Abstract
There are many accounts of “right wing populism”. Some emphasize income inequality, some culture, some the specifics of particular political systems. This paper takes a step back, and provides a longer term structural view. Its central contention is that what is happening in the world today is a structural crisis of capitalist democracy. The specific political styles and causal pathways that brought men like, Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, and Modi to power are hard to specify. What is blindingly obvious is the increasing detachment of large parts of the population from liberal democratic forms. The underlying cause of this detachment is the unravelling of the “material basis of consent” that had marked capitalist democracies in the post-war period. Unsurprisingly this unravelling has progressed the most in precisely the periphery of the core, and the semi-periphery. It is these countries that have become the political path-breakers for the more consolidated capitalism’s of the core. I sustain these claims in what follows through a brief comparative analysis of the rise of Berlusconi in Italy who was the “canary in the coal mine” of the current wave of Bonapartist figures, and Bolsonaro who is the most important current exemplar of the type.
Keywords:
Capitalismo; Democracy; Neobonapartism