Really existing liberalism, the bulwark fantasy, and the enabling of reactionary, far right politics1

There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now. (O'Neill, 1943) Therefore, I propose that core to the current panic over "illiberalism" and "populism" is a fantasy (Glynos, 2021) whose discourse uncritically posits liberalism and liberal democracy as a natural bulwark against reaction. This narrative, born out of the Second World War and the defeat of fascism and Nazism, is based on a simplistic, mythologizing reading of history, which conveniently eschews the well-documented ambivalence of "the West" toward many key tenets of what would eventually become the benchmark for "evil" in politics (Meister, 2010). In this narrative, the West and liberalism were redeemed through (eventually) taking sides against fascism (even though mainstream actors had not only partaken in some of the most abhorrent ideas pushed by the fascist regimes to their logical end but also influenced Hitler's own deathly ideology and practice (see Losurdo, 2014, pp. 337–340 for a summary)). The Second World War conveniently wiped the slate clean for the liberal elite,3 as if they had had no involvement in countless genocidal projects throughout the era of colonialism or are not continuing to benefit from the exploitation and/or exclusion of certain communities on the basis of (biological) race, gender, ability, or class. What I argue in this article is that such fantasies have led Western democracies to a situation where full-fledged reaction is at the gates of power, and yet where there is still no appetite to face the possibility that really existing liberalism4 has been a more or less active enabler rather than a bulwark. Addressing such shortcomings would mean that if we were to be serious about democracy, solutions would have to be found elsewhere than in fantasized visions of the past or blamed on others for stealing our enjoyment of liberal democracy. This would mean facing the failings of liberalism itself and restarting history. Yet at present, we seem stuck in a cycle where all we can be given as an alternative to a deeply dysfunctional and disliked status quo are reactionary politics taking us back, rather than forward: There is no present or future, only the past, over and over again. My aim is thus to tease out whether what we are seeing is the rise of "illiberalism" and/or "populism" against liberalism, or whether liberalism always held "illiberal" tendencies at its core and can therefore act as an enabler. To illustrate what has become an incredibly precarious position, where the rights of many are increasingly denied, threatened, or removed, I first briefly outline the construction of the liberal fantasy and counterpose it with really existing liberalism's failure to live by its own ideals. I then turn to the crumbling of the liberal fantasy and the necessity for the liberal elite of creating and hyping an illiberal other on the (far) right to strengthen the liberal hegemony leading to the mainstreaming of reaction. Finally, I conclude with a grim yet hopeful assessment of the current predicament and the urgent need to think democracy beyond the liberal hegemony. Before moving on, it is crucial to note that concepts such as liberalism and illiberalism are used in this argument as empty signifiers whose precise meaning is necessarily unclear and unsettled and as such serve the purpose of many actors whose aims may be dramatically opposed. This builds on the common acknowledgment highlighting the difficulty in defining liberalism precisely because of its many traditions and flexibility (Bell, 2014; Freeden, 2005; Laruelle, 2022; Losurdo, 2014; Waller, 2023). While these authors do not define liberalism as an empty signifier themselves, my point builds on this lack of clear definition and applies it to a wider political discourse where the conceptualization of liberalism as an empty signifier becomes meaningful. The aim here therefore is not to adjudicate what liberalism is or who is a liberal, but rather to reflect on the role played by claiming to be or being called a liberal or act on behalf or in defence of liberalism. As explored below, the contradistinction between who gets to belong to the liberal camp and who does not is key to the process of mainstreaming. It is worth stressing that these boundaries are fuzzy and constantly evolving and that someone seemingly illiberal at a point in time or in comparison to a more liberal person can become liberal should the pendulum swing toward illiberalism or when compared to a more illiberal person. Liberal democracy is used in a similar manner in this article, despite the relationship between liberalism and democracy being "complex and by no means one of continuity or identity" (Bobbio, 1990, p. 1). As Jason Glynos (2021) notes in his outline of critical fantasy studies, the concept of fantasy is a useful one for theorists, particularly those interested in discourse, as: It speaks directly to the way we are gripped by certain norms and ideas and identities, but also because it taps into a related network of concepts for thinking about problems of reform and transformation—whether social, economic, or political. It can speak to issues linked to resistance to change and transformation, just as much as issues linked to our ready embrace of change and transformation. Everyday understandings of fantasy of course tend to oppose it to reality and the 'facts of the matter'. However, one of the most intriguing insights that psychoanalysis brings to bear on debates about ideology is the idea that fantasy is precisely not opposed to reality or 'facts of the matter', at least not necessarily so. What is important from the point of view of fantasy is that it is aligned with desire, not that it opposes some notion of representational truth. For Losurdo, flexibility has always been one of the great strengths of liberalism