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Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization
Liberal civilisation is in crisis—now is a time of monstersThe rise of the new far-right has left the world grappling with a profound misunderstanding. While the spotlight often shines on the actions of charismatic leaders like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Rodrigo Duterte, the true peril lies elsewhere. They are but the political manifestations of a potent force - disaster nationalism. This mass cultural phenomenon, propelled through the vast networks of social media and fueled by far-right influencers, emerges from a reservoir of societal despair, fear, and isolation.At its core, disaster nationalism fixates on images of catastrophe - the 'Great Replacement,' Satanic 'cabals' - as explanations for its discontent. It yearns for an 'end of days,' a reckoning, a 'storm' as the QAnon faithful call it, to bring an end to its suffering. This yearning is only heightened by the relentless onslaught of real-world disasters, from economic recessions to global pandemics and ecological collapse.Within this seething cauldron, we witness not only the surge of far-right political movements but also the sparks of individual and collective violence against perceived enemies, from 'lone wolf' killers to terrifying pogroms. Should a new fascism emerge, it will coalesce from these very elements. This is disaster nationalism.In Disaster Nationalism, Richard Seymour delves deep into this alarming phenomenon, dissecting its roots, its influencers, and the threats it poses. With meticulous analysis and compelling storytelling, this book offers a stark warning and a call to action. The battle against disaster nationalism is not just political; it is a struggle for our collective soul and the future of civilization itself.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2024
105 people are currently reading
3575 people want to read
About the author
Richard Seymour
63 books173 followersNorthern Irish Marxist writer and broadcaster, activist and owner of the blog Lenin's Tomb.
Seymour is a former member of the Socialist Workers Party.
He is currently working on a PhD. in sociology.
Seymour is a former member of the Socialist Workers Party.
He is currently working on a PhD. in sociology.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 85 reviews
December 31, 2024
Disaster Nationalism is so close to being an excellent analysis of the current political moment that its retreat into the hoary and well-trodden halls of Theory is all the more frustrating. Seymour's goal is to understand the failures of the liberal centrist consensus of the early 21st century and the rise of inchoate proto-fascist politicians across the world. Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines, Modi in India, and of course, America's own big orange multiply convicted twice-impeached fraudster rapist Donald Trump.
The core of Seymour's thesis is that these movements are all part of a broad disaster nationalist trend, which seeks the reinvigoration of the nation through a cataclysm of violence. Riven through with intellectual contradictions, the main binding tie of the movement is a division of the world into friends and enemies, and the urge and ability to do violence to enemies. Moreso than any coherent class analysis, this is rooted in a psychology of decline, especially white male decline, a basic Freudian penile anxiety that links individual setbacks to broad trends in a paranoid web.
Are you scared yet?
The frustrating thing about this book is that as a keen observer of current events over the past decade (Christ, almost 10 years since Trump came down his escalator in 2015, announced he was running for President, and called Mexicans rapists), it's basically correct. But rather than present a particularly well-organized account of a whole lot of shit that's happened, or novel social theory along the lines of Max Read's "Zynternet", it's more Freud and Marx, again.
A few key things I think are worth pay attention to in the book. The central goal of disaster nationalism is to do a pogrom. Everything else is window dressing. What is at the center of this movement is an escalatory cycle between elite leaders and followers on the street, heading towards mass lynchings of a despised group. In Modi's India, it's Muslims; in the Philippines, drug addicts; Europe targets migrants; and in America, it's bring your AR-15 to school day. Law enforcement will of course aid and abet the pogrom, since the police fundamentally approve.
A second useful point is the centrality of what Baudrillard called the simulacrum. Reality is no longer what you see and feel, but rather the mediated experience of the 24 hour news cycle and the constant feeds of social media, all optimized for attention. If Benedict Anderson's Imagined Community of the nation required the newspaper, and the break of time into then-now-tomorrow, disaster nationalism takes place in a single smear between nostalgia, future greatness, and present despair, an ever-flickering cascade of images.
Third is the rise of stochastic terrorism. Organized Brown Shirt groups are rather rare in disaster nationalism. Rather, the frontline fighters are alienated individuals polishing their manifestos, and then attempting to go out in a symbolic blaze of mass murder. Essentially impossible to stop (well, not that cops even try, but I imagine the false positive rate of reports would be very high), lone wolf shooters are both a symbol and a symptom of the disease of disaster nationalism, a reminder not to attract attention by protest or difference, unless you're willing to die.
As for the rest of us, the people who rely on government services, I am personally fond of air traffic control, well, we can get fucked. Welfare will be cut to the bone, and what remains privatized and run by incompetent ghouls. Disaster nationalists are utter failures at delivering real benefits, even to their supports. Yet somehow Duarte and Modi maintain exceptional approval ratings, and America decided to get back on the Trump train.
If there's any consolation, it's that through incompetence and incoherence disaster nationalists are not very effective at carrying out their proposal. However, each day they're in office or on TV is another day we as society slide towards barbarism. I also suspect that they're so vehemently against gender studies and critical race theory because those two academic disciplines tread on their space of linking personal barriers and violations to broad intangible social constructs (invert white supremacist patriarchy and you get globohomo, and vice versa).
The introduction to this book is sharp and fantastic, the rest is a trudge.
The core of Seymour's thesis is that these movements are all part of a broad disaster nationalist trend, which seeks the reinvigoration of the nation through a cataclysm of violence. Riven through with intellectual contradictions, the main binding tie of the movement is a division of the world into friends and enemies, and the urge and ability to do violence to enemies. Moreso than any coherent class analysis, this is rooted in a psychology of decline, especially white male decline, a basic Freudian penile anxiety that links individual setbacks to broad trends in a paranoid web.
Are you scared yet?
The frustrating thing about this book is that as a keen observer of current events over the past decade (Christ, almost 10 years since Trump came down his escalator in 2015, announced he was running for President, and called Mexicans rapists), it's basically correct. But rather than present a particularly well-organized account of a whole lot of shit that's happened, or novel social theory along the lines of Max Read's "Zynternet", it's more Freud and Marx, again.
A few key things I think are worth pay attention to in the book. The central goal of disaster nationalism is to do a pogrom. Everything else is window dressing. What is at the center of this movement is an escalatory cycle between elite leaders and followers on the street, heading towards mass lynchings of a despised group. In Modi's India, it's Muslims; in the Philippines, drug addicts; Europe targets migrants; and in America, it's bring your AR-15 to school day. Law enforcement will of course aid and abet the pogrom, since the police fundamentally approve.
A second useful point is the centrality of what Baudrillard called the simulacrum. Reality is no longer what you see and feel, but rather the mediated experience of the 24 hour news cycle and the constant feeds of social media, all optimized for attention. If Benedict Anderson's Imagined Community of the nation required the newspaper, and the break of time into then-now-tomorrow, disaster nationalism takes place in a single smear between nostalgia, future greatness, and present despair, an ever-flickering cascade of images.
Third is the rise of stochastic terrorism. Organized Brown Shirt groups are rather rare in disaster nationalism. Rather, the frontline fighters are alienated individuals polishing their manifestos, and then attempting to go out in a symbolic blaze of mass murder. Essentially impossible to stop (well, not that cops even try, but I imagine the false positive rate of reports would be very high), lone wolf shooters are both a symbol and a symptom of the disease of disaster nationalism, a reminder not to attract attention by protest or difference, unless you're willing to die.
As for the rest of us, the people who rely on government services, I am personally fond of air traffic control, well, we can get fucked. Welfare will be cut to the bone, and what remains privatized and run by incompetent ghouls. Disaster nationalists are utter failures at delivering real benefits, even to their supports. Yet somehow Duarte and Modi maintain exceptional approval ratings, and America decided to get back on the Trump train.
