Right-wing populists do not try to persuade lower-income voters that austerity is virtuous or that deregulation is emancipatory.
They do something far more effective: they tell them who is responsible for their precarity and humiliation, and they do so with a clarity that technocratic liberalism has long since abandoned.
Migrants, cosmopolitan elites, gender nonconformists, welfare “scroungers”, Brussels, Washington, the media—these figures condense diffuse anxiety into a legible object of resentment.
What makes this approach so brilliant is how little positive content it requires. Hatred, once organised, does the work that policy once claimed to do.
Mobilising hate in this manner isn’t new.
When Hans-Ulrich Wehler invoked the term negative integration to describe Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, he had this strategy precisely in mind. It diagnoses a pathology that modern politics has never cured, only refined.
In Wehler’s telling, the newly minted German Empire—the Second Reich—did not so much reconcile its fractured classes as teach them whom to fear.
The Social Democrats, with their unruly unions and theoretical pretensions, became the negative pole around which a brittle unity could crystallise. Landed elites, industrial capital, Protestant notables, and an anxious petty bourgeoisie did not have to agree on what Germany was or ought to be; it was enough that they agreed on what it must not become.
Cohesion derives from a shared enemy rather than a common project.
What is striking, from our vantage point in late modernity, is not how archaic this strategy appears, but how contemporary. The apparatus has changed—mass parties have thinned into brands, newspapers into feeds, beer halls into algorithmic echo chambers—but the logic of negative integration has only intensified.
The “hate them” theory of politics is no longer a cynical aside; it is the operating system itself. Parties increasingly define themselves not by what they promise to build, but by the intensity with which they signal opposition to a designated adversary. Programs are liabilities. Enemies are assets.
In this sense, far-right populism is not an aberration but an honest elaboration of tendencies long incubated within liberal democracy itself.
This is not false consciousness in the old, comforting sense. It is not that voters are duped into misunderstanding their interests. Rather, interests themselves have been redefined affectively. It matters less how people are doing than how they are feeling.
To be recognised, to belong, to see one’s grievances named aloud: these are goods delivered on demand that outweigh the abstract promise of higher wages or stronger public services in a brighter future that is forever receding over the horizon.
Negative integration offers dignity in the present tense. Material redistribution, by contrast, is always deferred, conditional, compromised. When politics becomes a competition over emotional immediacy, the right’s cruelty often feels more authentic than the left’s caution.
Yet the left, at least in its mainstream institutional form, has hardly posed resistance to the reactionary use of negative integration. If anything, it has mirrored the strategy while draining it of its last vestiges of material substance.
Parties such as the Democrats in the United States, Labour in the United Kingdom, and the Social Democratic Party in Germany increasingly appeal to voters by focusing on the depredations of their opponents rather than articulating a coherent vision of social transformation.
While it’s true that the right is racist, authoritarian, and anti-democratic, stating that over and over falls short of a sustainable political programme. Opposition becomes an end in itself, a moral posture that substitutes for a failure of vision.
Voters are invited not to desire something new, but to avert catastrophe. The ballot becomes a prophylactic.
This is where negative integration reveals its corrosive effects most clearly. When a party’s primary function is to block the other side, it must constantly calibrate its own ambitions downward so as not to disturb existing power arrangements. Large donors must not be alienated; markets must not be spooked; institutions must not be strained.
The party of “resistance” thus becomes the party of stasis, clinging to a procedural liberalism whose material hollowing-out is either unwilling or unable to confront directly. Hatred of the opponent provides the emotional charge, while managerial competence supplies the alibi. The result is a politics that is morally saturated and economically evacuated.
The damage to liberal-democratic institutions that follows from this lack of political imagination happens almost automatically. Parliaments become theatres for performative outrage rather than sites of deliberation. Courts are elevated into quasi-political actors, because legislatures no longer legislate with conviction. Elections turn into referenda on personality and vibes, while policy is quietly outsourced to technocrats and central banks.
The public, invited into politics primarily as an audience for indignation, learns to experience democracy less as a collective project than as a recurring culture war. Participation becomes reactive, episodic, and increasingly cynical.
