Anti-System Politics
The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies
Jonathan Hopkin
Having read it
★★★★☆
Aside from being about a subject that is well worth exploring, analysing and learning about, this book seemed a little lost in its own academic smartness and efficacy to make it one that you really wanted to read every word and every chapter. If you did, then full marks I guess, but I didn’t! It’s a little ironic, though, that a book about anti-system politics is sort of a part of the system that people are a bit anti about anyway... hmmm, probably overthinking it but it did make some valid points (certainly in its introduction and main conclusion) and increased my understanding of anti-system politics.
A good passage
Globalisation is important, but it should not blind us to the consequences of political choices made by politicians and regulators. When the financial crisis hit, capital markets had to be rescued by governments, in a sudden reversal of a power relationship that had previously subjected politics to the whims of the market. The way this rescue was performed, and the measures taken to deal with the subsequent economic downturn, was very much the product of political decisions made by states, which in large part passed the bill for capitalists’ mistakes onto the people who had gained the least out of the neoliberal revolution. Banking bailouts and austerity were political choices, and citizens could not be expected to be indifferent to their consequences.
A second good passage
The crisis of the late 2000s contains all the basic ingredients for a political backlash: economic stagnation, high inequality, and a political system that blocked off any prospect of effective change. Across the democratic world, the share of the population benefiting from these economic and political arrangements has contracted to such an extent that the dominant political parties no longer have the votes to maintain themselves in office. The forty-year-long experiment in leaving people at the mercy of the market produced a top-heavy income distribution of a small number of big winners, a much larger group of losers, and a squeezed middle lighting to maintain its position in an increasingly insecure world. The political establishment had run out of ideas to make things better. The rise of anti-system politics reflects the exhaustion of neoliberal democracy: an economic model that ultimately only worked for a minority, and a political system that closed off alternatives to it.
A third good passage
Anti-system politics will not go away while the ‘system’ is perceived by a growing share of the population to have failed. The job of politicians is to develop a diagnosis of this failure, and a set of proposals for fundamental change, that makes sense and resonates with voters. The idea that markets can resolve most social problems, and that governance should simply provide the basic institutions to allow this to happen, has run out of political capital. Whatever new paradigm emerges must facilitate meaningful mass participation in political decision-making over whatever matters society thinks are important. In other words, what most people understand by the word ‘democracy’.