Is this fascism?

One​ way of thinking about fascism is to see it as historically specific: a reactionary mass movement produced by the economic and social chaos that engulfed Europe after the First World War. Fascism promised national rebirth through the violent cleansing of enemies at home and conquest abroad; to achieve this required public consent to the undoing of democracy. Where fascism took root, it grew rapidly beyond its base among the frustrated lower middle classes, attracting support from ‘the politically homeless … the socially uprooted, the destitute and the disillusioned’, as the German communist Clara Zetkin put it. Its supporters were organised into parties with uniformed paramilitary wings. They operated in what the historian Robert Paxton has called an ‘uneasy but effective collaboration’ with traditional elites, which wanted to maintain order and crush the left. Fascism, from this perspective, was born of particular social conditions that are unlikely to recur in the same form.

The other way of thinking about fascism is as a constant presence. Some see it as the expression of a human tendency towards domination. ‘Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed,’ Judith Butler wrote recently in relation to trans rights, ‘you’re operating within a fascist logic.’ Others see it as an inherent feature of unjust, oppressive societies. Fascism, Langston Hughes wrote in 1936, ‘is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America’. Aimé Césaire argued that interwar fascism was the result of a ‘terrific boomerang effect’: all the brutality of European imperialism – which had dehumanised the coloniser as well as the colonised – was visited on the home continent. Many historians and political theorists have described fascism’s appeal to the emotions. Paxton called them its ‘mobilising passions’: a sense of overwhelming crisis and victimhood, a fear of the decline of one’s group, a lust for purity and authority, a glorification of violence. Fascism could return in ‘the most innocent of disguises’, according to Umberto Eco, who grew up in Mussolini’s Italy, because we are all vulnerable to its emotional pull.

How useful is it to compare the current global resurgence of right-wing nationalism to fascism? We usually describe today’s right-wing nationalists as being on the ‘far right’, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are fascist. The political scientist Cas Mudde divides the far right into two groups: the extreme right, which rejects democracy entirely, and the radical right, which is hostile to liberal democracy. Fascist movements in the historical sense belong to the extreme right. They still exist, if largely at the margins: the most successful so far this century has been Golden Dawn, which mounted a campaign of racist intimidation and murder after the 2008 financial crisis and briefly became Greece’s third-largest party. More prominent today, in liberal democracies at least, is the radical right, which is supplanting traditional conservative movements. Trump, Modi, Meloni, Orbán, Milei, Bolsonaro and Duterte, as well as the many far-right parties with significant representation in the parliaments of Europe, Israel and elsewhere, all belong to the radical right.

Twentieth-century fascism appears to have little in common with today’s leading far-right movements. These groups share a political style – populism – which purports to be more democratic than that of its opponents. Populists, whether on the right or the left, portray themselves as authentic representatives of ‘the people’, in contrast to corrupt governing elites. Far-right populists seek to redefine ‘the people’ along narrow national, ethnic or religious lines. They like elections (as long as they win), but dislike the parts of the system – independent courts and media, intergovernmental bodies – that examine or restrain their power. Unlike interwar fascism, far-right populism does not seek to bring society under total state control. Some far-right populists, such as Nigel Farage, even claim to be libertarians. For the most part, far-right populism doesn’t share the expansionist territorial aims of interwar fascism, Trump’s sabre-rattling at Canada and Greenland notwithstanding; indeed, if anything links far-right populist programmes, it’s the call for a retrenchment of borders, whether political, cultural or economic.

The second way of thinking about fascism may seem more useful. Some far-right populists haven’t been content merely to display hostility to liberal democratic institutions, but have set about dismantling them. Under Viktor Orbán’s clientelist leadership in Hungary, the judiciary and media have been neutered, while in his second term Donald Trump is trying to undermine the functions of the US state by wilfully flouting the law. Far-right populist movements are usually built around conspiracist demagogues who promise to remove rights from minority groups and whose supporters trade in jokey, memeified references to fascism (is that outstretched arm a Nazi salute, or is it reaching for the stars?). Right-wing violence has become more prevalent, with the most extreme incidents carried out by ‘lone wolf’ mass shooters, militia groups or mobs. Some far-right populists have sought to harness these impulses: Jair Bolsonaro and Trump both encouraged their supporters to try to overturn presidential election results when they lost, though both ultimately backed down. Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP has links to a paramilitary street movement, the RSS.

