A must-read book
Richard Seymour, 2024
The pseudo-insurrection in Washington, DC, on 6 January 2021, intended to stop a supposed theft of the presidential election and restore Trump to power, was fantasy putschism minted by online disinfotainment: Caesarism for the QAnon “generation. But it was not the last of its kind. In the space of less than a year, an alleged coup attempt by the neo-Nazi Reichsbürger movement in Germany was thwarted, supporters of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro stormed government buildings in the hope of triggering ‘intervenção militar’ (military intervention), and the Russian paramilitary Wagner Group marched halfway to Moscow to force out the military leadership they blame for betraying the war on Ukraine.
In every case, the pseudo-insurrection was justified by conspiracist paranoia.
Mass violence in other forms, each motivated by its own fantasies of doom and redemption, has been enabled by national governments. In the Philippines, the line between police murders of drug addicts and volunteer death-squad killings is deliberately opaque. The anti-Muslim pogroms in India are systematically enabled by police, politicians and courts. In Israel, the pogroms carried out by settlers in the West Bank could not take place without the involvement of the Israeli army, whose officers and reservists are often embedded in the settler population. In each case, a vaguely insurgent energy has been unleashed, not against a decadent status quo, but in defence of it against fantasies inspired by the queasy sense of normality catastrophically slipping away. ‘Trump’s agenda is about making America a normal country,’ tech billionaire Peter Thiel explained. ‘Germany, but normal’ was the slogan of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in 2021.
To linger on the garish idiocy of these ideologies and the fusion of media infantilism and commercial cynicism that helps them circulate would be to succumb to the compensation of feeling superior. It would miss their explosive psychological power, and their potential to bring about a far more dangerous cataclysm. Graves have been filled with those who ‘knew better’.
The convection cells of this storm have long been gathering in plain view. As early as 1996, the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) became the biggest party in the Indian parliament four years after its illegal mob-led demolition of the Babri Masjid. The same year, Pat Buchanan’s far-right campaign did far better than expected in the US Republican primaries. In 1998, the young anti-communist nationalist Viktor Orbán, legatee of Hungary’s interwar ruler Admiral Miklós Horthy, swept to power in Hungary’s general election. In 1999, Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party came second in Austria’s legislative elections. There followed a string of surges for far-right campaigns, as the disasters of war and then financial ruin accelerated the deeply rooted unhappiness, distrust and social resentment already circulating in these societies, directing it towards Muslims and migrants. The neo-fascist Front National came second in France’s 2002 presidential race, the anti-Muslim Pim Fortuyn rose to 17 per cent of the vote in the Dutch 2002 general election, and the BJP swept the elections in Gujarat following an anti-Muslim pogrom. There followed breakthroughs for the Belgian Vlaams Blok, the Swiss People’s Party, the British National Party and, in the United States, the birth of the Tea Party movement.
The outbursts of demotic violence accompanying the catastrophes of war and depression, though not new in type, were elevated in wild and whirling winds of neighbourly hate. Alain Bertho documents a surge in worldwide terror events since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and a crescendo of civic violence since the 2008 financial crash. Lone wolf murders increased 143 per cent between the 1970s and 2000s (by 45 per cent in the United States, and by 412 per cent in fourteen other countries affected). By 2016, the number of people killed in lone wolf attacks was already more than double what it had been in the 2000s: a contagion spread mimetically, on gamer forums and far-right social industry channels. White supremacist violence has surged since 2010, while mass shootings were occurring in the United States at a rate of more than one per day by 2019. The growth of rightist paramilitaries could be seen from Eastern and Central Europe to the United States, alongside apocalyptic religious ideologies and millenarian conspiracy cults, from the wildly popular ‘Left Behind’ series to QAnon.
The rise in political violence, even as other forms of violent crime fell over thirty years, Bertho argues, indicates a severe crisis of political action. Since 2008, this crisis has been exacerbated by the sudden, acute awareness of inequality, inflamed by the aggravation of ‘horizontal inequalities’ such as racism in the United States or communal oppression in India. As Gudrun Østby of Oslo’s Peace Research Institute documents, political violence is strongly correlated to the magnitude of these sorts of inequalities, especially when democratic mechanisms don’t work to mitigate them.12 And the more that already weak democratic systems degenerate and become incapable of absorbing these crises, the greater the risk of violent explosions.
Trump increased his vote in counties with the highest rates of unemployment, and among almost every demographic but white men, including Muslims, Latinos and black men. For this reason, despite the damage to his reputation caused by the abortive coup, he is the Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential elections. As of this writing, opinion polling has him two points ahead of his likely rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.
What took place on 6 January 2021 was a momentary ingathering of the American elements of this storm, catalysed by an apprehension of civil breakdown. The intensifying ecological crisis, manifested in severe wildfires, storms and a long-predicted pandemic, accelerated the existing mood of social fear. The United States, ill-led and ill-placed to cope due to its dysfunctional, privatised health infrastructure and scant welfare system, left millions to their own devices as Covid-19 spread. In the ensuing panic, there were outbreaks of survivalist prepping, a surge in gun ownership among first-time buyers anticipating civil war, shortages of essential goods leading to the breakdown of precarious civility and the highest levels of homicide for decades.
America’s nationalist right sought explanations for the crisis within their Manichaean terms. The pandemic had to be the work of a rising Chinese superpower threatening America’s self-confidence.
The incoherent pastiche of conspiracist bricolage, hallucinatory anti-communism, lurid theories of radical sexual evil and theological millenarianism that spanned the public sphere from message boards to the White House explained all: the cracks and strains of civilization, the diminished self-assurance of the United States, the sudden frights and shocks of a world in crisis. Here was a local manifestation of what Christian theologians call ‘kairos’: the contraction and intensification of time.
These ruptures are not isolated events. They are too consistent over time, and too global, to be explained by local factors such as the backlash of a fading white supremacy, or Russian troll farms, or ‘bad actors’ spreading disinformation. They are part of a longer political cycle in which we can see what Gramsci referred to as ‘the molecular accumulation of elements destined to produce an “explosion”. It is useful to distinguish between what the historian Fernand Braudel described as the event, the cycle and the longue durée. The event is the familiar subject of the daily news and adrenalised social media feeds. The longue durée describes an underlying structure of human behaviour that is sustained for centuries, such as capitalism or colonialism. When we think of longue durée of the present, we’re thinking of the way those structures keep repeating certain patterns – economic crisis, political chaos, violence – over time. This is one of the reasons why the 1930s seem such a rich metaphor for us: there are arresting similarities between the Great Depression following the 1929 stock market crash, with its tumultuous political fallout, and the Great Recession following the credit crunch.
The medium-term duration, the cycle, describes a period of some decades in which a set of social changes or conflicts germinates, develops and matures. Examples of a cycle would include the industrial revolution (1760–1840), the European civil war (1914–45), or the era of neoliberal globalisation (1980–2008). Political outcomes over the last few years tell us what kind of cycle we’re entering. Amid the decomposition of the old establishment, and the comparative weakness of leftist upsurges, we’re entering a cycle of nationalist revanchism. The long-standing pathologies of cruelty and deprivation built into daily life, a version of what environmentalist Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence’, have erupted into spectacular violence.
It isn’t the economy, stupid. It isn’t even physical survival. In India, the Philippines, Brazil and the United States, pogroms, death-squad populism, far-right militias and police and paramilitary violence are the driving force of nationalist success. They offer not growth, but the chance to destroy a neighbour. Isn’t this what happens as civilization falls away?
The gravity-defying ascent of right-wing nationalists is of enormous importance. Their techniques of online celebrity, their cynical gaming of stalemated political systems and their politics of cruelty have been widely and justly studied… The conditions of their rise are negative: the stalemate of parliamentary institutions, the declining authority of the old establishment and the breakdown of social life (as documented, in the United States, by Robert Puttnam and Theda Skocpol).
It is common to compare their politics with fascism, particularly in American bestsellers about Trump. Historical fascism, however, was the product of a world long gone. In Europe, it was the product of a class civil war raging from Russia to France, turbulent processes of modernisation and urbanisation, racial tyranny in the form of segregation and colonialism, and pressures towards world war. That garrisoned, highly stratified world is gone, even if movements like Black Lives Matter are urgently raising awareness about its violent afterlives. Today’s disaster nationalism is not, with the exception of the Israeli far right, colonialist. The allure of imperialism for fascist movements is its vindication of race and violence as principles of life, in its affirmation of counter-democratic hierarchy, in its promise of reconstruction through what Bismarck called ‘blood and iron’ (Blut und Eisen) and in its promise of spiritual meaning achieved through an encounter with death. Today’s far right has a much more ambiguous relationship to imperialism: while many American soldiers have been radicalised on the frontlines in Iraq and Afghanistan, the institutions of US imperialism at least are seen as being too ‘woke’ and complicit in the ‘globalist’ project.
Nor does disaster nationalism make any claim to revolutionary anti-capitalism, as fascism did before taking power. To the contrary, it suggests that the problems of capitalist development – in rising middle-income countries like the Philippines, India or Brazil, as much as in declining powers like the United States – can be overcome by dispensing with human rights laws, climate controls, parliamentary bartering and enfeebling international agreements. Its leaders, from Trump to Modi, frequently represent themselves as hardheaded, macho corporate autocrats capable of knocking heads together and ‘getting things done’. Muscular capitalism is their weak utopian prospectus.
