It is conceivable that a single day’s news could include the election of a far-right party to power in Europe, the racist rantings of Donald Trump calling immigrants “animals” and “not human”, coverage of sexually graphic “deepfake” images of Taylor Swift, conspiracy theories on Covid vaccines, news of influencer Andrew Tate justifying rape, a mass shooting, mob violence in India or the United States, and genocide in either Gaza, Myanmar, Xinjiang or Ukraine. Admittedly, it would be a bad day’s news, but all these news stories are depressingly familiar.
Richard Seymour’s genius in Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation is not only to provide a coherent explanation for why such violent dysfunction is assailing us at the present time, but also to explain how these individual news items together point to the systemic erosion of democracy and the empowerment and emergence of fascism. In the “end days” of liberal democracy, Seymour reminds us, such a blizzard of dysfunctionality is precisely what we should expect.
Understanding the appeal of disaster nationalism could usefully begin at home by considering news stories of passing drivers shouting abuse at refugees camping on Dublin’s Grand Canal. How are we to understand such aggression and lack of understanding towards people in dire poverty and acute vulnerability?
Seymour’s explanation lies in what he calls “the falling middle”. He quotes research that shows that rising inequality intensifies the perceived threat to income and status, not particularly of the worst off, but of those higher up the class hierarchy. A trajectory of decline and a well-founded fear that we are at risk of being relegated in terms of income and status triggers not solidarity, but resentment and aggression towards those less well off. The far right, Seymour writes, is the balm for the threatened and downwardly mobile. And after decades of financial crises, a cost-of-living crisis, and severe deficits in housing and social services, that potentially includes an awful lot of people.
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While the far-right parties peddling disaster nationalism claim to represent the betrayed, the abandoned and the left-behind, in reality they draw support as much from those who fear that this may happen to them as from those to whom it actually has happened. Against this fear, disaster nationalism offers a curative violent restoration – the current disastrous situation can be solved by purifying the nation.
It also provides a tangible enemy you can attack and potentially eradicate, rather than nebulous “systems” which are responsible for the malaise. After all, climate change, inequality and financial crises, can neither be sued, rounded up and expelled, or shot at.
In this volatile context, Seymour adds, the shock tactic rhetoric of nationalist “strongmen” such as Trump aims to channel this resentment. Trump’s hatemongering, he writes, “is programmatic. It aims to barbarise mores. It aims at barbarism”.
The context, of course, is not just the experience, or threat of, personal economic decline. The current moment is also marked by a series of severe crises, which include acute inequalities, eroding democracies, rising autocracies, environmental disasters, wars and climate change. Disaster nationalism has a lot to draw on when capitalising on people’s fears.
Seymour’s second accomplishment in Disaster Nationalism is to draw together the desperate dysfunctions evident in our news bulletins to show that not only is this what we should expect in today’s “end times”, but also how far down the road we already are to fascism. Seymour’s focus here is not on the “strongman” leaders, but instead on the emergence within civil society of the conditions that enable them and the pathologies within civil society that mark the path to full-scale state-sponsored violence – the diffusion of lone-wolf murders and mass shootings, of networked vigilantes, conspiracists, and normalised sexual violence, culminating in violent pogroms and genocide.
The end point of disaster nationalism is starkly visible, Seymour writes, in the genocidal actions against the people of Gaza by Israel and the support for Binyamin Netanyahu’s far-right government by the major western democracies. His heartbreaking chapter on Gaza serves to show that genocide is happening today, and that the conditions for its widespread support are present in multiple places around the world. The popular appeal of rightist politicians is proving, yet again, that millions will gladly embrace the chance to destroy an enemy in pursuit of “security”, revenge and a purified vision of the nation state.
Given circumstances, and the trajectory we are on, it would be naive to assume that our fraught democratic systems can prove stable enough to withstand the current polycrisis. What comes next, Seymour writes, will depend on reinvigorating the template for our societies in other ways than simply shoring up faith in failing systems. The task is to abolish the conditions that necessitate illusions. Disaster Nationalism is a powerful repudiation of those illusions and a passionate call for an urgent change of course.
Ian Hughes is author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy
