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April 28, 2025
In Richard Seymour’s Catastrophe Nationalism, he makes an attempt to diagnose the apocalyptic nature of conservatism around the globe.
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A girl carrying a sweatshirt for the QAnon conspiracy idea gestures throughout a pro-Trump rally on October 11, 2020, in Ronkonkoma, New York.
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I’ve by no means identified fairly what to do when a conspiracy idea is shared with me. Having grown up in a conservative-talk-radio household, I confess {that a} gentle paranoia in regards to the liberal world is a given for me. The ravings included issues just like the dying of Vince Foster, Barack Obama’s delivery certificates, and FEMA’s malevolent incompetence. My uncles would ahead me chain e-mails about hoarding gold, Agenda 21, and the “Nice Substitute.” Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi debacle was a persistent obsession. That’s over three many years’ price of theories, a gradual drip of feverish claims spanning the years from Invoice Clinton to Joe Biden, that discovered their solution to my e-mail inbox or into informal conversations. The most recent, kindly shared by certainly one of my dad and mom within the weeks earlier than the 2024 election, was significantly florid: Chinese language troopers, I discovered, had been funneling fentanyl over the Mexican border in the course of the Biden years.
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Catastrophe Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization
by Richard Seymour
This capability for delusion, as soon as relegated to the fringes, has come to outline the cultural atmosphere of the precise. Through the Trump period, such fantasies went mainstream. You may in all probability recite them from reminiscence: There was the “rigged” election of January 6, 2020, as a false-flag occasion, the specter of antifa in all corners of American life, and the Covid-19 “Plandemic.” We is perhaps inclined to disregard, or endlessly debunk, these outlandish tales. They’re foolish, specious beliefs, in spite of everything, worthy of our scorn and perhaps even our pity.
It’s time, I believe, to reevaluate this response. In my very own life, wanting again on the conversations with my household’s lunatic fringe, it’s clear that I’ve by no means been capable of determine the place this collective psychosis emerged from. A logic that our liberal shibboleths are unable to understand is within the air. What if the precise’s fantasies of violent overthrow and dying weren’t the byproducts of social media poisoning, susceptibility to misinformation, or delusions born of boredom and complacency, however manifestations of one thing deeper, darker, and altogether extra cogent?
That is the query that Richard Seymour makes an attempt to reply in his new ebook, Catastrophe Nationalism. The phenomenon we’ve been witnessing this previous decade because the far proper surges globally, Seymour believes, displays a broad psychological transformation within the conservative psyche. Run-of-the-mill nationalist politics, if there may be such a factor, is now an ever stranger beast—the reactionary patriotism we’re so acquainted with is now contaminated with an apocalyptic mindset. If nationalism tends to focus strictly on issues like immigration and demographics in its effort to construct a pure ethno-state, catastrophe nationalism may be stated to make use of each paranoia within the ebook—pure disasters, local weather change, class anxieties, sexual and racial panics—to realize the identical finish. “It hyperlinks an already pervasive nervousness to a collection of phobic objects (Muslims, Communists, Globalists, Jews, and so forth),” Seymour writes. For teams experiencing social decline (to not be confused with the working poor), catastrophe nationalism may be considered an easy-to-use framework—an ideological looking scope is perhaps extra correct—to course of the chaos of the world. “For these confronting the demons of their heads,” Seymour continues, “it names a sophisticated demon which may be assaulted.”
That is primarily the phenomenon we are inclined to file underneath phrases like “populism,” “grievance politics,” and “racial resentment.” However these low-definition renderings haven’t helped us higher perceive an rising political perspective that exhibits no indicators of tapering off: This 12 months, from Canada to France to Germany, so-called proper populists are poised to take the reins of energy, on the backs of supporters who see, like these on this nation, a necessity for closed borders and crueler immigration insurance policies.
