By George Edwards
Far-right politics often appears to be concerned with everything but governance or policy. Consider Donald Trump, who finds time, amidst negotiating for world peace, to launch a range of fragrances, including ‘President Victory 45-47’ or ‘FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT’ (‘for patriots who never back down, this scent is your rallying cry in a bottle’). The perfumes were plugged on Truth Social, his social media platform-cum-sales channel, alongside a growing line of merchandise: NFTs, sneakers, watches, meme coins and bibles.
Or take Nigel Farage. Since being elected in 2024, no MP has made more money than Farage, pulling in nearly a million from speaking engagements and his work as representative of a gold bullion firm. He also earns a reported £150,000 a year selling short videos on Cameo. Pay £71.25 and one may request a thirty-second clip, where Nigel will riff on a message or theme of your choice. ‘So, I’ll see you on the campaign trail’, Farage closes a birthday message to a 20-year-old Reform supporter, ‘maybe we can have a pint together?’ All this extracurricular brand-building prompted one journalist to question whether his constituency work was just a side hustle.
As Rodrigo Nunes suggests, we should understand the contemporary far right as not merely discursively pro-entrepreneur, but as an entrepreneurial movement in its own right.1 For every Trump and Farage, there are multitudes who leverage social media and alternative media networks to mobilise and monetise political discontent. Rather than viewing political entrepreneurialism as being driven solely by pecuniary motives, I interpret it as rooted in economic transformations, where stagnant growth and a depressed demand for labour has meant hard graft and entrepreneurialism are culturally resonant, politically significant and, for many, economically necessary.
Graft and grift
The contemporary far right places great emphasis on self-reliance and individual aspiration. The ideal of the relentless, self-made, entrepreneur holds considerable sway. Reform UK’s 2024 election manifesto backed small business owners, the self-employed and the entrepreneur, promising more favourable fiscal environments. For his perceived entrepreneurial acumen, Elon Musk has many suitors, including Tommy Robinson who posted on Telegram a montage of Musk clips backed with the recording of an interview:
‘I’m available 24/7.. Call me 3am on Sunday morning. I don’t care… 22 hours a day, 80–100-hour weeks, every week… I don’t ever give up… I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated.’
Similar sentiments echo throughout elite gatherings like the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), where the likes of Douglas Murray and Konstantin Kisin openly fawn over Musk. At ARC’s annual conferences, the speakers queue up to explain how aspiration, innovation and hard work must be embraced to restore moral and economic order to a decaying society – an unleashing of entrepreneurial spirits necessary to revive the nation from its present turmoil.
While the far right loudly proclaims the virtue of hard work and individual resilience, these ideals are hardly confined to its orbit. The exaltation of the self-made striver saturates popular culture. In a slew of competitive TV shows, some explicitly entrepreneurial like Dragons’ Den or The Apprentice, but myriad others from cooking to pottery to sewing to dancing, aspirational individuals are judged by those who have found success in their field. In these shows, achievements are seen as the result of the skill and persistence of the individual, and correspondingly, any failings fall on the individual alone. Independence, energy, robustness, ambition, competitiveness are all on display; the ‘vigorous virtues’ at the core of neoliberal culture.2
With social media and podcasts, the injunctions to be more productive have both proliferated and become more private; they sound out across fragmented and clustered communities. Maximise your outreach, streamline your workflow, optimise your grindset. ‘Diary of a CEO’ is the third most popular podcast in the UK and often tops the most listened to business show around the world. Self-made entrepreneurs chat to host and former Dragon’s Den panellist Stephen Bartlett, sharing their startup journeys, daily routines and psychological advice on how to manage burnout. Bartlett also plugs wellness supplements and alternative health products, revealing how self-optimisation relates as much to health as wealth.
These cultural productions normalise the figure of the self-made striver, making it legible and resonant far beyond the world of reactionary politics. But while Apprentice-esque portrayals of entrepreneurial ideals have a knowing irony to them, be it through silly tasks or self-effacing authority, far-right mobilisations of entrepreneurial culture reframe these ideals as markers of authenticity and national belonging.3 This may seem less like entertainment and more like a form of civic duty, yet in today’s digitised media environments, that boundary quickly blurs.
Consider the evolution of former Apprentice contestant, Thomas Skinner, from self-employed trader into the world of politics. Selling mattresses from his white van, Skinner has built up a robust online following documenting his café meals devoured after a hard day’s work. He has now been promoted to the right-wing conference circuit, sharing stages with Rupert Lowe while being backed by Dominic Cummings to run as London Mayor.4 Skinner’s industrious work ethic appears to augment his common touch appeal and by extension confers a certain legitimacy upon his diagnosis of national decay.
