The Coda of the Fly I: A Retrospective Account of the Postliberal Future

Over the past twenty years three transnational political factions have emerged within the Western world. These are what I would call an indignant left, named as such for its original emergence as a negative reaction to 2008, austerity, and the Global War on Terror; what has been called neoliberalism by the left and "globalism" or "Davocracy" by the right; and finally, a new faction I call the Cratylian right, named for Plato's Cratylus, which emphasizes historical meaning over relative meaning, applied to nations, this defines a nation as a heritage community of descent, rather than as a shared civic body.

These three factions compete not on a nation-state basis but in nation-states in transnational conflict. In the same way the 20th century was shaped by transnational conflict between communism, fascism, and liberalism (which absorbed conservatism for a time), the 21st century is being shaped by an indignant left, neoliberalism, and a Cratylian right. These movements are transnational, with international publishing houses, journals, and forums. They are not mere continuations of communism, liberalism, and fascism. Each of those 20th-century ideologies is, in effect, dead. These new movements, like those of prior centuries, emerged for clear and understandable reasons due to historical change and have unique differences that set them apart from earlier ideological movements.

The crisis that prompted their formation in the West has one historical precedent: a crisis of non-citizen foreign labor in the 19th-century United States, the institution of chattel slavery. These new factions in the 21st century have arisen as the impact to what Tom Jones and others have called "Human Quantitative Easing," or HQE, on democratic states. HQE created a second class of non-citizen foreign labor that reignited basic debates about the nature of citizenship and statehood.

In this short essay, I will offer you a retrospective account of the near future. History’s actors come into view slowly, in starts and stops. Often, by the time you name them, they’re halfway gone. Let me paint you a picture of the next thirty years, based on a few observations on these last twenty.

Human Quantitative Easing: The Fly

The American Civil War resulted from the conflict between the slaveholding interests and the interests of free labor. For decades, political leaders sought to avoid settling the issue of slavery, pursuing political compromises, including the Three-fifths Compromise of 1787, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and the Compromise of 1850. There were two main proposals for what to do with slaves once the institution itself was abolished: the deportation of slaves to Liberia and other colonies or their full emancipation and assimilation into American society. The motivations to end slavery were not, first and foremost, moral but economic, as free labor, which was white northern industrial labor, was understood to conflict with the chattel slavery system. White northern workers supported the end of slavery because the slaveholding interest itself was a threat. Slaveholders challenged the egalitarianism of American citizenship, concentrating political power. White northern workers saw slavery as a system that drove down prices and threatened democracy. Before the Civil War, 25% of the labor force comprised slaves concentrated in the rural South.

Non-citizen labor in the United States today totals 19%, 21% in the UK, more than 10% in France, 15.6% in Germany, and 13% in Spain. In most Western countries, 10-25% of the labor force is non-citizen foreign labor. Most work on visas or guest worker programs, though a significant portion work illegally. In the United States, 6.7% of all workers are undocumented, and in the UK, 9% of the total foreign-born population are illegal immigrants. This second and smaller group of undocumented or illegal non-citizen workers are concentrated generally in specific occupations and exert a sharp wage suppression effect in those industries. Importantly, there are a significant number of foreign non-citizens who do not work at all.

Reliance on non-citizen foreign labor came about because of four historical trends. First, the Cold War and Global War on Terror; second, postcolonial anti-racist culture; third, population aging, decline, and management; and fourth, technological change.

American-led efforts to combat communism and the American War on Terror both caused mass migration by destabilizing states in the Global South and the Near East. This, in turn, led to large numbers of people fleeing to the United States and Europe for safety and security. They were broadly accepted as the cultural environment in the United States was liberal and multicultural. Similarly, an environment of guilt and postcolonial responsibility in Europe encouraged social acceptance of mass migration. At the same time, declining populations in Europe and the United States meant an increased labor cost. States saw the foreign non-citizen laborers, undocumented or legal, as a way to shore up ever-growing expenditures and budgets on defense and entitlements. Large amounts of immigration was thought to bring innovation and cultural vitality. Advances in global travel and telecommunications facilitated mass migration, making the costs associated with migration, such as family separation, long travel times, and the permanent loss of homeland, non-existent.

