Neoliberalism and the new political crisis in the West

With the literature on austerity having established that retrenchment hits lower income groups the hardest and that struggling regions are more affected than those that are prosperous, a focus on the co-constitution of race and neoliberalism provides a fresh insight into the structures of inequality that persist in society. [...]it allows for an understanding of how the experience of recession and austerity has bolstered support for an anti-globalisation, prolocalism vision that looks set to further marginalise the poorest members of society by camouflaging systems of privilege within an apparent meritocracy that 'mask[s] racism through its value-laden project' (Roberts and Mahtani, 2010: 253). In both countries the rhetorical case made for the restoration of a sovereign nation-state has allowed racism to flourish. Since the 1980s and the onset of neoliberalism, industrial decline and the reversal of the post-war settlement that protected labour from capital has left many facing the prospect and reality of downward social mobility (MacLeavy and Manley, 2018b). First modalities of difference such as race that remain salient in terms of the social positions of minority groups are elided and closed off from public scrutiny and debate (Fraser, 2017). [...]by depoliticising the lived realities of other constituents on the grounds of race or citizenship the narrative of white victimhood militates against the establishment of a multi-ethnic class politics, which is necessary to support and enable alternatives to neoliberal hegemony and the ethno-nationalism project on which it currently depends (Virdee and McGeever, 2018). Because it recognises the grievances felt by the traditional middle classes, underemployed skilled workers, the unemployed and informal workers with no realistic prospect of stable employment, ethno-nationalism can appear attractive, encouraging voters into believing that the forces promoting protectionism and xenophobia are good for them (Fraser, 2017).