Social policy has served as a powerful magnet for both political rage and mobilization within the contemporary global context of rising right‐wing populist and authoritarian politics. Social policy is also conventionally considered to encompass several related areas such as housing policy, child protection, family planning and some aspects of care work, insofar as these also relate to the function of providing for or influencing various social outcomes, such as learning, health, or the access to and the incidence of adequate and secure livelihoods and income They have served as powerful vehicles for mobilizing conservative and reactionary populist sentiments beyond critique and towards political projects that construct and propagate nativist notions of ‘community’ as well as ideologies and practices of social order based on segregation, exclusion and subordination. This begs us to question the degree to which current right‐wing populism, for instance, is really a reaction to neoliberal fragmentation or rather an extension of its more perverse but logical trajectories.
As Edmund Burke (1729-1797) who fiercely opposed the French Revolution wrote, “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” Today we are vulnerable to the politics of fear. The politics of fear is when leaders (or candidates for leadership) use fear as a driving or motivating factor for the people, to get them to vote a particular way, allow excesses in spending, or accept policies they might otherwise abhor. It’s banking on the fact that presenting people with an alleged threat to their well-being will elicit a powerful emotional response that can override reason and prevent a critical assessment of these policies. As author Mark Vernon remarks “… the politics of fear plays on an assumption that people cannot bear the uncertainties associated with [risk]. Politics then becomes a question of who can better deliver an illusion of control.”
Republican social policies tend to oppose extensive government regulations, government-funded social programs, affirmative action, and policies aimed at strengthening the rights of workers. While Republicans perpetually talk about getting tough on crime, they actually need it to get and stay in power. Pitting the lower middle class and poor against the really poor, who are simultaneously seen as responsible for and the victims of crime, is the way the economic elite divert attention away from the fact that under Republicans, there is less support for unemployment, income and social inequality – all of which lead to crime. Trump was for the little guy during the election, but once in office he surrounded himself with an economic elite who preach neoliberal doctrines which they know to be untrue in order to preserve their own social status. With social programs, more and more Republicans in 2020 fear being seen as the party of the one per cent.
A person’s social and economic status is highly relevant to their housing situation. More often than not, it will dictate the type of housing available and the likelihood that they will get the housing they are seeking. High market rents, insufficient social housing supply, low minimum wage and social assistance rates, and income-related rental requirements all make it very hard for a person who has low social and economic status to find and keep adequate housing. One’s housing situation is generally a good indicator of one’s overall social and economic condition. Many continue to struggle in the rental housing market, and may find themselves in housing that is neither affordable nor adequate, or, in extreme cases, may find themselves homeless. Pressures on decommodified housing stock since the beginning of the 1990s has translated into rising rents and the loss of inexpensive units that are easily accessible for households with limited financial resources.
Since the mid-1970s, neoliberal political-economic regimes have systematically replaced things like public ownership and collective bargaining with deregulation and privatization, promoting the individual over the group in the very fabric of society. Neoliberalism in terms of its practical effects on people working in areas subject to its power creates a climate of fear and marginalization which expresses itself in the form of cultural anxiety and doubt. When you have to compete in a world that is structurally unfair and where the game is so often loaded against the little guy, fear and stress result. With respect to the broad discussion of contemporary neoliberal globalization, the politics of fear is an important and sometimes underestimated aspect of how hegemony and power expresses and maintains itself. Fear tempts people to misread what truly threatens them. For example, fear persuades people to believe that immigration bans, the possession of automatic weapons, harsh criminal punishments, or the use of capital punishment can make society safer.
New criminology perspectives move from the motivations of the criminal to the factors that can promote criminal opportunities. The idea, therefore, is to increase the cost or reduce the benefits of the illegal (or uncivilized) action through the manipulation of the urban environment. This preventive model also follows the principle of individual responsibility of the (potential) victims: they can prevent offence with their behaviors. The main policy model is the multi‐level governance based on territorial and public‐private partnerships, community activation and citizens’ participation, control technologies such as CCTV. Neighborhood Watch, notes Neuberger (2009), is the largest voluntary movement in the UK and, according to Bennett et al. (2008), the largest single organized crime prevention activity in the US. The ‘success’ of Neighborhood Watch – and we should use this term advisably – has inspired wide-ranging lookalike schemes.
Ultimately, neoliberalism acts as a veil that obscures systemic social relations of power in its quest to crown each person as an individual who is master of their own fate. It thereby becomes an overwhelmingly influential, yet cloaked and diffuse, discourse that persuades people to deny their interdependence with each other, as well as with the environment. In accomplishing this, neoliberal ideology also obliges people to believe that competition, as well as the anguish of poverty, are natural and necessary. With respect to social assistance programs that evolved from the principles of the New Deal, however, over the past four decades there continues to be erosion and fragmentation of public institutions – tended to be piecemeal, underfunded and not prioritized by the state. These forms of specific economic policies (of neoliberal elites) that led to a shift in rationale away from cooperation towards competition and individualism are embraced by the populist right.
It would be an error to regard social media as a realm apart from the rest of the media environment. Instead, social media are an integral part of the total media system. Andrew Chadwick has theorized the emergence of “hybrid media systems” that encompass legacy and social media. In such systems, social and mass media feed off one another in recursive loops of so-called ‘viral reality’ whereby populist leaders and their followers co-create content, often through hashtags that straddle the social versus mass media divide and blur the lines between news and opinion. Actually, the security discourse is not any more a reserve for elites of professional experts, administrators and policy makers, but on the contrary, it becomes central in the public debate. The discourses of populists and mass media are widely based on an emotive storytelling: collective emotions such as outrage and anger have become a basic component of policymaking.
The commodification of politics and social services has stoked mass cynicism towards reigning neoliberal elites, creating receptive audiences for populist slogans to ‘drain the swamp’ at the heart of governments. Populists classically claim to speak for, and personify the interests of, ‘ordinary people’ against established elites (even when these leaders often emerge from elites themselves), and they condemn those who disagree as somehow not genuinely ‘of the people’. In particular, they tell people what they want to hear, often appealing to popular beliefs, prejudices, anxieties and fears, without the need to anchor their programs or policies in scientific or expert knowledge. They are ‘outliers’ – members of fringe minority factions of political organizations – that have hitherto operated only on the margins of established political systems. Trump is a master of fear, invoking it in concrete and abstract ways, summoning and validating it – has been able to grasp and channel the fear coursing through the electorate, until COVID-19.
Health and education provisioning, in particular, have huge implications for social stratification and the social reproduction of inequality, and they touch a core nerve of social politics because they structure the ways that various social groups might come into contact with each other in moments of intimacy and vulnerability. Social policies are in this sense fundamentally political given that they serve as the basis for defining and instituting rights and entitlements, distributing public goods, redistributing wealth, and articulating some of the main mechanisms of integration and segregation within societies. COVID-19 debates include political and economic ideas seriously discussed that had previously been dismissed as fanciful or utterly unacceptable: universal basic income, government intervention to house the homeless, and addressing the environmental crisis, to name just a few. On the other hand, the populist right supports ‘special interest’ groups and the ongoing fragmentation of public institutions. They cultivate resentment of the status quo – they are not agents of change for social policy.
1 Giuseppe Ricotta (25 July 2016) Neoliberalism and Control Strategies: The Urban Security Policies in Italy http://www.antoniocasella.eu/nume/Ricotta_2016.pdf