Disasterology

Richard Seymour has a new book out, Disaster Nationalism, which I haven't read yet (I'm hoping Santa will oblige) but whose central thesis he explained in an interview with Jacobin: "Right-wingers are really enthralled and obsessed by hallucinatory scenarios of extreme disaster" while being in denial about real disasters, such as climate change. Seymour sees this as a pyschological coping strategy - the prepper who believes he is in control - while the denial is often channelled into conspiracy theories that provide an identifiable target - Covid-19 as a government plot, for example. He rightly notes that this is not Fascism, because it hasn't yet evolved into a critique of democracy, but he does suggest that it might be a harbinger: "We’re in a stage of accumulation of fascist force. When you go back to the interwar period, that accumulation process had already taken place, there had already been massive pogroms, there had been big far-right movements before fascism." What I'm interested in here is not the psychology of the right but the attitude of the political centre. It was, of course, the liberal and conservative blocs in Italy and Germany that facilitated the rise of Fascism. It was the accumulation of establishment support, or at least tolerance, that mattered, not the pogroms.

Seymour is alive to the ambiguous nature of the political centre. As he puts it, "Increasingly I think that when push comes to shove, liberals do not want liberalism. Obviously, certain distinctions have to be made because there are liberals who are genuinely philosophically and politically committed to liberal values and will fight for them and will go Left if they have to. But there’s also the kind of hard centrists whose politics is organized principally around a phobia of the Left." This is a conventional view on the left, albeit one that conveniently excuses an enervating pessimism about the possibility of progress through the institutions of representative democracy. But it's also a critique that characterises the centre as cynically knowing. They may be deluded in their assessment of how successfully they can control the Fascist right - how far they can turn up the dial on racism and bigotry, for example - but their worldview is not shot through with the same obsession with "hallucinatory scenarios of extreme disaster". Instead we are assured that optimism remains the defining characteristc of liberalism. 

There's a revealing moment at the start of a separate interview between Seymour and Tad DeLay in which he begins by talking about actual examples of liberal hysteria, notably the hyperbole around the "disaster" of Brexit, and then segues into discussing the manias of the far-right, such as the great replacement theory, as if they were one and the same people. This prompts a question, can we really separate liberals and conservatives categorically in this way, between the hallucinating right and the pragmatic centre? And if we can't separate them, is it helpful to yoke the obsession with disasters to nationalism and thereby quarantine it on the right? My own view is that we cannot, not least because nationalism itself is a product of liberalism rather than an instinctive feature of conservatism. I think there's a lot to be said for Seymour's thesis about the right - the relish for disaster, the stylised death-wish - but I don't accept the idea that liberal politics are fundamentally optimistic and rational in contrast. If anything, they are pessimistic about society, hence the historic disdain for democracy.

Attempts by the political centre to outflank the right, for example Keir Starmer's claim that the last Tory government was running an open borders policy, are often met with derision by the left because they assume the manoeuvre is insincere. But this is to underestimate the attraction that conservative disasters - a nation "swamped" etc -  hold for liberals. The liberal promise that a better future is possible is always tempered by the apparent necessity to defer that future. We cannot have good things today, either because of the errors of the past or because "economic realities" intrude, and improvement is only possible through technocratic managerialism. Hope (socialism or even just participatory democracy) is ridiculed as naive. Conservative thinkers have long sought to link liberalism's progressive teleology back to the Terror of the French Revolution, and then forward to the Stalinist Terror, but the historical reality of liberalism has been anti-utopian since the Thermidorian Reaction and explicitly anti-radical since 1848. We rightly criticise liberals today for adopting conservative rhetoric, but they have been doing this for a very long time.

