The Cage and the Argument About Its Curtains

There is a feeling most people have about politics that they cannot quite name. It is not the feeling that their side is losing, though they may have that feeling too. It is the feeling that the entire argument is about the wrong thing. That the fury is real but the object of the fury is not. That they are being conscripted into a war whose real stakes are never mentioned, and that the energy they pour into it vanishes into a void, leaving everything exactly as it was.

This feeling is correct. And it is worth understanding why.

I.

Here is the simplest version of the claim: the culture war is an argument about the curtains inside a cage that neither side can see.

The cage is market totality — the condition in which every domain of human life has been absorbed into market logic, such that the economy is no longer a sphere of activity within society but the master framework within which all of society operates. Health is a market. Education is a market. Childhood is a market. Attention is a market. Dating is a market. Grief has a market (therapy, at $200/hour). Friendship has a market (networking, rebranded). Even the inner life has a market — meditation apps, wellness subscriptions, spiritual retreats with sliding-scale pricing.

The culture war — left versus right as we currently experience it — is an argument that takes place entirely inside this cage. The left says the cage should be more inclusive. The right says the cage should reward merit. The left wants to diversify who sits in the corner office. The right wants to ensure the corner office goes to the most qualified. Neither is asking why we live in an architecture of corner offices. Neither is asking whether the cage is a cage.

This is not a “both sides are the same” argument. The two sides have real differences, and those differences matter to real people. But the differences operate within a shared grammar — the grammar of market society — and that grammar is the thing that is destroying us. The argument over the curtains is not fake. The people are not fools. But the building is on fire, and the argument about the curtains cannot address the fire because it cannot see the building.

II.

To see the building, you have to understand what market totality actually is.

Markets are ancient and natural. They emerge wherever humans gather at sufficient scale. The Athenian agora, the medieval fair, the Moroccan souk — all involved exchange, price-discovery, and the rational pursuit of advantage. Markets as tools are among humanity’s great inventions, and critiquing them wholesale is as foolish as critiquing language or fire.

But there is a difference between a market within a society and a market society. Karl Polanyi named this distinction in 1944 and it remains the most important insight in political economy that almost no one has absorbed. In all prior civilizations, he argued, the economy was embedded in social life — in kinship, religion, civic obligation, and tradition. Markets existed, but they operated within a world that had independent sources of meaning and authority. You could leave the agora and return to a world governed by entirely different principles: the household, the temple, the polis.

The great transformation — Polanyi’s term for the revolution that produced modernity — reversed this relationship. The economy was disembedded from social life, and social life was re-embedded in the economy. Markets ceased to be a tool within society and became the operating system of society itself. Every institution, every relationship, every domain of human experience was progressively reorganized according to market logic — not because anyone decreed it, but because the market, once disembedded, exerts gravitational force on everything around it.

This is the cage. And its most remarkable feature is that it doesn’t look like a cage. It looks like freedom. It looks like choice. You can choose your career, your partner, your city, your identity, your spiritual practice, your gender, your breakfast cereal. The range of options is unprecedented in human history. What has collapsed is the range of logics by which those options can be evaluated. There is really only one: What maximizes my return? What is the cost-benefit? What is the ROI?

When all of life is a market, freedom of choice and imprisonment in market logic become the same thing.

III.

Now look at the culture war within this frame.

The mainstream left — not the socialist left, but the left that dominates institutions, media, and the professional class — is fundamentally a project of market inclusion. Its core demand is that the market should not discriminate: that women, people of color, queer people, and other historically excluded groups should have equal access to market rewards. This is a real and legitimate demand. Discrimination is real, its effects are devastating, and the people fighting it are fighting for something that matters.

But notice what this demand does not challenge. It does not challenge the market as the arena of human flourishing. It does not ask whether human flourishing can be achieved through market participation. It does not question the architecture — it diversifies the inhabitants. The endpoint of the cultural left’s project is a world in which a Black woman is equally likely to be CEO and equally likely to be crushed by medical debt. This is progress within the cage. It is not an escape from it.

Capital understands this perfectly, which is why it has so enthusiastically adopted the cultural left’s language. Goldman Sachs has a rainbow logo. Raytheon celebrates Women’s History Month. Amazon posts about racial justice while fighting unionization with Pinkerton-level aggression. This is not hypocrisy. It is coherence. The cultural left’s demands are compatible with market totality because they are demands for equal access to the market, not demands that the market relinquish its claim to totality. Capital can purchase these demands. It can hire a Chief Diversity Officer. It cannot hire someone to decommodify human life.

This is why the culture war, from the left’s side, feels simultaneously urgent and empty. The urgency is real — representation matters, discrimination kills. The emptiness is also real — nothing structural changes. The same people who fought for inclusive hiring at a tech company still can’t afford childcare. The victory is real and the victory is hollow, and the dissonance between these two facts is the source of the left’s permanent exhaustion.

