The United States as a Laboratory of Late-Modern Power

by A. McNeill Brown

I spend a lot of time thinking about Foucault. And I often wonder what he would have to say about the current state of affairs in the US over the last decade. In recent years, I have come to see the United States less as a coherent nation-state and more as an unstable testing ground. It functions as a kind of laboratory for what Michel Foucault called late-modern power. From the fragmentation of truth and governance to the intensification of surveillance, the U.S. offers an increasingly unvarnished view of how power operates. This power no longer relies primarily on domination but instead functions through normalization, crisis management, and the internalization of control.

Power Has Changed, But Not Disappeared

We often think of power in terms of sovereignty: police, borders, punishment, and the state. However, Foucault insisted that modernity shifted the axis of control. In his words, we moved from “the power to take life or let live” to “the power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault, 1978, p. 138). This is what he termed biopower: a form of power that manages populations, bodies, health, and risk. It does not operate solely through brute force but instead employs subtle forms of regulation.

In today’s U.S., this dynamic has reached an extreme. Biopower and sovereign power do not replace one another; they coexist in a state of tension. One moment, power appears as health policy, educational testing, or wellness apps. In the next, it erupts in police shootings, militarized borders, and forced births. As Foucault wrote in Society Must Be Defended, “biopower does not exclude death… it establishes a relationship between life and mechanisms of death” (2003, p. 254). The contradictions of this coexistence are everywhere in American life.

Crisis as a Mode of Rule

If there is a defining rhythm to contemporary American governance, it is a permanent crisis. Gun violence, opioid overdose, ecological collapse, housing shortages, and racialized policing are not just malfunctions of an otherwise healthy system. They are part of a political rationality in which crisis serves as a governing tool.

Foucault’s notion of governmentality (i.e. the rationality by which populations are managed) helps us understand how crisis is instrumentalized. Neoliberal governmentality, in particular, relies on this strategy. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault explains that neoliberalism does not aim to control the economy or protect citizens in the traditional sense. Instead, it reshapes citizens into entrepreneurs of the self, responsible for their own survival in a hostile environment (Foucault, 2008). In the U.S., we see this logic everywhere: in every broken healthcare bill, every crowdfunding campaign for medical care, and every invocation of personal responsibility amid systemic abandonment.

The Crisis of Truth and the Proliferation of “Truth Games”

What does it mean to live in a society where even the concept of truth is in question?

Foucault argued that truth is not discovered but produced. It is produced within institutions, discourses, and networks of power (Foucault, 1980). In today’s United States, we are witnessing a breakdown in the institutions that traditionally produced consensus – journalism, science, education, and the public sphere more broadly. As these institutions lose authority, we are left with competing systems of knowledge, each vying for legitimacy.

From the conspiratorial logics of QAnon to the algorithmic outputs of public health dashboards, the United States has become a battleground for what Foucault called “truth games.” The state no longer monopolizes knowledge, and neither do universities or media outlets. Instead, platforms, influencers, and artificial intelligence all contribute to shaping what counts as real. Truth is defined by exposure and virality, not by evidence and history.

Surveillance, Normalization, and the Internalization of Control

Foucault’s Discipline and Punish remains prophetic. He warned that modern power does not only function through surveillance, but through the internalization of norms. The panopticon is no longer limited to prisons; it is embedded in our smartphones, fitness trackers, and social media platforms. It is present in the algorithms that shape our behavior online and the credit scores that track our reliability as economic actors. Our health is purely defined by our productive capacities to engage in markets and productive system.

In the United States, this form of surveillance has intensified. Shoshana Zuboff (2019) calls it surveillance capitalism. We are not just monitored; we are continuously optimized and profiled. And crucially, we participate in this willingly. As Han (2017) noted, in neoliberal regimes of power, individuals become complicit in their own domination by willingly opting into systems of surveillance and control; “freedom itself leads to a voluntary self-exploitation” (Han, 2017, p. 8). These practices are framed as expressions of freedom—freedom to consume, to express, to improve ourselves. What results is a situation in which subjects internalize control. We come to manage ourselves in accordance with power’s imperatives, often believing we are acting freely.

Conclusion: The American Laboratory

The United States does not represent a failure of power. It reveals how power has mutated. It is a place where late-modern power experiments with new forms, that are disciplinary and sovereign, technocratic and conspiratorial, digital and militarized. Here, the promise of neoliberal freedom collides with the reality of structural abandonment. Truth itself becomes contested terrain, and governance fragments into techniques of crisis management and self-regulation.

Foucault would not have offered a conventional notion of hope. He believed that critique does not promise salvation. Instead, it creates the possibility to refuse the inevitability of the present. Our task is not to recover a lost political order, but to unmask the forms of power that shape us, and to imagine other ways of being.

“We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries” (Foucault, 1982, p. 216).

Reference

• Han, B.-C. (2017). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and the New Technologies of Power (E. Butler, Trans.). Verso.
• Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York: Pantheon Books.
• Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (C. Gordon, Ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.
• Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–795.
• Foucault, M. (2003). Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (D. Macey, Trans.). New York: Picador.
• Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (G. Burchell, Trans.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs.