The Ground Beneath Our Feet
Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization
Verso, 288pp, £20.00, ISBN 9781804294253
reviewed by Tymek Woodham
The ever-widening gyre of late capitalism requires, in British-American academic David Harvey’s phrase, a fix. The rampant accumulation of wealth constantly threatens to expend itself through the production of self-made crises: the market’s invisible hand has trembled since birth. And just as capitalism seeks ‘spatial fixes’ in the form of national banks, supranational economic zones or temporary forms of fixed capital that ensure the auto-destructive mechanisms of accumulation do not threaten the elites profiting from the misery they exploit, so too do the subjects who labour and consume under these systems require an imaginative fix to guard against the psychological terror of capital’s dislocations. Make it make sense — this is not a demand for civilised, public debate; it is the pleading of the bewildered, desperate for a fix.
Northern Irish writer and broadcaster Richard Seymour’s most recent book, Disaster Nationalism, argues that the imaginative fix of neoliberal managerialism that has dominated mainstream discourse for the last forty years is now well and truly spent. The historical reasons for this will no doubt be familiar: the failure of quantitative easing following the 2008 financial crisis and the immiserating programme of austerity that attended it; the cataclysms of US misadventure in the Middle East and the resurgence of imperialist military projects on European soil in 2014 and 2022; the hollowing-out of the internet as the virtual site of the ‘global village’ into a world-wide quarry where our attention spans are extracted for the personal enrichment of ad men and narcissistic monopolists. In a world defined by permanent crisis, whence flew the briefcased dweebs of the rules-based order, assuring us that the future was but a matter of tweaking the dials?
Seymour doesn’t waste time dissecting an ideological corpse. He’s more concerned with what fills the vacuum in the wake of the end of the end of history. ‘Disaster nationalism’ is not so much a coherent political project rivalling those of the early 20th century, nor can it be traced to any credible intellectual movement. It is best understood as an opportunistic scraping for psychologically gratifying narratives that promise temporary relief in a burning world; an ‘incoherent pastiche of conspiracist bricolage, hallucinatory anti-communism, lurid theories of radical sexual evil and theological millenarism.’
For now, the political beneficiaries of this deconstructed fascism have been confined mainly to the corrupt ambitions of narcissistic ‘strongmen’ or the insular politics of right-wing political parties. Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban, et al., are a rot festering within the spent systems of liberal democratic institutions; they do not embody the shape of 21st-century fascism but rather act as midwives for a future that hasn’t yet arrived. For Seymour, merely to denounce their projects is a divestment of political responsibility: there is much, much worse to come, and any resistance movement worthy of the name will have to understand why paranoid fever dreams currently seem to provide a more compelling imaginative fix than tastefully formatted slides projecting modest economic growth.
To answer this question, Disaster Nationalism maintains an international scope. Seymour’s characterisation of locally distinct right wing political formations as part of a globally connected, transitionary historical cycle means that political significance cannot be circumscribed within national borders. So while English-speaking audiences will be familiar with many of the events covered here
(the ludic insurrection of 6 January 2021 and its incubation in the forums of the hyper-online alt-right; the surging destabilisations of populist parties in an evermore groundless European Union; the culmination of the Israeli settler colonial project into an openly genocidal military operation), Seymour also tends to give equal weight to geographical areas that the Western news media tends to obscure.
Consequently, the Gujurat pogroms that launched Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political career in 2002 are as vital a case study as the launching of the ‘War on Terror’ by the United States a year earlier; the open paramilitarism of Philippines president Rodrigo ‘the Punisher’ Duterte finds rhetorical common ground with the more plausibly deniable dog-whistling of far-right European populists.
The point is not to muddy contextual specificities but to avoid the complacency that comes with the West’s self-understanding as an intrinsically pure beacon of liberal democracy. If the body count of 6 January is substantially lower than the spate of political murders and street violence endorsed by Jair Bolsonaro during his unsuccessful 2022 re-election campaign, formal homologies between participants’ social media algorithms should neutralise any residual smugness regarding the inherent stability of the U.S. political process. Surveying the full range of the international picture reveals the potential instability of the ground beneath our feet.