IV.

The mainstream right — not the post-liberal right, but the right that dominates Fox News, talk radio, and the Republican base — is fundamentally a project of market nostalgia. Its core claim is that the market used to work, that it rewarded the right people (hardworking, traditional, self-reliant Americans), and that something has gone wrong — usually identified as government overreach, wokeness, or cultural decay.

But this claim is incoherent in a way that is almost poignant. The “traditional values” the right defends — family stability, community cohesion, religious practice, local rootedness — are precisely the values that the market has destroyed. The forces that emptied the churches, atomized the neighborhoods, turned parenting into a competitive optimization problem, and replaced community bonds with consumer choice are not leftist forces. They are market forces. The family farm was not destroyed by critical race theory. It was destroyed by agricultural consolidation, commodity pricing, and the logic of economies of scale. The small-town Main Street was not killed by pronouns. It was killed by Walmart, and then by Amazon.

The right’s nostalgia is for a world that the right’s own economic commitments made impossible. You cannot simultaneously champion deregulated markets and stable communities. You cannot simultaneously demand maximum labor flexibility and intact families. You cannot let capital flow freely across borders while expecting people to stay rooted in their hometowns. The market liquefies everything it touches — that is what markets do at the scale and intensity we have unleashed them — and the right has spent fifty years celebrating this liquefaction as “economic freedom” while mourning its social consequences as “cultural decline.”

The right points at the left and says: you are destroying our way of life. And the left is doing real cultural damage, in ways I have written about before — the flattening of language, the bureaucratization of human relationships, the replacement of genuine moral reasoning with procedural compliance. But the deeper destruction — the destruction of the material conditions that made traditional life possible — was accomplished by the market itself. The left is vandalizing the ruins. The market built the wrecking ball.

This is why the culture war, from the right’s side, feels simultaneously righteous and futile. The righteousness is real — something precious has been lost. The futility is also real — the right cannot recover what was lost because it will not name what destroyed it. It rages at symptoms because acknowledging the cause would require rethinking its most foundational commitment: that the free market is the engine of the good society.

V.

So both sides of the culture war are trapped in complementary delusions.

The left believes it is fighting the system by demanding that the system be more inclusive. It is decorating the cage. Its most radical cultural demands — the ones that generate the most fury on the right — are precisely the demands that are most compatible with market logic, because they require only a change in who benefits from the system, not a change in the system itself. Capital can adapt to any identity politics. It cannot adapt to the argument that some things should not be for sale.

The right believes it is defending tradition against radical change. It is defending a memory of what the cage destroyed. Its fury is directed at the cultural left, whose provocations are real and visible, while the deeper force dissolving traditional life — the market itself — is treated as natural, as given, as beyond question. The right’s greatest enemy is not the left. It is the right’s own inability to see that the free market and the traditional society it mourns cannot coexist, because the former systematically destroys the latter.

Both sides, then, are performing a kind of displacement. The real crisis — that the market has absorbed all of human life and left us with no independent ground on which to stand — is too large and too structural to be addressed within the existing political framework. So the energy that should go toward confronting market totality is displaced onto the culture war, which has the advantage of being dramatic, emotionally satisfying, and utterly incapable of changing anything fundamental.

The culture war is not a distraction from politics. It is a distraction within politics — the mechanism by which political energy is absorbed and neutralized, leaving the structure of market society untouched. It is, in the most precise sense, a spectacle: a performance of conflict that functions to prevent the conflict that would matter.

VI.

But this is changing. And the change is the most important political development of our time.

On the left, the economic turn is real. The Sanders movement, the resurgence of labor organizing, the growing comfort with words like “public goods” and “decommodification” — these represent a genuine break from the cultural left’s market-compatible politics. When someone argues for universal healthcare, they are not arguing for a more inclusive market. They are arguing that health is a domain of human life that should not be marketized at all. That is a Polanyian move — a re-embedding of the economy in social logic. Same with the arguments for public housing, free education, and the pushback against private equity’s colonization of healthcare, housing, and elder care.

On the right, the post-liberal turn is equally real, if smaller and more intellectually concentrated. Patrick Deneen’s argument that liberalism has succeeded — that its consequences are not failures but fulfillments of its premises — is a genuine break from the conservative mainstream. Oren Cass’s economic nationalism, which argues that the market should be subordinated to the interests of workers and families, is a genuine break from the Republican orthodoxy of tax cuts and deregulation. The American Affairs crowd, the “common good capitalism” contingent, the young conservatives who are reading Polanyi and Lasch and Wendell Berry — these people are asking the structural question that the mainstream right has refused to ask for decades.

Here is the remarkable thing: these two groups — the economic left and the post-liberal right — are converging on the same diagnosis. Both are saying, in different vocabularies: the market cannot be the total framework for human life. The economic left says this in the language of solidarity, public goods, and class struggle. The post-liberal right says this in the language of tradition, family, community, and the common good. They would disagree violently about almost everything else. But they share the foundational insight that Polanyi articulated eighty years ago: that a self-regulating market, left to its own devices, will destroy the human and natural substance of society.

This convergence is invisible within the culture war frame, because the culture war is designed — not intentionally, but structurally — to prevent exactly this recognition. As long as the economic left is fighting the post-liberal right over abortion, and as long as the post-liberal right is fighting the economic left over immigration, neither will notice that they are both pointing at the same cage.

VII.

Let me be concrete about what the shared diagnosis looks like, using the clearest case I know: children.

A child is born. What happens next?

If you are a progressive parent in a coastal city, you will do the following, roughly in order: research daycares (average cost: $15,000–$25,000/year), hire a nanny or negotiate parental leave (if your employer offers it), apply to preschools with admissions processes modeled on college applications, enroll your child in enrichment activities (music, language, swim, coding), begin saving for private school or positioning for a selective public school, manage homework and test prep, and accumulate a portfolio of extracurriculars that will distinguish your child in the college admissions market. You will say, constantly, “I just want them to be happy.” You will not notice that every decision you make is structured by competitive market logic. The child’s happiness is defined by the market before you even begin to pursue it.

If you are a conservative parent in a suburb or small town, you will do a version of the same thing — different sports, different enrichment activities, different cultural valence — but the underlying logic is identical. You will drive your child to travel soccer three times a week. You will hire a private pitching coach. You will spend $1,000+ per year per child on a single sport. You will say you value “fun” and “character.” You will not notice that the volunteer coach who used to run the neighborhood league has been replaced by a paid professional, that the community infrastructure that once made childhood activities free has been destroyed, and that you are now purchasing from the market what used to be given by the community. You will call this “investing in my kid.”

Both parents — progressive and conservative — are doing the same thing: raising a child inside the cage. The progressive parent adds inclusive values. The conservative parent adds traditional values. Neither notices that the structure of their parenting — the competitive logic, the optimization mindset, the cost-benefit calculus, the substitution of purchased services for community bonds — is identical.

And neither can articulate what was lost, because what was lost was gratuitous community — the experience of childhood as something that happened within a web of non-market relationships, where a neighbor coached your team for free, where you played in the street until dark with kids of all ages, where the social fabric preceded and supported the child’s development rather than having to be purchased as a service.

That world was not destroyed by the left or the right. It was destroyed by the market — by suburban sprawl, by the collapse of civic institutions, by the dual-income necessity, by the professionalization of everything, by the optimization mindset that treats childhood as a production process. And it cannot be recovered by either side of the culture war, because both sides have accepted the market as the frame within which childhood occurs. They argue about what values to install in the child. They do not argue about whether the child should be installed in the market.

VIII.

What is the unnamed position? What does it actually look like to reject market totality — not from the left, not from the right, but from the ground up?

It is not socialism, exactly, though it shares socialism’s insistence that some goods should be decommodified. It is not conservatism, exactly, though it shares conservatism’s reverence for stable forms, unchosen obligations, and the authority of tradition. It is not libertarianism, obviously. It is not progressivism, because progressivism has largely made its peace with market society and is content to redecorate.

The unnamed position holds that there are domains of human life that are destroyed by marketization, and that the task of politics is to identify those domains and re-embed them in non-market logic.

Health is one. You do not shop for an oncologist the way you shop for a television. The introduction of market logic into healthcare does not produce “consumer choice” — it produces a sick person frantically comparing deductibles while a tumor grows. The market frame is not merely inefficient here. It is ontologically wrong. It treats a human being in extremis as a consumer, and this mismatch between frame and reality produces suffering that no amount of market reform can address. Only removing healthcare from the market addresses it.

Education is another. The optimization of education for “outcomes” — test scores, executive function, college placement — is the market colonizing childhood. It does not produce well-educated human beings. It produces anxious, credentialed labor units who have been trained to perform but not to think, to optimize but not to wonder, to achieve but not to rest. The frame is, again, ontologically wrong. A child is not an investment. Learning is not production. To treat them as such is not to apply a useful tool to education — it is to replace education with something else entirely while keeping the name.

Community is a third. The replacement of neighborhoods with housing markets, of civic associations with networking events, of churches with wellness brands, of friendships with “social capital” — all of this is the market entering domains where its logic is destructive. You cannot purchase community. The attempt to do so produces a simulacrum — a thing that looks like community from the outside but lacks the essential feature, which is that real community is given, unchosen, and free. You belong to a community not because you selected it from a menu of options but because you were born into it, or called to it, or stuck with it. The market cannot produce this because the market’s fundamental operation is choice, and community’s fundamental character is givenness.

