Disaster Nationalism by Richard Seymour, 2/26/2025

Disaster nationalism

On authoritarian tipping points worldwide

by Richard Seymour

[This article posted on February 26, 2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, http://www.linksnet.de.]

Today’s extreme right is not yet fascist, or not yet fascist. It does not maintain paramilitary storm troops to overthrow parliamentary democracy and abolish all political freedoms. Rather, it has a thin civil society base that has so far focused on culture wars, while its anger occasionally erupts in the real world in violent outbursts by “lone wolves” and vigilante groups, as well as in riots, pogroms, and pseudo-uprisings. The aggression of their elected leaders, such as Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Orbán, Milei, and Netanyahu, is not directed against parliamentary democracy, but against what they see as an overly liberal state. Even if they occasionally unleash the violence of the people against bourgeois legality, their real goal is a constitutional break that will shift the balance of power toward authoritarian democracy rather than dictatorship. The fascism that is being prepared in this way will not resemble classical fascism. The world that gave rise to fascism—colonialism, class struggles, revolutions, and intense industrial modernization—is gone forever. In the new world, it is the climate crisis that raises the central questions: Who gets what and who has to go without, who is allowed to live and who dies? The “new fascism in its infancy,” whether green or brown, is preparing the ground for a war against what it sees as mutated or misplaced biology: migrants or criminals.
“Today’s forms of burgeoning fascism transform the humus of misery into a kind of collective excitement that pushes for an ecstatic encounter with death – the métier of the ‘lone wolf perpetrator’.”

The burgeoning but still immature fascism currently being observed thrives on acute and chronic catastrophes. According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, classical fascism served a widespread death wish: in the end, the result was not the fabled Thousand-Year Reich stretching from Western Europe to East Asia, but rather the Nazis’ final act, the Nero Order to destroy all infrastructure in Germany. Today’s forms of burgeoning fascism transform the humus of misery into a kind of collective excitement that pushes for an ecstatic encounter with death—the métier of the “lone wolf perpetrator.” Since the current manifestations completely lack the utopian moments of interwar fascism—the refinement of the human species through the extermination of certain population groups and the improvement of the standard of living of one’s own people through colonial expansion—they are more openly a suicide mission than ever before.

I want to start with a relatively recent disaster story. In the summer of 2020, a wildfire raged in the US state of Oregon that was larger than anything the local population there can remember. The wind turned individual forest fires into large fires and tore down power lines, causing further fires that reached temperatures of up to 800 degrees. Ten percent of the state’s population had to be evacuated, thousands of homes were destroyed, and 33 people were killed. This acute disaster followed a series of chronic disasters, including the 2008 financial crash, which led to economic depression, rising poverty, mass unemployment, and, especially in rural Oregon, widespread alcoholism, the highest addiction rate in the US (before fentanyl became widespread), and a wave of suicides.

It is often said that disasters bring people together. This is referenced in dramas such as “The City of Comrades,” concepts such as “democracy of distress,” or what Rebecca Solnit calls “disaster communities.” But is this really true? Kai Erikson, a sociologist specializing in disasters, has not found a single example of general solidarity in emergency situations. When people do come together, it is only in those communities and neighborhoods that were not already plagued by ethnic or class divisions.

Erikson found that in most scenarios, an acute disaster only exacerbates chronic disasters. Chronic disasters such as poverty, addiction, and public misery creep into people’s lives and weaken their defenses without them always noticing. When an acute disaster strikes, they are often unable to resist.

