If there is one thing that the last decade ought to have taught us, it is that strong objective factors do not automatically translate into powerful movements, let alone into the spontaneous discovery of the correct line by the masses.

Even if we may still see major social explosions in the coming years, there is no reason to believe that they will take forms that will be easily recognizable to the left or that they will be immune to instrumentalization from the right.

This is usually the point at which the conversation might turn to fake news and propaganda, and it is undeniable that part of Bolsonaro’s and Trump’s surprising resilience even outside of government stems from the fact that they possess a far more efficient informational infrastructure than do their opponents to get their version of facts across.

Yet the path I wish to pursue here is a different one. It consists in relating the mystery of these two resiliencies—that of far-right discourse and the one displayed by neoliberalism post-2008—not just to show how they communicate and feed back into another but equally to point out what lies behind the sway of disinformation and constitutes the terrain in which it flourishes.

To put it bluntly: If the far right has managed, using lies or otherwise, to mobilize the anti-systemic feelings of people who feel they have been failed and left behind, it is because those sentiments exist. In other words, it is only because many people sense that there is something profoundly wrong about the existing economic and political system that the far right’s message can take hold. Combating this message, therefore, is not just a matter of fighting deception; it is ultimately about addressing the issues that are at the source of those feelings. This cannot happen, however, for as long as we are in denial about those issues.

Discipline has become starker even as—or precisely because—the normative claims behind it have become more suspect.

Let us start with the first mystery. Those who believed radical change was inevitable after 2008 underestimated two factors. First, they did not foresee the extent to which our political systems have become inured to running on low legitimacy. In the absence of any sustained challenge to their power, elites seem to trust their capacity to continually outmaneuver the majority of the population regardless of whether or not they are actually trusted. This was made possible by the concentration of political power that has followed directly from the concentration of economic power since the 1980s, but equally by decades of institutional reforms that have served to subtract ever more areas, particularly fiscal and monetary policy, from any sort of social control—the design of the Eurozone, for example, the antidemocratic nature of which was made explicit by the 2015 Greek crisis, or the “expenditure ceiling” introduced in Brazil after the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016.

The second factor is the sheer inertial force of neoliberalism’s disciplinary mechanisms—labor precarity, reduction of social protections, private debt, etc.—and the reprogramming of subjectivity that they serve to constantly (re)produce. While these have no doubt become more draconian in an age of austerity and uberization, we should not forget that neoliberalism has always had a retributive or punitive dimension, which is manifested in its intimate connection with crisis situations, famously summed up by Naomi Klein in the expression “shock doctrine.” Crisis is neoliberalism’s greatest disciplinary device: