In this reflective Voice of Youth commentary marking Rohingya Genocide Remembrance Day on August 25, PS Ayaas, a young Rohingya writer, activist, and community advocate, examines the enduring relationship between genocide, statelessness, exclusion, and political belonging. Drawing on the Rohingya experience, Ayaas argues that the 2017 violence cannot be separated from decades of citizenship restrictions, majoritarian nationalism, and narratives that constructed a minority population as an alien “other.” He connects this history to broader debates on populism, showing how exclusionary definitions of the “people” can normalize discrimination and undermine democratic protections. Moving beyond remembrance, Ayaas calls for accountability, equal rights, recognized education, sustainable livelihoods, meaningful Rohingya participation, and conditions for voluntary and dignified return. His central message is unequivocal: remembrance must become responsibility, and belonging must never be conditional.
Every August 25, I remember a day that did not end when the gunfire stopped. For Rohingya families, August 25 is not simply a date in history. It is carried in memory: in the stories of parents, in the names of villages, in photographs saved after flight, and in the silence that sometimes follows a question about home. I was still a child when I first understood that leaving home could mean never knowing when, or whether, you would see it again.
Rohingya communities mark August 25 as Genocide Remembrance Day to honor those who were killed, those who survived, and those who continue to live with displacement. But remembrance also asks a harder political question: how did an entire population come to be treated as if it did not belong?
From Violence to Exclusion
The violence of 2017 cannot be understood as an isolated eruption. It emerged from a much longer history of legal, political and social exclusion. Rohingya communities in Myanmar faced restrictions on citizenship, movement, education, marriage and livelihoods long before the mass displacement of 2017.
The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar documented the scale and systematic character of abuses committed during the 2017 military operations. It reported that more than 700,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh and documented killings, sexual violence and the burning of villages. UN human-rights investigators also recorded patterns of violence and deliberate actions that created fear and drove Rohingya civilians from their homes.
This history matters because genocide does not begin only when the world sees bodies or burning villages. It can be preceded by years of making a population politically disposable: denying people a secure legal identity, portraying them as outsiders, restricting their movement and normalising discrimination.
The 1982 Citizenship Law became a central part of this exclusionary structure. Rohingya were increasingly treated not as a recognised national community but as foreigners in the place many had always called home. The political message was devastatingly simple: you may live here, but you do not fully belong here.
The Politics of “Us” vs “Them”
This is where the Rohingya story becomes relevant to the study of populism. Populist politics often divides society into a morally pure “people” and an allegedly dangerous “other.” The boundaries of the “people” can be constructed through ethnicity, religion, race or nationality. Once a minority is portrayed as an existential demographic, cultural or security threat, exclusion can be presented not as discrimination but as protection.
Myanmar’s experience shows how dangerous this logic can become when it interacts with majoritarian nationalism, state power and organized violence. Anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya narratives did not remain confined to rhetoric. They helped create an environment in which discrimination could be normalized, and extraordinary violence could be justified. This does not mean that every aspect of the Rohingya crisis can be explained by populism. Military authoritarianism, ethnic nationalism, citizenship policy, colonial legacies, local conflicts and political economy all matter. But the construction of an “authentic” national community while defining a minority as alien offers an important lens.
The danger is not limited to Myanmar. Across the world, migrants, refugees and minorities can be turned into symbols of national decline or threats to social cohesion. When political actors persuade citizens that rights belong primarily to the “real people” and that minorities are outsiders who deserve fewer protections, democratic institutions become vulnerable. The Rohingya experience is therefore not only a humanitarian story; it is also a warning about what happens when belonging becomes conditional.
Remembering What Statistics Cannot Say
More than 700,000 Rohingya crossed into Bangladesh following the 2017 violence. In 2026, UNHCR reported that around 1.2 million stateless Rohingya remained in Bangladesh. Numbers are essential for policy, but numbers cannot tell us what displacement feels like. A statistic cannot describe a mother deciding what to carry when a lifetime must fit into a few possessions. It cannot describe a child growing up knowing the name of a village he or she has never seen. It cannot capture the psychological weight of living in a place that is simultaneously a refuge and a reminder that the original home remains inaccessible.
Nine years after the mass displacement, displacement has become a childhood, an adolescence and, for many young Rohingya, almost an entire lifetime. Humanitarian assistance remains essential, but humanitarian assistance alone cannot constitute a political solution. UNHCR reported in 2026 that limited livelihood opportunities left Rohingya refugees heavily dependent on aid.
This creates a dangerous paradox. The international community says that the future should ultimately be sustainable, while policies surrounding displacement can leave young people with too few opportunities to acquire recognized education, build livelihoods or participate meaningfully in decisions affecting their lives.
Home Is More Than a Location
For many Rohingya, return to Myanmar remains the deepest expression of hope. But “return” cannot simply mean crossing a border. A return that leaves people stateless, unsafe, segregated or without freedom of movement would reproduce the conditions that made displacement possible. A sustainable return requires citizenship or an effective legal status guaranteeing equal rights, physical security, freedom of movement, access to education and healthcare, protection of property and meaningful participation in public life.
International law has already placed important obligations on Myanmar. In January 2020, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered provisional measures requiring Myanmar to take measures within its power to prevent acts within the scope of Article II of the Genocide Convention and to preserve evidence. In July 2022, the Court rejected Myanmar’s preliminary objections and confirmed that the case could proceed. The proceedings are not a substitute for political action, but they demonstrate that the Rohingya question is not simply a matter of humanitarian charity. It is also a matter of international law, accountability and rights. The Rohingya should therefore not be asked to choose between justice and return, or between hope and realism. A genuine pathway home must combine both.
A Future Cannot Be Built in a Waiting Room
The greatest danger of protracted displacement is that waiting becomes normal. A child who has spent nine years in a refugee settlement is not living through a temporary interruption. Those years are education, adolescence, friendships and formative memories. A generation can lose opportunities while governments continue to describe its situation as temporary. Durable solutions must therefore be broader than repatriation alone. First, Rohingya children and young people need meaningful, recognized and continuous education. Second, refugees need safe and lawful opportunities to develop skills and livelihoods rather than being treated as permanently dependent. Third, Rohingya representatives — especially women and young people — must have meaningful roles in discussions about return, protection, education, resettlement and reconstruction.
Third-country pathways should also be discussed honestly where appropriate, without turning resettlement into a substitute for the right to return. Different Rohingya families may have different futures. Some may return when conditions permit; some may pursue resettlement; others may build lives in Bangladesh or elsewhere. A rights-based approach must respect those choices rather than forcing one political solution upon an entire people.
Remembering As Resistance
On August 25, remembrance is more than mourning. It is a refusal to allow political violence to erase political responsibility. To remember is to say that the dead had names. The villages had names. The families had histories. The people who fled were not an anonymous mass. They were citizens, neighbors, students, farmers, teachers, parents and children whose lives were interrupted by violence and exclusion.
It is also to say that the story did not end at the Bangladesh border. The crisis continues in displacement, statelessness, insecurity in Rakhine State, shrinking humanitarian resources and the uncertainty of a generation growing up without a secure relationship to home. Remembrance is therefore a challenge to the international community. If the world recognizes atrocities but allows the political conditions that produced them to remain, remembrance becomes ritual without prevention.
The lesson of August 25 is not simply “never forget.” It is “never normalize.” Do not normalize statelessness. Do not normalize indefinite displacement. Do not normalize political narratives that define minorities as less deserving of rights. Do not normalize a humanitarian crisis that has lasted so long that an entire generation has grown up inside it.
A Future in Which Belonging Is Not Conditional
I still think about home. For my generation, home is sometimes a place we remember through our parents’ stories. It is a landscape inherited through memory. But home should not have to remain only a memory.
The future of the Rohingya should not be decided by the logic that excluded us in the first place. We should not be forced to prove that we deserve to belong. We should not have to choose between dignity and survival.
A meaningful future requires accountability for grave crimes, equal rights, political inclusion, education and livelihoods, and conditions that make return genuinely voluntary, safe, dignified and sustainable. It also requires listening to Rohingya people themselves.
Every August 25, the world is invited to remember what happened. It must do more than remember. It must understand how exclusion was built, how an “other” was created, how violence became possible, and how those patterns can be prevented elsewhere.
Remembrance is the beginning of responsibility. And responsibility means building a future in which no child has to learn that belonging can be taken away.
PS Ayaasis a young Rohingya writer, activist and community advocate based in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. He is the founder of Refugee Wellness Mission, a youth-led initiative supporting community wellbeing, and currently pursuing a Bachelor of Health Science through the University of the People. His writing addresses displacement, statelessness, and the lived experience of the Rohingya community, drawing on volunteer work with organizations including BRAC and Save the Children, and participation in international fellowships focused on human rights, health, and youth empowerment. He speaks English, Bengali, Burmese, Hindi, and Rohingya. His work has previously appeared with the European Center for Populism Studies and Mixed Migration Center. Email: rohingyapubgsquad@gmail.com
Professor Ibrahim Ozturk examines the deeper political economy behind The Economist’s recent critique of Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu, arguing that the dispute reaches far beyond disagreements over institutional theory or AI productivity. He situates the controversy within a systemic crisis marked by inequality, weakened labor, technological concentration, declining governing capacity, and the erosion of liberal democracy’s social foundations. Drawing on Acemoglu alongside Polanyi, Rodrik, Stiglitz, Rawls, and Piketty, Professor Ozturk argues that technological progress is inherently political: institutions and power determine who directs innovation and captures its gains. The commentary contends that Acemoglu’s most consequential challenge is his insistence that markets cannot discipline concentrations of power they have themselves created—and asks whether the coming systemic reset will genuinely redistribute power or merely reproduce existing winners under a new institutional settlement.
The Economist’s attack on Nobel laureate in economics Daron Acemoglu is more than an academic dispute. It exposes a deeper struggle over who will govern technological change, who will bear the costs of systemic reform, and whether liberal democracy can discipline concentrated economic power. Acemoglu’s real offense is not pessimism. It is his insistence that technological progress is a political choice, that liberal democracy cannot survive without shared prosperity, and that markets cannot discipline concentrations of power that they have themselves created. The dispute is therefore larger than one economist or one disputed estimate. At stake is whether the coming systemic reset will redistribute power as well as losses—or merely reshuffle the cards while leaving ownership of the table in the same hands.
The Political Economy Behind the Acemoglu Controversy
A growing body of research shows that the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy cannot be explained solely by the personalities of populist leaders or the supposed irrationality of their supporters. Its deeper sources lie in systemic disruptions caused largely by the corporate capitalism of the neoliberal Washington consensus that came with unregulated hyper-globalization, widening inequality, weakened labor, financial instability, regional decline, technological concentration, and the diminishing capacity of elected governments to protect citizens from externally generated shocks.
This interpretation belongs to a substantial political economy tradition. Karl Polanyi argued that attempts to disembed markets from society eventually provoke a protective countermovement. But that countermovement need not always be democratic or progressive. If legitimate democratic institutions cannot provide social protection, nationalism, protectionism, and authoritarian populism may offer it.
Dani Rodrik similarly anticipated that advanced economic globalization would provoke a political backlash. Trade, capital mobility and global production networks generated aggregate gains, but the losses were geographically concentrated, socially persistent and inadequately compensated. In Rodrik’s formulation, the problem was not globalization alone but “hyper-globalization”: the subordination of domestic economic and social arrangements to the requirements of international markets.
Joseph Stiglitz has approached the same problem through the failures of neoliberalism. Deregulation, regressive taxation, weakened public services, and the political power of concentrated wealth did not produce the competitive market order that their advocates promised. They produced what Stiglitz calls a crisis of capitalism and democracy. Four decades of policies favoring capital over labor did not remove the state from the economy; they reorganized state power around particular interests.
In my recent works, I argued that unmanaged globalization creates political space for populists, who then weaken the autonomous institutions required for democratic correction. Turkey under Erdogan shows how institutional capture can insulate authoritarian populism from economic failure. Brazil under Lula, by contrast, demonstrates that a broad coalition can defeat an authoritarian-populist project, although its media, patronage and identity networks may survive electoral defeat. My comparative analysis of Lula and Erdogan therefore suggests that democracy must do more than remove populist leaders; it must rebuild the social and economic foundations of representation.
Reverse Convergence and the Crisis of the Western Model
I have placed these national cases within a broader process that I call “reverse convergence.” The post-Cold War expectation was that China’s integration into global capitalism would gradually make it more liberal, more transparent, and more institutionally similar to the democratic West. Markets would create an independent middle class; international integration would strengthen the rule of law; and economic modernization would ultimately generate political liberalization.
That prediction proved deeply misleading. China incorporated markets, global trade, multinational investment, and advanced technology without surrendering authoritarian political control. At the same time, the United States and parts of Europe began adopting practices once associated with illiberal systems: economic nationalism, strategic protectionism, industrial subsidies tied to geopolitical objectives, expanding surveillance, executive discretion, and restrictions on technological exchange.
China did not simply converge toward the West. In important respects, the West began to converge toward China. As I argued in “Capitalist Disruptions and the Democratic Retreat,” this reciprocal movement is rooted in the systemic crisis of corporate capitalism. Liberal regimes are adopting illiberal instruments, while authoritarian regimes maintain repression and selectively integrate into global markets. The institutional and normative distance between the two systems is narrowing from both sides.
This does not mean that China and Western democracies have become identical. Political pluralism, judicial independence, civil liberties, and electoral competition still create fundamental distinctions. Reverse convergence describes a direction of movement, not a completed state. Its warning is that market integration alone does not automatically liberalize authoritarian regimes, while economic insecurity and geopolitical rivalry may progressively illiberalize democratic ones.
The empirical literature on the so-called China Shock strengthens this argument. David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson showed that communities exposed to Chinese import competition experienced persistent employment and wage losses rather than the rapid adjustment predicted by standard trade models. Their subsequent research connected trade exposure with greater political polarization. These findings do not prove that globalization alone caused Trumpism. They do demonstrate that the distributional and geographical effects of trade cannot be treated as temporary deviations from an otherwise frictionless adjustment process.
Rodrik’s distinction between the demand and supply sides of populism is crucial here. Economic shocks generate insecurity and resentment, but political entrepreneurs decide how these grievances are interpreted. The anger may be directed against financial elites, multinational corporations, and inequality, or diverted towards migrants, minorities, and external enemies. Material dislocation and cultural politics are not mutually exclusive explanations; economic insecurity can be translated into identity conflict.