Instead, they experience “psychological shock,” a “numbing silence,” and retreat into the survival enclaves of everyday life. And a sense of hopelessness spreads, often with apocalyptic overtones. People feel like they are witnesses to a grim truth that has been revealed to the world in a terrible and irrevocable way.
Right-wing extremists are infatuated with disasters

Today’s right-wing extremists, however, love disasters. In a world where disasters are not exactly rare, they are eager to invent all kinds of conspiracies and afflictions: from the “Great Replacement” and “genocide of white people,” in which migrants will allegedly eliminate the white majority populations in Europe and the US, to the “Great Reset,” a supposed conspiracy of global elites in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, to “gender ideology,” which is considered a plot to destroy “Western masculinity,” to the “cultural Marxists” who are supposedly preparing to overthrow the system from within, to the alleged “Romeo Jihad” in India, in which perverse Muslim men seduce and convert Hindu girls as part of a thousand-year war against the Hindu nation. Right-wing extremists love to rage against imagined catastrophes and thus stir up pogrom sentiments.

In the case of Oregon, this took the form of a mass apocalyptic fantasy that first spread spontaneously via social media networks (in more rural areas, there are hardly any local newspapers or news stations left) and was then taken up by authority figures, from the local police to Donald Trump. Since 2017, rumors had been circulating in this area that there was a seditious group called Antifa planning a massacre of white conservative Christians and a “tyranny of the liberals.” And in 2020, when lockdown measures were introduced in response to the coronavirus pandemic, they said: Look, this is the tyranny we always warned about. And when the Black Lives Matter movement emerged, they said: Look, this is the uprising we always warned about. They’re burning down cities, they’re breaking into our homes. And now these fires. Very quickly, rumblings began among the population, with the first people claiming that Antifa was behind the forest fires. So many fires at once, they said, couldn’t be a coincidence. Someone must have set them deliberately to harm them: probably terrorists and mercenaries paid by the Democratic Party. Armed vigilantes then set up checkpoints. Some people refused to be evacuated. One man, who was told he had to leave his house because his life was in danger, said: “I’m protecting my city. If I see people messing around, they’ll feel the pain.” That’s a more exciting prospect than simply fleeing a disaster. It’s not pleasant to suffer a disaster. But, as Michael Billig has shown in his work on the psychology of British fascism, feeling threatened by other people can be exciting and boost self-confidence.

Why? From a psychoanalytical point of view, something that already exists can thus enter the consciousness: the feeling of threat. In political terms, this enables people to defend themselves and fight back. Because capitalism or climate change, even if you recognize them as problems, are difficult to shoot at. They are abstract forces that are difficult to combat. But you can shoot at Antifa and members of the Black Lives Matter movement, or march on the Capitol in Washington, D.C., to hang the “communists” who are blamed for all evils. That’s exciting. Of course, this doesn’t solve a single problem, because as with any symptom, the point is to avoid concrete solutions. It is part of an addictive cycle of threat and liberation strikes.

Catastrophe nationalism as an alternative to the pervasive depression resulting from the protracted decline of liberal societies is much more effective than CBD or any psychotropic drugs. It reassures people that the demons in their heads are real and that they can silence them with violence.

Fascist anti-totalitarianism and violence

In recent years, there have been a series of amateurish pseudo-uprisings by the far right. Less than a year after the riots in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, police in Germany foiled an “attempted coup” by the Reich Citizens’ Movement. A few months later, supporters of Brazil’s defeated former president Jair Bolsonaro stormed the government palace with the aim of persuading the military to intervene. In Russia, members of the paramilitary Wagner Group, led by former Putin ally Yevgeny Prigoschin, set out for Moscow to depose the military leadership, whom they accused of betraying their war against the “Hohols” (a racist term for Ukrainians). The uprisings were always preceded by conspiracy theory paranoia. Even more significantly, in most cases, the insurgents assigned the role of getting their hands dirty and completing the coups they propagated to the “good guys” in power.

A similar logic underlies the outbreaks of vigilantism in the US and Brazil, the pogroms in India, the attacks by Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and the voluntary death squads in the Philippines that claim to be fighting drug trafficking. These various forms of “people’s justice” exist alongside and with the tolerance, and in some cases even the active support, of state authorities. They thus support right-wing extremist governments and their henchmen in the repressive apparatus by going further than legal restrictions allow them to go, while at the same time paving the way for an expansion of state violence. This practice is not simply “counter-subversive,” but aims to create a division between those parts of the state that are considered a treacherous and legalistic establishment and the more traditional authorities, especially in the military, police, and law enforcement, from which right-wing vigilantes receive support.

