By Austin McNeill Brown
As someone who has spent years theorizing the erosion of democratic subjectivity under neoliberalism, I have become increasingly interested in the figure of the suburban subject. I do not see it as a relic of postwar prosperity, but as a deeply contradictory participant in today’s political crisis.
Most Americans live in the suburbs. The suburbs today decide elections. Thus, for me , the suburban subjectivity seems to be at the normative core of what constitutes the American psyche. To understand the US is to understand the suburban life and all of it’s real and imagined meanings, images, and culture.
During the first Trump era, (and now in its new authoritarian form), it has become clear to me that suburbia functions not merely as a place but as a political apparatus. It produces a particular kind of subject – a subject that has been systematically depoliticized, atomized, and subtly groomed to respond to authoritarianism not with resistance but with confused allegiance, or tacit acceptance. Resistance, if any, is verbal (or digital), performative, and relies on a morality which may or may not exist outside of the suburban sphere. It is a call out to normative ethical assumptions held by suburban America (belief in equality before the law, assumed justice for all, and of equal opportunity). Trump represents a transgression against the assumed values of suburban sphere, and yet, the image of Trump (and is rise to power) is very much an American phenomenon. It is this contradiction which itself has allowed the suburban subject to become inert in the face of authoritarian crises.
Yet, I also see the potential to liberate the American mind from this contradictory and lobotomized suburban subjectivity and reorient it toward democratic resistance. This means not simply criticizing suburbia from the outside but transforming its internal logic. The suburbs can be more than buffers against urban crisis and racialized fear; they can become spaces of relational repair, civic renewal, and imaginative refusal. In fact, I would state that if the US is to not only survive, but rebuild itself in a post-Trump era, it must begin by renegotiating the American suburban psyche itself.
How Suburbia Constructs the Subject
Suburbia has never just been about housing, schools, or lawns. It is a project of normalization. Drawing from Foucault’s concept of the disciplinary society, I argue that the suburban subject is created through a network of diffuse mechanisms: mortgages, property tax incentives, zoning laws, security infrastructures, and aesthetic codes that define what counts as “desirable.” These are not simply policy tools. They are technologies of the self, shaping how people understand their agency, their fears, and their responsibilities (Foucault, 1977).
Influenced by Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society, I see suburban subjectivity not as traditionally repressed but as deeply exhausted. The suburban subject constantly monitors and optimizes itself through diet, investment, parenting, and performance, all while becoming increasingly isolated (Han, 2015). This isolation does not just sap collective power. It renders the subject vulnerable to authoritarian messaging that promises safety, hierarchy, and restored order.
Trumpism did not create this dynamic. It capitalized on it. It recoded suburban anxiety as moral panic, targeting a long-standing fear of disorder and status loss. The racial and gendered subtexts of the “law and order” appeal are well known. What struck me most was how smoothly that message integrated into the daily life of many suburban communities. The fear was not merely of crime or decline. It was a deeper anxiety that the world might stop conforming to the internalized image of the good life—a life curated, detached from conflict, and managed in orderly silence.
Authoritarianism as a Mirror of Suburban Crisis
What Trump offered suburban voters was not only protection from change. He offered to restore a sense of meaning that had already begun to decay. My concept of “attrition,” developed in my General Theory of Attrition, describes this slow and ambient loss. It captures the erosion of collective purpose, relational depth, and political imagination.
I believe suburban spaces are among the most intensified sites of this phenomenon. They are simultaneously cushioned and collapsing. What appears to be stability from the outside often conceals profound emptiness on the inside.
In many of the suburbs I have studied or lived in, the emotional infrastructure feels hollow. People move through spaces of comfort and efficiency without rootedness or shared narrative. That void becomes fertile ground for reactionary politics. It is not apathy that drives suburban support for authoritarianism; it is grief disguised as grievance. The authoritarian leader becomes a figure who promises to fill the void, offering identity, purpose, and punishment in a single frame.
