Political Emotions on the Far Right

For over a decade now, leading liberal intellectuals have presented our political drama as straightforward. From Eastern European populists to Latin American authoritarians to emboldened neofascists to Pepe trolls to Donald Trump, the far right fattens itself by feeding on voters’ emotions. Their populisms, their fascisms all rely on an “authoritarian playbook” to manoeuvre voters whose resentment and fervour is outstripped only by their hoodwinkability. Against such manipulators has stood Liberalism. Liberalism, with a capital L, has been there just as it was in the 1930s – the protector of individuals, the defender of the marginalised, the guarantor of justice, the basis of all rational politics.

Thus one noted historian, on the heels of his books Bloodlands (2010) and Black Earth (2015), has written self-help books On Tyranny (2017), The Road to Unfreedom (2018) and On Freedom (2024). Another, no less X-adept colleague, has normalised, via X and CNN and Substack, the rhetoric about “strongmen” and their “playbooks.” From the author of such low-calorie airport bestsellers as Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020) to seemingly the entirety of MSNBC to a Yale philosopher who publishes titles as pompous as How Fascism Works (2018), How Propaganda Works (2015) and even Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future (2024), we are treated constantly to the image of a battle anyone can wage from Bluesky or Zoom room, in which historians own rationality and authority in the “resistance.” The American Historical Association hosted MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on one of the headline panels of its 2024 annual meeting, closing the circle of mutual legitimation.

In all these cases “we the rational” struggle against the manipulators; those who won’t resist are their marionettes. This us-versus-them narrative has predominated since the early 2010s. It lives off a convenient and overcooked binary: emotions belong to the extremists and are easily controlled – even manhandled – with the support of Russia, China, and other illiberal actors. We the rational think of pluralities, we articulate plans and policies, we react to science judiciously, we care properly for the marginalised, we “think things through.” Nevertheless, the theory goes, the authoritarians are multiplying because of the emotionally volatile crowds that support them.

And so has passed a decade of resentful voters, manipulated feelings, Steele dossiers, and stringent cautions about how good liberals cannot recoil because they need to capture the centre and convince enough good people, women especially. This entire narrative – they the emotional, they the manipulated – has not worked out well. The far right, alt right, “populist” right, fascist right, name it what you will, is no longer just “on the rise.” It is now well-established; from Britain’s Reform Party, lurching convulsively past Enoch Powell, to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, to the US president, to parts of Latin America. In France, the Front Républicain that was originally set up against the Front National (itself now wearing a “respectable” costume as the “National Rally”) has collapsed into a vague, opportunistic, even callous defence of Emmanuel Macron’s flagging presidency. Decrying the left as irresponsible, Macron ultimately based a government on the National Rally’s parliamentary force. The Netherlands has swung hard to the right and in Sweden the populist Sweden Democrats provide confidence to the government.

Weak powers elsewhere have had some, but only some, qualms about welcoming the far right into government. Austrian parties managed only with difficulty to form a government without it. German conservatives dithered over governing with the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). In Italy, enough Berlusconiesque governments have dominated over three decades to leave liberal self-celebration in Giorgia Meloni’s dirt. In the US, meanwhile, the defenders of liberalism warned us to save democracy. All that could stand up to the fury of the “deplorables” whose anxieties Trump was exploiting was a post-Obama tent that stretched from the supposed feminism of Hillary Clinton to the amorphous centrism of Kamala Harris, and from a loud (if bland) respect for difference to a nostalgia for an era where human rights guided us into the future and the dead in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and Libya and Mali were lamentable but acceptable prices to pay for liberal security. If these charming promises failed to break glass ceilings or ward off the “weird,” the courts would fix it all. Happy end guaranteed – if not now, soon.

The grand intellectuals articulate this moral fantasy about the world in a tone of urgency and couple it with an admonition: to oppose the right-wing disaster we must thump our chests (which is fine because we are rational, not like the toxic chest-thumpers), denounce the pliability of others, not keep our heads down, echo liberal language. As if we were not allowed to oppose the clownish disgrace of Trumpism unless we agree to the framing of the “authoritarian playbook.” This has been a pernicious argument that provides succour and dignity to those whom one should call “Biden and Harris’s useful idiots,” in echo of Tony Judt’s famous article, “Bush’s Useful Idiots”, written against the liberal fellow-travellers for the Iraq War. For too long, the liberal angle has been warping “the discourse,” pretending that it represents a middle-ground politics full of facts, that it is rejected only by the populists and an irrational left. When anyone proposed to analyse “post-truth,” these were the same intellectuals who mocked “postmodernism” as a relativism that enabled, even created, Trump. When anyone says, over and over, that we simply do not understand what is going on, how Trump’s victory was possible, how he can have this support, who can be satisfied by what he says, the answer was that we should go back to opposing strongmen and see the enemy’s moral turpitude. When anyone pointed out that the war in Ukraine needed negotiation and not demonisation, that it had become a problematic proxy war that exhausted alliances and seemed likely to fail because of sheer lack of political will, resource differentials, and the recognition that a wider war would be catastrophic – these same intellectuals decried cowardice and demanded scalps. Similarly, it became impossible for Democrats to move a hair’s breadth away from Netanyahu’s policies – to quote Kamala Harris responding to a pro-Palestine heckler, “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that” – and now look where we are. A liberalism that treats critics as hysterical and prejudiced has failed to see its own analytical resources are more limited and self-contradictory than they should be.

This supposedly rational ideology now lies in tatters. Unsympathetic voters smelled the condescension from a mile away. And what protection has this ideology offered, and to whom, against the abuses that the Trump administration has inflicted daily since January 20? None. It has offered zero. In Europe too, EU leaders seem shellshocked and paralysed that the world – which told them innumerable times in two decades that it did not see things their way – now confronts them with a properly existential crisis in the figure of J. D. Vance.

Many of the grand intellectuals have made windfalls from their self-presentation: the very systems they set up to ward off populism have become tools for their own advancement. There’s nothing startling about people seeking public attention for their ideas. Meanwhile, the opposing side of the “fascism debate” among academics has largely insisted that the American state has long been primed for a quasi-fascism, that the continuities to neoliberal policies are overwhelming, that the analogy to the 1920s and 1930s is weak. This “debate” has been sterile for some time: two echo-chambers that leave aside everything – everything interesting – that we have learned over almost a century of analytical work, from psychoanalytic to sociological to cultural approaches.

So: what if I don’t find either argument in the “fascism debate” convincing – neither the reductive liberal account, nor the alternative account which satisfies itself with decrying poor “historical analogies?” What is intensifying politically is grotesque and morally disturbing – and it is some new variety of fascism, a blend of: techno-authoritarianism; libertarianism drunk on new hierarchies; celebration of the normative majority; intentional cruelty toward the weak; a leader-cult; a warping of state institutions to the benefit of the “movement;” the appeal to masculine power-in-order; an endorsement of militarist violence against supposedly shadowy domestic enemies and foreign foes. Call this “post-fascism,” following Enzo Traverso, or if you prefer a post-neoliberal variety of fascism, or perhaps even “late fascism,” as per Alberto Toscano. The term needs updating, reloading, rethinking – but within the modern political vocabulary, and until an analytically and morally more effective one is found, it is perfectly reasonable. Sure, as the “alternative” account has argued, we are not back in the 1930s. And a blend of ideologies of freedom with a smaller state and neoliberal economics does muddy the waters. Yet this did not stop students and leftwing intellectuals throughout the postwar period from often correctly diagnosing continuities with the fascist era. It is possible to make the – effectively moral – decision to name and blame the current movements “fascism” in order to oppose it, without doing so on the grounds the grand liberals have proposed, and without altogether losing the capacity to understand those who find them appealing.

For this, it seems to me necessary to reconsider, together with the ideological schemas mentioned above, the entwinement of emotions and economic disaster thanks to which voters end up supporting this fascism. Can we look at the reasons why people feel as they do, why they embody a particular ethos thanks to which they find such practices not only unproblematic but exciting? The liberal lectures, with their haughty, admonishing tone, had supposedly figured out emotions and ideas on the far right. They have not. Much more serious work in decoding and rethinking the stances and appeal of the right has been pursued on the political-economic front by scholars like Wendy Brown, Quinn Slobodian and Melinda Cooper, who have sought to understand neoliberalism’s role, but also by public intellectuals like Sam Adler-Bell and Matthew Sitman on the Know Your Enemy podcast and by Natalie Wynn in ContraPoints. The essays that follow in this section parse desire, anger and injury. The goal is to foreground the share of emotion in the ongoing political, economic and intellectual disaster.

One rationale – you could have others – behind this building of emotions might go like this. By 1992, Pierre Bourdieu argued that it had become clear to small-town, unprivileged officials that the state was no longer serving as the guardian of the public interest. Instead, its upper echelons, the “senior state nobility,” were basically selling out on TV, where politicians appeared, craving ever more attention and symbolic capital. To those with daily contact with the poor, a decade of socialist rule had desiccated rather than strengthened the state. This was leading to worsening uncertainty and despair. Promises by the Socialist Party were empty given the shape of contemporary politics. The lesson to the “lesser” officials was as clear as it was to their constituents: like the powerful, you too have to abuse the state to serve your own interests. You too have to break it, to sell it out – it won’t work for those it should work for. When you fail to manipulate this system, it becomes as hostile and shadowy as anyone who seems to succeed at this.

