Introduction
1 P. Norris and R. Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
2 ‘Most Conservative members would see party destroyed to achieve Brexit’, YouGov, 18 June 2019.
3 J. Dean, ‘Communism or Neo-Feudalism?’, New Political Science 42, 2020.
4 ‘The Times’s endorsement for the general election: back to the future’, The Times, 11 December 2019.
5 See N. Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, Polity, 2016.
6 T. Fetzer, ‘Did Austerity Cause Brexit? Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy’, University of Warwick, Working Paper No. 381, 2018.
7 See A. Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Allen Lane, 2018.
8 K. Milburn, Generation Left, Polity, 2019.
9 This is often referred to as ‘economic imperialism’. See B. Fine and D. Milonakis, From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics: The Shifting Boundaries Between Economics and Other Social Sciences, Routledge, 2009.
10 See N. Maclean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Penguin, 2016.
11 W. Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition, Sage, 2014.
12 S. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Profile Books, 2019.
13 See J. Vogl, The Ascendency of Finance, John Wiley, 2017.
14 See W. Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System, Verso, 2017.
15 D. Harvey, ‘The “New” Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession’, Socialist Register 40.
16 As Jean-François Lyotard wrote in his 1979 The Postmodern Condition (Manchester University Press, 1984, pp. 4–5): ‘The relationships of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume – that is, the form of value. Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its “use-value”.’
17 See P. Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, Verso, 2013.
18 M. Feher, Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age, MIT Press, 2018.
19 See J. Meyer, ‘The Making of the Fox News White House’, New Yorker, 11 March 2019.
20 See M. Feher, ‘The Political Ascendency of Creditworthiness’, publicbooks.org, 1 September 2019; M. Feher, ‘Disposing of the Discredited: A European Project’, in W. Callison and Z. Manfredi (eds), Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture, Fordham University Press, 2019.
21 The idea of ‘real-time social science’ was pioneered by Craig Calhoun, initially in response to the September 11 attacks.
1 ‘The People Have Spoken’
1 N. Fraser, ‘Rethinking Recognition’, New Left Review, May–June 2000.
2 J. Guo, ‘What Donald Trump and Dying White People Have in Common’, Washington Post, 15 December 2015.
3 M. Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, University of Chicago Press, 1998.
4 G. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time, Verso, 2009.
5 See W. Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, Verso, 2014.
6 T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, 2014.
7 ‘Consultants reap rewards of Whitehall’s Brexit scramble’, Financial Times, 7 June 2019.
8 ‘Tony Blair admits he is baffled by rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn’, Guardian, 23 February 2016.
9 Esther Addley, ‘Study shows 60% of Britons believe in conspiracy theories’, Guardian, 23 November 2018.
10 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, 2006.
11 H. Jones et al., Go Home: The Politics of Immigration Controversies, Manchester University Press, 2017.
12 H. Steward and P. Walker, ‘Theresa May declares war on Brussels, urging: “Let me fight for Britain”, Guardian, 3 May 2017.
2 Quagmire
1 M. Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, Zero Books, 2014, p. 9.
2 D. Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War, Oxford University Press, 2011.
3 Cabinet Office, ‘The Future Relationship Between the United Kingdom and the European Union’, 2018.
4 H. Arendt, On Violence, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970, p. 66.
5 ‘Donald Trump told Theresa May how to do Brexit “but she wrecked it” – and says the US trade deal is off’, Sun, 13 July 2018.
6 B. Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Polity, 2018, p. 2.
7 Ibid., p. 3.
8 A. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Harvard University Press, 1970, p. 43.
9 See Mair, Ruling the Void.
10 O. Hahl et al., ‘The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy’, American Sociological Review 83:1, 2018.
11 S. Žižek, ‘How Wikileaks opened our eyes to the illusion of freedom’, Guardian, 19 June 2014.
12 ‘Police still not investigating Leave campaigns, citing “political sensitivities”’, opendemocracy.net, 11 October 2018.
13 R. Seymour, ‘The Economy of Reaction’, patreon.com, 23 December 2018.
14 Anderson, Imagined Communities.
15 ‘Unhappiness with politics “at 15-year high”’, BBC News, 8 April 2019.
3 ‘The People’ Versus ‘Politics’
1 P. Gerbaudo, The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy, Pluto, 2018.
2 Ibid., p. xx.
3 T. Bale, ‘Tory leadership: who gets to choose the UK’s next prime minister?’, BBC News, 23 June 2019.
4 ‘Most Conservative members would see party destroyed’, YouGov.
5 ‘Everything you think you know about Leavers and Remainers is wrong’, Britain in a Changing Europe, 11 June 2019.
6 ‘Johnson pledges to make all immigrants learn English’, Guardian, 5 July 2019.
7 T. Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, Random House, 2001.
8 H. Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics’, in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Penguin, 1993, p. 250.
9 ‘Majority worldwide say their society is broken – an increasing feeling among Britons’, Ipsos Mori, 13 September 2019.
10 Y. Benkler et al., Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, Oxford University Press, 2018.
11 G. Blank, ‘The Myth of the Echo Chamber’, OII blog, 9 March 2018.
12 Ipsos.com, ‘Ipsos MORI Veracity Index 2019: Trust in Professions Survey’, November 2019.
13 M. Andrejevic, ‘“Framelessness” or the Cultural Logic of Big Data’, in M. S. Daubs and V. R. Manzerolle (eds), Mobile and Ubiquitous Media: Critical and International Perspectives, Peter Lang, 2014.
14 P. Ford, ‘The Web is a Customer Service Medium’, Ftrain.com, 6 January 2011.
15 M. Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Routledge, 1991, p. 116.
16 ‘Tories pretend to be factchecking service during leaders’ debate’, Guardian, 19 November 2019.
Afterword: In the Wreckage of Liberalism
1 ‘Trust in UK government and news media COVID-19 information down, concerns over misinformation from government and politicians up’, Reuters Institute, 1 June 2020.
2 ‘Brits see cleaner air, stronger social bonds and changing food habits amid lockdown’, RSA, 17 April 2020.
3 R. Hendrikse, ‘Neo-illiberalism’, Geoforum, 95, 2018.
4 K. Pistor, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, Princeton University Press, 2019.
5 See W. Callison and Z. Manfredi (eds), Mutant Neoliberalism, Fordham University Press, 2019.
6 On the patrimonial quality of Trumpism, see D. Riley, ‘What is Trump?’, New Left Review 114, November–December 2018.