But even if a political movement shares one or more features of fascism – its leader’s use of rhetoric and propaganda, say – it does not necessarily follow that the movement will be fascist. Does anyone really believe that Farage intends to turn the UK into a dictatorship? The accusation can be a way of masking the failings of our political systems, from which far-right populism emerged. Bill Clinton’s former secretary of state Madeleine Albright bemoaned the implications of a Trump presidency for American global leadership in Fascism: A Warning (2018), one of a glut of such books that followed the populist election upsets of 2016, without considering the reason that Trump’s ostensibly anti-war message had appealed to so many Americans. Invoking fascism can also blur our understanding of what’s really going on. Trump, for instance, wants to abolish birthright citizenship in the US. Margaret Thatcher did this in the UK forty years ago. Are both of these decisions fascist, or neither – or is there something qualitatively different about Trump’s actions? Does it even matter whether we have an answer to the question ‘Is this fascism?’

It does matter. As the historian Ian Kershaw says, trying to define fascism is ‘like trying to nail jelly to a wall’, yet for all its slipperiness, ‘fascism’ describes a uniquely destructive force in politics, and one for which we don’t have a better word. Unlike other forms of authoritarianism, such as military dictatorship, if left unchecked it is not only murderous but suicidal. Interwar fascism involved millions of people in the effort to purify national communities, initiating a spiral of violence that led to war, genocide and self-immolation. Its devastating potential was rooted in the paradoxical promise of a revolution carried out in defence of hierarchy. As Paxton noted, this led either to entropy, as the movement failed to deliver, or to increasing radicalism, as leaders raced to meet the expectations of their followers. (Unlike most governments, as the historian David Renton points out, the fascist parties in Italy and Germany became more radical once in office.) Fascism involves a form of collective behaviour that seems unaccountable. Many in the interwar period were slow to recognise the danger it posed, seeing fascism merely as a tool of ruling-class oppression or as mass irrationality, rather than as a force with a logic and a life of its own. Today, ‘fascism’ is useful as a political concept only in so far as it enables us to spot its destructive potential before it fully discloses itself. As Primo Levi wrote, ‘it happened, therefore it can happen again.’

Are​ we, as Richard Seymour suggests, ‘in the early days of a new fascism’? In Disaster Nationalism, Seymour argues that in trying to understand the new far right, we have been looking in the wrong places. Parties and policy platforms, or the personalities of ‘strongman’ figureheads, can only take us so far. What matters more is the particular mood that pervades both the extremist fringes and the political mainstream. ‘The new far right is enthralled by images of disaster,’ Seymour writes. Far-right populists promise to defend their people from migrant ‘invasions’ and ‘deep state’ traitors. Conspiracy theorists chase cabals of Satanist paedophiles, while mass shooters believe they are resisting a Muslim takeover, or Jewish influence, or women who have emasculated them. Large numbers of people contribute to moral panics about religious, ethnic and sexual minorities, or left-wing activism; a few even take matters into their own hands in outbreaks of pogromist violence. These kinds of behaviour, in Seymour’s view, are evidence of the mix of reactionary and rebellious emotions peculiar to fascism; a new version of the mobilising passions identified by Paxton. They are shot through with ‘apocalyptic desire’ – a fear of impending doom, combined with the contradictory impulse to throw oneself into the abyss – and reveal a ‘pervasive ambivalence about civilisation … a submerged desire for it to fall apart’.

