‘Disaster Nationalism’ Sets Democracy in Its Sights

• Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization
• Richard Seymour
• Verso Books (2024)

These are upsetting days for people who like democracy, sometimes known as “liberal civilization.”

South Korea’s president declared martial law and withdrew the declaration in six hours.

Georgia’s government insisted it was elected fair and square, while thousands protested nightly in the streets.

A Romanian court annulled the first round of its presidential election, blaming Russian interference and ordering a replay.

Ukraine has endured daily attacks from Russia, with no firm guarantee of effective support from the West after the end of the Biden administration on Jan. 20, 2025.

Closer to home, president-elect Donald Trump continued to nominate professional scoundrels and scalawags to his cabinet, many of them billionaires dreaming of hitting trillionaire status.

Here in North America we’ve focused on Trump and whoever the hell supports him after a decade of his mayhem. Liberal pundits have earnestly advised us to listen to the Trumpists and Poilievre Conservatives to understand their grievances; no one ever advises the Trumpists and Conservatives to sit down and listen to us.

Richard Seymour’s new book Disaster Nationalism argues persuasively that Americans and Canadians aren’t the only ones about to lose our democracy; it’s happening all over the world. His work implies that if we understand what’s happening, we have a better chance to frustrate it. But the Northern Irish political commentator and author warns that it will not be easy.

According to Seymour, “disaster nationalism” is “the apocalyptic nationalism that has swept several far-right leaders to power and is even now readying more breakthroughs.” It has “mounted a spectacular critique of political orthodoxy.”

The recent success of rightist politicians around the world points to a sobering fact of contemporary society, Seymour writes. That people have voted them into power has proved “that millions will gladly, sometimes self-consciously, hurt what they are told is their own best interest: income, employment, health and sometimes even their lives can be sacrificed for the chance to destroy an enemy.”

Who’s to blame?

The enemy is defined as an economic class, an ethnicity, a race, a religious or political group that can be blamed, Seymour says, for some past or current disaster.

He cites social psychologist Michael Billig, who studied the fascist mentality.

“What distinguished them,” Seymour says, “was that, faced with abrupt and unwelcome changes, they tended to personalize the affliction. Our misfortunes are not the result of systems or situations: someone evil did this to us.”

More likely, several evil someones. To follow this logic means to deal with a conspiracy, which keeps the disaster personal: “What needs to be destroyed,” explains Seymour, “is not the system, but personnel.”

Strikingly, the disasters that anger fascists are often something trivial — not the genuine (and systemic) problems facing a society. That’s how violent storms and droughts can go ignored while politicians and their followers fret about culture war issues like who’s using which bathroom.

Disaster nationalism takes aim at sexualities and sexual expression that threaten what Seymour calls the “sexual hegemony” of straight, bourgeois white people. He calls this “porno-nationalism” and traces its roots to Gabriele D’Annunzio, an Italian poet and fascist.

By implicitly justifying violence against its targets, porno-nationalism offers fascists two things that appeal to their psyche and that follow the logic of disaster nationalism: the excitement of hurting people and the avoidance of suspicion of being “one of them.”

Be awful, but don’t be boring!

Seymour makes a very important point: disaster nationalism and fascism aren’t just bullies in jackboots knocking on the door at midnight.

“The fascist culture industry was as deliberately antipolitical as it was anti-intellectual,” Seymour argues. “Joseph Goebbels, as Reich propaganda minister, exhorted radio broadcasters: ‘Don’t be boring!’ Under his stewardship, both radio and cinema reduced their political output, with much more popular music, comedy and costume drama.... Culture war, just like cyberwar, is most effective when it does politics by other means.”

And cyberwar, the deliberate spreading of misinformation and disinformation, is now a Hobbesian war of all against all.

“From the United States to Russia,” Seymour writes, “states have been running troll farms, sock puppet accounts and other cyberwar tactics, recruiting citizen-soldiers in their millions, sometimes without their being aware of it, in a new levée en masse. This top-down aspect is essential to cyberwar: the phenomenon of ‘stochastic terrorism,’ where official incitements probabilistically condition the likelihood of a terrorist assault within a given population, would make no sense without it.”

And that in turn leads to the “lone wolf killers” who slaughter as many of their imaginary enemies as they can.

