Unite the Kingdom was a day for wearing St Georges flags that combined with the saturation demonising of Muslims and migrants. This from one of the keynote speakers, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, leader of the anti-transgender Party of Women: “It’s not too late to get Islam out of our classrooms. It’s not too late to get Islam out of that building [pointing at the Houses of Parliament]. And it’s not too late to get Islam out of …..” and so on. To imagine the word Islam replaced above by another religious minority is to also get an insight into an order of the presently permissible. The Far Right displaced the mid-May Nakba day commemoration from Parliament Square and Whitehall, a decision by Sir Mark Rowley, head of the MET police. The streets around Whitehall are littered with cans of Stella. The McDonald’s at Charing Cross is rammed, every seat has someone draped with a George Cross. The staff are all visibly migrants, or the children of migrants, many Muslim. If you are in a McJob you have no choice but to work through this. The vast majority of McDonald’s employees are on zero hours; McDonald’s offers formal fixed contracts but somehow the McJob and zero hours were made for each other – a raft of legal cases swirl around working conditions as in this BBC report. 

At the same time, there is no place like a McDonald’s for a critical reading on the making of the Far Right today. McDonald’s isn’t just another fast food chain with industrially intensive production with almost clinically regulated low wage labour. The presence of a McDonald’s on the high street or drive-by means much more. The Golden Arches are the very firmament of the world we live in, as in a McWorld that oversees the nature of the state, the meaning of sovereignty and form of democracy we live in. The term McWorld is from Benjamin Barber’s essay Jihad vs. McWorld – an essay that today may jar with its metaphors but nails the contest that matters in our time: tribalisation v globalisation. But through McWorld, according to Barber, democracy will prevail. It should be noted that Barber was writing in 1992 when neoliberalism was firmly established in the West and perestroika finally forced the dissolution of the USSR. 1992 was also the year when Francis Fukuyama released his End of History thesis in which liberal democracy and market liberalisation blended interchangeably at “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Both Barber and Fukuyama underplay or overlook the violence by which neoliberalism established itself. First in its beginning as a state project with the military coup by Pinochet in Chile in 1973. Then, in the liberal democracies with Thatcher in Britain, followed by Reagan in America. Unlike Pinochet, Thatcher used the instruments of liberal democracy to impose her neoliberal ‘counter-revolution’ on society: to summarise, it meant the ruthless privatisation of public services, forcing open the state to transnational capital, slashing public expenditure in particular welfare spending, and of course stripping the power of the labour unions. The scale of state violence all this involved is as well documented as the resistance to Thatcherism. But after Thatcher had done the hard work, most of the advanced liberal democracies of the West came to adopt the neoliberal model. The collective pain inflicted on society only came to express itself as a form of global resistance with the antiglobalisation movement of the mid-90s. This was a coalition of the ‘global South’ and the ‘global North’ against the imposition of  ‘market fundamentalism’ through GATT and WTO 1995. The slogans “Another world is possible”, ‘our resistance is as global as capital‘ were met by state brutality as in the Battle of Seattle 1999 and Genoa 2001. But the force and repression used to embed the neoliberal project is the forgotten violence destined to return in mutated forms. 

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Half a century after Thatcher, Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism (2019) identifies the dismantling of the ‘social state’ as the defining work of neoliberalism – ergo, Thatcher’s ‘there is no such thing as society’.  With the social state broken, the electoral parties of the liberal democracies progressively became mere functionaries of transnational capital; the markets governed the liberal state through them. Wages inevitably stagnated and social inequality became rife, patched up by borrowing. The banks raked it in through credit cards and subprime loans and mortgages. It was a debt-fuelled time bomb that blew up with the financial crisis of 2008. The rulers of the liberal democracies as elected representatives responded with taxpayer funded bailouts for the banks, and austerity for the poor. The reality of who democracy serves became clear as water: the 1% as Occupy put it. According to John Arlidge in the Sunday Times (26 April 2015) the super-rich doubled their wealth with the 2008 crisis. In the ‘movement of the squares’ that took hold in capitals, the demand was for the reform of democracy. But instead 2008 led to something radically different: a counter-revolution that exploited the financial crisis to extrapolate the power of a new kind of wealth of tech and digital finance, a counter-revolution that would harness the social despair to clothe it in new reactionary forms of libertarianism. Far from the reforms demanded in the Occupy encampments, its effects on democracy could be foretold by a 2009 essay by Peter Thiel, then a co-founder of Paypal with Elon Musk, and early Facebook investor,

Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

Thiel’s oxymoron of democracy would be addressed in a way tangentially opposite to the chants of  ‘This is what democracy looks like‘ in the horizontally-run encampments. It would redefine politics. While this counter-revolution took on many names, ‘neoliberalism on steroids’, ‘mutant neoliberalism’, Wendy Brown writes of it, as  “a second wave of reaction to neoliberalism born, this one more unruly, populist, and ugly”, one that deflected and channelled the wrath of the people so it came out, in the time of Obama, “screaming about ISIS, undocumented immigrants, affirmative action myths, and above all, demonizing government and the social state for the economic catastrophe ..”

Thiel would famously say that ‘technology is an alternative to politics’, claiming that ‘we can never win elections‘. But underlying that was a strategy to overturn the democratic process by connecting the bottom strata of society to the very top – to create its own demos in its own vision on its own platforms – the alt-Right. Thus whilst Thiel and a club of billionaires would become funders of fringe reactionary groups, they also acted as advisers to those with political ambitions like property billionaire Donald Trump. Another hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, a key Trump megadonor combined with Steve Bannon, Trump’s strategist, to co-found the data harvesting political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica. 

Cambridge Analytica would come to prominence in Britain with Brexit when the founder and financier of Leave.EU, Arron Banks was accused of working secretly with the company by harvesting Facebook data to spread alt-Right directives; according to the Information Commissioner’s Office this involved just over a million accounts in Britain used for sharing anti-Brussels, anti-migration messages. A small fraction of the global 87 million Facebook accounts harvested by Cambridge Analytica perhaps, but it made clear that tech had changed the very nature of the democratic process, a process subject to manipulation by a small number of individuals who wielded greater power than national agencies. 
And whilst Brexit was portrayed as the resistance of the ordinary against the establishment, an unprecedented amount of money poured into it; in addition to individual donations, Leave.EU received some two million pounds from private equity funds and over 5 million from hedge funds. In their book on how City money shaped the Brexit vote, Marlène Benquet and Théo Bourgeron (2022) read Brexit as the victory of one form of finance over another, the victory of a ‘second-wave finance’ over ‘first-wave finance’: first-wave being traditional or mainstream finance as in the large banks, insurance companies and institutional investment companies whose vested interests lay with Britain as part of the EU; second-wave as ‘alt-finance’ meaning the hedge funds, private equity and alternative investors who saw the EU and its regulations as a threat to its vision of Britain as a bastion of free capital. 

The watershed of Brexit showed how established parliamentary parties like Labour and the Conservatives could be outmanoeuvred. But worse was to come for them. The anomaly of referendum was that the parties who did not want Brexit became its administrators. Administrators of the pain of its economic costs, yet incapable of rapprochement with the EU for fear of provoking the Brexit vote-bank. Brexit Britain was a nation stuck in a limbo with increasing austerity to be re-instrumentalised by an alt-Right.

Then came Covid. Covid showed us why the political class could do no more than repeat the same mistakes as with Brexit because they had no power to do otherwise having sold their own services and public sector to private interests. Even the much vaunted welfarism of Keynesianism of furlough that paid 80% of wages to ‘stay at home and do nothing’ went into the coffers of online retailers like Amazon and platforms like Uber, Deliveroo whilst drawing out the social fault-lines through those forced to work in the pandemic. The administration of the vast intelligence gathering called the state of emergency was mopped up by corporations like Serco and Palantir (another Thiel project). Communication platforms like Zoom, Skype became the basic social infrastructure. The roll out of the vaccine produced by publicly funded research went to enrich corporate pharma, Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, etc.