‘Disaster nationalism’ is Seymour’s term for the political expression of these feelings. It arises, he writes, from the ‘profound unhappiness accumulated in the era of peak liberalism’ and offers the afflicted a range of enemies whose defeat will restore ‘the traditional consolations of family, race, religion and nationhood’. Significantly, it tends to ignore the real disaster staring us in the face, that of human-induced climate change: far-right populists are caught between outright denial of global heating and a perverse, gleeful wish to bring it on. Disaster nationalist figureheads don’t resemble traditional politicians so much as celebrities, borne aloft on a surge of violent emotion whose spread has been facilitated by the internet. Interwar fascism required mass parties to establish a fatal dialectic between leader and mob; social media platforms now perform that function. Political entrepreneurs, from populist leaders to far-right influencers, engage in ‘permanent algorithmic campaigning’, directing their followers’ anger and sadism at their opponents. Bolsonaro had a Gabinete do Ódio (‘office of hate’), a group of advisers who planned his social media strategy; Modi rewards his most virulent supporters on X by discreetly following them back; Trump is a ‘one-man troll farm’. And when rhetorical violence spills over into real life, it’s no longer career-ending.

This is a typical Seymour argument: ambitious, insightful and contentious. Over the past twenty years, the Northern Irish writer has built up a following on the anglophone left as an outsider intellectual. He emerged from the mid-2000s network of bloggers that also included Mark Fisher, Nina Power and Owen Hatherley.* Their interests differed, but they shared a commitment to challenging what they saw as the stultifying political and cultural consensus of the neoliberal boom years – what Fisher called the era of ‘capitalist realism’ – and to an idea of public writing that was engaged, disputatious and didn’t dumb down. Seymour was always the most straightforwardly political: first as a caustic opponent of the war on terror and its advocates (one of his early books was subtitled ‘The Trial of Christopher Hitchens’), then of the economic austerity that followed the 2008 crash. Like Hitchens, Seymour is a former Trotskyite; he left the Socialist Workers Party in 2013 when it imploded over allegations of sexual assault by a senior member. Unlike Hitchens, or indeed Power, whose work has taken a reactionary turn, Seymour has not moved to the right. Instead, he continues to examine the reasons that, despite the economic and environmental disruptions of our time, the right keeps winning.

This is what makes him a useful, if sometimes frustrating, guide to the present moment. Having abandoned the boosterism of the revolutionary left – ‘One more crisis, comrades, and it’s our time!’ – he practises a radical pessimism. Capitalism, in his view, isn’t just an engine for human misery, but, through the burning of fossil fuels, a threat to human existence. Capitalist democracy, ‘an inherently contradictory and unstable formation’ which asks people to forgo equality in return for the promise of rising living standards, is ill-equipped to avert it. Seymour’s writing is erudite, drawing on Marxism, psychoanalysis, cultural criticism and a wide range of social research, and sometimes has the breathless pace of the very online. He is a co-founder, with the novelist China Miéville and others, of the political journal Salvage (‘The catastrophe is already upon us,’ one of its taglines runs, ‘and the decisive struggle is over what to do with the remains’), and his style has similarities with Miéville’s gothic-futurism. Seymour aims to provoke the reader – not least through the force of his rhetoric – into thinking about what might be round the corner. His efforts don’t always land, but when they do he can throw a murky picture into sharp relief: I have come across no better encapsulation of the nature of social media than ‘participatory disinfotainment’.

In​ Disaster Nationalism, Seymour attempts to fuse the two ways of thinking about fascism – the historically specific and the continuous – to show that some version of it is emerging today. As in the 1920s and 1930s, the expansion of far-right politics clearly has some link to the capitalist cycle: voters in Europe, for instance, have tended to move rightwards in response to financial crises since at least 1870; the emergence of today’s far-right populism can be traced to the 2008 financial crash. But Seymour follows the more supple Marxists, notably Gramsci, in stressing that culture and circumstance, as much as economic interests, shape our attitudes. For Seymour, the determining factor is neoliberalism, whose ruins we continue to inhabit, as governing elites have struggled in the aftermath of the crash either to shore up the system or forge an alternative. Neoliberalism, Seymour writes, drawing on the work of the economic historian Philip Mirowski, aimed to persuade the masses ‘to abandon tribal sentiments of solidarity and accept the law of universal competition’. The result, amid soaring wealth inequality, is a ‘paranoid system’: if everyone is a potential competitor, there can be no meaningful social sphere, public services will be corrupt and inefficient, and welfare recipients will be regarded as freeloaders. This is a recipe for ‘resentment, envy, spite, anxiety, depression and rage’, whose long-term effects – in the West, at least – are declining social trust, increased loneliness and a rise in political violence, even as other forms of violent crime have fallen. The wager of neoliberalism, Seymour writes, was that if voters were treated as consumers ‘their rational choices would keep politics in the consensual middle ground’, and perhaps during the boom years they did. But many people have now come to feel that the system is rigged.