This new far right may be ‘post-fascist’ as Enzo Traverso argues, or it may represent a spectral imitation of fascism as Samir Gandesha suggests. I think disaster nationalist leaders are pathfinders for a new type of fascism, because in a manner of speaking we are always pre-fascist as long as the conditions for fascism have not been abolished. But whatever emerges will not be cosplay of the 1920s and 1930s. Apart from anything else, the fascist experience did not begin and end with the interwar crisis… Arthur Rosenberg, writing shortly after Hitler took power, observed that before fascism became a party-state it had to be a ‘mass movement’ rooted in the feelings of millions. Before it was a mass movement, millions had to be infected with völkisch, racial-nationalist ideas. If interwar fascism is to be the historical benchmark against which we are measuring the new nationalism, then it would be appropriate to begin where fascism begins. It begins, in the words of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri, as a ‘molecular’ uprising, with microfascisms fizzing away in masses of people. We are, today, in the early days of a new fascism.
Disaster nationalism, for all the complexity of the ideas and moods it involves, spreads as though it were a ‘simple’ contagion: finding its major pathways in communications networks rather than neighbourhoods or political gatherings. Indeed, from ‘lone wolf’ manifesto to ‘fake news’ story, it is self-consciously memetic.
The apocalyptic fantasies of disaster nationalism, I suggest, tap into a pervasive ambivalence about civilization which necessarily includes a hatred for all that is civilized, and a submerged desire for it to fall apart, as well as a need to be reassured that the disaster will all be made good in the end. This, as catastrophe novels, apocalyptic movies, ‘end times’ infotainment and now disaster nationalism suggest, is highly profitable. It accumulates both capital and souls.
In a short but extravagant work of pessimistic metapsychology, Civilization and Its Discontents, he argued that for all its benefits, civilization also makes us sick. We must give up too many erotic and aggressive satisfactions in the name of neighbourly love and civility, which does not come naturally, and the burden of which is unhappiness. If this were not redeemed by material advantages making our lives easier, Freud suggested, it would lead to a serious disturbance. The curative effects of decivilization, as millions let go of their respectable, politically correct selves and embraced their vindictive, self-defeating nastiness with pride, could only end in yet another explosion of the kind that had previously made Jews the scapegoats of Europe.
Freud’s narrow psychological focus on sexuality and aggression probably led him to underestimate the burdens of civilization, and the importance of their uneven distribution: class society breeds resentment, envy, spite, anxiety, depression and rage. His more radical peers, such as Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, attempted to probe further into the familial and capitalist structures of modern civilization and the underground emotional lives supporting fascist outbreaks. Later, psychoanalysis would be used by Octave Mannoni and Frantz Fanon to explore the dark, decivilizing impact of colonialism.
What unites the seemingly senseless and random outbursts of individual and collective violence in recent years is another aspect of modern civilization: the nation-state… Nationalism is powerful in part because it is so politically ambiguous, including everything from anticolonial nationalism to Scottish civic nationalism to Hindu ethno-nationalism. It has a long history of association with the far right but has also grounded the political projects of the democratic left. It can be expressed in everyday forms, what Michael Billig calls ‘banal nationalism’, and in extravagant symbolic events such as football tournaments. It is so pervasive that it is usually taken for granted.
Modern nation-states were founded, as Heather Rae observes, on forced conversions, suppression and ‘massive displacements’, often in the context of war. Among these traumatic events were the expulsion of Moriscos and Jews from Spain, the outlawing of French Protestantism and the flight of the Huguenots, the violent ‘population exchanges’ between Greece and Turkey at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the communal massacres during the partition of India and Pakistan.
Nationalising the masses did not, however, eradicate civil conflict. It gave conflict a new expression. The forging of nations in war defined them against an external enemy. Colonisation, indentured servitude and slavery, from Ireland to the Americas, from India to the Caribbean, defined the nation against its inferiors – who, lacking nation-states at that stage, were said to be beyond law and civilization. Finally, nations usually had their internal inferiors (the exploited) and enemies (the repressed). While the lower classes could be policed and seduced, religious and ethnic minorities were the object of demands for forced conversion and assimilation, if not expulsion or death. These processes of coercion, moral persuasion, and exclusionary violence were combined in the under-studied twentieth-century phenomenon of anti-communist witch hunts and massacres, which usually fell hardest on unpopular minorities.