Alongside a savviness with new media platforms, the contemporary political entrepreneur also converts political traction into financial reward.5 Jordan Peterson, one of the founders of ARC, is in many ways a textbook example here. Off the back of his best-selling books urging personal responsibility, his podcast and YouTube channel draw tens of millions of views, while his brand now extends into side ventures like alternative educational institutions and merchandise emblazoned with slogans like ‘Clean Your Room’. Peterson packages middle-class disaffection into a lucrative self-help brand. But political entrepreneurs operate in more fringe registers too—across Telegram, TikTok and alternative media, exclusive content, educational courses, self-published schemes, health supplements and workout regimes are flogged alongside far-right tropes.
While operating in distinct niches with different personalities and preoccupations, right-wing political entrepreneurs often share a guiding motivation: a turn to politics propelled by a sense of moral duty to avert or reverse national decline. Most flaunt their entrepreneurial acumen – highlighting their CVs or lifestyle habits – as markers of authenticity. The economic structure of the platforms through which they operate rewards and amplifies more extreme content, incentivising the production and dissemination of more provocative or conspiratorial content. As Nunes makes clear, this creates a self-sustaining and potentially escalatory pursuit: the more radical the content, the wider the reach, the broader the engagement, the more lucrative the revenue streams.
Forced entrepreneurs
In classical social theory, entrepreneurs—particularly small proprietors, artisans and independent shopkeepers—tend to belong to the petite bourgeoisie: a precarious middle stratum characterised by partial ownership of capital and a strong ideological alignment with self-reliance and autonomy. In his recent study, Dan Evans describes this class as personifying a ‘fetish for hard graft’ and embedding ‘the spirit of capitalist individualism and entrepreneurialism’.6 For Evans, these values are ideologically functional for society at large, particularly in moments of economic crisis, with the self-made individual representing resilience and sovereignty; a helpful yet illusory separation from society and its structuring effects.
While ‘entrepreneurial’ culture often conjures positive images of freedom and autonomy–be your own boss, leave the rat race–the reality for many self-employed individuals is less about being ‘pulled’ by opportunity and more about being ‘pushed’ by a lack of alternatives. One report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies found that nearly a quarter of solo self-employed individuals in the UK had previously been out of work, with half previously economically inactive. ‘For every freelancer or management consultant’, Evans notes, ’there is a Deliveroo driver, hairdresser or personal trainer in a chain gym’. On average, wages among the solo self-employed were almost a third less than employees, while many struggle to find sufficient work.
This current landscape of forced entrepreneurialism is rooted in the deindustrialisation of the late 20th century, which dismantled the postwar settlement of full employment and generalised welfare. This shift fostered a new ‘moral economy’ prioritising market autonomy, a culture of enterprise and respect for private property.7 At the same time, unemployment was reframed as a personal failing, with welfare scavengers and the feckless poor scapegoated to affirm the moral worth of economic self-reliance. These moral imperatives cohered around the nation; the economy reimagined as a household, helping to distinguish—in producerist fashion–between those who contributed to the nation’s wealth from those deemed parasitic upon it. As industry declined, individual industriousness became a more significant national virtue.
Today, with the engine of economic growth and job creation still seized up, the labour market continues to suffer from stagnant wages, job insecurity and widespread underemployment. There remain too few jobs for too many people, with many forced to take jobs with low wages or poor working conditions, often in the less productive service sector, or drop out of the formal economy entirely.8 Early signs suggest that AI will exacerbate this trend, either condemning more people to the ranks of superfluity, or demand they do more in the same amount of time.9 The entrepreneurial mindset–to work overtime, hustle on the side, trade crypto, rent out a spare room–cannot be separated from the shifting demand for labour.
But while a societal fetish for hard graft may celebrate productivity and legitimise precarity, it doesn’t guarantee payoffs. The ‘Social Contract Meme’ captures well a sense of thwarted expectation when hard work fails to pay, and how such frustrations can get channelled in reactionary directions. Nick, 30, is the archetypal young, urban professional. He is slumped over, head in hands; exhausted and exasperated. Arrows, all pointing away from him, illustrate where his wages and taxes are flowing: to pensioners, rent, Abdul, Karim, UKAID. Blurring parody and propaganda, the infographic illustrates a worldview where the industrious are asked to give more to support an attendant cast of folk devils, their racialised personifications speaking to the hardening anti-migrant sentiments that characterise the contemporary.10 In one analysis of the meme posted on Matt Goodwin’s Substack, the ‘Anonymous Zoomer’ writes: ‘Nick is us, and we are Nick… we cannot take it much longer’.
