I find myself sometimes so fearful of a return to the authoritarianism of the last century in a 21st-century form that I wonder if I was right to be so critical of ‘liberal’ democracy. At least liberal democracy triumphed in the west over violent authoritarian dictatorships. There was even a transition in the 1980s-90s to liberal democracy from military dictatorship in Latin America, the region I mostly work on and where I lived through the impact of those regimes of torture, assassination and disappearance of a generation of left activists.
At the same time, it is the failures of liberal democracy that have paved the way for the authoritarianism we now face in the world. And perhaps ‘failure’ does not quite capture the essential problematic of liberalism. As Patrick Deneen argues in Why Liberalism Fails (2018): ‘Liberalism has failed – not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself… A political philosophy that was launched to foster greater equity, defend a pluralist tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity and, of course, expand liberty, in practice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation, and undermines freedom.’
And of course, this is not a purely political issue. The political offer was intrinsically connected to the expansion of capitalist free market individualism. This in turn required servicing through politics and the state. A widespread societal backlash emerged in many western countries against politics itself when this fostered, justified and protected an extremely unequal social order. Different expressions of the right, not the left, have captured these resentments. Today, however, not only do we have the deep citizen disillusionment with what liberal democratic capitalism offers; there are now also different expressions of the forms of liberalised capitalism that capitalists propose and the forms of politics and the state that they think would best serve them. Increasingly, liberal democracy is not one of them.
Capitalism and democracy
The apparent victory of the western liberal democratic model at the end of the cold war coincided with the market-led economic model of neoliberalism intrinsically linked to global expansionism. China and the former Soviet Union certainly transformed economically in the direction of capitalist development and individual consumption and enrichment. Politically, however, they did not take the path to liberal democracy. Other powerful rising economies such as India and the oil states of the Middle East tried to keep a foot in both the west and the east, but with varied authoritarianisms. The capitalism democracy link did not survive.
Today, the political visions behind capitalism have further fragmented. Elections are financial investments by sectors of capitalism, as seen by massive cryptocurrency corporation investments in the US elections as well as Elon Musk’s in swing states on behalf of Donald Trump and his offer to fund the Reform party. Musk, once a capitalist Democrat party voter, is now a capitalist ‘libertarian’. He personifies the fragmentation of capital’s preferred political paths to enable individual and corporate enrichment. The management of digital communications has now provided a form of political influencing infinitely more potent and atomising than democratic electioneering.
We need to understand better how the far right builds its appeal, and the emotions of resentment, fear and insecurity it mobilises
Libertarianism tried its hand and failed in the UK under Liz Truss, but that doesn’t mean it is over. It won the presidency in Argentina with the election of self-declared anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei in 2023, while President Bukele in El Salvador steers in that direction and recently met with Musk. On 5 January, Musk tweeted how Bukele’s mass incarceration of supposed gang members – which has bought him great popularity – ‘needs to happen and will happen in America’. Bukele was the first president to make bitcoin a legal currency in 2021. In November 2024 he overthrew the anti-gold mining law, which communities had fought for seven years previously in a bid to protect their water supply and environment.
However, this is not the only expression of capitalism, even within the Trump camp. Other market liberals advocate protectionist tariffs and connect economics with the politics of nationhood, albeit with a minimal state. President Trump is already scaring global markets with his tariff threats at the same time as he appeases the libertarians with reducing public sector jobs and massive investment in AI and cryptocurrency. On the other hand, China and Russia’s authoritarian capitalism relies on an interventionist state and there are other combinations in the world today of low tax, free market economies combined with concentrated political power.
The sense that capitalism no longer needs democracy led me to reflect on Barrington Moore’s 1966 classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. ‘No bourgeoisie, no democracy,’ he famously said. Looked at in the course of time, however, the relationship between capitalism and democracy is highly contingent. The point of this article is to recognise this contingency, a century after the same lesson could be drawn from the rise of fascism in Europe.
1922-33/2022-33: what can we learn?
I will make three points to open debate not just on the relationship of capitalism to democracy but also on the importance of building an alternative left vision of democracy. First, what can be learnt – despite many contextual differences – if we look back a century to the decade from 1922 to 1933, when fascist authoritarianism and violence grew in Europe? Second, what tools do we have to analyse the gathering strength of capitalist authoritarianism in the west and beyond? And third, how can the left come together around an alternative democracy capable of appealing to populations, significant sections of which are investing their hopes in authoritarian capitalism promoted by passionate, disruptive, self-interested spokesmen?
