Societal polarisation and capitalist democracy

Abstract

Societal polarisation is inherent to capitalist democracy, which is grounded on the reproduction of structural inequalities required by the workings of the capitalist system. The scope for the exercise of democratic rights, including the rights of academic freedom and autonomy is restricted and subordinated to capitalist interests, a dynamic exacerbated by the empowered rise of illiberal political projects, in particular those led by far-right actors, and by associated neocolonial processes in the peripheries of global capitalist democracies. The current episode of the long-term ‘war in Gaza’ has exposed these contradictions in the core Western capitalist democracies questioning the strength of their commitment to academic freedom and autonomy and to the defense of the basic principles of democracy. This succinct response to Hanafi’s article includes some examples to illustrate this intrinsic character of societal polarisation in capitalist democracies and reflects on key challenges facing dialogical sociology partnered with dialogical liberalism in the current global context.

Sari Hanafi's (2025) article centres the attention on the challenges facing academic freedom in Western universities, illustrated by the blatant manifestations of social polarisation around the ‘war in Gaza’ that forms part of the decades-long collective punishment inflicted on Palestinian society (Baroud, 2010), a process whose most recent episode triggered in 2023 does not look as if it is going to end anytime soon but rather might become dwarfed by the escalation of war that threatens to engulf the Middle East and well beyond while I am writing this text in June 2025. From a wider perspective, reading the article in the context of the ongoing worldwide unashamed violations of basic human rights recalls what Eric Hobsbawm, reflecting on the aftermath of the 1990 to 1991 Persian Gulf War, termed ‘barbarism’. This means ‘the disruption and breakdown of the systems of rules and moral behaviour embodied in the institutions of states dedicated to the rational progress of humanity’ (Hobsbawm, 1994: 45), which brings out crudely the recurrent extreme forms of polarisation characterising the increasingly violent attacks against the key global institutions and principles nominally defended by the core Western capitalist democracies and their replications in peripheral areas of the capitalist world order, where academic freedom and autonomy – and democracy itself – have become seriously compromised (Bergan et al., 2020; Maassen et al., 2025; FAU, 2025).

In this connection, Hanafi's main argument is grounded on the assumption that Western academic institutions have been historically characterised by a liberal approach to academic freedom, in a broader context of societal tolerance of free speech and respect for diverse cultural identities, practices, religious beliefs and political preferences, a long-standing Western tradition under attack in recent decades as a consequence of increasingly illiberal political discourses and practices adopted by nominally liberal social actors, a contradictory convergence of otherwise antagonistic positions that Hanafi calls ‘Symbolic Liberalism’. Notorious manifestation of the regressive consequences of these processes are mushrooming manifold forms of social polarisation, the growing intolerance for respectful disagreement and debate, and the silencing, criminalisation, and repression of dissenting positions in academic institutions of the world's leading, traditionally liberal democratic countries, particularly the United States, the United Kingdom, and parts of Western Europe. I take Hanafi's article as a timely invitation to reflect on some aspects of these processes, briefly referring to a few experiences, some from Latin America, a region mentioned by Hanafi in his article as one where there would be a higher degree of empathy and concern among academics with the abhorrent levels of human suffering currently being unleashed in Gaza, than in the increasingly illiberal core Western democracies. ¹

To elaborate this succinct response to the article, I felt the need to look back, to place the intensification of societal polarisation and the related illiberal and anti-democratic attacks on academic freedom and autonomy in some perspective. In this regard, from the viewpoint of an academic born and originally trained as a sociologist in Latin America, the experience of societal polarisation, in contexts of recurrent or even permanent attacks on academic freedom and autonomy, and the silencing of dissenting positions, is part and parcel of the fragile and ever crumbling democratisation processes that characterised the region during much of the twentieth century. This is a situation that has been worsening in recent decades with the growing influence of extreme right-wing forces (McCoy, 2024), often funded by organisations based in the core Western capitalist democracies. Also, in the region liberalism has often become entangled with regressive conservatism in symbiotic arrangements that help the elites in their pursuit of keeping territorial and political control. In some ways it can be argued that extreme forms of economic liberalism have been, and largely remain, the dominant approach adopted by otherwise socially regressive, ultraconservative elites, that do not hesitate to exercise brutal control, often with the support of the military and influential religious institutions, particularly ultraconservative sectors of the Catholic Church's hierarchy, and, increasingly, also of fanatical branches of evangelical sects that have significantly expanded their reach in the region, becoming strategic supporters of far right extremist antidemocratic political groups (Guimarães et al., 2023).

