In his international best-seller The Burnout Society (2010), Byung-Chul Han, an enfant terrible of contemporary German thought, performs theoretical surgery on 21st century societies, deploying as a surgical knife the idea of the ‘burn-out’ that we suffer due to an ‘excess of positivity.’ Excessive activity, our exposure to a relentless flood of information and stimuli, and an endless ‘hysterical’ multitasking have spread globally as an antidote to an overly fluid, insecure and meaningless life. The imperative ‘to succeed’ drives us into a form of self-exploitation, blurring the boundaries between freedom and compulsion. The upshot is a generalised exhaustion and depression besetting our times.
Despite the apparent astuteness of this psycho-cultural anatomy of the new century, a contemporary reader is likely to dismiss it out of hand. Han sets out from the thesis that, thanks to medical and biological technologies, we have left behind the ‘immunological’ era of the 20th century, a ‘bacterial’ period in which we felt the need to sharply insulate the inside from the outside, the friend from the enemy. That time was marked by primarily aggressive and defensive attitudes, targeting what was perceived as the foreigner as such. Today, Han contends, this reaction to the strange, to the alien, is no longer the prevalent logic, erasing the dialectic of negativity that underlies it. We live in a world where ‘the positive’ has become a mass phenomenon, in a pacified and permissive society which is burning out due to excessive activity and the over- exposure to the Same in everyday experience.
In the post-COVID age, the global rise of an authoritarian, xenophobic and reactionary right takes aim not only at the ‘alien’ — migrants and Muslims — but also at the basic rights and liberties conquered by the various feminisms past and present and by LGBTQIA+ struggles; at liberal constitutionalism and ecology; and at human rights at large. In such a conjuncture, Han’s historical diagnosis risks being ridiculed as the utmost intellectual imbecility.
In times of uncertainty, of multi-crises and dramatic changes, a reflective posture calls, however, for caution, patience and persistence. The following analysis advances the critical hypothesis that, in our era, the ‘immunological’ paradigm has been renewed, reinforced and transmuted in conditions dominated by the social exhaustion and the burnout on which Han focuses. The surge of the xenophobic, conservative and authoritarian right appears thus as the reactionary resurgence of immunological patterns under the historical terms of the neoliberal hegemony, where the ‘horizon of expectations’ — of progress, emancipation and collective welfare — has vanished. At the same time, state authoritarianism cultivates attitudes of submission to power and aggression against the weaker — the hallmarks of the infamous ‘authoritarian personality’ sketched out by Theodor W. Adorno.1
The financial and broader socio-economic upheavals of the last fifteen years have not radically unsettled the global rule of neoliberal capitalism.2 They have converted and refigured it, however, by way of authoritarian inflections.
A first authoritarian shift of neoliberal post-democracies has come about as a direct consequence of the financial crisis that shook the world from 2008 onwards. This latter swept away the shaky foundations of the false prosperity — or promise of prosperity — of the middle classes: consumer debt, stock-market and real-estate bubbles, and the fantasy of a globalised market generating mountains of wealth for all. Austerity policies and the imperative to ‘pay off the debts’ collapsed the living standards of large sectors of society, who withdrew their support for the post-democratic neoliberal regime established in the 1990s by convergent centre-left and centre-right forces. In 2010–12, the middle class started protesting, becoming outraged and rising up with heightened intensity. Faced with the breakdown of social consensus, the regime rescued itself through violent repression. Neoliberal political and financial elites turned the crisis into an opportunity for the upward redistribution of wealth, or they simply remained attached to the neoliberal doctrine, or they were subject to crushing pressures from the stock market and vested corporate interests, at both the domestic and international levels.3
At the next stage, after the culmination of the financial turbulence and austerity which started in 2008, the prospect of restoring the material foundations of social consensus evaporated in a process of ‘normalising’ the crisis. The upshot of ‘critical’ debt management by neoliberal states was the considerable economic decline of the lower and middle classes, the lack of opportunities for social ‘betterment’ and upward mobility, stagnation and different degrees of material deprivation. On the other hand, finance and big corporations remained largely unaffected, or even managed to improve their position. Financial markets and shareholder wealth maximisation dictated and overturned national economic policies.4
Against this background, we entered into a second phase in which the reactionary regression escalates as neoliberal leaders converge with the authoritarian spirit of the xenophobic, nationalist and antiliberal far right. In different ways and following diverse trajectories, Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump and the Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis embody this coalescence and the endeavour to achieve social consent by catering to the morals and the logics of the most reactionary political currents.