Another characteristic of contemporary right-wing extremist disinformation, from QAnon to the Querdenker movement, is to place itself in the tradition of “anti-totalitarian” thinking and to present itself as a defender of individual freedoms. They abhor any demands or appeals to the “social” or “collective.” Just as “Red Rosa” was a figure of terror for the German Freikorps, according to Klaus Theweleit, today’s extreme right is terrified of the red-haired “fighter for social justice.” At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, she warned that social distancing was tantamount to communism and that the measures to contain it were preparations for a “Fourth Reich.” This “sociophobia” (Wendy Brown) shows the extent to which today’s extreme right is permeated by the logic of neoliberal political economy. Although she rejects the institutional forms of neoliberalism as “globalism,” she uses the same anti-democratic, anti-welfare state, and competition-oriented vocabulary as it does. Right-wing extremist politicians, from Viktor Orbán and Marine Le Pen to Narendra Modi, are flirting with or even experimenting with authoritarian versions of neoliberalism. This also explains why some who were reasonable critics of neoliberalism during its heyday turned to the far right during the pandemic: the myth of the “sovereign individual” had suddenly become countercultural, and they had the uneasy feeling that normality was slipping away from them.

None of this is entirely new. In a sense, conspiracy theorists such as Abbé Barruel and John Robison, who attributed the French Revolution to illegal networks of Templars or Freemasons, already provided a blueprint for this fascist “anti-totalitarianism.” From the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to the “New World Order” to the syncretic millenarianism of QAnon and the lateral thinkers: it is an imagined occult despotism that threatens freedom that fuels their violent fantasies and politics. Fascist intellectuals such as Pierre Drieu de La Rochelle and José Antonio Primo de Rivera were both enthusiastic and horrified by the idea that the individual could be absorbed into the masses. Rochelle wanted to “eradicate the fixation on the state by making use of the state,” while Rivera despised Marxism because he did not want to be an “inferior animal in an anthill.”

And yet neoliberalism has profoundly changed right-wing extremism. There is no longer any reference to “class transcendence” (Michael Mann) in today’s burgeoning fascisms. While the fascists of the interwar period still felt compelled to promise serious reforms to change the meaning of the working class, to “nationalize” it, so to speak, today’s extreme right is entirely on the side of prepotent capitalism, which only needs to be freed from all ‘wokeness’ and “constraints of political correctness.” Even the rhetorical attacks on “globalism” are a peculiarity of the far right in the Global North: in countries such as India, Brazil, and the Philippines, far-right governments are big fans of globalization. Apart from occasional cash transfers on a clientelistic basis, today’s authoritarian right has little to offer the working class beyond a few national measures to protect them from competition from migrants. Even that is subordinate to the more powerful and urgent offer: the chance to destroy a neighbor.
Key moments and the true innovators of burgeoning fascism

The convection cells of this storm have been visible for a long time. From the perspective of liberals in the West, the key moment was 2016, when Trump came to power and the British population voted to leave the European Union. But this focus on election results and their institutional consequences misses the point. The renewed turn to fascism is the result of a social and emotional infection that has been spreading for decades. Looking at its epidemiological course, the critical turning point would have been around the time of the 2008 financial crisis.

The trends that are coming to a head today have their origins in the 1990s, a decade that was thoroughly misinterpreted by so many and which marked the peak of the (neo-)liberal era. While Hindu nationalists in India destroyed the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, Pat Buchanan achieved a decisive first breakthrough for the “nativist right” in the Republican primaries in the US, and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), led by its chairman Jörg Haider, became the second strongest force in the National Council elections for the first time. The “war on terror” and the global “clash of civilizations,” in the course of which liberal states showed their old harshness with practices such as torture, kidnappings, police shootings, and renewed racist oppression, accelerated these trends. But while Islamophobic sentiment in large parts of Europe brought further electoral success to the far right, the newly forged ethno-nationalist alliances in the Global South, with their hate speech and violent attacks—from Modi’s pogrom in Gujarat to Sharon’s brutal occupation of the West Bank—proved to be the true innovators of the newly burgeoning fascism. When analyzing fascism, as with so many other things, it is time to provincialize Europe.