That was over 30 years ago – with none of the mess that has followed. Today, in Producteurs et parasites (2024), Michel Feher describes the French National Rally as offering an answer to that despair: a racialised “producerism” for dividing society between “producers and parasites.” Where Fordism and Keynesianism had long downplayed race, their demise since the 1970s, heightened by the tensions of globalisation, has allowed the right to reinsert race and an us-versus-them mentality by appealing to a “producer’s” wish to enjoy and own their work. It’s a different class struggle: grievances can’t be answered, as Bourdieu already noted, by the left’s doctrines. The National Rally, like Trump and Vance and so many others, has no difficulty identifying the supposed instigators of suffering: the “parasites,” including foreigners and most of the state apparatus. As grievances mount, one or more figures identified as leaders move in to name and blame the parasites, to guide the mounting fury, to stand in as healers of the injury.

Figures of the leader as enabler/healer have been around for some time – a healer working not through economic policy, but through emotional needs. Adorno had already suggested that “by making the leader his ideal, [the supporter] loves himself, as it were, but gets rid of the stains of frustration and discontent which mar his picture of his own empirical self.” Klaus Theweleit, in his study of the memoirs and novels of Freikorps soldiers after the First World War, presented the leader’s speech as having something more than a healing quality: the capacity to arouse. It mended the psychic castration of the injured:

“The monstrous form that is oratory emerges from the mouth of the Führer and closes around [the listeners’] open wounds. The ritual of the speech protects them from castration and makes clear that men must join together with men, phallus with phallus (at the expense of whatever is socially “below” them). When the leader speaks and the audience moves into formation; when both speaker and audience have assumed the correct form and can anticipate mutual contact which cannot, must not be expressed as actual male love, since this is strictly forbidden, then the man, even as officer, is permitted to cry; indeed he is called upon to cry. This is the orgasm of oratory – surpassed only by the orgasm of killing.”

This figure of the injured audience – healed through speech, fused through shared emotion, sexually aroused into community – offers a way of understanding the deep anxiety fueled as much by economics as by libido. It helps explain what seems incomprehensible to the liberal sensibility: the fabrication of a separate value system, the perception of the “mainstream” as an urban over-educated fluffy elite that picks right at each wound. The left may react that majoritarian conservatism is the value system that blocks any chance for difference, inclusiveness, and an understanding of the weakest. But that means very little to those who feel violated over decades, who respond not to appeals to a vague ideal – no universal can respond to personal injury – but to the sense that foreign norms violate.

We have perhaps spent too long with the languages of trauma and social inclusion to immediately recognise this alternate form of psychic injury, where economics leads to the invisibility and pain of another who believes they “should” not be invisible. The writer Édouard Louis, in his text “Why My Father Votes for Le Pen,” discounted his father’s homophobia and racism in favour of a similarly structural explanation of anger over disappearance and indifference: “These elections were a means to combat his invisibility. My father had understood long before me that, in the minds of the bourgeoisie, our existence did not count ... My father had felt abandoned by the left since the 1980s.” Back to Bourdieu: from the libidinal to the economic and back again. It is not that this circle is complete, or that it is all there is. Rather: not one part of it can be managed in the “fascism debate,” and especially not how this smelting of injury and rhetoric spreads beyond the traditional right.

As we well know, the broader problem is indeed structural: the former superpower, which had stood alone at the summit of history for a moment, has been declining and overcompensating at least since George W. Bush. Other powers are growing their middle classes and aren’t that interested in the subservient status that the US offers them. The costs of 1990s/2000s globalisation have transfigured into ghosts and precarity and “bullshit jobs.” The costs of wars belie the pretense to moral superiority. The global far right appeals not only to elites, but to people who can feel, constantly, the decline of their comparative advantage. Fascism, post-fascism, late fascism should not be a surprise. That Trumps and Orbáns respond to and exploit this situation should not be a surprise. Without understanding how this system works, how it generates a fascist dynamic, we cannot move ahead. Félix Guattari thought that fascism was fundamentally a matter of desire, that it (unfortunately) fulfills psychic needs, that a fascist hides in everyone: “Fascism seems to come from the outside, but it finds its energy right at the heart of everyone’s desire.” The newly heterogeneous socioeconomic groupings that became the bastion of Trump and Vance’s new coalition – and that get the chance to participate – are now excited about their own power. They too feel the decline of their comparative advantage, they too get the chance to use that energy right at the heart of everyone’s desire, they too get to blame others. As opposed to the derelict liberal narrative, as opposed too to anyone who might wave away that dangers of the present, the essays that follow here press us to rethink the pride that voters on the far right take in “freedom,” in “intelligence,” in needing to settle an increasingly hostile, structurally damaging, paranoid world, the fear and rage that they express against despair, the comfort – as much intellectual as affective – in devastating hatred.

The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) first entered the Bundestag in 2017. It’s now firmly ensconced in German politics and has done especially well in the most recent Eastern German elections – although notably there are plenty of West German politicians involved – and in the last national election it gained over 20% of the popular vote. The liberal Brookings Institution, as recently as 2019, was asking, “Is there a coherent AfD ideology?” And without question the party’s leadership and membership is heterogeneous – bringing together some neoliberal economics with defense of a white welfare state with Christian conservatism and völkisch nationalism. But the party is not in the least concerned with coherence; in fact, the big-tent contradictoriness is actually key to the AfD’s success: it keeps people guessing, expands the base, and provides deniability.

I argue for the AfD as postmodern fascism. By postmodern I mean a movement that is cleverly self-reflexive and plays, gleefully, with the inevitable contestedness and instability of truth. Fascist because it is hostile to the ideals of human equality and solidarity and vicious towards all who are vulnerable; because it proliferates racialised explanations for what are actually more complicated economic and social dynamics; and because it appeals to narcissistic longings for greatness. It is also brazen in pushing against legal and cultural norms and limits, inventing concepts and promoting them until they become normalised. The most recent instance is “Remigration” – the plan to engage in mass deportations of migrants and asylum seekers – a term which quickly lost its shock value precisely as it became ubiquitously discussed (including by Trump). Indeed, the effect of introducing the concept is that other German political parties are now debating which migrants are so dutifully hardworking and sufficiently integrated to deserve to be allowed to stay.

Another important postmodern element: present-day fascisms don’t require a “leader.” In the German case, with its own particularities, Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey’s Gekränkte Freiheit (Offended Freedom) updates Frankfurt School analyses of “the authoritarian personality” to identify a new modality of personhood, which they have named “libertarian authoritarians” – people rebelling in the name of the values of individual self-determination and self-realisation. Notably these folks are not looking for a strongman. But the phenomenon is authoritarian in its hostile warding off of any restrictions on the self (from Covid-19 guidelines to making room for migrants), any obligation to care or to sacrifice for those who might be more vulnerable.

With regard to sexuality and gender, the AfD’s messaging is constitutively contradictory. The party is, blatantly, both anti-gay (most recently with a Stolzmonat, or “pride month,” declared June 2023 as a homophobic counter to LGBT Pride) and pro-gay (one of the leaders is openly lesbian, there is an organisation of “Homosexuals in the AfD”, and anti-Muslim racism is promoted by an ad featuring a gay male couple: “My partner and I don’t value the acquaintance of Muslim immigrants, for whom our love is a deadly sin.”) The hetero messaging is also mixed. The party celebrates traditional families, jokingly advocates teen sex, celebrates sensual and proper white motherhood and portrays girls in skimpy bikinis as well as buxom barmaids. And the AfD invokes the threat of rape by men of colour – while, simultaneously, cleverly, displaying female nudity in public spaces – for instance using Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Slave Market together with the tagline “So that Europe does not become Eurabia.”

As feminist art historian Linda Nochlin pointed out decades ago about this category of painting: white men got to look at lovely naked flesh and feel indignantly morally superior to men of colour at the same time. This AfD poster is, after all, also nudity displayed in public space. Notably, the motif is not so different from the many examples in the Nazi Der Stürmer, which regularly featured on its cover a naked buxom blonde being violated by Jewish men – or snakes with Jewish names. More generally, then, I would highlight what I see as the AfD’s effective use of sexiness – which is not much discussed, although I think this is one of the strongest echoes between the AfD and the Nazis, who emphasised sexy-wholesome breastfeeding and plenty of lissome nudes. Five years ago, in a campaign poster of a naked blonde threatened by a man with a dagger, the strategy was campy-horror-obvious. More recently, the images are creepier and more cruel, such as the mash up of abjected men of colour and luscious gyrating white babes in the video for a “Remigration Hit” AfD dance party song. I’ll come back to this.

Yet the most distinctive (rarely analysed, but significant) feature of the AfD is its messaging about disability, especially cognitive disability. No other far-right party in the world is positioning itself as hostile to people with impairments and as obsessed with saying sly, nasty, cruel things the way the AfD is: reveling in a posture of taboo-breaking against what it perceives as goody-two-shoes kindness, borrowing from the antidisability playbook the time-honoured strategies of stirring emotions (above all disgust) while raising economic anxieties, and utilising the common far-right tactic of faux-innocently “just asking questions.”

Already in its 2016 party platform, the AfD railed against the “ideologically motivated inclusion” of children with learning difficulties into mainstream classrooms (claiming that it cost “significant expenses” but also would “hamper other children in their ‘learning successes.’”) Once the AfD entered the Bundestag, it got more crass. In March 2018, the party sought provocatively to stir revulsion against the disabled by presenting a formal “inquiry” to the government with regard to the (utterly fabricated) issue of migrant families producing disproportionately more children with cognitive impairments because of the (again, fantasised) prevalence of “incestuous” marriage among refugees. It turns out this anti-Muslim claim was actually grafted onto an older antisemitic trope from the 1920s, in which it was contended that Jews produced more cognitively disabled offspring than gentiles due to their prevalence of marriages between blood relatives. This stunt did meet with outraged response from disability rights organisations and the churches.

