The injunction to “know your enemy” makes most sense for losers. Defeated political forces have a clear reason to study their successful opponents, whereas the same is not necessarily true in reverse. Knowledge can be a consolation for ceding power – intellectual advance softening the blow of actual retreat – as well as a means of winning it back. If the radical left is locked out of government, it can at least try to develop a lucid understanding of those who hold the keys.
Theories of the populist right, which seem to multiply each time it scores a new electoral victory, from Washington to Thuringia to Runcorn, are a testament to this. Anyone interested in resisting reactionary nationalism recognises the need to define the strain that is now on the ascent. Attempts to do so have helped to reinvigorate socialist thought in the 2020s, after the near comprehensive rout of socialist projects in the 2010s. So far, though, they have not only failed to yield consensus – they have produced such wildly different theses that the enemy continues to elude our grasp. While its bigotry is transparent, what it represents as a historical phenomenon is less so.
Since Trump’s return, there have been three sites of discord on the left which are particularly revealing of populism’s chameleonic character. The first is its relationship to neoliberalism: opponent or ally? For Perry Anderson, the populist right attacks with “uninhibited vigour” the major pillars of the neoliberal order – which he defines as “inequality, oligarchy and factor mobility”, the final term describing the fluid movement of capital and labour across national boundaries. Populism, he writes, seeks to dismantle the existing variant of capitalism and replace it with an alternative, albeit one that remains under-articulated. Even a programme as incoherent as Trump’s tariffs immediately prompted announcements that neoliberalism was in “decay”, “dying” or already “dead”, with some kind of deglobalised system soon to rise from its ruins.
In Quinn Slobodian’s much-publicised new book Hayek’s Bastards, the populism-vs-neoliberalism narrative is rejected tout court. Slobodian observes that the central concerns of the early neoliberals were “how the state needs to be rethought to restrict democracy without eliminating it and how national and supranational institutions can be used to protect competition and exchange”. Within this camp, there was a prominent faction which argued that “group identity” – constructed through hierarchies of race, gender and nationality – was essential for a functioning free market. The politics of the new right is therefore one of basic continuity with what came before. It is less likely to assail inequality and oligarchy than to entrench them. Trumpism, writes one commentator, is not anti-neoliberalism but “hyper-neoliberalism”.
The second point of contention is right-populism’s attitude towards the domains of public and private power. The economist Cédric Durand claims that Trump’s project is “not to centralise authority in the state, but rather to empower private interests at the expense of public institutions” and “widen the scope of action for corporate monopolies”. Durand views the right as a vanguard of “neofeudalism”: wresting authority away from bureaucrats and elected officials and placing it in the hands of our 21st-century lords – Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk – whose digital platforms serve as their own personal fiefdoms.
Yet, to many, Trump’s recent strong-arming of Apple and Meta looks less like deference to private interests and more like an effort to ensure their conformity with his state project. The writer Mark Grief describes the process currently unfolding in America as an attempted gleichschaltung, the Nazi term for “coordination”: a bid to align all independent institutions with the will of the leader. Sovereignty, according to this theory, is not being privatised or parcellated as it was under feudalism. It is being hoarded by the executive.
Finally, there is the more general question of whether the right has outgrown the condition of historical stasis in which we have been trapped ever since the 1980s, when capital’s onslaught succeeded in discrediting every other social system. The editors of n+1 magazine have no doubt that, “For all its backward-facing sloganeering, the Maga right is a future-fixated project, intent on remaking the state apparatus and laser-focused on its internal succession… Its return promises all kinds of horrifying novelties.” For them, the right’s unstoppable dynamism has ended the end of history.
For the sociologist Dylan John Riley, by contrast, Maga is “peculiarly nihilistic in lacking any future-oriented vision”. It offers nothing in concrete terms beyond a regression to a low-skilled manufacturing economy, the abrogation of rights for oppressed groups and the sweet taste of unpasteurised milk. “Not even the National Socialists proposed a future so devoid of prospects,” writes Riley, since they could point to the so-called people’s community as a utopian horizon. The empty nostalgia of Trump’s American Greatness is Fukuyaman to its core.
What to make of these contradictory readings of the contemporary right? For or against the ruling order, neofeudalist or neofascist, charging into the future or retreating into the past? Are they merely a sign of the intellectual left’s disorientation, scattered across various academic disciplines and publishing platforms, with no party around which to unify and no leadership to impose discipline on the debate? Or are they a reflection of the disharmony on the right, with different parts of a coalition that spans Evangelicals and AI enthusiasts pushing their own agendas, which fail to add up to a coherent whole? Both these factors are no doubt important. But perhaps there is also something about the structure of right-wing populism that elicits such divergent descriptions – some inherent quality that refuses to submit to simple diagnosis.
