From the queues for unaffordable rentals in Sydney to the shuttered high streets of Northern England and the ICE executions in US suburbs, the chaos and decline of 2025 was the inevitable result of a global economic system that has stopped producing things and started devouring itself. Local and national tragedies are weaponised and co-opted by the far-right, worsening the vicious-circle of grievance, polarisation and distrust.
Why is everyone so angry? This polarisation is driven by ressentiment and the extreme wealth inequality of neoliberalism.
The politics of ressentiment
In modern societies formally founded on equality, individuals are constantly told they are equal, while gross disparities of power, wealth, status, education and property are maintained by corporations and the state.
Citizens are then incited by right-wing politicians and media to compare themselves with others and told that economic and social precarity is a personal failure. When actual social mobility and economic stability is materially restricted, this leads to a “tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability”.
Consequently, when a tragedy or disaster occurs, it feeds into pre-existing narratives of victimhood and exclusion, and is weaponised by media oligarchs and the billionaire class to divert attention from the fact that they are the principle cause of the economic and social instability.
This mutual hatred is ressentiment: the resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy, humiliation, and powerlessness, and driven by the real, material conditions of precarity and exploitation.
Individuals who feel “left behind” or culturally marginalised are told that they can restore their self-esteem by identifying with a group defined by ethnicity, religion, or race, and by demonising “others”. The political landscape transforms into us-versus-them, where the demonisation of internal enemies (such as minorities, welfare recipients or immigrants) becomes a tool for consolidating “in-group” (white, male) identity of the aggrieved group.
Neoliberal globalisation weakened traditional forms of authority and community support (like unions, churches, mutuals and the welfare state), leaving individuals isolated in a competitive, brutal “war of all against all” while the ultra-rich protected themselves through monopolies.
Financialised rentier capitalism
Everyday people across the world, and especially the West, are living under the “universal rule of capital“. For the last four decades, the rules of hyper-globalisation have handed liberal democracies a straitjacket and the political class and administrative state has willingly put the straightjacket on. It doesn’t matter if you vote for the centre-left or the Right, economic policy is decided by the bond market vigilantes.
The continued crises of 2025 were the consequences of this economic model.
- Productive investment is dead: Instead of building factories or homes, capital flows into asset speculation (housing bubbles, share buybacks, crypto and AI). The lending practices of commercial banks creates unthinkable sums of money to pump into this speculation.
- Austerity is global: Across the Anglosphere, politicians rule out taxing the ultra-rich because they are terrified of the threat of capital flight. The result is austerity cloaked as “fiscal responsibility”. They cut services benefits for everyday people instead — cuts to health, education, disability care, employment programs.
- Politics is marginal: When political leaders can’t change the economy, they become mere administrators of decline, for the benefit of the ultra-wealthy. Politics is “reduced to ineffectual, marginal tweaks” because of the structural logic of neoliberalism where the state functions primarily to manage the common affairs of the capitalist class.
This the logical endpoint of the global economic system: an economy distorted by extreme wealth inequality, where technological gains favour the ultra-wealthy, and policies support endless capital accumulation instead of the needs of everyday people. Extreme wealth concentration is corrosive to the basic premise of a free society, democracy and (with the climate crisis) civilisation itself.
The rise of the far-right
When the ability of the democratic state to control the economy is functionally restricted to focus primarily on protecting capital rather than protecting the welfare of citizens, a dangerous political vacuum is created and far-right extremists fill the space.
Political and intellectual elites, unable to explain the chaos through rationalist, liberal frameworks, retreat into binary thinking (e.g., the West versus Islam, free versus unfree, Abundance versus regulation). This failure exacerbates polarisation because everyday citizens, feeling unprotected by the state and ignored by the perceived cultural elites, are demobilised into “cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality“.
In the UK, Starmer’s “tin ear” to suffering has created a hatred that is almost visceral. In the US, Trump’s “relatively impressive” approval of -17 percent is because he still offers an outlet for “displaced anger” to his MAGA base — against immigrants, against Venezuela, against liberals. Trump performs resistance for his hard-core far-right base (even if fake), while centrists perform compliance to the hated neoliberal order.
Terror groups share the same underlying material cause, whether they are theological death-cults like ISIS, neo-Nazis marching through the streets, or rogue state-sanctioned murder squads like ICE. They offering a vehicle for the rage of the “disinherited” and “demobilised”. They appeal to (primarily young) men who, recoiling from the alienating cycle of consumerism, seek to destroy it.
The lessons for Australia
For us in Australia, the warning signs are flashing red.
We are seeing the same fragmentation and the same voter rage. While the LNP is the primary electoral victim of the rise of One Nation, the right-wing “frontlash” will also turn on Labor.
If the Federal Labor government continues to play by the rules of 1990s neoliberalism, refusing to tax the ultra-wealthy, break up monopolies, capture gas and mining super-profits, or touch the property market, they risk a similar fate to Starmer.
Rather than avoiding clash or trying to “manage away” the us-versus-them divisions, we need to realise that social conflict is integral to a healthy democracy. Democracy is not a polite procedural ritual and we shouldn’t bemoan “divisiveness”. Instead, we must recognise — as the billionaires and oligarchs do — that politics is as a struggle for material power.