But the AfD was undeterred. In April 2018, picking up the education theme again, candidates self-profiled as demanding an end to a “cuddle-curriculum” (Kuschelunterricht), the implication being that nondisabled children are not learning anything, while the “gifted” are slowed down by the presence of the disabled. One AfD politician suggested that if children with Down syndrome spent time together in class with “normal, healthy” pupils, it was akin to placing people with “severe contagious diseases” in a hospital ward together with noninfected persons.

The obsession has persisted through the years since, evident over and over in regional party platforms. Most notoriously, in a televised interview in summer 2023, prominent AfD member Björn Höcke – who led the campaign in Thuringia winning a whopping 32% of the vote – again attacked inclusion of disabled children in schools on grounds that it harms the ability of the nondisabled to become the “skilled workers of the future.” “Healthy societies have healthy schools,” he declared, but presently German children were falling behind in the “most basic” German and math skills. The cause of this dismaying deterioration? The schools, he said, needed urgently to be “liberated” from “ideological projects such as inclusion.”

There’s a lot to say about this angst around somehow not being a smart-enough nation. As one pro-inclusion activist mother of a son with Down syndrome asked already some years ago: “will 1,000 pupils become stupider just because Henri is sitting there?” But a crucial point that requires emphasis is that in fact inclusion in German schools has not actually happened. It isn’t true; it simply cannot be the cause of German pupils’ purportedly poor abilities. Signatory countries’ compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is recurrently monitored, and Germany is consistently found seriously deficient, with the failure to provide inclusion in schools as one main reason for that assessment. So the AfD’s attack on inclusion is not what it pretends to be. It is, we might say, a preemptive counterrevolution.

This brings me to my third point: sheer weirdness. Scene 1: in the conservative German newspaper Die Welt, three weeks after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack, the editor-in-chief of the entire Die Welt news conglomerate (itself a subsidiary of the powerful media group Axel Springer SE), Ulf Poschardt, published a free-associative piece entitled “The Despisers of the Free West” that opened with the assertion that Jews in Germany were once again living in fear, not least because of “migrants from the Arab cultural sphere.” Poschardt noted that the Shoah was a terrible rupture in civilisation which Germans had had a “large part” in causing and “which makes us bewildered to this day.” He praised the Israeli army, and deplored the “barbarity” of Hamas, that “Iran-backed terror gang.” So far, so routine. But then, amidst elaboration of echoes between the Nazis and Hamas, and whilst noting the “unspeakable suffering” the latter had caused, Poschardt slipped in the notion that Hamas had done so “in the spirit of Amon Göth, Heinrich Himmler or Josef Mengele (albeit minus their devilish IQ).” Why insist on the IQ of prominent Holocaust perpetrators?

Scene 2: a year later. Media outlets are of course reflecting on the anniversary of Oct. 7, and in this context Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the entire Axel Springer group, publishes an essay in which he urges that “Germany needs to become more Jewish.” Not a terrible idea. But what are his arguments? He proposes that – for both “altruistic” and “egotistic” reasons – Germany should make it especially easy for Jews to acquire German citizenship. He also promotes a hypothesis that antisemitism, past and present, is primarily caused by the emotion of envy. Envy because Jews, he gushes, are so smart and so successful. So many Nobel prizes, so much impressive wealth. Muslims and Hindus, by contrast, have hardly any Nobel prizes. It’s all due, he argues, to the Jewish tradition of love of learning, but also the experience of centuries of persecution, which forces people to excel in that which cannot be taken away from them: their intelligence. “Exclusion promotes excellence.” In face of constant discrimination and maltreatment, “to survive, you have to be better.” And he dangles the promise that if Jews were given citizenship en masse, then within ten years, within the now rather impoverished and declining former Eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, one will find “the best German universities, the greatest density of start-ups, the lowest unemployment rate, and the highest per capita income.” I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

Scene 3: A young Brit who’s posted on Substack about “The Smartest Nazis” (“by IQ”) and a young German who in 2023 was part of the secret far-right gathering at a Potsdam hotel to plan mass deportations, dream together of creating an elite modeled on the SS and explicitly envision a near-future AfD-governed Germany for which remigration is a priority. Both race and IQ are major preoccupations for them.

Scene 4: back up a few years to 2021. Independent historian Christoph Schneider, longtime docent-guide at the Hadamar Memorial Museum publishes an essay describing his sorrow and alarm at a phenomenon he’d been noticing with regard to groups of schoolchildren who are regularly brought to Hadamar to learn about Nazi crimes against the disabled. Hadamar is near Frankfurtam Main, and it was one of the T4 carbon monoxide gas chamber killing centres for the Nazis’ “euthanasia” programme. Rather than being able to identify with the victims, the young visitors, he reports, too often tended to empathise with what they assumed were the dilemmas of the perpetrators. A discussion among docents, led by a communications trainer, brought simmering worries to a head: the trainer urged that docents find ways to encourage the visiting children to be able to connect with the stories of the victims, to feel that the topic has something to do with their own lives: maybe they have a sibling or acquaintance with disabilities, she proposed, or maybe you need to point out that disability can happen to anyone, “you could get sick, have a stroke, become dependent on care.” That would never work, one of the docents objected, and blurted out: “I know what they’ll say… [They’ll say:] Then I’ll kill myself, then I don’t want to live, I’ll seek assisted suicide.” (To be clear: Schneider’s argument is not that this is about transgenerationally transmitted prejudice against the disabled; it’s about  heightening pressures in the present to be self-sufficient, competitive and invulnerable, even as welfare reforms and wage depression of the early 2000s have greatly increased experiences of precarity also for the working poor.) How did young Germans get to a place where the thought of becoming weak and dependent is so dreadful they’d rather die than require care?

Two precursor stories, reaching back to before the Nazis but concerning emotions they subsequently brought to grotesque extremes. The short version of the first is that the 1890s saw a proliferation of death wishes being expressed with regard to both disabled newborns and the long-term institutionalised. An obsessively referenced trope had to do with ancient Spartans who were said to have left their disabled newborns to die on Mount Taygetos. It was left to biologist Alfred Ploetz in 1895 – who coined the term racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene) as the German equivalent of Anglo-American eugenics – to erotically super-charge the significance of these ancient Spartans by dwelling not only on their infanticidal practices, but also by presenting them as inspirational in their sexual customs, in which pre- and extramarital intercourse were celebrated when these were likely to produce strong, lovely and smart offspring. Here we are again with sexy racism, or rather: sexy eugenics. But it’s more than that, it’s sexy euthanasia. The point is that historically, in this touchstone text, lethal malice and erotic arousal were affectively fused. That, at least, was the thrilling aspirational fantasy: keep killing off the ugly and weak, and the Germans will become a Volk that is strong, lovely and smart.

But then, wham. Germany lost the First World War. “National humiliation.” The ensuing rapid diffusion of a particularly vicious and mendacious eugenics needs to be understood as a deliberately constructed corollary to the antisemitic stab-in-the-back myth that, instead of acknowledging the Imperial German Army had been trounced on the battlefield, blamed the military defeat on the machinations and betrayals of Social Democrats and Jews on the home front. This is a second myth – involving histrionic assessments of the size of the problem, and the idea that the very survival of the nation was at stake, and the insistent propagation of the (scientifically insupportable) lie that cognitive deficit was biologically hereditary, as physicians were well aware that it was flawed yet blithely fabricated both theory and evidence.

Back to the present. What does the AfD’s combo of insistent sexiness, however silly and middlebrow, on the one hand, and obsession not just with insulting but explicitly demanding to segregate away into special schools (and thereby invisibilise) disabled children, on the other, suggest about what emotions are at work in the party’s appeal to voters? The erotic racism in the “Eurabia” slave market billboard obviously provided opportunities to feel morally indignant and superior – and still get to enjoy looking. The Remigration Hit video, by contrast, is more deliberately audacious, creating with AI a visual echo of the infamous May 2024 dance party on the island of Sylt at which elite young Germans were captured on film singing “Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus.” This is a different kind of arousal or rush, a flagrant display of a felt sense of virile superiority to brown and black men. I think we can read here a shift over the five years between 2019 and 2024: from sexualised danger-mongering (though that hasn’t gone away, in fact: the other parties, from the Christian Democrats to the Greens, have jumped on that bandwagon) to a mode of full-on braggadocio, where Schadenfreude reigns and – as Adam Serwer put it about Trumpism – “the cruelty is the point.” There is, apparently, delicious pleasure in being able to cause hurt. Or as Slavoj Žižek put it during that phase in the 1990s when he was making lots of sense: the secret memo of fascism to its followers is not repressive. On the contrary, it’s a message of license and impunity: “You may!”

Why does the AfD put so much time and energy into preemptively resisting inclusion of children with learning challenges in regular schools? Why bother? We need to think about how looking at antidisability hostility reveals things we don’t notice as clearly in considering other racisms. Three possible interpretations:

We could read it as reflecting insecurity, and here we could make the important point that the wannabe dominant group is never naturally dominant, it’s always just a pathetic fantasy of superiority. Indeed, AfD politicians admit that nondisabled German children are having trouble with reading and math.

Or, the insulting of the disabled has the additional function of flattering the merely-average person as being at least not-disabled (where David Roediger discussed “the wages of whiteness,” here we have the “wages of ableness”).

But by now, I have come to think that the combination of libidinally charged Social Darwinism with demands for invisibilising imperfection and vulnerability has a third, further function, and that is: the deliberate teaching of unkindness – the systematically pursued intentional extirpation of precious human reflexes of empathy and solidarity.

