A Depoliticized Democracy is and has been the Crisis of Democracy
Donald Trump was democratically elected twice. Unlike Trump and his followers who believe elections he lost were stolen, I don’t think any of his elections were stolen or that Musk fixed the system. Given what constitutes the democratic process in the US, a populist movement (along with the billionaire class that funded him and them of course) elected him and his administration twice. The most positive interpretation of these events is that the populists opposed the neoliberalism that dominated US politics at least since the 1970s. The argument goes like this: populists had an intuitive sense that the neoliberals that dominate our two-party system betrayed them and so they rebelled, smashing the system as best they could. Trump was their wrecking-ball. I agree that the two-party system betrayed them; I disagree that MAGA represents a populist rebellion against neoliberalism.
MAGA is an extension of what Philip Mirowski refers to as the “neoliberal thought collective.”[1] It has been an intentional, organized movement since the French philosopher Louis Rougier first gathered Friedrich Hayek and others in Paris for the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloque that then led to the establishment of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) in 1946. It brought economists and businesspersons together to fund think tanks, publications, conferences, politicians and more to convince anyone who would listen that only the market has the necessary information to make decisions about economic well-being. The purpose of this movement has been, and is, to convince people that political and ethical judgments do not belong in economics. Let the market think for us. It did, and now we have lost the spaces and ability to practically reason about things that matter most.
The members of MPS were explicit that they had to show the compatibility between Christianity and capitalism, and I think it safe to say they succeeded. The think tanks that they produced have had more influence on popular culture than all the seminaries combined. The four most important in the US are the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute at Stanford, and the Cato Institute. Each has direct connections to MPS.[2] There are now more than 105 such think tanks with a central clearing house for them, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. The businesspersons funding these think tanks also supported Christian Reconstructionists like R. J. Rushdoony and Gary North. A kind of “theological” education has been successful in the US; it is one that merges the vilest version of Christianity with the market as divine providence. As William Davies has argued, the result was the “disenchantment of politics by economics.”
On Oct. 2, 2025, Davies published an insightful piece on Trump’s second election entitled, “A critique of stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0.”[3] Rather than an “Orwellian image of brainwashed drones” who march in lock step to an authoritarian regime, Davies argues that our current “social model of stupidity” does not surrender “judgment” to dictators, but was “outsourced to impersonal, superintelligent systems of data collection and analysis.” He traces the origin of this to the mid-twentieth century and the neoliberal attempt to have markets “organize a society’s knowledge.” Christian Nationalism adopts this neoliberal strategy and calls it “God.” Silicon Valley reaps profits from it.
The US may be too far gone to recover from this version of a disenchanted politics that lets the market think for us. “We need a businessman in the White House,” many said, and they got one who is incapable of political and ethical reasoning. In truth, the seeds for this were planted long ago and identified by W. E. B. DuBois in his Black Reconstruction when he told us “how two theories of the future of America clashed and blended just after the Civil War: the one was abolition-democracy based on freedom, intelligence and power for all men; the other was industry for private property directed by an autocracy determined at any price to amass wealth and power.”[4] The latter won. The neoliberal thought collective brought it to a hegemonic power that now defines the judiciary, the political parties, much of our educational and entertainment institutions, and, unfortunately, much of the church.
Yet Christian faith asserts that evil can never obliterate the creation’s goodness. Every institution has some spaces where the practical reasoning necessary for political and ethical judgments about the good life remains. We need to claim them, intensify them, cultivate them, and offer a counter-vision to the “agnotology” of our de-politicized market society. It must be done at every level, from family and neighborhood gatherings to churches to civic, sporting, and educational institutions. By fearing that political, ethical, and religious judgments are too dangerous to be set forth in public, we abdicated that space to the neoliberal economists, businesspersons, and theologians. It is time to reclaim them, and it will take as much intentionality to do so as it took for MPS to solidify the theory of America DuBois warned against.[5]
[1] Mirowski, Philip & Dieter Plehwe, The Road From Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Harvard University Press), 2015.
[2] See Christine E. Weller and Laura Singleton, “Peddling reform: the role of think tanks in shaping the neoliberal policy agenda for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund,” in Plehwe, Walpen, and Neunhöffer, Neoliberal Hegemony, 70-85.
[3]https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/oct/02/critique-pure-stupidity-understanding-donald-trump Accessed Oct. 3, 2025.
[4] Du Bois, W. E. B., Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1890 (Library of America, 2021), 222.
[5] A fuller discussion of this is present in my forthcoming A Theological Economy: The Legacies of Adam Smith and St. Paul (T & T Clark, 2027).