Moreover, even when and where some degree of democratisation processes took root in the region, large sectors of the population, particularly indigenous and Afro-descendent communities, have remained the object of discrimination, displacement, dispossession, invisibilisation, silencing, criminalisation or straightforward annihilation (CIMI, 2024), often in the name of Western civilisation and democracy. These systemic violations of basic human rights are often played down, ignored or invisibilised by academics. Regrettably, mirroring similar processes taking place in core Western democracies, with some exceptions, the social sciences, including sociology, to a worrying extent continue to be part of the problem, as indicated by the slow incorporation of indigenous or Afro-descendent communities, as well as of those sectors marginalised from mainstream social life, into meaningful dialogues and participation in substantive democratisation processes, including in academia. I say ‘mirroring’ because these experiences are not restricted to Latin America or other peripheral areas of global capitalism. An example from Ontario, Canada, that I recently came across while writing about the recognition of indigenous knowledges in academia illustrates the question. In a book on the topic, Dr Dawn Martin-Hill, a female scholar from the Mohawk indigenous community, commented:

Aboriginal people live in the shadow of colonialism; on top of this, Aboriginal women must contend with violence and sexism in their own communities as well as racism and marginalization in academic institutions. Some non-Native academics refuse to respect Indigenous Knowledge or women. What does it mean to be a Mohawk anthropologist? I still do not know. Professionally, I have been identified as the first Mohawk anthropologist in Canada. There is no home for us at universities or in academia in general. Being the first of anything is little short of a nightmare. (Martin-Hill, 2008: 6)

It is probably fair to say that this example from Canada likely reflects to an important extent the situation facing indigenous and Afro-descendent communities in other regions colonised and dominated by people mostly of European origin, including much of Latin America. Nevertheless, achieving institutional recognition in scientific institutions and universities, does not preserve scholars from the consequences of the kind of extreme societal polarisation processes discussed by Hanafi. For example, at the time of writing this text, the self-described anarcho-capitalist government of Argentina headed by President Javier Milei since late 2023 is attempting to erase the country's historical memories of criminal state-led violence and to dismantle the internationally recognised human rights institutions of the country. This involves attacking their leading members, who include the world renowned Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the 1980 Peace Nobel Prize laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel, and seeking to delete their archives containing evidence of the crimes against humanity committed by the last civil-military dictatorship (1976–1983), crimes denied by the government and right-wing sectors, which include academics supportive of, or at least silent about the extremist attack on democracy launched by the democratically elected president and his entourage of far right forces operating in the name of ‘freedom’ (Jacobin, 2024). Milei's government is imitating US President Donald Trump's attacks on US universities, though for partially different reasons, as Argentina has not seen the kind of protests waged against the ‘war in Gaza’ taking place in the United States and other Western democracies. In Argentina, the government attempts to silence academics, destroy the country's long-standing tradition of academic autonomy, and close universities as part of a broader push to destroy public institutions, including hospitals, scientific research bodies, and regulatory agencies, among others. It has mounted an operation run from the government's headquarters, using an army of social media influencers and supportive monopolistic conventional media companies to discredit opponents, while also sending the security forces to brutally suppress those exercising their Constitutional rights to protest publicly in defence of public education, health, essential services, and against the destruction of workers’ living conditions. One of the recent events of resistance from public academic institutions against these policies was described in an article published by the journal Nature as a ‘huge protest against “scienticide”’ (De Ambrosio and Koop, 2025). ²

It can be argued that the examples briefly described in this section are neither surprising nor entirely unexpected. On the contrary, I think that addressing the crucial challenge presented by the growing attacks against academic freedom and autonomy, and against democracy more generally, in the context of rising illiberal extremism in formally democratic countries requires emphasising the fact that the kinds of societal polarisation discussed in Hanafi's article are not alien but are rather intrinsic to capitalist democracy.