as an ideology (and in our case empty signifier), as it has often proved able to adapt to its opponents: "it is enough, however briefly, to introduce the profane space (slaves in the colonies and servants in the metropolis) into the analysis, to realize the inadequate, misleading character of the categories (absolute pre-eminence of individual liberty, antistatism, individualism) generally used to trace the history of the liberal West" (see also Bell, 2016, pp. 62–70). While the Second World War provided a blank slate for liberalism to posit itself on the right side of history, a less hagiographic study of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrates that the ideas that eventually developed into Nazism and fascism were not always at odds with those of the founding fathers of modern liberalism. Beyond the ambivalence of liberal states and leaders in the early rise of fascism, liberal colonialism often provided templates regarding hierarchies of worth in who should be part of the people, who should lead, who could be exploited or altogether excluded and even killed (Arneil, 2012; Bell, 2016; Hobsbawm, 1989; Losurdo, 2014; Rodney, 2018).5 It is no surprise that the process of decolonization was so often read in national narratives in a manner that excluded such contradictions (see, e.g., Gopal, 2020). One could argue of course that it is not simply liberalism as an ideal or ideology that is a bulwark against fascism, but the liberal democratic settlement with its separation of power, rule of law, free press, and elections. Yet here again, much of this is based on what has been termed by Charles W. Mills as an "epistemology of ignorance." For Mills (1997, p. 3), the social contract, at the basis of the liberal order and our current hegemony, obfuscates "the ugly realities of group power and domination" and whitewashes over the ways in which "we, the People" or "the rights of Man" were originally constructed on clear exclusionary premises despite them forming the basis of a more open societal vision than what they aimed to replace: limited equality and progress are not full equality and progress. In fact, it can serve to further entrench systemic inequality: think, for example, of the introduction of the Jim Crow laws and segregation after the Civil War in the United States as an attempt to consolidate racial hierarchies and split the working class (Roediger, 2007). What Mills outlines for the Racial Contract was also discussed by others with regard to the sexual or patriarchal contract (see Gines, 2017; Pateman, 2018 1988) and could be expanded to other forms of exclusion inasmuch as they prescribe "for their signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance; a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites or men or anyone holding a privileged identity will in general be unable to understand the world they have made" (Mills, 1997). To return to the concept of fantasy, it is therefore possible to state both that liberalism did indeed create the opportunity for some progress and at times actively so, but that it also always harbored the possibility of reaction and often acted as an actor of progress against the will of some of its proponents. It is not only through the historiography of the Second World War and whitewashing of the liberal elite's role in exclusionary or genocidal projects or the more abstract idea of a contract that the liberal fantasy has naturalised exclusion but in its focus on individual freedoms (or more precisely that of some individuals). This again is particularly clear in the perpetuation of racism as a systemic form of oppression but could be extended to others. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Victor Ray (2015, p. 59) noted, "Most mainstream social analysis, and most Americans themselves, view racism as 'individual-level animosity or hatred towards people of colour," associated primarily with its most explicit historical manifestations and representations. This is particularly well documented in Bonilla-Silva's research on colorblind racism (2006, p. 2) which demonstrates that "Whites have developed powerful explanations—which have ultimately become justifications—for contemporary racial inequality that exculpate them from any responsibility for the status of people of color." Seeing liberalism as a bulwark against oppression therefore relies on what Tukufu Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva (2008) have called "white methods," that is The practical tools used to manufacture empirical data and analysis to support the racial stratification of society. White methods are the various practices that have been used to produce 'racial knowledge' since the emergence of White supremacy in the fifteenth and sixteenth century and of the disciplines a few centuries later. (Zuberi Hunger Mondon, 2023). This misdiagnosis failed to account for the many facets of the opposition to the technocratic and oligarchic takeover, conflating left-wing demands for generally moderate democratic rejuvenation and the resurgence of the far right. That both could denounce the same elite did not mean that both related to the same "people" or source of legitimate power in some sort of horseshoe theory.7 Yet it is this confusion that lent unjustified democratic credibility to the far right and its elitist politics (see Collovald, 2004; Glynos Mondon, 2017; Mondon Titley et al., 2017), secularism (Mondon, 2015), women's or LGBTQ+ rights (Farris, 2017; Puar, 2007). Similar absorption of reactionary politics can be witnessed in the constructed urgency to tackle immigration as "a major concern." These narratives are often based on skewed data and understanding of the construction of public opinion, which serves to negate the role played by those in discursive power in shaping the agenda (Mondon, 2022a). Instead, blame is placed on "the people" and by the same token, reactionary politics are