The apocalyptic threat, from this point of view, is not plague, wildfire or ecological catastrophe. It is the liquidation of social distinction. The nationalist fear of ‘gender ideology’, from Eastern Europe to Latin America, is a fear that men will become women. The fear of ‘Antifa’ and Black Lives Matter is a fear that, as historian David Starkey once complained, the whites are becoming black. The fear of ‘communism’ is the fear that the rich, and even the moderately affluent, will become paupers. And this chaos is threatened by ‘cultural Marxists’ and ‘critical race theorists’ who defame the nation-state by insisting that its dark history, such as slavery in the United States, is relevant today. When living standards are being squeezed and livelihoods rendered more precarious, this loss of distinction is widely experienced by those who have hitherto felt valued by society as a massive impoverishment of being, tantamount to the downfall of civilization. A downfall that can only be described in terms of emotionally compelling parables about ‘white genocide’ or elite child abuse. And against which terror, disaster nationalists offer a curative decivilization: violent restoration, followed by laughter and forgetting.
In part, societies have become more unhappy as they have become more unequal. Rising inequality intensifies the perceived threat to income status, especially among those higher up the class hierarchy. It makes failure toxic, the downward plunge that much steeper. This is part of a comprehensive change that has taken place over the last forty years. Neoliberalism, the name of that change, is often misleadingly called ‘free market fundamentalism’. But neoliberals were never opposed to the big state. What they opposed was the threat posed by the age of mass democracy to the sovereignty of markets and investors. They wanted to use state policy to reform human beings, wean them off their ill-founded belief in equality and their tribal notions of solidarity, and accustom them to the law of universal competition: ‘to change the soul’, as Margaret Thatcher put it.
Disaster nationalism offers another remedy, which is neither happiness nor self-medication. The far right has historically rejected happiness as an extension of liberal political economy. It was, sneered Mussolini, not true well-being but a degradation of humans to the status of cattle. The far right’s preferred model of spiritual revival was the adventure of war, with millions marching together towards an enlivening encounter with a disaster they could kill, excited and aroused by the prospect of death… “Disaster nationalism is not always about to rush off to war, though in Kashmir and Gaza it certainly thrives on the opportunity to enforce the nation’s moral boundaries by killing enemies. But even where it doesn’t, it harnesses the insecurity, humiliation and miseries of people from across classes to a revolt against liberal civilization, with its pluralist and democratic norms. It offers the balm, not just of vengeance, but of a sort of violent reset which restores the traditional consolations of family, race, religion and nationhood, including the chance to humiliate others.
Disaster nationalism flourishes on, and manipulates, the profound unhappiness accumulated in the era of peak liberalism. It has radicalised the racism, authoritarianism, sadism and paranoia already abroad. And though it militates against hallucinated catastrophes, it does so in a world in which real catastrophes – recessions, wildfires, floods, tsunamis, pandemics – are becoming more common and more deadly… And because today’s nationalists can neither address the multiplying crises of capitalist civilization nor do anything but inflame the anxiety fuelling their phobic crusades, they can only escalate.
Disaster nationalism, I have argued, is not yet fascism. Yet there hasn’t been a better time to be a fascist since 1945.
Historically, fascism has thrived, not on the originality of its doctrines – it borrowed almost everything from other political traditions – but on appropriating whatever was already popular for its own purposes. Similarly, today’s disaster nationalist tendencies metastasise ideological tendencies that were already current. The Islamophobic obsessions of Trump, Modi and most European far-right parties were curated and prepared in the first instance by both liberal and neoconservative intellectuals as part of their justification for the ‘war on terror’, or in defence of the ‘republic’ in France or as part of the soft communalism of the centre centre-left Congress Party in India. Fascism is a pathology that arises within the democratic mainstream.
Disaster nationalism, though not yet representing a complete rupture with liberalism, is culturally and politically anti-liberal in a way that mainstream conservatism hasn’t dared to be for decades… “Its violent anti-communism, even where there is no discernible communist opposition, is as hallucinatory as twentieth-century fascist expostulations against ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’. It normalises popular violence against minorities or the poor, supplementing it with new forms of state violence, in a way that resembles the dialectic of radicalisation between fascist leaders and their base.
And yet, as Theodor Adorno pointed out in his study of the pessimistic German reactionary Oswald Spengler, we would be foolish to dismiss rightist doom fantasies. They are often attuned to realities that liberal optimism prefers not to acknowledge.
There is no reason to assume that, in these circumstances of shortage, stress and struggle, our weakened democratic systems are going to stabilise themselves. Nor can we take it for granted that most people are forever inoculated against fascism… We will get nowhere in containing this threat if we start from the assumption that it consists of a small number of troublemakers, a ‘basket of deplorables’ to use Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate phrase, against whom we may define our virtuous selves. There is a fascist temptation for everyone: we all have our jackboots.
—Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism, Verso, 2024
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