The prospects of progressive politics are not looking good. Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere. Western democracies are now in thrall to the allure of authoritarianism. Why is this and what implications does it have for the future of progressive politics? It would seem that the best we can hope for now is the preservation of gains already made. Yet this may not be enough, since the failure of liberal democracy to pursue social justice has provided fertile ground for the rise of authoritarianism. Preserving the status quo when it was the status quo that produced much of the problems is not a solution.

The Trump-2 presidency is a major victory for the extreme right in western democracies as well as for Russia and its allies. A highly fractured Europe is now facing a long hybrid war with Russia while political tensions between the USA and China are mounting. This ‘polycrisis’ is all occurring in the context of a worsening climate emergency and intractable problems with reducing global carbon emissions. Progressive politics, already on the backfoot, is further challenged by a potential crisis of liberal democracy. The western democracies are fragile, and authoritarianism is also hardening elsewhere. Faith in democracy within countries such as the UK is at an all-time low, especially among young people.

The idea that democracy will spread to the non-democratic world also needs to be re-assessed. Dictatorships and autocratic politics are not the exception but the new normal (Applebaum 2024). It is often forgotten in recent analyses of the rise of the extreme right/right wing populism that dictatorships are the rule, rather than the exception, in the larger geopolitical context. The geographical space of progressive politics is shrinking. Since the second Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, sadly one of the main challenges for Europe today is re-armament. While this is necessary, it may detract from other important goals, such as climate change and social justice.

It is not all bad news: Western support for Ukraine until now has been at least positive and preserves the possibility of progressive politics in Ukraine, assuming it survives the war, which cannot at the moment be assumed. Spain, Ireland and Poland are examples of European countries so far successfully resisting the extreme right. Moldova has taken a stance against Russia and the student protest in Serbia beckons hope. Brazil rejected Bolsonaro and pulled back from the brink. Despite the abject failure, if not refusal, of the EU and the US to uphold humanitarian and human rights standards in face of the atrocities in the Middle East, above all those committed by Israel in Gaza, liberal democracy is still in need of protection. The post-1945 era of stability, which created some of the conditions for the flourishing of liberal democracy and progressive politics, is now long over and the cosmopolitan illusions of the 1990s need to be rethought for the present age of barbarity.

If the left does nothing more than maintain the status quo, that may be detrimental for both liberal democracy and for any kind of progressive politics.

My question in this short reflective piece, which is mostly written from a European perspective, is to what extent is the rise of political authoritarianism and the wider context of a world of autocracies closing down the space for progressive politics, such that all we can do is preserve what we have? Does the left have anything else to pursue other than to demand the rule of law? This might be a reasonable stance, but I argue that if the left does nothing more than maintain the status quo, that may be detrimental for both liberal democracy and for any kind of progressive politics, simply because many of the problems came from the status quo and are clearly not going to be solved by it. 

 

History Can Be a Poor Guide for the Present

Lessons from history can be invaluable but they can also be misleading. Analogies with the inter-war years are all too common nowadays, but such comparisons, however tempting, can be highly misleading since the world today is very different from the period 1925 to 1933 when democracy collapsed in Italy and Germany, paving the way for world war. It was a time when there were few democracies and, with some exceptions such as Britain and France, those that existed were recent ones and highly unstable. But even Britain had a Nazi King in 1936. Many of the European powers still commanded huge colonial empires which was where their sights were set. 

Capitalism is not in danger and exists in a variety of forms. It has proved to be compatible with authoritarianism… and with the new kinds of techno-capitalism.

The emergence of fascism in the early 20th century took place in the context of the global rise of communism and a very real challenge to Western capitalism. The situation today, despite the rise of political authoritarianism, is very different such that historical analogies with 1930s fascism and totalitarianism do not work well. Capitalism is not in danger and exists in a variety of forms. It has proved to be compatible with authoritarianism, as exemplified by China, Russia, and now the USA. It is of course also evident that neoliberalism is perfectly compatible with the new kinds of techno-capitalism that have developed with digitalization. There are no meaningful historical comparisons on this question, and history does not just repeat itself. 

Mussolini acquired dictatorial power in 1925 having ruled constitutionally, and Hitler acquired power in 1933 through parliamentary democracy. These were weak democracies, and the military complied with the nascent autocrats. It is unlikely Trump, despite the erosion of rights and law since his second inauguration, will be able to emulate the past victories of European dictators. Moreover, it is unlikely that the US military would be compliant with such an attempt, since it is shaped for external combat, not domestic oppression. The 6th January 2021 attempted coup is an example of a failed coup. Fascism also required the organization of mass violence. Despite the dangers of the extreme right, the same degree of organised mass violence is not a feature of the current situation. 

There are no meaningful comparisons with Hitler, Stalin and Mao whose reigns of terror were unprecedented in scale and intensity of violence: the Holocaust, Stalin’s Great Terror 1936-8 and Mao’s Cultural Revolution are without comparison in world history. Yet, despite considerable progress in science and the advancement of democracy and peace since 1945, the world is today a much more dangerous place than it was in the post-1945 period, with the climate emergency and the real risk of nuclear war. To assess the new dangers and the new opportunities, we need to think without being tied to past analogies.

 

Democracies and Dictatorships around the Globe

According to Democracy Report 2024, the world is now almost evenly divided between 91 democracies and 88 autocracies. 79% of the world’s population live in the latter while only 21% live in liberal democracies.¹ The level of democracy as measured by what is enjoyed by the average person is down to 1985-levels and by country to 1998. This is particularly stark in Eastern Europe and Asia. Israel has fallen out of the liberal democracy category. There are some exceptions: Latin America and the Caribbean go against the global trend and Brazil resisted the Bolsonaro’s attempted coup. The report highlights the deterioration in the quality of democracy – freedom of association, freedom of expression, fair and free elections compared to ten years ago – and while some countries are democratizing, more appear to be autocratizing.

Against that broad global background, which challenges the notorious ‘end of history’ scenario of the world-wide triumph of democracy and the optimism of the early 1990s, there is the additional trend towards illiberalism in western liberal democracies, which are also experiencing an increase in the electoral appeal of the extreme right (and various kinds of right-wing populism). One could well pose the question whether democracies will collapse into authoritarianism or indeed if dictatorships are likely to increase (Newell 2016). According to Barrington Moore in his now classic work, The Social Origins of Dictatorships and Democracies, there were three routes to political modernity: liberal democracy, fascism and communism (Moore 1966). The second was defeated in its main historical incarnation but the latter endured. Progressive politics today is to a very large degree dependent on liberal democracy or at least the existence of civil society – setting aside the fact civil society also produces right-wing populist organizations – even within non-liberal democracies. Increased autocratization in many countries closes down the space for progressive politics while paradoxically also making it more necessary, especially as the centre ground has little to offer as it struggles to keep the extreme right at bay. 

A general assessment is difficult because of the diversity both of liberal democracies and dictatorships. In fact, the appropriateness of both labels to describe existing political regimes has been put to doubt. The People’s Republic of China claims to be a democratic dictatorship; the Russian Federation claims to be a constitutional democracy, but it is more of a kleptocracy. By some accounts, the US has been an oligarchy for some time. Many of the autocratic countries mentioned in the above cited report have similar features to the twenty-century dictatorships, and many are continuations of them. However, there are also many departures from that pattern. Perhaps the most well-known position is the thesis of ‘spin-dictators,’ put forward by Guriev and Treisman (2022) who claim that modern dictators rely more on the manipulation of information than traditional repression. The argument is compelling, but it is not the full story, as evidenced by Russia in recent years where there has been a major increase in repression. It is also difficult to fully put a spin on the deaths of up to 200,000 Russian soldiers which Putin must sell to the Russian public as somehow necessary.

Dictatorships can be long-lasting, even if they might collapse overnight.

One is often struck by the sudden collapse of dictatorships and the hope that it gives rise to. The collapse of the Assad dictatorship on 5th December 2024 with Bashar Al-Assad’s flight to Moscow is a vivid reminder of how a regime can suddenly and unexpectedly fall. Other striking examples are those of the Arab Spring in the early 2010s and the events of 1989 in central and eastern Europe when the dictatorships collapsed one by one, as was perhaps most dramatically illustrated by Ernst Honecker’s flight to Chile in November 1989 and the end of Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime a month later. However, the reality is that dictatorships can be long-lasting, even if they might collapse overnight. The regimes of Mussolini, Hitler and Pol were short-lived, ending by external defeat, but the reality is that most dictatorships are highly durable. Franco ruled for 36 years from 1939 until his death in 1975; Stalin ruled for 29 years until his death in 1953, and the Soviet regime continued until 1991; Mao ruled from 1949 and the regime survived his death in 1976. Nicolae Ceausescu ruled Romania from 1965 to 1989; the Assad family ruled Syria from 1973 to 2024; Pinochet, the admired friend of Margaret Thatcher, ruled Chile for 17 years from 1973 to 1990; the Apartheid regime in South Africa lasted from 1948 to 1990. Europe’s so-called ‘Last Dictator,’ Alexander Lukashenko, has been in power in Belarus for 30 years.

The point is that dictatorships may be brittle, but they can last a long time, unless they experience external defeat or, and only with great difficulty, embark on the long road to internal defeat.² An exception was the peaceful end of the USSR in 1991 following the failure of Gorbachev’s reforms, which created the context for the end of the eastern European dictatorships. However, some of the post-communist regimes that replaced them have been far from perfect liberal democracies. 

Dictatorships have recourse to modes of repression that are not available to democracies, and this contributes to their capacity for endurance. Two of the world’s major dictatorships, Russia and China, show no signs of coming to an end. Democracies can morph in the direction of authoritarianism as, for example, India and Turkey (though they probably will not become fully fledged dictatorships in the twentieth-century tradition). So long as civil society exists, there is the prospect of internal transformation that goes beyond regime change. This of course can mean that new kinds of autocracy emerge, since civil society can also produce illiberal political organizations.

Authoritarian regimes work in two ways: they work through prohibition and repression – eliminating or reducing liberty – or by mobilizing people (hero worship for example, especially in the case of non-military dictatorships).³ Many dictatorships are tendentially totalitarian, a concept that is contested (Forti 2024). Hannah Arendt (1958) in The Origins of Totalitarianism distinguished between dictatorships, which seek to eliminate opponents, and totalitarianism, which aims at the total control of populations through depoliticization and atomization. She emphasized the obliteration of not just public life but also private life. Totalitarianism sought the domination of the human being from within. As Arendt also showed, totalitarian regimes were based on the power of deception through conflating truth and reality by methods such as propaganda and paranoia about conspiracies. They were obsessed with appearing lawful and many were obsessed with appearing to be democratic. Arendt’s theory is one of the most famous works on totalitarianism and in many ways is reflected in George Orwell’s 1949 dystopia Nineteen Eighty Four, but it is also a demonstration that totalitarianism ultimately fails since what it aims for – essentially control of the minds of human beings – is not possible. While the old military regimes, as reflected in the Assad Regime, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and perhaps today the military dictatorship in Myanmar, relied on total repression, others relied on the manipulation of truth for the suppression of dissent with the result that they fostered modes of rule that are distinctly dystopic.