Seymour desires us to know that one thing extra insidious and terrifying is at play—a “far better cataclysm” is within the offing. What we’re witnessing is a poisonous system of perception, able to overriding materials self-interest and logic as a result of the primary providing is revenge. However Seymour will not be speaking in regards to the shallow emotional repair of profitable elections or “sticking it to the libs.” It’s not a lot a hatred for anyone group, he suggests, however a “hatred of civilization” itself and the shallow rewards it promised: pluralism, self-determination, enfranchisement.
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It’s necessary to comprehend that materials pursuits can simply be tossed apart when individuals are sure that the one selection left to them is to burn every thing down and begin over. Seymour likens catastrophe nationalism, on this sense, to a sort of deranged self-help program, providing its practitioners an opportunity to get in on the motion. “It provides the balm of vengeance,” he writes, “the promise of nationwide self-love and the remedy of restoring society to a extra pristine, harmoniously hierarchical state by means of condign violence.” What emerges from the rantings and ravings of the perimeter will not be merely inchoate babble, then, however the efficiency of a deep-seated need.
Like Seymour’s earlier ebook, The Twittering Machine, by which he psychoanalyzed our compulsive relationship to social media, Catastrophe Nationalism is an try and diagnose the far proper’s emotional pathology. To take action, he attracts closely on Freud’s idea of Traumarbeit (or “dreamwork”), which famously proposed that goals are manifestations of unconscious human need. Seymour expands Freud’s idea to all the tangled mesh of conspiracy theories, techno-paranoias, and apocalyptic fictions that make up the precise’s fantasy realm. This “political dreamwork,” as Seymour calls it, is each a staging floor and train and a harmful construction of coping, able to organizing “financial, emotional and erotic miseries right into a constructing tidal wave of vengeful violence.”
However why the goals of dying and destruction? And why does discontent so usually result in violent options? “Perception,” Seymour suggests, “isn’t harmless.” One thing within a conspiracist desires the border to be overrun by Chinese language invaders, needs “white extinction,” and craves totalitarian situations. “That one thing,” he writes, is the “existential void” opened up by any of the true disasters roiling us: the collapse of the neoliberal order, local weather change, and widespread social melancholy.
If the thought of filling an existential void with this type of rubbish sounds a bit like soothing a abdomen ache with quick meals, that’s sort of the purpose. Catastrophe nationalism provides an emotional sugar excessive masquerading as a political program. It’s a brutally environment friendly instrument to take advantage of and manipulate essentially the most highly effective of human passions: resentment. This “addictive emotional swamp,” as Seymour describes it, is being successfully weaponized by nationalist demagogues to unleash a “politically enabled ardour for persecution.”
Although Seymour’s relentless psychologizing can come off at instances just like the overheated musings of a Marxist tutorial, the perception on the heart of Catastrophe Nationalism is a robust political studying. All of the paranoid murmurings of the precise—the inarticulate apocalyptic visions, the culture-war cruelty, the racist tropes, the low-simmering rage, and the harebrained conspiracist conjectures pushed out over the Web—quantity to a towering construction of feeling, an emotional clearinghouse for pleasure, pleasure, participation, and violent satisfaction that has no comparability on the left. To cease the far-right surge and defend liberalism itself, it’s this asymmetry that have to be urgently addressed.
The efficiency of this argument is diluted at factors in Catastrophe Nationalism, nevertheless, primarily as a result of Seymour tries to plug his idea into as many modern crises as he can match on the web page: lone-wolf terrorism, incel tradition, militia actions, QAnon. Catastrophe nationalism is so ubiquitous and so amorphous on this telling that Seymour usually has to spell out what it’s not. For starters, it’s not fascism. (That is “not but fascism,” Seymour clarifies.) Neither is it a well-organized tactical drive on the bottom (regardless that the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and varied dying squads around the globe embrace its ideas, and the Proud Boys seem like again in motion). It’s a political system that isn’t preoccupied with colonialist growth (although Israel is one huge exception, Seymour grants). Its “strongman” leaders usually are not true despots however as an alternative “far-right celebrities,” he writes. As a political ideology, catastrophe nationalism isn’t involved with issues like class, anti-capitalism, delivering materials change, or revolutionary upheaval, regardless that it’s generally mistaken for being pro-worker. And regardless that it’d seem to current a critique of neoliberal financial coverage, at its core it provides nothing greater than old school “muscular capitalism,” unshackled by labor protections or human rights legal guidelines, delivered to the accepted social teams.
