The multiple crises we are facing, from Covid-19 to climate breakdown, are very likely to exacerbate inequalities and reactionary tendencies amongst the elite and their base, such as racism. 

"Yet they create the possibility of an opening for radical change and the demand and urgency for it. As denial, which has made many comfortably passive, is becoming increasingly untenable, sitting on the fence will become less of an option as inaction will be increasingly akin to complicity.

"This is central to our book, which explores the way some ideas travel from the extreme to the mainstream, how some become the norm, while others remain reviled and can even be used to justify the centre's rightful hegemony, if only when compared to more radical alternatives.

"In a nutshell, things are bad, but they could be worse. Our aim is to map the way in which reactionary ideas and racism in particular have made their way back into mainstream discourse, under the guise of pseudo-progressive tropes such as free speech and liberalism, where freedom is understood solely as the freedom of the privileged, represented as victims, to defend said privilege and stifle any demands from those suffering from real and systemic injustice,"

Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream says.