The intrinsic character of societal polarisation in capitalist democracies

Capitalist democratisation processes have been historically driven by social polarisation. In fact, polarisation is not just a consequence but rather is a fundamental element for the existence of capitalist social orderings, as well put decades ago by the Fabian socialist British sociologist T.H. Marshall. Writing at a time of relative optimism in the aftermath of Second World War, during the creation of the British Welfare State, Marshall argued that the capitalist order and the development of citisenship rights, a core component of liberal democracy, are at war with each other, given that they are grounded on the opposing principles of structural class inequality required by capitalism and the ‘ideals, beliefs and values’ of equality associated with the progressive qualitative and quantitative expansion of civil, political and social rights (Marshall, 1950: 29).

It is unsurprising that, despite its reformist character, Marshall's classical long-term historical progressive approach to capitalist democracy's intrinsic societal polarisation processes became a main target for proponents of the extreme forms of free-market liberal capitalism driven by the ‘New Right’ that has radically transformed Western democracies since the 1970s and 1980s. In particular, both the notion of social rights of citizenship and its practical implementation in relation to providing universal public education, healthcare or essential basic services, became key targets for the aggressive wave of neoliberal reforms launched during this period in the United States and the United Kingdom (King and Waldron, 1988), and then imposed internationally, very often violently. Perhaps, for some the mention of ‘violence’ here may seem excessive, but if we recall Johan Galtung's definition of the term from the standpoint of our current historical context, the connection may be more understandable for sceptics: ‘I see violence as avoidable insults to basic human needs, and more generally to life, lowering the real level of needs satisfaction below what is potentially possible’ (Galtung, 1990: 292).

Indeed, the seemingly unending neoliberal experiment requires the use of a wide range of violences, including physical, cultural and epistemic, increasingly through reincarnations of historical forms of ‘necrocapitalist’ violences (Banerjee, 2008; see also Collins and Rothe, 2020), associated with ongoing neocolonial and neo-imperialist processes, carried out largely in the name of democracy and freedom.

In this connection, it is worth recalling here the 1975 Trilateral Commission's assessment of the state of what the main Western powers and their Cold War ally Japan termed ‘The Crisis of Democracy’. The authors defined this as a crisis caused not by enemies external to Western democracies, but rather by the fact that the dominant Western capitalist democracies had allowed an excessive degree of democratic participation, triggering spiralling demands for expanded citizenship rights that, they argued, were overburdening national states that they deemed unable to satisfy these demands (Crozier et al., 1975). The decades-long processes leading to the global situation addressed by that report were also characterised by extreme forms of societal polarisation, which the response to the ‘crisis’ given by the United States and its allies further deepened and worsened, notably by promoting, funding, and supporting criminal civil-military dictatorships to suppress dissent and social and political mobilisations whether peaceful or not, conspicuously in Latin America but not only. These dictatorships’ crimes against humanity are still being addressed in the courts of justice (e.g. Lessa, 2022). In turn, the political and epistemic polarisation unleashed by these processes is alive and having grave consequences for academic freedom, and for democracy more generally, in most countries of the region. In this connection, the current wave of highly illiberal political forces gaining increasing influence in capitalist democracies both in core and peripheral countries, have as key objectives the negation of these criminal histories of recent decades and the justification and legitimation of current attempts to obliterate democratic advances achieved in earlier periods.

Conclusion

Sari Hanafi suggests that dialogical sociology and a liberal dialogical project would provide an alternative to overcome the extreme and diverse forms of societal polarisation considered in the article. I broadly agree and express my strong commitment for the defence of academic freedom and autonomy. Still, crucial challenges for dialogical sociology are how to transcend elitist, ethnocentric and other intra-academic barriers that continue to hinder dialogue, and how to co-construct social orders grounded on the principles of equality, inclusion, and human rights, which also affect inter- and trans-disciplinary dialogues that must be embraced by sociology in the current context of geno-ecocidal capitalism.