Dictatorships and various kinds of autocracies continue to change and have developed technologies of government that display some features of totalitarianism, ultimately the erosion of society. As Anne Applebaum (2024) has brilliantly shown in a recent book, dictatorships today are part of a large, consolidated bloc based on kleptocratic financial structures, corruption and a complex of security apparatuses for surveillance and disinformation. Their tentacles spread into liberal democracies through corruption and de-stabilization. Christopher Walker in a similar vein has perceptively commented, ‘these regimes are able to monitor their own people in increasingly minute detail but are also able to choke off the opportunity for people to monitor their governments in return. Surveillance and secrecy — dominant features of important parts of today’s international operating environment — themselves create an enabling environment for authoritarian powers’ preferred modus operandi’ (2023). Understanding the changing nature of autocracy and its many forms is essential for both the protection of democracy and the advancement of progressive politics (Dirsus 2024).

 

The Allure of Authoritarianism

Western democracies may not all be in danger of autocracy, but the allure of authoritarianism persists within liberal democracies, which have produced major internal counter-movements. Why is this? 

One reason is that the old kinds of emancipation based on industrial male labour have ceased to offer a credible vision of the future. The historical support basis of the left, the industrial working class, has not perished but it is not the primary basis of progressive politics and the new support basis, the middle class, is divided between the right and the left. One of the key developments in the last ten years or so is that the centre right has lost ground, having in many cases made ill-fated alliances with the extreme right. This is evident today in the alliance of the new strongmen of techno-capitalism (Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg) with Trump. The UK still remains paralyzed by the disaster of Brexit.

The success of the extreme right is due in no small part to its capacity to take over identity politics from the new left and convert it into reactionary forms of identification. Progressive politics requires belief in collective action, but the right has only anger and resentment to offer. These do lend themselves to organised mass politics, such as extreme forms of nationalism, racist and neo-fascist movements, but they are highly amorphous and ephemeral.

The left has arguably been weakened by the greatest political challenge of our time, namely climate change. Green policies are often seen as coming with a high price tag beyond the means of working people, which dampens their enthusiasm for progressive politics. Climate politics requires a frame of thinking that is beyond what the majority of people living precarious lives can think about. To say this is not to deny that significant gains have been made with the transition to green energy, especially in Europe, but it does not lead to a mass support for progressive politics. It is also of course highly questionable that green politics actually translates into higher taxes, as the costs are borne by central governments, which have a tremendous capacity to absorb such costs, as the Covid pandemic demonstrates. 

Perhaps a bigger problem is the perception that climate change, for many people, seems less urgent than coping with everyday challenges of inflation and affordable housing (see some contributions to the symposium, e.g. Azmanova and Shapiro). Instead, a popular culture of doom pervades the contemporary political imagination (Delanty 2024). All of this is favourable to authoritarianism. 

The extreme right and right-wing populism more generally capitalizes on emotional responses to the widespread sense of uncertainty and unfairness that is a feature of contemporary society.

The right claims to offer a vision of the future but it is in fact a nostalgic, past-oriented one. Hall and Meyer (2024) and Azmanova (2020) make the important point that the extreme right and right-wing populism more generally capitalizes on emotional responses to the widespread sense of uncertainty and unfairness that is a feature of contemporary society. This is in line with Appadurai’s argument that while the left has only reason to offer, the extreme right has the more powerful force of emotion (Appadurai 2024, and Graetz and Shapiro (2020) also make this point).⁴

While the extreme right invokes nationalism, the notion of the nation they espouse is far from the familiar inclusive idea of a national political community, which was once based on a shared notion of citizenship and a common public culture. In this respect the extreme right joins forces with neoliberalism. A regressive feature of the present day is that the inclusive notion of the nation based on citizenship and a shared public culture has been abandoned in favour of a closed one (see also Turkin 2023). 

Collective action based on hope for the future is difficult in the context of a time when the everyday lives of most people, including the old support basis of the left, are characterized by abandonment and alienation. This leads towards depoliticization and despair. Lack of hope was almost certainly a factor in Trump’s re-election. Digitalised politics appears to reinforce this trend, since its main interlocutor/target is often the atomised individual. For this reason, so far the extreme right have been able to capitalise on the political advantages of digital technology, which is by its nature less favourable to collective action and feeds directly into the politics of fear and illusion, as fully embraced by Meta’s recent abandonment of fact-checking. 

Another reason for the spread of authoritarianism is simply that democracy provides opportunities for anti-democracy. As Ben Ansell argued in Why Politics Fails (2023) and David Runciman in How Democracy Ends (2018), liberal democracy is prone to crises deriving from public discontent and also from the simple fact that democracy cultivates opposition, which can also express itself as illiberalism. 

 

Alternatives

The future of progressive politics begins with resisting the allure of authoritarianism. The temptations of authoritarianism have already been to the detriment of the mainstream right in some countries, with the mainstream centre right parties being challenged by the extreme right and in some countries creeping into government. The next President of France may be an extreme right candidate.

For now, liberal democracies need to protect themselves against political authoritarianism as well as the direct threats to their existence by the world’s dictatorships. One way is to address the very real grievances that many people have about economic insecurity and precarity rather than play the script of the extreme right. 

No progressive change ever comes about without resistance. The autocratic world is not united despite nefarious deals and alliances.

As mentioned, the situation is now more complicated in that, at least as far as Europe is concerned, there is a major issue around national security since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has ramifications for Europe as a whole.⁵ The danger of nuclear war is also great. The conditions of war are never propitious for progressive politics.  Europe now needs to re-arm urgently to protect itself from Russia. Sweden is currently preparing for the possibility of an armed attack. There is only one thing that dictators understand and that is resistance. Dialogue has its place, but resistance is key and the condition of the possibility of the political. Until recently, Europe deceived itself into believing that it had no external enemies and that it could rely on the protective wing of the US military, which is effectively what NATO is. It is time to adjust to the new geopolitics. 

One lesson of history that is still pertinent is that no progressive change ever comes about without resistance. The autocratic world is not united despite nefarious deals and alliances. While democracy is not an unstoppable force in the world and democracies are fragile, the desire for it is arguably a strong force as is the desire for justice and solidarity. So, while it might seem that protecting the gains already made may be all that can be hoped for at present, this defensive attitude is not enough. If it is to have a future, progressive politics needs a new ambition.

 

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Albena Azmanova, Pavlina Tcherneva, and Tyler Emerson for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper.

Endnotes

1. See also the report of Freedom House and data at Our World In Data.

2. I am somewhat simplifying a more complex situation (see Geddes 2018, Chapter 8).

3. Arguably there is a third way, as reflected in for example the Gulf states and Singapore, through the seduction of wealth.

4. I have made similar arguments in various publications since the Brexit Referendum in 2016. See for example, Delanty (2020).

5. I am aware that some commentators are of the view that Russia will be satisfied if it takes Ukraine in whole or in part. It is a high-risk position that if put to the test and it proves wrong it will be too late for many countries. In any case, it was evident since the first Russian invasion in 2014, when no effective resistance was made, that the Kremlin wanted more.

Citations

Appadurai, A.  2024. ‘Polymorphous Populism.’ Post-Neoliberalism | Polymorphous Populism

Applebaum, A. 2024. Autocracy, INC: The Dictators who want to Rule the World. New York: Doubleday.

Arendt, H. 1958. [1951] The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Meridian Books. 

Ansell, B. 2023. Why Politics Fails. London Penguin.

Azmanova, A. 2020. Capitalism on Edge. New York: Columbia University Press.

Delanty, G. 2020. ‘The Crisis of the Present: Authoritarianism and Social Struggles.’ In: Delanty, G. Critical Theory and Social Transformation. London: Routledge.

Delanty, G. 2024. Senses of the Future: Conflicting Ideas of the Future in the World Today. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Dirsus, M. 2024. How Tyrants Fall and How Nations Survive. London: John Murray.

Forti, S. 2024. Totalitarianism: A Borderline Idea in Political Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Geddes, B., Wright, J., and Francis, E. 2018. How Dictatorships Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Graetz, I. and Shapiro, I. 2020. The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight it. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Guriev, S. and Treisman, D. 2002. Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hall, P. and Meyer, H. 2024. ‘The Emotional Underpinnings of Populism.’ Social Europe. https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-emotional-underpinnings-of-populism 

Moore, B. 1966. The Social Origins of Dictatorships and Democracies. Boston: Beacon Press.

Newell, W. 2016. Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice and Terror. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Runciman, D. 2018. How Democracy Ends. London: Basic Books.

Turchin, P. 2023. End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration. London: Allen Lane.

Walker, C. 2023. ‘The World has Become Flatter for Authoritarian Regimes.’ The Journal of Democracy.

 

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Gerard Delanty is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. His most recent publication is Senses of the Future: Conflicting Ideas of the Future in the World Today. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024).  https://gerarddelanty.com

Colleges and universities have long served as stages for societies’ culture wars and ideological battles. Over the past forty years, as neoliberal privatization has eroded institutions and practices of social and public welfare, political pressure has come to bear on higher education to focus more on job training and less on the importance of a liberal arts education. Today neoliberal politics and tactics have come to be signature themes in higher education: valuing skills for a gig economy, STEM over liberal arts, and quantitative thinking over genuinely critical thinking. Whether in a trade school or in an elite university, education is increasingly oriented toward the bottom line, including metrics for how schools rank in terms of students’ return on their investment of tuition dollars in terms of post-graduate salaries. And worse, in an increasingly volatile and uncertain job market, even the new focus on job training hardly guarantees a job. As Albena Azmanova notes in her Post-Neoliberalism Symposium piece, neoliberalism does not just create precarity for the poor; it is ubiquitous. Now even the most elite schools are producing a new precariat. 

But of late something new seems to be afoot. Anyone watching the news this past spring could hardly avoid images of police in full riot gear descending on student protesters with flash grenades, chemical irritants, tasers, and rubber bullets. These scenes played out in both public and private universities, especially larger research universities. Less visibly shocking, but equally unsettling, are new mandates at largely public universities, mostly in Republican-led states, curbing what faculty may say and teach, with bans on language pertaining to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and other bans on criticism of Israel. Where neoliberalism generally doesn’t care what anybody says, this new phenomenon is laser-focused on the words people use.

This is not your old neoliberal university. To the extent that higher education is a handmaiden of larger political forces, these are signals of a new political era. As I see it, higher education is moving from being merely neoliberal to becoming outright authoritarian. 

At that moment, the signs of authoritarianism that I had been witnessing on my campus for over a year suddenly clicked into place: the locked doors of the president’s office building, the closing down of means of communication between faculty and student leaders and their constituents, the vilification of certain words and phrases, the normalization of police presence.

Until recently, I thought authoritarianism happened only to countries. That changed in the Spring of 2024 when my own university’s administration called in outside police forces to violently terminate a peaceful protest with tasers, rubber bullets, and pepper spray, knocking heads to the ground, and arresting students and faculty, myself included. At that moment, the signs of authoritarianism that I had been witnessing on my campus for over a year suddenly clicked into place: the locked doors of the president’s office building, the closing down of means of communication between faculty and student leaders and their constituents, the vilification of certain words and phrases, the normalization of police presence. And all this with the backdrop of a decades-long slow but steady decimation of one of the pillars of higher education in America: shared governance.

