After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Western powers declared the victory of capitalism over socialism. The Western capitalist countries believed they had defeated fascism on the right and socialism on the left, assuming Western-style liberal democracy had no challenger only to sow the seeds of rightwing hooliganism, even fascism, by applying “shock doctrine” in country after country that had recently emerged from rightwing dictatorships or despotic communist rule.
By OP Rana
The return of Donald Trump to the White House after four disastrous years of the Joe Biden administration, in more ways than one, completes the rise of the Right across the world.
Political scientists often separate the rise of democracy, or what in Western political discourse is considered democracy, into three broad waves. The first began in the early 19th century and continued till the few years after World War I. The second began immediately after the end of World War II, leading to the establishment of democratic governments in Western Europe and the emergence of democracy in some countries that had recently gained independence from colonial powers. This was followed by the third wave, which began a couple of decades later, gaining strength in the Seventies, and lasted well into this century.
During the third wave, dictatorships were overthrown across Latin America, Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and the so-called Eastern Bloc collapsed giving way to elected governments, irrespective of the fact that the elections in those countries were influenced by Western powers.
At the turn of the century, countries in roughly half of the world had what the West called democratically elected governments.
The Deadly Impact of Chicago School
However, the Seventies were also the time when Milton Friedman first tested what Naomi Klein has described as the “Shock Doctrine revolution”. Writes Klein in her book, The Shock Doctrine, “Friedman first learned how to exploit a large-scale shock or crisis in the mid-seventies, when he acted as the adviser to Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, Not only were Chileans in a state of shock following Pinochet’s violent coup, but the country was also traumatized by hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy — tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation. Eventually, Chileans even saw their public schools replaced by voucher-funded ones. It was the most extreme capitalist make-over ever attempted anywhere, and became known as the “Chicago School” revolution, since so many of Pinochet’s economists had studied under Friedman at the University of Chicago.”
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Western powers declared the victory of capitalism over socialism. The Western capitalist countries believed they had defeated fascism on the right and socialism on the left, assuming Western-style liberal democracy had no challenger only to sow the seeds of rightwing hooliganism, even fascism, by applying “shock doctrine” in country after country that had recently emerged from rightwing dictatorships or despotic communist rule.
While the so-called democracy wave was perhaps the strongest in the 1990s, with former Soviet republics like Estonia, and especially Eastern and Central European countries like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic (now Czechia) “democratized” with remarkable speed, what essentially the democratization meant was Americanization. The fact is, true democracy was hardly the yardstick by which those new governments were measured.
The lack of real democracy allowed fringe, rightwing elements to slowly but surely exploit the situation to propagate populist ideas. This happened because those governments did not offer any kind of feasible or attractive alternative vision for people in those countries — actually, very few governments around the world offered a feasible alternative vision for a better future — and in many cases the elections were openly influenced by the US-led West, or in some cases rigged.
It is also the collective failure of the Left, the mainstream Left parties in particular, to provide a truly egalitarian and feasible social, political and economic program that would make people in general see reason — and a better future — and prevent them from being entrapped by the divisive, disruptive and destructive politics of rightist, neo-Nazi forces. Left parties across the world seem to have lost their organizational skills, their power of reasoning and the dedication to serve the people. Therefore, the Left has to share some of the responsibility for the rise of the Right across the world.
The fact that people were dissatisfied with their government was evident in quite a few countries, some of them in Europe, soon after the end of the Cold War. The Far Right used this dissatisfaction to its advantage to make its presence felt in the elections of some European countries — Austria’s Freedom Party even became a partner in a governing coalition in 2000 following its strong showing in the 1999 election. More signs of anti-democratic and Far Right activities were evident in the 2000s and early 2010s in even some “consolidated democracies” like Turkey (now Turkiye). But the self-proclaimed defenders of democracy and human rights turned a blind eye to these developments, because they were either currying favor with China (which had joined the World Trade Organization in 2001) or accusing it of human rights violations or not doing enough for protecting the environment, in order to invest in the country or set up production bases there.
The Rise of AfD and Other Populist Parties
The result was that by the 2010s the reactionary Right had risen to power, not through coup but through elections, in Turkiye, India, Israel, the United States, Hungary, Brazil and Poland. Extreme Right parties had made inroads even in Western Europe, with some of them, like Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), enjoying unprecedented electoral success, winning a large number of seats and larger vote shares in parliaments and joining governing coalitions. In fact, the AfD won more seats than German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic party in the European Parliament election in mid-2024.