In effect, the alt.right offers neoliberalism a deal: accept nationalistic restrictions on some of your activities, and the rest will be left free. Furthermore, the public’s rage will be directed away from you and on to immigrants and foreigners…Such an offer…threatens…to unleash an uncontrolled, anti-institutional political leadership...5
The outcome of this confluence is a sinister mix of policies through which an organically ‘embedded’ or corrupt political personnel serves the interests of big capital while subverting standard liberal institutions — by interfering with justice, installing high-tech surveillance mechanisms and intercepting communications, exerting extensive control over mass media etc. — eroding the rights of women and minorities, spreading nationalist discourses and waging war on migrants. Assaults on LGBTQIA+ people, Muslims, migrants, feminists, and human rights activists — the ‘enemies’ of the fatherland, religion, race and nation — give vent to social disaffection and socio-economic antagonisms, displacing them away from big capital and the hegemonic forces and towards scapegoats. State authoritarianism which corrodes core elements of liberal democratic constitutionalism becomes mainstream and is normalised, curb- ing or deactivating citizens’ reflexes and political responses.6
A third, most recent episode of this process, the management of the pandemic in 2020-2022, was marked by the renewed implementation of the quintessentially authoritarian policies of the ‘state of exception’. The suspension of basic liberties and the over-concentration of power in the executive branch were coupled with intensified policing, enclosure, confinement and repression. The reiteration of the repressive governmentality of the state of exception, after the violent repression of social reactions to the austerity regime, entrenched the authoritarian ‘exception’ as ordinary and familiar, the ‘common sense’ and ‘self-evident’ condition of our times.
Finally, the governmentality of violence assumes also a ‘techno-authoritarian’ edge by deploying technologies of surveillance, monitoring and control of people’s movements. Online statements, QR codes to certify vaccination, restrictions of movement and forced interventions in human bodies — all measures which came under fire from anti-vaxxers — made up the key components of a new apparatus of techno-power.
[T]his feeling of vulnerability is being exploited by neoliberal governments to foster the development of a neoliberal version of techno-authoritarianism, presented as the best way to provide security and protection. With innovative digital technologies like the QR code they are trying to reinforce their power and restore their legitimacy.7
Hence, in the last fifteen years, the iterations of executive despotism, police repression and biopower over ‘bare bodies’ deeply ingrained these practices and their logics in the body of the multitude. They install fear and a sense of impotence. They make people passive, establishing a ‘normality’ of subjection, violence and authoritarian affirmation. Anti-democratic governance becomes a ‘common place’ through its diffusion in everyday policies which assail the fundaments of liberal democratic constitutions, trampling on the freedom of the press, exerting a systematic and lethal violence against migrants, interfering with justice and persecuting political opponents.
This exacerbated authoritarian turn that marks our era does not only strengthen neoliberal hegemony, sharpening inequalities and exclusions while training docile and submissive bodies. It generates feedback loops with an expanding reactionary politics ‘at the grassroots’ which spreads in the everyday reality of racist and patriarchal violence, in nationalist and xenophobic mobilisations, in organised anti-feminist and anti-LGBQTIA+ action, and in the electoral rise of multifarious far-right wing formations.
