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 \u2018liberal\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u2018failure\u2019 does not quite capture the essential problematic of liberalism. As Patrick Deneen argues in Why Liberalism Fails<\/a><\/em> (2018): \u2018Liberalism has failed \u2013 not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself\u2026 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.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, the political visions behind capitalism have further fragmented. Elections are financial investments by sectors of capitalism, as seen by massive cryptocurrency corporation investments<\/a> in the US elections as well as Elon Musk\u2019s in swing states<\/a> on behalf of Donald Trump and his offer to fund<\/a> the Reform party. Musk, once a capitalist Democrat party voter, is now a capitalist \u2018libertarian\u2019. He personifies the fragmentation of capital\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We need to understand better how the far right builds its appeal, and the emotions of resentment, fear and insecurity it mobilises<\/p>\n\n\n\n Libertarianism tried its hand and failed in the UK under Liz Truss<\/a>, but that doesn\u2019t mean it is over. It won the presidency in Argentina with the election of self-declared anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei<\/a> in 2023, while President Bukele in El Salvador steers in that direction and recently met with Musk. On 5 January, Musk tweeted how Bukele\u2019s mass incarceration of supposed gang members \u2013 which has bought him great popularity \u2013 \u2018needs to happen and will happen in America\u2019. Bukele was the first president to make bitcoin a legal currency<\/a> in 2021. In November 2024 he overthrew<\/a> the anti-gold mining law, which communities had fought for seven years previously in a bid to protect their water supply and environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sense that capitalism no longer needs democracy led me to reflect on Barrington Moore\u2019s 1966 classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy<\/em>. \u2018No bourgeoisie, no democracy,\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 despite many contextual differences \u2013 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Democratisation of liberal orders always involved pressure from below, and often violence from those seeking to limit it. England\u2019s 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\u2019s Fascist Party by 1922, while the post-first world war liberal democratic Weimar republic in Germany collapsed amid multiple challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s appeal. Hitler and Mussolini both stand out as disrupters, who nevertheless offered \u2013 long before the age of social media \u2013 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 \u2018order\u2019. The emotional impact of naming and rallying against \u2018enemies\u2019 \u2013 communists, Jews, gypsies and others \u2013 was critical to the far right\u2019s appeal to \u2018national\u2019 unity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n History suggests that the struggle for alternatives has more possibilities under liberal democracies. This does not mean that liberal democracy is the goal<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 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<\/a>, the Czech Republic<\/a>, Finland<\/a>, Hungary<\/a>, Italy<\/a>, the Netherlands<\/a> and Slovakia<\/a>) and are winning significant support in others, including France<\/a> and Germany<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2018solutions\u2019 to material pain generated by capitalism itself. Key emotional appeals \u2013 this time against migrants, Muslims and \u2018woke culture\u2019 \u2013 remain. Protecting the \u2018nation\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, \u2018anti-politics\u2019, as it is often called, is even more potent. Enzo Taverso in his 2019 book The New Faces of Fascism<\/a><\/em> 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: \u2018a mixture of economic powers, bureaucratic machines and an army of political intermediaries\u2019. Politics as something meaningful and dynamic became associated with its opposite. The rejection of its liberal democratic expression by \u2018new\u2019, apparently more authentic voices, gained followers. Especially when they name who is to blame and bring multiple discontents together against that target.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2018influencers\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A good insight into the delinking of capitalism and democracy is Quinn Slobodian\u2019s 2023 study of \u2018crack-up capitalism<\/a>\u2019 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 \u2018economic zones\u2019 \u2013 \u2018not merely the means to an economic end but an inspiration for the reorganisation of global politics as a whole\u2019. Free-market zones became areas where precisely the absence of politics allowed economic freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hong Kong, permitted by London to set its own trade and taxation policy since the 1950s, became emblematic and also a template for China\u2019s 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 \u2018archipelago economy offshore\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is, of course, much more to be said about why today\u2019s rent-seeking capitalism no longer requires democracy or politics and prefers authoritarian governments charged with protecting it. The rise and extraordinary enrichment of the \u2018magnificent seven<\/a>\u2019 US tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta Platforms and Tesla) has created a power that is driving \u2013 if left unchallenged \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCapitalism and democracy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
1922-33\/2022-33: what can we learn?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Capitalist authoritarianism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n