Halfway into White Noise, Don DeLillo's novel from 1985, Jack Gladney packs his family in the car and leaves town running from a black chemical cloud. The “airborne toxic event” had triggered an emergency evacuation plan: floodlights from helicopters, sirens, unmarked cars from obscure agencies, clogged roads, makeshift shelters at a Boy Scout camp where the Red Cross would dispense juice and coffee. People are confused, they seek information wherever they can, “[s]mall crowds collected around certain men.” Among generalized bewilderment, Gladney observes a few individuals moving faster and more assertively than the rest, then getting into a Land Rover. In the chaotic scene of crisis, their confidence gets his attention. “Their bumper stickers read GUN CONTROL IS MIND CONTROL” Gladney reads. And his mind wanders: “In situations like this, you want to stick close to people in right-wing fringe groups. They've practiced staying alive.”

Fueled by paranoia, those survival instincts are now tested in real life, under a pandemic that sweeps the globe and demands governments to extend their power to control and to heal. Only that some of DeLillo's hunches from thirty-five years ago are fully fledged facts. Right-wing fringe groups are no longer in the fringe. Maybe they never were, and we were just too fixated on bumper stickers. It is not that, to mention just one case, President Sebastián Piñera of Chile is more extremist than former dictator Augusto Pinochet. But Piñera -a billionaire who has been elected president twice at the head of a modern right-wing coalition- has built a political vision by bridging the thin separation between fears of extinction and economic liberty. His call to keep the Chilean economy running in order to avoid a recession sent millions of workers to a truly airborne disease, thousands to their death, and the country into an economic paralysis.

Survivalists today are not so easily associated with a rifle and deranged white men in military fatigues, but rather with bankers, bunkers, islands, private jets and diamonds, wealthy individuals with a tailored plan to fly away from the nightmares they have helped to create. And it turns out that, as DeLillo obliquely suggested, they're not so good at staying alive, let alone at leading the way. Worldwide, the right has conceived the pandemic as a platform to channel a vision of the world, of hierarchies, and of workers that long precedes the Covid, and that has shaped changes in the world since the 1980s. It does not mean that there is nothing new with the pandemic, but for workers it has mostly meant a heightening transformation of the world of labor. When the pandemic is over and changes prove to be more nuanced than what most people proclaim today, inequality and oppression, and the stories we tell to make sense of them, will still be the center of our conversation.

For the most part, the enthusiasm around the wave of alt-right mobilizations is a honey trap. They are massive and passionate, yet they have cornered themselves towards the edges. From Berlin to Buenos Aires and from Rio de Janeiro to Austin, hundreds of thousands around the world have taken to the streets demanding the end of lockdowns, limits to government regulations over individuals’ actions in the name of public health, and the opening of the economy. The rallies have mobilized an excited (and excitable) political base. The public conversation took a turn in which old arguments of the right appeared under a new and favorable light. Historically, the rhetoric of right-to-work associated the fight against unions and government with workers’ freedom, rather than with a campaign for the sake of capital profit or labor subordination. Once the relation between labor and capital was free from manipulation and regulations, workers would be able to choose what is best for them in a free-flow dialogue with employers. This was the case mostly in the United States since the end of World War II, but right-wing neoliberals and conservatives have moved along similar lines in Latin America. The pandemic has provoked a heightened version of the same campaign: Let us decide our own balance between health and economy. Only in this case, economic freedom enmeshes with a raw form of political individualism, and the demand for further liberty (from government, society, agreed-upon scientific knowledge) not only may translate into lower wages and worse working conditions for everyone, but may actually kill fellow workers and citizens. Disparate players converge: “Masks Make Us Slaves”, claim right-wing and neo-Nazi partisans in Berlin during anti-lockdown protests, while a progressive intellectual in Buenos Aires denounces government restrictions of movement by showing up in a video with the yellow star of Jewish ghettos under Nazism. Fifty-six hundred miles to the north, a woman at a right-wing rally in Chicago held up a sign, addressed to the Jewish governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, reading “Arbeit macht frei, JB.”

On the brink of death, Cold War liberal regurgitation of the authoritarian threat clashes against public policies and any form of collective interest, even if that interest is called survival, economic and otherwise. A libertarian ethos fuses these screams for political liberty. At the beginning of the pandemic, former president of Argentina, Mauricio Macri -another billionaire who led a conservative coalition and last year lost his bid for reelection amid a spiraling financial and social crisis- called the Peronist President requesting that he consider the economic health of companies before declaring a stay-at-home order. That was just weeks before Macri traveled to Guatemala for a conference organized by another Latin American billionaire, Dionisio Gutierrez, to discuss with “US security agencies… the threats for the future of the region”, and declared that Latin America needed to “avoid something more dangerous than coronavirus, which is populism”.

