An impassioned call for an urgent change of direction – The Irish Times

It is conceivable that one day’s news could include the election of an extreme right-wing party to power in Europe, the racist tirades of Donald Trump calling immigrants “animals” and “not human,” reporting on sexually explicit images ‘deepfake’ images of Taylor Swiftconspiracy theories about Covid vaccines, news from influencer Andrew Tate justifying rape, a mass shooting, mob violence in India or the United States, and genocide in both GazaMyanmar, Xinjiang or Ukraine. Granted, it would be bad news of the day, but all of these news stories are depressingly familiar.

Richard Seymour’s genius in Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization aims not only to provide a coherent explanation for why such violent dysfunction currently plagues us, but also to explain how these individual news items add up on the systemic erosion of democracy. and the empowerment and rise of fascism. In the “end days” of liberal democracy, Seymour reminds us, such a blizzard of dysfunctionality is exactly what we should expect.

Understanding the appeal of disaster nationalism might be helpful by starting at home by considering the news stories of passing drivers shouting abuse at refugees camped 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 cites research showing that rising inequality amplifies the perceived threat to income and status, not particularly of the poorest, but of those higher up the class hierarchy. A trajectory of decline and a well-founded fear that we are at risk of being downgraded in terms of income and status do not lead to solidarity, but to resentment and aggression towards those who are less fortunate. The far right, writes Seymour, is the balm for the endangered and downwardly mobile people. And after decades of financial crises, a cost-of-living crisis and severe housing and social services shortages, this potentially involves a lot of people.

While the far-right parties that proclaim disaster nationalism claim to represent the betrayed, the abandoned and the left behind, in reality they receive as much support from those who fear this could happen to them as from those to whom it has actually happened. In the face of this fear, disaster nationalism offers a curative violent recovery – the current disastrous situation can be resolved by cleansing the nation.

It also provides a tangible enemy to attack and potentially eradicate, rather than vague “systems” responsible for the malaise. After all, climate change, inequality and financial crises cannot be denounced, arrested and expelled, or shot at.

In this volatile context, Seymour adds, the rhetoric of nationalist “strongmen” like Trump is intended to channel this resentment. Trump’s hate speech, he writes, “is programmatic. Its purpose is to barbarize mores. It is aimed 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 serious crises, including acute inequality, eroding democracies, emerging autocracies, environmental disasters, wars and climate change. Disaster nationalism has many opportunities to play on people’s fears.

Seymour’s second achievement in Disaster Nationalism is to bring together the desperate dysfunctions evident in our news bulletins, to show that this is not only what we should expect in the current “end times”, but also how far we are already on their way to fascism. Seymour’s focus here is not on the ‘strong man’ leaders, but instead on the emergence within civil society of the conditions that enable them to do so and the pathologies within civil society that mark the path to large-scale state control sponsored violence – the spread of solitary violence. wolf killings and mass shootings, networked vigilantes, conspirators, and normalized sexual violence, culminating in violent pogroms and genocide.

The endpoint of disaster nationalism is clearly visible, Seymour writes, in Israel’s genocidal actions against the people of Gaza and its support for Benjamin Netanyahu‘s far-right government by the major Western democracies. His heartbreaking chapter on Gaza shows that genocide is happening today and that the conditions for widespread support exist in several places around the world. The popular appeal of right-wing politicians proves once again that millions will happily embrace the opportunity to destroy an enemy in the pursuit of ‘security’, revenge and a sanitized vision of the nation-state.

Given the 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 reviving the template for our societies in ways other than simply bolstering trust in failing systems. The task is to abolish the conditions that make illusions necessary. Disaster nationalism is a powerful rejection of these illusions and a passionate call for an urgent change of course.

Ian Hughes is the author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities Destroy Democracy