“Identifying with the aggressor”: From the authoritarian to neoliberal personality (original) (raw)

Contemporary neoliberal capitalism can be said to be characterized by two significant features. On the one hand, there has been a staggering increase in social and economic inequality since the mid-1970s. For example, since 1977 sixty percent of the increase in US national income has gone to the top ten percent of the population (see Piketty, 2014). Combined with a constellation of forces and tendencies, for example, increasing investment in fixed capital and technical innovation such as intensifying automation, this inequality is only likely to increase in coming years and decades. On the other, in place of a robust, radically democratic challenge to the growth of an inequality so great that it shakes the very foundations of the political order, the rise in support for authoritarian populist political movements throughout Europe and North America proceeds apace. By authoritarian populist movements I mean the movements that purport to embody or represent the will of the people, understood in narrow ethno-national terms, defined in opposition to a power bloc. This was exemplified most dramatically by the breakthrough by the Front National, which came out on top in the first round in the December 2015 regional elections in France-an advance that was halted in the second only by expedient tactical voting by the French Socialists. The USA has witnessed the rise of the so-called alt-right and the election of Donald Trump as president on the basis of an unapologetically racist and profoundly xenophobic agenda that has sought, explicitly, to target Mexican immigration and has proposed a complete ban on Muslims entering the country. How is it possible to account for this strange and profoundly troubling conjunction of deepening socioeconomic inequality and the growing rise of authoritarian populism and ethno-nationalist extremism? From the militant left, commentators such as Stathis Kouvelakis have argued that neo-fascist political parties are anti-systemic movements that, nonetheless, seek to preserve the existing order of property relations. Kouvelakis argues: Nonetheless, it is precisely this aspect of the FN-its capacity to capture and "hegemonise" a form of popular revolt-that means that any "republican front" strategy, whether a partial or a total one, can only feed it, legitimising its discourse of "us against all the rest" and its self-proclaimed status as the only force opposing "the system"-even "radically" so. (Kouvelakis, 2015). According to Kouvelakis, the FN has managed to enjoy this success precisely because they occupy terrain that has been almost entirely vacated by an anti-capitalist left unable to challenge the existing power bloc through a counterhegemonic project of its own that would pose a legitimate alternative to neoliberal capital in general and austerity in particular.