By Richard Seymour On the one hand, it is obvious that the recent rise of right-wing nationalism has something to do with the economy, and specifically with the global financial crash of 2008. The electoral record in Europe between 1870 and 2014 suggests that voters generally respond to financial crises by moving to the right, with the far right gaining the most. On average, far-right parties increase their vote share by 30 per cent after such a crisis. On the other hand, decades of research have failed to find any evidence that voters respond to personal economic suffering by punishing the incumbent. Belonging to a group whose economic interests have been directly harmed seems only rarely to change political preferences. We are passionate animals. Passion, as Karl Marx wrote, is our ‘essential force’. To understand what’s happening today, we must return to the passions. Among the passions, the most important for this chapter is resentment. For good reasons, resentment is seen as a dis...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51