On the face of it, the balm offered by far-right populism seems mild in comparison with interwar fascism, which promised to transcend class divisions and bring nation, state and leader together in a single body – the ‘corporate state’, as Mussolini called it. Far-right populism, by contrast, offers what Seymour calls ‘muscular national capitalism’. Although its tools are those of orthodox economic policy – privatisation and welfare cuts for Modi; protectionism via tariffs for Trump; increased state direction for Orbán – they are being put to a very different end. Muscular national capitalism treats the economy ‘as a moral space in which it is argued the wrong people have been losing’. (The problem with globalisation, J.D. Vance said recently, wasn’t that it was unfair, but that it was causing rich countries such as America to lose their place at the top of the international pecking order.) Yet, as it turns out, its real economic benefits can be relatively meagre (average incomes in Brazil fell under Bolsonaro), since the true payoff is psychological. What far-right populists really have to offer is revenge: India’s frustrated Hindu middle classes will reap the benefits of growth if life is made intolerable for their Muslim neighbours; men in the Americas will become winners again when traditional gender roles are restored; cities in the Philippines will be regenerated if a war is waged on drug addicts; economically depressed regions of Europe will be revived by the mass deportation of refugees. The rhetorical tactics of far-right populism – the denigration of critics as traitors and Lügenpresse; the lurid claims about immigrants eating dogs; the obsession with ‘woke’ forms of social etiquette – are all ‘programmatic’, as Seymour puts it. They aim to channel the multifarious resentments of a population into a ‘revolt against liberal civilisation’; in other words, into ‘barbarism’.

Disaster Nationalism is part of a tradition that locates the roots of interwar fascism in the human psyche. The idea that civilisation makes us sick – that for all its benefits, it requires us to repress our aggressive and sexual urges, which reappear as various forms of unhappiness – originates with Freud. But where Freud focused on the individual, his successors Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm tried to understand the social character of support for fascism. For Reich, it was a form of ‘mass psychology’: the use of symbolism, emotion and sexual imagery to mobilise the people’s repressed violent urges. Fromm saw it in class terms, arguing that particular groups were drawn to fascism: authoritarians, certainly, but also defeated and dejected workers who had given up hope of social progress and put their faith in fascism’s promise of redemptive violence. Some have applied similar thinking to today’s far right: Wendy Brown identified ‘apocalyptic populists’ as a key component of Trump’s voter base in 2016, and her more recent work examines the mood of nihilism pervading contemporary political life.†

For Seymour, the key emotion of our time is resentment, fuelled by the insecurities and paranoia of class society and neoliberalism. It is an emotion we cannot do without, he notes, since it is essential to our sense of justice. We feel resentment at things we perceive as unfair and can feel it on behalf of others. But resentment can become an ‘emotional swamp’, leading in the most extreme cases to a ‘politically enabled passion for persecution’. Social media, which represents a shift in the way we communicate as significant as the rise of print newspapers was to the development of 19th-century nationalism, is an accelerant to this. Here, Seymour builds on his book The Twittering Machine (2019), which argues that the compulsive qualities of social media – its hall-of-mirrors narcissism, the dopamine hit of likes, clicks and follows – are used to manipulate our ‘fantasies, desires and frailties’ for profit. Participating in social media is to risk developing sadistic and self-harming forms of behaviour, since anger and conflict are often the quickest routes to online engagement: it is all too easy for social media users to find themselves subject to or joining in pile-ons, flame wars, trolling and other forms of online bullying. The industry has also proved a remarkably efficient conduit for the apocalyptic fantasies that sustain the far-right worldview.

