One of Karl Marx’s most persistent points, from “On the Jewish Question” forward, is that despite the formal freedoms that we enjoy in a liberal state — the right to freedom of speech, for example, or freedom of religion — we are socially and in fact unfree. (As Bruno Leipold reports in his Citizen Marx, a lot of Marx’s evidence for this claim, particularly about religion, came from travelers’ reports to America, which Marx read assiduously.) That is what it means to live in a liberal society, says Marx: formally free, actually unfree.

But lately I’ve been wondering whether we are not living in the reverse. Despite the efforts of right-wingers to bend the state in a repressive, less free direction, society seems more and more resistant to these efforts. Producing a situation that is, in some sense, the mirror image of what Marx described.

When I compare the current moment, since Donald Trump first rose to power, to previous moments of political repression and coercion and intimidation, it’s hard not to conclude that, at both the national and the state and local levels, this may be the weakest, most flailing effort to control society and individual and collective behavior in American history.

There are, of course, a lot of crosscutting tendencies in the current moment, with facts pointing in contradictory directions and eliciting multiple interpretations. But any full account of the right-wing mobilization of the last ten years has to take into account facts such as these (and there are others one could point to):

1. A few months ago, the media reported that despite the multiple abortion bans across the country, there were more abortions last year than ever, including in states with the most rigid bans.
2. After years of intense effort to suppress the vote, we saw voting rates and electoral participation skyrocket, in 2020, to their highest levels in a century, often among groups that historically had lower rates of turnout. This, remember, was an election in which Trump and the Republicans held the levers of state power, both at the national and the state and local levels.

And now, this morning, this, from the New York Times:

Despite book bans and other forms of pressure from policymakers and politically engaged parents, there are signs that many teachers are able to ignore — or subtly complicate — mandates to address race, gender and U.S. history in proscribed ways. Only a quarter of teachers have reported that restrictive laws influenced their choice of curriculum materials or instructional practices, according to RAND.

But the experiences of Mr. Collins and Mr. Gallegos show how difficult it can be for politicians to control public school curriculums. The American education system is “radically decentralized” in the words of one historian. Local schools and even individual teachers are often left to work independently, choosing their own curriculum materials and writing their own lesson plans — a structure that could restrain President Donald J. Trump in his second term.

I’ve obviously taken a strong position over the last eight years in the various debates about fascism and authoritarianism and Trump. But one persistent issue that I’ve not seen addressed in these debates, one that transcends a lot of the discussion and its terms, is how state capacity and political capacity have been transformed during the last half-century (mostly by the forces of neoliberalism, but also by various cultural shifts) that make the kind of older projects of political repression and state coercion a bit more complicated and variegated than they might once have been. There are exceptions to this rule: the most obvious ones being the suppression of the debate over Palestine and the mobilization against trans people. These all need to be part of our analysis. But the resulting portrait may be more complicated than many of the recent accounts suggest.

Or, as Marx says in The Civil War in France, “[I]t is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even defunct forms of social life.”