The transformation of Western party systems reinforces the problem. Thomas Piketty, Amory Gethin and Clara Martínez-Toledano document the emergence of a “Brahmin Left” representing highly educated voters and a “Merchant Right” representing high-income and wealth-owning groups. Sections of the working and lower-middle classes increasingly feel politically unrepresented. They face a cultural elite on one side and an economic elite on the other.
This helps explain why citizens experiencing abandonment may turn to leaders whose economic programs do not objectively serve them. Populism offers what technocratic liberalism no longer provides: a language of belonging, recognition and political conflict. Its solutions may be false and its leadership authoritarian, but its diagnosis begins with a real representational void.
The Global Policy Machine Is Running Out of Room
The world economy is now entering a phase in which national policy responses increasingly neutralize one another. Japan is caught between enormous accumulated public debt, rising financing costs, demographic contraction and a central bank whose policy space has narrowed. The United States combines structural fiscal deficits and high debt-service costs with protectionism and an increasingly explicit effort to preserve technological supremacy. Europe wants greater strategic autonomy, military capacity, green transformation and social protection, but confronts weak growth, high energy costs, fragmented capital markets and restrictive fiscal politics.
Each major economy is trying to transfer part of the adjustment burden elsewhere. The United States uses tariffs, industrial subsidies and the structural power of the dollar. China responds through production scale, export penetration and state-supported technological upgrading. Europe turns to defensive regulation and industrial policy. Emerging economies compete for investment through tax concessions, cheap labor, suppressed wages and regulatory exemptions.
What appears rational for each country separately becomes contradictory at the systemic level. Everyone wants to export more, protect strategic industries, attract capital, subsidize domestic production and prevent unemployment. Not everyone can do so simultaneously.
Monetary policy confronts similar limits. High interest rates may suppress inflation but intensify debt-service pressures, weaken investment and expose financial fragilities. Lower rates may sustain asset prices and indebted governments but revive inflation, encourage leverage and postpone restructuring. Fiscal expansion supports demand but confronts anxious bond markets. Austerity reassures creditors while weakening social legitimacy and accelerating political radicalization.
The world is approaching a point where conventional policies no longer resolve problems. They transfer them across time, borders and social classes. When these contradictions can no longer be postponed, governments will be tempted to reshuffle the cards: recognize losses, rescue selected institutions and transfer the bill to those least able to resist. Workers, taxpayers, small savers, pensioners and younger generations will be required to absorb the consequences of decisions they did not make. Without structural reform, the next major crisis will not be merely another business-cycle downturn. It may become a simultaneous crisis of distribution, political legitimacy and democratic representation.
The questions Acemoglu now addresses are therefore the real questions confronting liberal democracy: Why do governments change while economic direction remains largely fixed? Why can political systems identify their crises yet remain unable to reform the structures that reproduce them? And why does electoral alternation so often rotate the administrators of the system without altering the distribution of economic power, the direction of technological change or the mechanisms through which the costs of crisis are transferred?
United Kingdom offers a revealing example. Prime ministers and governing parties change, yet weak productivity, regional inequality, deteriorating public services, housing shortages, chronic underinvestment and the unresolved consequences of Brexit remain. Political alternation survives, but transformative capacity has weakened. Elections change the system’s managers without necessarily changing its economic direction. Acemoglu is searching, at his own analytical scale, for an explanation of this crisis of reform capacity and for a route beyond it.
This is precisely where The Economist occupies a paradoxical position. It presents itself as an unsentimental analyst of political and economic failure, yet its ideological framework often prevents the causal chain from being followed back to the underlying distribution of power. Governments fail, voters become irrational, institutions deteriorate, and populists advance; meanwhile, the ownership structures, fiscal privileges, financial interests, and technological concentrations that restrict meaningful reform remain less visible. Acemoglu’s recent work is disturbing because it begins to turn the analytical finger towards these protected centers of power.
A Critique with Two Very Different Layers
On August 17th 2026, The Economist published an unusually personal attack under the headline “The world’s most influential economist is oddly unconvincing.” The article acknowledges that Acemoglu is exceptionally productive, intellectually formidable, and generous towards younger scholars. It then devotes the rest of its space to questioning whether his reputation at the summit of the economics profession is justified.
This is a legitimate question to ask about any celebrated scholar, including a Nobel laureate. Acemoglu’s empirical research, institutional theory and estimates of AI’s productivity effects are not beyond criticism. The history of economics is full of influential theories that later proved incomplete, context-dependent or empirically fragile. Yet The Economist’s intervention does not read like a conventional scholarly assessment. Its tone, timing and structure suggest that something else is at stake. For instance, it moves from technical disagreements over colonial mortality data to dismissive judgments about Acemoglu’s political analysis, his account of technological change and his support for pro-worker AI. It does not merely claim that some of his estimates may be wrong. It seeks to diminish the intellectual authority he draws on to challenge today’s concentration of technological and economic power.
The article combines two fundamentally different kinds of criticism. The first is methodological. It revisits the famous 2001 paper by Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson on the colonial origins of comparative development. Their argument—those different colonial environments produced different institutional arrangements whose effects persisted—became foundational to contemporary institutional economics. The Nobel Committee recognized the three economists in 2024 “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.”
The settler-mortality data used in their original paper have genuinely been disputed. David Albouy questioned observations transferred between territories, the comparability of historical mortality figures, and the robustness of the instrumental-variable estimates. Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson responded that Albouy’s conclusions depended on removing much of Latin America and Africa from the sample and adding a questionably coded campaign dummy. Their formal reply was published alongside Albouy’s critique.
These are substantial questions, and The Economist is justified in discussing them. Yet the limits of the research program extend beyond one dataset. Adam Przeworski questioned whether endogenous institutions can coherently be treated as the primary cause of development; Edward Glaeser and his co-authors argued that human capital and prior development may themselves generate institutional improvement; and Gareth Austin showed how the reversal-of-fortune thesis compresses African history and underweights colonial political economy and local trajectories. More broadly, the inclusive–extractive distinction risks becoming an ex-post classification if imperial power, war, class conflict, external intervention and variation within countries receive insufficient weight. These objections limit the framework’s claim to a unified explanation; they do not render institutional analysis worthless.
The paper’s influence also extends beyond its precise coefficient. It helped shift development economics away from treating markets, capital accumulation, and technological diffusion as processes operating independently of political power. Institutions determine whose property is protected, whose contracts are enforced, who receives education, who controls the state, and who can organize collectively.
The second layer of The Economist’s critique goes beyond identification strategies or historical evidence and dismisses Acemoglu’s ideas as obvious, gloomy, or insufficiently adventurous. His argument that Trump increases executive power by destroying constraining institutions is met with “Well, obviously.” The magazine’s article characterizes his idea of pro-worker AI as attractive but self-evident. It presents his concern about the social direction of technology as pessimism.
This is not technical refutation. It is rhetorical minimization. A familiar method is at work: acknowledge that an argument is correct, then declare it too obvious to matter. Yet many of the most consequential truths in political economy appear obvious only after somebody has identified their mechanisms and shown why prevailing institutions systematically violate them. If it is obvious that AI should complement workers rather than displace them, why do corporate incentives and tax systems so often favor automation? If it is obvious that executive power must be constrained, why are liberal democracies progressively normalizing emergency powers, politicized administration, and rule by decree? If shared prosperity is an obvious foundation of democratic stability, why has it been so consistently subordinated to asset-price appreciation and capital mobility?
A Magazine Contradicting Its Own Acemoglu Archive
The severity of the 2026 verdict is striking because it does not grow naturally out of The Economist’s own record. When Acemoglu and Robinson were turning a partly Western-centered institutional narrative into a global theory—precisely when its circularity, historical compression and treatment of colonial power most required sustained scrutiny—the magazine largely welcomed the framework. It insisted that “institutions matter, a lot,” reported favorably on research connecting democracy and growth, and applied the Why Nations Fail framework to rebuilding fragile states. Its archive was not uncritical, but it was serious and constructive. The latest article abruptly converts familiar disputes into a personalized verdict on whether Acemoglu deserves his standing at the apex of economics.
Archive searches are imperfect, especially across changed URLs and print editions. The conservative claim is therefore not an exact lifetime total but at least ten identifiable, substantial Economist articles between 2012 and 2026 in which Acemoglu or his co-authored work is central. Passing citations, daily briefings, and Economist events would raise the broader count.
The inconsistency is not that a magazine changed its mind; serious publications should do so when evidence changes. The new verdict neither identifies decisive new evidence nor explains the editorial reversal. Nor has The Economist stopped treating Acemoglu as authoritative: its Antitrust Summit agenda schedules him for a discussion with the magazine on October 28th, 2026. The same institution can market his authority in one venue while attempting to deflate it in another. That tension deserves acknowledgment.
Institutions: Tautology or An Analysis of Power?
Acemoglu’s institutional theory does face a genuine analytical challenge. If successful countries are said to possess “inclusive institutions” and unsuccessful countries “extractive institutions,” there is a risk of circular reasoning. Inclusive institutions produce prosperity, while prosperity becomes evidence that institutions were inclusive.
Tyler Cowen and other critics have questioned whether institutional change is sometimes explained by reference to earlier institutional change, producing an infinite regress. Critics also point to China: how can a politically authoritarian and plausibly extractive system generate decades of extraordinary growth? These objections should be taken seriously. Institutions cannot become a residual category covering laws, norms, culture, political power, state capacity, and every historical event not explained elsewhere. A theory that explains everything after the event may predict very little before it.
Yet China does not automatically disprove Acemoglu’s argument. His claim is not that extractive systems cannot grow. Such regimes can mobilize resources, import technology, suppress consumption, direct credit, and achieve rapid catch-up. The stronger claim is that innovation-driven, broadly shared prosperity becomes harder to sustain when political power remains concentrated and accountability weak. China therefore represents less a decisive refutation than an unresolved test. Its future trajectory will depend on whether centralized control can coexist with innovation, demographic transition, rising debt, entrepreneurial autonomy and the increasingly complex information requirements of an advanced economy.
More importantly, institutional analysis becomes far less tautological when institutions are understood as structured distributions of power. Institutions establish who can veto policy, organize labor, own productive assets, finance political campaigns, control information, and impose losses on others. They are not merely “good rules” producing good outcomes. They are settlements among social forces. This interpretation connects Acemoglu to an older political-economy tradition rather than separating him from it. Polanyi’s embedded markets, Rawls’s fair value of political liberty, Stiglitz’s progressive capitalism and Rodrik’s productivist agenda all ask how economic power can be made compatible with democratic citizenship.
John Rawls insisted that political liberties must possess not only formal existence but “fair value.” Citizens must have a substantively comparable opportunity to influence political outcomes. His later preference for a property-owning democracy over conventional welfare-state capitalism was based partly on the fear that wealth concentrated in a few hands would dominate politics. This is no longer an abstract philosophical concern. Martin Gilens demonstrated that policy outcomes in the United States are far more responsive to affluent citizens than to those on middle or lower incomes. When unequal economic power becomes unequal political influence, liberal democracy may retain elections while losing substantive representation.
The “Old Acemoglu” and the “New Acemoglu”
Some defenders of Acemoglu have interpreted The Economist’s article as retaliation by “the system” against an economist who has become “dangerously radical.” An ideological reaction may be at work, but this interpretation should not be exaggerated.
As a good student of institutional economics, I would argue that Acemoglu is not a socialist revolutionary. He does not advocate abolishing markets or private property. He does not romanticize Soviet planning, Maoism, or Chinese authoritarian state capitalism. His project is reformist: to rescue liberal democracy from the consequences of its political and economic degeneration. His new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, makes this explicit. Acemoglu argues that liberal democracy flourished when it combined individual freedom, political participation, and shared prosperity. It lost legitimacy when post-industrial liberalism abandoned that settlement, let economic and educational elites detach from the rest of society, and failed to manage the disruptions caused by globalization and digital technology. His alternative is “working-class liberalism”: a democratic order centered on shared prosperity, empowered communities, human dignity, and a wider range of legitimate social values. The book’s central argument is the reconstruction of liberalism, not its destruction.
Acemoglu’s criticism of sections of the contemporary left is also important. He argues that progressive politics became too detached from working-class economic interests and too closely associated with highly educated metropolitan groups. That claim corresponds strikingly with Piketty’s “Brahmin Left” analysis. The cultural and educational elite may support minority rights and cosmopolitan values while remaining insufficiently attentive to labor power, regional decline, and economic insecurity. In this respect, Acemoglu is closer to Rawlsian social liberalism or renovated social democracy than to anti-capitalism. Markets should remain, but they must be embedded in democratic institutions. Technology should advance, but society must influence its direction. Capital should invest and innovate, but concentrated private power should not colonize politics, knowledge and public life.
Precisely because this is not a revolutionary program, it poses an uncomfortable challenge to defenders of the status quo. Acemoglu cannot easily be dismissed as an enemy of capitalism. He criticizes capitalism in the language of productivity, competition, opportunity, and liberal democracy itself. His message is not that liberal democracy failed because its enemies defeated it. It is that liberalism damaged its own social foundations.
This recasts the central democratic question. Are liberal democracies being destroyed from outside by populists, or hollowed out from inside by the concentration, dependency and inequality generated under economic liberalism? The alternatives are false if treated as mutually exclusive. Populist leaders are real agents of institutional destruction, but they also accelerate a prior internal decay. When markets concentrate wealth, governments lose governing capacity, work loses bargaining power, and citizens experience elections without economic agency, the constitutional shell remains while democratic substance thins. Trump, Bolsonaro and Erdogan did not invent this vulnerability; they organized and weaponized it. Lula’s return shows that electoral correction is possible, but also that removing a populist is not the same as rebuilding democracy’s social foundations.
The Reform Question Neoliberalism Avoids
For four decades, the dominant policy framework promised that trade liberalization, deregulation, financial deepening, labor-market flexibility and technological innovation would increase aggregate prosperity. Distributional losses could supposedly be handled afterward through education, worker mobility and limited fiscal compensation.
The promised compensation was frequently inadequate or never arrived. Productivity gains were distributed unevenly. Trade unions weakened. Labor lost bargaining power. Financialization expanded. Market and wealth concentration increased. Tax systems often treated capital gains, inherited wealth and multinational profits more favorably than ordinary labor income.