These tendencies are particularly concentrated in the lone-wolf terrorist, who takes revenge on the world for his personal and political grievances in a spectacular act of violence. According to the sociologist Ramon Spaaij, lone-wolf murders increased by 143 per cent in the West between the 1970s and the 2000s – but social media has essentially turned these killings into a game. The template was set by Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011. Breivik’s anger was nurtured and given shape by an extreme online subculture, in his case the Islamophobic ‘counter-jihad’ of the 2000s. His murders, as Seymour puts it, were essentially a ‘marketing plan’ for his online manifesto, an incoherent mixture of gamer talk, visions of the death of Western civilisation and diatribes by mainstream right-wing commentators about multiculturalism and Muslims. Since then, such behaviour has become much more common: in 2019, a gunman in Halle, Germany, livestreamed his attack on a synagogue on the gaming platform Twitch; in 2016, the perpetrator of a massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida checked Facebook midway through his assault; in 2019, an admirer of the man who murdered 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, expressed a desire to beat that ‘high score’.

Seymour’s title intentionally echoes ‘disaster capitalism’, Naomi Klein’s term for the exploitation by corporate interests of wars, natural disasters and other crises for financial gain. Disaster nationalism, correspondingly, involves far-right populists looking for political gain. But it also gestures to the way people behave when they feel threatened. We like to think disasters bring us together – and sometimes they do – but that isn’t always the case. In the summer of 2020, for instance, the world’s largest anti-lockdown protests were driven by the Querdenken (‘lateral thinkers’) movement in Germany. The movement grew out of concern over civil liberties and the economic impact of lockdowns, but quickly became conspiratorial, fed by a stream of ‘alternative news’ on the encrypted messaging app Telegram. Querdenken channels were dominated by followers of the QAnon cult, who believe in the existence of an elite, Satanic, cannibalistic child-sex-trafficking ring, and who see Trump as their saviour. This rightwards drift culminated in a protest in Berlin in August 2020, when a faction led by QAnon followers attempted to storm the Reichstag.

The profound shock of the pandemic was clearly a trigger for these events, but in Seymour’s analysis there was nothing inevitable or natural about the way they unfolded. People are often drawn to conspiracy theories as a way of regaining a sense of control over a frightening and complex situation: for some, it is more comforting to have a shadowy elite to rail against than to accept there’s a virus spreading that nobody knows how to combat. But if a conspiracy theory is to gain purchase, people must want to believe. They must have an existing distrust of power, of official or established information sources and authority figures; precisely those institutions, in other words, that become more remote from ordinary people the more unequal a society becomes. Conspiracy theories also fill an emotional need that isn’t being met elsewhere. As Seymour notes of QAnon, whose followers decode ‘clues’ posted anonymously online, people join in partly because they find it fun. There is a mix of horror and excitement, and a sense of community (one of their slogans is ‘Where we go one, we go all’). As Seymour writes, the conspiracy has taken on a life of its own: QAnon is ‘a conversion-machine designed by no single hand, turning agnostic thrill-seekers into devotees of the apocalypse … and translating the attentional surges thereby generated into profit’. Before Facebook gave in to pressure to tighten its regulations in 2020, more than three million of its users were sharing QAnon material.