It transpires, thus, that over the last ten years, far from receding, the immunological modes of political reasoning and mobilisation have resurfaced. They have transformed and widely expanded, on both the levels of institutional power and civil society, assuming the patterns and the international networking of the contemporary alt-right. The regressive recoil into the nation, race and patriarchy constitutes a defensive movement of fencing oneself off from the ‘poly-crises’ and the historical challenges of the present. These latter include global interdependencies, economic shocks, dramatic inequalities, stagnant poverty, climate disaster, radical and unpredictable technological changes (digital technologies, biotechnologies, AI), epidemics, and intensified migration flows that are largely due to that same critical condition of humanity and contemporary versions of colonialism. What has effectively receded at the beginning of the 21st century is not the immunological paradigm. It is, rather, the collective horizon of expectations for another world of equality, freedom and justice for all.8 In this age of precarity, fear, turmoil and unpredictable transition, there is
a strong temptation for ordinary citizens and the institutions we have created, including political parties, to respond by defensively holding on to what we have. But there lies the false security of pessimistic nostalgia.9
Colin Crouch makes the case that a ‘pessimistic nostalgia’ animates xenophobic right-wing parties and ‘right-wing populism’ — the fastest advancing form of politics today, which has spread from Brazil and the US to India, Russia, Italy, France, the UK, the Balkans and Turkey, while it is gradually becoming widely popular in Scandinavia and Germany.10 In his diagnosis, a politicised pessimistic nostalgia is the psycho-mental scheme which governs the immunological reactions of the closure upon the self, conservatism and regression.11
Nostalgia recalls a real or imaginary better past which has been lost. Pessimism feeds off the lack of hope that the future will be better. The pessimistic colouring of nostalgia for the goods that have been lost or are currently threatened, and the politicisation of pessimistic nostalgia by conservative political currents, feed the collective dispositions of defensiveness, exclusion and violence against those identified as ‘invaders’. Conservative political movements and actors in the ‘new’ far right construct nostalgia politically as a ‘zero-sum game’ in which the space for ‘our people’ shrinks. We must defend, thus, our vital room against putative intruders, which today include migrants, international institutions, global financial forces, but also feminists and LGBTQIA+ people who contest traditional masculinity. These ‘enemies’ become the objects of resentful rage, which is possessive and aggressive against those accused of depriving people from the good life of the past.12
The politics of fear drives the search for collective security for the tribe…authoritarians channel tribal grievances ‘outwards’ towards scapegoat groups perceived as threatening the values and norms of the in-group, dividing ‘Us’…and ‘Them’…we need high walls — and strong leaders — to protect us and our nation…This orientation underpins and vindicates…intolerance, racism, homophobia, misogyny, and xenophobia.13
For the time being, however, the physically murderous wings of the right- wing counteroffensive remain on the margins. This is what differentiates contemporary versions of politicised pessimistic nostalgia and reaction from the interwar fascisms.14
A critical matrix of this authoritarian conservative swing of our times is arguably the historical conjuncture rendered by Han as ‘lack of being,’ the loss of faith in our present. Human life becomes elusive, transient, without substance. The world is ‘denarrativised’ and life is devoid of meaning.15 Hence, the existential political question today is whether
post-industrial, post-religious, post-modern societies [are] capable of producing solidly established political identities, or are we now doomed to be masses of loosely attached individuals blown around by confusing blasts?16
Pessimistic nostalgia responds through a passionate attachment to nation and ethnicity, tightly intertwined with other forms of social conservatism. On the other side, the left and the centre fail to mobilise commensurately strong identifications grounded in existing and deep-rooted social identities.17
National identity is perhaps the only collective identity which is systematically reproduced and fomented by neoliberal regimes, thereby securing their hegemonic force under circumstances of acute social fragmentation and individualisation.18 Clinging to the ballast of national identity, intimately interwoven with patriarchal structures and other hierarchical traditions, nurtures an illusory sense of certainty in a chaotic, fluid and dangerous global condition. It provides, thus, a compass and traces of meaning and value in the ‘denarrativised’ world outlined by Han, that is, a world shorn of comprehensive, firm and vivid narratives which underpin the lives of the many and vest them with meaning.
