When Resistance Turns Right: Counter-Conduct and The Rise of Authoritarian Populism

This article interrogates the conceptual space that makes it possible for authoritarian populist politicians to successfully mobilise resistance narratives. It argues that democratic thought has progressively emptied resistance of its productive and collective dimension and enshrined it in the judgement of the free subject, laying the ground for its authoritarian political capture. Mobilising Foucault's writings on counter-conduct, the article retraces the conceptual history of democratic resistance from the counter-conduct of the Protestant Huguenots to Locke's right to resist and finally its neoliberal transformation. It is shown how counter-conduct is here first individualised and then privatised. Neoliberalism fuels the resistant subject's fear of an authoritarian take-over while undermining their ability to recognise it, creating a paranoid resistant subject blind to political force presented as anti-state.