legitimized through pseudo-democratic reasoning: This is what the people want. This is not limited to racialized politics, and the same processes can be witnessed in the mainstreaming of transphobia in the name of free speech, women's, children's, and LGB rights (Amery Said, 1978). Crucially, what the mainstreaming of reactionary politics through a combination of liberal and illiberal articulations highlights in particular is that the inclusion of minoritized communities within the liberal social contract has always been precarious, limited, and subject to conditions. As such, the liberal order and its progressive outlook have always been dependent on the forces it has had to contend with. Should the ante be on the side of progress, then liberalism would more or less willingly accommodate new demands for equal rights and justice, as was the case in the post-war period. However, it should have always been clear that, should the balance shift back toward reaction, liberalism could just as well adapt, more or less willingly, as it indeed did in 1930s Germany, even if this would cause its ultimate destruction. In this, the interests of the few were ultimately more important than those of the many.11 This does not mean that far-right narratives are ever accepted fully or unconditionally within mainstream discourse: They continue to serve their purpose as unacceptable alternatives to the status quo. As I have discussed in the case of Braverman or the LDH, they first allow for the creation of an apparently impermeable border between the acceptable and the unacceptable, the liberal and the illiberal, even if said liberal positioning increasingly legitimizes and even resembles the illiberal. Second, this also allows for the creation of false equivalences between alternatives to the system on the left and far right, in an attempt to delegitimize progressive alternatives. As Waller (2023, p. 8) notes, illiberalism "is politically neutral—that is, left- and right-partisan variants can be included and is economically unspecified meaning that statism, social market capitalism, and varieties in-between do not get defined out accidentally—only libertarian or strict 'classical liberal' economics are removed at the definitional stage from an understanding of illiberalism itself." Yet, more often than not, this is turned into a normative argument whereby any articulation of illiberalism is a threat not just to liberalism, but to democracy qua liberal democracy qua capitalism and even neoliberalism. This can be witnessed in recent elections in the United States, the UK, and France, where what should be considered moderate social democratic platforms (and even liberal by some standards and definitions) were treated in mainstream public discourse as similar to or even bigger threats than the far-right candidates, who ended up benefiting both from the lack of scrutiny and being propped up as legitimate albeit denounced alternatives. The defense of some mythical center at all costs has led to dramatic consequences whereby the reactionary right has been able to construct itself as a rebellious force speaking truth to power, rather than the defenders of old forms of privilege attempting to turn back the clocks on the limited and precarious rights won by various communities over the past century (Mondon Robin, 2018). This has not only strengthened their claims to be heard against the increasingly unpopular status quo but somewhat counterintuitively strengthened said status quo by creating false equivalences between left- and right-wing alternatives and hyping potentially misleading concepts such as polarization (Mondon Vergara, 2020) and inverted authoritarianism (Wolin, 2008) and the weakening of democratic, emancipatory alternatives. To understand our current predicament and the resurgence of reactionary politics, it is therefore urgent to take a more critical approach to liberalism and finally break away from the myths created in the 20th century to make sense of the atrocities committed by the West/North against their own and others. This requires accepting the clear and simple fact that the "liberal revolution" can only be understood as "a tangle of emancipation and disemancipation" (Losurdo, 2014, p. 301). Building loosely on Losurdo's own conclusions (2014, pp. 341–343), it is urgent to reckon with the facts that democracy has not always been at the heart of the liberal tradition; that various types of exclusion generally associated with illiberal politics have not been overcome painlessly within the liberal tradition, and that progress has not been linear. To put it simply, emancipation was often to be found against the liberal elite and outside of the "liberal world" (Delmas, 2018; Manchanda nothing is inalienable; and nothing is imprescriptible. Except, perhaps, property—still." Seeing the current context solely through the lens of an opposition between liberalism and illiberalism misses some crucial political points. It does not account for the well-documented flexibility of liberalism when it comes to adapting and absorbing reactionary politics rather than automatically and inherently opposing them. Perhaps more importantly, it excludes from the discussion the concept of democracy and its multiple practices altogether, which are only mentioned in panic and made synonymous either to liberalism and the need for its uncritical defense, or to so-called populism and the threat "the people" pose. This clearly taps into well-rehearsed arguments on the liberal side whereby only a liberal elite can give "the people" what they need. While this may be defined as liberalism should particular individual and minority rights be granted and protected, it is more akin to what Jacques Rancière (2005) has called "states of oligarchic law, … where the power of the oligarchy is limited by a dual recognition of popular sovereignty and individual liberties" or what Wolin (2007, p. 59) has called "misrepresentative or clientry government." For Rancière, far from being the keepers of democracy, the liberal elite displays more often than not a hatred of it. This hollowing out of democracy in its ideal form has been made far worse with the rise of neoliberalism (Abraham-Hamanoi et al, 2017; Brown, 2015; Cornelissen, 2023; Whyte, 2019), which has reinforced the idea that democracy comes second to capitalism, but that liberalism is increasingly one option amongst others as demonstrated by the rise of authoritarian capitalist regimes (see, among others, Bruff, 2014). Coupled with the resurgence of culture wars waged in the name of "the people," this has led to the strengthening of "reactionary democracy" (Mondon see also Richmond & Charnley, 2022). While one could still claim that rights remain protected thanks to the strength of liberal constitutions and the rule of law, these are in fact proving increasingly precarious, and authoritarian tendencies are not far under the surface. As Sheldon Wolin powerfully argued back in 2007 in his prescient book Democracy Inc., "far from being exhausted by its twentieth-century versions would-be totalitarians now have available technologies of control, intimidation, and mass manipulation far surpassing those of that earlier time" (2017, p. xviii). Yet what Wolin feared was not the totalitarianism hyped in reactionary circles around "clashes of civilizations," but those that found their source very much within liberal democracies which would represent "the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilisation of the citizenry" (his emphasis). Wolin stressed that contrary to theories of the end of history, the progress that had been achieved in terms of democratic rights over the past two centuries was not only far from complete but had not been consolidated and could be easily dismantled. Furthermore, the symbols that had been core to constructing such progress and reifying it could easily be harnessed by reactionary forces to push authoritarian agendas. Fast forward to 2023 and we can see that much of what Wolin predicted in what was considered a radical take at the time has become all too real. As already discussed, means of systemic exclusion and oppression have been naturalized using liberal and progressive concepts. All the while, corporate power has consolidated with private actors playing an ever more crucial role in the fate not just of countries but of the planet, with no democratic scrutiny (Farrow, 2023). In fact, those who were supposed to hold such power accountable in their role as the fourth estate have been either disbanded or fallen in line with their masters as a liberal oligarchy has developed, and securitization of society and the crackdown on democratic dissent have become the norm in what is argued—in an Orwellian manner—for the protection of democracy. Therefore, if democracy has become a shell of its former, imperfect and incomplete, self, it is not because it has been replaced by "illiberalism" or because of "populists," but because the liberal elite in power has failed to reckon with the many crises that demanded radical change. Daniel Bessner's pithy summary (2023) of Fukuyama's most recent work makes this particularly clear: Liberalism and Its Discontents is not especially illuminating, repeating tired criticisms of the left and the right that don't add much to scholarly analysis or political conversation. In essence, Fukuyama believes that embracing centrist liberalism was, and remains, the "mature" thing to do. While adolescents and fools endorse politics of radical change, adults accept that the limited reforms of liberalism are the best humanity can hope for. Though Fukuyama is willing to acknowledge many of liberalism's limitations, he cannot envision a world beyond it.12 There is, of course, not one singular strategy or solution to get out of our current predicament, but I would like to conclude on one which I believe is within our reach. Much of the current political landscape in the past decade has been shaped by populist hype (Glynos & Mondon 2019). This misdiagnosis has placed the blame on the people for the rise of reactionary politics and has therefore justified the inclusion of reactionary actors at the table and even the absorption of their ideas as, after all, "this is what the people want." Yet, this bottom-up understanding of the rise of reactionary politics is misleading. Whether it is Trump or Brexit (Mondon & Winter, 2018, 2020), Islamophobia (Mondon & Winter, 2017), or concerns about immigration (Mondon, 2022a), each has been blamed on a very limited understanding of "the people" and democracy, based on the idea that power does indeed reside in the pure collection of public opinions. Yet, this ignores very well-documented processes of mediation and top-down agenda setting which, when taken into account, paint a very different picture. Far from being passive administrators of the popular will, the elite in what is today considered as democracy has played a central part in shaping the current reactionary agenda and imposing narratives guiding our public debate. This is not a ground-breaking finding or a radical statement. Yet in the current context where much of the liberal elite shun their responsibility for the mess they have played a key part in creating and turn instead to fantasies as diversions, this could be a momentous reckoning. Aurelien Mondon is a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Bath. His research focuses predominantly on the impact of racism and populism on liberal democracies and the mainstreaming of far-right politics through elite discourse. His latest book Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream, co-written with Aaron Winter, is out with Verso. The Ethics of Researching the Far Right, coedited with Antonia Vaughan, Joan Braune, and Meghan Tinsley, will be out in March 2024 with Manchester University Press.