Starting already in the 18th century with the Enlightenment, the American and the French Revolutions, and on a more massive scale in the 19th and the 20th centuries, the religious and traditional foundations of the world were displaced by new horizons of meaning and hope: progress, emancipation, collective freedom and prosperity, which would emerge from revolutionary ruptures with the ancien régime, or from gradual reforms and improvements in industrially and scientifically developing societies. These new, markedly modern, coordinates of meaning and hope have been dismantled over the last decades, leaving behind them flattened, empty and gloomy worlds. In the words of Enzo Traverso:
with the disappearance of communism the very concept of utopia has been put into question. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, for two decades it was explained to us that utopias inevitably lead to totalitarianism: the only possible outcome of any project for a future society is totalitarian horror... In this context, the radical right and Islamism constitute surrogates for the utopias that have now disappeared. They are not new utopias but substitutes for them. Both are reactionary, because they want a return to the past: the radical right rejects globalisation in favour of trapping us within national borders and old conservative values. With their shallow conception of national sovereignty, they seek a break with the Eurozone, a return to protectionism and the exclusion of immigrants.19
Obviously, the nation-state is not only a source of meaning but also a bounded and fenced territory which is experienced as the first and main stronghold of collective security against domestic and foreign dangers.
Along with nationalism, the forces of authoritarian conservatism are anything but new in modernity. The socio-political developments of the last decades, however, have brought them again to the front stage. According to Crouch,20 from the French Revolution onwards two main cleavages of political antagonism divide modern societies: the clash between traditional conservatism and liberal rationalism, on the one hand, and the conflict over economic inequalities, on the other. In the second half of the 20th century, in mass democracies with organised trade unions and welfare states, struggles over issues of wealth distribution come to prevail. However, with the transition to neoliberal hegemony, the decline of the labour movement, the shrinking of the welfare state and the imperium of stock markets and big corporations, the politics of redistribution recede, and the first cleavage resurfaces anew with heightened tension. This is inflamed by increased migration flows and a sense of loss of national sovereignty which is engendered by globalisation, to the effect that voices around threatened national identities intensify.
In their diagnosis of the current ‘cultural backlash,’ Norris and Inglehart supply ample empirical evidence from across the world to illuminate how contemporary circumstances give rise to highly polarised culture wars between
The escalating widespread fear of uncertainty and destruction is both stoked and organised by authoritarian political actors who make use of it for their own purposes.
socially liberals and conservatives. The latter turn increasingly authoritarian as ‘they feel their core values are no longer widely respected’ and are ‘displaced by growing social diversity, linked with the influx of out-groups with different nationalities, languages, lifestyles, traditions, and religions.’21
Authoritarian inclinations foreground ‘(1) the importance of conformity with social conventions and established traditions; (2) the need for security to protect against risks threatening the group; and (3) the value of loyalty and deference to group leaders, who defend ‘tribal values.’22 Authoritarian reflexes are triggered by acute feelings of precariousness and risk experienced by conservatives who are faced with deep cultural change and diversification. But the sense of insecurity becomes also widely diffuse across society due to the economic context of steepening inequalities, precarity and impoverishment under neoliberal capitalism. This double bind of heightened cultural and economic insecurity marks our global historical present, prompting similar authoritarian collective responses across the world, which are shaped and reinforced by the ‘supply side’ of authoritarian conservative and nationalist leaders.23
The escalating widespread fear of uncertainty and destruction is both stoked and organised by authoritarian political actors who make use of it for their own purposes. They displace this fear ‘from its identifiable conditions of production — climate disaster, systemic racism, capitalism, carceral powers, extractivism, patriarchal social and state forms’24 — and refocus it externally, onto ‘spectres’ invested with the power to destroy our societies — foreign people, ‘gender’ or non-binary people, environmentalists etc. — in order to fortify religious authorities and state power, propping up anti-democratic politics.25 Authoritarian nationalism and conservatism appear thus to be a ‘distinctly conservative response to neoliberalism, that is, a strengthening of church and family in the wake of the devastation of social services in an increasingly privatised economy.’26
