and then compulsory reading, for American political theorists, who were taken with what seemed to be his insights into the deficiencies of liberal democracy’s emphasis on the rule of law and the formal aspects of democratic procedure. Some thinkers on the Left, such as Chantal Mouffe, used his ideas to advocate for a reinvigorated form of political democracy that valued frankly acknowledged conflicts over neutral rules and norms. This so-called “agonism” once inspired populist Leftist movements in Europe, but seems to appeal to few American academics after the rise, since the first Trump campaign, of Right-wing populism at home. Norms — such as Nato and Nafta — suddenly appealed to Leftists who had long critiqued them.

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While some tried to use Schmitt to attack liberalism from the Left, others, drawing on Agamben’s interpretation of Schmitt, argued that the United States was becoming or had become a dangerously illiberal country. Schmitt had argued, infamously, that states inevitably find themselves confronted with “states of exception” — situations where legal norms can no longer be applied. In such instances, some agent must decide what is to be done so that order can be restored and the normal rules can function again. Schmitt saw this power to make decisions in exceptional circumstances as the essence of sovereignty. He argued that liberal democracies — oriented towards preserving the rule of law, which their leaders and ideologues imagine needs no supplement of sovereign decision-making — ignore this fact to their peril.

Agamben, however, countered that supposedly liberal states are in fact constantly dealing with “states of exception”. Liberals do not, in his view, periodically confront normless states of exception in crises; rather they constantly create these conditions. In a series of works including his 1995 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben drew on Schmitt and Foucault to warn that what he saw as the paradigmatic instances of the Nazis’ systematic illegality and inhumanity — the concentration camp and the lethal power of doctors over “life unworthy of life” (the disabled, mentally handicapped, etc.) — were also present, at least potentially, in democratic states, which create their own zones in which law and rights are suspended.

After 9/11, these arguments took on great cogency for many thinkers on the American Left. The US Government appeared to them to be suspending fundamental rights of its citizens through the Patriot Act, which suspended long-standing norms about the limits of state surveillance. Meanwhile, in Guantanamo Bay, the Government seemed to consign individuals to a site-specific state of exception in which the norms governing neither the treatment of prisoners of war, nor criminals applied. Agamben’s theories did not offer much clear direction on what critics of the apparently norm-less War on Terror might do to oppose the “sovereign” power of the United States, but they did give a moral and philosophical weight to critics’ sense that the country was on a dangerous slide towards reenacting the worst horrors of the 20th century.

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Rather than argue, as Schmitt and Agamben did, that states of exception necessarily appear, or that liberal states continually create them, Sinema insisted that such situations could be avoided by protecting the rule of law. This revealed a basic misunderstanding of her chosen interlocutors’ arguments. Schmitt posited that the rule of law is never adequate, since states of exception requiring the exercise of sovereignty necessarily appear; Agamben likewise argued, following Foucault, that liberal states are inherently unable to live up to their own constitutional norms and in their routine exercise of power, place certain spaces and persons outside them. Sinema, either with naïveté or the cunning of stupidity, simply wishes the problem away and urges us to follow the rules. But, while her intellectual inadequacies are her own, the lameness of her conclusion reflects a change in the political valence of theory.

By the mid-2010s, as Sinema was writing, Leftist opposition to the imperial and illiberal dimensions of American security policy was melting away — or moving to the Right. In the following years, fears about terrorism targeted the latter, painting American conservatives, and the spectre of white supremacy, as security threats in much the same rhetoric that had been used to describe Islamic terrorist networks.

Since the spring of 2020, as Agamben has repeatedly observed, Covid policy has imitated the War on Terror in its suspensions of rights — and intimated the handing over of political power to medical officials in ways anticipated in Homo Sacer. Thus, if Schmitt and Agamben remain relevant for understanding our politics, it is in ways that are uncomfortable for the cultural Left, which now finds itself increasingly running, rather than critiquing, the machinery of American power.

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In our present-day sequels to the War on Terror — the campaigns against racism and Covid — hegemonic institutions pursue enemies and suspend liberal norms in the name of our psychological and physical wellbeing. Now in possession of what we might call the commanding heights of the moral economy, from which it produces elites’ and would-be elites’ worldview, this Left no longer needs to perform radicalness.

It can assume instead the position of a centre ringed about by benighted, ignorant, but nevertheless dangerous enemies: conservatives. The latter are not credited with having specific, comprehensible or legitimate objections to the dominant policies and values. They are instead imagined as hateful, prejudiced enemies of legality, science, and moral decency — that is, they are seen not as political foes, but as cognitive and moral degenerates — in a manner that recalls the way Islamic terrorists during the Bush era were said to hate America “for our freedom” and to be full of irrational “Islamic rage”, rather than recognised as having a comprehensible set of objections to American policies in the Middle East.

We should not be surprised to hear pleas for the rule of law and deference for experts from those who once, drawing on radical theory, revealed the subterfuges and hypocrisies behind liberal norms of legality and objectivity. Critique, like terrorism, is a weapon of the weak. The powerful claim to defend security, reason and morality, while those out of power, grown clever and cynical from their experience of marginality, contest these claims and question whether such things even exist to be defended. With the cultural Left in the ascendancy, the political theory by which it climbed has become a ladder to be thrown away — and available to be taken up by the Right.

Long after the furore around Sinema is forgotten, her academic work will glint as one ironic point of light in this vast change in the way liberals and conservatives in America think about themselves and their country.