A persistent criticism of the Labour government by media liberals is that it hasn't offered any hope, the promise of better times. The explanations for this omission have ranged from the wrong backroom staff (it was all Sue Gray's fault but Morgan McSweeney is a man with a plan) to the Prime Minister's lack of political mileage (he's actually been an MP for almost 10 years). A more honest assessment would be that the political centre no longer deals in hope in office, whatever it may campaign on, and hasn't done since 2008. Austerity has enjoyed consensus support across the centre-right and centre-left for the last decade and a half, despite its abject failure in its own ostensible terms, and following the budget reaction it now appears that the government has abandoned hope of stimulating growth to generate the revenues necessary to refurbish the public realm. Instead there will be more crackdowns on benefit claimants, more targeting of migrants, and any minister who tries to push politics further left will have their CV and social media pored over for incriminating evidence to justify their removal. In what sense could any of this be described as liberal optimism?

The Wilson governments of 1964-1970 also struggled with economic policy, and also cleaved to the status quo on foreign policy, but they made significant progress in terms of social policy, both through the legal reforms championed by Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary and in the major investments in education, housing and welfare. The Starmer government has less scope in those tangible areas due to decades of privatisation and marketisation, and it has yet to show much enthusiasm for reform in such traditional areas as the constitution and criminal justice. It is no surprise that elderly liberals like Polly Toynbee, who look back fondly on the liberal reforms of the 1960s (and on Roy Jenkins' subsequent political journey), should have celebrated the initial passing of Kim Leadbeater's private members' bill on assisted dying, but it is not at all certain that the government will do everything in its power to ensure the bill becomes law. That a government whip objected to and therefore blocked progress of another private members' bill to increase palliative care in children's hospitals, immediately after the vote on assisted dying, was telling in its symbolism: the whip was the former Tory MP Christian Wakeford.

In his interview with Jacobin, Seymour notes that the characteristics he discerns among the right can also be found among liberals: the "hallucinatory anti-communism" and the eager embrace of conspiracy theories like Operation Trojan Horse. You could also add the hysterical campaign against Jeremy Corbyn as Leader  of the Labour Party to that list. Many leftists consider that to be an example of dishonesty - the party right pretending to be scared or shocked in order to pursue factional advantage - but the tendency to dismiss it all as a scam ignores that many of Corbyn's accusers were clearly thrilled by the opportunity it afforded not only to pose as the righteous but to warn of impending disaster: the destruction of British Jewry. It struck me at the time that the liberal criticism of Corbyn over the EU Referendum campaign was not simply a smear (the claim he didn't campaign for Yes when he clearly did). It seemed to reflect a genuine contempt for his more measured assessment (famously he gave the EU "7 out of 10") and his unwillingness to cast the referendum in their preferred apocalyptic terms. 

We may well be in a period when the right is characterised by disaster nationalism, but that may actually be no bad thing as it appears to be mostly inwardly-directed and its conspiratorial mindset is flighty and incoherent. I'd be far more worried if we were facing expansionary nationalism of the sort that scarred the 20th century, and which looks dreadfully archaic today in Ukraine and Palestine. Of course this doesn't rule out the risks within states, and I think Seymour is right to particularly highlight the anti-Muslim pogroms in India, but my suspicion is that the right's cultivation of fictional disasters as a distraction from the real ones, or its attempts to explain real disasters like climate change as hoaxes or the malevolence of others, will eventually collapse in the way that most cults do. The bigger worry for me is the liberal tendency to adopt the right's style of "hallucinatory scenarios" for its own betes noires, such as the influence of social media, and even to overlap in its obsessions with the right, such as in the recent centrist turn against "wokeness", as this just provides more excuses to ignore liberalism's failures to address the real disasters that confront us: climate breakdown and galloping inequality.

The Persistence of the Old Regime

One of the more dispiriting developments following Donald Trump's election as 47th President of the USA is the return to prominence of Carole Cadwalladr and her hyperbolic style of reportage. It's not that she ever went away, but her regular beat of Russian disinformation and the role of social media in fomenting small town riots has been, well, small potatoes in comparison to her preferred narrative of how the liberal international order is being subverted from within by the "techbros" of Silicon Valley. Though she sees this as a collective threat, she is also happy to personalise it, in time-honoured liberal fashion, by focusing on Elon Musk as a malevolent actor threatening democracy. With his elevation to Trump confidante, she is now firing on all cylinders, happily introducing herself as a main character: the canary in the digital coalmine who correctly espied democracy's enemies at work in the 2016 EU referendum and Trump's election campaign later in the same year.