Stiglitz describes the necessary alternative as progressive capitalism: markets combined with strong public institutions, competition, social investment and limits on rent extraction. Rodrik’s “productivism” similarly shifts attention from redistribution after-market outcomes to the organization of production itself. Firms’ investment, employment, and innovation decisions reproduce poverty, inequality, and exclusion daily. Waiting to repair them afterward is both economically inefficient and politically destabilizing.
This is where Acemoglu’s pro-worker technology argument acquires significance. The distributional consequences of technology should be addressed when technologies are selected, designed, and deployed—not only after workers have been displaced.
Technology Does Not Choose Its Own Direction
The Economist presents Power and Progress, written by Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, as an excessively gloomy history of technological change. It responds that technological progress has made the average person vastly richer than people living before the Industrial Revolution.
That statement is true, but it does not answer Acemoglu’s argument. Acemoglu and Johnson do not claim that technology has produced no progress. Their central proposition is that the benefits of innovation are neither automatic nor naturally distributed. Technology creates possibilities; institutions, political organization, and bargaining power determine how those possibilities are deployed and who captures the gains.The MIT summary of Power and Progress states the issue clearly: technological advances can become empowering and democratizing, but not if decisive choices remain concentrated in the hands of a few technology leaders.
The Industrial Revolution eventually raised living standards, but its early decades also produced brutal factory discipline, child labor, unsafe cities, and the destruction of established livelihoods. The eventual social gains were not created by machinery alone. Labor organization, public health, education, political enfranchisement, social insurance, competition policy, and progressive taxation mediated them.
Acemoglu’s critics frequently collapse two different propositions: i) Technology can increase aggregate productivity. ii) Technology will automatically produce broadly shared prosperity.
The first can be true while the second remains false.
The same distinction appears in the economic literature on automation. Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo distinguish between a displacement effect, through which machines take over tasks previously performed by labor, and a reinstatement effect, through which technological change creates new tasks in which human labor has a comparative advantage. Automation can raise productivity while reducing labor’s share of income if the creation of new human tasks is too weak. The question is therefore not “technology or no technology.” It is what kind of technological trajectory societies encourage.
AI, Labor and Concentrated Power
Photo: Dreamstime.
Artificial intelligence makes this problem more urgent because AI is not merely another machine. It can reorganize the production of knowledge, monitor workers, shape communication, automate administrative judgment and concentrate informational power in companies controlling data, cloud capacity, advanced chips and foundation models.
An AI system may increase corporate productivity while reducing labor’s bargaining power. It may improve prediction while enabling pervasive surveillance. It may create useful information while degrading the shared epistemic environment required for democratic deliberation. It may create new occupations in aggregate while destroying the career ladders through which younger workers acquire expertise.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) finds that transformation and augmentation are more likely than the immediate disappearance of entire occupations. This supports neither technological utopianism nor apocalyptic unemployment forecasts. It supports Acemoglu’s emphasis on institutional choices: outcomes depend on how tasks are reorganized, whether workers participate in deployment decisions, and who captures the productivity gains.
The competition problem is equally serious. An OECD assessment identifies powerful concentration pressures arising from access to computing capacity, data and specialized skills, along with first-mover advantages and vertical integration. In other words, concern about AI oligopoly is not merely an ideological suspicion Acemoglu entertains. It is now a central competition-policy problem.
This connects Acemoglu’s position with Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism. Digital business models do not simply sell services. They extract behavioral data, convert human experience into a commercial resource, and acquire capacities to predict or influence behavior. This produces not only market power but a form of private authority over information and social coordination.
The issue is therefore larger than monopoly pricing. When a handful of corporations control the infrastructures through which citizens communicate, work, acquire knowledge and participate in politics, economic concentration becomes constitutional power.
Is Acemoglu Too Pessimistic About AI Productivity?
Here, The Economist has a legitimate point. Acemoglu’s 2024 paper estimated that AI would generate only modest productivity gains over the following decade—no more than approximately 0.66% in total factor productivity under its main assumptions. The calculation was deliberately conservative. It used a task-based model, focused on tasks that could plausibly be automated or assisted, and excluded some speculative future applications. Acemoglu subsequently acknowledged that he did not fully anticipate the speed of agentic AI and may have underestimated its applications in scientific research. That is an important concession. AI may accelerate software development, experimentation, materials science, drug discovery, organizational coordination and decision-making. Agentic systems can combine reasoning, memory, planning and external tools in ways not captured by earlier estimates. If these complementary innovations scale rapidly, Acemoglu’s original productivity estimate may prove too low.
But this argues for revising the quantitative estimate, not abandoning his political economy. Indeed, faster AI progress makes his institutional concerns more important. If AI were only a marginal productivity instrument, its concentration in a few corporations would matter less. If it becomes a general-purpose infrastructure governing production, knowledge and communication, democratic oversight becomes indispensable.
There is also an asymmetry in the dominant technology debate. AI firms and their investors routinely make spectacular claims about productivity, employment and scientific transformation. These claims influence valuations, infrastructure investment, electricity policy, tax incentives and public subsidies. Yet skepticism toward commercially driven forecasts is treated as ideological pessimism, while AI executives’ optimistic claims are presented as neutral technological expertise.
The people predicting an inevitable AI revolution are often the same people raising capital, demanding regulatory exemptions and accumulating political influence from that expectation. Injecting realism into these forecasts is not hostility towards technology. It is an elementary requirement of political economy.
Who Is the “We” That Should Steer AI?
Editorial independence is not the same as institutional neutrality. The magazine’s institutional setting must be discussed with precision. The Economist Group has formal safeguards for editorial independence, including independent trustees charged with protecting the publication’s character and preventing control by any single interest. Those safeguards matter. Yet editorial independence—a prohibition on owners dictating the line—is not the same as institutional neutrality or social distance from the economic sectors under scrutiny.
The Group’s own board disclosures show an unusually dense overlap among media governance, finance, ownership and technology.
Group chair Paul Deighton also chairs Goldman Sachs International and Goldman Sachs International Bank.
Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft AI, has served as a non-executive director of the Group since 2019 and sits on its technology investment committee.
Suzanne Heywood is chief operating officer of Exor—the Group’s largest shareholder—and also serves on that committee.
Diego Piacentini, another committee member, previously held senior roles at Amazon and Apple.
Editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes is herself a member of the Group board.
The commercial adjacency extends to AI. The October 2025 launch announcement for Economist Insider, the premium video product, said the launch was “supported by Claude—the AI for problem solvers.” It is safer to call Anthropic/Claude the disclosed launch supporter than to infer control over editorial content. The distinction matters: sponsorship or commercial support creates a relationship readers may reasonably examine, but it does not establish that a sponsor selected an article or dictated its conclusions.
Historical board links reinforce the point about proximity, not conspiracy. Eric Schmidt, then executive chairman of Alphabet, left the Group board in 2015. The relevant inference is limited: the publication’s governance network has long overlapped with the commanding heights of technology and finance. It would be wrong to leap from that fact to a claim of editorial instruction. It would be equally naïve to treat institutional location as irrelevant to which assumptions appear normal, which reforms seem excessive and which concentrations of power receive the benefit of the doubt.
No publicly available evidence establishes that Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Exor, Anthropic or any board member commissioned, edited or approved the August 2026 attack on Acemoglu. This essay does not allege such intervention. Its narrower claim is that the magazine’s authority should not be confused with a view from nowhere. Formal editorial autonomy can coexist with a governing and commercial ecosystem whose members share exposure to the technologies, financial structures and ownership interests Acemoglu wants democratic politics to discipline.
This institutional proximity becomes more consequential when The Economist moves from analysis to explicit policy advocacy. Only three days after attacking Acemoglu’s critique of concentrated technological power, the magazine published a leader declaring that Britain would be “bonkers to ditch Palantir,” thereby urging the government not to exercise the break clause in Palantir’s £330m NHS data-platform contract. The Palantir leader was unrelated to Anthropic’s sponsorship, and no evidence shows Palantir commissioned or influenced it. Nevertheless, it was an unmistakable editorial intervention in favor of maintaining a major public-sector relationship with a controversial American technology contractor—even after a parliamentary committee had warned of vendor lock-in and described Britain’s dependence on Palantir as an “unacceptable point of weakness.” The juxtaposition is difficult to ignore: The Economist dismisses Acemoglu’s warnings about concentrated technological power as gloomy or obvious while deploying its own institutional voice to defend precisely the kind of state–technology dependency his political economy asks democratic societies to scrutinize.
The Economist asks a fair question about Acemoglu’s demand that “we” steer AI in a pro-human direction. Who exactly constitutes this “we”? Governments can be captured. Regulators may lack technical expertise. Trade unions do not represent everyone. Expert committees can become unaccountable. National regulation may encourage investment to migrate towards more permissive jurisdictions. “Pro-worker AI” is not a self-executing program. But these difficulties do not justify leaving technological direction to the market. Markets do not remove political choice; they transfer decision-making to corporate executives, investors, platform owners and venture capital funds.
The absence of democratic governance is not neutrality. It is private governance. The real question is not whether somebody will steer AI. Somebody already does. The question is whether its direction will be determined exclusively by profitability, labor substitution, data extraction and market domination—or also by public purposes such as better employment, education, health care, scientific discovery and democratic resilience.
A credible pro-human AI agenda would therefore require more than a slogan. It would include competition policy, interoperability, public-interest access to computing infrastructure, public research funding, reform of tax incentives that favor automation, worker participation in workplace deployment, limits on algorithmic surveillance, and transparency in high-stakes automated decisions. Acemoglu’s prescriptions may be incomplete. Incompleteness invites us to develop the program, not to return decision-making to the oligopolies creating the problem.
Meanwhile, no publicly available evidence shows that The Economist’s article was commissioned by a technology company or produced as part of a coordinated campaign. Calling it a purchased attack without evidence would weaken the argument. An article does not need to be literally commissioned, however, to perform an ideological function. Its function is to narrow the boundaries of acceptable reform.
For decades, the liberal establishment was comfortable with institutional economics when it explained the poverty of developing countries through corruption, insecure property rights and authoritarian government. It becomes less comfortable when it applies the same analytical framework to Western capitalism and asks whether concentrated corporate power, weakened labor, regressive taxation, and technological oligopoly are themselves extractive institutions.
Acemoglu’s earlier work could be read as a vindication of the liberal order: inclusive Western institutions generated prosperity, whereas extraction explained stagnation elsewhere. His recent work turns the same lens inward. Formerly inclusive institutions can become extractive as wealth concentrates, labor weakens, shared prosperity recedes, and an increasingly consequential alliance forms among AI corporations, capital, and government. This resembles what I callreverse convergence: instead of drawing authoritarian systems towards Western norms, the West begins sacrificing its own restraints, competitive order and democratic commitments. The discontinuity is difficult to miss. The earlier Acemoglu was welcomed when extraction diagnosed failed states; the newer Acemoglu becomes objectionable when he asks whether the Western establishment is producing it from within.
That is the genuinely uncomfortable Acemoglu. He does not merely warn against Trump, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, or other populist-authoritarian leaders. He asks what failures of liberalism made their ascent possible. He does not excuse attacks on democracy, but he also does not let established elites present themselves as innocent guardians of a system they helped discredit.
His argument deprives the liberal establishment of its preferred moral simplicity: enlightened institutions on one side and irrational populism on the other. Between them lies the political economy of abandoned regions, insecure employment, declining mobility, concentrated wealth and citizens who experience democracy as periodic voting without meaningful influence over the forces shaping their lives.
Reform or Systemic Rupture
Acemoglu’s program may not be radical enough for the anti-capitalist left, yet it remains too interventionist for market liberals. That is precisely why it matters. It attempts to construct a reformist route between neoliberal exhaustion and authoritarian rupture.
The world does not lack warnings about populism. It lacks a political economy capable of removing the conditions from which populism draws its power. Democracy cannot survive indefinitely if its defenders offer citizens constitutional lectures while denying them economic security, social recognition and effective representation. Nor can democracy be protected merely by banning movements that attract disappointed voters. Suppressing political symptoms without addressing the economic and institutional disease risks transforming liberal democracy into rule by enlightened guardians—liberal in vocabulary but increasingly illiberal in practice.
This does not require accepting every demand articulated in the name of “the people.” Majorities can violate minority rights, attack judicial independence and empower authoritarian leaders. As Rodrik and Sharun Mukand emphasize, electoral democracy and liberal democracy are not identical. Political rights, civil rights and property rights rest on different social coalitions and may come into conflict. But defending minority rights and constitutional constraints cannot be permanently separated from material inclusion. Liberal democracy needs social and economic foundations—what Acemoglu calls shared prosperity and what Rawls approached through the fair value of political liberties.
The necessary reform must therefore go beyond ordinary regulation. It must reconsider the relationship between labor and capital, public authority and private power, national democracy and global markets. It must confront oligopoly, tax avoidance, the decline of collective bargaining, the privatization of knowledge, financial fragility and the political power accumulated by technology platforms. It must also recognize that efficiency is not the only criterion by which an economic order should be judged. Resilience, dignity, participation, social cohesion and democratic legitimacy are productive assets even when conventional models struggle to price them.
This does not make every Acemoglu proposition correct. His institutional categories can become too broad. His narratives may perform better retrospectively than predictively. His AI productivity estimate may require substantial revision. His reform agenda needs clearer instruments, stronger political coalitions, and feasible international implementation. These are reasons to debate Acemoglu seriously, not to dismiss or deny his contribution.
The Economist instead alternates between technical objections and rhetorical condescension. It asks why institutions matter if institutions emerge from earlier institutions. Yet all social explanation must begin with inherited structures, historical shocks, and political conflict. It describes pro-worker technology as obvious while economic incentives overwhelmingly favor labor substitution. It criticizes Acemoglu for underestimating technology’s benefits while neglecting his central question: who possesses the power to direct those benefits?
So, Whose Voice Is The Economist Speaking For?
Perhaps the answer is simpler than conspiracy. The Economist appears to want Acemoglu the institutional economist, but not Acemoglu the political economist of concentrated power. It was comfortable with the scholar who explained why poorer countries require better institutions; it is markedly less comfortable with the Nobel laureate who argues that the institutions of rich liberal democracies are themselves being captured and must be reconstructed. The archive therefore suggests that what changed is not simply the quality of Acemoglu’s scholarship, but the direction in which his institutional lens is now pointed.
