Don Flynn on avoiding the vortex towards fascism
Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation by Richard Seymour published by Verso
There are many worrying signs that the world is becoming a crueller and more callous place. Maybe it always was but it is not totally fallacious to argue that enlightened attitudes have taken root over time and progress has been made on the part of subaltern social groups in making a claim for their fair share of the benefits of living in a supposedly civilised society.
Seymour uses the term “liberal” to describe the world that embodied this progress which he sees slipping from our grasp. It would be more appropriate to speak of the struggle for democracy as the concrete reason for the advance of the working classes in taking their place in the sunshine. Better still, social democracy, because it has not just been about the extension of the franchise bit-by-bit to include all citizens, but also the construction of institutions and processes which curb the tyranny of elite classes and hold their power in check.
This book doesn’t give a consistent account of what constituted the liberal civilisation which is now being dragged down but the feeling is that humanitarian values that tend towards the promotion of equality and social justice are the things at stake. The criteria for judging what we are losing across the planet is the inexorable rise of parties of the right which make unabashed demands for more selfishness in the political realm – building entire programmes for government on the principle of depriving human rights and social goods to those deemed unworthy of inclusion.
The growth of nationalism is one indicator of how bad things are getting. The internal fracturing of society which divides bits considered “good” from those who need to be kept on the outer fringes has advanced a long way in many countries. The case of the former Philippines President Rodigo Duterte, whose willingness to exclude extended to hunting down by police death squads those he considered unwanted is only one example. Perhaps even more chilling is the fact that this savagery seems to be endorsed by a substantial majority of the Filipino population.
Seymour asks whether we can define these sinister developments as fascism and offers up some useful thoughts on this. What we witnessed in the Philippines and Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and is ongoing in Modi’s India, Netanyahu’s Israel, and any number of other countries, is not yet fascism in the sense of the systems established in Europe in the 1920s and 30s but is a large step in that direction. Before a population completely acquiesces to a totalising regime that enacts extermination and enslavement as the basis of its rule society necessarily goes through a series of processes which might end in the final Nazi configuration.
These processes are marked by a descent into a degraded public mentality which produces widespread grievance against “the other”; the “lone wolf” killer who acts on the sense of the wrong with performative violence intended to spark a social movement; the far right party securing an appreciable size of the vote; the focused opportunity, such as Brexit or “stopping the boats”, which gives a significant victory to mobilising support. And then the stage of entering government, with all that is presented to use state power to deepen the fracture between the favoured and the marginalised. At this point, whether the country in question has emerged as a full-blown fascist state will hinge on whether it has accumulated enough power to scrap any residual possibility of challenge by democratic forces.
As well as tracing all the steps in the journey towards fascism, Seymour’s other significant achievement is to update and deepen the Marxian psycho-analytical accounts of the allure of authoritarian political systems which were attempted in the German Nazi period by Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm. The ways in which citizens might be persuaded to love their oppressors has extended well beyond the drama of the exhilaration of parade-ground goose steps and wall-to-wall swastikas. Modern day fascists have abundant social media (as well as legacy media) tools available which encourage the oppressed individual to fall in love with the lie being sold by the new masters. Immersion in such absurdities as the QAnon conspiracy seems to have a spiritual dimension to its true believers, depriving them of the capacity to live a life outside their appalling fantasy.
A good way to resist being drawn into the vortex that swirls towards fascism (and Seymour insists we all have a fascist within us) is to be doubly conscious of the direction history is dragging us. His sketch of the disaster nationalism is a resource that many of us will benefit from during days when the dangers loom ever larger.