In North America and Europe, the financial crash of 2008 was followed by sovereign debt crises, austerity measures, and exploitation strategies that primarily affected the “undeserving” poor, migrants, minorities, and precarious wage earners, but hardened society as a whole. When the number of illnesses and deaths skyrocketed as a result of these measures, the medical diagnoses were mostly heart problems, diabetes, or drug overdoses. Hardly anyone spoke about the immediate political causes. But for many who felt this deterioration in their living conditions but couldn’t quite make sense of it, right-wing discourse offered an explanation: the “white working class” had been “abandoned.” The key term here was “white.” There was no longer any talk of these workers being exploited or oppressed. The emphasis was on the loss of recognition by the ruling liberal elites, whose attention was no longer focused on ordinary, hard-working people, but on minorities. The dissatisfaction of various class groups at risk of social decline was thus attributed to a kind of ethnic usurpation. Social disintegration led to the rise of militias, cyber fascism, and anomic lone-wolf fascism. At the international level, the crisis of imperialism in Iraq has given us the mega-nihilistic “Islamic State.” From a global perspective, the current strength of the extreme right is primarily due to the regression of liberal states and societies and the resulting ubiquitous affects such as depression and resentment.

In terms of the political and electoral system, the real breakthrough of the authoritarian right was not Brexit (which was more of a regional event) or Trump’s entry into the White House (which was more an outgrowth of the decline of the US as a world power), but the election of Narendra Modi as prime minister of India in 2014. Suddenly, no one remembered his responsibility for the bloody anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002. The entry bans imposed on him in the West at the time were lifted without comment. Instead, Barack Obama and various business journalists celebrated Modi’s economic development of Gujarat and his “iron fist” as a model of success, even though the Muslim minority there continues to lose out. At the heart of Modi’s fabulous success were cuts in social, health, and education spending in order to use the savings to subsidize commercial enterprises and attract investors.

This showed that open violence against minorities no longer has to be “embarrassing” for the far right, nor does it weaken their chances of being elected. On the contrary, they can refer to it as a kind of “unique selling point.” Thus, the Indian far right discovered the specific power of the connection between prepotent capitalism, murderous ethno-nationalism, and Islamophobia—which, following Deleuze and Guattari, can be described as a “resonance machine”—something that the European far right also took advantage of after the turn of the millennium. Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was expected to lose the parliamentary elections in Gujarat after its disastrous handling of the bloody riots in 2002, instead recorded a five percent increase in votes. This created the political basis for Modi’s version of capitalism with pogrom-like features.

Donald Trump, who was victorious with an explicitly racist-nationalist program; Rodrigo Duterte, who won the Philippine presidential election with the promise to murder millions of drug addicts; and Jair Bolsonaro, who successfully staged a soft coup against the Workers’ Party in Brazil with the support of the establishment—all of them were able to learn from the Indian experience.
It isn’t the economy, stupid

Catastrophic nationalism has turned the political orthodoxy of the ruling center upside down. For years, we clung to a false notion, borrowed from classical economic theory, that the dominant maxim of trade was enlightened self-interest. But this was more a description of a technique of government, deliberately playing certain human passions (greed, avarice, envy, etc.) off against others (longing for turmoil and upheaval). Most people do not vote with their wallets in most cases, and the new extreme right has repeatedly proven that it is willing to take a beating for the chance of a symbolic victory.