Pessimistic nostalgia, fear and resentment breeding conservative closure and aggressiveness towards the ‘other’ find a fertile ground among large and diverse sectors of contemporary societies, whose common background is that they are afflicted by the realities or the perceived threat of a material and/or cultural decline. Among others, resentful pessimism pervades segments of the industrial working class which struggle to survive globalisation and automation and feel abandoned by the forces of the neoliberal centre and the left. Hence, in the U.S.A., among others,
an aggrieved white working and lower middle class [is]…caught for several decades in a squeeze between neoliberal practices of escalating inequality and working insecurity, on the one hand, and noble pluralizing drives, on the other, that fail to identify [them as] … one of the struggling minorities in need of support. The distinctive bind into which this constituency is caught primes many in it to open valves of responsiveness to Trump as he intensifies and channels their anger along specific canals…[He] draws into a collage dispersed anxieties and resentments about deindustrialization, race, border issues, immigration, working-class insecurities, trade policies, pluralizing drives…27
Pessimistic nostalgia imbues also professionals beset by insecurity about their small businesses and the status of their skills in global digital capitalism. It is diffused also among sectors of the middle class that have been violently impoverished and have lost the hope for better days.28
But authoritarian conservativism permeates richer and privileged classes, as well, in countries with powerful xenophobic movements such as Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Austria, which fear the loss of privileges or worry that their national way of life is at risk.29
Finally, the disposition of authoritarian enclosure drives conservative groups which stand against the cultural advances achieved over the years on matters concerning gender, sexuality, the social role of religion, violence and minorities.30 In the post-war era, traditionalist currents were reined in by the guarantees of a basic economic and social security. This dam burst with the rise of neoliberalism and, crucially, with the austerity policies enforced during the financial crisis. Hence the waters of traditional conservatism — swollen by resentment for their marginalisation over decades — flooded contemporary politics.
Under the pressure of the manifold crises and historical ‘stresses’ of our present, reactionary, resentful and authoritarian movements are thus likely to have a transversal, multi-class composition.
Existential orientations to abstract revenge that attract people toward such movements can be forged out of several kinds of experience: a calamity, failure at work, social isolation…the decline of a state, or the intense sense of being neglected or downgraded for other reasons can draw people from a variety of social positions.31
Hence, the widespread ‘grassroots’ swing to the right, with its nationalist and xenophobic outbursts, appears reasonable and expected. A cultural conservatism which triggers revolts against modernisation and progressive values felt as threats to identity intersects with the economic axis, forming complex feedback loops under the pressure of social inequalities, extensive insecurity and the demise of the neoliberal social contract which promised development and prosperity for the many.32
It transpires, after all, that the latest authoritarian turn is far from an ‘absolute novelty. It displays marked affinities with the infamous fascisms of the 20th century as dissected, among others, by Nikos Poulantzas in the 1970s. A heterogeneous ideological complexity, melding reactionary conservatism and nationalist ideals with material social demands, appeals to diverse class sectors, notably the petite bourgeoisie and popular classes of the countryside, by capitalising on the actual failures and the apparent impotence of left parties and movements to meet popular needs while fascist actors promise to deliver in powerful and decisive ways.33
In recent opinion polls and research, the present articulation of the cultural axis with the economic has been described as a ‘security-based set of attitudes’.34 Here, the sense of insecurity or the animosity against cultural transformation is coupled with material deprivation or precarity or a fear of losing privileges, propelling social actors to seek protection from the state and state intervention. This complex quest for cultural and economic security is the most liable to be attracted to authoritarian policies promising to satisfy it. This is a core electoral pool for leaders of the old and the new far right who advocate for protection on both fronts by deploying the seemingly effective means of state authoritarianism.35
On the far and the radical right, the promise of economic ‘security’ is articulated, of course, not in terms of egalitarian redistribution but through the logic of national primacy over the ‘foreigners’ and minorities. It speaks the language of national protection, which safeguards big money from the demands of taxation and redistribution. Since the centre-left and the left have given up on their politics of redistribution and social justice, or they are unable to implement it under neoliberal hegemony, the more conservative sectors shift towards political spaces which express the dual desire for social conservatism and economic protectionism. At the same time, the political identity of the left and the centre-left is marked today by an emphasis on rights, internationalism and openness which repel these same sectors.