Economically, since 1970, real productivity gains have decreased. From 1920-1970, people did less and less for more and more; now, 1970-2020, people have had to do more and more for less and less.[1] Mass migration allowed states to increase productivity by increasing people without increasing the real productivity of the economy, pursuing critical reform, or resolve growing corporate power and inequality. A popular but unofficial term for this industrial strategy is "Human Quantitative Easing."

Human Quantitative Easing is the method by which government allows geographically rooted industries, which cannot offshore their workforce to lower wage economies, to satisfy their need for cheap labour by importing the same workforce to the UK — with government providing a subsidy, if required, in the form of services and welfare payments.[2]

If states could not have more productive people, they settled for more people producing. Having more people to produce reduces labor value and makes workers more replaceable, just as monetary quantitative easing reduces monetary value and increases liquidity. In the UK, some critics have alleged this is simply the state's industrial policy; whereas in the United States, this has not been the nation's sole industrial strategy, but there are indications that during President Biden's term, large amounts of migration were allowed to introduce workers into the economy.

GDP per capita has continued to grow even as median weekly earnings have not increased much since 1979.[3]Wages have grown since 1979, but irregularly, not often, and only during tight labor markets.[4]The lack of wage growth and resulting inequality is the result of a combination of factors, including offshoring, weakened unions, monopolization, a falling minimum wage, weaker labor standards, and fissuring; however, human quantitative easing undermines the key advantages all American workers have: access to the American job market and citizenship (legal protections). Furthermore, HQE proponents focused on resolving the population shortage problem, not realizing that opening up developed economies to undeveloped country populations introduced economic asymmetric warfare, where undeveloped countries had an incentive to extract as much wealth possible from developed countries through remittances, allowing them in turn to avoid real productivity growth, which is enormously difficult and requires domestic stability. Non-citizens—with less rights, less stability, and weaker legal protections—could compete asymmetrically in the economy with citizen laborers. The benefits of non-citizen foreign labor accrued at the top of society, as wages that would have risen in a tight labor market instead stayed suppressed, exacerbating wealth inequality.

Furthermore, HQE, though not the only reason inequality increased, encouraged businesses and corporations to view workers as replaceable cogs. Neoliberal governmentality emerged in tandem with HQE, though HQE is not the only reason for inequality; HQE is vital to developing a broader neoliberal view of humans as spare parts. Multiculturalism mattered. Multiculturalism is the idea that cultures can be multiple. If cultures can be multiple, there is no cost to importing persons of other cultures to a nation, which can always happily absorb more. Sociologically, multiculturalism, by downplaying the importance of culture, increased the replaceability of the human part. Economists often ignore or downplay the worst economic impact of globalization because no number can quantify the loss of national community. Bosses and the corporate elite were forced to negotiate with unions when there was a national market, when they lived close to their workers, and when they had to deal with the union because there was no HQE or an offshore alternative. Unions died because the unions relied on the local and national character of capital, deregulation mattered, but globalized capital mattered just as much. When HQE and offshoring are options, unions do not matter. Without de-globalization, unions are obsolete; workers know this, so they do not unionize.

In this environment, citizens' wages did not rise rapidly enough to cope with healthcare costs, housing, college, and children. Housing inflated as older people who owned real estate profited due to increased demand and speculation. Socially, lawlessness increased as non-citizens have an incentive to avoid the law. The worst criminal acts that come with mass migration, such as drug trafficking, have far more victims and generational downstream negatives than other crimes, such as aggravated assault.[5] In Europe, transnational gangs emerged as powerful transnational cartels.[6] While violent crime may have fallen, socially visible impacts of crimes such as shoplifting have led stores to install plexiglass locks.[7] The advances in global travel and telecommunications facilitated mass migration and mitigated against assimilation by easing remittances and making the loss of homeland non-existent. People could more easily maintain their culture and nationality through digital communication.