In fact, it is not so much populism that will be on the rise in the post-pandemic region, or at least it should not be our primary concern. Rather, it is the foundations of antipopulism that will be reinvigorated in Latin America. Piñera in Chile echoed Macri's claims at the end of July during his state of the union address. Many months into economic recession and some 10,000 Chileans deaths into a pandemic that he initially dismissed, the President stated that “the whole world is being threatened by populism, which is the easy way, the way of rights without duties, achievements without efforts, progress without work.”

Well before Covid arrived in the Americas, antipopulism has served as the preferred venue under which the right moves the fringe into the mainstream and with which it molds a hierarchical vision of the world of labor. For historians and commentators it might be exasperating to see how thinly the category spreads to a variety of political phenomena. But the right has a much less ambivalent understanding of populism as a “weaponized concept” against any collective challenge to the primacy of economic freedom. Which explains why in 2019, when Trump asked his Brazilian counterpart, Jair Bolsonaro, how he could help Brazil, Bolsonaro did not hesitate: support Macri “so populism does not come back to Argentina”. They might be labelled as populist by scholars, but they assume that it is the challenge to a status quo sustained by the primacy of economic liberty, and not the relation with liberal institutions, that defines populism as a threat.

Omnipresent since the end of World War II, antipopulist ideas have had a revival during the last two decades. They are deeply ingrained in a sociological discourse that identifies problems in social structures leading to deviations from a “normal” political behavior among workers and the poor. At the center of these problems is the notion of “transition”. Unable to leave behind a past that supposedly provided some comfort, and reluctant to embrace an inevitable future, workers become intrinsically unable to deal with the present and support demagogic leaders that take advantage of their anxiety. Transition from the countryside to the city, from agriculture to industry, from industry to the digital age, from the local to the global—workers are always trapped in the production of a social malfunction.

One consequence of this understanding of populism is that it normalizes politics. If you fix the social glitches that allowed demagoguery, then people will behave, so workers politics is never about the existent political options and their excruciating limitations but about how workers reach them. For example, seen in this light, the rise of Trump in the U.S. has little to do with the way the Democratic Party acts as an efficient suppressor to challenge and dissent and can easily be explained by social and demographic changes that has left workers, white men or the middle class as “available masses” ready to be taken.

The other, related tenet of antipopulist politics is the rhetoric of despair: People support populist movements because they're cornered and can't think clearly about more constructive alternatives that would benefit both them and the nation. The pandemic doubles down on this argument. And the ensuing social and sanitary crisis will nurture this argument further. In despair, people unlearn to wait. Argentine sociologist Javier Auyero has shown how “waiting” is the core of the Catch-22 situation in which poor people's politics is judged: if they plan arrangements to make their wait for benefits and progress more tolerable, they are judged as clients of unscrupulous powerbrokers. But if they don't wait, they are judged as desperate people. In Spanish, this descent into the abyss is apparent in the vocabulary: those who wait [esperan] and those who don't wait, despair [desesperan]. Like the Spanish word desesperar, the etymology of despair comes from the Latin de (down) and sperare, which does not mean time, but hope. Those unable to wait are those who have lost hope. For neoliberal politics, Covid and the pressures it put on workers’ lives arrived at the right time to detach despair from the historical memory sequence in which it was created. Under this light, what feeds misery is the disarray of the pandemic and the measures to contain its effect, and not the policies that shaped the society in which the pandemic occurs. A forceful call for economic liberty is the answer.

There are many reasons why this might be appealing for large groups urging a dynamic opening of the economy. The most obvious is the most convincing one: it provides an answer to the mighty loss of jobs and income that is happening since March. It is tempting to present this consensus as some form of death cult and blind greed, but it takes an altogether different meaning when located in the larger sequence of the lives of workers and the middle class during the last four decades. For millions, the realistic fear of ending up in the street, hungry, homeless, broken, indebted, alone, severed from any help, sick, trapped, is not bigger than that of Covid, but more forceful, at least until the virus hits. It is not delusion, but historical experience, a twisted form of class consciousness if you wish.