Social demands for ‘protectionist’ closure — rather than equality, social justice and democracy on universal terms — were exacerbated in the times of the pandemic when ‘control’ and ‘protection’ were raised to conditions of survival.36 As a result, we are witnessing the near rehearsal of pre-war dramas of the 20th century, which nourished the monsters of Nazism and fascism as the politics of protection and stabilisation targeted ethnic and other minorities and foreign nations. For the period which started at the beginning of the 20th century and ended with the 2nd World War, Karl Polanyi painted the picture of a ‘crustacean society’ which seeks absolute sovereignty and domestic security grounded in isolation or the exclusion of the other. The nationalist right weds the politics of protection and sovereignty to aggressiveness, the will to dominate, xenophobia, law and order, and the defence of established property regimes, concealing capitalist rule under the cloak of competition and conflict with foreigners and other nations.37
The ‘crustacean society’ lies at the core of the ‘immunological paradigm’ of our era as fleshed out by Roberto Esposito. According to Esposito, ‘immunisation’ underlies a wide range of crucial phenomena since the 1980s, from the HIV pandemic of the time to the fences erected against global migration flows.38 ‘Immunisation’ is a process of delimitation which defines the self and the other, that which belongs to the body and that which is external to it, putting up walls and establishing defensive mechanisms.
Esposito’s thesis is that the strategies of immunisation have come to prevail in the last decades, constituting ‘the symbolic and material linchpin around which our social systems rotate’, because of the diffusion and the acceleration of a ‘contagious drift.’ Pandemics and the multitudes of migrants are experienced as an ‘uncontrolled and unstoppable diffusion’ of contamination, which appears to threaten individual and political bodies.39
The immunological picture tellingly captures our ‘moment,’ the widespread social demand for ‘control and protection’40 in the turbulent context of global financial interdependencies and conflicts amplified in the maelstrom of the COVID-19 pandemic. What Esposito’s tableau fails, however, to illuminate is precisely Byung-Chul Han’s insight: the universe of meaning which vanishes, the eclipse of powerful strategic alternatives and the visions of egalitarian emancipation, as well as the diffuse sense of a flat, fleeting, tiresome and bare life bombarded by endless stimuli, information and hyper-activity. The quest for existential meaning in conditions where there are no cogent positive alternatives, no compelling horizon of progressive expectations, provides the ‘missing link’ for grasping the sweeping tide towards reactionary closure and aggression against the ‘Other.’
Three sinister features of the authoritarian downturn — targeting migrant (Islamic) populations as scapegoats, conspiracy theories, and bloody violence against foreigners, women, LGBTQIA+, progressive political activists — can be elucidated if they are situated within the co-ordinates of this historical condition. Large social sectors captured by dark feelings of impasse, frustration, impotence and existential threat fail to discern or do not face up to the complex systemic causes of this situation — the global economic system ruining the planet and the organised capitalist and political elites. Conspiratorial logics draw easily legible maps to traverse a confounding landscape experienced as menacing. Anti-migrant and patriarchal violence give vent to feelings of frustration, failure and powerlessness, leading up to further illusions of self-affirmation through the elimination of putative ‘existential threats,’ which function as a substitute for apparently stronger enemies and actors generating dramatic inequalities, crises and social impotence under ‘capitalist realism.’41
A pronounced advocate of authoritarian thanato-politics in the 20th century, Carl Schmitt, shed ample light on the existential depths of this politics and the dynamics of lethal violence that it motivates. In his classic essay, The Concept of the Political (1932), he advanced the thesis that ‘the political’ consists in a particular relationship between Friend and Enemy. The Friend is a collective entity that stands opposed to the collective group of the Enemy, animated by the most extreme tension and the ‘real possibility’ of physically eliminating the Enemy. ‘The political’ is thus construed as an antagonism between collective entities, which is not held in check by any external criterion — moral, economic, aesthetic, or other. What is at stake in this antagonism is the very existence of Friend and Enemy, the ends and the destiny of this existence. Hence the readiness to physically annihilate the Other if this is deemed necessary for the purposes of one’s being.