At first I thought that the problem was rooted in my own university’s malfunction. But as I started comparing notes with faculty at other universities, hearing their stories of what happened to them on their campuses this past spring, in the midst of a wellspring of student protest around Gaza, I realized that the very same things were happening everywhere. Virtually every university that overreacted to peaceful protests seemed to react in the very same ways, all uncannily similar to tactics followed by the likes of authoritarian leaders such Orbán, Trump, and Bolsonaro. 

As a critical theorist, I have to wonder, why is this happening? What material and social conditions have led to this shift? Is this a reversal of neoliberalism? Or a new chapter in it? What is underlying this move? It seems that critical theory has barely been able to keep up with the neoliberal tide and now it has to make sense of a new authoritarian one.

Several years ago I wrote a piece exploring neoliberalism as an anti- or de-political phenomenon that largely eviscerated any rich conception of democratic public life.¹ In lieu of a political process that tarries with ambiguity, disagreement, and uncertainty, neoliberalism offers up economic “truths” that should settle any matters. In lieu of gathering in public to deliberate and decide together, a private market promises to quietly have the last word. Instead of public space and public power punctuated by human reality, neoliberalism reduces any suffering to employment rates and return on investment. As Wendy Brown writes, “both the zone and the objects of the private are expanded to contest the domain and power of liberty’s enemies: political power and belief in the social.”²

And now we are witnessing this bewildering right-angle turn from a politics that is laissez-faire, globalized, and individualistic to one that is chauvinistic, statist, and moralistic. This is a politics that demands obedience to the law as well as a withdrawal from the rest of the world. Where the hallmark of neoliberalism was the banishing of borders, the call of the current moment is to build a wall.

Where neoliberalism generates precarity, the new authoritarianism rushes in to offer comfort and solace against the anxieties unleashed by precarity and it still continues the anti-political project.

While it might be tempting to see this moment as radically different from neoliberalism and to say that we are in a post-neoliberal era, this would be a mistake. What we are seeing now is a vicissitude of what gave rise to neoliberalism in the first place: an attempt to completely discredit any attention to shared, collective social life, including social-welfare and social-justice politics, and to disincentivize political action. Not only does neoliberalism attempt to eviscerate the political, it has steadily colonized the public realm with private values. With the new authoritarian turn it is now introducing patriarchal ones: family, god, bible, religion, unity (no divisive words, no books that question prevailing words, no acknowledgment of race and its terrible history). 

Neoliberalism emptied out the public sphere with a gig economy that left the person working three jobs too exhausted to be political. The new authoritarian politics demands obedience to the law as it is and brutally punishes those who question it. Both are in service to the same thing: a globalized, economic capitalist order free from political accountability. Where neoliberalism generates precarity, the new authoritarianism rushes in to offer comfort and solace against the anxieties unleashed by precarity and it still continues the anti-political project. Both operate by emptying the metaphorical and actual public square, but authoritarianism does this to assuage the anxiety that neoliberalism generates.

This sheds light on the playbook that authoritarian leaders of the past few decades seem to regularly invoke and follow. Uncannily, higher education leaders seem to be following the same playbook.

 

1. Foment fear

Where neoliberal policies generate real precarity, authoritarian leaders deflect attention from the actual sources to imagined ones. Authoritarianism operates by ginning up fear of some potential enemy that might destroy the community. On campuses, this often involves distorting facts, such as claiming that protesters were violent, when they were in fact peaceful. Alternative facts are floated as if they are truth, for example that there is a rising scourge of antisemitism on campuses. This is a kind of gaslighting: everyone talks about the rise of antisemitism on campuses even though the facts hardly bear this out. In reality, the protesters were calling for an end to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The charge of antisemitism arose from political and legal pressure on campus leaders to delegitimize protests by conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. 

This has been happening despite the presence of a disproportionate number of Jews in these largely peaceful campus protests. Even if it bizarrely means calling many Jews antisemites, this tactic serves to split the community between the good and peaceful people, on the one side, and the dangerous enemy on the other. This tactic not only drives a wedge between people, it consolidates support for the leader who promises to ward off all dangers. A hallmark of authoritarianism is this very thing: depicting benign adversaries as fearsome threats in order to instill anxiety that benefits the authoritarian. 

 

2. Scapegoat vulnerable populations

Frantz Fanon called such moves phobogenic. The person or group deemed dangerous becomes the target and reservoir for the group’s fears and anxieties. Manufactured phobic objects serve as scapegoats for authoritarian crackdowns on peaceful protests. Depending on the context, different groups can be posited as phobic objects, but usually they are those who have already been marginalized and ostracized: immigrants; trans and queer people; racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. All have served as scapegoats for political troubles—even though they are often in fact the victims of authoritarian politics. Then, weirdly, the victims get blamed for failing to forgive and move on, for being disloyal and recalcitrant. At NYU, as the New York Times reported, arrested students effectively had to apologize and confess: “In order to return to the university, some students would be required to complete a 49-page set of readings and tasks — “modules”—known as the Ethos Integrity Series, geared at helping participants ‘make gains’ in ‘moral reasoning’ and ‘ethical decision making.’” Even though the students were in their right to protest, this requirement effectively reinforced the view that they had been criminals all along.

Riven with anxiety, the public tends to fall for these phobogenic moves, believing that it is the students and not the police who are violent or hateful and need to be contained. Fear-mongering fuels authoritarianism by making people willingly consent to a brute power that might control these supposed dangers.

 

3. Consolidate executive power

Shortly after they get in power, authoritarian leaders will claim that exceptional circumstances warrant the suspension of normal procedures. This “state of exception” allows them to start whittling away at horizontal checks and balances. Because previous tactics in the playbook put the community into a state of anxiety and panic about imminent threats, many will go along, even taking pleasure at punishing their imagined enemies. As Theodor Adorno noted in his 1951 essay, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” authoritarian leaders manipulate these more regressed parts of the human psyche in order to get people to voluntarily submit to non-democratic rule and hence their own domination.³

When leading a country, an authoritarian might suspend parliament; when leading a university, an authoritarian might, as at the University of Kentucky, suspend the university senate. At Emory, the administration ignored its own open expression policy in violently terminating protests and unilaterally enacting new rules to clamp down on student protests, all despite the university senate’s protestations, ignoring standing policies that call for faculty oversight and input. 

All over the country, the neoliberal university has prepared for possible coming states of exception by denigrating and undermining norms of shared governance to the point that faculty councils and university senates have merely ceremonial roles and no actual power to do anything. All we are left with is the power of public opinion, which requires skills of community organizing and courting the press. Instead of being able to sit down with leaders of governing boards to work together, faculty are left with having to protest publicly the failure of the university’s administration to honor the faculty’s oversight in the educational mission. In the face of the brute vertical power of their administrations, faculty’s most available path to restoring shared governance is to cultivate democratic, horizontal power, to become skilled in the democratic arts of collective action and speech so that pressure against authoritarian measures might bear fruit.

 

4. Curtail democratic practices

Ah, but authoritarians have an answer for that. They seem to instinctively understand the power that can emerge from public assembly and speech, so one of the first things they do is close spaces for assembly and communication among the people, just as the British did with the 1774 Intolerable Acts banning New England Town Meetings. Today’s authoritarians close down democratic avenues by claiming there are imminent dangers that warrant suspending normal democratic practices. 

A subtle but telling sign of this is limiting ways in which people can communicate with each other. At my university, a year before the protests, the university disabled the ability of student and faculty government leaders to communicate directly with their constituents. They were told that since everyone’s email inboxes were overburdened, announcements should be funneled through the Emory Report, the email newsletter released by the administration that most people don’t bother to read.

Very recently several CCTV cameras appeared on campus buildings surrounding the quadrangle where students pass time between classes, where some professors hold class on a nice day, where people gather to protest.

In addition to curtailing communication, authoritarians will limit opportunities for people to physically gather, not just by violently terminating peaceful protests, but by locking doors to buildings. At Emory, for weeks before the police crackdown, the doors of the main building for the university president and provost had been locked. Over the summer, all the academic buildings and libraries were either locked or closed to the public. At Columbia University, people had to use their campus IDs to get on campus. At Dartmouth, students, faculty and staff who were arrested at a May 1 protest were banned from the campus Green and the administration building.

In addition to these brute forms of curtailing speech, there is also the more subtle but insidious tactic surveillance. Very recently several CCTV cameras appeared on campus buildings surrounding the quadrangle where students pass time between classes, where some professors hold class on a nice day, where people gather to protest. A place that was once free, at least on good days without police presence, has become a space of round-the-clock surveillance.

 

5. Normalize use of force and militarized police

The most visible sign of the new authoritarian playbook across the country is the image of heavily militarized police forces on college campuses. As I noted above, this past spring, all over the country they descended on campuses wielding flash grenades, tasers, pepper spray, long guns, rubber bullets, and drones. The most brutal included Emory University and the University of Texas—which violently terminated their demonstrations shortly after they began. Across the country, not only did they round up students, they smashed to the ground professors at Dartmouth College, Emory University, and Washington University, including breaking nine ribs and the hand of SIU-Edwardsville Professor Steve Tamari.

American colleges and universities are increasingly complicit with the growth of the police state. The very same police attacking students are creating new training facilities to ramp up their use of force against the populations they are supposed to be protecting. This phenomenon is central to the protests on my campus, where the same students protesting against genocide in Gaza are protesting against the development of “Cop City,” the police training facility where the Israeli Defense Force will continue training the Atlanta Police Department in tactics for taking down menacing students.

 

6. Truncate thinking

Through all these tactics the authoritarian mindset fosters an inability to think, much less tolerate, any range of possibilities. It trades in fear and dichotomies. It vilifies words and thoughts that might call into question how things are. It clings to absolutes and either/or thinking, to the point that hearing a chant about freedom for one group feels like it must mean death for another. The issue is not an inability to think rationally but an inability to sit with any thought that is indeterminate or engages contingency or ranges of possibility. Authoritarianism feeds on this. When the people are consumed by fear and anxiety, they will turn rule over to authoritarian leaders. The authoritarian needs an enemy on which the people can deposit anxieties and focus rage, to justify calling in heavily armed police on students sitting on the grass.

In the scheme of things, the authoritarian university is a bit player. There is an entire history behind the scene, a confluence of social and political and economic forces at work, many set in motion decades ago as global capital set about undoing the social safety nets of the welfare state, making the world ripe for global flows of power, data, money, and now bitcoin and AI. Neoliberalism was an attempt to discredit social justice policies, and now the new authoritarianism is a vicissitude of that same aim. Neoliberalism led to precarity, unease, and fear. The new authoritarianism offers neoliberalism’s phobic subjects a promise of safe havens. But instead of providing safety from the real threat, namely unfettered global capitalism, which has turned the working class into the abject poor, the new authoritarianism, what Wendy Brown calls “neoliberalism’s Frankenstein,” displaces danger from its actual source to its invented ones: immigrants, trans people, and any other supposed dangers to the state. Trying to call out and pin down these displacements is exhausting and unending, for the process of displacement can continue without end. There is always someone else to blame. So long as there is precarity, the promise of salvation is, for many, too tantalizing to resist.  

