‘Fun and Joy Are Very Powerful Political Forces’

Out of the Doom Loop: Can Liberalism Find a More Affirming Future?

Ben Anderson and Anna J Secor’s new book, ‘The Politics of Feeling’, seeks to explain how right-wing populism has successfully provided an energising vision of the future, even if it is rooted in the past. They speak to Hardeep Matharu and Peter Jukes about why liberalism is in crisis without such a narrative – and how understanding the role of ‘attachment’ and ‘affirmation’ in politics today could point to a way forward

Hardeep Matharu: The book weaves together a number of strands I have been exploring in Byline Times in recent years – about the importance of emotional viscerality and psychology in politics today, and the consequences of a dehumanising political-media culture over a number of years. In your analysis, what is the ‘politics of feeling’?

Ben Anderson: In the turbulence of the post-2008 financial crisis period, in the UK and the US, there was the emergence of a range of political figures who previously would have been nowhere near formal politics. So on the right, Donald Trump. On the left, figures like Jeremy Corbyn. And a range of different political movements – from Black Lives Matter to climate activists, as well as the emergence of right-wing populism. In the book, we are trying to understand the forces that have driven this period of turbulence in formal politics.

We see this as being defined by a break with a pre-2008 ‘double consensus’ – of, on one hand, a kind of economic liberalism that is associated, or normally named as, neoliberalism; and on the other hand, a kind of social liberalism that was articulated with that economic liberalism.

We see the post-2008 moment as being a break with this that gets expressed in the emergence of new figures and new forces on the right and left, and plays out in a broader sense in a volatile political present – for example, in the realm of formal politics in the UK, with multiple Prime Ministers; but also in the realm of the disruption to a series of norms, such as the emergence of ‘post-truth’ as a way of understanding what’s going on.