The unnamed position also holds that the culture war, as currently configured, is a mechanism for preventing the recognition of market totality as the shared enemy. As long as the left is fighting the right over representation, and the right is fighting the left over tradition, neither will notice that the force destroying both representation and tradition is the same force: the market’s absorption of all human life into its logic.

This does not mean the culture war’s issues are unreal. Racism is real. The erosion of family is real. The claims of marginalized people are real. The claims of rooted communities are real. But the framing of these issues as a binary conflict between progressive and conservative positions within market society prevents anyone from asking the structural question: What if the problem is not who wins within the market, but that the market has won?

IX.

I want to speak directly to both sides, because both need to hear something they do not want to hear.

To the right: You think you are defending tradition. You are not. You are defending a memory of tradition while living a life that is entirely structured by the forces that destroyed it. Your children are in travel sports. Your community is a subdivision. Your church, if you attend one, competes for your attention with Netflix and youth soccer tournaments scheduled on Sunday mornings. The market did this. Not the left. The left is irritating, sometimes destructive, often absurd. But the left did not gut your Main Street. Walmart did. The left did not destroy your church’s social role. The automobile and the suburb did. The left did not turn your child’s childhood into a competitive optimization problem. The $40-billion youth sports industry did. If you are serious about tradition, you will have to become serious about constraining the market — and that means abandoning the libertarian economic consensus that has defined the right for fifty years. The free market and the traditional society cannot coexist. Choose.

To the left: You think you are fighting the system. You are not. You are performing a fight that the system has learned to absorb and monetize. Your corporate diversity initiatives do not threaten capital; they provide it with moral cover. Your identity discourse does not challenge market logic; it extends market logic to new domains by encouraging people to understand themselves as brands, as portfolios of identities to be curated and marketed. The personal is political, you say — and the market heard you, and promptly made the political personal, which is to say, consumable. If you are serious about justice, you will have to become serious about decommodification — about removing entire domains of human life from market logic — and that means allying with people whose cultural commitments make you uncomfortable. The post-liberal conservative who wants to protect families from market predation and the socialist who wants to protect workers from market exploitation are natural allies on the structural question, even if they disagree about everything else. The culture war prevents this alliance. That is its function.

X.

I don’t have a program. I distrust anyone who does. Programs are what the technocratic mind produces when it encounters a problem, and the technocratic mind is itself a symptom of the disease.

But I have a conviction, which is this: the first step is seeing the cage. Not escaping it — we are all inside it, and pretending otherwise is just another form of market-compatible lifestyle branding (”I’m off-grid, I’m authentic, I’ve opted out” — said no one who has actually opted out, because actually opting out doesn’t come with a narrative). The first step is simply the recognition that the frame exists. That cost is not the only language of value. That efficiency is not the only measure of a life. That when you feel the pull to justify everything — your child’s play, your afternoon’s idleness, your unproductive friendship, your impractical faith — in terms of what it produces, you are hearing the voice of the cage. And you can, at least for a moment, decline to answer in its language.

Martin Heidegger, who was catastrophically wrong about politics but uncannily right about technology, called the cage Gestell — enframing — and described its danger this way: it threatens us “with the possibility that it could be denied to [us] to enter into a more original revealing.” Meaning: the danger is not that we will believe false things. The danger is that we will lose the capacity to see certain true things — that a river is not merely a resource, that a child is not merely a developing worker, that a neighborhood is not merely a housing market, that a human life cannot be optimized because it is not a process.

The culture war cannot address this danger because the culture war operates within the frame. Both sides are arguing in the language of the cage — the left in the language of market access, the right in the language of market meritocracy — and neither can see the cage as a cage because to do so would require a language that the cage has made nearly extinct: the language of the sacred, the given, the gratuitous, the common good.

These words sound archaic. They are not fashionable on the left, where they smell of religion. They are not fashionable on the right, where they smell of socialism. They are not fashionable anywhere, because fashion is a market, and these words are what the market cannot metabolize.

That is precisely why they matter. The things the market cannot metabolize are the things the market has not yet destroyed. They are the remainder. The residue. The seed bank.

Somewhere, a parent is watching their kid play in the dirt, doing nothing productive, and is resisting the urge to make it educational. Somewhere, a neighbor is coaching a team for free, for no reason other than that the kids are there and he knows how to throw a ball. Somewhere, a person is sitting in a church or a meeting hall or a living room, bound to people they did not choose, doing something that has no ROI.

These are not nostalgic fantasies. They are acts of resistance against the total market — small, inarticulate, and more radical than any political program. They are moments when the cage becomes, briefly, visible — and a human being, for no reason that the market can comprehend, declines to be a resource.

That is where politics begins. Not in the culture war. Not in the next election. Not in any program or platform. It begins in the moment when you see the frame and refuse to let it be the last word about what is real.

The left tells you what to think. The right makes it impossible to think otherwise. The task is to think anyway.