Review | Disaster Nationalism

Trump’s second term seems set to accelerate the growth of the far right around the world. Richard Seymour’s recent book Disaster Nationalism can help us understand what’s happening, writes Colin Wilson.

A month after the inauguration, the Trump regime continues its strategy of shocking its opponents into submission. Trump has issued dozens of executive orders including attacks on trans people, while immigration officials have threatened to carry out checks on school buses. JD Vance last week launched a political offensive against European leaders in Munich. Democrat politicians and centrist commentators have done little or nothing to oppose his administration. And these events in the US have an impact in Britain. Trump’s victory adds to the credibility of Reform, which is now about level with both Labour and Tories in repeated opinion polls. And the increasingly hapless Starmer government risks looking ridiculous as it tries to avoid offending Trump by pretending that nothing out of the ordinary is happening, or to act as some kind of intermediary between the US and Europe.

As Richard Seymour’s wide-ranging book details, Trump is only the most successful of the far right leaders gaining power around the world, from Italy to India. The individuals and parties involved vary greatly, with Itamar Ben-Gvir, ‘Israel’s leading fascist politician’ in the words of Israeli newspaper Haaretz, until recently part of a regime carrying through a genocide, while Nigel Farage takes care to distance himself from Tommy Robinson. But there are also clear political resemblances between different parts of the far right, as well as international networks of conferences and think-tanks linking them up. This week sees a conference in London organised by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, for example, where key speakers include Nigel Farage, Jordan Peterson, House of Representatives speaker Mike Johnson and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Also speaking are Kemi Badenoch, transphobic campaigner Maya Forstater, ‘Britain’s strictest headmistress’ Katharine Birbalsingh and Blue Labour founder Maurice Glasman.

Increasingly, fascist and nationalist ideas are influential across the spectrum of parliamentary politics, in more or less concentrated or diluted forms, without any red lines being drawn. It’s not surprising that these continuities exist, when the new far right is in many ways simply continuing the neoliberal project in a new way. As Seymour highlights, and as Quinn Slobodian has also argued, the core of neoliberalism is an attempt to use the state to prevent democratic interventions in the free market. Trump and Musk’s attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) are the latest version of this. Other elements of far right politics continue from earlier, more centrist, versions of neoliberalism. The Islamophobia of Musk’s comments about ‘grooming gangs’ has its recent origins in the ‘War on Terror’, and Trump’s plans to ethnically cleanse Palestinians are a further step on from Biden’s support for Israeli genocide. The new far right, Seymour notes, is by now a longstanding development – it was in 2002 that Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, blamed Muslims for the deaths of Hindu pilgrims in a train fire, causing Islamophobic riots in which 2,000 people died. The same year, a party headed by Islamophobic Pim Fortuyn won 17 per cent of votes in the Dutch general election.

But for all that it includes continuities with centrist neoliberalism, for all that it has long historical roots, the new far right has gathered pace in the last ten years. Those years are characterised by overlapping crises to which ruling classes have no response, such as ongoing austerity after the 2008 financial crash, the Covid-19 pandemic and the increasingly serious climate emergency. In this situation, different classes are drawn to the far right for their own reasons. For business leaders there is the promise of lower taxes and less regulation. There are entrepreneurs and the staff of think tanks looking to make careers for themselves. There are some workers who turn to the far right out of desperation.

The core of the far right is however, the middle class – it’s from that base that it builds across other classes. Individuals with fairly marginal material privileges – small business owners, middle managers – fear losing them, or that their social recognition as white or straight or cis people will be eroded. As Seymour puts it, ‘they were at risk of being relegated to the status of ordinary, struggling humanity.’ This loss is experienced as a ‘queasy sense of normality catastrophically slipping away’, a ‘massive impoverishment of being, tantamount to the downfall of civilisation’.

This is the dynamic behind the ‘disaster’ of disaster nationalism. The far right sees disasters, untold horrors, everywhere. Trump claims the 2020 election was stolen. A ‘great replacement’ of whites by migrants is taking place. Sunday Telegraph editor Allister Heath writes opinion columns with headlines including ‘Starmer’s Britain is no longer a free country – it’s an Orwellian dystopia’ and ‘Armageddon is upon us, and Britain will never be the same again’. The Telegraph frets, relentlessly, about a fantasy in which universities, the BBC, the Church of England, the National Trust – all those markers of bourgeois respectability – have been captured by the left. What can seem odd is that they plainly get a certain pleasure from announcing the end of the world.