If there's any consolation, it's that through incompetence and incoherence disaster nationalists are not very effective at carrying out their proposal. However, each day they're in office or on TV is another day we as society slide towards barbarism. I also suspect that they're so vehemently against gender studies and critical race theory because those two academic disciplines tread on their space of linking personal barriers and violations to broad intangible social constructs (invert white supremacist patriarchy and you get globohomo, and vice versa).
The introduction to this book is sharp and fantastic, the rest is a trudge.
July 23, 2025
One of those books that emits a forcefield when you leave it on the shelf, instilling dread before you've even read it: after many months of this it turns out on actually reading it that it is indeed as unnerving as expected, particularly on the cruellest and most violent aspects of the neo-nationalism of the 21st century (the Gujarat pogrom, Duterte, the IDF in Gaza and its approbation by Israeli public opinion), where Seymour doesn't shy away from rubbing the reader's face in evil. As analysis I think this gets a lot of things right - a particular target, unmentioned but obviously there, is the strange 'rational choice Marxism' that someone like Vivek Chibber does nowadays, which holds that if we just offer good 'bread and butter' working class politics, people will stop being so fucking weird. This is of course rubbish, and Seymour is typically merciless on why. But unlike Sexbeard's earlier The Twittering Machine, I won't be telling everyone I know to read this - it's relatively incoherent, with some of the phenomena not as closely connected as the argument implies (eg, the RSS-BJP seems so much more old-school mass mobilisation fascist than, eg, Orbanism, Trumpism and the like, which are in a way more the far-right version of Anton Jager's 'hyperpolitics'); there are also moments where I'd have appreciated a little less glee at the scale of disaster. But, here's a book that actually stares hard at what is happening and tries to make sense of it, a task many writers (self included) would prefer to desperately avoid.
December 11, 2024
When I was a kid, my mom made politics very simple. She said, "Republicans take care of rich people and Democrats take care of poor people. So we're Democrats." That made sense for most of my life until my father—as working class as they come—encountered conservative talk radio. Since then, I've been fairly obsessed with right-wing radicalization, particularly among the middle and working classes.
The thesis of Disaster Nationalism is that this radicalization occurs when wealth inequality creates desperation and insecurity which sublimates real disaster (ecological, economic, genocidal) into apocalyptic fantasy. Add to that some repressed sexual obsession and healthy dose of manufactured racial grievance, and you've got a recipe for violent nationalistic authoritarianism.
The book concludes with the warning that the seeds of protofascism have been planted in all of us. We're all prone to a thanatotic urge when we feel the foundations shaking. We can all imagine (and sometimes yearn for) some catastrophic reset button, which would inevitably be followed by authority through violence. Catastrophes are already happening right now, in real time, and they're not making the material conditions of anyone's life better. Well, maybe weapons manufacturers and oil barons are doing okay, but the rest of us should resist this urge. The bath water is filthy right now, but the baby's got a chance.
The thesis of Disaster Nationalism is that this radicalization occurs when wealth inequality creates desperation and insecurity which sublimates real disaster (ecological, economic, genocidal) into apocalyptic fantasy. Add to that some repressed sexual obsession and healthy dose of manufactured racial grievance, and you've got a recipe for violent nationalistic authoritarianism.
The book concludes with the warning that the seeds of protofascism have been planted in all of us. We're all prone to a thanatotic urge when we feel the foundations shaking. We can all imagine (and sometimes yearn for) some catastrophic reset button, which would inevitably be followed by authority through violence. Catastrophes are already happening right now, in real time, and they're not making the material conditions of anyone's life better. Well, maybe weapons manufacturers and oil barons are doing okay, but the rest of us should resist this urge. The bath water is filthy right now, but the baby's got a chance.
June 25, 2025
Absolutely essential. One of my top non-fic reads of recent memory.
I made a rather lengthy "Appreciation" of this book here
TLDR—a few ¶s from my intro to all that:
History doesn’t repeat itself, the adage goes, but it rhymes, and it is the thesis of this book that we are singing along with a ditty which is “not yet” fascist (or “not-yet-fascist”), but have been singing for a while now, and with increasing enthusiasm, alas. There’s been a new kid on the block of late, Richard Seymour claims (and argues, at length and quite convincingly), a New Right, one more “enthralled by images of disaster” than usual (the cleansing and renewing power of disaster in particular and violence generally being a reactionary staple since at least Burke’s Treatise on the Sublime). Seymour also terms it “apocalyptic nationalism”, and credits it with mounting a dark, if “spectacular critique of [the] political orthodoxy” of neoliberalism as well as a harbinger of a potentially even darker future. But if we are to prevent such a future, we need to map the present trajectory on a granular level, and resist making facile comparisons to past conjunctures. This entails, first of all, looking for clues in the source(s) of popular unrest at least as much as to the strongmen who capitalize on that ferment, and manipulate it:
I made a rather lengthy "Appreciation" of this book here
TLDR—a few ¶s from my intro to all that:
History doesn’t repeat itself, the adage goes, but it rhymes, and it is the thesis of this book that we are singing along with a ditty which is “not yet” fascist (or “not-yet-fascist”), but have been singing for a while now, and with increasing enthusiasm, alas. There’s been a new kid on the block of late, Richard Seymour claims (and argues, at length and quite convincingly), a New Right, one more “enthralled by images of disaster” than usual (the cleansing and renewing power of disaster in particular and violence generally being a reactionary staple since at least Burke’s Treatise on the Sublime). Seymour also terms it “apocalyptic nationalism”, and credits it with mounting a dark, if “spectacular critique of [the] political orthodoxy” of neoliberalism as well as a harbinger of a potentially even darker future. But if we are to prevent such a future, we need to map the present trajectory on a granular level, and resist making facile comparisons to past conjunctures. This entails, first of all, looking for clues in the source(s) of popular unrest at least as much as to the strongmen who capitalize on that ferment, and manipulate it:
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. According to Rick Saull, the distinctive far-right model of politics, combining paramilitarism and charismatic leadership, can be traced to 1848 and the backlash against the revolutions that swept Europe in that year. The popularisation of irrationalist, anti-democratic nationalism can likewise be traced to the latter half of the nineteenth century. 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. The appropriate model for analysing the current phase of nationalist politics is not, therefore, the ‘strongman’, the military dictatorship or the party-state. It is the contagious outbreak: the ‘brown plague’, as Daniel Guérin called it.If Seymour makes much of Freudian psychoanalysis in his argument, it matters less if this is because of his own prior intellectual commitments (or not) than that the times themselves do yield such analysis, and which always provides the patient reader with explanatory insight in these pages—via arguments which never feel superimposed upon current trends and events. When in his Introduction he writes, therefore, of our current crisis arising from “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”—a recipe which, if it seems straight out of Hollywood, is also therefore as ripe for capital accumulation at the macro-level as it is for careerist grifter-influencers harvesting shrimp in the weeds of the swamplands which are supplanting what used to pass for political discourse, where those tuning in to right-wing 24/7 cable news, say, or doom-scrolling on X (or Truth Social!) can be fed their daily dose of fear, loathing, and apolcaplytic (“apocalypse in the sense of an ‘unveiling’”) redemption...
January 15, 2025
i've been reading richard seymour's work via Salvage for many years now--maybe a decade--so i expected this to be quite sharp and it is. it is really a comprehensive reading of the conditions for reaction in the present. unlike most of the "global shift to the right" books in recent years, Seymour really attends to India, Philippines, and Israel (the latter in a full chapter). the chapters on "lone wolf" and "mass" shooters are the most helpful (if disturbingly still relevant), belying the idea that the present version of fascism is without street violence. as is to be expected, the book is massively benefitted by Seymour's understanding of internet and social media cultures. it bears comparison to Toscano's portrait of 20th century theories of fascism, and in that comparison comes as much more helpful in particular on questions of sex and desire. the class chapter in Seymour's book felt abbreviated and not fully explored. Seymour does come down on the side that the contemporary far right is not quite fascism in character (or at least that the "fascism debates" for Seymour distract from actually looking at what's going on). But "nationalism" feels a bit of a defanging too. conditions really are really bad rn, huh?