But even now—after so many years in which economic crises, proven economic incompetence, and poor governance by the far right have done little to harm them in elections—one still encounters the widespread explanation that the tendency toward fascism is in some way a misguided expression of “neglect” or “unmet material needs.” . The left has its own versions of this narrative. According to them, “issues of identity” have overshadowed the basic needs and universal concerns of the majority of the population. However, those who vote for the right, riot for them, or even kill for them can hardly be described as exceptionally disenfranchised or poor. There is evidence that they have suffered personal disappointments and experienced professional decline, and some live in so-called neglected regions. But capitalist conditions constantly ruin the lives of millions of people without them all undergoing right-wing radicalization.

To better understand the connection, we must return to Marx and his observations of humans as “objective beings.” According to this view, humans have a strong urge toward their objects, a passion to acquire them. We must therefore consider in particular the pleasure of persecution and the role of envy and vindictiveness in social contexts characterized by relentless competition and growing social inequality, where winners are celebrated, losers are despised, and the price of failure is high and psychologically toxic. It is not enough to lament the phenomenon of increasing disinformation as if the problem were the excessive gullibility of a particularly impressionable audience. Without question, disinformation exists, but it thrives on a lack of trust: a crisis of credibility among authorities. Most of what we know we learn from others: if we can no longer trust anyone, we can no longer know anything with certainty. In a crisis of trust, in which neoliberalism suggests to us every day that everyone is competing with everyone else and we must protect ourselves from being taken advantage of by others, many prefer to rely only on themselves and adhere to a culture of do-it-yourself, including when it comes to gathering information.

The exciting question is how the extreme right has incorporated the politically ambivalent alternative milieus, which in the 1990s displayed curiosity and openness toward the “other” and the “foreign” in the 1990s and joined the anti-capitalist and peace movements in the early 2000s, has incorporated and armed itself for cyberwarfare. After all, it not only spreads fake news to deceive and look good in public, but also seeks to stir up feelings of revenge against strategically selected enemies, destroy their reputation and career, and in some cases even physically destroy them. Modi “rewards” his favorite trolls, and his government has compiled lists of enemies that it sends to these trolls. Under Bolsonaro, there was a “cabinet of hate.” Duterte subjected his political opponents to sexual persecution and death threats before throwing them in prison or having them murdered.

Right-wing extremism clearly promotes a great desire for revenge and retribution, which seems to be part of its erotic appeal, further calling into question the notion of enlightened self-interest. In the fantasy world of the right wing, sexual evil plays a central role: pedophile elites, men who spread fear and terror disguised as trans women in women’s restrooms, Muslims seducing Hindu girls, gender ideology brainwashing children, Chads and Stacys and Tyrones tyrannizing lonely and sexually needy men. All of this is not simply conservative, it is mercilessly transgressive. MRA forums revel in topics such as rape and pedophilia. Andrew Tate fans advocate sexual slavery. Modi became a sex symbol in Gujarat after instigating a pogrom against Muslims. And why? Because in the bleak worldview espoused by him and his followers, someone is always being violated and humiliated. The only question is who it will be. One Hindutva activist explained: “They raped so many of us, now it’s the Muslim women’s turn.” What the right-wing extremists criticize about the communists is not that they persecuted, tortured, and humiliated many people, but that they were the wrong people. Catastrophic nationalism seeks to redistribute violence and humiliation.
The dialectic of mutual radicalization

That is why violence becomes a unique “selling point.” The pogrom in Gujarat in 2002 was allegedly preceded by a “massacre” by the other side. The fire on a train, in which dozens of right-wing Hindu activists died and which later turned out to have been an accident, was portrayed by the local authorities as an attack by Muslims who had carried out an assault on the train. BJP officials, the local police, and businesspeople then helped the Hindu activists in their hunt for the Muslim minority. They looted, tortured, raped, and murdered an estimated 800 people, including children. The same libidinous pattern can be observed in the Philippines, where Duterte’s death squad-backed regime achieved approval ratings of over 90 percent among the population, regardless of what it did. Although many voters feared that they themselves or their acquaintances could accidentally become victims of these death squads, Duterte managed to sell the planned extermination of the “unworthy” poor as a measure that would bring the nation the long-awaited economic upswing. But Duterte managed to sell the planned extermination of the “unworthy” poor as a measure that would bring the nation its long-awaited economic boom. The motto was: Let’s attack and destroy the poor and oppressed, then your grandmothers will dare to go out on the streets again, companies will invest in the country and help it prosper.

