Brian Judge's Democracy in Default
Trevor Jackson, at NYRB: "[T]he political theorist Brian Judge argues in his superb book Democracy in Default (2024) [that] modern liberalism has constituted itself around a denial of the need for distributive conflicts. Instead of open conflict over resources and rewards (which is common to other forms of political ideology), liberalism puts its faith in things like education, technology, expertise, and, ultimately, market forces to indefinity postpone those conflicts. As he puts it, '"The market" is a discursive construct operating within liberalism that reconciles the inherent tension between private property and universal consent.'"
"For decades now, the ideology of free-market liberalism has obfuscated the ongoing distributive conflicts of the world, but it has not blunted the material suffering of the people on the losing end. [...] The failure of market liberalism to reconcile political equality and economic inequality has produced a growing crisis of legitimacy and a growing constituency amenable to antiliberal figures like Trump, Orbán, Modi, and Bolsonaro."