One way of pinpointing this feature is to look again at neoliberalism, as a system that operates at multiple levels. There is the power structure that Anderson identifies (inequality, oligarchy, factor mobility); there is the wider imperative to protect the market from popular influence, which Slobodian traces back to Hayek; and there is the overarching logic of “there is no alternative”, which restricts our collective imagination to the parameters of the present. This final attribute has been memorably described as “the disenchantment of politics by economics”: a process by which the latter comes to dominate the former, such that political life no longer seems able to effect meaningful change, no longer powerful enough to transform the world. It is, instead, reduced to a matter of hard material necessities. With that, politics loses its aura. Sapped of its capacity to incite strong passions or commitments, it becomes the domain of experts.
And yet this disenchantment has never been total, because neoliberalism has maintained the aura of the nation – which was preserved as a dicrete unit (economically, politically, ideologically), even as trade and capital flows were made frictionless. In this “globalised” world, countries competed with one another to bring investment within their borders; novel systems of surveillance and law enforcement were established to defend the realm; nationalist discourses were weaponised against all manner of perceived threats, from migrants to “rogue states”.
The result was the persistence of an enchanted object at the heart of a disenchanted system: an element that never quite fit with the outlook of technocracy. One of the reasons for the populist right’s success is surely that it has claimed ownership of this object which is internal to neoliberalism yet also liable to disrupt it. As parties of the centre have severed ties with voters, elevating expertise over popular engagement, parties of the right have used the ready-made fetish of the nation to challenge them: rhetorically enshrining it as the supreme political value. Because the values of the left have no equivalent cachet (“class politics” having been drained of its affective force), their mode of opposition is less potent.
So if neoliberalism is the disenchantment of politics by economics, right-populism represents its re-enchantment by the nation. This, in turn, helps to explain much of the theoretical confusion outlined above. Right-populism can appear both pro- and anti-neoliberal because, in a curious way, the nation itself occupies both positions: an integral part of the globalist order and a living refutation of its dispassionate logic. By asserting the nation’s priority, politicians of the right often find themselves in a paradoxical situation, at once borrowing from the status quo and promising to break with it.
The same applies to right-populism’s vision of private and public power. On the one hand, today’s right has little appetite to reverse the corporate capture of the state, having emerged organically out of a neoliberal settlement in which the government’s main role was to create ideal conditions for profiteering. On the other, its political legitimacy – or capacity for re-enchantment – relies on wielding the power of the nation-state in the interest of favoured groups: using it to protect insiders and punish outsiders. So it zig-zags between these two imperatives, sometimes further gutting state institutions, sometimes violently asserting their authority. Neofeudalism speaks to the first dynamic; neofascism to the second.
None of this amounts to a compelling image of the future, as Riley makes clear. Virtually every plank of the right’s programme derives from the past – which is itself thoroughly dehistoricised, treated as nothing more than grab-bag of sentiments and symbols which can be plundered and repurposed for the present. Yet if the end of history was defined by the loss of aura, the lowering of expectations, the rise of apathy and the sway of “capitalist realism”, then there is no disputing that right-populism has overturned many of these trends – reinjecting politics with vitality, faith, devotion and fantasy. This may not amount to futurism. But for many it is the next best thing.
It is precisely because the new right has proved itself effective at reactivating popular politics that it has sowed such uncertainty and ambivalence among its rivals. For parties of the centre or the traditional right whose voter base is shrinking, the best chance of survival often lies in an alliance with populists: hence Spain’s Partido Popular hitching itself to Vox, Italy’s Christian Democrats backing Meloni, the Republican establishment welcoming Trump, and so on. But this is a dangerous compromise, because the raison d’être for these establishment forces is to guarantee steady returns and social stability, both of which are threatened by the cult of the nation and the passions it unleashes. That leaves them in a bind: either reject the hard right and risk electoral annihilation, or embrace it and erode their distinct political identity.
The left suffers from a similar dilemma. Time and again, it has seen the nation win out over class as the value most explicitly capable of rallying opposition against the centrist bloc. This creates a natural temptation to harness it for progressive ends: say, pitting the nation state against unaccountable corporations, or even banding together with right-populism to form an “anti-establishment” front, as when the Italian Five Star Movement joined the League Party in government. But, much like the centrists, the left does this at the cost of forfeiting its fundamental precepts, such as internationalism and anti-racism. It can only preserve its integrity and increase its mass appeal by imbuing these concepts with a sense of enchantment that exceeds that of the nation. Right now, however, that feels like a distant prospect.
[See also: Keir Starmer has time to turn this around]
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This article appears in the 09 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Harbinger