But there are advantages for them in this state of panic. If we’re in crisis, urgent action must be taken. Right-wing commentators blame migrants for a supposed ‘grooming gangs scandal’ and demand that something be done. A hard core of fascists and a periphery of desperate workers – most people charged over the summer riot came from the most deprived areas – are thus mobilised. But the ‘something’ that must be done never involves systemic change. Seymour cites the example of Oregon, where 12 percent of people are affected by alcohol problems and suicide is the eighth most common cause of death. In the summer of 2020, after the lockdown, more people than usual took to cooking outside. In a context of rising global temperatures, wildfires increased. The response from the right was a panic that ‘antifa’ were coming to the state and setting fires.

This has the advantage for the right that they don’t need social change to combat problems – to cut global heating or reduce deprivation in Oregon – when they can scapegoat individuals. Society need not change to accommodate trans people – it’s the teachers at school making kids trans. Covid-19 was the fault of careless Chinese scientists. And, while a goal like ‘reducing carbon emissions’ can seem abstract, hating on left activists focuses on identifiable people, it provides the appealing emotional focus of having someone to hate, at whom to direct your frustration and unhappiness.

Real deprivation on the part of workers – endless waits for hospital appointments or the lack of secure housing – or more often the fear of lost status for the middle class are thus the crucial context for the growth of the far right. As Trotsky argues regarding the growth of fascism in 1920s and 30s Germany, a key factor is a petty bourgeoisie fearful of workers’ struggles or bruised by the hyperinflation of the early 20s or the Wall Street Crash. It’s surprising and regrettable that Seymour doesn’t refer to that analysis. But he’s right to highlight the way that these issues can find expression not in demands for more NHS spending or better housing, but in other ways – the ‘grooming gangs’ riots clearly reflected deep and disturbing emotions about race and sexuality, about people’s identification with the nation and family as sources of self-worth. And gender and sexuality have become key battlegrounds – the attacks on trans people, Trump’s boasts about ‘grabbing pussies’ and Pete Hegseth’s absurd recently tweeted pics of himself jogging, in shorts, in the snow with troops who are ‘tough, disciplined, ready to fight’.

How can the left oppose the horrifying growth of the far right? First, Seymour stresses that, with the exception of India, the right’s ‘projection of political influence far exceeds its real social depth’. Trump won the 2024 election with 49.8 per cent of the popular vote, giving him no solid mandate for his policies. Opinion polls in the US since show that while majorities support the claim that there are only two sexes and plans to expand oil and gas production, majorities also oppose the pardon of the 6 January defendants and Trump’s planned takeover of the Panama Canal. In Britain, the far right has made gains in public opinion on trans people and especially immigration – but there is little support for other Respect policies, such as boosting private health care or cutting government spending on climate.

In fact, the main reason people in Britain say they will vote for Reform is not that they support their policies, but that Labour and the Tories have both failed and ‘another party needs a go’. That’s a real weakness, when the left can point out the repeated inconsistencies and hypocrisies of the right, which claims that ‘women must be protected’ from trans people but not from Andrew Tate, or which talks about democracy only to find Trump doing a deal with Putin over Ukraine without the involvement of the Ukrainian government.

We need to take advantage of these weaknesses – to organise and join counter-protests at Tommy Robinson marches and Reform UK events. But we also need to go on the offensive. As Seymour points out, ‘union members tend to be resistant to the disaster nationalist serenade’ – collective action in workplaces and communities can win people to a vision of society different from right-wing scapegoating. As the academic and activist Judith Butler put it recently, ‘On the left, we don’t know how to appeal to people’s deep passions. We think we’re very smart and very critical. But where’s the radical imaginary by which people will be passionately absorbed?’ The left needs to raise an alternative vision to Farage, the Tories and Labour – to say, as people did twenty years ago, that ‘another world is possible’. In fact, as multiple crises gather, it’s the only possible real solution.

Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation is published by Verso

Branch meeting hosted by rs21 North London on Disaster Nationalism with Richard Seymour is on Tuesday 4 March, 7pm at Kurdish Community Centre, 11 Portland Gardens, Haringay, N4 1HU. Tickets here!