iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Gabor Scheiring

Flamman @flamman.se · 30/09/2026

Alternativ för Tyskland växer bland unga, arbetare och företagare – och starkast där industrisamhället gått sönder. Demokratiforskaren @gscheiring.bsky.social menar att ytterhögern inte är ett kulturuppror utan ett svar på en ekonomisk modell som slutat fungera. www.flamman.se/inget-altern...

flamman.se

Inget alternativ för Tyskland

Framgångarna för Alternativ för Tyskland förklaras ofta med invandring. Men den verkliga förklaringen finns i en ekonomi som slutat fungera.

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

For now, let us just pause at this milestone and sit with this certainty that SUP is going to publish the book next year.

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

There is good news too. Democracy is reviving in Hungary, Uruguay, South Korea, and in the US resistance to Trump. The book draws out what these cases have in common and ends with concrete recommendations for strategy and policy. More on that later.

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Existing accounts (cultural backlash, economic grievance, the illiberal playbook) each explain part of the picture. None captures how comprehensive the challenge has become, or how closely it is tied to the weakness of pro-democracy forces.

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The book blends scholarly research with insider political experience. We trace illiberalism to a hierarchical global economic order that produces a triple devaluation of economic status, cultural worth, and political voice, which illiberal movements mobilize.

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

And this is only the end of the beginning. The book will come out by next fall at the latest, and we are already planning the book talks. Recommendations and invitations welcome!

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

It was an absolute pleasure writing this with such an amazing co-author, reconnecting with our old shared memories and reviving them with new analytical insights. Thank you, Bence! When we started on his suggestion, we were committed, but this milestone seemed a long way off.

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Contract signed across three continents, so now I am ready to believe it: @stanfordpress.bsky.social will publish our book with Benedek Javor: How Democracies Revive: Why Illiberalism Keeps Winning and What to Do About It. ✨📖🤓🧵

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Polanyi saw two exits from this paralysis: fascism, or social democracy. So far, today's "polycrisis" has produced only the first answer. As long as we keep reading the far right one variable at a time, nobody will offer the second. Link in the first post. 12/13

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

German real wages have stagnated since the early 1990s; 89% of AfD voters in Saxony-Anhalt fear they cannot pay their bills; the state has lost a quarter of its population since reunification. Wherever industrial crisis concentrates, the far right is strongest, including the old SPD Ruhr. 11/13

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The far right is a symptom of the exhaustion of the postwar class compromise that made liberal democracy possible in the first place. Polanyi and Gramsci worked this out for the 1930s, and their frameworks fit today with uncomfortable precision. 10/13

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

"Let them govern and watch them fail" rests on one Austrian data point from 2002 that the FPÖ has since thoroughly falsified. I also have sixteen years of "demystifying the far right in power" with Orbán to offer as a counterexample. 9/13

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Misdiagnosis produces dead-end strategies. The firewall creates a dual political sphere that leaves the theme of change to the far right and produces coalitions that cannot govern. Copying its migration program fails too: Merz tried in Jan 2025; the AfD doubled its vote four weeks later. 8/13

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

It won 41% of first-time voters, and its biggest donors are a diagnostics magnate and a real estate billionaire. This is exclusionary nationalism as a rebranding of neoliberalism, the path Fidesz, the Republicans, Reform UK & co have all taken. 7/13

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

And the cultural backlash story of old uneducated men, still the most influential and by now the most thoroughly refuted theory of populism, fails on the basic facts: the AfD was founded by neoliberal economists, and its chief whip has a Hayek portrait on his office wall. 6/13

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The Ossi-bashing story fails too: the same servile-national-character thesis was applied to Poles and Hungarians, among many others, right up until they voted their illiberal governments out. 5/13

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The institutionalist story fails because the far right is global: it's now Europe's most popular party family, and every country blames its own local quirk. 4/13

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Merz concluded the government simply hadn't explained its excellent policies clearly enough. Thirteen years of uninterrupted AfD growth, 20 years of rising illiberalism globally, and the diagnosis is a communication problem. What level of intellectual nihilism is this? 3/13

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Already in the run-up to the election, the German commentariat went looking for the "one" variable. The bureaucracy is too slow: cut it. East Germans have a defective political culture: educate them. It's immigration: toughen up. 2/13

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

New piece just out on the AfD's 44% in Saxony-Anhalt and why the standard explanations for the far right keep failing, currently on @jacobinmagazin.bsky.social's front page. #populism #FarRight @polisky.bsky.social #democracy #illiberalism #Germany #Europe 🧵1/13 jacobin.com/2026/09/afd-...

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Zarqa is an excellent interviewer. She gave me the room to think out loud about all of this, which is rare in academic interviews. I am grateful to her for it. 3/3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUwB...

youtube.com

Episode 4- Dr. Gabor Scheiring

YouTube video by TheOutlierPodcast

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

We also got into my research: how global economic shocks feed populism and produce health inequalities, and what lived experience contributes to that kind of analysis. And teaching. Specifically teaching at Georgetown in Doha, where the classroom is about as internationally diverse as it gets. 2/3

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

It was such an honor and pleasure to talk with Zarqa Parvez for her podcast. We talked about my intellectual formation: the formative years in activism and politics, the move from international economics to sociology, political economy, and comparative politics. 1/3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUwB...

