The Right to a Critique

Wyatt Verlen

May 2, 2025

Most historical figures, parties, and policies never gain a right to be critiqued. They come and go, express nothing world-altering either exoterically or esoterically, and are not fundamental to either a new status quo or the status quo they seek to improve. For instance, George W Bush’s “Compassionate conservatism” was at best a few tweaks to the Neoliberal state during the 2000s, mattering very little in the long term. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 certainly had its merits, but it was nothing that really challenged or overcame the post-New Deal system in America. These changes did not fundamentally alter the status quo. In their own time, however, critics acted as though they did, missing the trees for the leaves. Most “critiques” fail to critique. These idle remarks stay firmly within the status quo without challenging its basis. Critique seeks the real limitations and possibilities of the present. All else is mere complaint.

In 2016, Trump “won” his first election. He was hounded from the get-go by agents of the state, the media, and even his own party. His vision of capital beyond Neoliberalism appeared stillborn, he was only able to execute mild reforms. Just like Nixon before him, the world was not yet ready for Trump, while simultaneously hungering for nothing except Trump.

The Biden years were similarly a false start. Biden continued some of the reforms of the first Trump presidency, while nixing others. But where Trump was hounded by agents of the state, the media, and his own party, Biden was gently prodded into doing things the way the Neoliberal NGO-ist racketeers around him wanted things to be done. The result was a schizophrenic administration that finally proved once and for all that Neoliberalism’s time had passed. Bidenism was an attempt to make post-Neoliberalism a sort of non-change. To prevent it from registering and being understood as change.

It was only natural, then, that in 2024, Trump won with relative ease, and this time, there was no need for scare quotes around “won”. He really did win.  His approval ratings are higher than they’ve ever been. He won the popular vote, vastly overperformed among the youth vote, and swept all swing states. When he was inaugurated, there were hardly any protests, hardly a scant word from the soon-to-be refitted agencies of the state that had so opposed him before. Seated behind him during the inauguration were the titans of contemporary capital, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk, all three of whom had opposed him before.

Trump’s inauguration was the inauguration of a new phase of capitalism: post-Neoliberalism.The future would be different than the past, as another one of Trump’s financiers, Peter Thiel, had once written. In hindsight, it is amazing anyone ever thought anything else to begin with, as almost a few months in, this mode of governance feels far from alien, but rather is simply the new status quo.

There is a problem, however: Trump winning the right to make a new status quo has meant that he also won the right to be critiqued for it. Trump is not a liberal (liberalism, in a true sense, is impossible within capitalism after all) nor is he an emancipatory socialist; thus, he is simultaneously a regression from bourgeois society and not nearly radical enough to be more revolutionary than capitalism itself.  He is to be contested on the grounds of just how limited, contradictory, repressive, and alienating the new status quo will be. Surely, one can find a litany of complaints about Trump and his governance. Usually, these are made on the basis of the old status quo of Neoliberalism (sentimentalism), some notion of their unethical nature (moralism), or ideas about how this somehow stopped the soon-to-be anarcho-communist-feminist-BLM eco-communes from coming to be (this is best described as delusionalism). 

It is only a sign of how weak, both in terms of intelligence and in terms of vision, our supposed “intellectuals” are, that they are not meeting the challenge of critiquing the man and the system he is setting up, a man who has so earned a right to it. Today’s intellectuals can only “critique” from the standpoint of the past: Neoliberalism. The Atlantic constantly runs articles about how Trump is insufficiently Neoliberal. As I write this article, whole swathes of the “Left” have spent their time complaining about how Trump is restructuring labor (immigration), how Trump is restructuring trade (his new tariff policy), and how Trump is restructuring the family (his pro-natalist policies). Their complaints disguise grief over the loss of what was. The new order has been birthed, and the only thing the Left can even consider using its time for is writing complaints about how they expected capitalism to yield the results they wanted, as if capital cares.

The tragedy of this is enormous. Just as Neoliberalism birthed new modes of barbarism and repression out of the already barbaric and repressive Fordist economic order, post-Neoliberalism will come with its own forms of repression. The capitalist state is nothing if not forever hungry for more and more human lives to mangle, more and more sick ways of torturing people, more and more people to overtax and underdeliver for. It may change which people are affected, but it will have to take its share of flesh, and will certainly do so. 

Trumpism, post-Neoliberalism, or whatever we will call this new order, will produce new discontents with it. If the Leftist “intellectuals” keep complaining, they will have not met up to the task of critique, and will leave the next generation without any potential of building a successful movement for emancipation, just as the New Left failed for the Millennial and X’er Left to give the right lessons in why they failed. It is not natural that in 2025, a year in which AI can do things one once had to go to school for decades for, capitalism persists, but it does anyways. There will similarly be no reason for it to exist in 20 or 30 years, when another crisis in capitalism begins. But without critique, there will be no hope for any Left movement to be ahead of historical movement and actually stand a chance in changing social reality.

History gave Trump a right. As of the moment of writing, this right continues to be denied to him. That right is the right to be critiqued. Instead of writing another op-ed about how awful this or that Trump policy is, or reminiscing over the Neoliberal mass immigration labor system, or the Neoliberal trade system, or whatever else, it would be much wiser if the Left asked one question: What are the ways in which capitalism, including capitalism under Trump, falls short of the ultimate goal of socialism?

Until that question is answered, all that can be heard is a cacophony of violins, of complainers who never managed to be critics.