 

Footnotes

1. Noëlle McAfee, “Neoliberalism, the Street, and the Forum,” in Reclaiming Democracy: Judgment, Responsibility, and the Right to Politics, eds. Albena Azmanova and Mihaela Mihai, (New York: Routledge, 2015), 165-183.

2. Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein,” in Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky, Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 17.

3. Theodor  Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Power of Fascist Propaganda” (1951). Republished in The Culture Industry, J. M. Bernstein, (London: Routledge, 1991).

 

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Noëlle McAfee is professor and chair of the philosophy department at Emory University. On April 25, 2024, she was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct at the scene of a student demonstration. As of this writing, charges are still pending. This essay is adapted from a blog post she wrote for the American Association of University Professors.

 

Albena Azmanova (AA): in your new book Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood, you observe that victimhood has today become one of the most potent political vocabularies in our culture. But haven’t claims to suffered injustice been always a powerful strategy? What is new?

Lilie Chouliaraki (LC): Grievances of suffered injustice have been typically raised by leftist political actors, and the political right has reproached them for strategically ‘playing the victimhood card’. However, of recent, right-wing populists have turned the tables: they have adopted the claim of victimhood as a central strategy. This is the starting point of the book. Far-right populists that tend to castigate, ignore or even mock the suffering of marginalized groups or vulnerable social actors, while they use the rhetoric of the victimized people to win voters over and promote themselves as a charismatic saviour to gain popularity and win elections. Donald Trump is a textbook case of this phenomenon.

 

AA: The paradoxical development of far-right populism hijacking the language of the Left is just the entry point of your book. In order to show how and why this is the case, as well as to explore the consequences of this development, you offer a panoramic history of the idea of the victim in late modernity and an analysis of the present uses of victimhood in western societies. What is the differentia specifica in the way the far Right uses claims to victimhood? 

LC: For those parties and actors that advocate the protection of vulnerable communities and minoritized groups, it makes much sense to draw on these groups’ experiences of emotional pain or social marginalization or oppression and to speak out on their suffering as a cause for action. Social movements have been doing precisely this, from the Suffragettes and the Civil Rights movement in the 20th century to Black Lives Matter and MeToo in our century. But what we are seeing today (as we have also seen in the past with dire results) is that the far Right makes a masterful use of victimhood not to protect the vulnerable and marginalized in society but to benefit themselves: the leader, the party and the interests of the few. Just look at the number of billionaires rallying around Trump, Musk, Thiel, Murdoch, and his policies of minimal tax for the rich and no welfare for the poor. Same with the economic elites that supported Brexit in the UK. 

The weaponization of victimhood: the instrumental appropriation of claims to pain by political actors who neither speak from positions of systemic vulnerability nor serve the vulnerable in society

This is what I call the weaponization of victimhood: the instrumental appropriation of claims to pain by political actors who neither speak from positions of systemic vulnerability nor serve the vulnerable in society with a view to stirring strong emotions and achieving recognition and domination for themselves. One recent example of the far-right weaponization of victimhood is Putin’s justification for invading Ukraine. His keyword has been “denazification.” Ukrainians were cast as “nazis” who needed to be exterminated for threatening his country – thereby evoking complex histories of past victimhood while conveniently ignoring that contemporary Ukraine is a democratic state where the far Right has growing but limited power. The west as an ally of Ukraine also posed a threat to Russia, they were also perpetrators in Putin’s language. In this rhetoric, the Russian army was “on a peacekeeping mission”, fighting to keep their country safe –  just as they did in the ‘Great Patriotic War”. Putin here uses “denazification” to vilify Ukraine and evoke a glorious past of mass sacrifice for his nation, presenting today’s Russia as a noble victim that defends itself with the same defiance as its victorious predecessors. Putin, in other words, is weaponizing victimhood so as to justify his illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine and to legitimize his imperialist geopolitical agenda.

 

AA:  In contrast to quests for justice that engage the imagery of broader societal ideals of welfare, claims to victimhood have been the last resort of the weak. What allows nowadays those in positions of power — the powerful and the privileged — to claim victimhood?

LC: It is true that victimhood has historically been used as a last resort of the weak. Starting roughly in the mid to late 19th century, there is a long history to the birth of the contemporary vocabulary of victimhood, which developed precisely in order to speak about the suffering of the weak and the vulnerable. In this history, I trace down two main languages of pain:  trauma and human rights. Trauma spoke about those who are broken emotionally, and I speak in detail about how the horrific violence of 20th century wars contributed to a growing acceptance of psychological trauma as a pervasive condition of the modern self. And rights arose through this same history to protect those who are socially vulnerable, all those who are exposed to social forms of violence whether such violence is related to war, to extreme poverty and destitution, to misogyny, to racist aggression and discrimination, and more recently also to violence and discrimination because of sexual orientation or body shape and ability – this is a history associated not only with the major social movements of the 20th century, as I already said, but also with the gradual institutionalisation of human rights in global politics particularly in the post-WWII order.

This historical excursion notwithstanding, no vocabulary belongs to one social group alone, and communication has always been a site of contestation and struggle over whose voice is stronger and whose message is dominant. Victimhood is a particularly attractive weapon in these communication struggles because of the emotional value and the ethico-political impact that claiming to be a victim generates today – partly due to this history of institutionalized diffusion of the languages of pain (trauma and rights). It is because of this that today we see actors vying in public for who is the bigger victim and who deserves more outpouring of emotion or recognition for their suffering. In this struggle, those who have more power – meaning more economic, political, cultural capital – go further than others. They are the ones with the access to power, the broad visibility, the louder voice, the priming of algorithms and so their victimhood and their emotions tend to dominate in the public sphere. Claiming to be wronged on social media platforms, in particular, tends to generate some of the highest volumes of emotional engagement, typically anger and outrage from the far Right and this is because social media platforms push emotional content to monetize engagement. But, beyond virality, there is a series of other, longer-term societal developments, like the rise of therapy culture and emo-talk or the marketization and mediatization of politics, that have made political communication much more emotional today and made victimhood a central element in how political actors assert themselves and seek recognition and domination in public. And this why the pain of the underprivileged, which has little or no access to the public sphere, requires collective mobilization, co-ordinated action and sustained effort both online and offline in order to be heard and recognized in public – as the Black Lives Matter movement showed in 2020 (and throughout the past decade). 

 

AA: In the book you are talking about a “reversal of victimhood”, where the perpetrator tries to pose as a victim. What exactly is the mechanism here? 

A good way to challenge the reversal of victimhood that the far-Right so expertly uses is to ask the question who is absent? Who is not talked about? Who is silenced in this conversation? 

LC: Yes, the reversal of victimhood refers to the strategic inversion of the relations of victimhood between those who inflict pain and those who suffer that pain so that the perpetrators style themselves as victims for their own purposes. One example of reverse victimhood that I use in the book is the back-rolling of reproductive rights in the U.S. When in 2022 the U.S. Supreme Court, appointed by Donald Trump, overturned Roe vs Wade, and essentially took away women’s right to abortion, the main argument was that the foetus is “innocent unborn life” that has the right to be defended – and in Europe, despite the EU’s renewed commitment to the right to abortion, many far-right parties also call for restrictions on abortion rights. Their argument? “Defend life, from its conception until its natural end.” 

There are two things I want to point out with respect to those arguments. Firstly, the rhetoric of “unborn life” as an actual “person” and a “person” who has “rights” (one of the two languages of pain) casts the foetus as a potential sufferer. A sufferer who has the right to be defended. Secondly, this same rhetoric turns those who decide to have an abortion into perpetrators. By depriving the foetus of their right to exist, women who seek abortion are simultaneously seen to commit violence – in fact, nothing less than murder. Note here that the foetus did not have “person” status in U.S. legislation until the recent Supreme Court decision to grant it one – an act that was instrumental in presenting abortion as a form of violence that needed to be stopped and women as perpetrators that needed to be punished.  How does this reversal in the relations of victimhood work? It basically turns the control of women’s bodies by Evangelical Christians and misogynists of the American far Right into an emotional cause that legitimizes as benefactors those who took back one of the most profound legal victories for women’s reproductive rights in the 20th century. 

A good way to challenge the reversal of victimhood that the far- Right so expertly uses is to ask the question who is absent? Who is not talked about? Who is silenced in this conversation? What is missing from the far-right use of victimhood is the claim that women themselves are the only victims of abortion bans. There is extensive and long-term scientific research that demonstrates in detail the health-related harms and social harms that women who have not had access to safe abortion options suffer – from gynaecological and emotional trauma to poverty, unemployment  and further marginalization – especially women from impoverished and marginalized backgrounds. 

But perhaps the bigger point about this example is that victimhood does not work as a single word but sets in motion a whole vocabulary of blame and praise that slots different actors into positions of “enemy” and ‘friend” and rallies people around these positions. What I mean is that, in announcing the victim, at the same time, we also attach responsibility to those actors who surround the victim: those who inflict pain on the victim, or the perpetrator and enemy, and those who alleviate the pain of the victim, or the benefactor and friend. Victimhood is, in this sense, a whole vocabulary of suffering that conjures up a choreography of actors and puts value onto them according to what role they play in the political narrative at hand. Who is the sufferer? Who is the evil-doer? Who is the benefactor? Who is responsible for the harm? Who helped the victim? All these are important questions to ask when we hear far-right politicians, or indeed any politician, play the victimhood card. It is just that the far Right is making expert use of the vocabulary of the victim in their politics around the world. 

 

AA: You note that the nefarious political work in the instrumentalization of victimhood is to grant validity to claims to suffering made by powerful voices while silencing the grievances of the less powerful speaking out about their suffering. How does victimhood hold such validating or legitimizing power over those who claim it for themselves?

Communicating pain is political

LC: One of the reasons why victimhood is such a key vocabulary in our politics and culture today is because victimhood speaks to something that we consider universal: pain. Everyone feels pain. And everyone feels for those who are in pain. This feeling for the victim and expressing empathy with the victim is inherent to our self-description as citizens of late modern democracies of the west since the Enlightenment, particularly its Scottish legacy on the centrality of moral sentiments in western public spheres. In this legacy, we have all gone through some form of pain/trauma or some form of injustice that we want to see corrected. We all recognize the emotions of anger for those who have done wrong or compassion for those who suffer and gratitude or solidarity with those who help the victims. And so we do not usually think that there is politics – an insidious agenda — in hearing about people’s pain, in expressing pain or in supporting other people’s pain. But we need to challenge the idea that victimhood is not political, and that because we all feel pain, pain cannot be used as a tool for gaining power. 

