When the slowly boiling frog becomes self aware – culture war climate change has reset existential boundaries in America and Western Democracy

As we reel from the scale of a Trump win, Richard Seymour is an ecoMarxist who is pointing out that despite climate deniers being hit by storms caused by climate denial, they refuse to connect the experience to a wider understanding of the consequences and causes…

‘You can’t shoot climate change’: Richard Seymour on how far right exploits environmental crisis

In his latest book, Disaster Nationalism, the Marxist thinker explores how extremist movements around the world seek to blame fictional enemies for real disasters

he is, arguably, one of the UK’s foremost thinkers on the politics of climate breakdown and nature loss. In his regular Patreon and podcast appearances, Seymour – who is clearly something of a polymath – effortlessly joins the dots between environmental collapse, the rise of the far right and the role our desires play in a crumbling world, all while retaining his Marxist roots. As the Swedish scholar Andreas Malm asks on the front cover of Seymour’s new book, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization, “What thinker would you bring to an Earth on fire? You would not want to leave Richard Seymour at home.”

Our emotional responses to the world around us is one of the things that interests Seymour most. When we meet in the British Library to talk about his latest work, it’s this theme we keep circling back to.

Comparing the success of the far right in India, Brazil and the US (among other places), Seymour argues that most explanations for their rise are insufficient. What we’re seeing is “too consistent over time and too global, to be explained by local factors such as the backlash of a fading white supremacy, or Russian troll farms, or ‘bad actors’ spreading disinformation,” he writes. These movements also don’t have the hallmarks of historical fascism. “Their immediate objective is not the overthrow of electoral democracy,” Seymour observes, but “a constitutional rupture breaking with all humane and ‘woke’ constraints on the exercise of power.” While the old establishment decomposes, the far right conjures up apocalyptic images – “the great replacement”, “Islamisation”, “Chinese-style communism” – to animate potential supporters. This is not yet a distinct form of fascism; instead, it is what Seymour calls “disaster nationalism”.

An examination of the far right globally, Disaster Nationalism isn’t strictly about the climate crisis. But they are clearly connected. While disaster-laden fantasies capture imaginations, the environmental crisis lurks in the background. Seymour wants to interrogate this: why is fictional collapse so appealing, so exhilarating, when we live in a world of already existing, real disasters?

If people are miserable, insecure and humiliated, the far right offers a specific remedy in disaster nationalism, Seymour argues. “It offers the balm, not just of vengeance, but of a sort of violent reset which restores the traditional consolations of family, race, religion and nationhood, including the chance to humiliate others.”

Applying a psychoanalytic lens, as the American writer Tad DeLay does too, Seymour avoids commonplace and often sympathy-tinged characterisations of the far right as a cry of the working class (the “left behind”). The economy matters somewhat – he says a trajectory of decline fuels many middle-class people’s radicalisation to the right – but the roots of these movements often aren’t proletarian.

“All of these formations start off with a fairly middle-class voter base,” he tells me. “That’s certainly true of Bolsonaro, Duterte and Modi, and after a term in office, they have begun to build a real cross-class coalition, which is incredible.”

Anyone familiar with Seymour’s writing will know that he takes racism, sexism and transphobia seriously. When we talk, he speaks about these forms of bigotry with the same sophistication he brings to his writing and manages to do so while forgoing one of the other mainstream explanations of the far right’s rise, where voters are dismissed as gullible idiots who need to be shown the error of their ways – and of their information sources.

“If I agree to fantasise about gruesome, erotically charged scenarios for whose reality I’ve been given no good evidence, I am not simply lacking ‘critical skills’ or ‘media literacy’: the fantasy is doing something for me. It is staging something that I want, even if I don’t want to want it. And if that fantasy is then adopted by numerous others, for no good reason, then the wish obviously isn’t reducible to personal psychopathology but is rooted in a shared social condition,” he writes in Disaster Nationalism.

And that shared social condition is crucially affected and shaped by climate breakdown. The 2020 Oregon wildfires are illustrative, sweeping through the western US state after a series of chronic disasters: the credit crunch, skyrocketing rural poverty, alcoholism, suicide above the norm and a breakdown of local news, leaving Facebook and Nextdoor to fill the void. But when mostly white, rural, conservative Christians see the fires, it’s not climate change or capitalism they blame.

Spontaneously – not orchestrated by any one person or politician – it is the conspiracies they’ve heard that make the most sense of something so large and so destructive: Antifa, doing the bidding of the Democrats whose aim is to usher in communism, are to blame, wanting to kill people like them to remake America. Ideas like these spread like a contagion and the threshold for their uptake isn’t necessarily that high. As the fires rage, people refuse to leave, Seymour notes, so they can physically protect where they live from the arsonists they believe are behind all of this.

Ecological disaster transforms into disaster created by human evil; the climate crisis turns into a crisis of interpersonal rivalry, aggression and victimhood. The destruction of the planet creates the structural conditions for these ideas but it wouldn’t be possible if they weren’t already circulating, Seymour argues.

And he’s clear on why they’re so effective. “You can’t shoot climate change, you can’t take it to court, the same thing with capitalism. These are big, abstract forces, and you feel kind of hopeless against them,” he says. It’s far more attractive, exciting even, to “attack a personalised enemy”. All of us are susceptible to this, Seymour maintains – “There’s jackboots for all of us”, he reminds me at the end of our interview – albeit not equally.

…we might have believed that the climate catastrophe would force people to reflect, but of course they won’t.

As the climate gets progressively worse and more extreme, those denying it will become more unhinged and more sucked into conspiracy theories spread by social media hate algorithms.

Politics is now identity based on myths and lies all to hide from the naked truth that…

…and this…

…we need to be kinder to individuals and far crueller to corporations.

 

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