Ironically, almost every one of the new authoritarian parties and outfits has presented itself as authentically democratic despite openly attacking democratic values like secularism, multiculturalism and egalitarianism.
In their 2022 book Spin Dictators, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman have documented the transformation of authoritarianism across the world — the Far Right authoritarian parties have moved or are moving away from overt violent repression toward manufacturing consent through bogus elections and a managed press and social media (we’ll come to that later). The authors say that even countries like Russia and Singapore are not untouched by such Far Right movements.
The rise of the Far Right in Europe and the Americas is an established fact. The New Year began with renewed protests in Georgia against the ruling rightwing Georgian Dream party’s decision, contradicting the Georgian Constitution, in November to suspend accession talks with the European Union until at least 2028 and refuse all EU funding until then. The political crisis caused by the rejection of the legitimacy of the October 26 parliamentary election results by the Georgian opposition parties, President Salome Zurabishvili and a big part of civil society, who allege they were rigged, has exacerbated by the U-turn of the ruling party on EU accession. The protesters are still being arrested, beaten, tear-gassed and sprayed with cold water in the freezing Georgian winter. This horror has been going on for weeks on Georgian streets.
In countries like Israel, where the nationalist sentiment is on the rise, leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu are using their constitutional position and popular support to not only consolidate their power but also crush opposition forces and control even the judiciary despite people’s opposition. In the case of Netanyahu, he avoided being ousted from power and imprisoned for corruption by seizing the opportunity offered by the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, to launch a murderous assault on the Gaza Strip, killing more 46,000 people, a majority of them children and women, and destroying much of the Palestinian enclave. A ceasefire has been agreed to but there are doubts whether it will hold, given the sly and unscrupulous methods that Netanyahu has been employing to continue persecuting and killing Palestinians.
Even liberal France has been overrun by the National Rally, a Far Right party led by Marine Le Pen. The party won the majority in the French National Assembly, and recently toppled the French government through a no-confidence vote.
While in Romania, Călin Georgescu’s rightwing party appeared from nowhere to win 22 percent of the votes in the country’s presidential election, in South Korea, a right-wing president (now arrested for treason) declared martial law and attempted a coup d’état.
The activities of Far Right leaders and parties in other countries seem to suggest they have taken whole chapters out of Donald Trump’s playbook. Indeed, Trump has provided the blueprint for Far Right leaders across the world; he has taught them to capitalize on public discontent, fuel nationalist sentiments and use social media to win elections and, once in power, undermine democratic norms, capture democratic institutions and maim the judiciary to remain in power — well beyond the constitutional limits.
What perhaps explains this anti-people, anti-environment and anti-democracy phenomenon is the theory of the “reactionary spirit”. The rise of elected governments across the world also gave rise to political contests over inequality, bringing tensions over status and identity to the fore of the political conversation, fuelling the “reactionary spirit” and threatening the democratic socio-political order.
Humanitarian Policy Falls Prey to Bigots
In this regard, the refugee crisis of 2015 played the central role in the rise of the Far Right in Europe. The civil wars and violent bloodshed in countries such as Syria and Afghanistan, and before that in Libya, produced the single largest number of refugees since World War II. Many of those refugees fled to Europe more to save their lives than to seek a better life. The then German Chancellor Angela Merkel, despite being the leader of a centrist party, welcomed the refugees. The Far Right parties used her humanitarian move to accuse her of inviting “aliens” into Germany and thus making not only the country but also the whole of European Union unsafe, given the EU’s open-border policy, for the white European natives in order to increase their support among Europeans who were uncomfortable with a potential massive influx of people who looked different, spoke different languages and prayed differently.
The reaction was swift and disturbing. Statistics from The PopuList, which has been cataloguing far-right electoral support in European elections since 1989, show a massive increase in the support for Far Right parties across Europe in the wake of the refugee crisis.
European people’s resentment toward immigration seems rooted in their fear of change in Europe’s “traditional ethnic” composition. Especially in Hungary, the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment allowed a government that had already moved toward the Far Right to harness the “reactionary spirit” to consolidate its hold on power.
The hostility toward cultural differences created the fertile ground for the Far Right parties to expand their reach, especially because many of the immigrants came from non-white Muslim countries.
