Analysis

The Rise of the Right

‱ 10 min read

While the Left has been increasingly unable to adapt to changing realities without giving up its core mission of increasing equity and equality, the Right has gained traction and power across Western countries.

Our framework to understand the surge of the Right is hegemony theory. It explains how certain social groups attain and maintain dominance over others without overt domination. Hegemony can be understood as “consent armed by coercion” – or conversely a power structure in which “coercive force [is] cloaked in the respectable garb of consensuality”11Srnicek & Williams (2015), 226 ↩.

In the following article, we describe the rise of 21st century fascism as part and outcome of a hegemonic crisis and sketch some components of this crisis.

Theoretical Foundations

Following Alex Williams’s update of Antonio Gramsci’s original conception, we understand hegemony as

  • an emergent property of a socio-political system arising from the interactions of multiple self-organising agents within it;
  • a constraint on the self-organisation of these agents, shaping their behaviour without explicit top-down control;
  • an attractor within the state space of the system that is characterised by a specific power structure.22Williams (2020), 138; in the following, we’re trying to stick to a mostly non-technical account. ↩

We pay particulat attention to how agents of different types, from political factions and economic actors to memes interact to establish a hegemonic order as an emergent attractor.33This means we’re (implicitly) using a range of scale-free abstractions in our analysis. ↩

The Crisis of Neoliberalism

A hegemonic configuration has to constantly reproduce societal consent. It does so primarily in two ways: by providing just enough to meet the needs of popular groups (but not everybody), and by disseminating narratives that justify the socio-economic and political order (i.e. ideology)44More generelly, we understand ideology as a “network of social meanings, tools, scripts, schemas, heuristics, principles, and the like” (Haslanger 2017, 155) that is distorted in specific ways to justify systems of power and the social order they impose. ↩.

A hegemonic crisis is a period of political and ideological instability where this reproduction has stopped working.55Gramsci (1947) ↩ Ideologies lose their grip, while economic factors make it challenging to provide for the needs of essential supporters. In other words, the political system has left its attractor and hasn’t found a new one yet. As a result, political constellations shift unpredictably, and with them the distribution and structure of power.

The hegemonic crisis we have been witnessing since 2008 is the crisis of neoliberalism:66This analysis takes the one in Gilbert & Williams (2022) as its starting point and updates it as a new hegemonic constellation is emerging. ↩ of the sometimes uneasy, decades-long coalition between economic and social liberalism that brought us gay marriage as well as financial deregulation, and ultimately the demise of industrial capitalism in favour of what has variously been called “surveillance capitalism,”77Zuboff (2019) ↩ “rentier capitalism,”88Standing (2021), Christophers (2020) ↩ or “techno-feudalism”99Varoufakis (2023) ↩ – a system where rent extraction has replaced profit reinvestment as the dominant business model.

As a result, the wealth created by society has increasingly been vacuumed up by the rich, particularly the rentier class, i.e. tech and financial elites. Together with austerity programs and the increasing cost of housing and food, this had an immense impact on how social groups perceived and were affected by the neoliberal order. Not surprisingly, people lost faith in the ability and willingness of the system to meet their needs.

At the same time, conservatives and right-wing authoritarians who had been excluded from the neoliberal coalition have worked tirelessly to stoke and amplify mistrust of the “liberal elites”, fostering a sense of rightful anger towards institutions connected to them. To channel this anger, they provide alternative visions of a return to a more “natural” social order and justify the open expression of previously closeted right-wing authoritarian and social dominance orientations.

A Fascism for Nerds

In the anglosphere, a key actor in this process has been the so-called neo-reactionary movement. Its thinking can be understood as an updated, 21st century version of fascist ideology,1010Wolfgang has an analysis of the neo-reaction as a form of fascism. ↩ and yet its influence goes far beyond what is usually conceived of as “alt-right”. Its key tenets are the absolute primacy of societal order; the condemnation of communism, liberalism and democracy as undermining this order; and the vision of going back to an absolute monarch as the guarantor of this order – just this time around as the nation’s CEO.1111Anonymous (2025) ↩

The neo-reaction has emerged out of a specific historical constellation1212See Sandifer (2017) for an ambitious yet playful account of this emergence. ↩ – left-wing accelerationism, amphetamines, Lovecraftian mythology, and misogynist nerd culture, in particular the so-called Rationalist movement and the catalytic “Gamergate”. They not only conspired to shape neo-reactionary thinking, but also connect it to quite diverse groups and discourses whose influence has grown steadily as the hegemonic crisis progressed. Today, neo-reactionary ideas inform thinking about existential AI risk as well as Elon Musk’s priorities and politics.

