is this fascism?
"As the historian Ian Kershaw says, trying to define fascism is ‘like trying to nail jelly to a wall’, yet for all its slipperiness, ‘fascism’ describes a uniquely destructive force in politics, and one for which we don’t have a better word. Unlike other forms of authoritarianism, such as military dictatorship, if left unchecked it is not only murderous but suicidal. Interwar fascism involved millions of people in the effort to purify national communities, initiating a spiral of violence that led to war, genocide and self-immolation. Its devastating potential was rooted in the paradoxical promise of a revolution carried out in defence of hierarchy."
..." ‘Disaster nationalism’ is Seymour’s term for the political expression of these feelings. It arises, he writes, from the ‘profound unhappiness accumulated in the era of peak liberalism’ and offers the afflicted a range of enemies whose defeat will restore ‘the traditional consolations of family, race, religion and nationhood’. Significantly, it tends to ignore the real disaster staring us in the face, that of human-induced climate change: far-right populists are caught between outright denial of global heating and a perverse, gleeful wish to bring it on. Disaster nationalist figureheads don’t resemble traditional politicians so much as celebrities, borne aloft on a surge of violent emotion whose spread has been facilitated by the internet. Interwar fascism required mass parties to establish a fatal dialectic between leader and mob; social media platforms now perform that function. Political entrepreneurs, from populist leaders to far-right influencers, engage in ‘permanent algorithmic campaigning’, directing their followers’ anger and sadism at their opponents. Bolsonaro had a Gabinete do Ódio (‘office of hate’), a group of advisers who planned his social media strategy; Modi rewards his most virulent supporters on X by discreetly following them back; Trump is a ‘one-man troll farm’. And when rhetorical violence spills over into real life, it’s no longer career-ending."
..."Unlike Hitchens, or indeed Power, whose work has taken a reactionary turn, Seymour has not moved to the right. Instead, he continues to examine the reasons that, despite the economic and environmental disruptions of our time, the right keeps winning.
This is what makes him a useful, if sometimes frustrating, guide to the present moment. Having abandoned the boosterism of the revolutionary left – ‘One more crisis, comrades, and it’s our time!’ – he practises a radical pessimism. Capitalism, in his view, isn’t just an engine for human misery, but, through the burning of fossil fuels, a threat to human existence. Capitalist democracy, ‘an inherently contradictory and unstable formation’ which asks people to forgo equality in return for the promise of rising living standards, is ill-equipped to avert it. Seymour’s writing is erudite, drawing on Marxism, psychoanalysis, cultural criticism and a wide range of social research, and sometimes has the breathless pace of the very online. He is a co-founder, with the novelist China Miéville and others, of the political journal Salvage (‘The catastrophe is already upon us,’ one of its taglines runs, ‘and the decisive struggle is over what to do with the remains’), and his style has similarities with Miéville’s gothic-futurism. Seymour aims to provoke the reader – not least through the force of his rhetoric – into thinking about what might be round the corner. His efforts don’t always land, but when they do he can throw a murky picture into sharp relief: I have come across no better encapsulation of the nature of social media than ‘participatory disinfotainment’."
This is what makes him a useful, if sometimes frustrating, guide to the present moment. Having abandoned the boosterism of the revolutionary left – ‘One more crisis, comrades, and it’s our time!’ – he practises a radical pessimism. Capitalism, in his view, isn’t just an engine for human misery, but, through the burning of fossil fuels, a threat to human existence. Capitalist democracy, ‘an inherently contradictory and unstable formation’ which asks people to forgo equality in return for the promise of rising living standards, is ill-equipped to avert it. Seymour’s writing is erudite, drawing on Marxism, psychoanalysis, cultural criticism and a wide range of social research, and sometimes has the breathless pace of the very online. He is a co-founder, with the novelist China Miéville and others, of the political journal Salvage (‘The catastrophe is already upon us,’ one of its taglines runs, ‘and the decisive struggle is over what to do with the remains’), and his style has similarities with Miéville’s gothic-futurism. Seymour aims to provoke the reader – not least through the force of his rhetoric – into thinking about what might be round the corner. His efforts don’t always land, but when they do he can throw a murky picture into sharp relief: I have come across no better encapsulation of the nature of social media than ‘participatory disinfotainment’."
Is this fascism? By Daniel Trilling, LRB, Vol 47, no. 10
Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation by Richard Seymour. Verso, 280 pp., £20, October 2024
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