This anti-Muslim sentiment fuelled the reactionary Right BJP’s rise with a staged crisis designed to fuel the Hindu majority’s unease with the country’s vision of equality, and promote binary — us-versus-them — politics to capture and remain entrenched in power. (India’s is a case of an ongoing detailed study which cannot fit even in a book)
The story of the United States is somewhat similar to that of India in that external factors, such as a refugee crisis, didn’t fuel the rise of the Far Right (more appropriately “New Right”). The “New Right” refers to a coalition of American conservatives that led the “conservative ascendancy” or “Republican” ascendancy” in the late 20th century. Called the “New Right” — as opposed to the New Left, which emerged in the 1960s — it comprises conservative and ne-conservative activists who are opposed to a variety of issues, including abortion, homosexuality, the Equal Rights Amendment, the Panama Canal Treaty, affirmative action and most forms of taxation.
The “newness” of the “New Right” refers both to the reinvigorated and redefined forms of conservative political activities and to the mobilization of a previously disorganized suburban middle class, especially youths. The “New Right” grew rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s, partly because of organizations like the Young Americans for Freedom and College Republicans, which shared demographic characteristics (white, middle-class, Protestant, suburban) and claimed they were opposed to what they said was a decline in morality, including rampant drug use, more-open and public displays of sexuality and rising crime rates, race riots civil rights unrest, and protest movements against the Vietnam War.
Paradoxically, the “New Right” outfits also blamed liberalism for the US’ ills, as they claimed liberalism, the very liberalism or neoliberalism that Milton Friedman propagated, contributed to the mismanagement and corruption of the federal and many state governments. The seeds of the rise of the Right were therefore sowed by the economic policies of Friedman.
Analyzing the evil effects of Friedman’s neoliberalism, Noam Chomsky as well as Naomi Klein has rightly said that the primary role of neoliberalism was to act as an ideological cover for capital accumulation by multinational corporations.
The Irresistible Rise of Elon Musk
The fact that big corporations, both domestic and multinational, accumulate humongous amounts of capital or dictate government policies, or even run countries, is not new. The British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company did that in India and Indonesia centuries ago. What is new is the inclusion of oligarchs like Elon Musk into the official coterie of an elected government. What is also new is the open support Musk, the world’s richest man, has lent to the Far Right AfD party, and his conversation with the party’s chancellor candidate Alice Wiedel just weeks before the federal election in Germany. Musk didn’t stop at that, penning an article for one of Germany’s leading newspapers, Die Welt, to praise AfD for its plans to “reduce government overregulation, lower taxes and deregulate the market”.
Also, the Tesla and SpaceX founder contributed about $250 million to Trump’s presidential campaign and vociferously backed him to win the election to become the latter’s right hand man as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, which Trump has created. His success with Trump prompted him to test his strategy in the United Kingdom, which he began by praising the populist Reform UK party of Nigel Farage. Although the camaraderie between Musk and Farage came to a halt after Musk said “The Reform party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes”, Farage, eager not to miss a “golden chance” to seize power in the UK with the backing and financial muscle of Musk, has said he wants to “mend any broken fences” with the world’s richest man.
The activities of Musk are all the more alarming because he also owns a leading social media platform, X (formerly Twitter) — which has been influencing not only global public opinion but also national elections — has 21.24 crore followers on X and has been spreading misinformation about the British government to target Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The sad fact is that Starmer himself has displayed his rightist colours after winning a landslide majority in the general election, by saying that the Labour Party needs to be cleansed of “anti-Semitic” elements, referring to the support some Labour leaders voiced for the Palestinian people who were being massacred by Netanyahu’s forces.
Musk also shares a friendly relationship with rightist Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, who called him a “genius”. Musk, on the other hand, censured the Italian judiciary for curbing Meloni’s hard stance against migrants.
Musk has been trying to get involved in Indian politics as well as the Indian market, by being friendly with the Indian Prime Minister. India has been suffering the devastating consequences of crony capitalism for the past decade. The entry of another, much more powerful capitalist into the Indian market now threatens to further vitiate the political landscape and wreck the economy. The deadly combination of political power, financial muscle and disinformation-spewing social media along with godi mainstream media is sure recipe for disaster in which the poor and the marginalized will suffer the most.
So why are the Right (or populist) parties on the rise across the world? And how do we describe populism?
Populism and its Discontents
Populism, as a rule, is an anti-institutional movement but with contradictory demands — on the one hand it claims to be against the elite, seeks equal political rights and universal participation for the common people, on the other hand, it is fused with authoritarianism often under a charismatic leader.
