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.
Replies
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
jul 23, 2025, 8:14 am • 87 18 • view
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.
jul 23, 2025, 8:17 am • 0 0 • view
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.
jul 23, 2025, 8:24 am • 9 1 • view
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
jul 23, 2025, 8:36 am • 0 0 • view
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
jul 23, 2025, 8:36 am • 0 0 • view
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.
jul 23, 2025, 8:39 am • 7 0 • view
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.
jul 23, 2025, 8:44 am • 1 0 • view
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.
jul 23, 2025, 8:48 am • 6 0 • view
But that identities do or should strengthen democracy is a normative starting assumption I am not sure I share. it's meso-organisations that structure participation & strengthen democracy; collective identities contribute to democracy insofar they strengthen those organisations, not per se. 1/2
jul 23, 2025, 8:59 am • 1 0 • view
Per se, collective identities are problematic for democracies because they set boundaries between insiders & outsiders, modulate solidarity, and socialise individuals into confrontational politics. I'd argue that their positive role through meso organisations is the exception & not the rule.
jul 23, 2025, 8:59 am • 1 0 • view
When identities are disembedded from institutions, they lose the structures that enable collective agency. They're more easily captured by political entrepreneurs precisely because they lack internal organisation, accountability, or deliberative grounding.
jul 23, 2025, 8:49 am • 19 1 • view
That volatility produces mobilisation, but often without direction, structure, and durable power. It's influence without empowerment and visibility without voice. That’s the democratic hollowing I’m describing.
jul 23, 2025, 8:50 am • 18 0 • view
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
jul 23, 2025, 8:40 am • 6 1 • view
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.
jul 23, 2025, 8:40 am • 6 1 • view
So while identity politics is loud and visible, the organisational structures that once enabled collective identities to function as counterpublics, capable of shaping agendas and forcing change, have been hollowed out.
jul 23, 2025, 8:41 am • 7 1 • view
What we’re left with is identity as expression, not identity as strategic organising. That’s the terrain neoliberalism helped create, one where politics is deeply felt, highly polarised, but structurally disempowered.
jul 23, 2025, 8:41 am • 6 0 • view
Organizing dependent on government funds was never about liberation anyway!!
jul 23, 2025, 9:37 am • 0 0 • view
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.
jul 23, 2025, 8:15 am • 67 9 • view
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.
jul 23, 2025, 8:15 am • 74 12 • view
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.
jul 23, 2025, 9:09 am • 0 0 • view
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.
jul 23, 2025, 8:17 am • 62 11 • view
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.
jul 23, 2025, 8:18 am • 56 6 • view
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.
jul 23, 2025, 8:18 am • 66 7 • view
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.
jul 23, 2025, 8:19 am • 56 8 • view
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.
jul 23, 2025, 8:21 am • 65 5 • view
While you make excellent points about the managerial state, I personally find the use of "neoliberal" as a term of disparagement unhelpful, much in the same way the right uses socialism (or the "even worse" communism) to say that anything they don't like belongs to that group.
jul 23, 2025, 8:57 am • 2 1 • view
I don’t see him using is as a disparagement but as a an accurate descriptor. No one disputes its existence anymore than socialism’s existence
jul 23, 2025, 9:00 am • 2 0 • view
I’m not using neoliberalism as a casual slur. I use it because it names a specific ideological and policy shift: the reorganisation of state and society around market logic, individual responsibility, and efficiency over deliberation.
jul 23, 2025, 9:02 am • 6 0 • view
📌
jul 23, 2025, 6:52 pm • 0 0 • view
Episode 204 and 205 of Philophize This! also covers Sandel's work www.philosophizethis.org/podcasts
jul 23, 2025, 8:22 am • 40 3 • view
Sandel is a wonderful read. Any of them
jul 23, 2025, 8:26 am • 1 0 • view
📌
jul 23, 2025, 6:52 pm • 0 0 • view
I'd also recommend watching Adam Curtis' latest documentary Shifty after reading those, it'll give you a lot to think about.
jul 23, 2025, 8:43 am • 32 5 • view