October 14, 2025
This is THE BEST book on the rise of 21st century fascism I’ve read so far.
It’s not even close.
I loved its imperial boomerang-style inclusion of proto-fascism in India, Israel, and Brazil alongside the US. I loved the way it didn’t shy away from the most unhinged parts of far-right politics.
And two things struck me in particular—
1️⃣ Its main focus was: why do regular people crave fascism?
This focus on fascism, not as a form of government imposed on people by a tyrant but, as a government craved and pushed for by regular citizens, puts this book firmly in the tradition of post-WWII German philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno (and makes the typical American liberal books on modern fascism look amateurish by comparison).
But it’s Arendt and Adorno for our times. Rather than the Dreyfus Affair, Seymour investigates the hallucinated enemy that is antifa, anti-immigrant rhetoric, the homoeroticism of the manosphere, Islamophobia, and the un-horniness of incel culture.
His argument was really compelling. Basically, this incohate craving for fascism is caused by systematic failures and big disasters (the crappiness of late stage capitalism, climate disasters, pandemics, etc). Except blaming a scapegoat, especially a group they can persecute, feels way more real and cathartic than railing against a nebulous system they can’t impact and don’t understand.
2️⃣ I started this book just hours before Charlie Kirk was shot. And the way it described how proto-fascist governments will use disasters (Charlie Kirk’s death) to ramp up authoritarianism (scapegoating the “radical left,” linking antifa to terrorism, designating anti-capitalist thought or trans identity as pre-crime, the whole Jimmy Kimmel thing, etc)… 😳 the way this book soberly predicted and described the complete chaos that was happening irl…
It was like a fever dream, tbh.
Needless to say, his application of Naomi Klein’s concept of disaster capitalism to fascist nationalism was Spot. On.
It’s not even close.
I loved its imperial boomerang-style inclusion of proto-fascism in India, Israel, and Brazil alongside the US. I loved the way it didn’t shy away from the most unhinged parts of far-right politics.
And two things struck me in particular—
1️⃣ Its main focus was: why do regular people crave fascism?
This focus on fascism, not as a form of government imposed on people by a tyrant but, as a government craved and pushed for by regular citizens, puts this book firmly in the tradition of post-WWII German philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno (and makes the typical American liberal books on modern fascism look amateurish by comparison).
But it’s Arendt and Adorno for our times. Rather than the Dreyfus Affair, Seymour investigates the hallucinated enemy that is antifa, anti-immigrant rhetoric, the homoeroticism of the manosphere, Islamophobia, and the un-horniness of incel culture.
His argument was really compelling. Basically, this incohate craving for fascism is caused by systematic failures and big disasters (the crappiness of late stage capitalism, climate disasters, pandemics, etc). Except blaming a scapegoat, especially a group they can persecute, feels way more real and cathartic than railing against a nebulous system they can’t impact and don’t understand.
2️⃣ I started this book just hours before Charlie Kirk was shot. And the way it described how proto-fascist governments will use disasters (Charlie Kirk’s death) to ramp up authoritarianism (scapegoating the “radical left,” linking antifa to terrorism, designating anti-capitalist thought or trans identity as pre-crime, the whole Jimmy Kimmel thing, etc)… 😳 the way this book soberly predicted and described the complete chaos that was happening irl…
It was like a fever dream, tbh.
Needless to say, his application of Naomi Klein’s concept of disaster capitalism to fascist nationalism was Spot. On.
December 2, 2024
Enjoyed reading this. Often bleak but a poignant diagnosis of the current state of affairs globally and at home. I didn't expect to be re-devastated by the chapter on Israel's genocide in Gaza but I was. Published a month before the election, the experience of reading this reminded me of watching Adam Curtis' Hypernormalization sometime after the election in 2016 and feeling like all of the pieces were so clearly in place for us to get the outcome that we did, it's hard to believe that any of us missed it or were shocked. And while, it's hard to say that the outcome of this election was nearly as shocking as the outcome of 2016, this book's prescience deserves praise. I should emphasize that neither work set out to predict what would happen wrt the election(s) specifically, both explained the rise of the moments we find/found ourselves in (Disaster Nationalism more rigorously. i haven't watched hypernormalization since that first time)
January 3, 2025
Frustrating and flawed book on an important topic. At its best in outlining the specifics and similarities of the right in India, Israel, USA, Philippines and Brazil. At its weakest on anything coherent tying it together. Excessive use of the occasional esoteric and pretentious word or concept without contextualisation and explanation; and a stubborn refusal to define key terms like "disaster nationalism" or "neo liberalism". Also, too much Freud.
At the end was still left very unclear what the "disaster" in disaster nationalism means.
Would not recommend.
At the end was still left very unclear what the "disaster" in disaster nationalism means.
Would not recommend.
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January 24, 2025
An insightful read of the neo-liberal world through a marxist lens.
That sound derogatory, and it's not. I enjoyed this quite a bit. I recommend it for folks looking to think about what and how the new US administration is going to act and capitalize upon disasters. Nonstop disaster and chaos to keep resistors reeling and disoriented, filled with rage and burnt out or desolate with despair—either way, easily pliable.
That sound derogatory, and it's not. I enjoyed this quite a bit. I recommend it for folks looking to think about what and how the new US administration is going to act and capitalize upon disasters. Nonstop disaster and chaos to keep resistors reeling and disoriented, filled with rage and burnt out or desolate with despair—either way, easily pliable.
March 20, 2025
Terrifying.
A look into the abyss that lies under our progressively thawing liberally socialized selves. A glimpse of an increasingly inevitable horror stricken future and the violent ethnonationalist dream response it will illicit. An honest look at how far weve already fallen. A bitter aftertaste when realising this was published before the permissibility of Nazi salutes returned as a topic of casual conversation. An undeniable argument for the reality of all the conditions existent to fuel a fascist revival >
*a mirror appears*
...
'he at once is rebellious and craves authority. he wants a rebellion that imposes authority'
'As though nationalism were a modern-self esteem movement. A curative decivilization: violent restoration, followed by laughter and forgetting'
'conspiracy theory is rumour metastisized. A rumour is a dream, a wish fulfillment - the rumour stages the fulfillment of an unacceptable wish, a wish that one doesnt wish for. Rumours would not accumulate and win souls were it not for a mass of people yearning for what they offer. For rumours to be converted into social and political capital, there must be people willing to be converted. They must feel in their bones they must change. "we want to be converted, by those people who can solve our most unbearable conflicts'
'the wish isnt reducible to a personal parapsychology but is rooted in a shared social condition'
'if I agree to fantasize about gruesome and often erotically charged scenarios for whose reality I have been given little evidence, I am not simply lacking 'media literacy': the fantasy is doing something for me'
'My desires are modelled and life is once again exciting'
...
'the threshold for the uptake of these ideas has been systematically lowered'
...
'this experience of time speeding up is a typical experience in apocolyptical moments'
....
'disaster nationalism is not yet fascist. But at its past zenith, it tundered along fixed rails to total war, ecological cataclysm and human annihilation'
A look into the abyss that lies under our progressively thawing liberally socialized selves. A glimpse of an increasingly inevitable horror stricken future and the violent ethnonationalist dream response it will illicit. An honest look at how far weve already fallen. A bitter aftertaste when realising this was published before the permissibility of Nazi salutes returned as a topic of casual conversation. An undeniable argument for the reality of all the conditions existent to fuel a fascist revival >
*a mirror appears*
...