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Catastrophe nationalism is a mode of politics, in different phrases. It’s exaggerated, loud, contemptuous, and unambiguous. It’s a mode that may be simply understood, tailored, and unfold throughout our networked societies. It’s cross-pollinated by inputs derived from social and political content material. As content material, it’s spring-loaded for virality and certain to be imitated. Oddly, although, Seymour by no means describes it as a mode, maybe as a result of his unified idea of immediately’s conspiratorial proper would sound a bit like a previous era’s unified idea of the conservative psyche, as delineated in Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Fashion in American Politics.” Written in 1964 in regards to the dispossessed fringes rallying round then–presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, Hofstadter’s essay was the primary main psychological profile of the “paranoid spokesman,” consumed by conspiratorial thought and fantasy, and the “apocalyptic phrases” that Goldwater’s insipid motion favored. Very like Seymour’s catastrophe nationalists, these mid-century paranoids have been “at all times manning the barricades of civilization” in a need to “battle issues out to the end.”
The similarities within the psychological portraiture some 60 years aside show that not a lot has modified within the left-liberal mental’s grappling with the vengeful proper. What will we do with this image—or with the data that these dispossessed lots can’t be talked out of their hardcore positions? (May we at the very least hear some tactical methods? Slicing off their entry to the Web, maybe?) Seymour doesn’t dismiss the folks embracing this model of politics, as Hofstadter did when he predicted that his paranoids would eternally be a “modest minority” of the general public. Fairly than delivering character judgments or social criticism, he focuses on the phenomenon itself: the “molecular circulation” of society’s reactionary energies, as he places it. It’s an method that leads Seymour to keep away from the sort of liberal-minded magical realism that likes to see itself as immune from fascist or conspiratorial need. If the situations are proper, anybody can find yourself a paranoiac trying to beat up on an outsider. “All of us have our jackboots,” Seymour cautions.
It is a political model that’s higher understood at a methods scale—as a drive set free by the collapse of neoliberalism. With one ideological period closing and a vacuum of perception opening in its wake (the “disaster of authority,” as Gramsci known as it), catastrophe nationalism is perhaps the political perception system most able to filling the void, a uncommon enchantment in a dismal time. It’s solely considerably ironic that, for all its brio and bluster about burning down civilization, catastrophe nationalism is designed to perpetuate and keep crumbling political methods.
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To take one instance of this, there’s Israel, to which a complete chapter of Catastrophe Nationalism is devoted. Titled “Genocide,” the chapter options Seymour’s effort to hurry by means of a historical past of the Zionist venture, from the European settler motion to the genocidal struggle machine that Israel is immediately. Israel’s drift to the far proper may be defined, he thinks, by its embrace of free-market neoliberal doctrine, which, starting within the Seventies, successfully yanked off the restraints on Zionism’s ethnonationalist urges. Hollowed-out unions, crippled welfare methods, and an ineffectual liberal opposition allowed a far-right ruling coalition to achieve management of Israeli society with out dissent. But, regardless of (or maybe due to) this, crises abound there. Israel is among the many most unequal societies within the Western world. A way of hyper-victimization is rampant within the populace. The nation’s “liberal” democracy is a contradictory sham, not more than a two-tiered apartheid system allowing solely second-class citizenship to Arabs. Worst but, Zionism’s promise to ship an ethnically pure “homeland” to Jews is a delusional lie, partly as a result of Palestinians proceed to persist in each their opposition and their sheer existence. Because of this, limitless struggle is the one political program on supply. (It’s the one factor able to delivering “ethical regeneration,” as Seymour places it.) For flailing states like Israel, catastrophe nationalism is a manner by which to “metabolise” the dysfunction. That is the dreamwork that retains afloat the fantasy of ever-growing economies, of safer borders, of purer societies, and of returning to the way in which that issues as soon as supposedly have been. What’s much less clear, after the deaths of over 50,000 Palestinians and the near-total destruction of Gaza, is whether or not any quantity can quench these urges as soon as the dreamwork is totally set in movement.