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Income moved upward, labor was repressed. The lessons travel. Serbia, Türkiye, Egypt, and others - not predatory but neither developmental states. Strong authoritarian states build institutions and still lock an economy into dependency. What decides the outcome is how capacity is constituted. 3/3

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

He ran an accumulative state: real institution-building, coherent intervention in markets, but all subordinated to the short-term interests of his coalition of nationalist politics, national bourgeoise, and transnational capital. Dualism deepened, value moved outward, and then the shocks came. 2/3

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Orbán governed Hungary for 16 years with more centralized power than most governments. The international far right copied him. He still failed at development, and then he lost. My new open-access piece in New Political Economy explains the rise and fall of Orbanism. 1/3 doi.org/10.1080/1356...

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

The Hungarian numbers are stark. It was the only country in the region where the wage share of GDP kept falling through the 2010s. Domestic value added in exports is among the OECD's lowest. Innovation capacity, above South Korea's until the late 1980s, is back to post-1989 lows. 10/11

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I call the regime that ruled Hungary from 2010 to 2026 an accumulative state: high capacity, no autonomy, a loyalty-based apparatus serving its ruling coalition instead of disciplining it. The outcome was accumulation without development. 9/11

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Upgrading rests neither on liberal institutions alone nor on authoritarian strength. It needs a social coalition that charts a long-horizon plan and builds a bureaucracy able to enforce this developmental script against elites' short-term drive to accumulate. 8/11

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

In my new open-access article in New Political Economy, I offer a third reading that transcends both. The empirics are Hungarian, but the theory is about the conditions for development outside the capitalist core. 7/11

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

A rival reading, popular in pro-Orbán circles and some institutionalist political economists, is equally flawed. It treats the authoritarian state as a precondition for catch-up. Orbán just ran out of time to deliver the miracle, so the story goes. 6/11

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

By that logic, the exhaustion of Orbánism and Fidesz's defeat in 2026 reads as a happy ending. History was derailed by forces alien to the liberal order, and now it returns to its natural liberal path. 5/11

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

The clearest case is authoritarian capitalism in Hungary. For 16 years, Orbánism was read as an external disturbance: a flashback of Hungarians' "Eastern" (i.e., authoritarian) psyche, or the work of a devious strongman conspiring with other strongmen. 4/11

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

The danger to liberal order is exogenous: external subversion or a dysfunctional cultural legacy. This ignores that liberalism has conflicting currents. Economic liberalism undermines political liberalism, and, as the new Acemoglu argues, serves established economic interests. 3/11

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Why Nations Fail argued that liberal institutions are the ultimate cause of long-run prosperity: property rights, rule of law, open markets set a society on a self-reinforcing upward path. Nations fall behind when anti-liberal forces like extractive elites choke off growth. 2/11

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Daron Acemoglu wrote the establishment's favorite book on prosperity, Why Nations Fail (2012). His new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy? (2026), attacks that establishment. In response, The Economist calls him "oddly unconvincing." A thread on why the old Acemoglu was wrong. 1/11

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Reposted by Gabor Scheiring

Climate Dad @climatedad.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Your kids want you to take a look at this:

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Reposted by Gabor Scheiring

Jacob Ware @jacobware.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

“Across democracies, the central dynamic is not two poles drifting apart but the transformation of the political right into authoritarianism, norm breaking, and openness to political violence.” 🎯

cambridge.org

It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right | Perspectives on Politics | Cambridge Core

It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

That is an outstanding book, was such a revelation when I first read it.

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Let us remember him as he'd want to be: the impossibly well read, quietly witty professor at the front of the room, explaining the Western social theory canon. His brilliant Yale course, Foundations of Modern Social Theory, is still online. With us for posterity: youtube.com/playlist?lis... 6/6

youtube.com

Foundations of Modern Social Theory with Iván Szelényi - YouTube

This course provides an overview of major works of social thought from the beginning of the modern era through the 1920s. Attention is paid to social and int...

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Founding dean of social sciences and Max Weber Professor Emeritus at NYU Abu Dhabi, William Graham Sumner Professor Emeritus at Yale, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, VP of the American Sociological Association. 5/6

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Very few are left who do all three at his level. The academic system that produced people like him is being aggressively dismantled. 4/6

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

He combined Marx, Weber, & Polanyi with an ease and elegance that's hard to match. He belonged to an academic era and milieu that is literally dying out. He represented a university tradition that expected a scholar to master social theory, run serious empirical research, and speak to a public. 3/6

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

He was my "Ph.D. grandad", the supervisor of my supervisor, and a constant presence in the background of my early academic career. He wrote more recommendation letters for me than I can count. Rec letters always on time. He read and reviewed my book. He inspired. 2/6

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Iván Szelényi (1938-2026), a towering figure in sociology, one of the finest global intellectuals Hungary and Eastern Europe has ever produced, has died. Rest in peace and solidarity. 1/6

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Spain: Solidarity, Consistency, Ease, Hope, Compass. Thank you guys! Spain 🇪🇸

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

And to spice it up, I am on an unexpected journey to Doha for a few days...

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Gabor Scheiring @gscheiring.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Keir Starmer: The centrist project to bolster the status quo against "populism" ended as disgracefully as it started. Hollow corporate managerialism doesn't fix a systemic crisis.

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