Communicating pain is political. And the fact that claims to victimhood somehow speak to our common experience of feeling pain, our shared humanity so to speak, hides the relations of power wherefrom those who speak of victimhood already occupy in society. In this sense, the question “who is silenced in this conversation?” can reveal quite a lot about the social struggles at play when specific claims to victimhood are made in the public sphere. Often we see that those political actors who speak loud and clear about victimhood are those who already possess some form of legitimacy or capital that enables them to be heard. The far Right across Europe and the world, as we already know, have a whole disinformation industry of malignant actors and professional trolls who spread hate speech, division and outrage online against every ‘enemy’ that stands in their way all the while claiming that they are victimized. A case in point is that of  the  Algerian boxing athlete, Imane Khelif, who won the women’s 66kg final in the 2024 Olympic Games, and who was accused of being “a man beating up women” and “had to be suspended from the games”. This threw into relief the strong grip that far-right voices of victimhood can have in global conversations when they set the agenda of who suffers and deserves empathy and who is a perpetrator and deserves punishment in our culture. 

On the other end of the spectrum, those systemically vulnerable, the migrants, the low-wage workers, the racial/ethnic minorities, people-in-need in the global South remain mostly silent, marginalized or doubted in their words; or spoken for or about by other more powerful actors.  That’s why for vulnerable groups, it takes a whole social movement to be heard, as I already mentioned, or, wherever possible, it takes serious legal representation – as in Khelif’s case who filed a criminal complaint over alleged “acts of cyber-harassment” at the end of the 2024 Olympic games.

As I have shown both in this and in my previous work, The Spectatorship of Suffering, which dealt with how news journalists portray distant suffering on our screens,  it is important to ask how reporters in crisis zones, whether in disaster or conflict, employ the vocabulary of victimhood, who is portrayed as a victim, who is a perpetrator and who the benefactor, who is overreported and who is underreported, whose voice is heard and whose silenced, whose lives matter and whose are dehumanized – I mean how reporting plays out its own politics of pain, can tell us something really important about the geopolitical and moral norms that inform the practices and narratives of news organisations in the first place. Personally, I believe that it is urgent that we continue asking questions like these because, every time someone is presented as a victim and someone else as perpetrator, a certain vision of social order is being affirmed and a certain hierarchy of human lives is legitimised. But equally every time a dominant narrative of victimhood is challenged, that social order is challenged as well, and that hierarchy of lives is also challenged.

 

AA: Shouldn’t we also worry that labelling someone as a victim is deeply disempowering – adding insult to injury, so to speak. Much as the label of a victim  attracts compassion and desire for help, it can also be denigrating. “Bestowing victimhood’ to certain groups can also be a strategy of self-empowerment for entrenched political elites. As I have argued in this symposium, in conditions of ubiquitous precarity, “various minorities are competing for victimhood, as this is the only apparent avenue to social protection, while ruling elites source their power from the patronage they bestow to select minorities.” How do you propose to solve this conundrum? 

LC: That’s right. In the book I emphasize the point that being a victim should not be taken as an objective, stable identity of a person or something that each person carries inside them, but it is an act of speech or something the person communicates about themselves. This distinction is not meant to deny anyone’s lived experience of being a victim. I do not mean to make judgments on how individual people actually feel. Nor do I encourage an attitude of denying any individual person their pain by saying “you are just saying you are a victim, but you are obviously not”. We can never know the depths of a person’s emotional pain nor preclude that they feel hurt by the circumstances of their lives. Any such attitude would have been immoral, and my own approach has nothing to do with that. 

The value of the distinction between victimhood as claim and vulnerability as a condition is not to produce a rigid schema where each one of us is boxed in depending on their salary scale or their gender identity

What I think is important, however, is that we start thinking more critically about victimhood and its relationship to vulnerability. The two are different. While victimhood is an act of speech, vulnerability is a condition of the self. Vulnerability, in other words, has to do with the personal and social circumstances through which someone experiences life and how such circumstances may expose persons to various forms of violence or shield them for such violence – their circumstances of economic safety or precarity (class), of gender or race dynamics that may constrain them through misogynist or racist prejudice, of their sexuality and how this might fit within dominant norms or marginalize them, or the range of abilities and wellbeing they enjoy and how far these support them or hold them back as human beings. 

The value of the distinction between victimhood as claim and vulnerability as a condition is not to produce a rigid schema where each one of us is boxed in depending on their salary scale or their gender identity. That would be a dogmatic way of approaching the question of pain and suffering that is distinct for each individual and includes various degrees and combinations of emotional and social harm. 

What the distinction does, however, is that it draws our attention to the politics that lie behind claims like “I am a victim, we are wronged” – what I earlier called “the politics of pain”. This is an emotional politics of communication that invites us to feel for the pain of the victim and, in focusing on the feeling for the pain, systematically obscures where exactly these claims come from, what position of vulnerability (or privilege) they may be spoken from. Instead of taking these claims at face value and responding emotionally because of our prior commitments, the wish to go viral or simply as an emotional reflex, it would be best if we pause for a minute and look at where exactly each of these claims are coming from. Look at the historical and structural context where people speak from and think about how far this context that they occupy exposes them to which forms of violence or shelters them from other forms of violence. And when I say violence, I mean both physical violence and social violence: harms that come because of who people are in terms of their gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, age – or any intersection of those. 

To use myself as a hypothetical example, as a white female middle-class professor with an invisible disability, I am relatively sheltered from, say, class or race-related violence even though I am open to certain forms of gender-related, ableist and perhaps also ageist discrimination. My lived vulnerability, however, becomes victimhood only at the moment that I decide to articulate in public speech the exclusions or discriminations that I might have suffered because, say, of being a woman. In my case, the two, my vulnerabilities and my speech on gender discrimination would overlap, in which case, I would have used my voice to announce my suffering and protest in public. As I have already said, this overlap between people announcing their vulnerability through specific claims to victimhood is something that historically oppressed and marginalised groups have always done – take the Civil Rights Movement, Black Lives Matter and others. They use victimhood to speak out on the systemic forms of suffering they embody or experience. But as we all know, the two – structural forms of vulnerability and claims to victimhood – do not always overlap. Let’s get back to Trump. From his rape trial to his fraud trial, to his impeachment on the January 6th insurrection, he has always claimed to be the victim, the one persecuted rather than the persecutor. His suffering here is not systemic but tactical – it is an identity that does not articulate vulnerability but is put forward for the purposes of political and personal gain. This unstable coupling of vulnerability  and victimhood  is at the heart of the politics of pain that is ubiquitous in our culture today. How exactly forms of vulnerability and claims to victimhood come together – and so who they present as a victim deserving recognition and who they do not – is one of the most important political questions of our time. 

 

AA: Are you saying that the powerful cannot suffer? In Capitalism on Edge, I claim that the affluent and the socially privileged can also be victims of precarity and of the ecological trauma – harms incurred by capitalism’s profit motive; in this sense they are also victims of systemic injustice. How do we adjudicate between valid and abusive grievances of suffered injustice, between what you call ‘tactical’ and ‘systemic’ suffering? What is our gauge? 

LC: I agree that it would be wrong to a priori deprive anyone of their use of victimhood for whichever purposes they may wish to use it. For instance, Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court judge who was accused of attempted rape by Christine Blaisey Ford back in 2018, has as much right to claim that he is a victim of a smearing campaign against his name as much as Blaisey Ford has to claim she has been the victim of sexual assault by him. 

What I think is important to do, however, is to stop engaging in emotional debates or angry contests about who is the “real” victim in this or in any case – in many cases, we cannot even decide on the “truth” of victimhood because indeed both sides can feel “real” in the pain. Instead, we could introduce critical judgment that pushes us to think beyond our pre-existing prejudices and attachments. This means asking questions not about real or fake victims but about the game of power that is played out in the case at hand, and who is actually harmed by which forms of violence. 

It is important to have a language that delinks claims to victimhood from structural vulnerability or oppression

The starting point for this kind of questioning is to remember that when we speak of victimhood, we do not necessarily talk about vulnerability – about systemic exposure to various forms of social violence – but we talk about the communicative power of speaking out and being heard. In other words, what matters is what kinds of power those who claim victimhood hold and how far that power grants them privileges in terms of institutional authority, moral legitimacy and believability. To go back to the Kavanaugh example, as a white cis man, Yale graduate and prominent Republican Judge, Kavanaugh was indeed believed by those who had the power to vote him onto the U.S. Supreme Court as an associate justice, despite Blaisey Ford’s testimony but also the testimonies of three more women – testimonies that the FBI “failed” to investigate further during the Trump administration. A few years later, as a member of the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh was one of those who voted for the overturning of Roe vs Wade, depriving millions of women of their right to make decisions about their own bodies.

My point is that the stand-off of victimhood between Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford cannot be decided on the basis of fake or true victimhood. Both people can feel pain, both can claim they are victims. What I want to add in the conversation is that it would be more productive to approach their stand-off from the perspective of power. As an unequal struggle between claims to pain, where harm inflicted upon a woman systemically open to patriarchal violence (as a sixteen-year-old girl at a party and as a female academic and adult witness at the Senate stand) is conflated with the personal grievance (for having to face an accusation) of a man with superior social and political power and male entitlement (to sex as a young man and to Supreme Court candidacy, now membership, as a middle-aged man). 

The bigger point here is that, when we are confronted with claims to pain, instead of rushing to take sides and emotionally connect with this or that victim, it would be better if we paused for a minute and asked questions that bring the broader context into the picture: 

• Who holds systemic forms of power in this context? 
• Who has historically been exercising which forms of power over whom? 
• What kinds of identities and actions do claims to victimhood legitimize? Who lines up with whom? 
• Whose pain is recognized and acted upon by whom? 
• And whose pain is not? Whose pain remains silent? And why? 

I think politically, at a moment when the far-right and more broadly racist, misogynist, neocolonial forces and groups – almost everywhere in the world in the global North and the global South, are coming to power or are close to coming to power in the name of victims and of the oppressed – it is really important to have a language that delinks the two – claims to victimhood from structural vulnerability or oppression. And to see what they say for what it is: a politics of pain that aims at those already being privileged securing more privilege and those who are already vulnerable – poor, marginalised, vilified – not just remaining in their place but suffering even more. 

 

AA: How about the risk  of turning the heuristics of victimhood into a dogmatic schema of sociological categories, as for instance when the struggles against discrimination become institutionalised into programmes and policies? I have in mind the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion programmes that list a number of ‘protected identities’ while obscuring other forms of discrimination. 

LC: My argument is not that the critical questioning of victimhood should be a matter of ticking boxes off a sociological grid: class, gender, race etc. My aim is to question why, in our current emotional contests and divisions over who is a victim, we do not take into account the circumstances of vulnerability from which claims to pain are made? 

I also argue that taking into account the various intersecting forms of vulnerability and privilege that people inhabit as they speak out on being victims can produce richer and subtler accounts of victimhood. Such accounts can also help us challenge common-sense ideas, such as that there is a “pure victim” and a “pure perpetrator”; or the idea that victimhood is a zero-sum game, if I am a victim you are not.  And they highlight that victimhood is a continuum of positions from abject vulnerability (marginalised communities, people living in occupied territories, refugees) to relative shelter from most forms of violence (upper middle-and-upper white men largely in the west) – and claims to victimhood may fall at any point across that continuum. 

