Absent some new realignment, we face an unsettled terrain with no broadly legitimate hegemonic ruling bloc—nor any clear and credible counterhegemonic challenger. In this situation, the most likely near-term scenario is a series of pendulum swings, with governments oscillating back and forth between the frankly neoliberal (progressive or regressive, diversity-friendly or exclusionary, liberal-democratic or proto-fascist) and the professedly anti-neoliberal (left- or right-populist or social-democratic or communitarian), the precise mix to be determined in every case by national specificities.

Such political oscillations mark the present as an interregnum: a time when, in the words of Antonio Gramsci, „the old is dying and the new cannot be born.“ The duration of this interregnum is anyone’s guess, as is the likelihood of its devolution into full-bore authoritarianism, major war, or catastrophic meltdown—as opposed to „mere“ slow unraveling. One way or another, the system’s impasses will continue to grind away at our ways of life, until such time as a credible counterhegemonic bloc can be assembled. Until then, we will live (and die) amid the vast array of „morbid symptoms“ that mark the death throes of financialized capitalism, and the general crisis it has wrought.

Whatever happens, this much is clear: crises like this one do not come along every day.

—Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism, (London: Verso, 2022), 136-137.