After Legitimacy
On desocietization and its discontents
Legitimacy has become harder to ignore because the justificatory shell around U.S. power has become so thin it no longer even pretends to persuade. The United States has seized Nicolás Maduro in a military operation whose legality is openly contested and which Maduro’s defense has described as a “military abduction”; at the same time, it is now embroiled in a widening war with Iran that has already produced major casualties, attacks on energy infrastructure and other civilian sites, and open threats to destroy Iranian power plants. At home, the same erosion is visible in the numbers: just 17 percent of Americans now say they trust the federal government to do what is right always or most of the time, Gallup reports that confidence in major U.S. institutions remains historically low, and Pew finds widespread dissatisfaction with the way democracy is working in high-income countries, including the United States. The minimal legitimacy once available to neoliberal and neoconservative rule has given way to something closer to naked administration, coercion, and managed spectacle (Reuters 2026a, 2026b, 2026c; Associated Press 2026; Pew Research Center 2025a, 2025b; Gallup 2024; Habermas 1975; Streeck 2014).
The renewed interest in legitimacy, or more precisely in its absence, indicates a deeper problem. “Legitimacy crisis” once named something real. It now risks softening the condition it is supposed to describe.
What “legitimacy crisis” gets wrong
Legitimacy crisis assumes that legitimacy remains the operative horizon. Institutions are contested and their authority is disputed, yet the social world remains organized around the question of whether power is justified. When people protest, sue, vote, organize, or stop complying, they still imply that things ought to be otherwise: power has failed to meet a standard it continues to be held to. The concept is relational. It describes the gap between institutional claims and popular belief, and it presupposes that both sides of that relationship remain, in some sense, intact (Habermas 1975; Beetham 2013).
Post-legitimacy names a different condition. Institutions no longer consistently pursue thick legitimacy grounded in shared values, democratic authorization, or credible claims to expertise and public purpose; populations no longer consistently expect it from them. Nor do institutions attain legitimacy through provisions or exchange. Life does not materially improve enough to compensate for the collapse of moral justification. Governance continues through procedure, compulsion, platform dependence, metrics, emergency management, and the privatized absorption of risk. Power is still exercised, but it is not authoritative in Weber’s sense. Authority requires justification, belief, and at least minimal consent. Without authority, the social world can still reproduce itself. We go to work, pay rent, use the platforms, navigate health insurance, scroll past catastrophe. What disappears is the sense that these activities belong to a shared moral order (Weber 1978; Beetham 2013).
Desocietization
The concept I want to put at the center of this analysis is desocietization. The claim is stronger than a loss of faith in institutions, though that loss is real. Society itself ceases to function as a credible experienced form. It depends on some notion of mutual obligation, whether person to person or through a social contract between state and citizens. In a desocietized condition, people remain densely interdependent. They rely on supply chains, logistics systems, financial infrastructures, municipal services, digital platforms, and global circuits of production. Interdependence is total and inescapable. What fades is the experience of a common world: something collectively governed, normatively bounded, or morally meaningful. The systems on which people depend instead appear opaque, arbitrary, and unreachable. Desocietization, at its core, is interdependence without social mediation. In that setting, the idea of a legitimacy crisis loses force. It is no longer a crisis in the old sense because there is no social contract to violate, no moral economy to serve as a social countermovement in the sense E. P. Thompson or Karl Polanyi would have understood (Thompson 1971; Polanyi 2001 [1944]).
Desocietization differs from polarization, populism, and mistrust. Polarization presumes a shared social space that has been divided. Mistrust presumes a disappointed expectation of trust. Desocietization reaches further down, to the premise that we inhabit and can collectively govern a common social world. Once that premise weakens, low trust in government becomes only one symptom of a broader atmosphere of mistrust and political voicelessness (Giddens 1991; Durkheim 1997 [1893]; Pew Research Center 2025a).