While the universalist claims of his conception of the political are untenable, Schmitt penetrates into the logic of violence at the core of authoritarian reactionary politics. Here, collective identification and the vitality of collective existence are grounded in the radical hostility against the Other and our readiness to kill them. In Schmitt’s narrative, collective identity does not derive its life and its content from another, extrinsic meaning — God, higher moral values etc.- but only from this existential clash with the Other which is charged with the highest tension, making it autonomous from any other field of meaning and action — ethical, aesthetic, economic or religious. In a denarrativised — mundane, bare, rough and dangerous — world, far-right politics generates ‘meaning’ for being and upholds existence primarily through this radical antagonism, infused with an extreme violent disposition, against the Other.42
The forces of equality, liberty and collective emancipation should not respond politically by reacting further to reaction. Otherwise, the response would be determined by the logic and the frame of mind of the enemy. If the global diffusion of regressive authoritarianism signals the ‘triumph of fear over hope’,43 the historical challenge for egalitarians is not only an effective rebuttal but a new construction that overflows the ominous horizon of the reactionary recoil and enlivens hope by bringing on progressive transformations — a new hegemony of the many which entrenches and deepens freedom on a footing of equality. No doubt, this calls also for a confrontation with the historic crises and challenges to which the reactionary turn likewise responds.
The dissemination of attractive and compelling narratives of emancipation, which vest life with meaning by foregrounding the planet, people, solidarity, the freedom and well-being of all, is the main challenge at hand under con- temporary conditions of disorientation, emptiness and pessimism. Action which crafts here and now new forms of organisation and social bonds — other worlds of good, equal, solidary and free life in social relationships, the environment, the economy, culture, care, health etc. — is equally vital not only to meet urgent needs and to cope with disasters, but also to recover credibility and hope through tangible, real action and works. And even if, under certain circumstances, counter-hegemonic interventions in the political system are bound to be fruitless, by combining diverse acts of resistance with pressure and mobilisation across existing institutions — local administration, work- places, trade-unions, health and education, local civic initiatives and everyday relations — we can build bulwarks and lay the foundation for a broader counter-hegemonic strategy, for a social victory and change originating in the democratic self-direction of the many.
In this arduous venture, which will follow wayward trajectories and will face halts, leaps and possible regressions, the vision of transformation which is realised in an ongoing creative practice of equality and freedom here and now will be the mobilising force which engenders joy, meaning and power for the people who act together, nurturing more broadly a political culture of good and free life in common. As a complex configuration of material and cultural issues propels the authoritarian reactionary right, the socio-political basis of a new historical alliance for progressive change will be an effective articulation of political programs which address the needs of the labouring classes while caring for the earth and advancing the equal rights of many different multitudes.
One of the most urgent tasks is to discern and intensify the powers of coalition to secure forms of freedom and equality indispensable to any future democracy worth the name…Against the passion for authoritarianism we could perhaps pose another desire, the one that wants freedom and equality passionately enough to stay in the struggle…Can we make alliances that reflect that interdependency with both human and nonhuman life, that will oppose climate destruction and stand for a radical democracy informed by socialist ideals?44
Endnotes
1 Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, The authoritarian personality, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950.