'he at once is rebellious and craves authority. he wants a rebellion that imposes authority'
'As though nationalism were a modern-self esteem movement. A curative decivilization: violent restoration, followed by laughter and forgetting'
'conspiracy theory is rumour metastisized. A rumour is a dream, a wish fulfillment - the rumour stages the fulfillment of an unacceptable wish, a wish that one doesnt wish for. Rumours would not accumulate and win souls were it not for a mass of people yearning for what they offer. For rumours to be converted into social and political capital, there must be people willing to be converted. They must feel in their bones they must change. "we want to be converted, by those people who can solve our most unbearable conflicts'
'the wish isnt reducible to a personal parapsychology but is rooted in a shared social condition'
'if I agree to fantasize about gruesome and often erotically charged scenarios for whose reality I have been given little evidence, I am not simply lacking 'media literacy': the fantasy is doing something for me'
'My desires are modelled and life is once again exciting'
...
'the threshold for the uptake of these ideas has been systematically lowered'
...
'this experience of time speeding up is a typical experience in apocolyptical moments'
....
'disaster nationalism is not yet fascist. But at its past zenith, it tundered along fixed rails to total war, ecological cataclysm and human annihilation'
December 23, 2024
It's not fascism, but whatever you call it, it's damned ugly. This grim survey of the nasty forces pulling apart liberal civilisation was probably a bad choice for me to read straight after Donald Trump's triumphant and depressing return to office. But's a compelling theoretical analysis.
The great mystery for many of us on the left is why the biggest beneficiares of the breakdown in the neoliberal order since the global financial crisis - one in which bankers who destroyed the livelihoods of millions walked away scot-free - are the nationalist, populist right.
And this is not just confined to the US. It's happening everywhere in those parts of the world that were seen as part of the liberal democratic order - in terms of holding regular elections, allowing a relatively free media and supporting individual rights.
From the Hindu death squads of Modi's India to Duterte's extra-judicial killings of 'drug traffickers' in the Phiippines to Bolsanaro's environmental destruction in Brazil, nationalism is on the march. Macho thuggery, unconstrained by any respect for liberal principles, is ascendant. And this is not just in the former third world but also is increasingly dominant in the centres of Anglo-American capitalism and the EU.
In this persuasive analysis, Richard Seymour, a Marxist intellectual, calls the phenomenon 'Disaster Nationalism' - an apocalyptic form of nationalism that has brought far-right leaders to power and is challenging political orthodoxy as represented by the traditional centre-right and centre-left parties of capital and labour respectively.
Arguing that this movement is not quite fascism but a possible precursor to it, Seymour dismisses standard analysis from the left that this is purely about people's disenchantment with 'the economy', pointing out that millions will gladly work against their own best interests to purge their anger. This at base is a nihilist movement that seeks to tear everything down out of frustration with the stalemate of parliamentary instituions, the declining authority of the old establishment and the breakdown of social life under neoliberalism..
"Disaster nationalism (does not) make any claim to revolutionary anti-capitalism, as fascism did before taking power," he writes. "To the contrary, it suggests the problems of capitalist development...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."
As pointed out by Naomi Klein in her own recent book 'Doppleganger' (a work that Seymour frequently cites here), the left has made a fatal mistake in dismissing these people - the kind that sought to sack the US Congress on January 6, 2021 - as deluded and stupid. Instead, this is a kind of contagion triggered by the perceived loss of social distinction. It's what motivates the lone wolf attackers and networked militias and conspiracists and even the liberatarian 'wellness' gurus.
"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, following by laughter and forgetting."
In other words, this is about class, not the economy. And those on the frontlines are not so much the traditional lower working class of the Leninist model but the petit-bourgeois who have "just enough security and prosperity" to identify with the wealthy and see their nation as an island that must be protected from migrants and spongers. See Brexit. Rather than totally repudiating neoliberalism, the disaster nationalists embrace that ideology's social Darwinist management of the poor, Seymour wries, treating social problems as racial or ethnic problems.
Even in the face of climate breakdown, increasingly hard to deny, the nationalists resist the idea of an abstract enemy and turn their attention to the bogeymen created by Murdoch. For instance, Seymour recalls how during the Oregan wildfires of 2020, conservative rural people bought apocalyptic fantasies spread on social media that the fires had been deliberately lit by Antifa. The conspiracy theory here is a type of wish fulfillment. This is the war they want to fight.
As Klein also points out in her book, this is not about facts. It is about feelings that can't be denied. And no amount of fact-checking websites or promotion of 'media literacy' can defeat this thing. Media has lost all credibility in any case - captured by the political biases of its owners, the influence of advertisers and the fusion of news with infotainment. When Trump says 'I alone can fix it', his supporters don't really believe him, but they love his sentiment of tearing everything down and starting again - even if it means destroying themselves. That's the scariest part.
As to what to do about disaster nationalism, Seymour says the left needs to stop fighting the right on its own chosen ground. Populations in major economies for the most part support action on climate change, demand greater attention to inequality, support abortion rights and want social democratic institutions like public healthcare and education preserved.
"For all that they are adroit at gaming attention and exploting the media's preoccupations, on few of their agitating issues are disaster nationalists cutting with the grain of majority opinion," Seymour writes. "They appear larger than they are thanks to the long shadow cast by the glaze of media attention. They depend substantially on the paralysis or tacity complicity of their opponents."
Readers in Australia or the UK - watching the parties of the traditional centre-left cravenly and timidly accepting the right's talking points and framing of a host of issues - will be nodding along at this point.
"To defeat and marginalise the new far right, it is necessary first to decisively let go of the resignation that has characterised by the left and the labour movement for three decades," Seymour writes. "Disaster nationalists need not be the only ones to benefit from the crisis of liberalism."
Without radical action from the left, he says, we are hurtling toward ecological cataclysm and human annihilation.
It's hard to argue otherwise. A must-read.
The great mystery for many of us on the left is why the biggest beneficiares of the breakdown in the neoliberal order since the global financial crisis - one in which bankers who destroyed the livelihoods of millions walked away scot-free - are the nationalist, populist right.
And this is not just confined to the US. It's happening everywhere in those parts of the world that were seen as part of the liberal democratic order - in terms of holding regular elections, allowing a relatively free media and supporting individual rights.
From the Hindu death squads of Modi's India to Duterte's extra-judicial killings of 'drug traffickers' in the Phiippines to Bolsanaro's environmental destruction in Brazil, nationalism is on the march. Macho thuggery, unconstrained by any respect for liberal principles, is ascendant. And this is not just in the former third world but also is increasingly dominant in the centres of Anglo-American capitalism and the EU.
In this persuasive analysis, Richard Seymour, a Marxist intellectual, calls the phenomenon 'Disaster Nationalism' - an apocalyptic form of nationalism that has brought far-right leaders to power and is challenging political orthodoxy as represented by the traditional centre-right and centre-left parties of capital and labour respectively.
Arguing that this movement is not quite fascism but a possible precursor to it, Seymour dismisses standard analysis from the left that this is purely about people's disenchantment with 'the economy', pointing out that millions will gladly work against their own best interests to purge their anger. This at base is a nihilist movement that seeks to tear everything down out of frustration with the stalemate of parliamentary instituions, the declining authority of the old establishment and the breakdown of social life under neoliberalism..
"Disaster nationalism (does not) make any claim to revolutionary anti-capitalism, as fascism did before taking power," he writes. "To the contrary, it suggests the problems of capitalist development...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."
As pointed out by Naomi Klein in her own recent book 'Doppleganger' (a work that Seymour frequently cites here), the left has made a fatal mistake in dismissing these people - the kind that sought to sack the US Congress on January 6, 2021 - as deluded and stupid. Instead, this is a kind of contagion triggered by the perceived loss of social distinction. It's what motivates the lone wolf attackers and networked militias and conspiracists and even the liberatarian 'wellness' gurus.