There is a connection between this violence and the extreme right-wing political economy, which also has nothing to do with enlightened self-interest. Today’s extreme right renounces any utopian element and does not pretend to be an anti-capitalist force anywhere. Not only has it internalized the logic of neoliberalism, it also benefits from a strange symbiosis with the neoliberal center. They share a common interest: the cultivation of hopelessness and revenge, or in short: sado-pessimism. What distinguishes the far right, however, is that it is willing to allow the outbursts of popular violence provoked by these passions to happen, rather than containing them and expecting people to passively enjoy the state’s cruelty directed at unpopular migrants and demonstrators.

A fatal tipping point is what I call the dialectic of mutual radicalization. The armed base, incited by its leadership, carries out shock attacks on the enemy. It goes further than the state can due to legal restrictions. The leadership defends it, adds official force, and thus raises the rhetorical stakes. This encourages the base to go even further. An example of this is what happened after the Black Lives Matter street fights in 2020. Trump called on right-wing vigilantes to fight back, using the famous slogan of supporters of former racial segregation in the US: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Kyle Rittenhouse, who was proven to have shot two anti-fascist protesters, was turned into a poster boy by Trump and his allies, supposedly representing suburban revenge. The costs of his legal defense were covered by right-wing big donors. Then Trump sent in paramilitary units of the federal police to arrest protesters off the streets. This led to the extrajudicial execution of a man named Michael Reinoehl, who had been suspected of shooting a right-wing extremist activist. This was the prelude to the later storming of the Capitol.

The end, the telos of this process, is genocide. In Israel, the symbiosis between the bourgeois center and the extreme right also stands for global convergence due to the country’s importance for Western foreign policy. In Gaza, an army of men, most of whom are not much older than their early or mid-twenties, is currently operating, thirsting for revenge and a thorough redistribution of humiliation after Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, known as “Al-Aqsa Flood.” Socialized in a dehumanizing state, they are equipped by the state for genocide in every respect. And according to their posts on social media, some of them are thoroughly enjoying what they are doing. Apparently, there are virtually no written rules of engagement[1]. Anything that is not expressly prohibited is considered permissible. They are the products of a state in decline: the nationalist utopia of the post-war period, which was only made possible by the “Nakba,” i.e., ethnic cleansing, has not been viable for decades and has left behind an increasingly unequal and pessimistic society that tends toward messianism. It can be assumed that young soldiers are disproportionately attached to religious nationalism (Dati Leumi) or secular right-wing extremism. Many of them want to occupy the Gaza Strip permanently and believe that the extermination of the Amalekites (according to the Hebrew Bible, the “enemy people” of the Israelites, editor’s note) is progressing too slowly. According to a report by Ha’aretz on March 19, 2024, ordinary soldiers have been in a de facto revolt against their military leadership since the first months of the war. Meanwhile, in Israel, anyone who criticizes the war, even for humanitarian reasons, risks being fired, hunted down by fascist mobs, or ending up in solitary confinement.

This is what they have been waiting for: The internal traitors will be killed, the neighbor will be destroyed. And the liberal followers will either follow them all the way or be destroyed as well. That is what it means to live in a civilization doomed to destruction.

First published by LuXemburg Online, http://www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de.

Note

[1] See, among others, Oren Ziv: “I’m bored, so I shoot”: The Israeli army’s approval of free-for-all violence in Gaza, in: +972, July 8, 2024,http://www.972mag.com/israeli-soldiers-gaza-firing-regulations/, editor’s note.