In Sarasota County, Florida, a clinic named “We the People Health & Wellness Center” offers its clients Ivermectin for treating Covid-19 infections. Its name suggests that within the confines of its campus there exists a true democracy of treatment options and consumer choice. Billing itself as a “Freedom based wellness center,” it promises treatments that offer its clients more than cures: the gratifications that come from practicing a truth that is opposed to normative and institutionalised medicine. Freedom, in other words, is conditioned on such alternative truth. Ivermectin enthusiasts and anti-vaccine activists sometimes present the truth as a personalised and individualised notion which corresponds to individual freedom conceived as a personal choice or a personal right – “my truth.” Yet the same activists and communities also express rhetorics of collective freedom and anticipate building a social order in which their truth-telling would no longer be required, because “my truth” would now be understood by everyone, codified in institutional practices and in new laws, protections and rights.

One Florida-based activist, Tanya Parus, has been vocal in insisting that doctors be able to prescribe Ivermectin for Covid-19.  Parus is a member of Moms for America, which began as a group promoting “medical freedom” but has widened its mission into three objectives: “Empower Moms, Promote Liberty, Raise Patriots to heal America from the inside out.” When asked by a journalist why she spends so much time and energy militating for the use of Ivermectin, a widely discredited cure, Parus responded, “It’s about freedom ... doctors should be able to prescribe whatever they feel the patient could benefit from.” So a medical prescription expresses, in other words, a feeling (whether hunch or certainty), and freedom means not having any legal barriers to rendering this feeling into a medical assessment. Behind this feeling, that an alternate treatment is the right one, is another that Parus shares with the imagined doctor: a feeling of paranoia, a sense that established protocols of scientific inquiry are an elaborate plot for social control or maximal profits. Alliances between corporate and state entities surface in paranoid fantasy as the workings of a cabal. This feeling of paranoia and of exposure underwrites the claims of a growing medical freedom (or health freedom) movement, which aligns with anti-vax interests though its remit is broader than vaccines and extends to placing limitations on scientific research. As a social movement it is an assemblage of anti-vax and anti-lockdown supporters, alternative medicine advocates, and wellness industry enthusiasts. This movement, though heterogenous, has come to be represented by conspiratorial health sceptic and recently appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) campaign, with its growing ranks of “MAHA Moms.”

Medical freedom movements are just one part of a larger political trend animated by paranoia. Large segments of the public subscribe to the wild theories of QAnon, and many may not even be aware their beliefs were part of a fringe conspiracy theory that went mainstream. Paranoid discourse about border control and vigilance against immigrants can always be counted on to inflame the passions, with or without the aid of conspiracy theories. Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) aim for paranoid levels of gender policing. Apart from these phenomena, paranoia also comes into play in a more general way in political polarisation, when one’s political opponent is always presumed to be a menace to society. There may be no better concept to characterise the disorienting present than “paranoia,” a term whose etymology (para + nous) suggests being outside or beside one’s mind. While in contemporary cultural politics paranoia is commonly associated with the resurgence of conspiracy theories, it applies across a much wider spectrum of social life. A feeling of dangerous exposure to forces outside of one’s immediate control is central to paranoia, and this mood runs across widely different publics. From rising inequality to the steady withdrawal of states’ protections of citizens, the devastating ravages of neoliberalism around the globe are, by now, well-documented. From this vantage, which includes scenes of catastrophic climate events, the feeling of exposure to danger seems a rational response to the social order. Paranoia is not the necessary outcome of such experiences: it is both a symptom of vulnerability and a defense against it. Among its attractions paranoia names the unnameable by indicating a threat or a malevolence, whose existence and unique powers it designates as “truth.” 

In the rhetorics of contemporary right-wing extremism in the United States, “freedom” is often invoked as an antidote to feelings of danger, and has become a totem for otherwise heterogeneous political action committees, conspiracists, lobbyists, online trolls and activists. While the emphasis may shift, with some voices espousing anti-statism and others emphasising personal license above all, by and large the banner of freedom is what mobilises many right-leaning people.

The QAnon Shaman’s insurrectionary howls in the Senate chamber on January 6 included animal sounds and the word “Freedom.” The shaman would position the word “Freedom” somewhere between a war cry, a lament, and a prayer, so it can take on the eldritch powers of benediction, and so he can in turn cast himself as a steward for the magic of the state. A stencil of his impassioned horn-bedecked face with the word FREEDOM written underneath it is available for purchase at his online store. Moms for Liberty, whose members eschew such outré performances, nevertheless organises itself around the same value. Founded during the pandemic in response to school closures, Covid-19 restrictions, and mask mandates, this group’s notion of freedom entailed exempting oneself from collective responsibility. “Do not comply!,” a familiar cry of anti-vaxxing and anti-lockdown protestors at the height of the pandemic, became a governing principle for Moms for Liberty. Over time this group changed its political mission by making rights and responsibility – rather than noncompliance – the centre of its platform, under the moniker “parental rights.” By shifting its operations from protesting on the streets and lobbying politicians to successfully taking over school boards and demonising teachers for teaching “Critical Race Theory” or “grooming” schoolchildren into becoming queer or trans, Moms for Liberty has wielded the discourse of rights and responsibility against democracy and against the state. The group receives critical support from the Council of National Policy, a network of organisations from the Reagan era that connects big money with Christian conservatism to influence political agendas on the right. Members sign a pledge to protect the “fundamental rights of parents including but not limited to the right to direct the education, medical care and moral upbringing of their children.” Yet their fight for parental rights entails, in fact, the suppression of others: public school teachers, medical care providers, librarians, trans people.

Imagining themselves as the ultimate authority with respect to their children, parental rights advocates (of which Moms for Liberty is only the most visible and influential group) assume authoritative stances with respect to public education, medical treatments for trans youth, the content of library shelves, and so on. Their politics thus operate in a double movement. Acting as the arbiters of morality, education and traditional values, parental rights activists call for an iron-clad authority that would secure their visions for the social order. The defiant and rebellious cry of “do not comply!” has resolved into a wish to submit to a form of state authority that would ensure and protect parental rights, thereby making parents the ultimate authorities regarding children. In this political imagination, the children are thus altogether sequestered from the social.

As for medical freedom, it had already informed social policy in some places well before RFK Jr’s appointment in the Federal Government. In May 2023, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis signed four medical freedom laws. These laws block businesses and government offices from requiring vaccines, masks, testing or proof of post-infection recovery from Covid-19 to access services. They also create protections for those prescribing alternate treatments and they expand exemptions for those opting out of public health services. Erstwhile pro-choice slogans like “my body, my choice” are increasingly taken up by anti-vaccine movements but recast in a libertarian frame suffused with paranoia as injunctions to escape “the biomedical security state.”

There is a revolving door between movements for medical freedom and movements for parental rights, because both movements concern themselves with the family as the fundamental unit of social reproduction. Both medical freedom groups and parental rights groups are often spearheaded by women who primarily identify themselves as “Moms.” As Melinda Cooper has argued, modern capitalism creates and reanimates certain forms of solidarity and love while pathologising others. Neoliberalism has installed the traditional nuclear family, and not the state, as the privileged site of debt, wealth transfer and care. The family is charged with overseeing the protection of individuals. This shifting of values from the state to the traditional nuclear family entails coercive expectations of gender conformity and a renewed valuation of social-reproductive roles for mothers and wives.

So it is not accidental that so many medical freedom and parental rights organisations operate under a label involving “Moms” – Moms for this, Moms for that. In other words, an alternate vision of the social, of relation, and of interdependency animates these political movements, and the “Mom” has become a bearer for neoliberalism’s moral charge. She is first and foremost a moral subject whose needs and wishes align with truth; since she presumably aims at bettering the lives of her children and the children of the nation, her desires render her actions true. Her love for her children is the basis of her authority as a truth-teller. All of her demands are to be deemed legitimate because they are grounded on the truth of a mother’s love. Her desire – focalised around children and family – asserts itself as a surrogate for everyone’s common interest. If her desire is destructive and entails, for example, banning books from public libraries, demonising health-care providers, subverting democratic processes or civic institutions, militating against gender-affirming surgeries, then such negativity is in the service of preserving her family, a goal legitimised by the fact of being a Mom. As such, the Mom inhabits a hallowed space in cultural politics, one that J.D. Vance famously denied to Kamala Harris when he decried “childless cat ladies” running the country: the Mom is exceptional yet representing the norm, simultaneously a privileged subject yet one speaking for the demos. “We The People” is frequently stenciled behind her when she speaks. The freedom-fighting Mom – who tends to refer to herself as “Warrior Mom” – is accountable only to her family, even though she seeks to govern other families’ medical treatments or conditions of education. Because her actions and statements concern the family, the Mom may mobilise an individualising language of preferences, wishes, desires and dislikes, yet even when she expresses individualist ideas, she never speaks as an individual.

Freedom for such groups comprises self-ownership, personal license, and exemption from state regulation and social responsibility. These rhetorics of freedom that position themselves against political equality offer up politics as an arena for psychosocial satisfactions. In medical freedom and parental rights movements, people enjoy the satisfactions of stating truths opposed to prevailing scientific or educational norms. According to the political imagination of these movements, existing educational and governmental institutions and scientific norms are the results of a broken social pact, and this brokenness requires that all manner of imagined ideal pasts be reinstated. The body as body politic must be made healthy again on the basis of truths increasingly hidden by malevolent interests. Existing social arrangements are to be treated with paranoid scepticism, since the fundamental political fight is about truths that society obscures. For these social movements the political aim is to enable the emergence of an authority that could enforce these hidden truths. In the meantime, because freedom can be enjoyed by speaking such truth – online, in courts, at medical board hearings – it is as much a matter of will as veridiction. That is, freedom as a value sanctions political action. For medical freedom advocates a minimum political action is to spread alternate truths in order to “inform the public”; for parental rights advocates this means fighting for the heteronormative family unit as the truest form of family and one that is autonomous from the state. Truth-telling makes the will to power feel like freedom, and hence freedom can be opposed to science, public education and expertise.

