Anxiety both fuels authoritarian populism and may enable radical resistance

Evidence

Capitalist anxiety diminishes societies’ horizons of possibility, often stoking a calamitous skepticism toward democracy and cementing the ascendancy of authoritarian populism. But can the condition of anxiety also become a source for a still inchoate yet more radical collective resistance? — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 532

Capitalist anxiety diminishes societies’ horizons of possibility, often stoking a calamitous skepticism toward democracy and cementing the ascendancy of authoritarian populism. But can the condition of anxiety also become a source for a still inchoate yet more radical collective resistance? — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 346

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes the book’s earlier chapters on authoritarian populism as an imagined escape from financialized uncertainty; also tracks the Mark Fisher thesis about capitalist realism appearing elsewhere in the book. — connects to: Populism may itself express the public’s irrational exuberance — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 686; Populist attacks on central banks intensified while technocratic crisis responses expanded — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 702; Typical populist movements blend egalitarian and authoritarian elements — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 7
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 532; Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 346