According to Ernesto Laclau, a leading post-Marxism and discourse theoretician, “populism has no referential unity because it is ascribed not to a delimitable phenomenon but to a social logic whose effects cut across many phenomena. Populism is, quite simply, a way of constructing the political.”
Laclau further writes in his book, On Populist Reason: Marx, in The Class Struggles in France, says “that the parasitism of the lumpen-proletariat, the scum of society, is reproduced by the finance aristocracy at the highest levels of social organization — people who earn their income not through productive activities but ‘by pocketing the already available wealth of others’. So the finance aristocracy ‘is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpen-proletariat on the heights of bourgeois society’. Moreover, for Marx this extension of the category is not a marginal one, limited to a small group of speculators, for it refers to the whole question of the relation between productive and unproductive labour, which political economists had discussed since Adam Smith, and which is central to the structuration of the capitalist system.”
In other words, the lumpenproletariat allows itself to be used by the ruling class to “denature from within opposition to its rule (the long tradition of the criminal mob serving those in power)”.
However, Slavoj Zizek counters Laclau’s claim of populism being “a way of constructing the political”. In his book, In Defense of Lost Causes, Zizek writes: “‘pure’ politics, ‘deconstructed’ from the economy, is no less ideological: vulgar economism and ideologico-political idealism are two sides of the same coin. The structure here is that of an inward loop: “class struggle” is politics in the very heart of the economic. Or, to put it paradoxically, one can reduce all political, juridical, cultural content to the ‘economic base’, ‘deciphering’ it as its ‘expression’ — all except class struggle, which is the political in the economic itself”.
Here Zizek is not trying to challenge Laclau’s notion that populism is a movement political in nature, rather he is rubbishing Laclau’s attempt to divide the working class into progressive and regressive factions; one fighting for their rights and other just causes and the other serving those very powers that the first is fighting against.
However, Laclau’s argument that populism is not defined by any particular political or ideological content but, instead, it structures in a way the representation of whatever political content it articulates cannot be ruled out.
In the context of India, Partha Chatterjee, in his book, I Am the People, writes: “whereas the rise of populism in Europe and the United States reflects a crisis of the integral state, populism in countries like India occurs on the site of the tactically extended state”.
Chatterjee says: “What Laclau’s analysis also suggests is that populism creates a condition in which there is a tension between logics of difference and equivalence. Thus, when a populist opposition comes to power and rules for some time, such as the Peronists in Argentina … it becomes institutionalized within administrative structures and the logics of difference tend to prevail over equivalence. This produces a sort of state populism in which the populist content becomes diluted and loses its appeal … (But as we) will see from the Indian examples, the ability to construct ‘the people’ as a floating signifier is a major political achievement of successful political parties.” And it is this floating signifier that helps political parties win elections.
Chatterjee, however, explains the rise of populism thus: “I believe the most meaningful way to understand populism is to see it as a crisis of bourgeois hegemony.”
As Chatterjee has said, as long as there is no alternative narrative that can bind the regional popular mobilization into a credible, cohesive bloc at the federal level, the BJP can only be challenged through tactical electoral alliances, which unfortunately is not what we are seeing in India today.
This brings us back to the Left. Just like in the other parts of the world, the Left (the mainstream Left) has to shoulder the blame for letting the chance it had to strengthen its organization and consolidate its position in the Indian polity. When he wrote The New Mole 15 years ago, Emir Sadr, referring to Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, said that the small, almost blind mole has been burrowing below the surface of Latin America unbeknownst to us only to surface when we least expect it to. “The mole burrows away silently, ceaselessly, even while order reigns on the surface and there is nothing to suggest approaching turbulence. It is an image that captures the permanent contradictions of capitalism, contradictions that continue to operate even when ‘social peace’ — that of the bayonets, of the cemetery and of alienation — seems to prevail.”
This image of revolutionary forces tirelessly working to bring about social and political change, to build an egalitarian society is fascinating. Not only are they no longer doing so, but also they seem to have forgotten, as Murzban Jal says in his book, The Seductions of Karl Marx, that “Socialism is not a bettering of the bourgeois state, or any state. One does not perfect the state machine, to borrow Marx’s phrase, one has to smash it.”
OP RANA is a journalist.
(The article was first published in the print issue of Groundxero published in January 2025)