With truth as the guiding principle, and with freedom serving as a kind of totem, paranoia itself becomes an ethics, in Michel Foucault’s precise sense of a set of practices and beliefs that aid in subjectivation. The ethics of paranoia enable social, emotional and material gratifications that are legitimised even more when practiced under the banner of freedom. The freedom imagined by medical freedom activists, Moms for Liberty, and other such groups entails obligation, necessity and responsibility, a freedom unlike the utter disinhibition practiced by anonymous users on 4chan, Telegram, Gab, and militias like Proud Boys and the Three Percenters. Whether freedom is practiced as a form of disinhibition (January 6) or sublimated through superegoic mechanisms, the collective nature of political action (whether an insurrection or a school board populated with like-minded people) confirms the validity of individually held beliefs. For medical freedom fighters, freedom is practiced through a variety of political actions. While the ideal action helps enact laws that would curtail governmental regulation of medical treatments, in the absence of such laws there are additional political strategies. These include attending and disrupting the board meetings of public hospitals; seeking election to such boards; protesting in front of vaccine providers; legally challenging the basis of medical licensing protocols; expanding the recognised exemptions  for vaccines or other treatments; and spreading the “truth” about established medical treatments online.

These actions are not an unchecked will to power. Rather, they assert their authority by working alongside the social demands of politics, while being ready to subvert these demands in the name of some higher truth seen to be critical for everyone.

For far-right female influencers, espousing traditional roles now includes the normalisation of extreme political positions and the politicisation of heretofore neutral online spaces. A reel on how to fold fitted sheets also serves as a warning against vaccines. A cooking video becomes an occasion for opining against minorities. In the political imagination of such paranoid ethics, parental rights and health freedom are under threat everywhere with the state poised to usurp parental and bodily authority. Hence, in medical freedom movements, the search for legal exemptions to whatever official policy is being contested: whether vaccines or masks, etc. Until the law can be abolished, this logic goes, it must be exploited such that it need not apply to oneself even if it applies to others. While neoliberal discourse about family values had hailed the nuclear family as a means of punitive protection, the discourse on “parental rights” intensifies this to the point of perversity: the family becomes a zone of radical exemption, a means of opting out of the social altogether. Being exempted and exceptional feels like freedom. Indeed, medical freedom advocates apprehend something rotten in the law itself when they seek to exploit its loopholes – namely that even when laws are in force without any loopholes, they nevertheless apply differentially across the populace: punitive for some and exempting for others. This is starkly the case for abortion bans because they harm women of colour and less wealthy women disproportionately. Not only do wealthy and white women have access to better medical care but they can often travel more easily to get abortions. Wealth and whiteness are, then, always already exemptions from the law even as wealth and whiteness are often presumed as incarnations of the norm.

As with medical freedom movements, such an ethics of paranoia entails speaking the truth and having spoken it, arriving at a fuller understanding of one’s own identity as shaped by these truths. The promised and expansive future of liberty conceived as the absence of restraint is indulged by being unafraid of giving offence in the present moment.  Negative liberty of this kind has long been the aim of libertarian politics, but libertarianism as a political tendency does not quite capture all that is politically at stake for these movements. Their political rhetoric does espouse individualism as the cornerstone of libertarian thought – through notions of self-ownership, individual choice, self-sovereignty – but that individualism is overtly expressed as a concern about the social bond between parents and children and about the social relations undergirding societal reproduction. In its concern for the social, such political rhetoric might not be wholly congruent with libertarian notions of freedom, but it is perfectly in line with the twin freedoms of traditional family and markets most valued by neoliberalism.

How to characterise the freedom imagined by health/medical freedom movements? A fundamental sense of vulnerability (to governmental control, to environmental hazards) underwrites its politics that, in turn, proliferates vulnerability for others by exposing everyone to diseases that vaccines seek to eradicate, or repealing social policies that would protect them. This freedom promises self-mastery even as it requires the installation of an implacable authority (whether family or moral law, or family upheld by moral law) that would ensure the exposure of others to violence or illness. Destruction of others and of the self are, of course, intertwined in the freedom on offer by those who consider themselves exempt. The new movements for medical freedom and parental rights share a fantasy similar to other death-driven politics, from preppers to accelerationists: they imagine world catastrophe as a cleansing process, in which one’s own survival is secured through an assumed exemption. Such is the psychosocial afterlife of individual autonomy, which liberal democracy offers but cannot make real. So, it returns as a wish for large-scale catastrophe that is to be welcomed rather than avoided, enjoyed rather than feared. The law need not apply to oneself, and yet the law – whatever form it takes – is both necessary and iron-clad. Freedom’s embrace of its cherished truths (about Ivermectin, about parental rights, about the dangers of pharmaceutical research) is, at the same time, a wish to outlive the coming catastrophe by hastening it.

That far-right political tendencies maintain complex and manifold relations with conspiratorial thinking is a well-known fact, and this certainly calls for assessment in terms of delusion, distortion or alteration. At the same time, though, as scholars of conspiratorial thinking have abundantly established, this assessment demands precaution. It demands so because, in a sense, alteration is everywhere. The kernel of conspiratorial thinking often stems from a somewhat fair interpretation of the political concepts of the tradition of liberal philosophy: fair, in the sense of faithful and attentive, though excessively radical, excessively literal, fundamentalist, obsessional, punctilious to the extreme. But the problem is that these concepts are already loaded with phantasm.

This is particularly the case in the tradition of liberal philosophy in the United States of America. In Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (1999), Timothy Melley examined the extent to which the “agency panic” that characterises conspiratorial thinking (also, populist imagination, one may add) derives, at least in part, from the fragility inherent in the prime concept of liberal philosophy: the concept of freedom. Conspiratorial thinking operates as paranoia does, at least in part: that is, as a too serious, too intense drive towards the interpretation of the paradoxes of the polity, or as an extremist overinterpretation of a concept of freedom that works a bit like an empty signifier. In his recent Freedom: A Disease Without Cure (2023), Slavoj Žižek would go as far as considering the idea of freedom as the sign of some kind of fetishistic impulse, a contradictory desire for something that is, inescapably and inherently, limited.

Varieties of nationalist populism, religious radicalism, and secessionist libertarianism abound today that correspond to that syndrome. They often take the form of a radical, fetishistic defense of freedom that ends up taking the paradoxical form of an authoritarian rage, as Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey describe in their Offended Freedom: The Rise of Libertarian Authoritarianism (2024). One can identify there an exacerbation of the tensions that are intrinsic to the dream of a radical liberal democracy. This is indeed the dream of a world made of free contracts established between sovereign, flesh-and-blood individuals that form the ultimate hub of resistance – sometimes called the “Nation” or the “People” – against the contrived powers of government. This resistance can become a sacred quest, as it embodies the very essence of the liberation of the soul, or, in other words, the release of one’s true value.

One can think, immediately, of the so-called “sovereign citizen movement” and of the enormous political traction with which it provides the present moment. This is certainly not a homogeneous movement: rather a sketchy cluster of tendencies, initiatives and orientations, sometimes clearly connected to the “QAnon” conspiratorial syndrome, sometimes not, often recognisable through a rhetoric of radical liberation (“I do not consent”) from the bonds of governmental and corporate authority. Once a fringe form of libertarian activism found principally in the United States, the sovereign citizen movement has gained currency in many places over the years: Australia, the United Kingdom and Ireland, but also Germany, Austria, Italy, France, and elsewhere in the world. Sure, there is an element of marginality and exoticism in these phenomena. However, there is also something momentous: an expression of the potentials on which is built the shape of fascism emerging today.

As I argued in Paranoid Finance (2024), one important key to capture the phenomenon is the notion of value: value, though, considered as some sort of a political emotion. Value often appears in our conversations rather in the form of an economic concept. That is, as an analytical compass that allows us – or is meant – to assess the probity and intentionality of an economic process. Where does value really come from? How well, or not, is it represented? Both in theory and in practice? Considering value as a political emotion prompts a different kind of questions. It is about taking value as a vernacular concept, not an analytical category: value as a notion inherent in the moral and political imagination of our time. It is also about gauging its potentials for radicalisation, escalation and intensification. The notion of value produces meaning, but that meaning is inherently twisted.

This is plainly so in standard financial order. In The Everyday Practice of Valuation and Investment: Political Imaginaries of Shareholder Value (2021), Horacio Ortiz shows how the tension between “fundamental” and “speculative” value forms the lingo of contemporary financial imagination: one in which asset managers and financial analysts ought to think of themselves as “free investors” capable of appraising future return and deciding accordingly how to maximise it. Liliana Doganova further examines, in her Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (2024), the enormous performative powers of this way of thinking: one in which time ought to be confiscated, priced, and protected from dilapidation, in order to secure the yield of capital. The point is not to take this worldview at face value. The point is to examine the troubles and paradoxes that it contains: the desires it foreshadows and the anxieties it expresses. Gauging everything from the perspective of a “free investor” who is, by default, entitled to the inner maximisation of value, and who enters into voluntary contracts in order to fulfil that entitlement, craftily evading any form of authority that would claim to be more superior: that is exactly what dominant financial imagination is about. It is, also, what ultimately drives the value dreams found in the sovereign citizen movement. The dreams of financial value produce sovereign demons.

