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Recent years have seen the emergence of strongmen as serious political forces in liberal democracies the world over: Narendra Modi in India, Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and perhaps now Prabowo Subianto in Indonesia, despite the latter’s attempt to project a gentler public image. These figures represent the ascendance of a new kind of right wing, one that operates not only through elections but by exerting dominance in the arenas of culture, society, ideology, and the economy. This new right is not necessarily concerned with overthrowing the norms of liberal democracy, but in many cases with making use of them. “Fascism” is therefore an insufficient term to describe the new right wing, for it denies what has been called by Aijaz Ahmad ‘the intimate embrace between liberalism and the far right.’
In this talk, Vijay Prashad argues that the formulation of this ‘intimate embrace’ allows us to understand that there is no necessary contradiction between liberalism and the far right, and indeed that liberalism is not even a shield against the far right, let alone its antidote.
Prashad is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. His latest book, On Cuba Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (published July 2024), was written with Noam Chomsky. Prashad is Executive Director of The Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Chief Correspondent for Globetrotter Media.