Democracy is dying. Across the world, liberal societies are electing their own executioners—authoritarian movements that promise to destroy the very freedoms that brought them to power.
This rise of the far right is not a rupture with neoliberalism—it is its terminal mutation. What began as an elite project to disembed markets from democratic constraint has culminated, half a century later, in a regime that no longer even pretends to be democratic. Today’s far right strips away liberal façades to reveal a paradigm of domination grounded in exclusion, economic supremacy, and technology.
In the 1970s, neoliberalism emerged as a counter-revolution to social democracy. From Hayek to Friedman, it promised freedom by dissolving the political—no more justice, only competition; no more solidarity, only choice. Its genius was to present technocracy as neutral while rendering its violence—privatisation, precarity, planetary destruction—as common sense. It dismantled unions, fragmented civil society, and redefined citizenship as consumption.
But markets cannot produce meaning. When the 2008 crisis shattered the promise of shared prosperity, what remained was not liberty but angst, not order but chaos, not democracy but domination by money and machine. When politics tried to reclaim control, neoliberalism mounted its final defence: techno-authoritarianism.
Its ideology echoes fascism, but where fascism was statist and nationalist, today’s authoritarianism is entrepreneurial, secessionist, techno-utopian. It fuses libertarian capital-worship with neoconservative fantasies of purity, decline, and rebirth. Its moral logic is procedural domination—via code, capital, and calibrated cruelty. Where neoliberalism corrupted citizenship, its heirs abolish it altogether—replacing political agency with loyalty to ethno-meritocratic hierarchies of power.
Some still claim the far right is a backlash AGAINST globalisation, but the convergence is plain: the same billionaires who funded austerity now bankroll ethno-populism. The same platforms that promised emancipation now enable surveillance and disinformation.
Why do so many rally to movements that deepen their subjugation? Because neoliberalism did not merely destroy democratic legitimacy—it rewired desire. Abandoned by the state, people seek belonging. They do not vote for policy; they pledge allegiance to myth. The far right does not persuade—it seduces. When the future is foreclosed, rage becomes the final form of hope.
Yet we cannot defeat myth with data. The new right offers not arguments but identity. If #democracy is to survive, it must recover the political as a shared moral project—one that dignifies, binds, and inspires. That demands institutions of truth, structures of care, and the courage to confront capital not only with critique, but with a counter-myth rooted in #justice, solidarity, and the possibility of a common good.
(Published: July 2025)
#Democracy #Leadership #PoliticalEconomy #Neoliberalism #Authoritarianism #CommonGood
The post’s image intentionally echoes Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