Not all conspiratorial thinking is as baroque as QAnon, but to Seymour its prevalence shows there is a latent desire for a ‘violent reset’: ‘There is evil in the world,’ the logic goes, ‘but it has a face and a name and we can strike back against it.’ For Seymour, taking his cue from Lacan, ‘the fantasy of a “world without them” is destined to turn suicidal,’ since the desire to annihilate the Other cannot be satiated and ultimately turns inwards. Whether or not you follow him all the way here, it is certainly plausible that nationalism can be a beneficiary of unconscious aggression, since the nation is still, for all the disruptions of globalisation, the primary form of our collective political life. Nationalism is always susceptible to violent confusion, since ‘the nation’ means two things at once: a civic community defined by shared space and an ethnic community defined by blood. Far-right nationalists put considerable effort into exciting fears that collective national life is under threat by focusing on its corporeal elements – think of their preoccupations with sex, birth and death – and naming the culprits. The Russian far-right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin recently described Ukrainians as ‘collective transgenders’: Ukraine blurs the boundaries between Russia and the West, he says, thereby undermining the integrity of the Russian nation.

‘Popular war against national enemies,’ as Seymour puts it, may not yet be central to far-right populism in the way it was to interwar fascism, but it is lurking in the background. When Rodrigo Duterte took office in the Philippines in 2016, he practised what Seymour calls ‘death squad populism’, urging the murder of drug addicts as well as dealers in an effort to revive urban neighbourhoods. It is estimated that as many as thirty thousand people were killed, some by vigilante groups, in the space of six years. In Israel, the far right’s eliminationist rhetoric has provided the drumbeat to the genocidal violence meted out to Gazans since the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, as well as the increase in settler pogroms in the West Bank. India continues to be racked by outbursts of Hindu nationalist mob violence. The correspondences between leader and mob may be looser elsewhere, but they are still significant: Trump’s pardoning of the 6 January 2021 rioters as soon as he began his second term, including members of militias and street gangs, makes clear his relationship to that part of his base. If his economic policies fail to deliver, and his ostentatious tormenting of migrants and trans people fails to make up for it, he may need them again.

In​ the UK, far-right politics appears to have moved away from violent extremism. Since the collapse in 2010 of the British National Party, a group founded by neo-Nazis that began to win support only when it adopted a more moderate public face, the momentum has been with the populists. Farage’s various projects – Ukip, the Brexit Party and now Reform UK – have been the defining right-wing influence on British politics in the past fifteen years. As elsewhere in Europe, the growth of far-right populism in the UK can be ascribed at least in part to various economic ills. Flatlining wages, stalled social mobility and a decrepit public realm have plagued British life since 2008 and are a breeding ground for the resentment that Seymour describes. Until 2016, governments largely tried to manage that resentment by assuring voters that they were eager to punish the undeserving poor: the ‘shirkers’ targeted by George Osborne’s cuts to the welfare state and the illegal immigrants Theresa May told to ‘go home’. But this did nothing to stave off far-right populism, which was buoyed by a combination of sympathetic coverage from the traditional right-wing press and the increasing prominence of far-right influencers in the mainstream media – only five people have appeared more often on the BBC’s Question Time than Farage – and online. More recently, the right has secured its own TV channel, GB News. Since the EU referendum in 2016, which might not have happened without Farage, the principal effect of far-right populism has been to pull the mainstream further right: the Conservatives’ reward for this has been the erosion of its electoral base; they are now – at best – competing with Reform for second place at Westminster. According to recent polling by the anti-fascist organisation Hope not Hate, 40 per cent of British people would prefer a ‘strong and decisive leader who has the authority to override or ignore Parliament’ to a liberal democracy with regular elections and a multi-party system. The more pessimistic people are about their own lives, the poll found, the more likely they are to support Reform, to believe multiculturalism is failing and to oppose immigration.

If you believe Farage, his brand of politics is a bulwark against violent extremism, yet such violence has been on the rise too, and has often been cultivated online. The murder of Jo Cox in 2016 by a white supremacist was followed a year later by a foiled plot by members of a neo-Nazi youth network to murder a Labour MP. According to Hope not Hate, a growing number of young men are attracted to violence and are becoming ‘increasingly ideologically fluid’ in the ways they justify their impulses. In August 2021, a 22-year-old man in Plymouth shot and killed five people, including his mother and a three-year-old girl. He had immersed himself in nihilistic and misogynistic online subcultures, and described himself shortly before the killings as ‘beaten down and defeated by life’. A 25-year-old man who raped and murdered his ex-girlfriend and murdered her mother and sister in Hertfordshire in July 2024 had been searching online for material by the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate shortly before he carried out the killings.