"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, following by laughter and forgetting."
In other words, this is about class, not the economy. And those on the frontlines are not so much the traditional lower working class of the Leninist model but the petit-bourgeois who have "just enough security and prosperity" to identify with the wealthy and see their nation as an island that must be protected from migrants and spongers. See Brexit. Rather than totally repudiating neoliberalism, the disaster nationalists embrace that ideology's social Darwinist management of the poor, Seymour wries, treating social problems as racial or ethnic problems.
Even in the face of climate breakdown, increasingly hard to deny, the nationalists resist the idea of an abstract enemy and turn their attention to the bogeymen created by Murdoch. For instance, Seymour recalls how during the Oregan wildfires of 2020, conservative rural people bought apocalyptic fantasies spread on social media that the fires had been deliberately lit by Antifa. The conspiracy theory here is a type of wish fulfillment. This is the war they want to fight.
As Klein also points out in her book, this is not about facts. It is about feelings that can't be denied. And no amount of fact-checking websites or promotion of 'media literacy' can defeat this thing. Media has lost all credibility in any case - captured by the political biases of its owners, the influence of advertisers and the fusion of news with infotainment. When Trump says 'I alone can fix it', his supporters don't really believe him, but they love his sentiment of tearing everything down and starting again - even if it means destroying themselves. That's the scariest part.
As to what to do about disaster nationalism, Seymour says the left needs to stop fighting the right on its own chosen ground. Populations in major economies for the most part support action on climate change, demand greater attention to inequality, support abortion rights and want social democratic institutions like public healthcare and education preserved.
"For all that they are adroit at gaming attention and exploting the media's preoccupations, on few of their agitating issues are disaster nationalists cutting with the grain of majority opinion," Seymour writes. "They appear larger than they are thanks to the long shadow cast by the glaze of media attention. They depend substantially on the paralysis or tacity complicity of their opponents."
Readers in Australia or the UK - watching the parties of the traditional centre-left cravenly and timidly accepting the right's talking points and framing of a host of issues - will be nodding along at this point.
"To defeat and marginalise the new far right, it is necessary first to decisively let go of the resignation that has characterised by the left and the labour movement for three decades," Seymour writes. "Disaster nationalists need not be the only ones to benefit from the crisis of liberalism."
Without radical action from the left, he says, we are hurtling toward ecological cataclysm and human annihilation.
It's hard to argue otherwise. A must-read.
Read
January 27, 2025"the state of emergency conceals the multitude of emergencies"
Maurice Blanchot: "The apocalypse is disappointing, because in it's glare, nothing really changes."
Maurice Blanchot: "The apocalypse is disappointing, because in it's glare, nothing really changes."
December 10, 2024
There are many worrying signs that the world is becoming a crueller and more callous place. Maybe it always was but it is not totally fallacious to argue that enlightened attitudes have taken root over time and progress has been made on the part of subaltern social groups in making a claim for their fair share of the benefits of living in a supposedly civilised society.
Seymour uses the term ‘liberal’ to describe the world that embodied this progress which he sees slipping from our grasp. But it would be more appropriate to speak of the struggle for democracy as the concrete reason for the advance of the working classes in taking their place in the sunshine. Better still, social democracy, because it has not just been about the extension of the franchise bit-by-bit to include all citizens, but also the construction of institutions and processes which curb the tyranny of elite classes and hold their power in check.
This book doesn’t give a consistent account of what constituted the liberal civilisation which is now being dragged down but the feeling is that humanitarian values that tend towards the promotion of equality and social justice are the things at stake. The criteria for judging what we are losing across the planet is the inexorable rise of parties of the right which make unabashed demands for more selfishness in the political realm – building entire programmes for government on the principle of depriving human rights and social goods to those deemed unworthy of inclusion.
The growth of nationalism is one indicator of how bad things are getting. The internal fracturing of society which divides bits considered 'good' from those who need to be kept on the outer fringes has advanced a long way in many countries. The case of the former Philippines President Rodigo Duterte, whose willingness to exclude extended to hunting down those he considered unwanted by police death squads in which he claimed to participate is only one example. Perhaps even more chilling than the fact that is the fact that this savagery seems to be endorsed by a substantial majority of the Filipino population.
Seymour asks whether we can define these sinister developments as fascism and offers up some useful thoughts on this. What we witnessed in the Philippines and Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and is ongoing in Modi’s India, Netanyahu’s Israel, and any number of other countries, is not yet fascism in the sense of the systems established in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, but is a large step in that direction. Before a population completely acquiesces to a totalising regime that enacts extermination and enslavement the basis of its rule it society necessarily goes through a series of processes which might end in the final Nazi configurment.
These processes are marked by a descent into a degraded public mentality which produces widespread grievance against ‘the other’; the ‘lone wolf’ killer who acts on the sense of the wrong with performative violence intended to spark a social movement; the far right party securing an appreciable size of the vote; the focused opportunity, such as Brexit or ‘stopping the boats’, which gives a significant victory to in mobilising support; and then the stage of entering government, with all that is presented to use state power to deepen the fracture between the favoured and the marginalised. At this point, whether the country in question has emerged as a full-blown fascist state will hinge on whether it has accumulated enough power to scrap any residual possibility of challenge by democratic forces.
As well as tracing all the steps in the travel towards fascism, Seymour’s other significant achievement is to update and deepen the Marxian psycho-analytical accounts of the allure of authoritarian political systems which were attempted in the German Nazi period by Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm. The ways in which citizens might be persuaded to love their oppressors has extended well beyond the drama of the exhilaration of parade-ground goose steps and wall-to-wall swastikas. Modern day fascists have abundant social media (as well as legacy media) tools available which encourage the oppressed individual to fall in love with the lie being sold by the new masters. Immersion in such absurdities as the QAnon conspiracy seems to have a spiritual dimension to its true believers, depriving them of the capacity to live a life outside their appalling fantasy.
A good way to resist being drawn into the vortex that swirls towards fascism (and Seymour insists we all have a fascist within us) is to be doubly conscious of the direction history is dragging us. His sketch of the disaster nationalism is a resource that many of us will benefit from during days when the dangers loom ever larger,
Seymour uses the term ‘liberal’ to describe the world that embodied this progress which he sees slipping from our grasp. But it would be more appropriate to speak of the struggle for democracy as the concrete reason for the advance of the working classes in taking their place in the sunshine. Better still, social democracy, because it has not just been about the extension of the franchise bit-by-bit to include all citizens, but also the construction of institutions and processes which curb the tyranny of elite classes and hold their power in check.
This book doesn’t give a consistent account of what constituted the liberal civilisation which is now being dragged down but the feeling is that humanitarian values that tend towards the promotion of equality and social justice are the things at stake. The criteria for judging what we are losing across the planet is the inexorable rise of parties of the right which make unabashed demands for more selfishness in the political realm – building entire programmes for government on the principle of depriving human rights and social goods to those deemed unworthy of inclusion.
The growth of nationalism is one indicator of how bad things are getting. The internal fracturing of society which divides bits considered 'good' from those who need to be kept on the outer fringes has advanced a long way in many countries. The case of the former Philippines President Rodigo Duterte, whose willingness to exclude extended to hunting down those he considered unwanted by police death squads in which he claimed to participate is only one example. Perhaps even more chilling than the fact that is the fact that this savagery seems to be endorsed by a substantial majority of the Filipino population.
Seymour asks whether we can define these sinister developments as fascism and offers up some useful thoughts on this. What we witnessed in the Philippines and Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and is ongoing in Modi’s India, Netanyahu’s Israel, and any number of other countries, is not yet fascism in the sense of the systems established in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, but is a large step in that direction. Before a population completely acquiesces to a totalising regime that enacts extermination and enslavement the basis of its rule it society necessarily goes through a series of processes which might end in the final Nazi configurment.
