1/ What a time to be alive!

In the US, Trump is re-elected, and in Europe, governments are collapsing (Germany), teetering on the edge of collapse (France), heading toward a last-ditch centrist coalition that nobody believes in (Austria), or have already flipped to the far-right (Hungary, Slovakia, Italy, Netherlands).

It’s clear the liberal world order has collapsed and will not recover—not only at the periphery, where it was always fragile and embroiled in wars (hence the easy alignment of Harris and Cheney), but also at the center. At the periphery, which no longer accepts the status of periphery and has become present in many forms in the center, few will shed tears—except the Ukrainians and, possibly, the Taiwanese. The pious bromides about human rights and a rules-based order can no longer provide justification and soft power, with the genocide in Gaza the final nail in the coffin.

At the center, the order collapsed because of its own contradictions. Though there are many, they manifest themselves in different ways, but I think they boil down to the neoliberal state being unable to manage two really deep transformations.

2/ One is digitization, where market forces created extreme concentrations of wealth and power while threatening everyone else with redundancy (most recently even artists, long presented as neoliberal role models). It destroyed the public sphere (a problematic construct to begin with), replacing it with a system of chaotic volatility.

The other is climate change, where the weakened state has been unable to overcome the resistance of fossil fuel interests. Instead of strong policies, “market incentives” were used, which made life under stagnating wages even harder, while having no impact on the structural dependencies. Hence, the clean energy build-out did not reduce the amount of carbon emissions. That might change in the medium term, simply for economic efficiency reasons, but likely too little, too late. All of this made a mockery of expertise and rationality, which acknowledged the problem while coming up with a long list of reasons why not to act on it. Against this background, the argument that climate change is not a big deal because we can fix it later once AI has delivered a miracle solution is at least internally consistent.

While Trump and the far right are, well, fascists in a political science sense, their support is not because people became fascists (though some have always been, and it has become OK to say so openly). As Brian Holmes has argued for a long time now, the popularity of the far right is better seen as a Polanyian double movement, people turning to fascism as a way of seeking protection against the ravages of unconstrained capitalism (Trump’s two main points: lower prices and closed borders).