Value is a fetish indeed. Not quite in the sense popularised in critical political economy, though – a sense that is somehow a bit at odds with the history of the notion, as examined by William Pietz in The Problem of the Fetish (2022). Value is a fetish rather in the psychoanalytic sense of the word. That is, the fetish as a process of disavowal, the fetish as an image that we rely on in order to postpone the impact of reality, a reality in which the desired object the fetish ought to stand for is in fact manifestly missing. It is the very notion of value that stands as a fetish: a fetish to which one has to cling in order to cope with the hopes and aspirations that foreshadow a society beyond capitalism. Only this fetish is the decoy, so to say, by which capitalism rules. In other words, it is the very idea that capitalism may be concealing value that precipitates the fetishistic disavowal.

The idea of value creation is in fact so perverse, is such a twisted fetish, that it stands at once for both the core of financial imagination and the core of the dominant critique of financial capitalism. Value creation means return on investment, in standard financial language. But it also refers, in critical discourse, to the “real” value that ought to be protected from the perils of malevolent speculation represented by “bad” finance. The fixation with value feeds both dominant financial imagination and the dominant critique of finance. The effect of this is what we see in the drift of populist sentiment today: a form of political anxiety that sees in the “restoration of true value” (whatever that means) the aim of spiritual uprising.

The worldviews that feed the sovereign citizen movement, the QAnon syndrome, but also other strains of conspiratorial, millennialist, libertarian, secessionist, spiritual discourse about radical sovereignty are not only about radical freedom. They also abide by the rule of the notion of value, the hope of value creation and the fear of value destruction. In the QAnon imagination, for example, financial value is central. It is evil and good at once. This has been amply established by QAnon investigators, such as Mike Rothschild in his book The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything (2021), or Aaron John Gulyas in Conspiracy and Triumph: Theories of a Victorious Future for the Faithful (2021).

In QAnon narratives, finance represents the threat from which true value ought to be protected. Such narratives involve the existence of a “Cabal” defined as a conspiracy of globalist bankers, who have enslaved our souls and sequestered our value, and the existence of a virtuous “Alliance”, led by President Donald Trump, which is “draining the swamp” and winning today a secret war against this evil force. The revolutionary solution to this is, in turn, essentially financial too. It involves a series of secret reforms (known to the initiated through the acronym “NESARA / GESARA”). These shall achieve the restoration of the true value of persons and things, by means, for example, of the institution of a magic currency based on the gold standard, the end of taxation and regulation, also with some kind of a cryptocurrency fantasy called the “Quantum Financial System” (which further connects to the spiritual syncretism of “quantum mysticism” present in some QAnon strains).

In other variations of paranoid finance, closer to the sovereign citizen movement, this magic currency is just oneself: one’s living body and eternal soul considered as a “CVAC” (“Creator’s Value Asset Center”), from which infinite returns can be collected. This is the case of the syndrome known in conspiratorial milieus as “OPPT” (“One People’s Public Trust”). Such variety of the sovereign citizen movement is recognisable through the belief in the entitlement to an eternal source of money that has been concealed by a malevolent power. That value can be unlocked through a complicated scheme that involves a series of self-declarations that invalidate previous legal bonds and obligations (paying taxes, reimbursing debts) and institute a new order of sovereign beings (that is, of free investors).

These cases exemplify the breadth of a phenomenon of “value panic” which, akin to the “agency panic” Melley examines in Empire of Conspiracy, feeds the political imagination of the present moment. Value panic offers, as a revolutionary antidote to the troubles of capitalism, the fetish that capitalism itself produces so well: the entitlement to value. This is a hypothesis worthy of consideration, if one is to judge from the considerable amounts of passion, violence, pain and disarray that the love of value can produce. The critique of finance is something that can morph into truly perplexing forms of conspiratorial thinking and spiritual cult. Sometimes, these manifestly emerge as the result of a radicalised fetishisation of some type of “true value” that ought to be protected from the perils of “false value”. Varieties of nationalist populism, religious radicalism or secessionist libertarianism exemplify well these developments today all over the world. The promise of the restoration of the primordial organ of value production (empty, by default), by way of some sort of a mystical upraising or magic technique, operates as a distorted double of the very promise of finance itself, which is about veritable “value creation”. The rage these movements represent translates into a paranoid critique of finance, and of political economy altogether – a critique that intensifies the fetishisation of value political economy comes with.

This is certainly not a new perspective. It communicates with a growing body of research (see Right Wing Populism in America (2020) by Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons; Producers, Parasites, Patriots (2019) by Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes; and Producteurs et Parasites (2014) by Michel Feher) that deals with the latent content encapsulated in dominant metaphors of value creation and value destruction. This is about examining the narratives that pit the “enemies” of real value (“parasites”) against its “friends” (the “producers” of real value, be they patriotic industrialists, conscientious bankers or hard-working nationals). The point here is to observe in such rhetoric devices the effect of finance’s own paradoxes, and of finance’s own fixation with the veracity of value, and the protection of its yield.

How can a way out from “paranoid finance” be thought of? It certainly requires some sort of emancipation: not of value, though, but from value. Freedom from the notion of value altogether, as the safest way to prevent it from being filled-up with the demons of financial imagination. In a way, this amounts to an honest acceptance of the condition of fetishism: clinging to the fetish of value, albeit knowingly and with a good “safeword”, as fine fetishists do.

In April 1967, Theodor Adorno delivered a paper to a socialist students’ society at the University of Vienna, “Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism,” sketching an analysis of the then-recent electoral emergence of the neo-Nazi Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), drawing on four decades of collective theorising and social research on capitalism’s fascist potentials and pathologies. This talk, only published half a century after it was delivered, is peppered with living insights about the political phenomenology of post-war reaction, whether in discussing the “imago of communism” in the absence of the real thing, fascism’s anti-theoretical animus or the “pseudo-scientific pedantry” that dominates far-right discourse. I want to touch on a passage where Adorno defines a political emotion that he deems central to the psychosocial fortunes of “right-wing extremism,” what he terms “the feeling of social catastrophe.” What this feeling mediates are the “social conditions for fascism” which have endured beyond Hitler’s downfall – namely an overwhelming tendency towards the concentration of capitalism which is accompanied by the clear and present danger of déclassement for social classes anxious to retain their privileges and entitlements, however miserable. The feeling for social catastrophe is rooted in lived experiences and fantasies of loss and obsolescence grounded in effective political-economic dynamics. The “spectre of technological unemployment,” of being made redundant by automation, means that even those endowed with wages and job security “already feel potentially superfluous.” To conjoin a phrase from Marx’s Grundrisse with an earlier title for The Authoritarian Personality: the virtual pauper can morph into the potential fascist. Now Adorno, in his 1967 talk as in several of his writings on fascism, does not tire of warning that psychological explanations for far-right ascendancy are partial at best, while simultaneously warning about overly simplistic correlations between social crisis and the rise of reaction. It is here that the temporality and, we could say, historicity of the “feeling of social catastrophe” play a crucial role. For Adorno, it is more in their orientation towards crisis than in their response to it that the forces of reaction find their advantage. In their propaganda and prognostications they are masters at “anticipating terror.” As he observes:

“One might speak of a distortion of Marx’s theory of collapse that takes place in this very crippled and false consciousness. On the one hand, on the rational side of things, they ask, “What will happen if there is a big crisis?” – and that is where these movements are attractive. On the other hand, they want the catastrophe, they feed off apocalyptic fantasies of the kind that, as it happens, could also be found among the Nazi leadership, as documents show. If I had to speak psychoanalytically, I would say that, of the forces mobilised here, the appeal to the unconscious desire for disaster, for catastrophe, is by no means the least significant in these movements.”

But this feeling is rooted in a classed standpoint, for which the ambivalent orientation towards catastrophe (imagining it, fearing it, wanting it), is over-determined by a rejection of any social transformation that could avert catastrophe but would also have done with one’s group identity and special prerogatives.

“Someone who is unable to see anything ahead of them and does not want the social foundation to change really has no alternative but, like Richard Wagner’s Wotan, to say, “Do you know what Wotan wants? The end.” This person, from the perspective of their own social situation, longs for demise – though not the demise of their own group, as far as possible, the demise of all.”

I’ll return by way of conclusion to this Wagnerian cry of the petty bourgeoisie, but I wanted first to frame Adorno’s diagnosis of the emotional catastrophism of the far right, in terms of the place of pessimism within the genealogy of the far right.

Adorno himself mentions the documented apocalypticism that coursed through National Socialism. The French historian Johann Chapoutot, in his study of Nazism’s obsession with Greek and Roman antiquity – and with racial explanations of their demise –  has written illuminatingly of how the Nazis’ “utopian philosophy of the will” was consistently shadowed, and in the regime’s collapse, overtaken, by a “feral, desperate eagerness to envision [Nazism’s] own demise, for what mattered was not so much victory in real life as the symbolic triumph of sublime, heroic defeat in memory, which would survive through the process of myth.” It was precisely this “choreography of catastrophe” that lay at the heart of Walter Benjamin’s analysis of fascism as the aestheticisation of politics in the “Work of Art” essay. For Benjamin, Fiat ars – pereat mundus was a fascist motto, speaking to a vision of humanity whose “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” Mussolini himself mused to a journalist that “fascism will end, but it will have lived … thanks to exaltation, and I am exaltation!”

