Both neoconservatism and neoliberalism are quite compatible with today’s regulatory state and the new American regime. Both center around the activities of defining and providing health and safety. Furthermore, both focus on perfecting the realm of health and safety without regard to the public-private divide. And both prioritize that effort over the totalitarian goal of making the realm of health and safety universal.

Although their moral agendas may differ in the particulars, both “neos” are concerned to advance the same sorts of objectives for the same sorts of reasons (parsing the legitimacy of political liberty and the value of civil liberties accordingly). Although these motives and goals have been part of the intellectual conversation for decades—first appearing on the “conservative left” that constituted “first wave” neoconservatism—not until now has the American regime so deeply internalized and externalized its scope and methods.

What we have today then is something quite “neo,” historically speaking: a robust regulatory state that pursues health and safety at the expense of liberty in the context of a culture that demands robust interpersonal freedom. Rather than stamping out hedonistic pursuits and pleasure-centered living, 1984 style, the new statism creates a “safe” space for their “healthy” experience. Yet, rather than expanding the project limitlessly, Brave New World style, so as to make all pleasure official, the new statism tacitly acknowledges that our most potent appetites can never be fully domesticated, even with all the tools of force, surveillance, and coercion at the government’s disposal. The kind of motion that defines our age is not the crossing between public and private that once characterized our regime. Instead, it is now an oscillation between the realms of health-safety and sickness-danger.