Nothing about this is inevitable. Forty years of neoliberal restructuring produced it historically by shifting risk from states and employers onto households, weakening unions that once generalized norms beyond their own members, fragmenting public institutions, and expanding forms of platform labor in which dependence is individualized while control remains concentrated. Desocietization follows from the systematic dismantling of collective life’s mediating infrastructure (Hacker 2006; Western and Rosenfeld 2011; Rosenfeld 2014; Schor et al. 2020).
What fills the gap
Desocietization produces chronic ontological insecurity. That insecurity need not end in apathy or democratic withdrawal. It can also create demand: for boundedness, obligation, identity, and a credible account of how the world hangs together. When legitimate institutions cannot supply those things, substitute formations move in.
Much contemporary analysis misrecognizes what it is looking at here. The manosphere is misogynistic, but misogyny alone does not explain its social function. It offers disaffected men an account of status, injury, hierarchy, and obligation. Fascist nostalgia works in a related way: less as simple manipulation than as a substitute social totality, a mythic reconstruction of the social that promises coherence, enemies, duty, and rebirth. Conspiracism, too, cannot be reduced to an epistemic defect. It can furnish meaning, group belonging, and an explanation of injury in worlds where official knowledge has forfeited credibility and no persuasive collective alternative has emerged (Ging 2019; Griffin 1991; Robertson, Przybylski, and Douglas 2022). Anton Jäger has described the contemporary situation in terms of “hyperpolitics,” a condition in which everything is politicized but nothing is subject to actual political control. Unlike the lifeworld of, say, the DDR, this aestheticized politics provides a compensatory shell of ontological security without the concomitant institutions to do the work of politics (Jäger 2024).
These formations are not reducible to irrationality. They perform real social and psychological work in situations that generate genuine insecurity. Research on conspiracy belief increasingly suggests as much: such beliefs often grow out of alienation, identity threat, and the search for meaning rather than mere gullibility. Their durability follows from that function. People are rarely argued out of a compensatory structure by being shown that it is false. Such structures are displaced only when something more compelling performs the same social work better (Giddens 1991; Schnell et al. 2024).
The theoretical problem
The left has been poorly equipped to respond. Some of the weakness is organizational and material. Some of it is theoretical, and that theoretical problem needs to be stated directly.
Beginning in the 1970s, and accelerating through the 1980s and 1990s, an important strand of critical thought came to treat reconstructive projects—attempts to articulate a collective future, build durable institutions, or appeal to shared interests—as intrinsically suspect. Grand narratives were discredited. The subject was decentered. Institution-building was often read as discipline in disguise. Anti-totalization became an interpretive method and, increasingly, a moral reflex (Foucault 1977; Lyotard 1984; Brown 1995).
Much of that critique was necessary. It exposed domination concealed in universalism, exclusion concealed in consensus, and violence concealed in institutional routine. Yet something was lost. The anti-totalizing turn became historically inadequate at the precise moment when the right was reconstructing social totalities from the ground up, while neoliberal capitalism was building new institutions, new infrastructures of discipline, and new mythic frameworks at enormous scale. Critical theory became highly adept at diagnosing decomposition while increasingly reluctant to theorize repair. Under desocietization, that reluctance becomes a political liability. The demand for boundedness and common life does not disappear because theory has learned to distrust it. It migrates elsewhere.
The question this leaves
Post-legitimacy does not ask why people are irrationally turning toward reaction. Most are not irrational, as I argue with my colleague in research on public discourse following the East Palestine train derailment. People are responding, in damaged and often dangerous ways, to chronic insecurity and the disintegration of credible social mediation. They are seeking substitute structures of orientation, belonging, and collective identity. The real task is to challenge those structures through more than debunking: by building better alternatives.
That requires thinking differently about institutions. A return to midcentury liberalism will not be enough; neither will a technocratic patch or an anti-institutional reflex that leaves reconstruction to the right. Between the legitimist fantasy that existing institutions can simply be repaired and the anti-institutionalist reflex that sees domination in every collective form, there is room for a politics that treats ontological security as a material and political problem. Such a politics would understand the appeal of reactionary formations not as a pathology to be mocked away, but as a distorted response to needs that remain real.