IN A brilliant reassessment of the challenges posed to liberal democracy by the radical governments that came to power in Bolivia and Venezuela, scholar John Brown makes an incisive observation.

His book, Deepening Democracy in Post-Neoliberal Bolivia and Venezuela (Routledge, £130), examines the democratic gains enjoyed by hitherto excluded popular sectors under the anti-system outsiders Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez.

Nonetheless, their authoritarian reflexes comprising a form of “illiberal de-democratisation” vexed observers — not least the Anglo-American scholarly establishment — who had bought into a particular species of democracy under neoliberalism as the “only game in town.”

The problem with the often fulminating critiques levelled against Morales and Chavez was that they simply overlooked the behaviour of opponents who refused to play by the rules, namely recalcitrant conservative elites who enjoyed US backing.

As Brown points out, neoliberalism had stripped entire areas of popular sovereignty from the realm of politics, meaning that for poor people stable “market democracy” simply meant “low-quality democracy” which excluded them as much as the status quo ante.

The thread that Brown weaves links the rise of anti-system outsiders — often crudely branded “populists” — with the previous capture and erosion of democracy by a political elite monopolising both the centre-right and centre-left.

In the latest manifestation of this phenomenon, the election in Argentina of the far-right Javier Milei in November reflected as much a public appetite to escape the stranglehold of his Peronist predecessors as an affirmation of support for his economic fantasies.  

This same thread runs through a number of the books published in 2023, can be traced back to neoliberalism’s locus of origin in the US, explains the momentous events of our era, and draws attention to an ancient engine that continues to drive history — imperialism.

Moe Taylor’s North Korea, Tricontinentalism, and the Latin American Revolution (Cambridge University Press, £85, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/many-vietnams,) is a refreshing way to begin following this thread.

The author revisits the mid-1960s experiment in internationalism known as Tricontinentalism that established US imperialism firmly as the enemy of historical progress and origin of global instability.

Vietnam formed the centrepiece of the analysis emerging from revolutionary movements such as that in Cuba, with Che Guevara’s celebrated maxim a call to arms by creating “two, three, many Vietnams.”

The latter years of the Tricontinental coincided with the Chilean coup and the inauguration of a new phase in US imperialism — the experimental imposition of neoliberal economics.

The best concept with which to analyse the profound influence of neoliberalism as an ideology since then is that of hegemony, employed by Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams to revisit Gramsci’s ideas in Hegemony Now (Verso, £16.99, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/practical-strategies-combat-neo-liberalism,).

Gilbert and Williams demonstrate how neoliberalism became “common sense” as the only system of ideas, political practice and culture by which to live, with a number of books published this year exploring the deep implications of this bald truth.

Ian Greer and Charles Umney’s Marketization (Bloomsbury Academic, £55, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/required-reading-labour-party,) looks at a cornerstone of neoliberal strategy, the extension of private competition into areas formerly off limits such as healthcare, and Elizabeth Anderson’s Hijacked (Cambridge University Press, £20, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/what-work,) shows how progressive ideas have been used to impose a conservative work ethic stripped of its original Puritan morality.

And alongside neoliberal hegemony comes oligarchic rule (Kevin Funk, Rooted Globalism, Indiana University Press, £27.99, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/finding-cracks-globalisation,) and populism, whose key driver — alluded to by Brown in Latin America — is also identified by Larry Bartels (Democracy Erodes from the Top, Princeton University Press, £25, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/nowt-so-queer-folk,) and Fred Paxton (Restrained Radicals, Cambridge University Press, £85, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/all-talk-and-no-trousers,) as the widening gulf in market democracies between politicians and the public.

But while writers also explore how the left might resist neoliberal hegemony — permanent grassroots mobilisation (Simon Escoffier, Mobilizing at the Urban Margins, Cambridge University Press, £85, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/natural-born-activists,) or wooing the petty bourgeoisie (Dan Evans, A Nation of Shopkeepers, Repreater, £7.99), the question that lingers leaves a sense of dread: is imperialist hunger ever satisfied?

Recent work does not augur well, with US fantasies of domination now extending to space (Bleddyn Bowen, Original Sin, Hurst, £20) and cyber-space (Max Smeets, No Shortcuts, Hurst, £25, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/offensive-mindset,).

In the face of such ambition, our only recourse might be to reach for the inspiration of another writer, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, whose celebrated 1863 novel asking simply What Is to Be Done? (Cornell University Press, £23.99) inspired, from his jail cell, generations of subsequent revolutionaries.