by RICHARD SEYMOUR
Richard Seymour on how crisis and catastrophe are feeding the far-right surge
The inchoate breed of fascism emerging today thrives on disasters, chronic and acute. Today’s far right is not yet fascist, or not-yet-fascist. It does not organize paramilitaries with the aim of overthrowing electoral democracy and destroying political freedom. Rather, it has a thin, networked civil society base whose energies are wrapped around culture wars that occasionally explode into the meatspace violence of lone-wolf murderers, vigilantes, riots, pogroms, and pseudo-insurrections. Its elected leaders such as Modi, Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Orbán, Milei, and Netanyahu direct their aggression not at electoral democracy, but at the liberal state. They have at times unleashed popular violence in an offensive on bourgeois legality, but the aim is to effect a constitutional rupture that tilts the balance of rule toward authoritarian democracy rather than outright dictatorship.
The fascism that is being prepared through this sequence will not resemble classical fascism. The world that made fascism — colonialism, class civil war, revolution, and intense industrial modernization — has passed. The new world is one in which the big questions will be those raised by the climate crisis: who gets what and who does without, who lives and who dies. Neonate fascism, whether green or brown, is preparing the terrain for a war on what it sees as mutant or out-of-place biology: the migratory or criminal.
According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, classical fascism liberated a popular desire for suicide: its fulfilment was not the fabulated Reich stretching from Western Europe to East Asia, but the Nero decree ordering the destruction of German infrastructure as the Nazis’ final act. Today’s incipient fascisms metabolize the mulch of misery into a form of collective excitement tending toward the ecstatic brush with death that is the metier of the lone-wolf murderer. Wholly lacking the utopian aspects of interwar fascism, with its idea of refining the species through brutal demographic culls and improving living standards through colonial expansion, it is today, more nakedly than ever before, a suicidal programme.
Let me begin with a contemporary disaster story. In the summer of 2020, the US state of Oregon witnessed a wildfire bigger than anything in living memory — so far. Winds blew wildfires into megafires, and downed power lines to create more fires, burning at up to 800C. Ten percent of the state’s population was forced to evacuate. Thousands of homes were destroyed. Thirty-three people were killed.
This acute disaster came hard upon a series of chronic disasters: the financial crash of 2008 was followed by economic depression, soaring poverty rates and joblessness especially in rural counties, pervasive alcoholism, the highest addiction rates in the United States — before the fentanyl crisis took off — and a surge of suicides. We often hear that disasters bring people together: the “city of comrades”, the “democracy of distress”, or what Rebecca Solnit calls “disaster communities”. It isn’t necessarily so. Kai Erikson, a sociologist specializing in disasters, found not a single example of this. If it happens, it happens only where the community wasn’t already riven with ethnic and class fault lines. Erikson found that in most scenarios, acute disaster compounds chronic disaster.
The chronic disasters — of poverty, addiction and public squalor — creep around and shut down a person’s defences without them noticing. When the acute disaster comes, she is in no position to resist. She instead experiences something akin to a “psychological concussion”, a “dull silence”, a retreat to the survivalist enclaves of life. And hopelessness — apocalyptic hopelessness. They share the sense that some bleak truth about the world has been horribly and irreversibly disclosed.
Loving Catastrophe: The Spectre of Disaster Nationalism
Yet, today’s far-right loves disaster. In a world where disasters are not exactly scarce, they can’t stop fantasizing about imaginary disasters: the “Great Replacement” in which migrants will allegedly swallow up white Euro-American societies, the “white genocide” that will be its supposed result, the “Great Reset” favouring globalist elites after Covid, the “gender ideology” that is said to be a plot to destroy Western masculinity from Eastern Europe to Latin America, the “cultural Marxists” plotting sedition from within, and, in India, the “Romeo Jihad” in which deviant Muslim men seduce and convert Hindu girls as part of a thousand-year-old war on the Hindu nation. They love raging and pogroming against imaginary disaster.
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