As befits a work of augury, this is a book with an awful lot of neologisms: tidy bits of conceptual engineering that seek to understand how the strategies of early 20th-century fascism have been scrambled up and repurposed for the attentional economy. ‘Curative decivilization’, ‘feel-good pogromism’, ‘death-squad populism’ – Seymour’s coinages attempt to link together tried-and-tested political technologies with the more novel psychological structures of contemporary political feeling. Merely claiming that our current moment ‘feels an awful lot like the thirties’ is not enough. Fascism has indeed returned, although not amid the backdrop of world war, socialist revolution and the mass media but the impending oblivion of climate apocalypse, the piecemeal downfall of U.S. global hegemony and the noisy data of the information age. (On this last point, Seymour is particularly insightful: his 2019 book The Twittering Machine is still the most lucid jeremiad on social media’s disembowelment of contemporary political discourse.)
It would be flippant to deny the libidinal appeal of fascistic conspiracy as a salve to the downfall of the liberal consensus. When psychoanalyst Felix Guattari wrote that ‘everybody wants to be a fascist’, his point was that the narratives of fascism succeed precisely because they align with the psychological, rather than the purely rational truths of the human mind.
While it is irrational to argue that Hilary Clinton is commanding a secret network of paedophiles from the basement of a pizza parlour, or that Bill Gates is insidiously injecting people with computer chips via Covid vaccinations, or that Antifa are directly responsible for the 2020 Oregon wildfires, such claims do respond to a perfectly legible psychic need. Mimicking the twisty reveals of the Hollywood three-act formula, they gratify rather than persuade; reduce rather than complexify.
The fact is that secret networks of paedophiles do seem to be embedded within superelite society; tech companies are spying on us, and some people do (in the medium term at least) benefit from climate catastrophe. The rub is, of course, to do with distributions of agency and what is at stake when we describe a process as ‘structural.’ But thinking injustice solely through these terms always leaves an affective imbalance: the agents of disaster may ultimately be impersonal, but their victims are not.
Seymour argues that we ignore this at our own peril. It’s in the precarious middle zone between personal rage and systemic failure that disaster nationalism mutates. Any political alternative to the zombie-like vacuity of contemporary neoliberalism will have to reckon with the fact that political subjects are desiring subjects, seeking not only material security but stories that compel them into acting in the world. Conspiracy theories are totalitarian by nature. When one has reduced the causes of complex phenomena to the fictitious agency of a single scapegoat, there is no more fitting solution than the rapid deployment of a steel-hearted, telegenic dealmaker to neutralise the ‘responsible’ actors for us.
But what would a competing story look like? What kinds of claims could squash the ‘paranoid, anti-social and vengeful passions’ and replace them with a more vital desire for collective, collaborative hope? On this more prospective issue, Seymour breaks out of his meticulously up-to-date bibliography and falls back on classical Marxist revolutionary theory. ‘It is in historical movement,’ he dutifully intones, ‘that consciousness is raised and democratic life is built.’
Wherever history is moving, consciousness had better hurry up.
Northern Irish writer and broadcaster Richard Seymour’s most recent book, Disaster Nationalism, argues that the imaginative fix of neoliberal managerialism that has dominated mainstream discourse for the last forty years is now well and truly spent. The historical reasons for this will no doubt be familiar: the failure of quantitative easing following the 2008 financial crisis and the immiserating programme of austerity that attended it; the cataclysms of US misadventure in the Middle East and the resurgence of imperialist military projects on European soil in 2014 and 2022; the hollowing-out of the internet as the virtual site of the ‘global village’ into a world-wide quarry where our attention spans are extracted for the personal enrichment of ad men and narcissistic monopolists. In a world defined by permanent crisis, whence flew the briefcased dweebs of the rules-based order, assuring us that the future was but a matter of tweaking the dials?
Seymour doesn’t waste time dissecting an ideological corpse. He’s more concerned with what fills the vacuum in the wake of the end of the end of history. ‘Disaster nationalism’ is not so much a coherent political project rivalling those of the early 20th century, nor can it be traced to any credible intellectual movement. It is best understood as an opportunistic scraping for psychologically gratifying narratives that promise temporary relief in a burning world; an ‘incoherent pastiche of conspiracist bricolage, hallucinatory anti-communism, lurid theories of radical sexual evil and theological millenarism.’
For now, the political beneficiaries of this deconstructed fascism have been confined mainly to the corrupt ambitions of narcissistic ‘strongmen’ or the insular politics of right-wing political parties. Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban, et al., are a rot festering within the spent systems of liberal democratic institutions; they do not embody the shape of 21st-century fascism but rather act as midwives for a future that hasn’t yet arrived. For Seymour, merely to denounce their projects is a divestment of political responsibility: there is much, much worse to come, and any resistance movement worthy of the name will have to understand why paranoid fever dreams currently seem to provide a more compelling imaginative fix than tastefully formatted slides projecting modest economic growth.