It wants criticism of authoritarian populism without a complete investigation of the economic order that produced populist demand. It welcomes innovation but resists democratic claims over its direction. It accepts limited regulation while remaining suspicious of any project that would redistribute decision-making power from capital owners, digital platforms and credentialed elites towards workers and communities.
This does not mean that the magazine speaks under instruction from a hidden group of technology billionaires. Its voice is more structural than conspiratorial. It expresses the worldview of a liberal-capitalist establishment that recognizes the excesses of the existing order but remains reluctant to reconsider its distribution of power.
This distinction becomes decisive as the available policies and strategies approach their limits. Monetary policy is trapped between inflation and debt; fiscal policy between social demand and bond-market discipline; industrial policy between national security and retaliatory protectionism; democratic politics between electoral competition and declining governing capacity. We can already feel the breath of the next crisis. The central question is no longer whether the cards will be reshuffled, but who will be permitted to reshuffle them – and who will own the table after the reshuffle.
The defenders of the existing order may accept new leaders, a new regulatory vocabulary and even a redesigned institutional facade. What they resist is a settlement in which the groups that absorbed the old system’s losses gain real power over the new one. Their preferred reform redistributes the cards, but the old owners remain the winners: governments change, technologies change, and the language of policy changes, while command over capital, data, knowledge, and political influence remains substantially intact.
From this perspective, the attack on Acemoglu matters not simply because it targets a Nobel laureate. It attempts to weaken one of the intellectual routes leading public attention from the visible failure of governments to the deeper structures that constrain them. Acemoglu encourages us to ask not only why one government failed, but why successive governments confront the same wall; not only why populists win, but why liberal democracy no longer corrects the grievances on which they feed; and not only whether AI raises productivity, but who will control that productivity and appropriate its gains.
It favors reform, provided it does not become a transfer of power. Acemoglu’s real offense is not pessimism. It is his insistence that technological progress is a political choice, that liberal democracy cannot be separated from shared prosperity, and that markets cannot discipline concentrations of power they have themselves created.
The irony is that Acemoglu is trying to save, not destroy, the liberal order that The Economist historically defended. He warns that unless capitalism is disciplined, technology democratized, and prosperity more broadly shared, the next stage will not be a purer liberalism. It will be deeper oligarchy, more aggressive populism and an expanding authoritarian state.
The global system is running out of conventional policy space. Its monetary, fiscal, geopolitical and technological contradictions can no longer be resolved by indefinitely shifting costs onto workers, taxpayers and future generations. Either liberal democracy develops the capacity to reform the structures producing inequality, insecurity and concentrated power, or a future crisis will reform them through disorder.
One may disagree with Acemoglu’s models, historical interpretations, or remedies. But dismissing his central warnings as gloomy or obvious is not an answer. The essential question is no longer whether the existing order needs reform. It is whether reform can arrive before the next crisis—and whether reshuffling the cards will create a genuinely new settlement or merely reproduce the old winners under a new institutional name.
In this commentary, Bernard Allan V. Garcia argues that contemporary populism strategically reframes migration not simply as a policy issue but as a political instrument for redirecting public anger. Rather than confronting structural inequalities such as wealth concentration, housing crises, and labor exploitation, populist leaders shift political conflict from a vertical struggle between citizens and elites to a horizontal conflict between natives and migrants. Garcia demonstrates how this narrative preserves existing economic hierarchies, redefines political enemies, and transforms migrants into convenient scapegoats while leaving the underlying causes of social and economic insecurity untouched. The commentary offers a provocative framework for understanding anti-migration rhetoric as a mechanism of economic elite preservation rather than a genuine response to citizens’ socioeconomic grievances.
By Bernard Allan V. Garcia*
In an era of staggering wealth inequality, stagnant growth, soaring living costs, and decaying public infrastructure, populist leaders often target vulnerable populations rather than addressing systemic shortcomings. The rhetoric of modern populist movements is directed downward, frequently toward migrant populations (Wodak, 2015). This is no coincidence. It is a recurring pattern in countries led by populist governments, albeit with different variations, and has become a core strategy of contemporary populism.
To understand why human migration remains such a controversial issue in contemporary politics, we must look beyond standard and overused explanations (i.e., xenophobia and traditional economic models). The reality in countries governed by populist leaders is more structural: migration and migrants serve as instruments of political distraction and redirection (Rini, 2019). This strategy shifts political conflict from a top-down class divide to a horizontal conflict between citizens and immigrants.
The Elite’s Dilemma
Every sovereign state today has its own deep structural fractures. For ordinary citizens, difficulties such as unaffordable housing, inadequate health insurance, bankruptcy, or industrial decline naturally lead them to search for explanations. Public anger tends to flow vertically upward, toward government institutions, powerful elites, and the corporate structures that, directly or indirectly, shape people’s daily lives.
This places political and economic elites in an equally difficult position, as a society organized around a vertical, top-down understanding of power can become highly volatile. When directed upward, public anger can generate demands for wealth redistribution, higher corporate taxes, and structural reforms that threaten the status quo benefiting those who hold power. To preserve that status quo, political leaders who depend on elite donors face a fundamental dilemma: how can they acknowledge the frustrations of the working class without allowing that frustration to be directed at the elites themselves?
The Art of Anger Redirection
Migration and migrants are, unfortunately, well suited to solving this dilemma (Nayyeri, 2024). By introducing an external group into the political equation, populist leaders can dramatically redirect public attention and redefine the source of public suffering. For example, housing crises in many Western states, where rental prices are skyrocketing, are driven primarily by internal factors such as restrictive zoning laws, low interest rates, and the financialization of housing as an investment rather than a basic human right. Addressing these problems requires significant redistribution of resources and a reordering of policy priorities—measures that may be unpopular with economic elites. Instead, populist leaders attribute the problem to migrants. It is far easier to tell working-class families that housing prices have risen because of the millions of migrants who have arrived in recent years than to introduce policies that might strain relations between the government and economic elites. As a result, the political conflict instantly rotates by 90 degrees, shifting from Bottom vs. Top to Inside vs. Outside.
This substitution offers an immense political advantage. First, the redirection preserves the economic and political status quo because there is no need to raise taxes on wealthy individuals or undertake structural reforms. Second, it provides political leaders and economic elites with an easy villain in a fabricated narrative, as migrants lack both political power and media representation to defend themselves. Finally, it unites a struggling working class and powerful elites around the issue of border control, creating a shared political agenda that can be translated into electoral advantage.
Redefining the “Enemy”
Historically, the elite has consisted of those with economic power, such as business owners, landlords, and corporate executives. However, populist leaders, driven by both the desire to remain in power and the need to preserve their relationships with traditional elites, introduce a revised concept of who constitutes the elite (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017). In the populist narrative, an elite is no longer a billionaire who pays workers minimum wage while benefiting from low corporate taxes. Instead, the elite becomes a progressive liberal politician, university professor, journalist, or anyone who advocates for migrants. Through this lens, those who defend migrants’ rights are portrayed as enemies of the state, while those who oppose migration are celebrated as patriots.
When populist leaders attack migrants and the migration system, they claim to be fighting the established liberal order. Working-class voters may feel a sense of victory in dismantling the so-called migrant establishment, even though their own economic exploitation remains unresolved.
The Paradox of Protecting Local Labor
The hypocrisy of populist politics can be seen in the priorities set by populist governments. One of the most common justifications for anti-migration populism is the protection of local employment opportunities. If populist leaders were truly concerned with protecting local jobs, their proposed policies would follow a logical order. They would champion strict penalties against corporate exploitation, including the abuse of both local and undocumented foreign workers. They would insist that all workers, regardless of their country of origin, be treated fairly and that no employer be allowed to use race or nationality to justify paying below-standard wages. They would also advocate pathways to citizenship or permanent residency to protect migrants’ rights and prevent employers from coercing them into accepting substandard pay.
However, such policies remain far down the list of priorities for populist leaders. Instead of penalizing corporate exploitation, they target workers themselves. The objective is rarely to eliminate the unregulated labor market—including undocumented foreign workers—but rather to preserve a system of permanent insecurity. By keeping migrants in a legal twilight zone while simultaneously using them as political punching bags, populist leaders claim two victories: a source of cheap labor for the economy and an inexhaustible political scapegoat during elections.
Stop Looking at the Border
None of this commentary suggests that migration policy is simple or that sovereign states should not manage their territorial boundaries. Managing immigration is both a legitimate and a necessary function of a sovereign state. However, there is a difference between treating migration as a complex humanitarian challenge and presenting it as an all-purpose solution to domestic political problems.
As long as public scrutiny remains focused on the horizontal conflict between locals/natives and foreigners, the underlying causes of societal inequality will remain unaddressed. The housing market will continue to suffer as long as housing is treated primarily as an asset and investment. Wealth will remain concentrated at the top of the social hierarchy. Public services will continue to deteriorate. Ultimately, despite efforts to militarize state borders, citizens may one day wake up and realize that their lives have not fundamentally improved.
Therefore, whenever political figures attempt to convince you that your main adversary is an immigrant arriving by boat or crossing a border, commentators, journalists, and citizens must remain vigilant and look upward. The central political conflict of our time is not a clash between natives and foreigners; it is a struggle between those who profit from a broken status quo and those left to bear its costs. While public attention is directed toward the border, ask yourself which policies are being quietly buried. When working people compete with one another over scraps instead of demanding a seat at the table, ask who truly benefits.
(*) Bernard Allan V. Garcia is a political demographer having earned degrees in International Studies and Population Studies. He is currently an Associate Researcher at the Asian Institute of Management in the Philippines. Email: bvgarcia@aim.edu
References
Mudde, C. & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
In this commentary, Dr. Kamil Joński examines why Poland remains an exceptional case in contemporary Europe, where high levels of religiosity continue to overlap with strong right-wing political identification. Drawing on data from the 11th wave of the European Social Survey (ESS), he demonstrates that regular church attendance and conservative political identity increasingly reinforce one another, creating a distinctive “churchgoing right” that shapes both political discourse and the Catholic Church itself. Dr. Joński argues that this convergence helps explain Poland’s restrictive social policies, the enduring influence of the Church on public life, and emerging tensions between Polish conservatives and the post-Vatican II direction of the Holy See. The commentary offers fresh insights into religion, polarization, and democratic politics in Europe.
The breakup of the Polish right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party has inspired numerous analyses, commentaries, and anecdotes. One of them offers intriguing insight into the uniqueness of the Polish right on the European political landscape. The leader of the new initiative, Development Plus, M. Morawiecki (“Law and Justice” Prime Minister from 2017 to 2023), hosted its July 31, 2026, kick-off as a grill event. Among other preparations, he secured a Roman Catholic bishop’s permission to violate the canon law requirement of abstaining from eating meat on Fridays (the day of the Crucifixion), so that his fellow right-wingers could enjoy grilled sausage. Quite a bizarre touch at the gathering of a self-proclaimed modern and pro-development right, led by a former bank CEO? Only at first glance.
Many Poles Remain Religious…
The data collected during the recent (11th) wave of the European Social Survey (ESS) documents the relatively high religiosity of Poles, with nearly 60 percent of respondents describing themselves as religious (“Regardless of whether you belong to a particular religion, how religious would you say you are?”, variable rlgdgr).
…and Maintains Bond with Institutional Church
The theory predicts that “secular transition happens in three steps: first, public ritual participation declines; second, the importance of religion to individuals declines; and third, people shed religious affiliation.” In this context, it is even more important that a substantial share of Poles maintains its bond with the institution of the Roman Catholic Church. Despite the post-COVID drop in religious participation, 40 percent of respondents declare regular, weekly participation in religious services (“Apart from special occasions such as weddings and funerals, about how often do you attend religious services nowadays?”, variable rlgatnd).
The Right-Wing Is Strong…
At the same time, the Polish political landscape is skewed toward the right, with two out of five respondents placing themselves on the right end of the political spectrum (“In politics, people sometimes talk of ‘left’ and ‘right’. Using this card, where would you place yourself on this scale, where 0 means the left and 10 means the right?”, variable lrscale).
… and Overlap Matters
However, the most revealing insight emerges from combining these two dimensions: the bond with the institutional Church, as measured by religious participation, and self-placement on the political spectrum. It turns out that nearly one in four Poles declare both weekly attendance at religious services and right-wing identification.
What makes this situation truly unique on the European political landscape is that this “churchgoing right” constitutes the majority among both churchgoers and right-wingers. In other words, their sensitivities are likely to set the tone for both political rallies and sermons. As a consequence, the Polish throne and the altar remain entangled in ways that are virtually unimaginable elsewhere in contemporary Europe.
The result is, among other things, an extraordinarily restrictive abortion law, a state-enforced de facto blasphemy law (the criminal provision on “offending religious feelings”), and the rejection of same-sex civil unions (not to mention marriages). For the mechanisms of Church influence, see A. Grzymała-Busse (2015), Nations under God: How Churches Use Moral Authority to Influence Policy.
“Post-Secularism” or Anti-Vatican II
The situation seems to affect the Church as well. Back in the early 2000s, when the Polish conservative Pope John Paul II made statements that were interpreted as endorsing Poland’s accession to the EU, the population of churchgoers included self-declared moderate leftists and rightists, with a firm anchor in the center.
As time went by, the mutually reinforcing processes of polarization (not to say radicalization) and secularization (people voting with their feet) shifted the proportion of right-wingers among churchgoers from 30 to nearly 60 percent. According to the 11th wave of the ESS, right-wing hardliners (i.e., those who place themselves at 10 on the ten-point left-right scale) alone account for one-fifth of churchgoers. The median churchgoer in Poland now places herself at 7 on the ten-point left-right scale. There is evidence of similar processes shaping the clergy as well.
If a right-wing churchgoer demands a firm anti-left and anti-liberal group identity (spiced with a sense of divine truth and centuries-old tradition), she is unlikely to be satisfied by Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Lampedusa. Indeed, at Morawiecki’s grill event, the very first panel discussion—entitled “The Right 2027: How to Win Elections and Widen the Supporter Base”—drifted into a discussion of the Holy See’s teaching on migration, with one participant declaring what he called “Pope-skepticism.”