These processes are marked by a descent into a degraded public mentality which produces widespread grievance against ‘the other’; the ‘lone wolf’ killer who acts on the sense of the wrong with performative violence intended to spark a social movement; the far right party securing an appreciable size of the vote; the focused opportunity, such as Brexit or ‘stopping the boats’, which gives a significant victory to in mobilising support; and then the stage of entering government, with all that is presented to use state power to deepen the fracture between the favoured and the marginalised. At this point, whether the country in question has emerged as a full-blown fascist state will hinge on whether it has accumulated enough power to scrap any residual possibility of challenge by democratic forces.
As well as tracing all the steps in the travel towards fascism, Seymour’s other significant achievement is to update and deepen the Marxian psycho-analytical accounts of the allure of authoritarian political systems which were attempted in the German Nazi period by Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm. The ways in which citizens might be persuaded to love their oppressors has extended well beyond the drama of the exhilaration of parade-ground goose steps and wall-to-wall swastikas. Modern day fascists have abundant social media (as well as legacy media) tools available which encourage the oppressed individual to fall in love with the lie being sold by the new masters. Immersion in such absurdities as the QAnon conspiracy seems to have a spiritual dimension to its true believers, depriving them of the capacity to live a life outside their appalling fantasy.
A good way to resist being drawn into the vortex that swirls towards fascism (and Seymour insists we all have a fascist within us) is to be doubly conscious of the direction history is dragging us. His sketch of the disaster nationalism is a resource that many of us will benefit from during days when the dangers loom ever larger,
March 2, 2025
I can't help but feel this book was released just a little bit too late - or early. To late to be a warning against a second Trump term and too early to take into account the very same. In the few months since it was released so much has happened that directly connects to the theme of disaster nationalism that it could fill an entire chapter.
Like Anderson's Imagined Communities and Billig's Banal Nationalism, "Disaster Nationalism" reads like the final chapter in a trilogy of explanation and warning of the dangers of nationalism because of it's symbiotic relationship with fascism. And as such, it's eerily contemporary. Not only through it's examples from India, Gaza, Ukraine and the USA, but also by utilizing the symbolism and language used by these right wing forces in a way that makes it impossible to shield yourself from the fact that the things he's describing are happening right here, right now.
Four days after I started reading this, Donad Trump was sworn in for his second term as president of USA. Three days after the worst school shooting in swedish history I start reading the chapter on lone wolves. And I finished it today, in the mind numbing aftermath of the already (and for all the wroing reasons) historical Trump-Zelensky meeting.
This is essential reading for anyone interested in or concerned by the policial upheavals going on throughout pretty much the whole world right now. It might not feel uplifting. It might actually scare you shitless. But, yeah, I still regard it as essential reading.
Like Anderson's Imagined Communities and Billig's Banal Nationalism, "Disaster Nationalism" reads like the final chapter in a trilogy of explanation and warning of the dangers of nationalism because of it's symbiotic relationship with fascism. And as such, it's eerily contemporary. Not only through it's examples from India, Gaza, Ukraine and the USA, but also by utilizing the symbolism and language used by these right wing forces in a way that makes it impossible to shield yourself from the fact that the things he's describing are happening right here, right now.
Four days after I started reading this, Donad Trump was sworn in for his second term as president of USA. Three days after the worst school shooting in swedish history I start reading the chapter on lone wolves. And I finished it today, in the mind numbing aftermath of the already (and for all the wroing reasons) historical Trump-Zelensky meeting.
This is essential reading for anyone interested in or concerned by the policial upheavals going on throughout pretty much the whole world right now. It might not feel uplifting. It might actually scare you shitless. But, yeah, I still regard it as essential reading.
February 5, 2025
A recurring point in Irish political writing for several years in the opening years of the 21st century, particularly from the center and academia, was the seeming immunity of Ireland from the mass racist parties and movements which were coming to prominence across Western Europe. This was often smugly described as being due to Ireland’s experience as a nation of emigrants or the egalitarian nature of our republican tradition. Whilst Irish politics was never actually spared the taint of racism, this myth has been thoroughly punctured since 2020. The anti-lockdown movement transitioned seamlessly into the organisers of anti-migrant demonstrations such as those proclaiming “Ireland is Full” and the Dublin riots of November 2023.
These are a local example of the emergence of what Richard Seymour calls “Disaster Nationalism”, a strain of far-right politics exemplified by the likes of Trump, Modi, Netanyahu, Bolsonaro and Le Pen. The advocates of disaster nationalism, whilst not fascist as Mussolini would have understood the term, are nevertheless fixated with fantasies of catastrophe and conspiracy alongside mass scapegoating of minorities and moral panics. Unsurprisingly, much of their ire is directed at the gains in racial and gender justice that have been won at great difficulty in recent decades and its impact on the privileged status of white men.
These movements have become hugely prominent in recent years by offering those suffering under the social breakdown and economic anxiety caused by the catastrophes of the 2008 recession and the Covid pandemic the possibility of a future in which, to quote Seymour: “Your life may not get any better, but your neighbour’s can get worse”, be they Muslims in India or France, trans people in Britain or Palestinians in Gaza. The emergence of social media has allowed the proponents of disaster nationalism to disseminate and adapt disinformation on a scale unimaginable to previous far-right activists, becoming a form of social contagion in which people unwittingly normalise these positions. This element may go some way to explain why this has taken root in Ireland, unlike its predecessors.
Seymour identifies this as a very contemporary carnival of reaction, albeit one with clear historical parallels to fascism and the psychological conditions that made it possible (drawn out over the course of numerous lengthy digressions about Guattari, Freud and others). It was not only made possible, and accelerated by social media, but has its roots in a very particular ethic of competition and resentment exacerbated by ever-increasing precarity and burnout in a workforce, housing market and romantic landscape that’ve been decimated by neoliberalism. In the absence of the visions of a better world under socialism or fascism which previous generations could aspire to, disaster nationalism instead offers a project based on violent catharsis in which the (largely imagined) enemies of society are punished endlessly. This culminates in a dystopia not unlike the present state of Israel, which Seymour analyses at length as an example of a political order where the ruling classes rely on the public’s hatred of the other to compensate for a declining standard of living and uncertain future.
Whilst Seymour does make important connections between these disparate movements, and articulate how this is very much a problem of the present moment, what’s missing is a sufficient sense of how it’s come to this. Netanyahu, Trump and Modi arguably represent more of a continuation than a breach from what reactionary politics have looked like in their respective countries since the 1980s when examined in context. Mainstream conservative parties have been incorporating and normalising far-right positions for decades now - no less an authority than Marine Le Pen described Sarkozy’s 2007 French presidential election win on an anti-migrant platform as vindication for their movement. The FN (now known as the RN) have since become the biggest party of opposition in the French parliament, proving this position was unfortunately correct.
Seymour is also overdependent on theory and psychology in his analysis, which feels overly fatalist in places. Whilst certain human characteristics which make us innately susceptible to conspiracism and scapegoating might explain the most devout followers of Trump or Modi, it hardly accounts for all of their success. A cursory look at their contrasting recent electoral fortunes would show Trump’s share of the vote rose and Modi’s declined largely due to economic anxiety amongst voters living through a major cost of living crisis. In turn, it’s hard to imagine Bolsanaro coming to power without the Petrobras scandal sparking mass protests over corruption and the cost of living in Brazil. Would the cries of “Ireland is Full” have fallen on deaf ears had the decade prior not seen the decimation of public services and the worst housing crisis in a century?
Disaster Nationalism provides a useful and novel account of contemporary far-right politics, but an incomplete one. All of the movements studied within have their forebears and fit within a given tradition of reactionary politics - the task of the left to communicate a vision for something better remains the same as it was before the internet melted our brains.