What is crucial, to my mind, is that this belief in the inevitability of downfall – be it in a more biological or cultural, cyclical or apocalyptic register – which structured the fascist worldview was articulated as a “racial pessimism.” This was the title of the 1923 presidential address to the American Sociological Society delivered by Ulysses G. Weatherly. I turn to this text because it provides a striking illumination into an interwar mood, belonging to what Richard Overy termed “the morbid age”, which preceded and exceeded the organised far right and its fellow travellers. Framing a capacious review of the declinist social theories of his time, Weatherly depicts the Great War as a moment that could be perceived “as if a sardonic world-spirit had suddenly arrested the Occident in the flower of its boasted culture in order to audit an overdue account.” And the question guiding this audit is: “Is the white race, as the special exponent of that system, threatened with extinction, or at least with loss of hegemony?” (Some of Weatherly’s summaries seem to foretell the rhetoric of a J.D. Vance on the plague of childlessness: “Others bemoan the world-weariness of our surfeited intellectuals who refuse to undertake parenthood, dreading to project offspring into a sordid existence, on the theory, I suppose, that the process of generation, if continued, would always produce little tired radicals”; or: “Under the pressure to get a cheap labour supply, there is a constant temptation to dilute and degrade the social population by tapping ever lower levels of migration in order to secure laborers who can underlive and therefore undersell the existing supply. Of such displacement and substitution there are examples wherever the modern industrial system has penetrated.”)

It is useful in any case to reflect on how in 1923 “the peril of the white race” could be a central question to be dealt with by an assembly of American sociologists, whose empirical anchor was “racial displacement on a world-scale.” Whether in the racist tracts of Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, or in Mussolini’s 1932 statement that “the entire civilisation of the white race can disintegrate, weaken, grow dim in a disorder without aim, a misery without tomorrow”, the philosophy of history and Stimmung of racial pessimism is a core determinant of a far-right mindset that retains remarkable mobilising potential a century later. It is indisputable that the pessimistic preoccupation with miscegenation, denatalism, the First World War as a civil war between whites, and the racial entropy and devitalisation instigated by democracy, finance, urbanisation or feminism are powerfully over-determined by the perception of a crisis of the colonial order and of the coming “coloured world revolution,” to borrow Spengler’s formulation from the 1931 work, Man and Technics. Interwar fascism, in this respect, can also be understood as a planetary salvage operation for white supremacy in a temporal (and affective) horizon of (eventual, inevitable or perhaps postponable) decline. In her insightful anatomy of “interwar pessimistic historiographies,” Donna Jones has underscored how though “deeply antagonistic to the colonised and any prospect of their ascent, rightist historiographies, while paranoid, did what no other history had done heretofore – granted recognition to the historicity of Europe’s subjects. From a position of dread rather than curiosity, Europe envisions a future in which the non-Western world reaches a state of the coeval.” In a distinct if related vein, in his unfinished work on the anthropology of “cultural apocalypses,” The End of the World, Ernesto de Martino had tried to articulate dialectically the millenarian movements triggered by the world-unmaking forces of colonialism with the way in which the “apocalypse without an eschaton” that coursed through Euro-America’s literature and ideology of crisis could not be thought outside the horizon of decolonisation and its threat to white hegemony. Cultural pessimism was a racial pessimism. Writers and thinkers of the far right could even draw on the early Nietzsche’s speculations on the Aryan roots of Greek tragedy (Nietzsche had borrowed from Burckhardt the adage “pessimism of worldview, optimism of temperament” long before Gramsci’s famous refunctioning of Romain Rolland), to argue that pessimism bore an intimate kinship with whiteness. As Gottfried Benn declared in 1943, in his The World of Expression: “the thought of the white race is pessimistic, it is the element of its creativeness … pessimism is a legitimate spiritual principle, a very ancient one which found genuine expression in the white race and which it will interweave with the future, supposing it still possesses the metaphysical power to incorporate and assimilate, the power of integration and of giving form.” This vision of whiteness as a culture of tragedy, and its downfall as a tragedy of culture, is firmly ensconced in that religio mortis, or religion of death, that for the Germanist and mythologist Furio Jesi was a pillar of right-wing culture.

Racial pessimism made reflexive and militant, or “activist pessimism”, in Emilio Gentile’s formulation, is one possible definition of fascism – an answer to Nietzsche’s question from the “Attempt at Self-Criticism” that prefaced the 1886 edition of The Birth of Tragedy, newly subtitled “Hellenism or Pessimism”: “Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, decay, degeneration, weary and weak instincts? … Is there a pessimism of strength?”

Now it would be an easy, and perhaps bitterly diverting exercise, to employ Nietzschean diagnostic categories, perhaps filtered through Deleuze’s interpretation, to see in the persistence of racial pessimism in today’s far right – with its obsession with ideologemes or simply memes like “white genocide”, “the great replacement”, and so on – a textbook case of ressentiment and the operation of reactive forces at a mass scale, a pseudo-politics and hyper-politics of impotent rage. I won’t follow this tack today, but wanted instead to think what becomes of pessimism, “racial pessimism” included, when the material coordinates of our historicity are transformed (notwithstanding the seemingly inert character of fears of substitution and déclassement that appear in distressingly similar guises in the 1920s and the 2020s). Simply by way of sketching a hypothesis for further research, and further discussion, I think we need to attend to two axes of collective temporal experience that inflect that feeling of social catastrophe which Adorno rightly indicated as a leitmotiv of far-right politics, and a cause of its appeal. The first rhymes with Adorno’s turn to the prospect of technological unemployment as among the chief social conditions for the resurgence of reaction. As many critical political economists have analysed, we live in an age of capitalist stagnation, where super-profits and eye-watering social inequality accompany sluggish productivity and indifferent growth. Especially in the long wake of the 2007-8 crisis, the collective social experience of increasing precarity and diminishing horizons, as well as a retrocession from the aspirations and chances of previous generations, makes up the very atmosphere of our politics, and of the increasing disaffection and disaffiliation that vast swathes of the global population feel for political systems and regimes whose symbolic power is extremely brittle. Second – especially, I would argue, when it is denied, disavowed or minimised – the reality of eco-social catastrophe in the form of global heating is at the core of contemporary “pessimism.” It overdetermines its politics of walls and drawbridges, its penchant for contradictory forms of autarky, as well as multiple instantiations of what Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective have termed “fossil fascism”.

Beyond its murderous fringes – namely the “accelerationist” communiqués of racist mass shooters – the pessimism of today’s far right is hardly tragic. Narratives of racial or national displacement are accompanied by the suggestion that supremacy and affluence could be durably restored and secured. Yes, the present tendency is “American carnage,” but a nationalist renaissance is possible, mass deportations permitting.

Confronted with the pessimism of the far right, as well as the rival optimisms and linear philosophies of history of liberalism, social democracy and Stalinised Bolshevism, some dissident thinkers of the 1920s wagered that the forces of pessimism could be wrested from reaction. The communist and surrealist intellectual Pierre Naville derided right-wing obsessions with the end of the white race or the decline of Latin civilisation, arguing instead that political and aesthetic radicalism required embracing the collapse of a certain humanism, cultivating the sense of loss and desertion, advancing despair as a virulent, scintillating, creative passion. Any pessimism that did not work to negate contemporary social conditions, that did not lay claim to “the right to modern disaster”, was not worthy of the name. In a remarkable 1929 essay on surrealism as “the last snapshot of the European intelligentsia”, Walter Benjamin made Naville’s call to “organise pessimism” his own, and wrote: “Surrealism has come ever closer to the communist response. And this means pessimism from start to finish – positively and absolutely. Mistrust in the fate of literature, mistrust in the face of freedom, mistrust in the face of European humanity, but above all mistrust, mistrust, and mistrust in every kind of rapprochement – between classes, between people, between individuals. And unlimited trust only in IG Farben and the peaceful perfecting of the air force.”

This polemical, sardonic, and disturbingly premonitory motto – clearly marked by Benjamin’s close collaboration with Brecht over these years – speaks of an effort to craft a kind of affective disposition on the far left, one that would have done with those political emotions that are anchored in the temporality of an idea of progress that might appear full of human promise but is contaminated at its core by the empty time of capitalism. As the historical repertoire of far-right pessimism once again becomes a fertile source for reactionary myth-making, it might also be an opportune time to revisit this minor tradition of communist pessimism.

Carlo Invernizzi Accetti on Poor Social Standing

In moments of crisis it helps to take time to reflect. The success of the National Rally in 2024 – in the European parliamentary elections and in the first round of the French legislative elections – rang alarm bells. So did the recent doubling of electoral share for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in February’s elections in Germany. But above all it is the re-election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States that has sparked a global panic amongst defenders of the so-called liberal-democratic international order, both within and outside the country.

From concerns about an authoritarian takeover within the United States itself, to the prospect of a collapse of the Western alliance that is supposed to have guaranteed world peace for the past six decades, up to catastrophic scenarios about impeding ecological breakdown, the sense that we are living through a time of “democratic emergency” is palpable.

Yet an emergency is, as the word itself says, something that “emerges” suddenly – and there was nothing unexpected about Trump’s electoral resurgence. His political career now spans more than a decade. It therefore can and should be situated in a broader context.

Across the West, the first two and a half decades of the 21st century have been characterised by a mounting succession of manifestations of collective anger at political institutions: from the “No Global” movement of the early 2000s to the recent protests against international support for the Israeli government’s operation in Gaza, via the Twin Towers bombing on 11 September 2001; the victory of the “No” vote in the French referendum on the proposed European constitutional treaty and the riots in the French banlieues in the spring of 2005; the Indignados movement in Spain, Occupy Wall Street and the Greek Όχι to the austerity policies demanded by the country’s international creditors after the financial crisis of 2008-2011; the vote for Brexit, the first election of Donald Trump; #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, Greta Thunberg’s school strikes; the Gilets Jaunes movement, the anti-vax movement, and the 6 January 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Each of these events springs from a particular history and boasts its own specificity. But there is also a common thread running through them, an underlying mood that has infused the most salient events of the past two and a half decades: anger at political institutions. Just as the French speak of the “Trente Glorieuses” to describe the period of economic growth between 1945 and 1975, and in the English-speaking world we speak of the “end of history” to describe the triumphalist optimism of the period following the end of the Cold War, the first two and a half decades of the 21st century can be described as “25 years of rage.”