Suppression and Resistance: Spiders and Birds

Implicit to neoliberalism was the optimistic idea that culture, religion, and race would remain private, personal, and uncontroversial; efficiency was the priority. For neoliberal governments, non-citizen foreign labor solved the problem of demographic decline. They did not consider the long-term downstream negatives.

A discrete class of second-class laborers emerged as non-citizen foreigners were imported, threatening native-born citizen workers' interests. The crisis of slavery was not enslavement; the crisis was the economic impact of non-citizen foreign labor. The moral anti-slavery abolitionists were a minority. If anything, non-citizen foreign labor in the 21st century is more competitive with native labor than chattel slavery ever was. Chattel slavery was confined to the rural American south, while non-citizen foreign labor is in practically every industry except professions such as American law, which is insulated from competition through the bar.

The political result was twofold.

First, the socialist left found a political ally in this new class of laborers. In Europe and the United States, Muslims and socialists were united by the cause of Palestine, by negative views of Western society and capitalism, and by a legacy of anti-racism. Indignation, meaning anger at unfairness or things beneath dignity, is their motivating political feeling. Socialists, most of whom grew up during the GWOT, embraced Islam readily as an ally against imperialism. This forged the political alliance that has allowed the resurgence of the left, as this brought together the student left, old socialists, and migrants, many of whom were Muslim, into a united front. Antisemitism on the American left, the real violence of Islamists, and violent clashes between antifascists and police meant that the center began to disfavor the left, which had become more radical.

Once, socialists had many tools to mitigate globalization: protectionism, opposition to open borders, cautious use of capital controls, state-private economic partnerships, subsidies, and so on. This is largely forgotten and now irrelevant because the contemporary left is motivated more by indignation than socialism. They understate the significance of foreign non-citizen labor, overemphasizing the quantifiable effects of union decline and corporate capture of regulation. They consider the globalized market to need tweaks, better policies, regulatory changes, stronger unions, and a higher minimum wage, which is all fantastic, but more so fantastical.

This is because the indignant left has an incoherent worldview. The socialist left wants a full employment economy, universal programs, high taxes, and to abolish ICE. Senator Sanders in the United States, for example, was forced to abandon his traditional socialist views on labor and immigration, favoring protectionism and closed borders to create a tight labor market and preventing offshoring, and instead adopted an abolish ICE stance crafted by immigration advocates.[8] The indignant left's immigration stance has been more deeply shaped by "kids in cages" than by a cogent consideration of the economics of mass migration, meaning workers do not support them. Unionization without remigration or onshoring is a pointless promise. The socialist left lost the ability to win workers in a meaningful way by not having a strong enough attack on immigration and globalization. They replaced their base of workers with new immigrants, who would benefit from amnesty and who shared their views on Palestine, but that is not a socialist left. They believe the world is sliding into fascism and almost anything, from language standards for truck drivers to border security to opposition to childhood transition, is fascistic.

The second major political impact was that many on the right developed a postliberal understanding of nationhood, founded not on propositional nationalism but Cratylian nationality. Renaud Camus, the most influential right-wing writer today, argued that one should understand nations as a historical people, united by culture, language, and descent rather than as "propositional nations" or "civic nations." This idea is not inherently white supremacist or anti-immigrant—for most of the modern period, this was the default idea of a nation. But as liberalism moved into neoliberalism, this idea of the nation was abandoned.

Many non-white persons in Western nations vote for parties that subscribe to these ideas. Yet because of the historical experience of Nazi Germany and racial segregation, and the reality of white supremacy and racism on the right, both the left and center categorized the emergent Cratylian right as fascistic, white-supremacist, and racist, and so suppressed them—which only served to strengthen their growth through forcing them to build parallel institutions across alternative media.