2 Colin Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism, Cambridge: Polity, 2011.
3 Ibid.; Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy After the Crises, Cambridge: Polity, 2020.
4 Crouch, Post-Democracy After the Crises, op. cit., pp. 53, 78-79, 142.
5 Ibid., pp. 142-143.
6 Giorgos Katsambekis, ‘Mainstreaming Authoritarianism,’ The Political Quarterly, 94 (3), 2023, pp. 428-436.
7 Chantal Mouffe, Towards a Green Democratic Revolution. Left Pop- ulism and the Power of Affects, London: Verso, 2022, p. 15.
8 Crouch, Post-Democracy After the Crises, op. cit.; Mouffe, Towards a Green Democratic Revolution, op. cit..; Paolo Gerbaudo, The Great Recoil. Politics after Populism and the Pandemic, London: Verso, 2021; Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019; Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism, London: Verso, 2019.
9 Crouch, Post-Democracy After the Crises, op. cit., pp. 150-151.
10 Ibid., pp. 91-92, 96.
11 Eefje Steenvoorden and Eelco Harteveld, ‘The appeal of nostalgia: The influence of societal pessimism on support for populist radical right parties,’ West European Politics, 41(1), 2018, pp. 28-52; Edoardo Cam- panella and Marta Dassù, ‘Brexit and nostalgia,’ Survival, 61(3), 2019,
pp. 103-111.
12 Crouch, Post-Democracy After the Crises, op. cit., pp. 91-99.
13 Norris and Inglehart, Cultural Backlash, op. cit., pp.7-8.
14 Crouch, Post-Democracy After the Crises, op. cit.., p.99; Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism, cit.
15 Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, Stanford: Stanford Briefs, 2015.
16 Crouch, Post-Democracy After the Crises, op. cit.., p. 117.
17 Ibid.
18 Norris and Inglehart, Cultural Backlash, op. cit.., p. 451.
19 Traverso, New Faces of Fascism, op. cit., p. 149.
20 Crouch, Post-Democracy After the Crises, op. cit.., p. 132.
21 Norris and Inglehart, Cultural Backlash, op. cit.., p. 450.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., pp. 450-465.
24 Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2024, p. 247.
25 Ibid., pp. 247-249.
26 Ibid., p.70; emphasis added.
27 William Connolly, Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017, p.12.
28 Gerbaudo, The Great Recoil, op. cit.., pp. 146-147.
29 Crouch, Post-Democracy After the Crises, op. cit.., pp. 97, 135.
30 Ibid., pp. 133-138; Norris and Inglehart, Cultural Backlash, op. cit.
31 Connolly, Aspirational Fascism, op. cit.., p.61.
32 Gerbaudo, The Great Recoil, op. cit.., pp. 63, 116.
33 Nicos Poulantzas, N., ‘Shetika me ti laiki apihisi toy fascismou,’ in Problimata toy syhronou kratous kai tou fascistikou fainomenou, Athens: Themelio-Kritiki, 1984, pp. 159-173.
34 A. Malka, Y. Lelkes, B.N. Bakker, and E. Spivack, ‘Who is Open to Au- thoritarian Governance within Western Democracies?,’ Perspectives on Politics, 20 (3), 2022, pp. 808-827; C.D. Johnston, H.G. Lavine and
C.M. Federico, Open Versus Closed: Personality, Identity, And the Pol- itics of Redistribution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
35 Ibid.
36 Gerbaudo, The Great Recoil, op. cit.., pp.
37 Ibid., pp. 111-119.
38 Roberto Esposito, Immunitas. The Protection and Negation of Life, Cambridge: Polity, 2011, pp. 1-2.
39 Ibid., pp. 2-3.
40 Gerbaudo, The Great Recoil, op. cit..
41 To use Mark Fisher’s term. See Connolly, Aspirational Fascism, op. cit..,
p. 16.
42 Norris and Inglehart, Cultural Backlash, op. cit.., pp. 453-455.
43 Ibid., p. 8; emphasis added.
44 Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, op. cit., pp. 133, 259.