In the midst of a massive global attack on the welfare state and social provisions fueled by neoliberal policies, the social contract central to liberal democracies has been shredded and with it any viable notion of solidarity, economic justice and the common good. Progress has been turned into its opposite and registers more inequality, suffering and violence. The older language of collective rights has given way to the discourse of individual rights, and the vocabulary of collaboration and compassion has been uprooted by a discourse of radical individualism and a harsh, survival-of-the fittest ethos. "Freedom" has morphed into a synonym for unbridled self-interest and a rationale for abdicating any sense of moral and political responsibility.
Under global neoliberalism, the future is viewed as more of a curse than a blessing and has lost its value as what Zygmunt Bauman calls "the safest and most promising location for investing [one's] hopes." In contrast, as Bauman observes in his contribution to The Great Regression, the future has now become a repository for projecting our most dreaded anxieties. He writes that such fears and apprehensions are now driven by a number of elements that have come to characterize neoliberal societies:
"...the growing scarcity of jobs, of falling incomes reducing our and our children's life chances, of the yet greater frailty of our social positions and the temporality of our life achievements, of the increasingly widening gap between the tools, resources and skills at our disposal and the momentousness of the challenges facing us. Above all, we feel our control over our own lives slipping from our hands, reducing us to the status of pawns moved to and fro in a chess game played by unknown players indifferent to our needs, if not downright hostile and cruel, and all too ready to sacrifice us in pursuit of their own objectives. Not so long ago associated with more comfort and less inconvenience, what the thought of the future tends nowadays to bring to mind most often is the gruesome menace of being identified or classified as inept and unfit for the task, denied value and dignity, and for that reason marginalized, excluded and outcast."
The dream of the democracy has turned into a nightmare as more and more people are considered expendable and subject to the whims of a market that reduces them to the status of merely surviving rather than getting ahead. The failure of neoliberalism's promise of social mobility, equal opportunity, employment and privatized dream worlds gave way to regressive taxation, off shoring, deindustrialization, the slashing of social provisions, the dismantling of public services and the rise of right-wing populism. Desperation, isolation and a sense of abandonment coupled with the collapse of democratic institutions and public spheres have produced a new collective fatalism all over the globe.
Growing Support for Authoritarianism
The increasing failure of global neoliberalism has produced the conditions in which more and more people are inclined to express support for authoritarian alternatives that reproduce the power of right-wing populist nationalists and favor the interest of white majorities who advocate a return of barricades and borders rather than eliminating the systemic conditions of economic, cultural and social domination. Viktor Orba'n, the Hungarian prime minister, spoke for many when he proclaimed that societies founded on liberal principles will not be able to compete successfully in a global market and that there is no reason for democracies to be liberal in order to be successful. According to Orba'n, the state is not defined by democratic values, but by its economic and cultural interests, interests that fall on the side of a growing number of far-right regimes. He writes:
"The new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not deny foundational values of liberalism, as freedom, etc. But it does not make this ideology a central element of state organization, but applies a specific, national, particular approach in its stead.... We are searching for (and we are doing our best to find, ways of parting with Western European dogmas, making ourselves independent from them) the form of organizing a community, that is capable of making us competitive in this great world-race.
This worldwide rejection of liberal democracy is fueled by a landscape of massive instability, inequality, fear and insecurity driven by a counter-revolutionary global capitalism of permanent change that, in the words of Pankaj Mishra, can neither "fulfil its own promise of general prosperity [or conceal] its contempt for the democratic principle of equality." In the place of failed states and broken economies, there has been a retreat into promises offered by the rise of the security state, racial cleansing, economic nationalism, xenophobia and a call for the suppression of dissent and a growing emphasis on law and order.
Heinrich Geiselberger has called this "the great regression," an apt metaphor for the growing collapse of public discourse, values and democratic institutions and public spheres. As is well documented, the toxic effects of neoliberalism cannot be separated from diverse counter-revolutionary and right-wing populist forces that have contributed to the resurgence of authoritarianism across the globe.
The political crises and earthquakes shaking the foundations of liberal democracy reveal more than the pent-up collective energies of despair, rage and insecurity. They also speak to the growing mechanisms of exclusion and ideologies of racist contempt that have returned with a vengeance all over Europe and in the United States. Dressed up in the discourse of a ruthless hyper-capitalism, the crises haunting liberal democracies across the globe have provided fodder for right-wing demagogues to promote nationalistic policies. In so doing, they denounce democratic values in the name of a popular will that both resents what the political establishment has done to them and is comfortable with political leaders who are xenophobic, authoritarian and patriarchal. Accompanying the rise of authoritarian states in Russia, India, Turkey, Hungary, Egypt, the Philippines and the United States, among others, there is also the growing presence of right-wing political formations in France, Greece, Italy and a number of other countries.
Rising Bigotry and Nationalism
Politics has become more personal, wrapping itself in the narrow embrace of cultural nationalism and racial, religious and ethnic bigotry. Historic calls for democratization that marked the post-war period have given rise, in part, to a collective anxiety and apprehension fueled by a despair and anger deeply tied to a form of casino capitalism that camouflaged its underlying modes of oppression and politics of disposability in the seductive yet failed discourses of freedom and justice, both of which were defined in strictly economic and market terms. Stoked by fear and a resentment toward those considered a threat to white nationalist ideologies, the retreat from the imposed death-dealing effects of neoliberalism parading as democracy gave rise to the awkward return of the repressive ideologies of ethno-nationalism, the stifling of dissent and exaltation of state violence as a mode of governance.
For instance, under Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey there has been a return to the traditions and grandeur of an Ottoman past. In India, the right-wing ideologue, Narendra Modi, has resurrected the ideology of Hindu nationalism. In a similar vein, President Trump has fueled a culture of fear, racism and demonization as part of his efforts to resuscitate a culture of white Christian nationalism has reproduced in the first part of his presidency his own brand of political illiberalism. As Paul Mason points out:
"If we analyse Trump through his actions, rather than his garbled words, it is political illiberalism that has won out during the first seven months of his presidency. When a judge blocked his Muslim immigration ban, he attacked the judiciary's constitutional role. When the press revealed malfeasance, he labeled them 'enemies of the American people.' When James Comey refused Trump's appeals for 'loyalty,' he was sacked."
White resentment and white nationalism have come to symbolize Trump's politics, beginning with his egregious and false claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and taking shape in his appointment of white nationalists, such as Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon, to the highest levels of government -- an issue I have discussed in detail in my forthcoming book American Nightmare: The Challenge of American Authoritarianism (City Lights Press, 2018). Such measures have bolstered his credibility with white militias, neo-Nazis and other white nationalist groups. Carol Anderson correctly states that "The guiding principle in Mr. Trump's government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage -- that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration."
Arjun Appadurai argues that what Trump and similar authoritarian leaders have in common is a hatred of democracy because it stands in the way of their monomaniacal efforts to seize political power. In his contribution to The Great Regression anthology, he writes:
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