What are demagogues offering them after all? They're offering security, stability, identity, solidarity, fraternity - these are traditionally left projects. The left has to understand that if it doesn't do the hard work, the right is always going to benefit. The far right in particular. The left, or whatever there is left of the left, simply failed to understand these imperatives are important, and the far right has very successful hijacked them.

Author Pankaj Mishra examines the rise of populist anger across the modern world - as reaction to (and against) a neoliberal consensus with nothing to offer working people, and as sign of democracy's slow corruption under capitalism - and calls for the left to fundamentally transform its mission to one of solidarity and liberation, beyond the chains of economic self-interest.

Pankaj is author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Interview transcript via Antidote Zine

Guest

Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra is the author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, and several other books of nonfiction and fiction. Mishra won the 2024 Weston International Award, as well as the 2014 Windham–Campbell Prize for nonfiction. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books, among others.