Right-wing parties adopt austerity politics while rejecting the neoliberal ‘globalist’ label

Evidence

As a recipe for combating the rise of extremism, this combination of free markets and human rights has not been a great success. Instead, right wing movements, overtly racist parties and authoritarian leaders have come to power by publicly disparaging the ‘globalist’ agenda, even as many of them have embraced the austerity politics and attacks on welfare (and racialised welfare recipients) that have defined the neoliberal consensus for decades. While neoliberalism survived the Global Financial Crisis largely ‘unscathed’, as Philip Mirowsi notes, it has not survived entirely unchanged. Today, the explicit appeals to ‘Western civilisation’ and the racialised fear of ‘the masses’ that defined early neoliberalism are resurgent, and appeals to humanitarianism are increasingly replaced by xenophobic and exclusionary attempts ‘to beat people into submission’ in order to protect the ‘smooth operation of the market economy’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 451

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s austerity/neoliberalism literature: the paradox of far-right parties maintaining neoliberal economics while discarding its cosmopolitan framing. — connects to: Right-wing populists continue rather than challenge capitalist austerity. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 43; Right-populist leaders’ policies continue austerity despite anti-establishment rhetoric — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 43; Neoliberal figures deliberately blurred their boundaries with rival right-wing factions (+4 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: how the depoliticized liberal framing of markets helped enable its own rejection by right-wing populists who kept the economics and dropped the humanism.

Broader Connections

• Right-populist leaders’ policies continue austerity despite anti-establishment rhetoric #corroborates (0.95) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 43
• Broader neoliberal shifts enabled austerity’s return to economic common sense #expands (0.80) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 406
• Neoliberal figures deliberately blurred their boundaries with rival right-wing factions #expands (0.75)
• Austerity persists as an ideology that resists empirical refutation #qualifies (0.75) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 613
• Neoliberalism claims to liberate while actually eroding political sovereignty #expands (0.72) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 211