Why the Right Fantasizes About Death and Destruction
In Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism, he attempts to diagnose the apocalyptic nature of conservatism around the world.
I’ve never known quite what to do when a conspiracy theory is shared with me. Having grown up in a conservative-talk-radio family, I confess that a mild paranoia about the liberal world is a given for me. The ravings included things like the death of Vince Foster, Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and FEMA’s malevolent incompetence. My uncles would forward me chain e-mails about hoarding gold, Agenda 21, and the “Great Replacement.” Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi debacle was a persistent obsession. That’s over three decades’ worth of theories, a steady drip of feverish claims spanning the years from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden, that found their way to my e-mail inbox or into casual conversations. The latest, kindly shared by one of my parents in the weeks before the 2024 election, was particularly florid: Chinese soldiers, I learned, had been funneling fentanyl over the Mexican border during the Biden years.
This capacity for delusion, once relegated to the fringes, has come to define the cultural environment of the right. During the Trump era, such fantasies went mainstream. You can probably recite them from memory: There was the “rigged” election of January 6, 2020, as a false-flag event, the specter of antifa in all corners of American life, and the Covid-19 “Plandemic.” We might be inclined to ignore, or endlessly debunk, these outlandish tales. They are silly, specious beliefs, after all, worthy of our scorn and maybe even our pity.
It’s time, I think, to reevaluate this reaction. In my own life, looking back at the conversations with my family’s lunatic fringe, it’s clear that I’ve never been able to identify where this collective psychosis emerged from. A logic that our liberal shibboleths are unable to comprehend is in the air. What if the right’s fantasies of violent overthrow and death weren’t the byproducts of social media poisoning, susceptibility to misinformation, or delusions born of boredom and complacency, but manifestations of something deeper, darker, and altogether more cogent?
This is the question that Richard Seymour attempts to answer in his new book, Disaster Nationalism. The phenomenon we’ve been witnessing this past decade as the far right surges globally, Seymour believes, reflects a broad psychological transformation in the conservative psyche. Run-of-the-mill nationalist politics, if there can be such a thing, is now an ever stranger beast—the reactionary patriotism we’re so familiar with is now infected with an apocalyptic mindset. If nationalism tends to focus strictly on things like immigration and demographics in its effort to build a pure ethno-state, disaster nationalism can be said to make use of every paranoia in the book—natural disasters, climate change, class anxieties, sexual and racial panics—to achieve the same end. “It links an already pervasive anxiety to a series of phobic objects (Muslims, Communists, Globalists, Jews, and so on),” Seymour writes. For groups experiencing social decline (not to be confused with the working poor), disaster nationalism can be thought of as an easy-to-use framework—an ideological hunting scope might be more accurate—to process the chaos of the world. “For those confronting the demons in their heads,” Seymour continues, “it names a worldly demon which can be assaulted.”
This is essentially the phenomenon we tend to file under terms like “populism,” “grievance politics,” and “racial resentment.” But these low-definition renderings haven’t helped us better understand an emerging political attitude that shows no signs of fizzling out: This year, from Canada to France to Germany, so-called right populists are poised to take the reins of power, on the backs of supporters who see, like those in this country, a need for closed borders and crueler immigration policies.
Seymour wants us to understand that something more insidious and terrifying is at play—a “far greater cataclysm” is in the offing. What we’re witnessing is a toxic system of belief, capable of overriding material self-interest and logic because the main offering is revenge. But Seymour is not talking about the shallow emotional fix of winning elections or “sticking it to the libs.” It’s not so much a hatred for any one group, he suggests, but a “hatred of civilization” itself and the shallow rewards it promised: pluralism, self-determination, enfranchisement.
It’s important to realize that material interests can easily be tossed aside when people are certain that the only choice left to them is to burn everything down and start over. Seymour likens disaster nationalism, in this sense, to a kind of deranged self-help program, offering its practitioners a chance to get in on the action. “It offers the balm of vengeance,” he writes, “the promise of national self-love and the cure of restoring society to a more pristine, harmoniously hierarchical state through condign violence.” What emerges from the rantings and ravings of the fringe is not merely inchoate babble, then, but the performance of a deep-seated desire.
Like Seymour’s previous book, The Twittering Machine, in which he psychoanalyzed our compulsive relationship to social media, Disaster Nationalism is an attempt to diagnose the far right’s emotional pathology. To do so, he draws heavily on Freud’s concept of Traumarbeit (or “dreamwork”), which famously proposed that dreams are manifestations of subconscious human desire. Seymour expands Freud’s concept to the entire tangled mesh of conspiracy theories, techno-paranoias, and apocalyptic fictions that make up the right’s fantasy realm. This “political dreamwork,” as Seymour calls it, is both a staging ground and exercise and a dangerous structure of coping, capable of organizing “economic, emotional and erotic miseries into a building tidal wave of vengeful violence.”
