The Axis of Illiberalism (2026) — Part V
From Stacking the Game to Rigging It: How Neoliberal Power Gave Way to Illiberal Democracy
Neoliberalism is usually described as an ideology. A belief in free markets, limited government, competition, and individual responsibility. In that telling, it presents itself as sceptical of state power and wary of democratic interference in economic life.
That description is accurate, but incomplete.
Neoliberalism was not only a belief system. It was also a method. A practical strategy for concentrating wealth while insulating it from democratic constraint. Its real-world success did not depend on whether its philosophical claims were true, but on whether it reliably delivered outcomes favourable to capital.
This distinction matters, because it explains both neoliberalism’s long dominance and its eventual abandonment by many on the right.
As an ideology, neoliberalism was articulated most clearly by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and translated into state practice by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Hayek supplied the moral argument against democratic control over economic life, portraying collective planning and popular intervention as a slippery slope to tyranny, even while conceding a limited role for legal and institutional rules. Friedman supplied the economic programme: deregulation, privatisation, monetarism, and the subordination of social policy to market discipline.
As a method, however, neoliberalism was shaped less by philosophers than by organisers.
In the United States, figures such as Paul Weyrich understood early that elections were unreliable vehicles for permanent power. Weyrich was not a free-market theorist. He was an institutional engineer. He co-founded the Heritage Foundation, helped create the American Legislative Exchange Council, and pioneered the idea of permanent policy infrastructure supplying ready-made legislation, personnel, and strategy regardless of electoral outcome.
Alongside this institutional project ran a cultural one. Older far-right conspiracism was repackaged into the language of civilisational critique. Economic policy written for capital was fused with grievance capable of mobilising mass support. Redistribution became decadence. Regulation became tyranny. Labour power became moral collapse.
Serious money followed. The Koch network funded a sprawling ecosystem of libertarian and free-market institutions. Later, the Mercer family expanded the model into data-driven media and behavioural influence. They were not alone. Others associated with oil, alcohol, sugar and gambling also provided support. Neoliberalism became hegemonic not because it was uncontested, but because it was structurally advantaged.
In Britain, parallel structures emerged through the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute, and the Centre for Policy Studies, which laundered American neoliberal ideas into a British idiom and supplied intellectual cover for deregulation, austerity, anti-union legislation, and privatisation across party lines. These institutions did not need to win every argument. They needed to define what counted as serious.
For several decades, this dual structure held. The belief supplied justification. The method delivered results. Eventually, liberal democracy began to function as intended.
Research documented social and economic harm. Courts enforced environmental, labour, and equality law. Regulators constrained monopolies. Public opinion shifted against austerity and deregulation. Legislatures, unevenly but perceptibly, responded.
Neoliberalism remained profitable, but it became politically fragile. Its claims were scrutinised. Its outcomes contested. Its legitimacy eroded. The problem for concentrated wealth was no longer how to win arguments inside liberal democracy, but how to remove the veto points that liberal democracy still retained.
Neoliberalism had exhausted its usefulness. What followed was not an ideological conversion, but a strategic pivot. Illiberal democracy did not replace markets. It replaced constraint.
Russia and Hungary showed what a post-liberal order could deliver. They were not admired for their values. They were studied for their reliability. What mattered was not legitimacy, but predictability.
In Russia, the bargain was explicit. Wealth and access were permitted on the condition of political acquiescence. Law existed, but it was discretionary. Courts, prosecutors, and regulators functioned as instruments rather than constraints. Rights depended not on neutral rules, but on alignment. Once loyalty was established, risk collapsed. For insiders, the system was brutal at the margins but stable and profitable at the centre.
Hungary demonstrated a softer version of the same logic. Elections continued. Courts existed. Media formally survived. But outcomes became predictable. Electoral law was rewritten. Media ownership was reshaped. Universities and civil society were hollowed out. A loyal oligarchic class was constructed through state contracts, advertising markets, and EU fund channelling. Independent capital was not banned. It was marginalised. Aligned capital flourished.
The difference was not moral, but procedural. Russia enforced loyalty through overt coercion. Hungary achieved it through administrative attrition. Both delivered the same outcome: discretionary protection in exchange for alignment.
Together, these systems revealed the same lesson. Liberal democracy is fairer, but risky. Illiberal democracy is unjust, but reliable.
Under liberal democracy, protection is probabilistic. Courts are independent. Regulators intervene unpredictably. Journalism exposes wrongdoing. Elections can change policy. Wealth confers substantial advantage, but it is always exposed to correction.
Under illiberal democracy, protection is conditional but stable. Pay dues to the ruling party and its ecosystem. Fund its media. Donate. Align publicly. In return, enforcement becomes selective, access becomes predictable, and exposure collapses.
Illiberal systems do not eliminate risk. They reallocate it. Risk concentrates at the margins, among dissidents, independent institutions, and the politically unaffiliated. For insiders, uncertainty collapses.
This alignment of wealth with illiberal democracy was not ideological extremism. It was risk management. Illiberal democracy removes the residual uncertainty that neoliberalism within a liberal democracy could not eliminate.
The pivot did not require new institutions. The same donor vehicles, media platforms, litigation networks, and policy shops were already in place. What changed was their orientation toward democracy itself. The goal shifted from winning arguments within liberal democracy to minimising the risks a functioning democracy posed to accumulated power.
Neoliberalism wanted a smaller state. Illiberalism wants a captured one. It runs on a simple requirement: acquiescence. Leaders do not demand belief. They demand compliance. Independence is tolerated only when it does not obstruct power. Inconvenience is punished. Loyalty is rewarded. Anticipatory obedience becomes rational.
From the perspective of concentrated wealth, this is not radicalism. It is a change in risk structure. Under liberal democracy, wealth is exposed to courts, regulators, journalism, elections, and public learning. Under illiberal democracy, wealth is protected by alignment. Law does not disappear. It becomes discretionary.
This is why oligarchs sign up.
In the United States, this logic is visible in the alignment of major media owners, technology financiers, and platform operators with Trumpism. These actors do not oppose the state. Their businesses depend on government contracts, permissive regulation, selective enforcement, and hostility to supranational bodies when those bodies threaten to impose constraint.
Trump’s volatility obscures a consistent message. Alignment brings protection. Resistance brings cost. For capital, this is clarifying rather than frightening.
Across systems, oligarchs do not need to share ideology. They need only recognise the bargain.
Support the centre of power.
Do not fund opposition.
In return, enforcement becomes selective, access becomes predictable, and wealth becomes insulated from democratic correction. Neoliberalism allowed capital to win most of the time. Illiberal democracy allows it to lose almost never.
Illiberal democracy is not a revolt against neoliberalism’s project. It is what that project becomes when persuasion, legality, and neutral enforcement are no longer judged sufficient to guarantee extreme profits.
It is not a revolt against elites.
It is an elite solution to liberal democracy.