Fascism is the wave of the future. This was Edward Luttwak writing back in 1994, not an easy thing to say at the height of triumphalist globalisation. His case was that the germs of a “product-improved” fascism would arise as a logical product of a wild capitalism where mass layoffs, technological development and a race to the bottom in global wages was taking place much faster than people and communities could adapt to it. The resulting unprecedented level of personal economic insecurity (– note insecurity, not poverty) across working and middle classes would lead to fertile ground for a new fascism to develop whose appeal would lie in part on “restraints on corporate Darwinism” . 

This is what burst to the fore in 2008. When Covid-19 hit, the world was still grappling with the political rise of the far-right. The reason for this is not hard to gauge. After the second world war, western governments had concluded that economic depression, insecurity and unemployment had played a big part in giving rise to fascism and communism and so Europe, the US and Japan would consciously pursue economic programmes to reach full employment under welfare states. It worked wonders: capitalism was secured in the West and in the East, communism, whose entire appeal rested on a promise of greater material prosperity, collapsed as their people unfavourably compared their lifestyles with those of their western neighbours. As communism ran out of steam, so did social democracy as western elites reacted against the inflationary pressures built into an economy pursuing full employment and growing wages and created neo-liberalism. The defining ideology of globalisation. 

A mirror-image of communism (complete with its own tomes and ideologues) this capitalist ideology too rested on the promise of delivering material prosperity. This is what the 2008 crisis brutally demolished. But instead of doing what the much more far-sighted politicians did after 1945, the current elite simply made the poor and middle class suffer, ramped up inequality and economic insecurity popularised as “disruption” or “services” or the “gig” economy in the corporate lecture circuit. So, years after the 2008 crash, the western world got Donald Trump (promising to bring back jobs and reinstate barriers in a symbolic backtracking from globalisation) and a variety of proto-fascisms within Europe. The ideologues claimed that globalisation had made the world better off (even if the distribution of wealth could have been done better). The problem was that much of this prosperity happened in China, where a communist government presides over an illiberal, state-capitalism exploding the myth that freedom for the market would ultimately lead to the freedom of democracy. For developing nations, themselves long suffering from high inequality, jobless growth and harsh dislocations, they turned to figures such as Putin, Erdogan, Modi, Netanyahu, Duterte, Bolsonaro. Things can’t be going that great in the developing world either if everyone there too is begging for a saviour. 

All this is to say the world was already in trouble when Covid-19 hit. Now as mass unemployment again rears its head all over the world, governments seem keen on repeating what they did in 2008. Economic insecurity piled on top of more economic insecurity. If we were still grappling with a Trump, it can only be imagined what a few years after Covid-19 (handled in the same way as the 2008 crisis) would bring a few years down the line. More surveillance capitalism? (Mauritius is quite charmed by this idea), a continued disintegration of the liberal idea due to the insatiable greed of its own elites? Or attempting to muddle through in the grip of glaring contradictions like encouraging mass layoffs and thereby collapsing demand while continuing to try to run a welfare state mostly funded through consumption-taxes? Or perhaps will we finally start seeing jackboots elsewhere while praying that nobody in our increasingly economically insecure country starts getting the same idea?