That could be the indication of “post-secularism”, with politicians hand-picking suitable pieces of religious tradition, without particular regard to the religion itself. Alternatively, it could be just a nostalgia to pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic orthodoxy. All the disappointed rightists need to do, is to dust-off the writings of Pope Leo’s XIX-century namesake. In Leo XIII view, humanity is inherently “separated into two diverse and opposite parts, of which the one steadfastly contends for truth and virtue, the other of those things which are contrary to virtue and to truth. The one is the kingdom of God on earth … The other is the kingdom of Satan”.
That could be an indication of “post-secularism,” with politicians hand-picking suitable pieces of religious tradition without particular regard for the religion itself. Alternatively, it could be just nostalgia for pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic orthodoxy. All disappointed rightists need to do is dust off the writings of Pope Leo’s nineteenth-century namesake. In Leo XIII’s view, humanity is inherently “separated into two diverse and opposite parts, of which the one steadfastly contends for truth and virtue, the other for those things which are contrary to virtue and to truth. The one is the kingdom of God on earth … The other is the kingdom of Satan.”
In political life, the latter insists “that marriage belongs to the genus of commercial contracts, which can rightly be revoked by the will of those who made them … all men have the same right … each one is naturally free … power is held by the command or permission of the people, so that, when the popular will changes, rulers may lawfully be deposed … that the State should be without God; that in the various forms of religion there is no reason why one should have precedence over another … Their chief dogmas are so greatly and manifestly at variance with reason that nothing can be more perverse.”
In this commentary, Dr. Oludele Solaja argues that waste is no longer merely an environmental management problem but an emerging question of sovereignty, justice, and environmental security. Underscoring the concept of waste sovereignty, he contends that the central issue is not simply who bears environmental burdens, but who has the authority to refuse them. Using Turkey’s transformation into a major destination for European plastic waste as a revealing case, the commentary demonstrates how the circular economy can shift environmental risks rather than reduce them when accountability is displaced across borders. Dr. Solaja calls for a new framework that links waste governance to political agency, material accountability, and environmental justice, arguing that the future of environmental security depends on empowering communities—not merely managing waste.
The world has a waste problem. But have we been asking the right question? Today, international environmental policy has focused mainly on waste as a management issue – how to collect, recycle, regulate and dispose of waste safely. Yet the growing international movement of discarded materials reveals a more fundamental political question: who has the authority to decide where the environmental consequences of global consumption will go—and who has the power to refuse them? This is not a semantic distinction. It’s about the kind of inequality that is at the core of the current world.
Now commodities, capital, and the waste flow across borders with great ease. Environmental risks do not. They tend to concentrate in specific locales, workplaces and communities — frequently in areas of weak political bargaining power and limited regulatory capacity. Some societies consume; others process; still others live with the pollution, occupational hazards and ecological damage generated along the way. Waste is therefore not simply what remains after consumption. It’s becoming more and more a question of power, sovereignty and security.
A Shipment Can Be Legal Without Being Just
Here comes the concept of waste sovereignty into play. Waste sovereignty is a shift from the question of how poorer countries can deal with the world’s waste, to why should particular countries and communities shoulder environmental risks produced elsewhere? It is about the ability of a state or community to decide what types of waste are brought into their area, how and for whom. More fundamentally, though, it’s about a political right to say ‘no.’
That right is significant because there are not two equally powerful actors conducting international waste transactions. A shipment can be legal without being just. A nation can say ‘yes’ to accepting waste and communities impacted by it have limited real say in the decision. The issue of consent can be particularly complex when the government accepts imports of waste since it benefits from jobs, foreign exchange or investment, but the environmental costs are borne by populations that have little political power.
This asymmetry is apparent in the international trade of plastic waste. Although plastic-waste trade declined between 2017 and 2022, substantial exports from OECD countries to non-OECD countries continued, particularly toward Southeast Asia. The Basel Convention’s new plastic-waste provisions have enhanced global controls, but that is not enough to overcome the issue of political inequality. The problem is not only that waste is moving across the borders in a legal fashion. It is whose interests are protected when it does.
Turkey Shows That Recycling Can Shift, Rather Than Reduce, Environmental Harm
Turkey provides a tell-tale example. It has transformed the country into a big hub for European plastic waste and worries have been raised about microplastic pollution linked to plastic recycling in the Adana area. This case has far-reaching implications beyond Turkey. It reveals a disturbing paradox in the circular economy: recycling is not necessarily good for the environment when it’s referred to as recycling.
Increased movement of the recyclable materials to locations where regulatory oversight, technological ability or environmental protection is less robust can lead to a shift of environmental risk, instead of reduction, through recycling. The questions raised are thus not limited to the question of whether something is recyclable. So, where, by whom, under what conditions and at whose environmental cost are things being recycled?
Politics of waste enters into the politics of circular economy here. While the circular economy can turn waste into resources, and resources do not circulate in neutral systems. They permeate markets, borders, labor relations and regulatory regimes. Circularity can perpetuate the very inequalities it aims to tackle if the environmental impacts of processing are continually passed down to communities who have less bargaining power.
Environmental Insecurity Often Accumulates Quietly Among the Politically Weakest
The African experience makes this even more apparent. Too often, the Global South is represented as the passive destination of unwanted materials around the world. However, in African cities, informal waste workers are collecting usable materials which are not always collected by the formal sector. In Lagos, Accra, Nairobi and elsewhere, informal recyclers perform essential resource-recovery work while often operating without adequate occupational protection, social security or political recognition.
Here lies one of the great paradoxes of contemporary environmental governance: those most excluded from environmental decision-making may be performing some of its most important work. This means that waste sovereignty cannot be reduced to the ability of governments to close borders to imported waste. It must also concern who controls the conditions under which waste is recovered, processed and transformed into economic value. Informal recyclers should not simply be incorporated into global circular value chains as inexpensive labor. A just circular economy must recognize their environmental contribution, protect their livelihoods and give them meaningful influence over the systems in which their labor and environments are embedded.
This broader understanding also changes how we think about environmental security. Environmental security is conventionally associated with climate change, water scarcity, food insecurity, disasters and displacement. Waste reveals another dimension: the insecurity produced when environmental risks are systematically displaced across borders and concentrated among politically weaker populations.
Consider the chain: Consumption → waste generation → international export → processing/recycling → environmental exposure → livelihood disruption → community resistance → political conflict.
A polluted irrigation canal can threaten agricultural livelihoods. A recycling facility can become a source of neighborhood conflict. A landfill can generate political mobilization. Informal waste workers can be criminalized even while providing essential environmental services. Environmental insecurity does not therefore always arrive as a spectacular disaster. Sometimes it accumulates quietly—in polluted waterways, degraded land, unsafe workplaces and communities living with risks generated by decisions made elsewhere.
Waste Sovereignty Asks Who Has the Power to Refuse Environmental Burdens
This is why waste should be understood as an emerging politics of environmental security.The critical issue is not merely whether environmental risks exist. It is whose security is protected and whose security is sacrificed in managing them.
This also requires abandoning the image of the Global South as simply a “dumping ground.” Such language may describe a real historical pattern, but it can obscure something equally important: contestation. The Global South is not merely where waste arrives. It is also where resistance, refusal and renegotiation can begin.
China’s 2018 restrictions on foreign waste imports disrupted established global waste routes and forced exporters to search for alternative destinations. The episode demonstrated that receiving countries are not powerless endpoints in a global waste system. They can restrict imports, renegotiate arrangements, strengthen regulation and demand greater responsibility from exporters. More recent European regulatory developments likewise reflect growing recognition that international waste movements require stronger safeguards and accountability.
But the deeper question is what happens when this capacity for refusal moves beyond governments and becomes a claim made by communities and workers themselves. This is where waste sovereignty extends the environmental-justice tradition. Environmental justice has taught us to ask: Who bears the environmental burden? Waste sovereignty adds another question: Who has the authority to decide where that burden is placed—and who has the power to refuse it? The difference is profound.
The Future of the Circular Economy Depends on Material Accountability, Not Recycling Alone
A society may be protected from environmental harm only when it possesses meaningful authority over the decisions that produce environmental exposure. Security without agency is fragile. Consent without participation is incomplete. Circularity without accountability can become another form of environmental displacement. The future of the circular economy therefore depends on more than increasing recycling rates or reducing the volume of waste sent to landfills. It requires material accountability.
Producer responsibility must extend across borders. Exporting countries should remain accountable for the environmental consequences of materials they send abroad. Importing countries must retain meaningful regulatory and refusal powers. Informal recyclers should be recognized as environmental workers rather than treated merely as obstacles to formalization. And communities living alongside waste facilities must have a meaningful voice in decisions affecting their environments. The principle is simple: No society should be expected to surrender its environmental security in exchange for another society’s convenience. This principle carries implications far beyond waste policy.
Globalization has long been understood through the movement of commodities, capital, technologies and information. Increasingly, however, we must also understand it through the movement of what societies no longer want. Environmental inequality is produced not only through the extraction of resources from poorer territories but also through the geographical displacement of unwanted materials and risks.
When the Global South Says ‘No,’ It Redefines Environmental Security
The Global South is therefore not simply where the world’s waste ends up. It is becoming a political arena in which sovereignty, economic opportunity, environmental justice and security are contested. And this may be the deeper significance of waste sovereignty.
The politics of the twenty-first century will not be shaped only by who controls oil, minerals, land or data. It will also be shaped by who controls the movement of materials that others no longer want—and, crucially, who has the right to refuse them. The question for the coming decades may therefore be deceptively simple: Who has the right to decide where the world’s unwanted materials go? The answer cannot be determined solely by those who generate the waste.
When communities and states begin answering that question for themselves, waste ceases to be merely the end of consumption. It becomes a site of political authority. And when the Global South says “no,” that refusal should not be understood simply as resistance to global trade. It may represent something more consequential: a demand to redefine who counts in the making of environmental security.
The future of environmental security will depend not only on protecting societies from environmental threats. It will depend on ensuring that no society can make itself secure by making another society environmentally insecure. That is the political promise of waste sovereignty.
Brazil’s 2026 presidential election is widely portrayed as another contest between left and right. In this commentary, Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that this interpretation overlooks the deeper forces shaping Brazilian politics. Rather than replacing social inequalities, culture wars moralize them, transforming disputes over race, religion, gender, education, and social mobility into competing visions of national identity. Dr. Ferreira Dias contends that both Lulism and Bolsonarism have evolved into enduring social identities sustained by negative partisanship, while culture wars function as a mechanism for reproducing political polarization across electoral cycles. The commentary offers a timely framework for understanding why Brazil’s 2026 election is unlikely to resolve the country’s profound social divisions, regardless of which candidate prevails.
Four years ago, after Lula da Silva’s narrow victory over Jair Bolsonaro, I described Brazil as a country “without communicating vessels” (Ferreira Dias, 2022). Lula won the election, but he did not defeat Bolsonarism. Bolsonaro lost the presidency, but he did not lose his electorate, his cultural influence or his capacity to define the language of the Brazilian right.
The 2026 presidential election confirms that this division was not a temporary consequence of Bolsonaro’s government. Lula is again the candidate around whom the Brazilian left organizes itself, while Flávio Bolsonaro is attempting to transform his father’s political movement into a family inheritance. The candidates have partly changed, but the political and social frontier separating their respective camps remains remarkably stable.
Brazil is therefore not simply preparing to choose between competing governments. Once again, it is being asked to choose between two moral representations of the country.
Culture Wars and the Social Question
Culture wars are often described as conflicts over abortion, sexuality, gender, religion, education and national identity. Yet in Brazil they cannot be understood as a superficial distraction from economic and social problems.
Culture wars do not replace the social question. They moralize it.
Brazil remains marked by extreme inequality, racial hierarchy, regional asymmetries and the unequal presence of the state. These divisions are older than Lulism and Bolsonarism. What contemporary political actors have done is translate them into narratives about merit, family, religion, authority and national belonging.
A dispute over access to higher education becomes a conflict over merit. Racial affirmative action becomes “reverse discrimination.” The recognition of LGBT rights becomes an attack on the traditional family. Environmental regulation becomes a conspiracy against agribusiness and national development. Secular public institutions become agents of religious persecution.
Material conflicts do not disappear. They acquire a moral language.
The political importance of this translation became particularly visible during the governments of Lula and Dilma Rousseff. The expansion of higher education, affirmative action and social policies altered the composition of institutions previously occupied disproportionately by white, middle- and upper-class Brazilians. Black, brown and lower-income students gained greater access to universities and other spaces of social recognition (Francis-Tan & Tannuri-Pianto, 2024).
For the beneficiaries, these changes represented an extension of citizenship. For some members of historically privileged groups, however, inclusion could be experienced as the loss of exclusivity. Social democratization was consequently presented as unfair advantage, ideological imposition or the destruction of merit.
It would be simplistic to argue that social inclusion caused Bolsonarism. Bolsonaro’s rise also reflected economic recession, corruption scandals, public insecurity, institutional discredit and hostility towards the political establishment (Hunter & Power, 2019). Nevertheless, his movement successfully aligned these crises with pre-existing divisions involving race, religion, gender and social status (Layton et al., 2021).
Bolsonaro did not invent Brazil’s divisions. He gave them a common grammar.
Lulism and Bolsonarism as Social Identities
Brazilian polarization can no longer be described solely as ideological distance between left- and right-wing voters. It has become affective and social. Citizens increasingly define themselves through rejection of the opposing political camp. Anti-petismo and anti-Bolsonarism operate as negative identities: voters know whom they oppose, fear and distrust, even when their own positive political commitments are less clearly defined (Areal, 2022).
Lulism and Bolsonarism have therefore become more than electoral preferences.
For millions of Brazilians, Lula represents the memory of increasing wages, social mobility, access to consumption, higher education and recognition by a state that had historically marginalized the poor. Lula is not merely a candidate. He is the political archive of a period during which many citizens believed that their children might live better than they had.
This explains his durability. It also reveals the principal weakness of the Brazilian left. The social memory created by Lulism has not produced an institutionalized political succession. Its principal custodian remains Lula himself.
Lula’s fourth presidential campaign is therefore simultaneously evidence of political strength and proof of institutional failure. The left remains united because Lula is still present. It does not know whether it will remain united when he is gone.