Can the left psychoanalyze its enemies into oblivion? Clearly not—and Seymour concedes as a lot. As for options, his approaches are fuzzy at finest. Seymour is skeptical that we should always supply the so-called “bread and butter” fixes that the left often argues for: increased wages, full employment, and expanded social security nets. What he argues for as an alternative is a vaguer and appropriately extra psychological mixture of proposals, one being that the left “let go” of the “resignation” that has outlined it over these previous 30 years. One other loftier suggestion is the formation of “mass beliefs,” renewed social power, and the “eros of collective motion,” which seems extra concretely like the event of a countercultural motion, cast by means of egalitarian beliefs like unionism, to counteract the “paranoid, anti-social and vengeful passions” of catastrophe nationalism.
It’s clear that the precise has mastered the politics of libidinal satisfaction. And it continues to ship to its followers dopamine-spiking wins, all whereas wrecking their materials situations. Most appear pleasantly happy with the association as a result of, at the very least on its face, they will take part. In the meantime, the electoral left appears intent on providing as little satisfaction to folks as doable. Confronted with a rising tide of resentment—born from the panics of financial stagnation, crippled establishments, and the evaporation of civic life—liberals made a sterile plea in 2024 to defend the abstraction of democracy and keep the established order. Practically 7.1 million Democratic voters opted to take a seat out the presidential election in response. Now, as President Trump and his pet billionaire, Elon Musk, dismantle the federal authorities, the leaders of the opposition celebration are busy insisting to their base that they’re powerless to do something about it. Their mounting losses, they insist, are the results of a “messaging downside.”
To blunt the rise of political kinds like catastrophe nationalism, a wholly new construction of feeling will have to be constructed on the left—one providing the identical sort of libidinal satisfaction to its followers within the face of crumbling methods and establishments. This might imply addressing the collapse of the neoliberal order, acknowledging the unfolding polycrisis, and talking to the mass discontent warping the American spirit. However above all, constructing this construction of feeling would require the left to reclaim political feelings it has lengthy ceded to the precise—corresponding to hate, which the anthropologist and political anarchist David Graeber as soon as argued could possibly be a type of advantage. Hate, when directed at issues like injustice or militarism or nationalism, generally is a righteous political instrument, one able to powering societal change, crafting broad political coalitions, and neutralizing the mass manipulators of our age. It’s the gas mandatory for any political dreamwork. “To completely exclude hatred from politics,” Graeber wrote, “is to tear the fiber out, to disclaim the primary motor of social transformation, in the end, to scale back it to a flat aircraft of hopeless cynicism.”
For these of us who haven’t fallen underneath the spell of catastrophe nationalism, this feels like a fairly correct description of the political second. Productive emotion, not to mention one thing like hate, has been notably absent on the left in these first months of Donald Trump’s second presidential time period. In the meantime, a gentle fascism seems to be sprouting up within the White Home—animated by Nazi tributes, open racism, and, as at all times, the miasma of conspiracist perception. The suitable is at present the standing winner and direct beneficiary of liberalism’s grand disaster in America and past. Scorn, empathy, pity—these aren’t emotions able to combating violent fantasies made flesh. A long time of losses have made as a lot clear: Solely an equal and forceful reverse response will suffice.
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Nathan Taylor Pemberton
Nathan Taylor Pemberton is a author and editor from Florida, who at present lives in Brooklyn.
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