In her first major article in The Observer following the election result she erected a notable dichotomy between traditional news outlets and newer media: between "clean, hygienic, fact-checked news" and "the information sewers", as she puts it. She characterises the old order as "[T]ruth. It’s evidence. It’s journalism. It’s science. It’s the Enlightenment. A niche concept you’ll find behind a paywall at the New York Times." Unfortunately for Carole, this came around the same time that the NYT, along with most of the Western media, eagerly published ridiculous claims of a pogrom in Amsterdam, and after months of passive-voiced reports on deaths in Gaza following unattributed air-strikes. Despite admitting that 2016 didn't in fact spell doom for truth, Carole is convinced that this time it is for real: "The Observer’s reporting on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica belongs to the old world order. An order that ended on 6 November 2024. That was the first wave of algorithmic disruption which gave us Brexit and Trump’s first term, when our rule-based norms creaked but still applied."

In evidence she cites a hardening of attitudes among the figureheads of Silicon Valley: "These bros know. They don’t fear journalists any more. Journalists will now learn to fear them. Because this is oligarchy now. This is the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite. It’s not a coincidence that Musk spouts the Kremlin’s talking points and chats to Putin on the phone. The chaos of Russia in the 90s is the template; billions will be made, people will die, crimes will be committed." The idea that "the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite" is some sort of novelty in Western democracies will surprise many, from historians to former Observer journalists like Anthony Sampson, but the more useful idea here is the parallel with Russia in the 1990s. It would be easy to point out that the chaos was as much the work of Western advisers from the Chicago School of Economics as of Russian nomenklatura, or that the rise of Putin and the Siloviki was a reaction to that chaos, but the more telling point is the importance of certain industrial sectors, notably oil and mining, in the power struggles of the era.

Carole's belief is that technology companies are now the dominant power in the US, defining the culture and thus the politics, and that the leaders of these companies constitute an elite that will shape policy in Washington for years to come. The older politico-economic establishment, based on oil companies, manufacturing, retail and the like, will presumably be marginalised under the new order. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the scale and importance of technology companies to the US economy, let alone their cultural reach, and that's without considering that she is only really concerned with a narrow slice of the technology sector itself: she isn't bothered about IBM or Dell, let alone General Electric, and Apple as usual gets a pass. This is perhaps to be expected of a journalist who sees everything through the self-important prism of traditional media, but it also highlights a longstanding failure of the journalistic profession to understand the variety to be found among those she lumps together as "techbros", or even to take seriously the sociology of the wider capitalist class.

For all the emphasis on bleeding-edge technology, Elon Musk is tied to traditional industry sectors, notably car manufacture (Tesla), transportation (SpaceX) and telecommunications (StarLink). His shift to the conservative right, and his purchase of a media company, is what you would expect from such a background: simultaneously berating the state for its interference in the free market while being reliant on it for contracts and sympathetic regulation. Mark Zuckerberg, who has felt aggrieved by both Democrat and Republican administrations in the past, remains on the fence politically simply because Meta hasn't expanded beyond a business dependent on the goodwill of a broad cross-section of the population, leaving Carole to critique him for his choice of haircut. In preventing the Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris, which it probably would have done as the voice of the Washington establishment, Jeff Bezos wasn't hedging his bets with Trump so much as indicating that he wants Amazon to be considered politically neutral, as befits the "everything store". 

The broader shift in political allegiance among Silicon Valley luminaries, from the fuzzy libertarianism of the 90s to the increasingly authoritarian conservatism of today, reflects material changes in the industry, notably the rise of abusive mediation and monopoly - what Cory Doctorow has polemicised, from the perspective of the consumer, as enshittification. This has led to greater antagonism between the state and technology companies, e.g. the recent ruling against Google's near-monopoly on search, but that in turn has simply made it more necessary for those companies to exert political leverage. Initially that was achieved through the Democratic Party, in combination with the banking interests that have long dominated it and with which the industry had an obvious synergy during the IPO mania, but more recently it has led to alliances with the Republican Party as the focus has shifted away from the proactive design of regulation to resistance against attempts to impose the costs of externalities on it, whether hate-speech or climate change. But far from supplanting traditional industrialists as political power-brokers, the technology company leaders have simply joined the club.