Throughout this period, neoliberal governance failed to resolve the housing crisis, reduce immigration, reform or improve healthcare, and improve quality of life. TVs may be cheaper than ever, but in cities homes are too expensive and in rural places industry is gone. The sharp pains of globalization hit people in just the right way to make widespread feelings of decline.  Instead of resolving these issues through any of the innumerable tools of government, the state adopted an ever-tighter securitization of society. COVID-19 heightened all of these tendencies, including the tendency toward suppression. School shootings, extremist violence, and gun and knife crime were resolved by neoliberal governance through police strategies that radicalized the left, which saw these as authoritarian measures, and radicalized the right, which saw these as ignoring the problems of mass migration. The examples are countless—solving UK knife crime with dull knives, transparent backpacks in schools, barriers at Christmas markets, suppression of free speech, French laïcité being replaced by niqabs in public school, anti-extremism programs, anti-BDS pledges—neoliberal governance became security governance, swallowing spider after spider to manage the downstream effects of HQE, which were cultural fragmentation, crime, violence, ethnic competition, and political radicalization.

The critical problem with HQE is that a short-term strategy of supporting pensions and entitlements morphed into a transnational conflict over nationhood, citizenship, and democracy; just as slavery began as a Spanish and Portuguese effort to bring additional labor to new world colonies but ended in the deadliest war in American history.

HQE created two tiers of workers: citizen labor and non-citizen foreign labor. The left opposed the two-tier system, and the right opposed the foreign non-citizens being in a nation in the first place because of the asymmetric nature of citizen vs. non-citizen labor competition in addition to the cultural, criminal, and labor impacts. HQE relied on an implicit but untenable compromise: non-citizen foreign labor would not be citizens, would have second-class rights, would assimilate into multiculturalism, and be small in number. However, non-citizen foreign laborers didn't want that. They wanted to stay, they wanted to bring their families, they wanted their own culture, and they wanted rights too. The Cratylians didn't want that. They wanted them to leave.

Neoliberal governance pursued a strategy of deferment to resolve the immigration issue, which itself was a deferment strategy to cope with declining productivity and growing budgets. They simply ignored the problems, continuing HQE to brute force growth through biomass. This continued until it was impossible any longer because the indignant left doubled down on amnesty, which was unacceptable for the Cratylian right (Trump's sinking of the 2023 U.S. immigration deal was anti-amnesty), as this would normalize the population and labor competition levels while simultaneously incentivizing more migration. There is no immigration compromise anymore; it's only mass amnesty or immigration.

Postliberal Cats

A popular idea is that the 21st century will be a reenactment of the 19th century's Great Power conflicts, drawing a parallel between the multipolar geopolitics of the 19th century and competition between the United States, Russia, and China. They are right to draw the comparison but wrong in the substance. Great Power Conflict in the 19th century was of secondary importance relative to the much more historically impactful process of nation-making in events like the Italian Risorgimento or the American Civil War. Great Power conflict in the 19th century was mostly a narrative of elite managers of frontier.[9]

The most important political event of the 21st-century United States, tied with 9/11, is the Trump administration's request to review the 14th Amendment's interpretation.[10] It should not be surprising that a 19th-century amendment regarding slavery is being redeployed in the 21st century to reduce non-citizen foreign labor, which is incentivized to enter the United States as their children may receive citizenship. No state in Europe today has "birthright citizenship."[11] 

HQE replaced an aging crisis with a crisis of non-citizen labor, which means states must again settle the question, "Who is a citizen, and what are they entitled to?" Suppose automation progresses as expected, resulting in mass unemployment. In that case, states must provide more for their citizens, making the question, "Who is a citizen, and what are they entitled to?" more critical.

I consider post-liberalism, from a historical view, to be a reevaluation of liberal norms in the face of the rising tension of a fragmented society and a declining standard of living. Most people and political parties are postliberal in that censorship, suppression, domestic surveillance, and freedoms are secondary to the primary task of recovering lost prosperity. Corruption and abuses of power—always problems in liberal governance—are now critical levers of control and action. Heightened tension, conflict, and stakes destroyed the possibility of a liberal consensus.

The indignant left is postliberal in that they have abandoned free speech, free exercise of religion, and capitalism entirely; their program is mostly to tax the billionaires, expand welfare and entitlements, and to perform mass amnesty without ending HQE. If they could, they would suppress their opposition in power. The neoliberal center has become almost fully identified with HQE, multiculturalism, and status quo governance because they have no major economic vision. They have adopted a reflexive defense of neoliberal capitalism and globalization paired with ever-harsher security measures.