Democratisation of liberal orders always involved pressure from below, and often violence from those seeking to limit it. England’s Peterloo massacre in 1819 is testimony. However, capitalism in the west adapted to electoral politics, unless interests were once more threatened. Communism was the threat in the interwar years of the last century. This coincided with growing societal disenchantment from left and right with post-first world war liberalism, notably in Germany and Italy. Liberalism had given way to Mussolini’s Fascist Party by 1922, while the post-first world war liberal democratic Weimar republic in Germany collapsed amid multiple challenges.
The far right grew in the 1920s until Hitler consolidated his power in 1933. The great depression of 1929 was a significant contributor to the right’s appeal. Hitler and Mussolini both stand out as disrupters, who nevertheless offered – long before the age of social media – the rhetorical clarity that those living in material uncertainty and political disorder search for. Order and security are real concerns for people that the left leaves to the right at its peril. And the right turns easily to violence to implement its ‘order’. The emotional impact of naming and rallying against ‘enemies’ – communists, Jews, gypsies and others – was critical to the far right’s appeal to ‘national’ unity.
History suggests that the struggle for alternatives has more possibilities under liberal democracies. This does not mean that liberal democracy is the goal
Nevertheless, liberalism survived following the second world war, took on its neoliberal economic clothes in the 1980s and appeared to have gained global domination after the end of the cold war in the 1990s – until once again today it faces rejection and the far right in various guises looks to gain politically. Already, far-right parties are in power in seven European countries (Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia) and are winning significant support in others, including France and Germany. In his first week in office, Trump trashed much of the liberal democratic order in the name of a libertarian/liberal protectionist (this tension is not resolved) economic one.
Although the rise of the far right cannot be equated per se to the ideas that degenerated into fascism 100 years ago, we need to understand better how it builds its appeal and the emotions of resentment, fear and insecurity it mobilises alongside its ‘solutions’ to material pain generated by capitalism itself. Key emotional appeals – this time against migrants, Muslims and ‘woke culture’ – remain. Protecting the ‘nation’, understood as homogenous and under threat today from the collapse of traditional social hierarchies due to effective movements from women, black, gay, lesbian and transgender people, remains a potent mobilising tool for the contemporary right.
However, ‘anti-politics’, as it is often called, is even more potent. Enzo Taverso in his 2019 book The New Faces of Fascism analyses how neither centre-right nor centre-left governments in the post-cold war world offered much change when they alternated governments. Politics mostly subsisted as empty institutions: ‘a mixture of economic powers, bureaucratic machines and an army of political intermediaries’. Politics as something meaningful and dynamic became associated with its opposite. The rejection of its liberal democratic expression by ‘new’, apparently more authentic voices, gained followers. Especially when they name who is to blame and bring multiple discontents together against that target.
No longer are we talking about competing ideologies. It is rather about the emotional harvesting of the frustrations generated by a new age of capitalism, in which ‘influencers’ are the key political articulators of an anti political, socially atomised age. Intellectuals and philosophies are rejected. Young men in particular feel the impact of less certainty and control in roles and relationships with women. At the same time, precarious jobs mean that higher education in digitally related sciences is likely to be the only guarantee of meaningful and secure economic horizons, for which only a few will be prepared or inspired.
Political profit from emotional capture becomes a driver for a far right of varied expressions. Nevertheless, important though these processes are, what is giving them such impetus is the rise of a form of capitalism that can positively embrace an authoritarianism that enables liberal nationalist and libertarian capitalist accumulation.
Capitalist authoritarianism
A good insight into the delinking of capitalism and democracy is Quinn Slobodian’s 2023 study of ‘crack-up capitalism’ and the dream of a world without democracy. He reminds us of the roots behind this dream. The 1990s process of globalisation allowed market radicals to look to ‘economic zones’ – ‘not merely the means to an economic end but an inspiration for the reorganisation of global politics as a whole’. Free-market zones became areas where precisely the absence of politics allowed economic freedom.
Hong Kong, permitted by London to set its own trade and taxation policy since the 1950s, became emblematic and also a template for China’s opening to foreign investment. The City of London, Singapore and over time start up cities and low- or zero-tax jurisdictions in various parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa emerged, establishing the ‘archipelago economy offshore’. They are the realisation of regulation-free, but property- and contract protected, zones of wealth accumulation. The state is there for capital not the citizen.