This is not to suggest that capitalist business-as-usual means there is no threat to democracy. Capitalism and democracy are inherently antagonistic, and managing capitalism for its own good (social democracy) or managing democracy to defend capitalism (neoliberalism) are both fraught with contradictions, which leads to a ceaseless quest to find new justifications for the maintenance of the hierarchies that democracy threatens. What remains distinctive about the Californian Ideology is its reactionary modernism, which combines social accelerationism with a supersession of democratic accountability. As William Davies described one of its current luminaries, "Figures such as Peter Thiel explicitly straddle the worlds of wealth management and ethnonationalist politics, proposing at the overlap of these two spheres a form of revolutionary reaction, in which capital breaks free of liberal democracy so as to restore some primordial past in the future." It's easy to be distracted by the wacky natalism, the revival of "race science", or the aristocracy of taste that is effective altruism and forget that this is ultimately about preserving wealth.

Donald Trump's picks for office have prompted much horrified pearl-clutching, but what has been less remarked upon is how many, beyond the usual rich industrialists and think-tankers, have been TV personalities or gossip column regulars, not the very online guys of Carole Cadwalldr's nightmares, which emphasises that Trump himself is an analogue president, a product of the TV and tabloid age. Similarly, the liberal press remain stuck in an imagined past of civility and decorum circa Lou Grant (forgetting the more pointred lessons of Network). As in 2016, they thought that Trump would self-implode by saying something offensive, then to women, this time to Puerto Ricans. Like Talleyrand's Bourbons in exile, they have learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing. In the aftermath of this month's defeat, the Democrats have oscillated between blaming the brutish mass for their stupidity and blaming the left for alienating the solid citizenry. Leading neoliberals are already happily parroting conservative lines about pronouns and politicised academia. What we're witnessing is not a new era but an old one. This is the Restoration not the Revolution.

The Loyal Opposition

The recent US Presidential election was presented as a moment of crisis: democracy in danger, Fascism imminent. In the event, following Donald Trump's much-feared victory, Joe Biden immediately committed to an orderly handover. The fevered post-count analysis - Trump didn't win, Harris lost; it's the economy, stupid; the Manosphere swung it etc - obscures that the US establishment has once more emerged victorious. Obviously it is one particular wing of the establishment, and that bias will have real consequences for many Americans, but don't imagine that a second Trump presidency will significantly diverge from established policy, either domestically or internationally, any more than his first term did, and you can be assured that any substantive changes he does make will more than likely be maintained if not explicitly endorsed by a future Democrat president, just as the US embassy remains in Jerusalem and just as illegal immigrants were deported under Obama.

Trump is unlikely to be the harbinger of Fascism, even if some of his backers and hangers-on might desire that. It was the failure to deliver anything beyond a standard conservative administration during his first term that assured voters he could be trusted again, with the events of January the 6th four years ago now downgraded from a hyperbolic insurrection to a farcical riot. Among his backers, the Project 2025 crowd are likely to be more disappointed than the various billionaires. Trump isn't a programmatic guy. He may pick and mix some of their ideas, but his own egoism is likely to be a bigger factor in determining policy than a 900-page tome he clearly hasn't read. Apart from his personal indolence, he will be restrained by the guardrails of American politics. Ultimately, he wants to be loved more than he wants to be feared, and that means cleaving to the longstanding orthodoxy.

Fascism is reaction in the guise of revolution but Trump offers nothing revolutionary. His politics today are well within the historical norm, from tariffs as the solution to American industrial competitveness to moral panics over immigration as the unifying substrate of American nationalism. And this is why the Democrats will willingly go into internal exile and brood upon the electorate's lack of gratitude rather than the nature of the Republic. The "resistance" will once more be a rhetorical style that will quickly pall, while the DNC will start the beauty parade to find another pliable centrist who will appeal to rich donors. Just as nationalism cannot arise without the foundation of liberalism, so Fascism cannot arise except in the context of a democracy brought to crisis by that same liberalism. But the Democrats are not going to question the nature of their creed any more than they will question their commitment to the national secuiry state.