But why the dreams of death and destruction? And why does discontent so often lead to violent solutions? “Belief,” Seymour suggests, “is never innocent.” Something inside of a conspiracist wants the border to be overrun by Chinese invaders, desires “white extinction,” and craves totalitarian scenarios. “That something,” he writes, is the “existential void” opened up by any of the real disasters roiling us: the collapse of the neoliberal order, climate change, and widespread social depression.
If the idea of filling an existential void with this kind of garbage sounds a bit like soothing a stomach ache with fast food, that’s kind of the point. Disaster nationalism offers an emotional sugar high masquerading as a political program. It’s a brutally efficient tool to exploit and manipulate the most powerful of human passions: resentment. This “addictive emotional swamp,” as Seymour describes it, is being effectively weaponized by nationalist demagogues to unleash a “politically enabled passion for persecution.”
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Though Seymour’s relentless psychologizing can come off at times like the overheated musings of a Marxist academic, the insight at the center of Disaster Nationalism is a powerful political reading. All the paranoid murmurings of the right—the inarticulate apocalyptic visions, the culture-war cruelty, the racist tropes, the low-simmering rage, and the harebrained conspiracist conjectures pushed out over the Internet—amount to a towering structure of feeling, an emotional clearinghouse for pleasure, excitement, participation, and violent satisfaction that has no comparison on the left. To stop the far-right surge and protect liberalism itself, it is this asymmetry that must be urgently addressed.
The potency of this argument is diluted at points in Disaster Nationalism, however, mainly because Seymour tries to plug his theory into as many contemporary crises as he can fit on the page: lone-wolf terrorism, incel culture, militia movements, QAnon. Disaster nationalism is so ubiquitous and so amorphous in this telling that Seymour often has to spell out what it is not. For starters, it is not fascism. (This is “not yet fascism,” Seymour clarifies.) Nor is it a well-organized tactical force on the ground (even though the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and various death squads around the world embrace its principles, and the Proud Boys appear to be back in action). It’s a political system that isn’t preoccupied with colonialist expansion (though Israel is one massive exception, Seymour grants). Its “strongman” leaders are not true despots but instead “far-right celebrities,” he writes. As a political ideology, disaster nationalism isn’t concerned with things like class, anti-capitalism, delivering material change, or revolutionary upheaval, even though it is commonly mistaken for being pro-worker. And even though it might appear to present a critique of neoliberal economic policy, at its core it offers nothing more than old-fashioned “muscular capitalism,” unshackled by labor protections or human rights laws, delivered to the approved social groups.
Disaster nationalism is a style of politics, in other words. It’s exaggerated, loud, contemptuous, and unambiguous. It’s a style that can be easily understood, adapted, and spread across our networked societies. It is cross-pollinated by inputs derived from social and political content. As content, it’s spring-loaded for virality and sure to be imitated. Oddly, though, Seymour never describes it as a style, perhaps because his unified theory of today’s conspiratorial right would sound a bit like a prior generation’s unified theory of the conservative psyche, as delineated in Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Written in 1964 about the dispossessed fringes rallying around then–presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, Hofstadter’s essay was the first major psychological profile of the “paranoid spokesman,” consumed by conspiratorial thought and fantasy, and the “apocalyptic terms” that Goldwater’s insipid movement favored. Much like Seymour’s disaster nationalists, these mid-century paranoids were “always manning the barricades of civilization” in a desire to “fight things out to the finish.”
The similarities in the psychological portraiture some 60 years apart prove that not much has changed in the left-liberal intellectual’s grappling with the vengeful right. What do we do with this picture—or with the knowledge that these dispossessed masses can’t be talked out of their hardcore positions? (Could we at least hear some tactical strategies? Cutting off their access to the Internet, perhaps?) Seymour doesn’t dismiss the people embracing this style of politics, as Hofstadter did when he predicted that his paranoids would forever be a “modest minority” of the public. Rather than delivering character judgments or social criticism, he focuses on the phenomenon itself: the “molecular flow” of society’s reactionary energies, as he puts it. It’s an approach that leads Seymour to avoid the kind of liberal-minded magical realism that likes to see itself as immune from fascist or conspiratorial desire. If the conditions are right, anyone can end up a paranoiac looking to beat up on an outsider. “We all have our jackboots,” Seymour cautions.
This is a political style that is better understood at a systems scale—as a force set loose by the collapse of neoliberalism. With one ideological era closing and a vacuum of belief opening in its wake (the “crisis of authority,” as Gramsci called it), disaster nationalism might be the political belief system most capable of filling the void, a rare enchantment in a dismal time. It’s only somewhat ironic that, for all its brio and bluster about burning down civilization, disaster nationalism is designed to perpetuate and maintain crumbling political systems.