These are a local example of the emergence of what Richard Seymour calls “Disaster Nationalism”, a strain of far-right politics exemplified by the likes of Trump, Modi, Netanyahu, Bolsonaro and Le Pen. The advocates of disaster nationalism, whilst not fascist as Mussolini would have understood the term, are nevertheless fixated with fantasies of catastrophe and conspiracy alongside mass scapegoating of minorities and moral panics. Unsurprisingly, much of their ire is directed at the gains in racial and gender justice that have been won at great difficulty in recent decades and its impact on the privileged status of white men.
These movements have become hugely prominent in recent years by offering those suffering under the social breakdown and economic anxiety caused by the catastrophes of the 2008 recession and the Covid pandemic the possibility of a future in which, to quote Seymour: “Your life may not get any better, but your neighbour’s can get worse”, be they Muslims in India or France, trans people in Britain or Palestinians in Gaza. The emergence of social media has allowed the proponents of disaster nationalism to disseminate and adapt disinformation on a scale unimaginable to previous far-right activists, becoming a form of social contagion in which people unwittingly normalise these positions. This element may go some way to explain why this has taken root in Ireland, unlike its predecessors.
Seymour identifies this as a very contemporary carnival of reaction, albeit one with clear historical parallels to fascism and the psychological conditions that made it possible (drawn out over the course of numerous lengthy digressions about Guattari, Freud and others). It was not only made possible, and accelerated by social media, but has its roots in a very particular ethic of competition and resentment exacerbated by ever-increasing precarity and burnout in a workforce, housing market and romantic landscape that’ve been decimated by neoliberalism. In the absence of the visions of a better world under socialism or fascism which previous generations could aspire to, disaster nationalism instead offers a project based on violent catharsis in which the (largely imagined) enemies of society are punished endlessly. This culminates in a dystopia not unlike the present state of Israel, which Seymour analyses at length as an example of a political order where the ruling classes rely on the public’s hatred of the other to compensate for a declining standard of living and uncertain future.
Whilst Seymour does make important connections between these disparate movements, and articulate how this is very much a problem of the present moment, what’s missing is a sufficient sense of how it’s come to this. Netanyahu, Trump and Modi arguably represent more of a continuation than a breach from what reactionary politics have looked like in their respective countries since the 1980s when examined in context. Mainstream conservative parties have been incorporating and normalising far-right positions for decades now - no less an authority than Marine Le Pen described Sarkozy’s 2007 French presidential election win on an anti-migrant platform as vindication for their movement. The FN (now known as the RN) have since become the biggest party of opposition in the French parliament, proving this position was unfortunately correct.
Seymour is also overdependent on theory and psychology in his analysis, which feels overly fatalist in places. Whilst certain human characteristics which make us innately susceptible to conspiracism and scapegoating might explain the most devout followers of Trump or Modi, it hardly accounts for all of their success. A cursory look at their contrasting recent electoral fortunes would show Trump’s share of the vote rose and Modi’s declined largely due to economic anxiety amongst voters living through a major cost of living crisis. In turn, it’s hard to imagine Bolsanaro coming to power without the Petrobras scandal sparking mass protests over corruption and the cost of living in Brazil. Would the cries of “Ireland is Full” have fallen on deaf ears had the decade prior not seen the decimation of public services and the worst housing crisis in a century?
Disaster Nationalism provides a useful and novel account of contemporary far-right politics, but an incomplete one. All of the movements studied within have their forebears and fit within a given tradition of reactionary politics - the task of the left to communicate a vision for something better remains the same as it was before the internet melted our brains.
December 30, 2024
Perhaps reading this in one fatal swoop - one impassioned sitting (a plane ride) - was a mistake.
Seymour contends that "disaster nationalism" is the existing form of civilizational deterioration in which liberal democracies are descending to violent, extremist battlefields led by illiberal demagogues. It rings unfortunately accurate as a theoretical framework. His observations in the various chapters are somewhat scattered (in the sense of no logical choices for some picks - he certainly is not schematic in his choice of examining India, or the USA, or Israel/Palestine, etc) but overall well developed. And the style... oh, exquisite and painful.
The introduction here could be all one needs if one is impatient. It is well refined and hits like a fist to the gut. The conclusion is an interesting exposition that leads out to worker politics. Along the way, there are a lot of useful correctives to the banalities espoused by mainstream media and theorists who bemoan the kind of short-sighted voting against personal interest that vaunts illiberal candidates into the places of power. As Seymour is at pains to argue, it is precisely that many desire the end of their world, which they disavow, which causes this. Or, to use his words,
In the past, I've found Seymour a bit tendentious on topics like social media. Here, he has found his metier. Strongly recommended.
Seymour contends that "disaster nationalism" is the existing form of civilizational deterioration in which liberal democracies are descending to violent, extremist battlefields led by illiberal demagogues. It rings unfortunately accurate as a theoretical framework. His observations in the various chapters are somewhat scattered (in the sense of no logical choices for some picks - he certainly is not schematic in his choice of examining India, or the USA, or Israel/Palestine, etc) but overall well developed. And the style... oh, exquisite and painful.
The introduction here could be all one needs if one is impatient. It is well refined and hits like a fist to the gut. The conclusion is an interesting exposition that leads out to worker politics. Along the way, there are a lot of useful correctives to the banalities espoused by mainstream media and theorists who bemoan the kind of short-sighted voting against personal interest that vaunts illiberal candidates into the places of power. As Seymour is at pains to argue, it is precisely that many desire the end of their world, which they disavow, which causes this. Or, to use his words,
The apocalyptic fantasies of disaster nationalism ... 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, apocalypse movies, 'end times' infotainment and now disaster nationalism suggest, is highly profitable.To what end, one might ask?
Disaster nationalism today harnesses the insecurity, humiliation and miseries of heterogeneous classes and social groups, including some of the poorest [but, as Seymour discerns, mostly the downwardly mobile middle class], to a revolt against liberal civilization, with its pluralist and democratic norms. It offers the balm of vengeance, the promise of national self-love and the cure of restoring society to a more pristine, harmoniously hierarchical state through condign violence. A cosmic reset, one might say. It seeks to restore the traditional consolations of nationalism for the threatened and downwardly mobile. The obsession with seemingly trivial expressive norms, such as the use of correct gender pronouns, is in fact fundamentally about how much violence and humiliation are socially permissable.It's stark, it's accurate, and it is more than agitating.
In the past, I've found Seymour a bit tendentious on topics like social media. Here, he has found his metier. Strongly recommended.
April 15, 2025
I've always liked Richard Seymour's writing. His books are like vocabulary exercises: I make sure to read them on a Kindle so I can look up all the ten-dollar words.
Disaster Nationalism looks at our strange ideological moment, where the Right has unleashed a "vaguely insurgent energy" that is "not against a decadent status quo, but in defence of it." In a world with no lack of unfolding catastrophes, right-wing forces become ecstatic fighting against disasters that exist only in their imaginations.
The result is an "incoherent pastiche of conspiracist bricolage, hallucinatory anti-communism, lurid theories of radical sexual evil and theological millenarianism" (lots of fun words there!). These conspiracy theories serve to obscure the systems hurtling us towards apocalypse. Seymour explains the psychological mechanisms at work: "One wants the disaster to assume the contours of a concrete and personal foe, an enemy who, unlike the abstract forces that actually rule us, can be killed in combat."
This far-right paranoia is a product of neoliberalism, which taught us that we're all on our own and "they’re all out to get you." Seymour examines this new phenomenon — "the early days of a new fascism" — in the U.S., Brazil, the Philippines, Israel, and India, combining sociopolitical with psychoanalytical observations. Trump's rise has very little to do with Trump's personality. The rightward shift is driven forward with pogroms and social media. While reformists say that the Left should focus on "bread and butter" issues, Seymour points out that people often mobilize and sacrifice for completely abstract ideals, above all "the nation." The Left needs to inspire passion as well.