Bolsonarism faces a different succession problem. It has survived Bolsonaro because it is no longer merely the relationship between one charismatic leader and his followers. It possesses parliamentary representatives, evangelical networks, digital infrastructures and a political language through which supporters interpret the world.
Within that worldview, the authentic Brazilian is Christian, productive, patriotic, supportive of the police and suspicious of universities, journalists, artists and progressive movements. Political opponents are not simply mistaken. They are portrayed as corrupt, communist, immoral or hostile to the nation.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s candidacy represents an attempt to transmit this political identity through the biological family. In a movement strongly dependent on personal authority and weakly institutionalized through parties, the family becomes the most credible mechanism of continuity.
The irony is evident. A movement that presented itself as a rebellion against Brazil’s traditional political oligarchies is attempting to establish a dynasty of its own.
A Technology of Electoral Reproduction
Culture wars have consequently become a technology of electoral reproduction. The mechanism is relatively simple. First, social transformation is represented as loss. The extension of rights, visibility or opportunities to historically marginalized groups is interpreted as the dispossession of those who previously possessed greater status.
Second, this perceived loss is attributed to an organized enemy. Feminists, Black activists, universities, journalists, environmentalists and LGBT movements are represented as components of a single progressive project.
Finally, political disagreement becomes a civilizational conflict. Every election is presented as the last opportunity to save Brazil from communism, fascism, moral collapse or authoritarianism.
This mechanism survives both victory and defeat. Electoral success confirms the righteousness of the group. Governmental failure can be attributed to hostile institutions, courts or the media. Electoral defeat becomes evidence of persecution or conspiracy.
Each camp also supplies the other with its principal justification for continuity. The left returns to Lula because it fears the populist right. The populist right returns to the Bolsonaro family because it defines itself through hostility towards Lula and the Workers’ Party.
The two camps are not democratically equivalent. Lulism’s personalism and inability to organize its succession cannot be equated with Bolsonarism’s attacks on the electoral system, nostalgia for military rule and tendency to represent political opponents as illegitimate enemies. Social polarization can be bilateral without democratic responsibility being symmetrical.
Brazil’s problem is not the existence of conflict. Democracies depend upon political disagreement. The problem begins when disagreement becomes evidence that the other half of the country does not legitimately belong to the national community.
The 2026 election will choose a president. It is less likely to resolve the division that makes this electoral confrontation possible. Once again, Brazil will vote on its future by returning to the unresolved conflicts of its past. One side offers the permanence of a leader. The other offers the foundation of a dynasty. Whoever wins may govern the country. Neither has yet demonstrated how to reconnect it.
References
Areal, J. (2022). “‘Them’ without ‘us’: Negative identities and affective polarization in Brazil.” Political Research Exchange, 4(1), Article 2117635. https://doi.org/10.1080/2474736X.2022.2117635
Francis-Tan, A., & Tannuri-Pianto, M. (2024). “Affirmative action in Brazil: Global lessons on racial justice and the fight to reduce social inequality.” Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 40(3), 642–655. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grae027
Hunter, W., & Power, T. J. (2019). “Bolsonaro and Brazil’s illiberal backlash.” Journal of Democracy, 30(1), 68–82. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2019.0005
Layton, M. L., Smith, A. E., Moseley, M. W., & Cohen, M. J. (2021). “Demographic polarization and the rise of the far right: Brazil’s 2018 presidential election.” Research & Politics, 8(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168021990204
Dr. Amir Ali examines the emergence of India’s Cockroach Janata Party protests as the country’s first distinctive Gen Z protest movement, arguing that what began as a satirical online response to an official’s derogatory remark rapidly evolved into a nationwide campaign against educational injustice, government unresponsiveness, and democratic decline. Situating the movement within the broader trajectory of Indian politics, he explores how youth mobilization, meme culture, digital activism, and street protests combined to challenge the perceived invincibility of the Modi government. The article further assesses the movement’s implications for state-society relations, media credibility, educational governance, and the future of democratic dissent, suggesting that the Cockroach protests may represent a turning point in India’s contemporary politics.
When Gen Z protests took place in Nepal and Bangladesh in India’s neighborhood, and further afield in Morocco and Madagascar, a question arose in people’s minds whether such extraordinary political events could ever happen in India. India’s Cockroach Janata Party was the country’s very own bespoke Gen Z movement. The protests were prompted by remarks made by Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant. He disparagingly suggested that unemployed youngsters gravitating towards journalism and social activism were like cockroaches. An Indian student pursuing a master’s degree in public relations in Boston University in the US, Abhijit Dipke, saw an opportunity to make a meme out of the mention of cockroaches by the Chief Justice. He created the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), parodying the nation’s formidable ruling party led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The result was an internet sensation as the CJP’s social media following easily surpassed that of the ruling BJP.
From Student Anger to Political Accountability
These events played out in the middle of May of 2026 when Dipke was still in the US. A few days earlier the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) that close to two million youngsters in India had taken to gain admission to medical courses across the country, was cancelled. Dipke was set to return to India on the 6th of June. He announced that he would be going straight from the airport to a designated protest site in Central Delhi, called the Jantar Mantar, named after an 18th century astronomical observatory, that still stands. There was speculation that Dipke would be arrested on his arrival at the airport. He emerged in the glaring presence of India’s notoriously raucous media channels. He held a copy of B.R. Ambedkar’s autobiography to indicate his respect for the man whose name is associated with the drafting of the Indian constitution, and who is the iconic leader of India’s historically oppressed Dalit community.
Dipke was not arrested and he proceeded to Jantar Mantar where there was an underwhelming crowd that received him. This was perhaps the slightly disappointing first day of the movement that would in less than two months’ time extract a resignation from Narendra Modi’s Cabinet in the form of the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Modi’s government in the twelve years that it has been in power has become synonymous with not yielding to demands for resignation on moral grounds from the opposition and civil society. There have been some exceptions such as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, MJ Akbar, who had to resign in 2018 when allegations of sexual assault were made against him.
Pradhan is a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS) which is an ultranationalist and supremacist political movement whose political front is the ruling BJP. The Cockroach Janata Party demanded Pradhan’s resignation as Education Minister as it was under his authority that regular leaks of questions for entrance examinations to prestigious courses like medicine and engineering happened. The NEET for medical courses that had been cancelled in mid-May, had been rescheduled for late June and there was youth discontent that the Cockroach movement was able to very effectively channelize.
How the Cockroach Movement Gathered Momentum
The Modi government throughout June and most of July remained intransigent on the question of education minister Pradhan’s resignation. The mentality of the Modi government seems to be that resignation signals weakness on its part. This stonewalling and lack of responsiveness has become something of a character trait of the Modi regime. The earlier rare exception that underlines this intransigence was in late 2021 when the Modi government backtracked on a set of farm laws it was pushing through parliament as it had angry farmers from neighboring regions blockading major arterial roads into the capital city New Delhi, with their tractors.
The Cockroach Janata Party protests received a shot in the arm when Abhijit Dipke was joined by an educational reformer and environmental activist from a remote region in the Himalayas. This was a man called Sonam Wangchuk from Ladakh. Wangchuk had recently been in jail for protests he had organized and he promptly decided to go on hunger strike to express his solidarity with the Cockroach Janata Party. One of the features of agitational Indian politics is the hunger strike undertaken as a kind of imitation of the prolonged hunger strikes that India’s founding father, Mahatma Gandhi was known to take recourse to. Wangchuk’s health kept deteriorating with the Modi government showing no signs of budging.
When the Modi government finally moved on Saturday 18th July, exactly a week before Pradhan’s resignation on the next Saturday, it was to remove Sonam Wangchuk from the protest site by policemen who took him to a government hospital to monitor his health condition. Wangchuk demanded that the matter of examination paper leaks be taken up in the upcoming session of parliament, before breaking his hunger strike in the presence of senior government ministers. Meanwhile, the young ‘cockroach’ protesters at the Jantar Mantar protest site kept growing and the protests seemed to have graduated far beyond Sonam Wangchuk.
When Youth Protest Shook the Modi Government
On the first day of the new parliament session on Monday July 20 when the protesters marched to Parliament, they were met by very heavy-handed police measures. Not only were they tear gassed and baton charged by the Delhi Police, but there were also allegations of pellet guns being fired. Protests were also happening across the country and in major provincial capitals like Patna and Kolkata, where provincial assembly elections had very recently returned governments from Mr. Modi’s BJP, consolidating his formidable political grip over the country. And yet, just as electorally his political grip was being strengthened in provinces which for many years had not yielded to the BJP’s political dominance, Mr. Modi was being challenged by impudent youngsters right under his nose in New Delhi.
The week beginning from Monday 20 July when the Delhi Police brutally responded to protesters, up to Saturday 25 July, when Education Minister Pradhan resigned, progressed in a politically feverish sort of way. There was speculation that there would be a cabinet reshuffle to respond to the situation, but not a resignation.
A veritable meme revolution started as youngsters mercilessly mocked the carefully cultivated media image of Modi as a great and strong leader. Modi seemed to desperately respond with a midnight Instagram post with his haggard face far too close to the camera, eyes appearing like slits. Modi appealed to youngsters with a supposed Gen Z style of addressing them as ‘friends,’ instead of the trademark nasalized Hindi word mitron that he frequently uses. This Instagram post was interpreted and ridiculed as a sign of Modi being nervous and ruffled.
The Cockroach protests made very clear demands in addition to the resignation of the education minister, like dropping all police charges on protesting students. Soon after the resignation announcement, the protests at Jantar Mantar were a little hastily withdrawn. After yielding on the resignation, the Modi regime is unrepentantly doubling down, evident in the choice of Mr. Pradhan’s successor as Education Minister, another RSS member, which means the same educational agenda.
What Did the Cockroach Protests Achieve?
There is no doubt, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, that these were India’s unique and indeed idiosyncratic Gen Z protests. Further, the Cockroach protests are very different from the India Against Corruption movement that happened 15 years earlier in 2011, the same year as the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements took place in different parts of the world. The India Against Corruption Movement did not share the global concerns of those significant protests, democracy in the case of the Arab Spring and inequality in the case of Occupy Wall Street.
The India Against Corruption movement was backed by the ultranationalist RSS. It contributed significantly to the catapulting of Modi to power three years later in 2014. On the contrary, the Cockroach protests have targeted the RSS and BJP’s polarizing politics of sowing division between majority Hindus and minority Muslims. Some of the slogans at this year’s Cockroach protests emphasized unity between the two religious communities. That way the Cockroach protests can be seen as extending the Shaheen Bagh protests initiated by Muslim women in a locality in Southeast Delhi to protest the Citizen’s Amendment Bill that was passed by the Modi Government in December 2019 and that threatened the citizenship status, especially of Muslims. Right wing media commentators supportive of the BJP argued that the Cockroach protests need to be suppressed.
Continuing with the contrast between the India Against Corruption Movement of 2011 and the Cockroach protest of 2026, the differing role of the mainstream media is glaring. The 2011 India Against Corruption Movement was supported by and virtually a creation of the mainstream electronic media. Large sections excitedly beamed visuals of protestors holding candles, waving flags, and singing the national anthem to ward off corruption, in what Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) political scientist Ajay Gudavarthy called a television soap opera. That very same mainstream media became the infamous lapdog Godi media as they are called now in India (Godi means lap in Hindi) that has thrown all journalistic standards to the wind by never questioning the Modi government. It has also injected large doses of communal animosity into the Indian body politic by organizing inflammatory prime time debates, many blatantly Islamophobic. With the Cockroach protests, the same lapdog Godi media has met its comeuppance with Gen Z protesters chasing them away and ridiculing them for their biased and skewed coverage.
The cockroach protests have made a significant dent on the impregnable character of Modi’s government. They have done so by removing a pervasive fear across the country about criticizing the government and expressing dissent. The Cockroach protests forebode the inevitable end of the Modi regime at some point in the future. Mr. Modi’s powerful Home Minister, Amit Shah has arrogantly claimed that his party will be in power for at least another fifty years. If that were to happen, then today’s Cockroach protesters would have advanced from middle age to become elderly citizens in their sixties. The BJP’s regular electoral victories in provincial assembly elections, and especially its recent success in crucial provinces like West Bengal and Bihar, have led some to believe that it is electorally invincible. This invincibility arises in the view of its critics from a combination of massive party funds, the Election Commission of India forfeiting its constitutional neutrality by favoring the BJP, and a controversial electoral roll revision exercise called the SIR (Special Intensive Revision) that seems designed to disenfranchise some sections of the electorate.
The Cockroach protests have laid bare India’s education crisis that twelve years of BJP rule have exacerbated. Those years have intensified the desperate situation of India’s Gen Z who would have been children when Mr. Modi came to power in 2014. Prior to the Modi regime, India’s educational system showed severe structural infirmities like unemployable graduates, and school children whose literacy and numeracy skills were way below desired levels. The BJP through its parent organization the RSS has foisted an educational policy that is uncritical, unscientific and chauvinistic in terms of claimed civilizational achievements. Rewritten textbooks are full of errors, spelling a lost generation. This is compounded by doubts about Mr. Modi’s claimed educational qualifications. Multiple Right to Information requests seeking details of his degrees have been routinely turned down.
Cockroach Coda
The Chief Justice of India’s choice of word to characterize India’s youngsters was extremely unfortunate. In 2022 the Editors Guild of India noted a dangerous plunging of the media discourse when it compared India’s mainstream television media with Radio Rwanda, a reference to Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines that during the 1994 Rwanda genocide conveyed the chilling message to kill the cockroaches. The embrace of the word cockroach by India’s youngsters is the most significant challenge to Modi’s populist regime, jaded and clueless about how to handle India’s restive youngsters and their demands for a good education and proper employment.
US President Donald Trump’s intervention in the Smithsonian Institution signals a new phase in America’s culture wars. In this insightful commentary, Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that the notion of “cultural Marxism” has evolved from a conspiracy theory into a category of governance used to legitimize state intervention in museums, universities, and other institutions that shape public knowledge. Tracing the concept’s genealogy from Nazi-era “cultural Bolshevism” to the contemporary MAGA movement, the article explores how culture-war narratives become instruments of illiberal memory politics. It further demonstrates the irony that, while denouncing a supposed Marxist “long march through the institutions,” the Trumpist right is itself engaged in a Gramscian struggle to reshape American history, national identity, and democratic citizenship.