It’s an attractive meme because it offers people the iconic “red pill” to escape an ideologically determined construction of reality by revealing “what’s really going on.” This is structurally identical to what a hegemonic analysis aims for: to make sense of the political situation in a moment of realisation, helping channel experiences of disenfranchisement and disempowerment towards political action. The uncomfortable truth is that the neo-reaction is currently way better at that than we are.

A Movement Platform

Partly thanks to these strategies, traditional sensemaking institutions like mainstream media, science, or political parties have suffered a catastrophic loss of trust and legitimacy,1313See Duffy (2023), Kennedy & Tyson (2023), and Kleis Nielsen & Fletcher (2024) for empirical data on this. ↩ moving discourse and influence towards semi-public forums, online communities, and individual podcasters. This is fertile ground not only for meme production and innovation in general, but for conspiracy narratives in particular.

A particularly fascinating product of this environment is QAnon. Something in between conspiracy theory, alternate reality game, online community, and social movement, it effectively provides what Rodrigo Nunes calls a platform for emerging collective power – a mechanism that allows various actors to connect and coordinate, as well as put forward their initiatives, but without determining the results.1414Nunes (2021). For more about movement platforms, see our article on building alternative models. ↩ Rather than represent a pre-existing will of the multitude, a platform proposes ideas that the collective can engage with, test, and ultimately adopt. It is as much a meme-generator as a meme itself that has spread far and wide. For its proponents, it creates experiences of agency and shared purpose, providing an entry point for indoctrination and radicalisation.1515Munson (2008) provides an account of how in social movements often a sense of belonging and connection comes first and ideology second. ↩

Libertarian Broligarchy and Nationalist Economics

The new hegemonic alliance has, in various forms, already gained power in Poland, Hungary and Italy, and is gaining strength in all other European countries. And then we have Donald Trump’s second election in 2024 – an inflection point in that the alliance has now captured one of the world’s superpowers. This means we should look at the alliance’s specific configuration in the US is not only as an instructive example, but to understand the risks that come with its power grab.

There are (at least) two distinct factions in this constellation: the libertarian broligarchs, exemplified by, e.g., Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel, and advocates of nationalist economics like Steve Bannon. While they are united in their rejection of liberal and progressive values and their disregard for human rights, they have very different economic agendas: while the former wants full deregulation to the point of forming autonomous “network states,”1616Srinivasan (2022) ↩ the latter advocates for more state intervention in the form of tariffs, industrial development, and a clampdown on immigration.

While the nationalists do certainly not shy away from power, the broligarchs push this to a whole new level: their agenda of “absolutely zero limits on their power”1717Samuel (2025). This agenda was already explicit in Davidson & Rees-Mogg (1997), sometimes called the broligarchs’ “bible”. ↩ includes superintelligence, space colonisation, and eternal life. The reality they live in and the future they plan are fundamentally different from those of 99.99% of humanity – and at the same time highly desirable for people with less privilege who are under the spell of hegemonic narratives like the American Dream, the Selfmade Man, or Technology as Progress.

The nationalists, on the other hand, can argue that their re-industrialisation strategies are designed for the benefit of the working class, adding to the allure the Right has been holding for them. But behind these strategies is just a different set of economic interests: While financial capital and digital technology want be free from the shackles of the nation state to avoid taxes and other burdensome regulations, industrial capital and extractive industries expect investment and protection by the state.

With the very public fall-out between Musk and Trump we are already seeing the cracks in this uneasy alliance. This should teach us two lessons: We need to get comfortable with uneasy alliances, otherwise we won’t build enough collective counter-power; and we need to watch these cracks to catch the moment when they’ve widened enough so we can drive in a wedge.

Liberal Apathy

But it won’t be liberals or the establishment of nominally left-wing parties like Labour who’ll do this. Much to the contrary, these parties seem oblivious to the risk of feeding the further rise of the Right (Labour in the UK) or the need to resist when an authoritarian regime has taken hold (Democrats in the US).

Liberal anti-fascism shies away from actual confrontation, not only because it’s a coward, but because liberalism and social democracy are deeply intertwined with the socio-economic system of which the new hegemony is just the latest iteration. We can’t expect them to understand or accept that the system from which they benefit has to change fundamentally; collective counter-power will have to come from outside the mainstream.

A New Hegemony

We are coming towards the end of the hegemonic crisis. We’ve seen a new alliance, a cohesive new social structure emerge: A network of people, groups, and ideas who had been (or felt) left behind by the previous order, allied with economic interests that profit from a far-right agenda.

While there are tensions and breaking points in this alliance, it’s united by the ruthlessness with which interests are being pursued. There is no more pretending dressed up with liberal narratives – its politics are blatantly about who has the most power and resources.

Which is exactly the definition of fascism. The emerging political order might look very different from older fascisms, but in substance that’s what we’re witnessing and should worry about: The rise of 21st century fascism.

References

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