‘Neoliberalism, far-right politics, and the shrinking White middle class in Southern California’s Inland Empire’

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines far-right, authoritarian politics among middle-class White communities of the Inland Empire region of Southern California. Grounded in a materialist theoretical framework and an analysis of 30 semi-structured interviews and the recent political-economic history of the region, I interrogate the political and social attitudes of study participants in relation to their experiences and perceptions of changing political-economic and sociocultural conditions in Southern California in the twenty-first century. Drawing upon Gramsci and the critical theoretical literature on authoritarian populism and neoliberalism, I consider how study participants’ authoritarian politics and ideologies reflect a reactionary political response to processes associated with the reorganization of racialized capital accumulation under neoliberalism. I argue that the appeal of these movements is, in part, how they provide commonsense (hegemonic) explanations for economic precarity, demographic shifts, and immigration, among other issues, while at the same time normalizing this increasingly exploitative and brutal regime of capital accumulation.