Donald Trump’s latest intervention in the Smithsonian Institution marks a significant development in the American culture wars. The idea of “cultural Marxism” is no longer functioning solely as a conspiratorial explanation for social and cultural change. Under MAGA, it is increasingly becoming an administrative category used to justify governmental intervention in museums, universities, archives and other institutions responsible for producing public knowledge. Tracing the genealogy of this political specter from interwar Germany to the American conservative movement, this commentary argues that the campaign against “cultural Marxism” is part of a broader illiberal politics of memory. Ironically, while denouncing a supposed Marxist “long march through the institutions,” the Trumpist right is conducting its own Gramscian war of position over American history and national identity.
From Political Rhetoric to Executive Action
On July 24, 2026, Donald Trump signed an executive order entitled “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution.” The measure followed a report prepared by the White House Domestic Policy Council, Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage. The executive order does not literally command the immediate removal of every “trace of Marxist ideology” from all the museums, libraries and educational collections that comprise the Smithsonian Institution. Its legal and administrative scope is more specific. It directs several federal authorities to identify and use the legal, financial and contractual mechanisms available to encourage the Smithsonian to address the alleged problems identified in the Domestic Policy Council’s report.
It also orders the installation of temporary signs and exhibitions on National Park Service property surrounding the National Museum of American History. These signs are intended to warn visitors about what the administration calls the museum’s “ideological capture” and to direct them towards supposedly more accurate interpretations of American history.
The broader political message is less restrained. In its official fact sheet, the White House accuses the Smithsonian’s leadership of replacing historical education with extreme political activism “rooted in Marxism.” Exhibitions and programmes concerning slavery, race, migration, gender, Indigenous peoples, LGBT rights and social justice are grouped together as expressions of a single ideological project allegedly designed to divide and demoralize the American people (The White House, 2026a; Domestic Policy Council, 2026).
This episode represents more than another rhetorical confrontation between Trump and progressive cultural institutions. It marks the conversion of “cultural Marxism” from a polemical label into a category legitimizing state intervention in the production of historical knowledge.
The Genealogy of a Political Specter
To understand the significance of this development, it is necessary to reconstruct the historical genealogy of the concept.One of the principal antecedents of what is now called “cultural Marxism” appeared in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. Conservative, nationalist and subsequently Nazi political actors used the term Kulturbolschewismus—“cultural Bolshevism”—to classify modern art, secularism, sexual reform and other forms of cultural experimentation as parts of a communist assault on German society.
In Nazi propaganda, modernist and avant-garde art was frequently described as the product of Jewish and communist influences allegedly seeking to weaken the German nation. “Cultural Bolshevism” thus became intertwined with the antisemitic mythology of a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy against Western civilization (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2020). It would be historically reductive to claim that every contemporary use of “cultural Marxism” is simply a reproduction of Nazi ideology. There is no straightforward organizational continuity connecting the propaganda of the Third Reich to all present-day conservative actors who employ the expression. There is, nevertheless, a significant narrative continuity. In both cases, complex and decentralized social transformations are attributed to the coordinated actions of a hostile intellectual minority. Cultural change is interpreted not as the outcome of political conflict, generational replacement, technological transformation or social mobilization, but as evidence of a deliberate plan to destroy the nation, religion and the traditional family from within.
The Weimar Republic provided a particularly fertile environment for this political imaginary. Berlin became an intense laboratory of cultural modernity, associated with artistic experimentation, new forms of sexuality, cabaret culture, drugs and popular dances such as the foxtrot. Yet this cultural effervescence coexisted with political corruption, organized crime, economic instability and escalating street violence. The television series Babylon Berlin offers a dramatic representation of this atmosphere. The streets and cultural institutions of the German capital became battlegrounds between competing visions of society: Nazi racial nationalism, which glorified the German nation and its mythological past, and communism, which advanced a transnational and class-based conception of political identity.
The conflicts of this period helped shape political cosmologies that continue to reappear in altered forms. The tension between cultural progressivism and moral conservatism did not disappear with the end of the interwar period. It became one of the organizing antagonisms of modern culture-war politics.
The Frankfurt School as a Political Scapegoat
The Institute for Social Research was established in Frankfurt in 1923. Under the intellectual leadership of Max Horkheimer, it brought together thinkers including Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and Friedrich Pollock. The intellectual tradition subsequently known as the Frankfurt School examined capitalism, authoritarianism, antisemitism, mass culture, social psychology and fascism. Its thinkers were influenced by Marxism but did not constitute a homogeneous doctrinal bloc. Several were deeply critical of Soviet communism, economic reductionism and orthodox versions of Marxist theory (Jay, 1973).
After the Nazi seizure of power, the Institute was closed by the Gestapo. It moved first to Geneva and then, in 1934, to New York, where it became affiliated with Columbia University. Its members’ experiences of exile, fascism and antisemitism shaped their research into authoritarian personality structures, propaganda and the political uses of mass culture. The Frankfurt School unquestionably influenced sections of the post-war New Left, particularly through the writings of Herbert Marcuse. Intellectual influence, however, is not evidence of political coordination.
The contemporary conspiracy theory transforms a diverse and frequently internally divided intellectual tradition into the command center of a centralized plan to capture universities, the media, the family and the moral foundations of Western society. It retrospectively fuses the Frankfurt School with Antonio Gramsci’s writings on cultural hegemony, despite the substantial theoretical, historical and political differences between these traditions. In this account, Marxists supposedly concluded that Western workers would not support a proletarian revolution because they remained attached to Christianity, nationalism and the traditional family. The alleged solution was therefore to undermine those institutions through universities, entertainment, feminism, multiculturalism and movements for racial and sexual equality.
There is no historical evidence of such a coordinated programme. The theory produces unity at the level of the imagined enemy rather than at the level of intellectual history. Marxism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, feminism, critical race theory, queer theory and liberal multiculturalism are treated as interchangeable components of one political project, even though they emerged from different traditions and are often theoretically incompatible. As Martin Jay (2010–2011), Jérôme Jamin (2018) and Joan Braune (2019) demonstrate, the Frankfurt School has consequently become a political scapegoat onto which anxieties concerning cultural transformation can be projected.
The contemporary use of “cultural Marxism” cannot always be reduced to conscious antisemitism. Many who repeat the term may be unaware of its historical genealogy. Nevertheless, the conspiracy frequently reproduces older antisemitic structures: cosmopolitan intellectuals, often identified as Jewish, are imagined as operating behind the scenes to control education, culture and the media while dissolving religion, national identity and traditional morality.
The American Consolidation of “Cultural Marxism”
Although anti-communist paranoia remained politically active throughout the Cold War, the contemporary American narrative of “cultural Marxism” consolidated during the culture wars of the 1990s. In a 1999 “Letter to Conservatives,” the influential conservative strategist Paul Weyrich equated political correctness with cultural Marxism. He argued that universities, the entertainment industry and other cultural institutions had been deliberately captured by an ideology fundamentally hostile to Western Judeo-Christian civilization.
The following year, William S. Lind systematized this interpretation in his speech “The Origins of Political Correctness.” According to Lind, Marxism had transferred its revolutionary strategy from economics to culture. The opposition between proletarians and the bourgeoisie had supposedly been replaced by conflicts involving racial, sexual and cultural identities.Under this interpretation, women, racial minorities and LGBT people became substitute revolutionary subjects, while white people, men, Christians and heterosexuals were recast as the new bourgeoisie. Political correctness was presented as the disciplinary language of this new revolutionary order (Lind, 2000).
This formulation became part of the ideological DNA of the contemporary conservative reaction. It offered a comprehensive explanation for feminism, multiculturalism, secularization, changing sexual norms, affirmative action and the increasing public recognition of historically marginalized groups. Its analytical weakness was also the source of its political strength. Because “cultural Marxism” lacked a precise definition, it could incorporate almost any development regarded as culturally threatening. It became what might be called a conspiratorial master signifier: a category capable of transforming heterogeneous opponents into manifestations of a single hostile force.
The discourse subsequently circulated beyond the United States. As research into Australia and Brazil demonstrates, the conspiracy theory can be adapted to different national contexts while retaining its central narrative of institutional capture and moral subversion (Busbridge et al., 2020; Silva, 2021).
MAGA, Cultural Backlash and the Mythic Past
Donald Trump’s rise and the emergence of the MAGA movement revitalized this political grammar. The cultural backlash thesis developed by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart helps explain the social conditions under which such narratives become effective. Their argument does not suggest that every supporter of populist radical-right movements is economically deprived or culturally conservative. Rather, it identifies the political consequences of perceived status loss among social groups that once occupied more secure positions within dominant cultural hierarchies (Norris & Inglehart, 2019).
Changes associated with racial equality, feminism, secularization, immigration and LGBT rights can be experienced by some groups not simply as the extension of citizenship to others, but as the displacement of their own identity and social authority. Populist entrepreneurs convert these perceptions into a narrative of cultural dispossession. Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” operates through this temporal logic. As Jason Stanley argues, fascist and authoritarian politics frequently construct a mythic past: an imagined period of national greatness, social unity and moral order that existed before the nation was corrupted by internal and external enemies (Stanley, 2018).
The MAGA past does not correspond to one historically coherent period. It is a selective composite. It combines industrial prosperity, energy expansion, patriarchal family structures, white Christian morality and American geopolitical supremacy while suppressing the history of racial segregation, Jim Crow legislation, gender inequality and political exclusion. The political purpose of this myth is not historical accuracy. It is to define the present as a period of national decline and to identify those allegedly responsible for it.
In classical populist discourse, society is divided between the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite” (Mudde, 2004). The cultural-Marxist narrative adds another layer to this division. The elite is not merely corrupt or self-interested. It is portrayed as the institutional agent of an ideological project seeking to transform the identity of the nation. Professors, teachers, curators, journalists, civil servants and cultural workers are therefore represented as members, or at least instruments, of an internal occupying force.
The Smithsonian and Illiberal Memory Politics
The intervention in the Smithsonian reveals how this conspiratorial worldview can be translated into an illiberal politics of memory. The Domestic Policy Council’s report presents the National Museum of American History as an institution captured by an intersectional form of critical theory allegedly rooted in Marxism. Its criticism is directed not only at factual inaccuracies but also at the museum’s interpretative orientation.
The report objects to the idea that museums should “reframe” celebratory national narratives, promote social justice or examine how historical institutions reproduced racial, gendered and economic inequalities. It contrasts this approach with a conception of the museum as a patriotic institution intended to cultivate gratitude, national pride and confidence in American exceptionalism.
This is ultimately a conflict over the democratic function of public history. Museums are not ideologically neutral repositories of objects. They select events, construct narratives and determine which voices and experiences are incorporated into the national memory. A museum that addresses slavery, colonialism or racial exclusion is not necessarily replacing history with ideology. It may instead be expanding the historical community whose experiences are considered worthy of public recognition.
Legitimate disagreements can exist concerning curatorial balance, political activism, historical interpretation and the use of public funds. The conspiratorial move occurs when these disagreements are explained through a single totalizing cause: the coordinated capture of cultural institutions by Marxist activists. The Trump administration resolves the controversy by claiming that one interpretation is ideological while its own is merely truthful and patriotic. State intervention is consequently presented not as the politicization of culture but as the restoration of neutrality.
This is a characteristic illiberal operation. The government denies that it is imposing an official interpretation of history. Instead, it claims to be liberating institutions from an ideology already imposed by others. The result is a reversal of power. Although the executive possesses administrative authority, access to public funding and the capacity to pressure institutions, it continues to represent itself as the insurgent victim of an entrenched cultural elite. Governmental coercion is thereby reframed as democratic restoration.
The Gramscian Irony of the MAGA Right
There is an important intellectual irony at the center of this campaign. While condemning an alleged Marxist “long march through the institutions,” the radical right has increasingly adopted a strategy that can itself be described as Gramscian. It recognizes that political power depends not only on winning elections or controlling the state, but also on shaping common sense, collective memory and the moral vocabulary through which society understands itself.
Recent research on transnational radical conservatism demonstrates that sections of the right have consciously appropriated concepts such as hegemony, counter-hegemony, metapolitics and the “war of position” (Abrahamsen et al., 2024). Think tanks, publishing houses, universities, legal organizations, religious networks and digital platforms become sites of counter-hegemonic struggle. Their purpose is to challenge the cultural authority of liberal institutions and make previously marginal ideas appear legitimate, reasonable and eventually dominant.
The MAGA campaign against the Smithsonian should be understood within this broader strategy. The objective is not merely to correct individual exhibitions. It is to redefine the legitimate purpose of a national museum, determine which interpretations of American history can receive public support and discredit critical historiography as evidence of ideological subversion. The right accuses the left of capturing institutions while developing its own programme for their political realignment. This does not mean that the two projects are normatively or historically identical. It does mean that the Trumpist right has understood a central Gramscian insight: durable political power requires the transformation of cultural authority.
From Paranoid Style to a Technology of Government
Richard Hofstadter’s concept of the “paranoid style” remains useful for understanding the emotional and narrative structure of the cultural-Marxist conspiracy. The term does not constitute a clinical diagnosis. It describes a political style in which history is interpreted as the product of an immense, coordinated and morally evil conspiracy (Hofstadter, 1964).
Yet the Smithsonian episode demonstrates that the phenomenon can no longer be understood as rhetoric alone. Under MAGA, the paranoid style is becoming a technology of government. The accusation of ideological capture creates the justification for investigations, funding restrictions, administrative pressure, public warnings and the political supervision of cultural institutions.
The operation is relatively simple. First, institutions are declared to have been captured. Second, every critical interpretation of national history is transformed into evidence of that capture. Finally, governmental intervention is presented not as the politicization of culture, but as the restoration of historical neutrality.
There is no evidence of a centralized Marxist plan controlling American universities, museums and media organizations. The narrative nevertheless fulfils an important political function. It consolidates the MAGA electorate, converts social complexity into moral conflict and transforms political opponents into agents of civilizational subversion. Trump is therefore doing more than accusing the Democratic Party and progressive institutions of Marxism. He is mobilizing his political base through a genuine war of position over the soul of America.
The struggle concerns who have the authority to tell the national story, which historical experiences deserve public recognition and whether democratic citizenship requires patriotic reassurance or the critical examination of the past. The specter of “cultural Marxism” may have little correspondence with intellectual or institutional reality. Its political consequences, however, are becoming increasingly real.