In foreign policy, there will be no divergence on Ukraine, let alone Israel. The US long ago made clear that it saw Ukraine as a disputed borderland between Russia and Europe and had no intention of accelerating NATO membership. Whether Trump leans on Zelensky to agree a Carthaginian peace, or whether he simply lets the war drag on and insists it's up to the Europeans to pay for it, the outcome won't be much different to what a Harris presidency would have delivered. Putin knows this, but it will suit his domestic political agenda to allow Trump to claim partial credit for a deal, and for him to appear magnanimous in victory. Netanyahu can expect a more overtly supportive White House, however the dynamic between the US and Israel is not one of empathy but of utility, and the strategy since Bill Clinton has been a deliberate absence of restraint on Israel's treatment of the Palestinians coupled with an explicit restraint on Israel's antagonism of Iran. That won't change. 

Allowing for population growth, Trump has received pretty much the same popular vote for three elections in a row. If his victory in 2016 was down to the structural bias of the Electoral College, this year's victory owes everything to the Democratic vote tanking. The party failed to turn abortion rights into a vote winner despite a number of states that voted for Trump as President simultaneously passing pro-abortion legislation. This suggests that voters have given up on the Democrats passing pro-choice legislation at a federal level, something they have repeatedly failed to do even when in full control of Congress. Pro-abortion activists are instead focusing on defending and extending rights at the state level. Likewise, many voters have decided that the Democrats cannot be trusted to re-engineer the Supreme Court, in a manner similar to the Republicans' ruthless pursuit of power, despite ample opportunities.

There has been no shortage of claims over the years that the GOP was heading for history's trashcan, whether due to demography (the dominance of cities and the growing multi-ethnic young) or its takeover by the crazies (from the Tea Party onwards), but there is no doubt that the Republican Party will persist as the preferred vehicle of both broader capital (domestic industry, land etc) and American nationalism (even if paradoxically both imperial and isolationist). What is less certain is that the Democratic Party will persist as its higher echelons reflect an ever narrower strata of high finance, the culture industry and the state apparatus, and as it consciously alienates its supposed natural supporters among the working class and progressive opinion. Its problem is that it has become a loyal opposition, hence the civility of its response to defeat and hence it cowardice over issues such as abortion. It assumes that the American people are innately conservative and this latest failure will simply reinforce that self-limiting belief.

This isn't a failing  peculiar to American centrists. In the UK, and contrary to much hyperventilating opinion in the British press, it is the Labour Party, rather than the Conservatives, that is most at risk of a steady and then sudden abandonment by its traditional supporters. The right may be currently split between the Tories and Reform, but it can easily unite, something that appears more likely as Nigel Farage now has reason to spend even more time in the US than he does in London, let alone Clacton. The broad left, from progressive liberals to socialists, looks far less cohesive, despite the dynamics of an electoral system that promotes coalition around two poles. In extirpating the left from the party, and in alienating ethnic minorities as it searched for the socially conservative vote, Labour's right have perhaps permanently damaged the progressive coalition. 

Arguably the most advanced Western democracy in terms of this trajectory is France. Not only has the traditional centre-left of the Parti Socialiste fragmented, but the technocratic centre has willingly marched to join forces with the right. Emmanuel Macron has legitimised the Rassemblement National as the loyal opposition and dismissed everyone to his left, the actual progressive coalition of the Nouveau Front Populaire, as the disloyal opposition. One day, French centrists will wake up to find that the far-right has become the government. Their response will be to become the loyal opposition in turn. Across the West, neoliberalism remains politically hegemonic despite its repeated rejection by electorates. Because neoliberalism can accommodate nationalism, opposition to it is forced into the channels of the right. The left remains anathema because its critique cannot be accommodated. The morbid symptom this gives rise to is a liberal establishment that decries the conservative right in increasingly hysterical terms while happily adopting its policies.