Possessive Familialism and the Crisis of Democracy in the United States

Amid rising concern over a crisis of democracy in the United States, one point of political alignment across the political spectrum stands out: valorization of the family. This is especially striking because it would seem to conflict with the core ethos of the dominant neoliberal political rationality. We propose that both convergence and crisis are fueled by a logic of possessive familialism. Taking up recent feminist, Marxist, and critical analyses of neoliberalism to situate our claim and tracing the genealogy of this thinking to John Locke, we argue that possessive familialism more aptly describes foundational commitments and assumptions of liberal, and now neoliberal, politics. At the core of the governing rationality of our time, the solo, self-sufficient family obscures the realities of human interdependence and fuels capitalist extraction and accumulation. Feeding the fantasy that individuals, families, and polities survive—and even thrive—absent cross-cutting, overlapping nests of social supports, possessive familialism is the linchpin of neoliberal political rationality that starves democratic imagination, culture, and structures, and fuels the current crisis. We identify five elements of possessive familialism; illustrate its operations through several contemporary examples, including the case for marriage equality and the COVID-19 pandemic; and show how it threatens the very conditions of democratic politics in the US.