“The lone wolf,” Seymour writes, “is an entrepreneurial barbarian, a one-man pogromist, who wants to be copied” — and always is.

The lone wolf likes to issue manifestos online as he begins killing, perhaps hoping to provoke a race war. And perhaps also, Seymour thinks, hoping to be killed.

From lone-wolf killers to state pogroms

Lone wolves get much of the attention, both politically and in the public conversation. But national governments are the real experts in pogroms, which might be defined as attacks on people because of who they are, not what they’ve done.

In India, for example, Seymour writes, Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the chief magistrate of Gujarat state orchestrated an anti-Muslim pogrom that was just the first in an ongoing series.

“The Gujarat pogrom,” Seymour writes, “demonstrated that, far from damaging a rightist party, collective violence could be among the materials out of which consent was built, and coerced. It could summon broad popular support for a regime that, like nationalist governments in Hungary, Brazil and the United States, imposed an otherwise unpopular autocratic neoliberalism. It also prefigured the ad hoc alliances between the state and volunteer killers, the fusion of DIY paramilitarism and electoralism, and the bonding of strategic ends with recreational mayhem that would later appear — albeit in by no means as gory a fashion — in the United States, Brazil, the Philippines and the West Bank.”

Seeing what Modi has achieved through violence in India, we Canadians should count ourselves lucky that he hasn’t been tied to more killings here.

How to kill people and charm voters

Seymour also describes the violent career of Rodrigo Duterte, who as president of the Philippines encouraged both police and vigilantes to kill people addicted to drugs.

“If you lose your job,” Duterte told workers, “I’ll give you one. Kill the drug addicts.” The International Criminal Court in June 2020 estimated that between 12,000 and 30,000 Filipinos had been murdered, while Duterte’s popularity soared.

In the United States, Seymour shows that Trump at the start of the pandemic was forced by business interests to impose a lockdown and provide a big stimulus package to keep the economy afloat. Meanwhile, Trump promised that COVID-19 would soon vanish. “It’s going to disappear,” he said on Feb. 27, 2020. “One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

Meanwhile, Trump did nothing to discourage his base from ignoring public health recommendations and threatening health-care workers.

After the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020, protesters took to the streets. So did right-wing militias and a young man named Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot two protesters dead and wounded a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August 2020.

“The American right,” Seymour says, “was electrified by its own violence.”

Violence, a ‘tool in the nationalist kit’

Rallying around the false disaster of a “stolen” election, Trump’s followers were now conditioned for Jan. 6 — an insurrection that seemed to fail, but actually normalized anti-state violence.

If Trump does indeed pardon all those convicted for their offences on Jan. 6, 2025, the day the presidential transition of power from Joseph Biden to Donald Trump will take place, such violence will become just another tool in the nationalist kit.

Seymour’s analysis of countries like India, the Philippines, the United States, Brazil and Israel shows them too similar to be coincidental.

He argues, “There is a wealth of historical work now supporting the intuition of anti-colonial movements that the stimulus for fascism in its original appearance was colonization and its pioneering of racial dictatorship and genocide.”

Or, more briefly, fascism is colonial policy carried out in the homeland.

Seymour argues that, for example, anti-immigrant sentiment ignores the climate change that drives scores of millions to migrate.

When the migrants number over a billion by 2050, and disaster nationalists are among them, they will get their shattered world, but it will not be clean or long-lasting.

“Where real crises abound, disaster nationalism is enthralled by entirely fictional crises,” Seymour writes towards the end of the book. “Inasmuch as it presents itself as a solution, it is also palpably hankering for a world-shattering, cleansing crisis: bring it on.”

It’s clear that Canada is home to its own disaster nationalists evolving into fascism, and we are going to have to deal with them as well as with their comrades in the United States.

Seymour warns us that “the civil war for which disaster nationalists hanker is now more murderous than interstate war.”

He sees some hope in the tension between “sociophobic” libertarians and radical authoritarians eager to impose their will through big government. They may attack one another rather than the rest of us.

But whether facing disaster nationalism within Canada or in other countries, we who define ourselves as centre or left will have to deal aggressively with our opponents. Appeasement didn’t work with the original fascists, and it won’t work with their wretched descendants.