Good questions; I’m not claiming the pre-neoliberal era was a democratic ideal, but neoliberal meritocratic technocracy didn’t just weaken institutions, it hollowed out the conditions for democratic participation, including the role of counterpublics. bsky.app/profile/ande...
The democratic project has always relied on more than formal elections. Counterpublics, organised groups outside dominant power, play a vital role in expanding rights, challenging elites, and reshaping what democracy even means.
No this is what happens when you allow unregulated social media run by actual Nazis, oligarchs and the Chinese state. All of whom seek to destabilise democracies by promoting racial hatred and hiding truth.
That's part of it, but if we ignore the political and social systems that takes place within then we're going to constantly fail to deal with the deeper problems.
Yes, but the lesson of Biden's presidency is social media vibes matter far more than objective truth. Fixing the system doesn't help when the vibes insist it is still broken. So if we don't fix social media we are doomed to fail whatever.
I'd argue the reason the "vibes" have so much power is because the underlying systems have lost public legitimacy. The form remains, but the substance is hollow.
No it is social media, most people don't pay any attention to the underlying systems. Which is why people reported the economy was doing badly while simultaneously saying they were better off personally.
Fixing social media is necessary, but if we don’t also fix the political, institutional, and civic structures it reflects and distorts, we’re just tuning the amplifier. The noise will persist if the signal, the system itself, is broken.
In the postwar period, despite many exclusions, unions, grassroots movements, radical media, and activist communities forced democratic expansion. They didn’t just protest, they produced knowledge, exerted pressure, and built legitimacy from below.
Neoliberalism weakened these spaces: – Unions lost power – Local organising was defunded – Radical media became unsustainable – Protest was reframed as disruption – Collective identity was replaced with consumer identity
I would really hesitate to characteristic the current period as low on identity politics and deprived of radical media (whatever that means). If anything, it's quite the opposite.
We’re not short on visible identity discourse or oppositional media content. But that’s exactly the issue: visibility has replaced structure, and expression has replaced organising. We have identity performance, but far fewer identity-based movements capable of strategic leverage.
I disagree: most data suggest identities (in particular gender and national ones, but not only) are increasingly fundamental drivers of politics. Two large bodies of literature - one on GAL-TAN and one on Affective Polarization- illustrate this to great detail. 1/2
What has changed is that traditional forms of mass collective identities (class, religion, and organisational belonging) have been hollowed out and replaced by new forms of meaningful identification. 2/2
I don’t disagree that identity remains politically powerful, and that newer identities (gender, nation, culture) have become central. But the form and function of identity in politics has changed profoundly in the neoliberal era, accelerated by the incentives of social media.
For sure they are less anchored in meso-institutions and intermediary associations. But these make them more, not less, powerful factors in the dynamics of politics, precisely because they are unachored and 'up for grabs' by smart political entrepreneurs, as illustrated by Hooghe and Marks.
I'm approaching this from the perspective of democratic participation, not just political volatility or salience. The fact that identities are up for grabs may make them exploitable, but that doesn't mean they strengthen democracy.
We’ve shifted from embedded collective identities, tied to unions, churches, parties, and movements, to disembedded, affective identities, often shaped through individual experience and online discourse
These new identities are meaningful, but they’re often reactive, fragmented, and mediated by platforms designed for performance, not organisation. They generate affective polarisation, but not sustained leverage over power structures.
Organizing dependent on government funds was never about liberation anyway!!
Social media simulates some of the surface features of counterpublics, it gives people visibility, voice, and connection. But that’s not the same as organised contestation with strategic power and sustained pressure.
What we get instead is performance without leverage, expression without structure, and visibility without impact. The algorithm rewards what spreads, not what builds. Anger circulates, but nothing changes.
That really made me think that the recent success of extremist parties may be due to them being perceived by many as "the true expression of the people", opposed to those moderate technocrats. In any case, said parties play heavily on that perception.
Simulated participation provides epistemic cover for technocratic systems: it suggests democracy is alive because people are speaking, but without collective organisation, strategic pressure, or deliberative space, it becomes spectacle, not a challenge to power.
So yes, managerial logic may respond to some pressures from the electorate. But that electorate is increasingly atomised, depoliticised, and disempowered. Social media simulates participation while weakening its democratic substance.
This is the real hollowing out. Not just of institutions, but of the cultural and structural forces that once pushed democracy to expand. We’re left with the shell of participation, but not its organising core.
It’s true that some voters may have supported reforms promising growth and efficiency. But democracy is more than preference satisfaction, it’s about agency, deliberation, and collective authorship of the future.
I'd recommend Michael Sandel's The Tyranny of Merit and Wendy Brown's In the Ruins of Neoliberalism for anyone interested in exploring those ideas more deeply.
The neoliberal approach regards rules either as hindrance or as self-ruling, as if they don't need to be enforced by an outside force. It's like thinking about architecture without stairs, toilets and the way people move inside or to it. Of course these topics are not what a building is about but >
if you willingly don't think about them funny things happen. I like the institutional approach by Douglass C. North. It adds institutions aka norms and rules (that restrain actions) and transaction costs to classic liberal economy. This approach helps to explain why some countries are rich/poor.