Far from being dogmatic, these accounts challenge yet another common-sense idea, namely that if you are a victim (if you make a claim to victimhood in public) you automatically deserve empathy and support. No, we need to look beyond the claim and the emotion and the immediate response. We need not take the concept at face value, “oh this is a victim.” Instead, we need to do some thinking to work out who speaks from which position and in which specific ways their position of relative privilege or vulnerability exposes them to which forms of violence and harm to and to which effects. Of course, understanding victimhood is not an exact science. It is an interpretative exercise. So, it is not going to help us find the perfect victim – that is not the point. But we can at least have a method to evaluate how relative privilege and relative vulnerability shape the circumstances and balances of power at work in each context where a politics of pain is at play. 

 

AA: What is the one shift that urgently needs to be made in the way our societies address injustice? 

In our culture – a culture of neoliberal capitalism and the dominance of platforms, claims to victimhood are usually individualised.

LC: One of the main themes that run throughout the book and are there implicit in everything I said earlier is that, in our culture – a culture of neoliberal capitalism and the dominance of platforms, claims to victimhood are usually individualised, that is people speak out about their own personal truth, their own experience of pain. And, even when this experience is added up to make an online movement like MeToo and pushes for institutional change, the whole culture behind this still promotes individualised and commercialised solutions to social problems: whether it is the empowerment of postfeminism – that is completely tied up with consumerist choice and the promotional culture of big brands (feminist logos on Chanel t-shirts, for instance) – or the self-care industry of mindfulness and healthy living among others – which is again another mega industry of profit-making of an emerging class of gurus of well-being. 

What is missing from all this is a focus not on online victims, popular victims in our politics and culture but on structural vulnerability – on the forms of violence that some individuals and groups endure because the various personal and social circumstances that they find themselves in do not protect them enough from those forms of violence.  We live in times of unprecedented inequalities: yes, there are institutional improvements, there has been progress in terms of recognition and inclusion, but this is not enough while questions of redistribution remain unresolved. Thomas Pikkety claims that, in terms of income inequalities, we are coming full circle to a moment in time, when global inequalities seem to be about as great today as they were at the peak of western imperialism in the early 20th century. 

So, structural vulnerability is a matter not of victimhood but of injustice. And, in this sense, we need not individualised claims to pain that single out this or that issue but collective narratives that combine the appeal to emotion with explicit justifications about why and how, on the basis of the justification offered, we need to reform or transform the conditions of the structurally vulnerable who are implicated in the claims. A move from individualistic explanations of social suffering towards concerted action that can transform the conditions of suffering in the first place and collective struggles against organized systems of oppression, capitalism, patriarchy, and structural racism.

 

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Lilie Chouliaraki is Chair in Media and Communications in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Chouliaraki’s latest book is Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood.

On January 6, 2021, a mob attacked the U.S. Capitol with the goal of suspending the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the U.S. presidential election. Three years later, on March 26 of 2024, the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after being struck by the Dali Cargo Ship, carrying 4,700 containers and a 21-member crew from India and Sri Lanka. Five road construction workers from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, who were repairing roads on the bridge, lost their lives as a result, while several crew members remained confined in the ship for almost three months after the incident. While these events appear unrelated, thinking of them together can illuminate connections between politics and capitalism that are central to contemporary discontent and the appeal of far-right politics to citizens in the wealthy world. 

The January 6 mob was incensed by the racialized rhetoric of the speech then-President Trump gave at the White House earlier that day. This speech, which inaugurated the still powerful “Stop the Steal” mantra, singled out Arizona and Georgia as sites of possible electoral fraud, hinting at the active Latino and Black organizing that secured these states for Biden. But this visible animosity coexists with the fact that these groups sustain—in a very material sense—the life of all Americans. This became clear in the Key bridge collapse on March 26, when vulnerable Latino and South Asian workers laboring in exploitative conditions tragically crossed paths. While the focus was on dock workers and the urgency to rebuild the bridge, an alternative reading brings into relief the central role of super-exploited¹ racialized labor in sustaining the infrastructure that delivers packages to our doorsteps and guarantees smooth commutes in the morning. The events of January 6 and March 26, together, demonstrate that racialized groups are targets for both political exclusion and super-exploitation. This is a “bash and reap” strategy that denigrates the very subjects that are conscripted to sustain us. More specifically, their working and living conditions in the Global North (as migrants) and in the Global South (as workers) is predicated on these twin factors: their disenfranchisement entangled with and necessary for their exploitation. These combined features sustain societies in the Global North. 

As I will argue below, it is no mere coincidence that the far-right’s anti-immigrant hysteria is thriving as precarity reaches the wealthy world and conflict and poverty pushes people from the post-colonial world. While formally over with the end of colonialism in the course of the 20th century, the postcolonial order preserved the exploitative domination of a ‘core’ composed of Global North’s liberal democracies over the ‘periphery’ of the Global South’s newly sovereign countries. These dynamics of racialized political subjugation, resource extraction, and labour exploitation have enabled the prosperity that sustained western democracies both under the colonial and post-colonial global orders. As the relative prosperity enjoyed by workers in the wealthy world is crumbling, social anxiety in western democracies is being directed not against those whose wealth has multiplied, but against the groups that were supposed to stay subjected according to the post-colonial deal. If a less unjust world is to emerge after the demise of neoliberalism, democracies need to rethink their struggle for justice as one that does not require the subjection of others as in the system that prevailed under the colonial and continues today, but contests the exploitation and dehumanization of racialized others at a global scale. 

 

The underbelly of 20th century western democracy

Democracy in the west took shape through the gradual enfranchisement of the white working class, which proceeded in the context of empire in the early- to mid-twentieth century. As I argue in my recent book Democracy and Empire, the white working class was enfranchised after abandoning radical anti-capitalist demands and acquiescing into an agreement to share the spoils of empire with capitalists. The process was mediated by states that unions pressured to commit to welfare regimes, which reached their golden age in the postwar era. The politics of organized labour during this period cannot be understood without the imperial context. Settler colonies, for one, provided an escape valve for the poor and the unemployed, prevented labor unrest in the metropole, and facilitated upward mobility for white workers escaping abject poverty in industrializing England. Workers emigrating to British colonies became settlers, requesting enfranchisement for themselves while demanding the fencing off of land and working opportunities for other non-white foreigners arriving to the same territories. Questions of labor, mobility, and migration were heavily debated during this period at the level of British imperial bureaucracy and—eventually—state-based immigration regimes emerged not to restrict foreigners from entering, but to absorb the imperial system of labor control. Despite its formal focus on the foreign, migration systems were not created to exclude foreigners but to establish a gradated system. Migration control did not exclude white foreigners, but incorporated them to the polity while implementing their claims to self-government as including the ability to restrict non-white Chinese and South Asian migration to Australia, South Africa, and Canada. Failing that, popular movements fought to legally relegate them to the most arduous jobs, conveniently setting them up for exploitation.² U.S. debates proceeded alongside similar paths. Chinese restriction gave way to reliance on Mexican labor, whose “advantages” purportedly included their bodily resistance to arduous work in the fields and the ease of their return or deportation to Mexico when no longer needed. This racially gradated migration regime served to control labor, allowing for the provision of cheap and exploitable work where it was needed, while preventing the political enfranchisement of most racialized migrants. 

The division of labor between white and non-white migrants in settler colonies had a counterpart in the global division of labor, with racialized workers overseas tasked with providing food and raw materials to feed citizens and machines in the industrialized world.³ This combined regime of migration and global racialized division of labor evolved but did not substantially change during the twentieth century for those groups singled out as racial others (in contrast with the more fluid access to whiteness by Southern and Eastern Europeans). It can still be seen in racialized migrants’ overrepresentation in care, gig, farm, and construction work in the west and in contemporary exploitative extractive economies and export-oriented growth based on the toil of badly paid workers for apparel or high tech factories. Historically, countries in the Global South fought anti-colonial wars and resisted the imposition of anti-democratic development models. These models were eventually imposed by western-backed authoritarian regimes and enacted by co-opted local elites committed to pacification and stabilization programs. These dynamics of oppression were later augmented by structural adjustment policies under the ‘Washington Consensus’ policy agenda and implemented by neoliberal or neodevelopmentalist democratic regimes. 

The history of western democracy is thus also the history of empire shaping the world to serve this island of prosperity, where the political and economic emancipation of the domestic working class entailed the appropriation and redistribution of resources garnered through force and oppression, which destroyed communities in the subjugated territories in the service of capitalist accumulation. The democratic citizens in these imperial projects were thus united by two factors: first, a possessive feeling that organized the rule of others despotically to extract resources, and second, reciprocal political relations among themselves. These two factors mandated the redistribution of the capitalist gains from exploiting the Global South, itself predicated on citizens in western democracies claiming the right to set the rules of interaction with the Global South. This imperial mode of democratic politics, which I call “self-and-other-determination,” elicited significant resistance abroad, and multiplied conflict through the waging of colonial wars like Vietnam, the arming of friendly militaries, and the sabotaging and support for coups of regimes pursuing socialist projects like Arbenz or Allende. This mode of engagement bred instability because it militarized social conflict, both generally by favoring repression of social protest and progressive demands to make countries “safe” for investment and, specifically, by tackling socio-economic questions like the consumption and trading of drugs as if they were security issues. 

 

The breakdown of the imperial deal as a breakdown of western democracies

Fast forward to the present, and factor in the dismantling of welfare states and what Albena Azmanova has described as ‘epidemic of precarity’, understood as “a condition of vulnerability — disempowerment rooted in social threats to lives … experienced as incapacity to cope due to a discrepancy between responsibilities and power.” The imperial deal is breaking down. Unsurprisingly—and as Marx anticipated in his writings on English and Irish labor—the deferral of the white working class to empire and capitalism only strengthened capitalism’s hand and backfired: capitalism struck back by reneging on the domestic ‘democratic’ pact. In parallel, we have witnessed the sensationalized construction of migration as a threat by the extreme right and, in many countries, the increasing transformation of the problem into one of security across the political spectrum. The migrants that make it to the Anglo-European world are a small proportion of a very real exodus of people escaping poverty, violent conflict, climate change, and facing possible death in militarized paths they traverse well before reaching European or U.S. borders. In other words, they are escaping capitalism’s ravages.

These ravages are the other side of the deal between capitalism and the white working class. The stable access to resources and exploited labor in the Global South entails significant force and co-optation of local military and civilian elites willing to govern their populations to facilitate the extraction of labor and natural resources, as noted earlier. Conflict, climate change, development models predicated on cheap labor pushed people toward migration, made easier by the proliferation of information and ease of mobility. It is well known that the great majority of displaced populations remain within their home countries or in neighboring countries. For those who venture toward the Anglo-European world there is no unproblematic access to dignified labor conditions upon arrival. Rather, the militarization of immigration control creates ideal conditions for vulnerability and exploitation of undocumented migrants or asylum seekers who successfully cross the militarized barriers. This connection between vulnerable status and exploitation was clearly at play in the spike in underage labor drawing from the pool of unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S. Southwest border in recent years.

