The Far Right: Formidable but Not Unbeatable

Abstract

The level of discontent and alienation with neoliberalism was already very high in the Global North before the coronavirus hit, owing to the inability of the established elites to reverse the decline and living standards and skyrocketing inequality in the dreary decade that followed the financial crisis. And in much of the Global South, the chronic crisis of underdevelopment under peripheral capitalism, exacerbated by neoliberal ‘reforms’ since the 1980s, had already shredded the legitimacy of key institutions of globalization. This article seeks to identify key elements in the rise of the far right in the Global North and the Global South and indicates steps that need to be taken to confront the far right.