Far-right political entrepreneurs tend to represent society as consisting of two antagonistic camps: honest hard-workers who produce wealth, and those parasitical on the wealth that others produce. Indeed, such a producerist antagonism often frames protests outside asylum hotels. ‘We work hard and pay our taxes for immigrants to get put up in luxury hotels’. Where once an entrepreneurial moral economy obscured economic transformations, translating structural stagnation into personal failings, today’s producerist moral economy is forged more explicitly at the national scale, with political entrepreneurs demanding the removal of the non-productive elements within. With each escalation of rhetoric, the audience widens and the producerist antagonism hardens, encouraging the production of more divisive content still.
Beyond the grind
Much of the literature on the far right and nationalism tends to separate cultural and economic issues into distinct analytical domains, treating them as unrelated spheres of influence.11 More than an academic dispute, this has political stakes. As Agnieszka Graff and Elzbieta Korolczuk note, ‘the success of contemporary right-wing populism is owed largely to its ability to moralise issues and concerns that the left would like to frame in economic terms’.12 Thinking through political entrepreneurialism suggests how politics is inseparable from economy or culture. While material conditions such as deindustrialisation and a depressed demand for labour may underpin aspects of contemporary discontent, explanations focused solely on economics miss how cultural forms—media, narratives and memes—actively mediate economic and political processes, shaping how grievances are understood and acted upon.
If the far-right entrepreneurs effectively weave residual values of civic duty and national order into the dominant logics of self-reliance and ambition through the emergent forms of platformed media, then how might the left structure alternatives that are politically effective and culturally resonant? Accepting exhaustion to be a pervasive structure of feeling, what cultural forms evade late capitalist rhythms? Not denying the appeal of purpose and contribution, what emergent forms could dislodge the values of nation and productivity? Against national decline and punitive moralism, what residual values of collectivity and relatedness might inform counter-narratives? Amid stagnating growth and an accelerating pace of social life, the left’s focus should shift away from end times and toward reclaiming time, not despite the sense of crisis, but rather because of it. It should resist the injunction to do more, refuse the producerist frame and the moralism of productivity, and nurture cultural forms that slow the tempo of everyday life and make visible our mutual interdependencies.
- Nunes, R. (2020). Of what is Bolsonaro the name? Radical Philosophy, 209, 3–14. ↩︎
- Valluvan, S. (2019) Clamour of Nationalism: Race and nation in twenty -first-century Britain. Manchester University Press. p.125 ↩︎
- On such ‘cynical reflexivity’ and its relation to entrepreneurial culture see Wayne, M. (2018). England’s discontents: Political cultures and national identities. Pluto Press. ↩︎
- Harris, N (2025) ‘Is Thomas Skinner the future of the right?’ https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2025/06/thomas-skinners-full-english ↩︎
- Nunes, R. (2020). Of what is Bolsonaro the name? Radical Philosophy, 209, 3–14. ↩︎
- Evans, D. (2023). A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie. Repeater. ↩︎
- Moral economy is here taken to be the norms, sentiments and expectations underpinning economic practices and social relations—in this case the salient social relation is that between state and citizen. See Sayer, A. (2000). Moral Economy and Political Economy. Studies in Political Economy, 61(1), 79–103. ↩︎
- Benanav, A. (2020). Automation and the future of work. Verso. ↩︎
- Burn-Murdoch, J. (2025, March 28). Why hasn’t AI taken your job yet? Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/471b5eba-2a71-4650-a019-e8d4065b78a0; Lim, S., Strauss, D.,Burn-Murdoch, J., & Murray, C. (2025, July 24). Is AI killing graduate jobs? Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/99b6acb7-a079-4f57-a7bd-8317c1fbb728 ↩︎
- Sometimes bearing a mock Mackenzie logo, the ‘social contract’ meme has been recreated for several different national contexts. ↩︎
- Gross, S. G. (2022). Understanding Europe’s Populist Right: The State of the Field. Contemporary European History, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777322000261 ↩︎
- Graff, A., & Korolczuk, E. (2022). Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment. Taylor & Francis. p.19 ↩︎