From a leftist perspective, it’s tempting to conclude that this is simply a moral failure, one that might be remedied by better rhetoric or more inclusive messaging. However, this underestimates the extent to which negative integration is woven into the political economy of late capitalism.
When states are structurally constrained in their capacity to redistribute wealth and privilege—by global capital mobility, by debt regimes, by legalised austerity—the range of credible positive programs narrows. Under such conditions, politics shifts toward the symbolic and the punitive. If you cannot promise to make life materially better, you can at least promise to make someone else suffer.
This is why the call for an unapologetic class politics cuts so sharply against the grain. Class politics insists on naming antagonisms that liberal negative integration works so hard to obscure. It does not deny conflict; it relocates it.
Instead of migrants versus natives, woke elites versus common sense, red versus blue, it posits a structural division between those who live by selling their labour and those who live by owning assets. This is not a moral claim but an analytic one, and its scandal lies precisely in its refusal to personalise blame.
Class politics is, in this sense, anti-theatrical. It directs anger away from cultural proxies and toward impersonal relations of exploitation that are harder to dramatise but far more consequential.
The difficulty is that class politics lacks the immediate emotional payoff that negative integration so efficiently supplies. There is no single villain onto whom anxiety can be projected. Capital is abstract, systemic, and often invisible.
Moreover, class politics demands positive commitments—redistribution, decommodification, collective provision—that in turn require institutional conflict and sustained mobilisation. It cannot survive as a purely oppositional stance.
To advocate for universal healthcare or labour protections is to confront insurers, employers, and investors, not just rhetorical adversaries. It is to risk losing donors, media support, and electoral safety nets. It means doing politics rather than performing politics.
This is why so much of the contemporary left flirts with class rhetoric while remaining structurally committed to negative integration. Inequality is denounced in the abstract, billionaires are scolded in speeches, but the mechanisms that produce inequality are treated as immutable.
The left learns to speak the language of resentment without building the organisations capable of converting that resentment into power. Movements flare and recede; campaigns spike and dissipate. What remains is a thin moralism that condemns the right for its hatred while parasitically depending on that very hatred to mobilise its own base.
There is an irony here that Bismarck himself would have appreciated. Negative integration, initially deployed to neutralise socialism, now operates as a generalised condition that weakens all political actors, including those who rely on it most heavily.
The right’s enemies multiply and radicalise, eventually turning inward in purges and conspiracies. The centre hollows out, governing without enthusiasm and losing more legitimacy with each electoral cycle. And the left oscillates between protest and accommodation, unable to sustain a counter-hegemonic project.
Everybody hates someone; no one truly governs.
To argue for a renewed class politics is not to indulge in nostalgia for an imagined era of disciplined parties and smokestack solidarity. The social bases of twentieth-century labour movements are fragmented, precarious, and heterogeneous.
But class politics, understood as a refusal of purely negative integration, remains indispensable. It insists that politics must be about altering the conditions of life, not merely adjudicating cultural antagonisms. It asks not only whom we oppose, but what we intend to build—and at whose expense.
This insistence is deeply unfashionable. It disrupts the comfortable moral binaries of contemporary discourse. It risks alliances that are messy and solidarities that are not immediately gratifying. It demands patience in a political culture addicted to outrage.
Yet without class politics, the “hate them” theory will continue to dominate, corroding institutions while offering its participants the hollow satisfaction of perpetual antagonism.
Negative integration works because it is easy. It asks little of its adherents beyond loyalty and affect.
Class politics, by contrast, is demanding. It requires organisation, compromise, and a willingness to confront power where it actually resides. It also requires abandoning the fantasy that democracy can be saved by better villains alone.
If liberal democracy is to be more than a procedural shell animated by mutual loathing, it will have to recover the capacity to communicate positive collective ends. That recovery will not come from hating the opposition more cleverly, but from naming, without apology, the material antagonisms that structure our everyday life.
In that sense, the real scandal of class politics today is not its radicalism, but its simplicity. It cuts through the noise, the brands, the performative indignation, and asks an almost embarrassingly old-fashioned question: who benefits, and who pays?
As long as politics remains organised around everything except that question, negative integration will continue to masquerade as unity, and hatred will continue to pass for solidarity.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