There is, of course, much more to be said about why today’s rent-seeking capitalism no longer requires democracy or politics and prefers authoritarian governments charged with protecting it. The rise and extraordinary enrichment of the ‘magnificent seven’ US tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta Platforms and Tesla) has created a power that is driving – if left unchallenged – not only our economic but our social and political relationships and futures. As the most messianic and actively political of the CEOs of these superpowers, Elon Musk illustrates the dangers they represent as he seeks to articulate a philosophy of individual sovereignty, the right of free speech and the hierarchies of worth he imagines and appeals to.
On 4 September last year, the Independent captured one of his re-tweets: ‘People who can’t defend themselves physically (women and low T men) parse information through a consensus filter as a safety mechanism. Only high T alpha males and aneurotypical people (hey autists!) are actually free to parse new information with an objective “is this true?” filter… This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.’
The ability of the far right to attract people least likely to benefit from their hierarchical, libertarian metaverse is what the left should be focused on. Lies and contradictions do not seem to harm it – for example, the claim that the concentration of power is needed to liberate the individual. Or Musk’s defence of free speech as based on the right of the world’s richest to dominate the platforms and tools through which it is expressed. If people begin to gain tools for independent critical analysis of this reality and to express their desire for a genuine voice and power in politics, I am convinced violence would be the tool of the wealthy to defend ‘free speech’ or their narrative of what the world should look like.
The left, participatory democracy and agency for change
Critical thinking is an essential pedagogical tool for the left to nurture. It has a particular trajectory in Latin America, where Paulo Freire was a truly radical thinker who recognised the knowledges of the uneducated and enabled activists from the poorest areas of Brazil to find voice and organisation against dictatorship and beyond. The idea of a conscious, independent, thinking, working and peasant class capable of building a counter hegemonic project in Italy was also deep in Gramsci’s imagination as he wrote from Mussolini’s prison in the 1920s and 1930s. It was part of his challenge to the vanguardist top-down communist approach. The UK itself has a rich history of cooperatives and workers’ education. New approaches to informal education in the age of precarious working lives are a crucial step towards rebuilding people’s analytical capacity and releasing once again independent agency for change, which capitalist authoritarians are doing everything they can to suppress.
The left has this and much more to build on in order to reconnect with the lifeworlds of those the far right has reached so effectively. Understanding the emotional impacts of power shifts in gender, race and sexual relationships, and of inequalities in multiple fields, would help build trust and communication with people whose resentments are otherwise channelled by the right. Feeling free to express anger and fear has been validated by the ‘free speech’ advocacy of the right. The left must understand why that feels good and then find ways to analyse with people what and who is behind this ‘liberation to hate’. In Latin America, the word desechables (literally, the throw-awayables) is used to describe victims of this hate that the system ‘throws away’, such as the migrants allowed to drown in the Mediterranean or die crossing the desert into the United States. Undermining human solidarity and compassion greatly serves capitalist authoritarians.
History suggests that the struggle for alternatives has more possibilities under liberal democracies. This does not mean that liberal democracy is the goal. It suggests that we might have to fight authoritarianism through alliances with the remaining progressive liberal democrats in order to preserve and build spaces for convincing people of the value of an alternative. The change will not be overnight. We need pedagogies and sensibilities for building conscious agency for change, re-politicising generations seduced by consumerism and more recently digital exposure to the excitement of following and gathering followers. We need to communicate with people in new ways and listen to why their lived realities have left them vulnerable to the appeal of the far right. And any alternative has to offer dignified working lives, meaningful relationships, pleasure, fun and creativity – in other words, the prospect of shared liberty alongside equality and fraternity (solidarity). Why, I always wonder when I am in Paris, have these three themes of the French Revolution never been brought together in practice by the left?
The practical challenges of reduced public spaces and enhanced virtual spaces are great. Resistance to the far right without a clear alternative from the left is huge. In his final chapter in Capital and Ideology, Thomas Picketty, who collected the data and documented the global history of inequality regimes, lays out the elements for a participatory socialism for the 21st century. He offers important and practical ideas and links them to participatory democracy. A much deeper debate is needed on how to co construct in practice the basis for an ethical, participatory socialism capable of offering a realistic, non-authoritarian, non-capitalist rather than non-market, nonviolent route to change. Unless we find that route, wealth and violence will decide the future of what is now recognised as ‘finite earth’ and who survives climate change. In other words, it is not just whether liberal democracy survives, but whether humanity survives.
