Illiberal Responses to Neoliberalism by Attacking Liberalism

The third speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Maria Bakardjieva, whose focus is on the affordances of social media in grassroots illiberalism. Affordances here describe a relation between users and objects, and media affordances include technical and institutional aspects. Maria notes the well-established problems with the term ‘populism’, which is a poorly defined concept that applies equally to the left and the right, and to democratic and antidemocratic discourses; this generates pseudo-equivalences between very different aspects.

Illiberalism is more useful in describing a specific regime type, founded in an ideology and culture that is conjured up by supportive intellectuals and political leaders; this is less about material consequences than neoliberalism. Such illiberalism, then, can also be understood from the bottom up: where grassroots participation in democracy is challenged by current developments, uncivil and voluntary societal organisations and groups can emerge to fill the void, motivated by material conditions, lived experiences, powerful mythologies, and raw emotions.

Such illiberal groups might respond to the consequences of neoliberalism at economic and other levels, for instance, or to other key developments. Inequality and support for populist parties in Europe both grew notably from the 1980s and 1990s, for instance. Digital technologies and their affordances can play a critical role in such activities.

These developments were certainly felt in post-communist Eastern Europe, with a rapid swing from communism to neoliberalism in the 1990s, and significant economic and societal consequences resulting from this. In Bulgaria, for instance, several illiberal groups arose in response to these challenges, at levels from institutionalised politics through radical activism to ordinary football fandom. Some of these initially grassroots illiberal groups are now well-established and influential in formal politics. In responding to neoliberalism, these take the illiberal subversion of liberal values for these values themselves; instead of challenging the market absolutism of neoliberalism this attacks the core values of liberalism and rejects the core institutions of the liberal social order as a whole.

Social media are the epitome of such neoliberalism, marked by an extreme inequality of ownership, a lack of regulation, and attention economy, and a commodification of self-formation and self-expression; in a strange irony, the affordances of these high-neoliberal platforms also provide the apparatus for illiberalism in public communication: extra-institutional content creation, affective framing and binding, consumerisation of publicity, post-truth, and celebritisation of public communication.