Covid and its state of emergency established an architecture of state controlled by tech corporations and alt-finance. We had entered a new order of politics. But whilst the established parties remained in the hubris of their parliamentary power and its rule book, the newly formed ‘anti-system’ parties like Reform were moving on to the next steps of dismantling the liberal order, reversing ‘woke’ policies such as net zero on climate change, the Race Relations Act, overturning asylum and so on. How far these are now entrenched as realisable goals in the minds of a significant section of the electorate can be measured by the polls and on the podium of Far Right gatherings. One speaker at Unite the Kingdom began with an attack [prior to my recording] on the Conservative’s net zero suggesting it be replaced by zero migration, with an emphasis on the zero. The speech then went on to summarise the economic devastation of life in small towns enabled by the rule of establishment parties before concluding with a passionate call to action by the tens of thousands of Winston Churchills before him. The alchemy on offer, which no establishment party will grant, is the replacement of helplessness by agency, aggrandised agency for the battle to come. Entrenched in the psyche of the Far Right now is a battle to come, a battle now firmly embedded in social media, one that will destroy woke liberalism and save the country. 
 

Wendy Brown in her last chapter of In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, writing on Trump as the ascendency of an unrestrained violence through democratic means, refers us back to Nietzsche’s concepts of nihilism and ressentiment – the ressentiment of lost entitlement of white suprematism that now roams freely given expression in a ‘nihilism beyond Nietzsche’s vivid dreams’.

It might still be that a McWorld as imagined by Benjamin Barber still remains, a world whose stability is underwritten by the McDonald’s and the global brands on the high street. If we look into these brands and their ownership, we will find the same names – Blackrock, the Vanguard Group, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, State Street Corporation and so on. Names that may mean little to the ordinary person but  are the investment companies who own the brands in our shopping trays and who also own bits of each other – eg Blackrock owns about 7% of JP Morgan. Such is the circular nature of global capital that underpins our stability of life. Behind all the fronts of swirling capital, the Golden Arches of McDonald’s remain the symbol of the integrating success of global capitalism. “No two countries that have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.” But that war is now internal to capital itself. This is now an alt-McWorld emerging out from neoliberal’s own evolution. Having wrung dry the social state, the project has now pushed on to another level of extraction.

Reading the correlation between capital’s advancement and the Far Right today, Inga Rademacher (2025) explains how capital mobility has reached almost perfect levels though new financial machines whilst ‘the pie of economic productive capital’ declines. Théo Bourgeron (2026) writes that we are not just in a crisis of political representation but in a crisis of accumulation. That in the management of the contradictions, the Far Right and its scapegoating plays a key role in the formulation of policies to restrict the rights of selected groups and minorities; policies which ironically then strengthen the power of capital to intensify, not ameliorate, its exploitation of the general working population. 

All this follows the well-worn path of capital’s use of the reactionary Right for its ends. One that exploits every opportunity to fan the flames of unrest. Today it is driven on social media, on platforms owned by the same financial interests who profit and draw political advantage from it. That is a dynamic against which the capacities of contest by what remains of a liberal democracy only diminishes in time. 

Far from an end-state where democracy and the market co-exist in harmony, we are in an alt-McWorld where ressentiment and nihilism reign, where it’s the Far Right who march under the banner of Unite the Kingdom. But in a time when ‘democracy’ has been long been sold to the interests of capital, we cling on, even after Brexit, even after Covid, to the very word. To that end, the measure of a McWorld from the 90s only helps as a reality check on what can function as a barometer of order today.

Siraj Izhar is an artist and activist. His writings are at amplife.org