Why so much animosity toward the established order? If it is true that rage (or anger, two terms that I will be using interchangeably here) is the key matrix of our zeitgeist, a return to how this emotion has historically been conceived and analysed can shed light on our current conjuncture.

The first thing to note is that rage does not enjoy a good reputation in the history of Western thought. As early as late antiquity, in his treatise De Ira, Seneca described it as a “brevis insania”, that is, a short-lived madness. This criticism is part of a broader condemnation of all emotions that is common to Stoic philosophy and the whole later rationalist tradition.

Christianity too has historically conceived of anger as one of the “deadly vices,” encouraging mercy instead, according to the precept of “turning the other cheek.” In contemporary therapeutic culture, the ability to control anger has become one of the pillars of mental health – to the point that in English-speaking countries anger management courses are sometimes prescribed by clinical or legal authorities as measures of good personal and/or professional behavior.

Echoes of this pathologisation of anger can be heard in most commentary on its collective manifestations over the past two and a half decades, which often dismisses these manifestations as expressions of irrational emotionalism or ignorance of the masses. But it is too easy to condemn what we do not understand, or fear. And the irrational cannot – by definition! – be understood. We might therefore do better to start from a less haughty and moralising conception of anger in order to understand the spirit of our times.

In classical antiquity rage was not conceived as something pathological but as natural, healthy and in some ways even noble. As the first word in the Iliad (and thus in Western literature) already indicates, μῆνιν, Achilles’ “wrathful anger,” is the main feeling that animates the hero’s actions. Aristotle will even go so far as to say that the inability to feel anger in the face of injustice is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the natural slave. The citizen of a democratic society must be able to experience anger in the face of injustice, in order to defend their rights.

But why does Homer’s Achilles get angry? Here we can find a first clue that illuminates the contemporary conjuncture. When Agamemnon takes from him the slave Briseis, whom Achilles had won in battle, Achilles is not made poorer. The king of the Achaeans tells him that he can have any other slave in return. But Achilles is offended because he says he has been treated “like an ordinary foreigner.” At the root of the hero’s anger we therefore find a lack of recognition that touches on pride, that is, ultimately, on social status.

The same basic sentiment can be found in the slogans of the major protest phenomena and political movements of the past two decades. Think, for example, of the Italian Five Star Movement’s “Uno Vale Uno” (meaning that each is worth the same as any other), Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and the Rassemblement National’s “Les Français D’Abord” (“The French First of All”), but also of the very idea that Black Lives Matter, or the slogan “Me Too”. None of these point to economic claims. Instead, the sphere of social recognition is in play – that is, ultimately, the “dignity” or “value” attributed to an individual or group.

Starting from the classical archetype of anger, we can thus arrive at the hypothesis that what explains the rampant animosity toward political institutions is not so much material deprivation, nor even the irrationality of the masses, but a widespread sense of lack of recognition of one’s social status.

Large sections of the population – most notably rural or suburban dwellers and the notorious “white males” called into question by political correctness, but also members of ethnic minorities, women and youth – feel ignored, wronged and ultimately invisible. That is why they get angry, demanding above all attention, even before they claim material benefits or social rights.

The electoral sociology of the past two decades has long highlighted this phenomenon. Already in the months following the victory of the “No” vote in the referendum on the proposed European Constitutional Treaty in France in 2005 (only the first in a long series of “No” votes against the entire political establishment), the category of the “losers of globalisation” was coined to identify those who felt – and evidently still feel – excluded and marginalised from the dominant value system of the globalised world.

Here too the emphasis has been primarily on the economic dimension. According to the political scientist who coined the expression, Hanspeter Kriesi, the “losers of globalisation” are those who do not materially benefit from the increased flows of international trade. But the concept of loser, in English, has a broader meaning, which also points to the symbolic dimension of social recognition. In common parlance, a loser is someone who is not worthy of respect by others. While someone whom others aspire to be is cool, the loser is treated with contempt, and therefore feels humiliated.

Can one therefore conceive of today’s anger as a kind of revolt of the losers? This is what German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk suggested in his provocative 2006 essay Rage and Time, in which the world-historical figure of the loser is elevated to the interpretive key of our time.

Whereas, in Hegelian (and later also Marxist) philosophy of history, the key figure of antiquity was that of the “slave,” defined by deprivation of legal rights, and the key figure of modernity is the “proletarian,” defined by economic deprivation, for Sloterdijk the main subjects of contemporary rage enjoy both universal legal rights and a relatively high degree of material well-being. But they suffer from a lack of recognition of their presumed social status. That is, they feel reduced to the status of losers and that is why they get angry.

It is important to underline here that this hypothesis is not meant to minimise the problem, nor to underestimate the importance of the legal or economic dimensions of the present crisis. The claim is rather that we need to expand our conceptual categories to make sense of the present.

After all, there was some truth to the self-congratulatory narrative of the “end of history” as a planetary-scale affirmation of the “capitalist democracy” model of society. Today, most individuals enjoy unprecedented levels of material well-being and also universal legal rights. But then why so much anger against the established order?

The claim advanced here is that we cannot understand the major political events and movements of the past two and a half decades without taking into account the symbolic dimension of social recognition; that is, the way in which large sections of the population have felt humiliated by the same global order that they are increasingly calling into question.

Understanding a problem is not the same as solving it. It is, however, a necessary precondition because it allows us to see the limitations of the main political strategies adopted over the past two and a half decades to address the widespread rage against the established order.

Populism and technocracy have been the two dominant political formulas of the first two decades of the 21st century. Instead of soothing the widespread anger, however, they have contributed to exacerbating it, for different but equally significant reasons.

Populism correctly identifies the root of the problem in that it seeks to give voice to a widespread sense of exclusion, or at least marginalisation, from the exercise of political power. However, the solution it proposes proves counterproductive: it simplifies the principles and procedures of constitutional democracy and ends up concentrating even more power in the hands of the leadership, effectively reducing the base to a passive role of plebiscitary approval of its actions.

The experience of the Five Star Movement in Italy is illuminating in this respect. The slogan of its origins – “Uno Vale Uno” – effectively captured a widespread desire for recognition, that is, for dignity and thus ultimately for participation in the exercise of political power. However, the tools that it put in place to follow up on that promise – from the illusion of direct democracy to the concentration of full powers in the figure of a charismatic leader (first Beppe Grillo and then Giuseppe Conte) – have ended up making it an object of the same anger that initially nurtured it, as the party’s defeat at these last European elections shows.

Having failed this experiment in “leftist” (in its intention, democratic) populism, popular resentment is now being channeled – not just in Italy, but also in many other Western democracies – toward a form of identitarian and nationalist populism. The latter offers an even easier response to the widespread desire for recognition, that is, for affirmation of one’s status. Worse even than the myth of direct democracy, however, identitarian nationalism suffers from an internal contradiction in that it includes only some at the cost of excluding others. Instead of creating a unified “people” it thus polarises society in two antagonistic groups that misrecognise and thus hate each other, increasingly worsening the levels of social anger.

Technocracy, conversely, claims to practice good governance but completely disregards the dimension of social recognition. In this sense, it openly proposes what populism says it combats but in fact reproduces: the reduction of the people to the role of passive reception of the work of government. To the extent that the anger of our time stems from a widespread sense of exclusion or marginalisation from the exercise of political power, this can only contribute to its further exacerbation, regardless of the quality of the decisions made.

Once again, the Italian experience can serve as an illustrative example. Two “technocratic governments” have been in power in this country over the past two and a half decades: one headed by Mario Monti from 2011 to 2013 and the other headed by Mario Draghi between 2021 and 2022. Both applied themselves diligently to making the reforms long indicated as “necessary” by experts, even achieving quite decent results: public accounts improved, the economy returned to growth, and poverty and unemployment rates declined. Yet, at the polls, voters soundly rejected both Monti and Draghi, expressing widespread discontent with technocratic government formulas.

Something similar can also be said of the experience of the Biden administration in the United States. In many ways, this administration did deliver on on its promise to offer “good governance”. Biden came to power at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, with an economy in shambles, which he restored to growth. His administration also took measures to direct massive levels of public investment towards the most disaffected areas of the country’s southern states, in particular through the Inflation Reduction Act 2022, which also laid the foundations for a “green transition” of the economy. The wages of the poorest quintile of the population increased faster than those of the top quintile during his tenure, decreasing overall levels of income inequality, and even inflation was by and large tamed by the time Biden left office.

Yet, none of that was enough to quell the widespread public anger against the political establishment, as evidenced by Trump’s resounding electoral victory in 2024. This suggests that there is more to that anger than merely a desire for economic well-being or material redistribution. Large sections of the American population still feel “forgotten” or marginalised by the country’s economic recovery. They are therefore demanding recognition, as well as redistribution.

From this perspective, it does not seem likely that we will emerge from the vortex of anger into which we have fallen as long as we remain seduced by the false promises of populism, on the one hand, and technocracy, on the other. Emerging from this double trap requires a new political project capable of channeling the widespread anger in a direction that is both purposeful and inclusive. Unfortunately, nothing like that seems to be on the horizon: populism and technocracy continue to be the two principal political projects on offer.

The 25 years of rage we have just experienced could therefore easily become 30 or more, before the inexhaustible unpredictability of history yields new surprises. .