Right-wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism ― Regression and Hope in a Time Without Future

Commentators across the political spectrum have argued that the future has been absorbed by an ever-expanding present to which we cannot imagine alternatives. The notion that we have lost the ability to imagine change-culturally, socially, and politically-has become one of the defining problems of our time. But what is the difference between the populist narratives of those who promise to return us to a glorious past and those who promise to lead us into a glorious future?

Often, this book argues, not very much at all. Suggesting that Donald Trump and Elon Musk, neo-authoritarianism and capitalist hyper-innovation, are two sides of the same coin, Mathias Nilges shows that both today's reactionaries and futurists harness and profit from the same temporal crises of our present. Looking to design, popular culture, art, and recent theoretical as well as popular political discussions, this book demonstrates how we can get to the bottom of our era's purported inability to imagine true alternatives to the present. Nilges offers ways of understanding the re-emergence of familiar and disturbing forms of right-wing politics and culture (authoritarianism, paternalism, fascism) not as a matter of historical repetition but as dangerous consequences of the contradictions of the current stage of capitalism.

Critical theory, in particular the work of Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, allows us to trace this development and to reveal the plural temporalities of our present that include both dangerous reactionary desires and unfulfilled wishes for liberation in which we may find a way of recovering a politics and culture of hope.