Yet for the most part, the majority of the population in these places support -or are willing to tolerate- the hefty costs of restrictions to economic activity, social life and freedom of movement as a collective effort to save their lives. Angela Merkel remains remarkably popular in Germany, but so did Alberto Fernández in Argentina for a while, for a while, where the economy plummeted and poverty has peaked to some 50 percent, as the long lockdown stressed an already teetering economy. In the meantime, those who embrace this call for freedom are embattled by the consequences of their own arguments. Not only Donald Trump in the United States, but also Piñera in Chile, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Iván Duque in Colombia—they have articulated social demands in terms of a right-wing agenda even, in some cases, at the cost of declining popularity and embattled political grounds. Historically in Latin America, this form of libertarian call had found expression mostly through military forces and it only gained democratic support in the antipopulist rhetoric of the last two decades. Piñera, Macri or even the Guatemalan Gutierrez represent a break with the authoritarian forces of the past while they radicalize the ideological sprouts of those same groups. The reaction to the pandemic bolstered that radicalization and gave it an immediate mission. But it also tempers its expansion.

Why has the right found itself in this trap? On the one hand, the same social turmoil that bolsters right-wing freedom fighters imposes limits to their agenda. As the IMF has corroborated in its analysis of the economic reactions to the current crisis, none of its country members have developed fiscal austerity policies since the beginning of the Covid pandemics. So, libertarian calls for the riddance of the evil interference of government are forced to live alongside a massive expansion of social programs the derision of which is the DNA of their political identity. The apex of this conflicting position came in the form of the emergency stimulus packages like the one implemented in the U.S.: checks sent to all individuals, no strings attached, no labor in return, the closest the U.S. has ever come to a hurried form of universal income. The nightmare of Ronald Reagan's “Welfare Queen” prescribed by its decriers.

But on the other hand, the distressed scenario in which the radical right (and one is tempted to ponder whether there is any other form of the right, even in its liberal iterations) flourished is less of a novelty than what we have usually thought. Political rhetoric of various lineages associate “work” with a world of realizations and wellbeing for the majority. The call for the creation of “decent jobs” conveys the sense that labor, by adding value to goods and services, makes meager incomes more respectable for the earner. “Decent jobs” evokes forms of stable income, food security, basic needs solved, upward social mobility on the horizon—images mostly extricated from postwar welfare state societies but that, for millions, has not been associated with the way income is produced. What the pandemic exposed about workers across the globe is an experience of despair that long precedes the arrival of Covid 19. For many (large majorities in many countries) the association between work culture and wellbeing is plainly foreign to the economic structure in which they have developed their lives for generations. In those places, “workers” is no longer a rousing collective identity the way many of us want to believe, but a byword imposed from above, disregarding the achievements and setbacks of people who have not experienced work, unions or salaries in the postwar sense of these terms.

This is not to say that the economic recession is not trouncing social fabrics across the globe in new and more dramatic forms. But in many cases it also made visible structural cracks fostered by decades of neoliberal policies. In Argentina, the Peronist government quickly implemented in March an “Extraordinary Family Income” and braced for a massive wave of applicants for the US$ 140 benefit. It expected some 3.7 million applicants; it received 7.8 million. Even more: the pandemic expedited answers to demands that have been there for a long time and otherwise would not have been answered and, in many cases, would not even have been visible. In the U.S., a report by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis revealed that 34 per cent of the increase in national unemployment from January to April were workers in occupations that earn less than US$ 34,963, such as cashiers, servers, and janitors. Not surprisingly, considering the extra US$ 600 payment established in March, more than two-thirds of American workers on unemployment insurance are making more in jobless benefits than what they did at work, in turn incensing right-wing ideologues and sympathizers because the government might create incentives to remain at home, not because workers’ salaries are so shamefully low. In Chile, the deep recession forced Piñera to accept a law with a change of one of the central and most unfair features of the country's privatized pension system -cornerstone of neoliberal economic projects introduced during the Pinochet dictatorship. Voted by Congress in open challenge to the government and economic elites, the new rule allows Chileans to withdraw up to 10 percent of their retirement savings, which until then were untouchable. With 2.5 million unemployed, the morning after the law was passed, long lines stretches through the streets of Santiago in front of the pension fund offices. The economic costs of the novel resolution are only surpassed by the symbolic and political defeat exposing the shambles private social security.

The pandemic has functioned as a filter that enhances the tragic features of a preexisting social landscape. A report by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean and the International Labor Organization about the challenges of the pandemic reveals that in Latin America, before the arrival of the Covid, some 59 percent of people worked in sectors with high or medium-high economic risk. Approximately 54 percent of the work force is in the informal sector, which in general means low income, no savings, no access to health services, no easy ways to replace revenue with other sources of income. It is more than a political miracle that workers who have been forced to go out to the streets, risking their lives to sustain their economic activity against government recommendations or orders, have not massively supported right-wing calls to dismantle those same protections.