Thus, the crisis of the two pillars of western imperial democracy (capital and labour sharing of imperial spoils and their cordoning off and “pacification” of populations conscripted for labor exploitation to ensure stable capitalist extraction) has thrown imperial democracy out of whack. This understandably creates anxiety and perhaps a sense of threat, as Azmanova’s Capitalism on Edge makes clear, but my point here is that this anxiety is associated with the crumbling of the imperial bargain, and the demand is to restore it. That is, the boisterous and peevish publics in the west have reacted to precarity not by demanding a rethinking of capitalism or redirecting their attachments toward forms of life not predicated on the exploitation of others, but by blaming migrants and refugees for said publics’ misfortunes. . The modes of visibility and sensationalizing of migration suggest that immigrants are not staying in their place, i.e. racialized subjects are seen as being guilty of exceeding the modes of labor mobility dictated by empire such as explicitly sanctioned guest-worker programs or exploited labor overseas. But this is not entirely transgressive, because the contemporary model of surveilled populations with irregular status is merely an update of imperial indenture programs and postwar guest labor. It is an update in that it produces, through other means, exploitable populations (like the road repair crew in the Key Bridge without proper means of communication or a safety skiff) in line with the formations demanded by metropole and settler working classes. 

 

Shedding democracy’s imperialist addiction

This historicized account of imperial democracy shows that western politics and models of emancipation remain addicted to and entrapped by empire and capitalism. In so doing, it also challenges the ideological apparatus that frames migration as a matter of sovereign states’ prerogative to control borders. Instead, it presents contemporary institutions of migration control as functional equivalents of a global regime of racialized labor control, now administered by democratic nation-states. 

The proposed framing of democracy and migration control allows for a better assessment of both contemporary far-right politics and left responses in historical perspective, rather than continuing to rely on ahistorical contemporary commentary that takes migration to be something that “happens” to societies. For example, a recent piece reflecting on the European turn to the populist right notes that “[n]o country, including the United States, has ever dealt happily with the panic, no matter how unfounded, prompted by mass migration, legal or clandestine, and the Europeans are doing no better.” Among scholars, migration is posited as one more “flow” that comes with market-driven globalization and prompts an authoritarian or right-wing populist backlash. But this begs the question of why the backlash against globalisation takes the authoritarian, far-right hue that it does, which only the historical account of imperial democracy proposed here properly addresses. Shortly put, migration is central to the crisis because its growth is a symptom of the proliferation of conflict and crises in the Global South.⁴ These crises are themselves indicators of a destabilized system of capitalist extraction resulting from the excessive exploitation of communities and nature. This, alongside the growing egoism of capitalist elites, even vis-à-vis their compatriots, signals the crumbling of the imperial bargain between capital and labour within western democracies and fuels a nostalgic demand for a past of “orderly”, insulated (hence, racialized) welfare. Importantly, the racist reaction to non-white migration, now, as in the past, fuels ever more violent regimes of migration restriction and surveillance, thus turning racialized hostility and violence into means of labor control and capitalist accumulation. 

In other words, anti-immigrant restriction is imperial racial capitalism returning with a vengeance, relying on racial hostility to create opportunities for accumulation but this time (mostly) refusing western working classes a welfarist agenda. The proposed diagnosis, moreover, brings into relief the danger for left parties of a return to the imperial socialism of the early 20th century. Notably, before passing a measure granting parole to undocumented spouses, President Biden enacted an executive measure akin to the measures approved by Trump, which suspended asylum at the border after certain triggers.⁵ UK’s brand new Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, on the other hand, has set “illegal immigration” as his government’s top priority and promised “no more immigration” through a strategy that would use “counter-terror style tactics” to “smash the gangs” that facilitate crossings at the English Channel.⁶ The New Popular Front in France presents a welcome contrast, with a legislative contract that proposes revising European and French asylum policies, the creation of a rescue agency, and the extension of rights to work and citizenship to asylum seekers. The authorization to work aside, the (welcome) humanitarianism measures are insufficient if they do not come accompanied with a more decisive anti-capitalist program that tackles global processes of accumulation rather than merely sheltering domestic publics from their harshest effects. Thus, the challenge for the western left at the current moment of crisis is to return to its anti-capitalist project and to globalize it, rather than limit itself to adjudicate an ever-shrinking slice of public funds domestically while, at best, standing by the violent global order and the destructiveness of capitalism. At worst, left governments in western states continue to enlist their political clout and military power to sustain and expand their corporations’ influence in a process that can only strengthen corporate actors.

An alternative left politics is one of commitment to universal labor justice, where gains for western citizens are not extracted at the cost of migrants and workers in the Global South but obtained by directly attacking the power of corporations and wealthy elites. Projects like the job guarantee, the $17 minimum wage and 4 day working week are excellent examples of projects that aim to guarantee the wellbeing of workers. But these proposals ought to be global, like the otherwise relatively modest proposal for a 2% tax on wealth. Grappling with migration fueled by conflict and lack of opportunities means grappling with the fact that the deficiency of opportunities in the Global South is by (capitalist) design. This is what dependency theorists argued, and what export-led growth-qua-cheap-and-unprotected-labor-led growth continues to show. Another lesson of dependency theorists and other critics is that capitalism is a global system.⁷ If this is the case, then a left anti-capitalist project that doesn’t challenge the global division of labor falls short of challenging capitalism. But domestic-centered left projects leave untouched (or fuel through international organizations and foreign policy) capitalism’s global reach only at their own peril. This is because a domestic-centered anti-capitalism is not merely neutral in two senses. First because it permits unfettered capitalist accumulation abroad and strengthens capitalist elites as a domestic actor, and, second, because it protects its own constituencies/workers only by allowing and reaping the benefits from the continued super-exploitation of racial others. Thus the real danger of the embrace of anti-immigration measures by left parties is not only that this sends them down the far-right’s path into projects of immigration restrictionism and militarization, but also that it fails to genuinely challenge capitalism. It may be cheaper to militarize borders and buy off transit countries to repress migration in the short term, but absent a significant improvement in the conditions of sending and receiving countries alike, migration will continue and capitalism as a global and domestic project will only gain strength. Recently, commentators have grappled with this reality, but instead of grounding the staggering global wage inequalities in the historical transfer of wealth from the periphery to core countries, they have suggested it “create[s] the largest arbitrage opportunity on the planet,” which could be realized through temporary guest worker programs administered through “secure digital identities” and punitive penalties on businesses that move temporary workers outside of this legal schema. Indeed, a violently enforced global division of labor that produces inequality in combination with militarized borders and racial hostility does create arbitrage opportunities! Offering low-wage labor opportunities through “time-limited labor mobility” to address the demographic crisis in the west while employing digital technology and punishment to make sure imperial gains remain protected is the definition of adding insult to injury. Moreover, far from constituting a new “solution,” it comprises the very structure of the current system of irregular, hyper-surveilled migrant labor.

In sum, the growing popularity of far-right movements in Europe and the US reveals citizens’ wish to vanish non-white subjects or relegate them to even further margins of society. This is the repetition of an old mistake: democratic peoples in wealthy countries turning a blind eye to capitalism’s the intensive exploitation of racialized workers while hoping to appropriate a larger portion of these imperial spoils. This impulse is not foreign to the left, whose emancipatory orientation has too often narrowly concerned domestic workers, whose grievances are presumed separate from the global ills that capitalism produces abroad. But this is misguided. There is no way forward for the left without recasting the challenges of capitalism as global ones. As we witness, at the time of writing, the advance of the far-right in Europe and the U.S., it is imperative to understand the Capitol uprising in January 6 alongside the Key Bridge collapse three years later as symptoms of the persisting imperialist orientation of western democracies. We must grapple with the capitalist and imperial dynamics that brought Latino road workers and South Asian crews into violent collision in Baltimore – a collision that revealed the subterranean ways in which racialized exploited labor sustains western democracies. The racist hatred toward racialized groups represented by the January 6 uprising tells us something important about the democratic polities we live in. This is because by elevating aggrieved white citizens supposedly threatened by racialized political advances, it continued a tradition of white citizens joining capitalist projects as minor partners while keeping racialized workers at home and worldwide vulnerable and set for exploitation for capitalist accumulation. The challenge as we face the contemporary resurgence of this hatred is to undo the overall structure, rather than refuel it.

Footnotes

1. In Dialectics of Dependency Ruy Mauro Marini defines super-exploitation as the mode of labor typical of dependent countries. This mode of labor entails an increased intensity of labor, longer working days, and below subsistence remuneration.

2. In addition to establishing poll taxes and banning property ownership by non-white migrants and residents, the United States and the Anglo-settler colonies restricted access to certain trades for non-whites either informally through Anglo settlement and displacement of Mexicanos from the best occupations after the Mexican American war, or by enacting explicit measures, like in Canada and South Africa.

3. Workers in the Global South were both native and foreign, like the millions of indentured Chinese and South Asian workers enlisted to build railways in Africa, extract nitrate in Perú, or replace slave labor in Caribbean plantations.

4. Migration was historically considered and has worked as a safety valve to poverty, instability, and the potential for societal unrest, as British political economist and politician Edward Gibbon Wakefield argued in his writings on emigration/colonization in A Letter from Sidney (1829).

5. Specifically, asylum would be suspended at the border whenever border arrests hit a daily average of twenty-five hundred arrests in a given week. This suspension wouldn’t be lifted unless the number of arrests dropped below 1,500 and stayed that way for the duration of two weeks. This measure was harsher than the failed Senate bill that was rejected in the House.

6. The specifics of his plan are yet to be released.

7. See Rosa Luxemburg, Oliver Cox and Immanuel Wallerstein, among others.

 

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Inés Valdez, political theorist, is associate professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Valdez’s most recent book Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism (Cambridge UP) theorizes the material underpinnings of western democracy and its embededness in empire.

We live in an age of radicalization. We see it everywhere – from the evening news to conversations at the corner shop. Life has become a series of risks, radicalized people being, quite simply, dangerous to others. What is happening and can anything be done about it? 

All significant movements of the Geist (as in “The Phenomenology of Spirit”) inevitably produce a radical fringe. A small fraction of the human mass searching for new answers to new problems loses patience with the pace of events and decides to force them along by sheer willpower. This radicalized fringe cannot be dismissed as an insignificant blip on the radar screen or as a passing fad. For every radicalized individual, there are thousands, who share the same grievance, anger, and frustration, but disagree with the extreme posture; as John le Carré shares in his memoirs, he sympathized with some of the arguments of the Red Army Faction, but not with its methods. 

To avoid the disturbances – indeed, disintegrations – that result from continued radicalization, one must address the problems that, ultimately, give rise to that particular grievance which produces a radical fringe. 

Grievances are, as a rule, ignited by dramatic changes that disturb the settled fabric of life. A previously dominant Idea, underpinning social reality, has run its course. A new Idea needs to be formulated, in order for society to regain its balance. “The body cannot live without the mind”, noted Morpheus in “The Matrix”; by the same token, society cannot live without an underpinning Idea. And so, the human spirit tries to understand and evaluate the changes leading to the decline of an Idea, to see to which new Idea they may be pointing and to ponder whether something drastic needs to be done about it. 