Finally, the Cratylian right, which includes both the super-rich and the working class, has emerged from conservatism via Donald Trump, who forced the right to move past the idea of the proposition nation. This is Trump's contribution to history. In response to ISIS, Trump asked the question, "Who are we letting into our country?" which very rapidly became, "Wait, who even belongs in the country?" Heightened global tension and advanced security measures led the right to Cratylian nationhood, abandoning the liberal idea of a civic nationalism or proposition nation. Cratlyians answer, "Who belongs in the country?" with, "Who has been there, and who is helping them stay there." The right is not nativist. It is Cratylian, favoring an open-heritage view of nationhood that can assimilate immigrants so long as they actually assimilate and, by necessity, are few in number.

Unlike the indignant and neoliberals, they have a vision of a new economy. What Trump is doing now was described by David Davis, a key architect of Brexit, in 2016:

Economic growth in the UK …has depended, above all, on large population increases based on uncontrolled mass migration. This has made the economy bigger, but not necessarily better for individual citizens, as shown by GDP per capita growth rates of two percent or less – significantly weaker than in most decades since the Second World War. It has depended on moving a large number of people out of unemployment, which is good, but because the new jobs tend to be low paid it created a low productivity economy. And it all depends far too much on domestic demand, which even after 2008 is excessively funded by consumer credit. This is unsustainable in the long run. We need to shift our economy towards a more export-led growth strategy, based on higher productivity employment. Fortunately, this will prove eminently possible as a part of a Brexit-based economic strategy. Indeed, far from being the risky option that many have claimed, Brexit gives us many tools to deal with the very serious economic challenges that the country will face in the coming decades.[12]

The Trump administration is pursuing American exit for the same reason the British pursued Brexit. Offshored manufacturing is a national security threat in a more dangerous world that leaves behind many of your own people. While many people moved into higher quality white collar jobs, many were left behind.

Then, COVID-19 taught everyone one lesson: the ventilators are made in China. What started as a right-wing movement to prevent mass migration and lead reindustrialization took on new importance post-pandemic, as states realized their long supply chains, de-industrialized regions, and culturally fragmented populations were liabilities. COVID-19 featured major riots in Europe and the United States that spurred on this fear. The vision of closer-to-home production for security is not even right-wing; as Emmanuel Macron has said:

As far as industrial policy is concerned, we used to say that this was not really Europe's objective. And at a time when many are revisiting the concept "the freedom to stay", industrial policy is the answer. It offers the possibility of producing everywhere on European soil, whereas somehow the European Union, by relying too much on a model of competitiveness, including intra-European competitiveness, has created imbalances, which the cohesion policy had not sufficiently compensated for, and which subsequently created the demographic imbalances experienced by many of our partners.[13]

The war in Ukraine has made Western Europeans realize that Eastern Europe cannot be an undeveloped weak point. The world is too dangerous.

Fears of China's rise, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and real tensions over Taiwan and semiconductors have prompted global anxiety. Strong states learned to fear the security of their global supply chains and global labor chains because they began to look vulnerable. Globalization is viewed as a real threat to sovereignty. This has prompted a move towards a new system, as described by Russell Napier,

I say we are headed towards a system of national capitalism. Interestingly, the term "national capitalism" has been used before, by a man who used to live in Zurich for a while: his name was Lenin. In a system of national capitalism, governments direct national savings towards national purposes. And our purposes today are investments, as outlined by Macron or Draghi and also by industrial policy initiatives in the US: Investments in energy infrastructure, in defense, in new productive capacity in order to de-risk from China. If we get into a bad Cold War with China, this will have a high national priority.[14]

This is not the end of global trade but the start of far more careful global trade and domestic investment. National capitalism is incompatible with HQE, and HQE will have to end as nations and states move to a national capital model, with Europe pursuing a European model. Trump's victory is not why so many nations are moving right; they are slowly realizing, as Macron has said,

…we now know our civilizations are mortal. We must be clear about the fact that today, our Europe is mortal. It can die. It can die, and it all depends on our choices. These choices have to be made now.

