I’m increasingly frustrated with a
specific failure mode on parts of the intellectual left: analysis that
performs insight while refusing to touch the real object. It oscillates
between two shortcuts. The first is a kind of diagrammatic
power-critique — tracing who funds who, which networks influence which
narratives — as if mapping influence were equivalent to explaining why a
new constituency is forming. The second is the speed with which it
collapses that constituency into a moral category — “Nazis,” “fascists,”
“deplorables” — as if labelling were a substitute for understanding.
Both moves give you the feeling of clarity while avoiding the harder
work: diagnosing the political economy of the present.
The deeper
problem is not that these tools are always wrong. It’s that they become
evasions at exactly the moment we need realism. If you treat the current
shift as primarily elite orchestration, politics becomes exposure and
denunciation. If you treat it as primarily moral pathology, politics
becomes excommunication. But what is actually happening is more
difficult: a successor settlement is assembling in the open, because the
old one is failing to hold continuity. And if you won’t name the
conditions that are producing that — non-delivery, volatility, status
injury, institutional illegitimacy, felt vulnerability — you will keep
mistaking the symptom (the coalition’s surface ideology) for the cause
(the human experience it is metabolising).
This matters because
the political moment has shifted. For a long time, the implicit
settlement in much of the West was: growth provides surplus; the state
mediates distribution; institutions deliver continuity; rights expand
alongside provision; legitimacy is sustained through predictable
improvement. Even where that settlement was uneven or unjust, it had a
core operational claim: we can deliver a rising baseline and a liveable
future. That claim is now failing in too many places, for too many
people, too consistently.
Wage stagnation alongside asset
inflation. Housing as a rent-extraction machine. Debt-based consumption
as false stability. Precarity in work and care. Public capacity
thinning. Infrastructure ageing. Volatility compounding through energy
shocks, climate disruption, geopolitical stress, pandemic aftershocks —
and now machine-accelerated labour substitution anxiety. In this
context, aggregate indicators become less persuasive than lived
experience. People do not experience “the economy” as GDP; they
experience it as fragility: the sense that a single shock can unmake
their lives and that institutions will not catch them.
When
delivery weakens, legitimacy migrates. Politics stops being organised
primarily around “who gets what share of growth” and reorganises around
“who will protect me from decline.” This is the regime shift that too
much of the left refuses to metabolise. It continues to speak as if the
master variable is redistribution inside a functioning delivery state,
while the ground has moved toward continuity, protection, and strength
under constraint.
This is where the right has been strategically
sharper — not morally superior, but structurally more attuned. It is not
“winning” primarily through policy detail or better arguments. It is
winning because it is building a constituency around a different
anthropology: a thesis of what it means to be human in this moment.
Exposed. Unheld. Unprotected. Disoriented. Economically insecure.
Culturally unmoored. Epistemically overwhelmed. Vulnerability becomes
the substrate — but not framed as mutual care and solidarity. Framed as
fear, humiliation, perceived weakness, status loss, and the feeling of
being quietly dispossessed while elites moralise. Those feelings are
then made legible, given targets, and translated into alliance.
The
left often reacts to this by classifying the coalition: “libertarians,”
“reactionaries,” “fascists,” “Nazis.” Sometimes those labels capture
real ideological currents. But they don’t explain why the coalition
coheres. They mistake taxonomy for comprehension. They substitute
condemnation for explanation, and explanation for construction. And
because they fail to name the underlying attractor — the demand for
continuity under volatility — they keep losing to the political
formation that is addressing it, however crudely or dangerously.
At
a deeper level, the emerging right is engaged in
settlement-construction. It is behaving as if we are in a legitimacy
transition — from a rights-and-welfare legitimacy (dependent on
institutional capacity and surplus) to a strength-and-security
legitimacy (dependent on continuity under constraint). It is offering
people a story of themselves inside that transition, and then supplying a
set of operating moves that convert insecurity into coherence.
One
move is epistemic: attack the old legitimacy engines — universities,
media, credential regimes, expert institutions — not only as “biased,”
but as self-referential monopolies that no longer justify their
authority through performance. This is not simply anti-intellectualism.
It is a wager that the current knowledge order is degraded and captured,
and that legitimacy must be reopened through disruption and
replacement.