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To take one example of this, there is Israel, to which an entire chapter of Disaster Nationalism is devoted. Titled “Genocide,” the chapter features Seymour’s effort to speed through a history of the Zionist project, from the European settler movement to the genocidal war machine that Israel is today. Israel’s drift to the far right can be explained, he thinks, by its embrace of free-market neoliberal doctrine, which, beginning in the 1970s, effectively yanked off the restraints on Zionism’s ethnonationalist urges. Hollowed-out unions, crippled welfare systems, and an ineffectual liberal opposition allowed a far-right ruling coalition to gain control of Israeli society without dissent. Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) this, crises abound there. Israel is among the most unequal societies in the Western world. A sense of hyper-victimization is rampant in the populace. The country’s “liberal” democracy is a contradictory sham, no more than a two-tiered apartheid system permitting only second-class citizenship to Arabs. Worst yet, Zionism’s promise to deliver an ethnically pure “homeland” to Jews is a delusional lie, in part because Palestinians continue to persist in both their opposition and their sheer existence. As a result, endless war is the only political program on offer. (It’s the only thing capable of delivering “moral regeneration,” as Seymour puts it.) For flailing states like Israel, disaster nationalism is a way in which to “metabolise” the dysfunction. This is the dreamwork that keeps afloat the fantasy of ever-growing economies, of safer borders, of purer societies, and of returning to the way that things once supposedly were. What is less clear, after the deaths of over 50,000 Palestinians and the near-total destruction of Gaza, is whether any number can quench these urges once the dreamwork is fully set in motion.
Can the left psychoanalyze its enemies into oblivion? Obviously not—and Seymour concedes as much. As for solutions, his approaches are fuzzy at best. Seymour is skeptical that we should offer the so-called “bread and butter” fixes that the left usually argues for: higher wages, full employment, and expanded social safety nets. What he argues for instead is a vaguer and appropriately more psychological mix of proposals, one being that the left “let go” of the “resignation” that has defined it over these past 30 years. Another loftier suggestion is the formation of “mass ideals,” renewed social energy, and the “eros of collective action,” which looks more concretely like the development of a countercultural movement, forged through egalitarian ideals like unionism, to counteract the “paranoid, anti-social and vengeful passions” of disaster nationalism.
It’s clear that the right has mastered the politics of libidinal satisfaction. And it continues to deliver to its followers dopamine-spiking wins, all while wrecking their material conditions. Most seem pleasantly satisfied with the arrangement because, at least on its face, they can join in. Meanwhile, the electoral left seems intent on offering as little satisfaction to people as possible. Faced with a rising tide of resentment—born from the panics of economic stagnation, crippled institutions, and the evaporation of civic life—liberals made a sterile plea in 2024 to defend the abstraction of democracy and maintain the status quo. Nearly 7.1 million Democratic voters opted to sit out the presidential election in response. Now, as President Trump and his pet billionaire, Elon Musk, dismantle the federal government, the leaders of the opposition party are busy insisting to their base that they are powerless to do anything about it. Their mounting losses, they insist, are the result of a “messaging problem.”
To blunt the rise of political styles like disaster nationalism, an entirely new structure of feeling will need to be constructed on the left—one offering the same kind of libidinal satisfaction to its followers in the face of crumbling systems and institutions. This would mean addressing the collapse of the neoliberal order, acknowledging the unfolding polycrisis, and speaking to the mass discontent warping the American spirit. It could mean harnessing things like the societal rage and the strange coalitions shaped in the aftermath of Luigi Mangione’s assassination of a health insurance executive. But above all, building this structure of feeling would require the left to reclaim political emotions it has long ceded to the right—such as hate, which the anthropologist and political anarchist David Graeber once argued could be a form of virtue. Hate, when directed at things like injustice or militarism or nationalism, can be a righteous political tool, one capable of powering societal change, crafting broad political coalitions, and neutralizing the mass manipulators of our age. It’s the fuel necessary for any political dreamwork. “To absolutely exclude hatred from politics,” Graeber wrote, “is to rip the fiber out, to deny the main motor of social transformation, ultimately, to reduce it to a flat plane of hopeless cynicism.”
For those of us who haven’t fallen under the spell of disaster nationalism, this sounds like a pretty accurate description of the political moment. Productive emotion, let alone something like hate, has been notably absent on the left in these first months of Donald Trump’s second presidential term. Meanwhile, a soft fascism appears to be sprouting up in the White House—animated by Nazi tributes, open racism, and, as always, the miasma of conspiracist belief. The right is currently the standing winner and direct beneficiary of liberalism’s grand crisis in America and beyond. Scorn, empathy, pity—these aren’t feelings capable of combating violent fantasies made flesh. Decades of losses have made as much clear: Only an equal and forceful opposite reaction will suffice.
