Many have said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. In the case of the public sphere under contemporary capitalism, we should consider whether the order has been reversed.
Perhaps tragedy and farce now walk hand in hand.
There is a grim theatricality to the political spectacle of the 21st Century, one which suggests less the rational-critical discourse envisioned by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas in his lament for the bourgeois public sphere, and more the feudal pageantry of representative publicness that he discerned in the ancien régime.
Only now, the court has moved online, the sovereign tweets, and the ritual sacrifice of enemies of the people takes place via algorithmically optimised outrage.
Political theory, especially that of the more critical persuasion, is always casting about for concepts to characterise putatively new configurations. This search has been particularly intense in the last two decades, driven by the collapse of North Atlantic liberalism.
That’s where the concept of refeudalisation comes into play. Its proponents typically start with the privatisation of formerly public functions and the reconfiguration of profit generation, shifting away from production, toward rent-seeking of various kinds, AKA rentier capitalism.
Beyond that, there is a great deal of debate amongst leftist academics and researchers, which has generated a literature so opaque that even specialists have difficulty parsing it.
If we focus on cultural as opposed to economic history, however, another possible avenue of approach suggests itself.
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas describes the pre-bourgeois world of power as one of representation in the most literal sense. People did not mediate power through institutions or deliberative bodies; they were power, and their presence was a performance of that fact.
The parade, the coronation, the royal hunt—these were not superfluous spectacles but the very enactment of sovereignty. Visibility was authority; opulence was legitimacy. The bourgeois public sphere, with its salons and journals, sought to replace this with critical debate, the exchange of reasons among private citizens acting as a public.
But as Habermas himself warned, the rise of mass media in the 20th Century already hinted at a “refeudalisation” of the public sphere. In place of genuine debate, elites dominated the public from above with the help of public relations and image management.
This shift resulted in symbolic power that mirrored the structure of medieval pageantry, albeit in a more refined form.
Late capitalism, supported by the dematerialising tendencies of digital media, has now finalised this process with a twisted twist: representative publicness reemerges, but its rituals are now shaped through antagonism —the symbolic persecution of enemies from within.
Enter far-right populism, whose dazzling ascendancy in Europe, the United States, and beyond can be read precisely as a reassertion of this feudalised form of political visibility.
The populist leader, whether bedecked in a red hat or boasting of iron-fisted authority, is a figure of representation in the old sense: not a delegate of reasoned will, but a corporeal embodiment of the people’s ressentiment.
Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, ever the connoisseur of political antagonism, might have recognised in this phenomenon the crystallisation of his friend/foe distinction, updated for the meme economy. In populist politics, the category of friend is reserved for the “real people,” a homogenous fiction endlessly invoked but never quite defined.
The foe, by contrast, is legion: migrants, racial minorities, LGBTQ+ communities, intellectuals, scientists: anyone who betrays the essentialised will of the people as constructed by their representative.
Indeed, this is not representation in the democratic sense of speaking for others. Rather, the populist leader is the people, just as the king once was the state.
In the typology of Habermas, the populist’s visibility is his power. His pronouncements, regardless of coherence or factual basis, are not arguments but rituals of affirmation.
When Donald Trump declares climate change a hoax or Viktor Orbán lambasts the decadent intellectualism of Brussels, they do not engage in debate. Instead, they enact sovereignty through visibility, inviting the public not to reason but to witness their outbursts.
Social media platforms are, of course, the ideal stage for such performances. The digital architecture of platforms like Twitter and Facebook privileges the incendiary, the outrageous, the spectacle of humiliation.
In such spaces, publicness is measured not by the strength of an argument but by the virality of a symbolic action.
The accused—be they refugees, trans people, epidemiologists, or dissenting academics—are arraigned before the court of the feed, where their otherness is made hyper-visible, their treachery hyperbolised, and their punishment ritually enacted in comments and shares.
This public onslaught is not an accidental feature of the present conjuncture but a structural one. Late capitalism, with its spectacularisation of all social relations, has refashioned the public sphere into a monetised theatre of visibility.
What Schmitt identified as the existential foundation of politics—the friend/foe distinction—expresses itself not in the language of war but of culture, identity, and belonging. Nevertheless, the structure remains: the populist leader, in his digital Versailles, must ceaselessly demarcate the foe, for his authority resides not in competent governance or policy success but in the unending dramaturgy of enmity.
That this process thrives on the destruction of liberal institutions is no surprise. The university, the press, the judiciary: each claims a form of autonomy and rationality that threatens the populist’s representative publicness. These institutions insist on discourse, on norms of evidence, on the slow deliberation of complexity, all fatal to the immediacy of sovereign display.
As a consequence, populists must decry them as corrupt, effete, and hostile to the people. The liberal politics of the 20th Century, with its earnest proceduralism and technocratic faith, appears in this light as the grey eminence of a fading order, ill-equipped to counter a politics of spectacle.
In this context, the enemies targeted by populism are not actual threats so much as necessary props.
Non-whites, LGBTQ+ people, and refugees occupy the role of the monstrous other, whose presence is indispensable to the sovereign’s self-representation. Like the heretic or the infidel of medieval Christendom, these figures are necessary foils, against which populist demagogues continually reassert the purity of the people. Their persecution is not incidental but constitutive of the populist ritual.
The irony, of course, is that this supposed return to the will of the people occurs within a socioeconomic order that renders them ever more abstract.
As social bonds dissolve under neoliberal atomisation, and as precarity becomes the norm, the public as a space of solidarity recedes, replaced by an audience of spectators. What they witness is not a deliberative process but a series of cathartic spectacles in which enemies are named, shamed, and symbolically destroyed.
This might seem like the final triumph of the spectacle, in Guy Debord’s sense—a society in which lived reality is replaced by its mediated image.
Yet, whereas the French leftist based his concept of the spectacle on the smoothness of consumerist illusion, the populist refeudalisation of the public sphere is gleefully coarse and deliberately vulgar. It invites not passive consumption but active complicity in the symbolic violence inflicted upon the foe.
However, this too is an exercise of power, one that masks the profound impotence of the populist project in material terms. The ritualised persecution of minorities does not redistribute wealth, rebuild infrastructure, or address ecological collapse. Its goal is to consolidate authority by diverting discontent away from capital and towards the conveniently constructed other.
Thus, we arrive at a politics that is both archaic and hypermodern: archaic in its theatricalisation of sovereignty, hypermodern in its digital dissemination.
The public sphere, once imagined as a space of critical engagement, has become a feudal court, where the sovereign displays his might through the orchestrated abasement of the enemy. The people, reduced to spectators and occasional participants in the ritual, are interpellated not as citizens but as subjects of a new-old order.
Is there a way out of this refeudalised publicness?
Jürgen Habermas’s faith in communicative rationality appears quaint amid the algorithmic din. Perhaps the first step towards liberation is to recognise the theatre for what it is: a theatre of power that thrives on manufactured enmity.
Only then might we begin to reconstruct a public sphere capable of something more than the endless reenactment of sovereignty’s darkest rites.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