As always, Seymour is insightful, deeply pessimistic, and credulous toward reformist leaders. Faced with the "downfall of liberal civilization," the only concrete remedy he's willing to consider is the milquetoast reforms offered by Sanders or Corbyn. I would say: the only answer to Disaster Nationalism is Disaster Communism.
Disaster Nationalism looks at our strange ideological moment, where the Right has unleashed a "vaguely insurgent energy" that is "not against a decadent status quo, but in defence of it." In a world with no lack of unfolding catastrophes, right-wing forces become ecstatic fighting against disasters that exist only in their imaginations.
The result is an "incoherent pastiche of conspiracist bricolage, hallucinatory anti-communism, lurid theories of radical sexual evil and theological millenarianism" (lots of fun words there!). These conspiracy theories serve to obscure the systems hurtling us towards apocalypse. Seymour explains the psychological mechanisms at work: "One wants the disaster to assume the contours of a concrete and personal foe, an enemy who, unlike the abstract forces that actually rule us, can be killed in combat."
This far-right paranoia is a product of neoliberalism, which taught us that we're all on our own and "they’re all out to get you." Seymour examines this new phenomenon — "the early days of a new fascism" — in the U.S., Brazil, the Philippines, Israel, and India, combining sociopolitical with psychoanalytical observations. Trump's rise has very little to do with Trump's personality. The rightward shift is driven forward with pogroms and social media. While reformists say that the Left should focus on "bread and butter" issues, Seymour points out that people often mobilize and sacrifice for completely abstract ideals, above all "the nation." The Left needs to inspire passion as well.
As always, Seymour is insightful, deeply pessimistic, and credulous toward reformist leaders. Faced with the "downfall of liberal civilization," the only concrete remedy he's willing to consider is the milquetoast reforms offered by Sanders or Corbyn. I would say: the only answer to Disaster Nationalism is Disaster Communism.
January 20, 2026
A very impressive overview of what Seymour terms as “disaster nationalism,” something which he separates heartily from climate fascism, a distinction which confused me initially. To him, “disaster nationalism” should be defined specifically around violent and apocalyptic thinking on the right, weakening centrist consensus while framing all non-rightist belief as communist (or generally degenerate). To buttress his argument, Seymour casts a wide net, looking across the world at a wide array of trends which are on the move — and little seems capable of fully halting their progress. He looks intently at both personal and political sources of fuel for the fire, be they sexual or economic. Generally though, unlike historic fascism, there is no real popular economic policies for disaster nationalism, in fact, they seem quite intent on clawing back bourgeoise victories. The particular study of most interest to me is India, perhaps where disaster nationalism is the most developed and the deepest practiced. I’m very thankful for the bibliography here, as the works citied seem to give a decent wide account of the BJP’s tenure and history. Seymour’s own account is decent enough, noting briefly some of the historic fascist roots and detailing heavily their sexual politics and violent, paramilitary nature. I do wish he covered the Rohingya genocide more extensively, it feels an exemplary case of these weak, internet reliant social networks breaking out into the real world in a hyper violent way. Also lacking is of course that most defining disaster, climate change. Many of the “disasters” that define disaster nationalism are caused by them directly and intentionally, rather than being a broader consequence of capitalism or circumstance. I also feel his account on the Zionist entity is good though vacillates somewhat. But overall a great read.
October 18, 2025
There’s some worthwhile insights here. First and foremost, rather than starting with Trump and Brexit, Seymour makes the important decision to centre much of his analysis on the far-right in India and Israel, regimes percolating since the 1990s and perfecting the fusion of legal and extra-legal violence through the tactic of the pogrom. Here, it becomes very obvious that today’s coterie of far-right celebrity politicians are products of the war and terror, propelled by the sociophobic tendencies of a decaying neoliberalism post-GFC. However, don’t think that these movements are merely a false consciousness of a left-behind white working class. Like most historic fascist movements, today’s far-right draws most of its energy from the paranoid middle, resentful at elites and fearful of the prospect of downward class mobility. Combine this with some global warming infused psychoanalytic death wishes, and you have a pretty potent combination. This is unlikely to be tamed by a mere return to social democracy and “bread and butter” issues. Rather, the left must draw lessons from the far-right, insofar as it demonstrates the radicalising potential in sacrificing yourself to a “greater cause”, without any immediate material benefits.
The book’s glaring weakness is that it reads like a literature review. This is not unique to Disaster Nationalism. Alberto Toscano’s recent book on fascism had the exact same issue. Is there just so much already written on fascism that it’s too easy to get lost in the weeds? Or is it a cowardice in expressing one’s own original opinion, without the comfort of citations? Either way, it’s getting annoying.
The book’s glaring weakness is that it reads like a literature review. This is not unique to Disaster Nationalism. Alberto Toscano’s recent book on fascism had the exact same issue. Is there just so much already written on fascism that it’s too easy to get lost in the weeds? Or is it a cowardice in expressing one’s own original opinion, without the comfort of citations? Either way, it’s getting annoying.
February 23, 2025
A book about the world that we live in now, unfortunately. A book about how democracy dies and populist fascism takes root in an empire too powerful for others to ignore or stop from trampling on their rights.
Now that I'm done waxing philosophical, this was a pretty interesting book. There are a lot of people writing books about things like this these days and this is a better one than most of the others that I've read. At least in the top 20% of them, but admittedly I have not read them all.
Now that I'm done waxing philosophical, this was a pretty interesting book. There are a lot of people writing books about things like this these days and this is a better one than most of the others that I've read. At least in the top 20% of them, but admittedly I have not read them all.
June 14, 2025
Erg inzichtelijk boek, waarin ideologieën als kapitalisme, nationalisme en fascisme op een behapbare manier worden uitgediept en naast elkaar worden gezet. Had beter dit boek eerst kunnen lezen en daarna pas ‘Late Fascism’ van Alberto Toscano. Allebei aanraders, maar wel in die volgorde! In het huidige tijdsgewricht vind ik boeken als deze erg behulpzaam om actuele en historische tendensen te kunnen doorgronden en hierop te kunnen reflecteren.
February 9, 2025
An incredible summary of where we (humanity / society) are at in our current moment in history. I think Richard Seymour just became my new favourite writer. Highly recommend to anyone concerned about the resurgence of the far right, and its potential/likely descent towards fascism.
December 31, 2024
It’s a good read. Well-written. Grim. Dense. But also quite easy to follow. The thesis is something I’ll mull over for a while. I’m glad to have read it heading in to the next period of time.
February 25, 2025
Very interesting listen, would recommend.
March 26, 2025
Painful! An astute analysis of what's happening around us today. Never thought I'd be able to comprehend the far right's hypocrisies and contradictions. Seymour takes concepts introduced by Naomi Klein in Disaster Capitalism as well as Döppelganger, and runs the gamut with them. I found this book to be decidedly less smug and better organized than Klein's writing.
August 5, 2025
probably the most urgent book to read rn
November 1, 2025
A dense fully packed read. Not for the casual or the vocabulary challenged. A serious examination of our current malaises.
January 9, 2026
Things are bad at the minute but this book is good at explaining the bad.
February 2, 2025
2.5/5
Though it tended to repeat itself and drag at some points, it was an interesting read. Seymour is very critical of both parties in the United States (definitely very heavy criticism of conservative America), while also comparing similarities between recent elections in Brazil, UK, and the Philippines among others.
Though it tended to repeat itself and drag at some points, it was an interesting read. Seymour is very critical of both parties in the United States (definitely very heavy criticism of conservative America), while also comparing similarities between recent elections in Brazil, UK, and the Philippines among others.
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