References
Abrahamsen, R.; Drolet, J.-F.; Williams, M. C.; Vucetic, S.; Narita, K. & Gheciu, A. (2024). World of the right: Radical conservatism and global order. Cambridge University Press.
Braune, J. (2019). “Who’s afraid of the Frankfurt School? ‘Cultural Marxism’ as an antisemitic conspiracy theory.” Journal of Social Justice, 9, 1–25.
Busbridge, R.; Moffitt, B. & Thorburn, J. (2020). “Cultural Marxism: Far-right conspiracy theory in Australia’s culture wars.” Social Identities, 26(6), 722–738. doi: 10.1080/13504630.2020.1787822
Domestic Policy Council. (2026). Saving America’s story: How ideological capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History erases our heritage. The White House.
Hofstadter, R. (1964). “The paranoid style in American politics.” Harper’s Magazine, 229(1374), 77–86.
Hunter, J. D. (1991). Culture wars: The struggle to define America. Basic Books.
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Jay, M. (1973). The dialectical imagination: A history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. Little, Brown and Company.
Jay, M. (2010–2011). “Dialectic of counter-enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as scapegoat of the lunatic fringe.” Salmagundi, 168/169, 30–40.
Lind, W. S. (2000). “The origins of political correctness.” Accuracy in Academia.
Mirrlees, T. (2018). “The alt-right’s discourse on ‘cultural Marxism’: A political instrument of intersectional hate.” Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice, 39(1), 49–69.
Mudde, C. (2004). “The populist zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541–563. doi: 10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x
Norris, P. & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism. Cambridge University Press.
Silva, M. (2021). “O marxismo cultural no Brasil: Origens e desdobramentos de uma teoria conservadora.” Cultura y Religión, 15(1), 180–222.
Stanley, J. (2018). How fascism works: The politics of us and them. Random House.
The White House. (2025). Executive Order 14253: Restoring truth and sanity to American history.
The White House. (2026a). Fact sheet: President Donald J. Trump restores trust in the Smithsonian Institution.
The White House. (2026b). Executive order: Restoring trust in the Smithsonian Institution.
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Why do some of the world’s wealthiest individuals openly support populist radical right and far-right movements whose central political message revolves around anti-immigrant and anti-minority mobilization? In this commentary, Dr. Bulent Kenes argues that this alliance is best understood not as an ideological convergence but as a pragmatic strategy for deflecting public attention from the structural roots of social injustice, economic inequality and wealth concentration. Drawing on John Rawls’s concept of the veil of ignorance, the article examines how immigrants—among the principal victims of contemporary economic and social inequalities—are transformed into convenient scapegoats. It further explores how the growing concentration of economic and digital power enables technology billionaires to amplify exclusionary narratives while marginalizing pluralistic voices, raising profound questions about democracy, algorithmic governance, and contemporary capitalism.
If we were to apply John Rawls’s famous veil of ignorance thought experiment, developed in A Theory of Justice, to today’s world, there is little doubt that immigrants would emerge as one of the most disadvantaged and the most vulnerable social groups. Immigrants, political refugees, in particular, as well as individuals forced to migrate for economic reasons, are compelled at some stage of their lives to leave behind their accumulated economic, social, and professional capital and begin life anew in a different country. Consequently, they typically enter their host societies from the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy. In terms of cultural, economic, and professional resources, their starting point is often below zero.
In this respect, immigrants constitute one of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable segments of society in terms of social justice and income distribution. Yet, while attempting to rebuild their lives, they are forced to contend not only with economic and social hardships but also with the prejudices generated by the rising populist radical right (PRR) and far-right parties and movements. Moreover, by being portrayed as the principal culprits behind economic inequality and social injustice, they are turned into scapegoats, a process that imposes severe socio-psychological costs on an already vulnerable population.
One point can be stated unequivocally: economically (and even culturally) driven anti-immigrant sentiment is not a phenomenon that emerges spontaneously. Social injustice and income inequality are undoubtedly real societal problems, and angry eyes are constantly searching for those responsible for them. Unfortunately, they do not always succeed in identifying the real causes. Meanwhile, for far-right actors who incite, inflame and ride the wave of resentment generated among these groups, targeting immigrants—one of the weakest, least organized, and least capable social groups in socio-political and economic terms—is both the easiest and the least politically costly strategy. Although the attempts of far-right political actors, whose humanitarian sensitivities have been considerably weakened, to exploit and simultaneously provoke this wave for political gain deserve the strongest ethical condemnation, it is nevertheless understandable why they choose this strategy within the context of political competition, which is driven less by values than by the pursuit of power. The fact that populist far right politicians such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders, Robert Fico, Jarosław Kaczyński, Jimmie Åkesson, and many others have placed anti-immigrant politics at the center of political mobilization can be understood within this framework.
What is particularly striking, however, is why dollar billionaires—and even the owners of trillion-dollar companies—whose activities are largely confined to technology and the global economy, support far-right actors, PRR parties and movements, and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
In my view, the principal explanation lies in pragmatic interests. The anti-immigration discourse of the populist radical right and the far right systematically recasts those who are most severely affected by income inequality and social injustice from victims into perpetrators of these very problems. In reality, however, immigrants—alongside other disadvantaged groups—are among the greatest losers of the contemporary global economic order and the structural inequalities it generates. This is precisely where the core of the issue lies. By systematically constructing immigrants as scapegoats, far-right actors divert public attention away from the structural sources of economic inequality and social injustice. In doing so, they help obscure the role of the super-rich, who are not only the principal beneficiaries of the existing distribution of wealth but also key beneficiaries of the economic structures that reproduce and deepen these inequalities.
It is precisely at this point that the logic behind the support given by figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos—the greatest beneficiaries of the existing global economic order—to populist radical right parties and far-right actors becomes apparent. Historically, just as the East India Company and the West India Company represented the corporate actors that benefited most from the global colonial order of their time, today’s technology giants occupy a comparable position as the greatest beneficiaries of contemporary global hi-tech capitalism. The strengthening of political discourse centered on anti-immigrant sentiment diverts public attention away from these structural causes of economic inequality and wealth concentration.
Regrettably, I must note that approaches which, in recent years, have argued that anti-immigrant sentiment is fundamentally the product not of economic grievances but of a cultural backlash, even if unintentionally, contribute to strengthening this political strategy. The influence of cultural factors and identity politics cannot, of course, be denied. However, explaining anti-immigrant sentiment primarily through cultural dynamics diminishes the visibility of structural causes such as economic inequality and social injustice, while simultaneously providing the far right with an indirect—albeit problematic—source of legitimacy. The issue, therefore, is not merely one of cultural reaction; it should also be understood as a political mechanism of distraction that conceals underlying economic power relations and discourages scrutiny of the existing distribution of wealth.
If the support that the super-rich extend to the far right were merely an expression of their individual political preferences, it might not warrant such sustained attention. The issue, however, extends far beyond that. These billionaires, who have effectively acquired monopolistic positions in the technology sector, not only deploy their immense economic resources in support of far-right political movements but also possess the capacity to shape the boundaries of public discourse through the digital platforms they control, including X, Facebook, YouTube, and others. Through complex algorithmic mechanisms, these platforms are increasingly transformed into the principal channels for the circulation of far-right narratives, while alternative viewpoints, critical voices, and pluralistic perspectives experience a substantial loss of visibility.
In this process, observations suggesting that the digital visibility of actors defending liberal democratic values, pluralism, the rule of law, and humanitarian principles is being systematically weakened, while polarizing, provocative, and extremist content is algorithmically rewarded, are increasingly supported by empirical research. As a consequence, democratic actors using these platforms face not only declining public influence but also invisible, though perceptible, algorithmic barriers that make it increasingly difficult even to reach their own natural audiences.
This picture reveals the combined impact of the economic and digital power of technology barons who stand among both the principal creators and the greatest beneficiaries of the global income divide. Despite being among the primary causes and beneficiaries of wealth concentration, economic inequality, and social injustice, Elon Musk and similar actors openly support extremist, far-right political movements that systematically portray immigrants and other vulnerable socio-cultural minorities as those responsible for these problems and as convenient scapegoats. Elon Musk’s most recent extensive interview with The Economist, in which he reiterated positions supportive of the far right, together with his backing of Marine Le Pen, Alternative for Germany (AfD) and various other far-right parties and actors, is open to interpretation within this framework. The political positions, public rhetoric, and algorithmic maneuvers of Musk and other technology-baron billionaires function as a deliberate mechanism of distraction, obscuring the true sources of wealth concentration and structural economic inequality.
Perhaps the greatest contradiction that deserves attention, and the most fundamental question that requires an answer, is the following: Why do broad segments of society that are themselves victims of structural economic inequality and social injustice follow far-right political actors supported by the greatest beneficiaries of wealth concentration, rather than questioning the structural causes of these inequalities? More importantly, why are they tend to view immigrants and socio-cultural minorities—groups that share similar structural vulnerabilities—as the principal causes of these problems? This paradox points not only to the discursive success of the populist radical right and far right but also to a fundamental research problem requiring us to understand how public perceptions are reshaped through the influence of economic and administrative power over digital communication infrastructures.
Dr. João Ferreira Dias argues that the contemporary center-left may be entering a decisive post-neoliberal phase by re-centering politics on material security rather than cultural conflict. Using Andy Burnham’s political vision as a point of departure—and drawing comparisons with Zohran Mamdani—he contends that democratic renewal depends on reconnecting progressive politics with the everyday concerns of housing, employment, public services, and economic security. While defending the achievements of cultural inclusion, Dr. Dias suggests that the left must once again become the primary political organizer of material insecurity if it is to counter the appeal of ethnonationalist populism. This timely commentary offers a compelling contribution to current debates on populism, post-neoliberalism, democratic representation, and the future of liberal-social democracy in an era of deep political realignment.
Andy (Andrew Murray) Burnham’s first speech in Downing Street, in reminding me of Zohran Mamdani, left me wondering whether we are witnessing a new tendency to recenter political action and political language on material questions. If this tendency is confirmed, it would mark a programmatic shift within Labour’s centrist and moderate left: one that is less ideological and more programme-driven than the radical left, which has lived off struggles for recognition and cultural emancipation. Put differently, the center-left wants to deprive the culture wars of their monopoly over the political agenda.
After decades in which the left increasingly became an interpreter of cultural transformations, Burnham is seeking to return it to its original function: politically organizing economic and social insecurity at a time when that insecurity has been captured largely by the radical right, through a clear articulation of economic resentment with conservative and nationalist appeals. Not because ethnonationalism follows automatically from economic insecurity, but because such insecurity creates fertile ground for converting material loss into cultural resentment (Gidron & Hall, 2020; Rodrik, 2021).
The causes of the erosion of the left’s social representativeness are by now well known. Both the radical left and the radical right identified a culprit behind growing economic unease and anxiety: the neoliberal policies that culminated in the 2008 crisis. Yet, following the success of the radical left during that period, left and right shifted their arenas of action, in a mirror game centered on the struggle for cultural hegemony between progressivism and cultural backlash (Hopkin, 2020; Mudge, 2018; Norris & Inglehart, 2019).
In the post-austerity turn, the left placed greater emphasis on policies recognizing voices historically rendered subaltern and on the struggle against white privilege. The agenda was commendable, but its timing proved challenging as immigration reshaped the social landscape and became an increasingly sensitive political and social issue, carrying with it both economic and cultural anxieties. The radical right, in turn, transformed these anxieties into an identitarian narrative according to which the loss of security, status, and control resulted not from the economic model, but from immigration, cosmopolitan elites, and the cultural transformation of Western societies (Norris & Inglehart, 2019).
Inflammatory rhetoric, readily identifiable culprits—corrupt politicians, immigrants, and “leftists”—and simplistic solutions to complex problems gave the ethnonationalist right room to grow among segments of the working and middle classes who were materially vulnerable, culturally disregarded, and politically estranged from elites. Many of these voters felt anxious about cultural change while parts of the radical left pointed the finger at them as racists, xenophobes, and beneficiaries of racial privilege (Gidron & Hall, 2020).
Like Mamdani, Burnham seems to understand the elementary formula for combating the radical right. It does not lie in continuing to impose a moral framework centered on patriarchy and white privilege, nor merely in explaining that, for example, Nigel Farage is wrong and is a populist. On the contrary, it requires addressing the needs to which he responds: economic and employment security, social protection, public safety, the creation of a sense of belonging and identity within a multicultural framework, and the promise of a shared horizon.
Burnham and Mamdani do not, of course, occupy the same ideological position. What brings them together is less the programme than the political method: making the left intelligible again through the price and quality of everyday life and returning to the idea of a platform broader than the segmentations on which it has come to depend. Rather than first asking voters to subscribe to a moral or identitarian framework, they show them what public power can do for housing, transport, employment, and essential services.
The ethnonationalist right offers security through the border, belonging through the ethnic nation, and a future through restoration. Burnham seeks to offer security through public services, belonging through community and territory, and a future through investment and reindustrialization. He therefore does more than promise protection against decline: he seeks to recover an idea of progress, mobility, and collective capacity, without which the left risks becoming merely the administrator of decay (Hopkin, 2020).
This does not mean, however, that the culture wars can simply be declared over. The radical right will continue to mobilize immigration, national identity, gender, religion, and historical memory even if the left prefers to concentrate on economic questions. The response cannot be to abandon cultural achievements and minority rights, but to integrate them into a universalist language and an idea of common civic belonging. Material politics is necessary, but insufficient. Yet it is now the best and most urgent weapon available to centrists everywhere.
The rematerialization of the centrist left is an essential step towards rebuilding an electoral base amid the urgent need to safeguard the principles of liberal-social democracy. Burnham does not appear to want to replace culture with economics, but rather to reconstruct materially the conditions of democratic belonging—a belonging that is as much of the left as of the right, as much liberal as conservative—which the radical right has converted into an ethnonationalist promise.
References
Gidron, N. & Hall, P. A. (2020). “Populism as a problem of social integration.” Comparative Political Studies, 53(7), 1027–1059. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414019879947
Mudge, S. L. (2018). Leftism reinvented: Western parties from socialism to neoliberalism. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674984837
Norris, P. & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595841