To answer this question, Disaster Nationalism maintains an international scope. Seymour’s characterisation of locally distinct right wing political formations as part of a globally connected, transitionary historical cycle means that political significance cannot be circumscribed within national borders. So while English-speaking audiences will be familiar with many of the events covered here
(the ludic insurrection of 6 January 2021 and its incubation in the forums of the hyper-online alt-right; the surging destabilisations of populist parties in an evermore groundless European Union; the culmination of the Israeli settler colonial project into an openly genocidal military operation), Seymour also tends to give equal weight to geographical areas that the Western news media tends to obscure.
Consequently, the Gujurat pogroms that launched Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political career in 2002 are as vital a case study as the launching of the ‘War on Terror’ by the United States a year earlier; the open paramilitarism of Philippines president Rodrigo ‘the Punisher’ Duterte finds rhetorical common ground with the more plausibly deniable dog-whistling of far-right European populists.
The point is not to muddy contextual specificities but to avoid the complacency that comes with the West’s self-understanding as an intrinsically pure beacon of liberal democracy. If the body count of 6 January is substantially lower than the spate of political murders and street violence endorsed by Jair Bolsonaro during his unsuccessful 2022 re-election campaign, formal homologies between participants’ social media algorithms should neutralise any residual smugness regarding the inherent stability of the U.S. political process. Surveying the full range of the international picture reveals the potential instability of the ground beneath our feet.
As befits a work of augury, this is a book with an awful lot of neologisms: tidy bits of conceptual engineering that seek to understand how the strategies of early 20th-century fascism have been scrambled up and repurposed for the attentional economy. ‘Curative decivilization’, ‘feel-good pogromism’, ‘death-squad populism’ – Seymour’s coinages attempt to link together tried-and-tested political technologies with the more novel psychological structures of contemporary political feeling. Merely claiming that our current moment ‘feels an awful lot like the thirties’ is not enough. Fascism has indeed returned, although not amid the backdrop of world war, socialist revolution and the mass media but the impending oblivion of climate apocalypse, the piecemeal downfall of U.S. global hegemony and the noisy data of the information age. (On this last point, Seymour is particularly insightful: his 2019 book The Twittering Machine is still the most lucid jeremiad on social media’s disembowelment of contemporary political discourse.)
It would be flippant to deny the libidinal appeal of fascistic conspiracy as a salve to the downfall of the liberal consensus. When psychoanalyst Felix Guattari wrote that ‘everybody wants to be a fascist’, his point was that the narratives of fascism succeed precisely because they align with the psychological, rather than the purely rational truths of the human mind.
While it is irrational to argue that Hilary Clinton is commanding a secret network of paedophiles from the basement of a pizza parlour, or that Bill Gates is insidiously injecting people with computer chips via Covid vaccinations, or that Antifa are directly responsible for the 2020 Oregon wildfires, such claims do respond to a perfectly legible psychic need. Mimicking the twisty reveals of the Hollywood three-act formula, they gratify rather than persuade; reduce rather than complexify.
The fact is that secret networks of paedophiles do seem to be embedded within superelite society; tech companies are spying on us, and some people do (in the medium term at least) benefit from climate catastrophe. The rub is, of course, to do with distributions of agency and what is at stake when we describe a process as ‘structural.’ But thinking injustice solely through these terms always leaves an affective imbalance: the agents of disaster may ultimately be impersonal, but their victims are not.
Seymour argues that we ignore this at our own peril. It’s in the precarious middle zone between personal rage and systemic failure that disaster nationalism mutates. Any political alternative to the zombie-like vacuity of contemporary neoliberalism will have to reckon with the fact that political subjects are desiring subjects, seeking not only material security but stories that compel them into acting in the world. Conspiracy theories are totalitarian by nature. When one has reduced the causes of complex phenomena to the fictitious agency of a single scapegoat, there is no more fitting solution than the rapid deployment of a steel-hearted, telegenic dealmaker to neutralise the ‘responsible’ actors for us.
But what would a competing story look like? What kinds of claims could squash the ‘paranoid, anti-social and vengeful passions’ and replace them with a more vital desire for collective, collaborative hope? On this more prospective issue, Seymour breaks out of his meticulously up-to-date bibliography and falls back on classical Marxist revolutionary theory. ‘It is in historical movement,’ he dutifully intones, ‘that consciousness is raised and democratic life is built.’
Wherever history is moving, consciousness had better hurry up.