Reclaiming the Political Within the Suburban Self
I do not believe we can confront this threat solely by criticizing Trump or warning about fascism. We must start with the everyday subject, particularly those living in suburban environments of America. The fight against authoritarianism must be inward-facing as much as it is outward-facing. It must involve a reconfiguration of how people understand their lives, their time, their relationships, and their ethical obligations to others.
Drawing again from Han’s Psychopolitics, I see the suburban subject as one governed less by external repression and more by internalized competition. This means that resistance cannot rely on traditional moral appeals alone. It must introduce a new ethic, one based on relationality rather than optimization, and forms of care rather than control or discipline (Han, 2017). We need a counter-narrative to the self-contained, property-centered mode of life. This involves reclaiming the commons not only as physical space but also as an emotional and ethical orientation. It also means recognizing private space and private lives as a part of the public sphere – as a kind of psychological commons that affects us all.
Practically speaking, this might look like neighbors building trust through small acts of solidarity: organizing mutual aid groups, creating collective childcare networks, participating in local food systems, or hosting reading circles that open up difficult conversations. These may sound modest, but in a space designed to prevent connection, such acts are profoundly subversive. They resist the logic of isolation and reintroduce the political into spaces of artificial neutrality.
Tactical Re-politicization and the Role of Everyday Infrastructure
I use the term tactical re-politicization to describe the process of rebuilding democratic consciousness in depoliticized spaces. Suburbs are a perfect case for this strategy. Rather than waiting for national narratives to shift, we can begin to lay down alternative infrastructures right now.
These include new systems of accountability, democratic education, communal land trusts, and participatory neighborhood assemblies. But they also include imaginative infrastructure: stories, symbols, and rituals that help people feel something different from fear or scarcity.
The suburban subject has long been told that politics is a dangerous intrusion and that safety is synonymous with distance. What I want to propose instead is a version of safety rooted in interdependence. When the fence becomes a place of gathering rather than a boundary of exclusion, the political returns in a hopeful form.
From Liberal Individualism to Post-Suburban Subjectivity
Wendy Brown’s writing on the ruins of neoliberalism has deeply shaped my thinking about this moment. She argues that what looks like collapse can also be the beginning of something else. The crisis of meaning that many people feel, especially in suburban spaces, can become the opening for a new kind of political subjectivity (Brown, 2019).
In my work, I have begun to think about what I call the post-suburban subject. This is not simply someone who leaves the suburbs or renounces comfort. It is someone who begins to perceive the relational threads that tie them to others, even across difference and distance. It is someone who understands that freedom is not the absence of obligation but the capacity to respond ethically to others. It is someone who redefines success as the ability to share a world.
We will not defeat authoritarianism through outrage alone. We need a subject who is whole enough to refuse the seduction of cruelty. We need someone who has tasted enough connection to reject the myth of supremacy. I believe this subject can emerge from the suburbs if we are willing to do the quiet, intimate, and deeply political work of rebuilding relational life.
The Future of Resistance Lies in Ordinary Spaces
Suburbs are not just swing districts or zones of comfort. They are psychic and spatial front lines in the struggle for democracy. If we want to defend democratic life in the United States and beyond, we must begin in the very spaces that neoliberalism has taught us to ignore.
My work on attrition is not simply a critique. It is a call to look closely at the subtle ways our worlds are thinning out. I want us to notice when connection feels burdensome, when time feels devoured, and when relationships feel instrumental. These are not personal failings. They are systemic signals that we have been co-opted by an inhumane logic which reduces all things to cost-benefit, and they must be interrupted.
The interruption does not need to be dramatic. It can begin on a sidewalk, at a community center, or during a walk. It can begin when someone decides that safety does not require silence. It can begin when someone chooses to act as a neighbor rather than just a property owner. This is where a new kind of subject can be formed. And this is where authoritarianism begins to lose its grip.
References
Brown, W. (2006). Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton University Press.
Brown, W. (2019). In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. Columbia University Press.
Butler, J. (2020). The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. Verso.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books.
Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press.
Han, B.-C. (2017). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso.
McNeill Brown, A. (2023). General Theory of Attrition (manuscript in progress).
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