For world leaders, things feel too dangerous to allow mass HQE to continue. Remigration is step one of the 2.0 Risorgimento; as vital as population movement was to found nations, it will be doubly vital to re-found core economic industries. This is not the end of global trade but the move to more careful global trade. While foreign non-citizen labor is not slave labor, the political interest of foreign non-citizen labor has had the same effect of dividing societies and forcing the citizenship question to resurface. HQE, which caused this problem, is incompatible with national capitalism in the long term. Foreign non-citizen labor is an interest that seeks to perpetuate itself, has allies, and has many financial beneficiaries. To expect HQE to end in anything but violence is to ignore why we had the Civil War. The end of HQE will be an enormously violent, difficult task. Every step of the way the indignant left and the neoliberals will fight the Cratylian right. Reorienting the global economy means rights and freedoms will be trampled. The Cratylian right won't feel guilty because they are postliberal and for them, this is a civilizational war.

The leaders of the world had a terrible thing stuck in their throats: an unprecedented, massive, aging population who were promised a tremendous amount just as productivity was declining. They swallowed the easiest fly, HQE, as the other flies were a bit bigger and tougher to stomach. But the rational blowback to HQE made them swallow a swarm of terrible birds that have brought us here, to the fighting days of postliberal cats, and this won’t be a short war because they each have nine lives.

My postliberal cat does not exist because my cat is remigration socialism, blue labor, and left realism. But who knows. Cats have a strange homing instinct; an odd way of surviving and coming back.  

Footnotes

[1] Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth. (n.d.). Princeton University Press. Fig 1-1

[2] Sixsmith, B. (2024, October 17). The Conservatives must reject Human Quantitative Easing | Tom Jones | The Critic Magazine. The Critic Magazine. https://thecritic.co.uk/the-conservatives-must-reject-human-quantitative-easing/

[3] Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over. (2025, April 16). https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

[4] How should we assess and characterize worker wage growth in recent decades? (n.d.). Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/blog/how-should-we-assess-and-characterize-workers-wage-growth-in-recent-decades/

[5] City Journal. (2024, October 20). No, you're not imagining a migrant crime spree. https://www.city-journal.org/article/no-youre-not-imagining-a-migrant-crime-spree

[6] Lüdtke, L. (2024, February 11). Sweden faces a crisis because of flood of immigrants. GIS Reports. https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/sweden-immigrants-crisis/

[7] Hernández, A. (2024, December 25). New shoplifting data explains why they're locking up the toothpaste. Stateline. https://stateline.org/2024/12/19/new-shoplifting-data-explains-why-theyre-locking-up-the-toothpaste/

[8] Kullgren, I. (2019, November 7). How Bernie Sanders would change immigration. POLITICO. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/07/bernie-sanders-2020-immigration-plan-067204

[9] Hopkins, B. D. (2008). The myth of the 'Great Game.' In Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks (pp. 34–60). https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230228764_3

[10] The White House. (2025, January 21). Protecting the meaning and value of American citizenship. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/protecting-the-meaning-and-value-of-american-citizenship

[11] McMaken, R. (2025, January 29). Why the World Is Giving Up on Birthright Citizenship. Mises Institute. https://mises.org/mises-wire/why-world-giving-birthright-citizenship

[12] Mp, D. D. (2016, July 14). David Davis: Trade deals. Tax cuts. And taking time before triggering Article 50. A Brexit economic strategy for Britain. Conservative Home. https://conservativehome.com/2016/07/14/david-davis-trade-deals-tax-cuts-and-taking-time-before-triggering-article-50-a-brexit-economic-strategy-for-britain/

[13] Emmanuel Macron: Europe—It Can Die. A New Paradigm at The Sorbonne - Groupe d'études géopolitiques. (2024, April 26). Groupe D'études Géopolitiques. https://geopolitique.eu/en/2024/04/26/macron-europe-it-can-die-a-new-paradigm-at-the-sorbonne/

[14] Dittli, M. (2024, December 13). Russell Napier: We are headed towards a system of national capitalism. The Market. https://themarket.ch/interview/russell-napier-we-are-headed-towards-a-system-of-national-capitalism-ld.12718