How neoliberalism created the populist backlash

Decades of neoliberal managerialism hollowed out political leadership, creating the vacuum in which right-wing populism could thrive, writes Dr James Schuurmans-Stekhoven.

FOR DECADES, modern democracies have operated under a comforting illusion: that governance could be safely outsourced to spreadsheets, technocratic consensus and market-driven metrics.

Public administration was treated as a frictionless optimisation problem, overseen by an elite class insulated from the messy friction of everyday civic life.

Yet, in engineering a system designed never to break, the establishment made it profoundly brittle. By systematically purging the political and cultural ecosystem of the genuine outsider – the disruptive, independent-minded figure capable of challenging the status quo – the neoliberal consensus created what can be understood as a managed void.

And as both historical precedent and institutional sociology demonstrate, when a society systematically outlaws genuine change, the system does not remain stable; it merely stores up a compounding debt of unaddressed friction.

The aftermath of that suppression is now all around us: the rise of modern right-wing populism and its inevitable slide into kakistocracy — rule by the least qualified.

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To understand how we arrived at an era defined by performative political chaos, we have to examine what the managerial elite replaced.

Throughout modern political history, human systems have survived the natural tendency of institutions to calcify through the periodic intervention of what sociologists term the charismatic avant-garde. These are arresting figures endowed with deep intellectual complexity and the raw agency required to shatter obsolete norms and realign collective behaviour with a changing world.

Neoliberalism, however, treated the very concept of the disruptive outsider as a systemic hazard. Through professional managerial filtration, credentialism and the rise of what organisational theorists describe as the “audit society” (characterised by endless rituals of verification and standardised compliance), political and corporate establishments erected strict institutional gates.

As Michael Power, professor of accounting, noted in his foundational analysis of institutional control, systems increasingly prioritised formal accountability and risk management over adaptive capacity. To rise to power, an aspirant had to pass through hyper-standardised, risk-averse filters and KPIs that rewarded procedural conformity above all else. Anyone whose cognitive architecture threatened institutional harmony was systematically filtered out.

Recognising that human societies retain an intuitive craving for exceptional leadership during times of crisis, the system did something clever: it industrialised faux charisma. It manufactured the safe, corporate surrogate — the “TED talk visionary”, the agile CEO, corporatised popular music and the reality TV icon. We were served up wave after wave of offensively inoffensive celebrities. Stripped of intellectual depth and thermodynamic power, this manufactured performance provided the aesthetic theatre of rebellion with zero structural consequence.

By sealing the gates against genuine outsiders and laundering rebellion into consumer entertainment, the political establishment created pseudo-charisma and forestalled the immediate sociopolitical tensions. But it did so by evacuating competence from the commanding heights of public life.

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When an artificial system suppresses the natural cycle of renewal, the friction does not disappear — it compounds behind closed doors. Economic data from the OECD and labour market analysts consistently highlight how decades of wage stagnation relative to productivity, combined with widening geographic disparities between thriving metropolitan cores and hollowed-out regional areas, eroded civic trust.

Yet, the managerial elite insisted their models were self-correcting. The few remaining critics endured ridicule and were dismissed as offering ignorant populist nonsense.

When that compounding friction finally breached the petrified gates, the public hunger for an outsider could no longer be contained. The collective psyche demanded an immediate, uncompromising rupture with the technocratic status quo. But because decades of managerial gatekeeping had hunted down and rooted out the genuine independent thinkers, there were no multi-dimensional, cognitively complex outsiders left to guide a constructive structural redesign.

What stepped into the vacuum was a degraded, reactive substitute: modern right-wing populism. Denied intellectual depth, the populist movement substituted strategic vision with raw grievance, hyper-simplified tribalism and performative anti-establishment theatre. Because the system had spent decades punishing competence that fell outside accepted corporate parameters, the figures who successfully breached the broken gates frequently lacked depth, administrative skill or strategic vision.

Thus, neoliberalism’s suppression of genuine charisma paved the wide and direct highway to kakistocracy. The public, desperate to smash a system that had locked them out, accepted an unprincipled and chaotic surrogate, trading technocratic ossification for performative decay.

The trajectory from neoliberal management to populist backlash reveals the fatal flaw of any social order that attempts to engineer human friction out of existence. By eschewing and outlawing the avant-garde – a natural and adaptive sociological element – and replacing dynamic leadership with corporate theatre, the establishment ensured that when a real crisis finally struck, the state would be utterly defenceless.

It is neoliberalism that spewed forth the talentless national leaders (bereft of both moral convictions and courage) we are now forced to endure as the elites ransack the few remaining remnants of our society.

The managed void cannot hold forever. When a society forestalls profound tensions through structural denial of human disruptive forces, the eventual correction is never a graceful pivot. It is a hard historical reset forced by reality upon a system that forgot how to change.

Dr James Schuurmans-Stekhoven has a career defined by high-level academic rigour, a polymathic approach to research and a commitment to strategic optimisation across multiple disciplines.