A great Idea emerged in the 18th century and gradually, over generations, shaped a new kind of society. We can call this Idea “Justice for All.” At its very foundations lies the rejection of privilege and the demand for equal and fair treatment.

It germinated in the striking request of the British barons, back in 1215, that certain basic rights be treated as universal and unconditional human entitlements rather than privileges reserved to some. By the 18th century, the idea became prevalent among ‘enlightened public opinion’ in Western Europe. Much as social reality remained infested with human suffering, the ideal of ‘justice for all’ was the dominant lens through which that suffering was judged and interpreted. It was by no means uncontested: Conservatism, as a political stance, emerged as a revolt against Enlightenment universalism. It is this revolt that first gave birth to identity politics in the glorification of parochial loyalties. However, as the concept of “justice for all” spread from Paris cafes and London clubs, it held out the promise of enfranchisement – of bringing in, out of the cold, the dispossessed, the downtrodden, the exploited, the discriminated against. The establishment and outward spread of political rights was followed by human and social rights.

A multitude of social groups, whole countries and regions were being brought in from the cold. Employment gradually became secure, racial segregation was discontinued, women and gay rights were recognized. Ongoing enfranchisement, seen as emancipation from the oppression of privilege, was assumed to be the Idea of any legitimate society. Even communist leaders found themselves bound to claim, unconvincingly, that they were in the enfranchisement business. 

Societies which diverged from this model were gradually brought into line. The last colonies became emancipated through the 1960s and 1970s. Military dictatorships fell throughout Europe and Latin America. The communist regimes in Europe, which in fact enshrined privilege to a truly feudal degree, disintegrated in 1989. The nations “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic” decided to model their societies on the “Justice for All” principle. This onward march seemed unstoppable – for now and for all times: the End of History, no less. 

Human history cannot ever end for the simple reason that every dominant idea inevitably produces a reaction, an opposing idea or concept; and thereupon a great debate ensues about life, the Universe and everything. Such ideas and concepts were already circulating in the wake of 1989 (i.e. during the supposed ending of history), although few people noticed. 

Human beings inevitably argue with each other. For a long time the arguments were, ultimately, over food and the distribution of scarce resources. By the early 1990s, the food question was seen as resolved in what used to be labelled the First and the Second Worlds: no longer would you eat “what was given”; you would eat what you wanted, because everything was permanently available and you also had the resources to have it. This happened for the first time in history and it changed everything. People stopped arguing about food and, after casting around for a bit, focused on a new issue: they began arguing about “identity.” The era of culture wars was upon us by the time those hijacked planes hit the Twin Towers. 

Arguably (at least Richard Rorty argued thus¹), while remaining focused on the emancipation of repressed and discriminated groups, “identity” was an integral part of the emancipation movement: you could not, the argument ran, be fully emancipated as an individual if you happened to be a member of a repressed or a discriminated group. Such a drift towards collective (rather than individual) rights can only be temporary and must be called off the moment the repressed group is no longer so. Otherwise, a collectivist mentality will become entrenched and liberal democracy weakened. 

While Rorty allowed for the existence of “identity” temporarily and for clearly defined purposes, the great historian Tony Judt saw the entire “identity business” as extremely dangerous.² It is indeed so, for at least three obvious reasons. The first: modern humans have too many identities. When people become focused on expressing just one of them, the outcome is a plethora of ever-smaller identities competing for attention. Their proponents, in order to be heard, have to become increasingly more vocal. And, when engaged in too much shouting, we all become more radical in both our expression and our ideas. Identity radicals spread through the known world, fighting increasingly obscure battles with increasing bitterness. 

The second reason why “identity” is a dangerous business is that it subsumes the human individual – and the entire liberal-democratic edifice arising out of the placing of the individual at the centre of society and politics – into a collective. Once this drift into collectives becomes a tide, then “identity” inevitably shifts to the arena of reactionary, primitive, pre-modern agendas – ethnic, racial, religious, nationalist, populist. Whereas, while residing on the Left, identities kept splintering and, although increasingly vocal, weakening, with the shift to the reactionary arena they became big and felt strong. Inevitably, they were taken over by authoritarians and, under their leadership, became aggressive towards other collectives: Donald Trump, Putin, Hamas, Orban, Modi… the list goes on and on. 

The Left bears responsibility for the reductionist approach to identity, which in turn has provided fodder for the reactionary identity politics of the right. 

Identities, when becoming aggressive, feed on a sense of rage (against the enemy, be it the “liberal establishment”, the “elites”, “migrants”, “foreigners” or “infidels”) and victimhood. Victimhood fuels the rage and the rage penetrates into the souls of more and more people. 

The third reason behind Judt’s judgment is that “identity” fuels radicalization, which in turn fuels various novel forms of tribalist populism. This is the point at which we are at the moment. 

History has not ended; it can never end, because people will always argue. It has splintered. 

The political result is de-emancipation, which in turns fuels more resentment, rage and radicalism. This is how it works. 

The movement away from the individual and towards conceptualizing humans as collectives has initiated a historic turn of the tide. The spread of emancipation depended on the idea that individuals should be freed of all unreasonable restrictions – i.e. restrictions that could not be defended with arguments from Kant or Mill. With the weakening of the individual, the idea of ever-spreading rights is inevitably eclipsed by the ancient (and reactionary) idea of ever-spreading privileges for collectives. 

Equality is only possible among individuals; among collectives there is a struggle for privileged positions. Privilege, being the sworn enemy of rights, leads to de-emancipation.

At the same time (here we again see the dialectic in action) the position of the privileged groups is being strengthened by their entry into client-patron relations with the groups claiming victimhood. As Albena Azmanova has noted³: “Various minorities are competing for victimhood, as this is the only apparent avenue to social protection, while ruling elites source their power from the patronage they bestow to select minorities.” In this way, she concludes, victimhood becomes instrumentalised, losing its ethos of solidarity. This, in turn, puts the clock back to the feudal model⁴ of societal organization, which has little room for individual rights and freedoms, structured as it is around group hierarchies and subordination, rather than around free and equal individual citizens. 

This new twist to the plot creates another source of rage and radicalization. Losing acquired rights always makes people angry. De-emancipation is seen, quite rightly, as unfair by the majority of those who, throughout the last 30 years, have remained individuals and managed to stay away from collective identities. In the West, jobs become precarious as employers, becoming class-conscious again, revert to exploitative methods. In the East, individuals are denied the individual right to choose their religion or, indeed, to live in peace and keep their lives. Everywhere ruling groups morph into self-serving oligarchies. 

De-emancipation cannot but lead to anger because it overturns the entire logic of Modernity. For the last (at least) 300 years we have been battling against privilege and trying to get to a level playing field, with equal chances for all. Lord Acton called this process the “gradual passage … from subordination to independence”⁵ and identified this passage as the very essence of Modernity. With de-emancipation comes the revival of privilege and with it – a movement back to subordination. 

And so it came to be, by a canny dialectical metamorphosis, that a movement to collective rights, designed to emancipate whole groups, turned into its opposite and de-emancipated the individual. The feeling spread that something very essential was being lost, taken away. 

The feeling of loss was, as Ivan Krastev has pointed out⁶, further intensified by the perceived collapse of the idea of meritocracy. Just as vast numbers of people were becoming members of the precariat⁷, while others were wondering why they were losing long-established rights, it began to seem that success was in fact preserved for an entrenched privileged elite, rather than open to everyone in equal and fair measure. The appearance of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, together with the “Panama papers” served to underline the general impression that privilege and oligarchy had returned and taken effective power. 

This is enough to make anyone’s blood boil. It is a question of fairness. In societies based on the individual and her rights and freedoms, justice is the only legitimate basis of politics and of the institutions of state. Consequently, the feeling of injustice leads to a de-legitimation of the whole edifice. 

Here is Adam Smith’s take. The following he wrote in his “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759), wearing the hat of a great moral philosopher (rather than the more prosaic hat worn while writing “The Wealth of Nations”):

“…Justice (…) is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice. If it is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society… must in a moment crumble into atoms (…) Every appearance of injustice, therefore, alarms man [sic] and he runs (…) to stop the progress of what (…) would quickly put an end to every thing that is dear to him. If he cannot restrain it by gentle and fair means, he must beat it down by force and by violence, and at any rate must put a stop to its further progress.”⁸ 

To paraphrase Master Yoda: “De-emancipation leads to Anger, Anger leads to Hate, Hate leads to… Suffering.” In our case, suffering comes in the form of radicalization and loss of civility in society, and of authoritarian populism in politics and government.

Rage, victimhood and the desire for revenge, if not checked, will make civilized life impossible.

As Adam Smith noted: “Society, however, cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another.”⁹

And there you have it. The current convulsions of the Geist have produced a generalized frustration with the eclipse of fairness that, in turn, has brought into being a radical fringe that gives tongue to agendas of revenge, hurt, and injury. Countries that have gone down this road have found themselves in a twilight landscape of: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”¹⁰

The way out of this is obvious. We must take seriously all of those major thinkers – from Plato and St Augustine to Smith, Kant and Mill – who placed justice at the basis of government and politics. More specifically, we urgently need to reboot the whole agenda of emancipation rooted in that struggle against privilege and for fairness that produced not only Modernity, but also liberal democracy, human rights and the possibility to be (in Benjamin Franklin’s words) civil to all and enemy to none. 

 

Footnotes

1. Richard Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” Radical Philosophy 59 (1991), pp 3-14, at p. 8.

2. Tony Judt, ”Edge People,” The New York Review, March 25, 2010.

 3. Albena Azmanova, “Precarity for All,” Post-neoliberalism symposium, 29 November, 2023.

4. David Graeber noted, sometime ago, the revival of feudalism in big corporations: “It’s not at all uncommon for the same executives who pride themselves on downsizing and speed-ups on the shop floor, or in delivery and so forth, to use the money saved at least in part to fill their offices with feudal retinues of basically useless flunkies.” In “Bullshit jobs and the yoke of managerial feudalism,” an interview with David Graeber, The Economist, 29 June, 2018.

5. Lord Acton. Lectures on Modern History. Macmillan 1963, p. 19.

6. Ivan Krastev. After Europe. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 

7. See: Albena Azmanova. Capitalism on Edge. How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia, Columbia University Press, 2020.

8. Adam Smith. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, Oxford University Press 1976, p. 86, p. 88.

9. Ibid., p. 86.

10. Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan (1651). Baltimore: Penguin Books 1968. Pt. 1 Ch. 13.

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Evgenii Dainov is Professor of Politics at the New Bulgarian University, Founding Member of the Green Movement in Bulgaria and composer and guitarist with rock band Magistri. His latest books include Politik und Rock’n’Roll. Wie kamen wir won “Love Me Do” auf Donald Trump? (Edition Konturen), Russia: A Story of a Country Without History (in Bulgarian, New Bulgarian University Publishers), Bowie: An Elegy (In Bulgarian, Millenium Publishers).