Have unions made a difference in such a heterogeneous labor force? Yes, but more restricted and localized than what we might expect. Unemployment (some 12 percent in the region before Covid), informality and inflation all curtail unions’ power to bargain. And when that power is still relevant, it cannot prevail in sustained battles. The case of Latam Airlines offers a comparative perspective. As one of the largest carriers in the region, the company has downsized its activities since early March, right after the pandemic hit. Its 42,000 workers expected the worst, and that they received. Employees across the region were told that their salaries were automatically cut 50 percent for a renewable period of six months; most of them started working remotely when feasible, while temporary contracts were cancelled and early retirement programs were encouraged. It affected its 11,000 workers in Chile and most of the others throughout the region. By April, the company had laid off some 1,500 employees in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. The exception, once more, was Argentina, the country with the largest proportion of unionized workers in the region (in relation to its labor force) and where unions’ bargaining authority reaches non-unionized workers. Latam complained that unions have made these “agreements” impossible. Among other things, the government had implemented along with unions a set of temporary measures that made layoffs almost impossible. But in May, the company filed for bankruptcy and started a large restructuring of its labor force. In Chile, workers have already been notified that the 50 percent cut in their salaries will be extended, while those employees working remotely will continue to do so on a permanent basis. Unions in Argentina, in the meantime, are negotiating with the company retirement programs and other strategies that will ease the pain during the crisis, but that will nonetheless have to acknowledge downsizing and cuts.

Rather than a drastic rupture with the past, the pandemic seems to reaffirm the continuity of the helplessness that denotes the experience of labor, particularly after the neoliberal turn. Two apparently dissimilar images of desolation during these months originated among American workers in particular. One, from May 25, was George Floyd dying while police officer Dereck Chauvin knelt on his neck for almost eight minutes. Unable to breath, in his last moments he simply uttered “Mama… I'm through.” His most iconic utterance, “I can't breathe”, enlarged a sphere of struggle, the Movement for Black Lives; yet Floyd's calling out to his deceased mother, no longer begging, that primal scream by a grown-up man, brought to the surface the world of vulnerability to which we belong. Floyd was a worker who had lost his job as a bouncer in a restaurant when the governor of Minnesota declared a stay-at-home order, less than two months before his death. The other image is the one captured on April 13 by photographer Joshua Bickel, of some 100 people assembled outside the Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, protesting against Governor Mike DeWine's decision to continue with stay-at-home order and non-essential business closures. White people carrying American flags and Trump hats, their faces pressed up against a glass, their mouths open like the agonized expression in Edvard Munch's Scream. In the two weeks before the picture was taken, half a million people had filed for unemployment in Ohio. Collectively described as Trump supporters against lockdown, there is little information about them before and after the picture. Had they lost their jobs? Did they have relatives who were infected? Were their stores closed? Have some of them died?

I am not trying to make an analogy between Floyd and anti-lockdown protesters, between Black Lives Matter and Trumpism. But I want to stress the fact that these two disparate episodes shared a common social landscape, that they emerge from an underlying shared scene of helplessness. Margaret Thatcher famously said “There is no such thing” as society. “There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.” The then British Prime Minister had started her statement with her perception of workers’ politics: “I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they're casting their problems on society, and who is society?”

That was 1987, around the same time of DeLillo's fantasy about a small world in disarray. Thatcher's interview was an analysis as much as a vision. Whether a society existed or not was beside the point; what mattered was how to build a civilization in which individuals would be on their own. More than three decades later, workers live under the shadow of the realization of that social commentary. No government job, no grant, no house. Nothing but what you got. Inhabitants of the neoliberal world within and outside the United States experience government mostly in the form of a knee on the neck. Otherwise, with jobs or without, workers are flying solo, free from protection and from safety nets and from collective resources. Free to choose between death and death, protesters in Ohio and elsewhere chose what their political education had taught them to.

We would be wrong to think that desolation is a byproduct of the pandemic, a discovery of this latest tragedy. For millions of workers and the middle class, despair is encrypted in the daily experience of labor, existing as a dormant creature against which they have developed a variety of resources. Collective freedom, neighborhoods, churches, unions, powerbrokers, political parties, families, courageous political leadership—everything that proves that societies actually exist and that they can be a formidable barrier against oppression, is still there. The pandemic will pass; societies and the workers that shape them, will not.