What’s more, as Seymour suggests, mainstream politics is now punctuated by the violence of the street. After 2016 there were frequent attempts by far-right Brexit supporters to intimidate MPs on their way in and out of Parliament, and canvassers for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party were assaulted during the 2019 election campaign. Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the anti-Muslim English Defence League, has more than a million followers on X, and has mobilised tens of thousands of supporters to take part in street demonstrations in London. The populist posturing of some ministers in the successive Johnson, Truss and Sunak administrations did nothing to discourage far-right extremism. In autumn 2020, while Johnson, the then home secretary, Priti Patel, and the Daily Mail mounted rhetorical attacks on ‘lefty’ immigration lawyers, a Nazi sympathiser tried to kill the head of immigration law at a prominent firm of solicitors. Patel’s eventual successor, Suella Braverman, was removed in a reshuffle in November 2023 after writing in the Times that police had applied a ‘double standard’ in being tougher on ‘right-wing and nationalist protesters’ than on ‘pro-Palestinian mobs’.

These various strands came together in the riots of the summer of 2024. To put it in Seymour’s terms, acute disaster – the Southport murders, carried out by a teenager who had cultivated his grievances online – led to a crisis in the chronic disaster of British politics, triggering riots and anti-immigration protests in 27 towns and cities. Committed far-right activists inflamed the response: as unfounded rumours spread online that the killer was Muslim or an asylum seeker, a veteran neo-Nazi from Merseyside called for a protest in Southport, promoting it via a Telegram group that swiftly attracted thousands of followers. Similar calls cropped up elsewhere online, but according to Hope not Hate most of the people involved in them, and in the riots themselves, had no formal political affiliation.

Although most of the disturbances took place in deprived areas, as rioting usually does, the stories of the people convicted for participating in or encouraging the violence suggest a perplexing range of motivations. Gavin Pinder, a 47-year-old with a highly-paid job at a nuclear power plant, was said to be laughing as he attempted to attack a mosque in Southport; so was Leanne Hodgson, a 43-year-old former flight attendant who charged a line of police with an industrial wheelie bin. Peter Lynch, 61, joined a mob that tried to burn down a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham; he was carrying a placard condemning the ‘deep state’, the World Health Organisation and Nasa. In Bristol, Ashley Harris, the 36-year-old owner of a scaffolding business, led a chant of ‘We want our country back’ before punching a female counter-protester. ‘Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards,’ posted Lucy Connolly, 41, a former childminder and the wife of a Tory councillor in Northampton. ‘If that makes me racist so be it.’ Levi Fishlock, a 31-year-old from Barnsley who tried to set fire to the hotel in Rotherham, told arresting officers that it was for a ‘good cause’.

All of this illustrates the mix of apocalyptic fantasy, nationalist resentment and libidinal excess that Seymour describes. But it’s a long way from fascism as an organised political force. One problem with Seymour’s analysis is that he doesn’t explain how you get from one part of his picture to another – from a disordered outburst of racist violence, for instance, to a successful far-right electoral project. Another way of reading last summer’s riots is that they demonstrated the resilience of the UK’s political system: after a swift law and order crackdown instigated by the government, and large counter-protests endorsed even by the Daily Mail, the violence petered out. Farage, whose political skill lies in carefully treading the boundary of mainstream respectability, was put on the back foot and had to disassociate himself from the violence. This year, Reform has been pushed into crisis twice by Farage’s attempts to maintain respectability: once, when Elon Musk called for Tommy Robinson to be admitted into the party, and again when Farage sacked his MP Rupert Lowe after a row caused – at least in part – by Lowe’s call for mass deportations.