A second move is to change the master variable from
wealth to strength. In a world of compounding shocks, wealth looks like a
weak proxy for security. Strength — resilience, optionality, capacity
to absorb volatility, ability to act — becomes the organising value. It
resonates because it meets the lived sense that money is not protection
and institutions are not shelter.
A third move is coalition
technology: belonging as infrastructure. Where liberal frameworks often
treat belonging as dangerous because it can slide into exclusion, the
right treats belonging as the mechanism that enables commitment when
transactional society fractures. In a complex system, coordination is
scarce; identity becomes a tool to produce coherence. It converts
diffuse anxiety into a “we.”
A fourth move is material anchoring —
a kind of economic homesteading logic. Freedom is not framed as
abstract liberty but as having a base: land, housing, tools, energy
access, local productive capacity, reduced dependency. This lands
because the existing settlement increasingly offers freedom as rhetoric
while structurally intensifying rent, platform dependence, and the
erosion of household sovereignty.
A fifth move is executive
decisiveness: the claim that complexity produces paralysis, capture, and
endless process; therefore legitimate power must be concentrated enough
to act. This is the most dangerous move — it can slide quickly into
authoritarianism — but it is also a response to a widely felt condition:
institutions seem unable to decide, unable to build, unable to respond.
A
sixth move is to treat intelligence — sensing, feedback, learning
velocity — as the core resource of governance. When the world is moving
quickly, the scarce asset is not moral language; it is epistemic
quality. The right’s hostility to inherited institutions often rests on a
belief that they have become low-signal systems: high status, low
learning.
Threaded through all of this is an attempt to invert
status from consumption to discipline, contribution, and control — to
delegitimise passive consumer identity and replace it with a moral
economy of toughness, production, and sacrifice. Again: politically
combustible, often scapegoating — but aligned with the felt exhaustion
of consumerism as a substitute for agency.
None of
this is easy. We are in a genuinely challenging event-space:
contradictory needs, real scarcity, eroding institutional capacity, and
demands that cannot be simultaneously met inside the inherited
settlement. That doesn’t justify cruelty or scapegoating — but it does
require a fundamentally different politics: one capable of naming
trade-offs, recognising limits, and constructing alternative settlement
pathways rather than performing moral purity. If we can’t even say these
issues out loud, we remain trapped at the level of name-calling and
counter-name-calling. And at that level there is no pathway to build the
politics that could actually work — no way to earn legitimacy through
delivery, no way to design shared protection, no way to hold continuity
under volatility.
Seen this way, the right is not
only a set of bad ideas. It is an adaptive response to a real
institutional condition: non-delivery, exposure, and legitimacy decay.
It is building a constituency around protection. It is offering
coherence under volatility. It is constructing a successor settlement —
one that may be exclusionary, punitive, and authoritarian, but which is
responding to the question people are already asking: who will hold me
when the system doesn’t?
This is why the left’s power diagrams and
moral labelling feel like evasions. The diagrams imply the problem is
coordination among elites; the labels imply the problem is reducible to
moral pathology. Both moves avoid confronting the deeper regime shift:
the old settlement is failing to deliver continuity, and politics is
reorganising around strength.
The task, then, is not merely to
“debunk” the right as if this were primarily a misinformation event, nor
to retreat into the comfort of denunciation. The task is to build a
better successor settlement — one that can meet the underlying
conditions without scapegoating and without tyranny.
That means
treating protection as a legitimate demand and designing it differently:
material security through housing, energy affordability, care
infrastructure, local economic continuity, and credible pathways for
dignity; epistemic security through institutions that learn in public
and earn trust through performance; belonging as civic infrastructure
without enemies; strength as resilience and capability rather than
domination; decisiveness through accountable architectures rather than
concentrated power.
If we cannot offer a political economy of
shared protection — continuity that people can actually feel — then the
politics of fear will keep winning, because it is answering the master
question of the era. Not “who influences who,” but: how do we hold human
lives steady inside degenerative volatility?
Until that question
is met with credible institutional design, the field will remain open to
whoever can promise strength most convincingly — even if the promise is
ultimately paid for by exclusion, cruelty, and the shrinking of
freedom.
That is the argument. And it requires something more
demanding than the lazy comforts of diagrams and labels: an updated
anthropology, an updated political economy, and the courage to build a
successor settlement in full view.