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.