This raises​ the question of whether, in focusing too heavily on the fascist potential of today’s far right, we miss what’s really going on. In the late 1970s, too, British capitalism was in crisis and the political system seemed stuck. One result of this was a rise in support for the National Front. But Stuart Hall, in his essay ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ (1979), argued that the left was misreading the moment, either behaving as if interwar fascism were at the door again, or treating the Conservatives under Thatcher as run-of-the-mill Tories. The NF, while vicious and dangerous, was in Hall’s view marginal. Thatcher, however, represented something new and significant: a form of ‘authoritarian populism’ that would win broad support through its attentiveness to forms of resentment at large in society and would reset British capitalism in favour of ruling elites, leaving the left adrift. That is more or less what happened. And it was achieved within the bounds of liberal democracy – though the Metropolitan Police were on hand just in case. When Farage describes Reform as a ‘brand new Conservative movement’, we should think a bit harder about what that means.

A related problem is that Seymour doesn’t quite explain the reason the trends he identifies are more prominent in some places than in others. His use of international examples is a welcome change from the usual anglophone solipsism – indeed their implication is that the cutting edge of nationalist revanchism in the 21st century might lie outside the sclerotic economies of the West – but this is not a properly global account. How, for instance, does disaster nationalism relate to a more straightforwardly autocratic regime such as Russia under Putin, or to post-communist China, which has developed its own version of muscular national capitalism? Both are mentioned only in passing. This is a shame, because as Trump’s second term has already shown, the division of the world into rival, heavily militarised power blocs, each dominated by its own regional nationalist bully, seems to be a goal of far-right populists and dictatorships alike. A self-destructive spiral of violence is one potential consequence, but so too is a more stable form of authoritarianism: a ‘managed democracy’ under which people’s rights are curtailed and territories grabbed but the show rolls on.

The counter argument would be that nothing about this moment seems stable. We have not yet experienced the profound social shocks – of world war or hyperinflation – that helped give rise to interwar fascism, but that’s what awaits us, Seymour believes, if we fail to halt climate breakdown. It would be ‘Pollyanna-ish’, he says, to assume that our democratic systems are resilient enough to ride out the coming climate storms. The more forward-thinking far-right politicians are already trying to infuse their nationalism with an ecological flavour, turning away from the question of how to avert catastrophe and signalling instead that nations must look to their own. ‘Borders are the environment’s greatest ally,’ Rassemblement National’s Jordan Bardella said in 2019. ‘It is through them that we will save the planet.’

Seymour wants us to imagine the worst that could happen, and to do something to avert it. But it’s hard to square these aims. On the one hand, he stresses, correctly, that today’s far right can be defeated. It thrives on a diminished social sphere, on the timidity and paralysis of its opponents, and on the sense that hope, as Fisher once put it, is a ‘dangerous illusion’. Any meaningful reinvigoration of democracy will need to attend to emotional needs as much as to what Seymour calls the ‘bread and butter politics’ of jobs, wages and public services. Look, he says, at the way trade unions build solidarity among workers. People come together to improve their material circumstances, in the form of pay and conditions. But in doing so, other needs are awakened, ‘such as the need for other people in “communal activity and communal enjoyment”’ – here he is quoting Marx – ‘and even the development of “radical needs” such as “the need for universality”’.

On the other hand, Seymour’s foreboding vision leaves him with little room for manoeuvre. ‘We cannot disown apocalyptic desire,’ he writes, suggesting that there is ‘a latent rebelliousness in even the bluntest expressions of hopelessness’, such as the banner unfurled at an Extinction Rebellion protest that read simply: ‘We’re Fucked.’ But that’s not nearly enough. I first started reporting on the far right in the late 2000s, when it was regarded as an unpleasant, if lurid, sideshow. As I have watched it become one of the defining political currents of our time, one of the hardest things to grasp has been the way it thrives on failures in the existing system, yet offers remedies that would make everything much worse. It is difficult, but necessary, to give both parts of the equation due attention. Fascism, Paxton wrote, becomes a serious political force when it taps into ‘a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions’. In order not to arrive at that point, we could start by looking at what we stand to lose, and thinking about how we might preserve it.