In Review - Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization by Richard Seymour

On a recent walk in Madrid, I was gobsmacked by a poster agitating for a “stop” to the alleged “Islamicization” of Spain. The poster made me wonder: had whoever plastered the poster up been in Spain in the past, más o menos, 600 years? If so, they would surely have noticed that native-born Spaniards continue to drive the nation’s government in a prosperous, progressive, European Union-affirmative society. Moreover, greater Colombian or Korean or British influence is evident in Spain in 2025 as compared with ostensibly hegemonic (in reality, marginal) Islam. Next question: What may account for the poster’s aggrieved hysteria that also rings familiar bells? An answer may implicate the complex of interpenetrating the crises of our times—in this instance, transposing the mere presence of Islamic Others into Islamic hegemony—that diffuse like chlorine in a pool, circulating across the globe. Richard Seymour, a London School of Economics-trained public intellectual, assays further analysis.

Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism is an arresting and troubling book. To oversimplify for the moment, Seymour argues disasters that nations and the world face have, under the umbrella of rightwing extremism, been transposed onto obsessions with, for example, “pure”, monolithic identities. Always already asserting incipient collapse, disaster nationalists seek remedies far worse than the problems that they reify. Below, I will focus on Seymour’s analyses of this displacement of crisis, socioeconomic class, extremist violence (encompassing lone wolves, pogroms, and genocides), and the efficacy of performative-oriented disaster nationalist governmentality (preview: it governs abysmally).

Disaster Nationalism draws on psychoanalysis and left-wing political economy. Seymour’s eclectic volume is distinct from Cas Mudde’s more dispassionate sociological study of the international far right or Nicole Hemmer’s historical narrative focused on the extremist takeover of the US’ Republican Party. In oscillating between theory and cases, Disaster Nationalism more closely resembles Jason Hannan’s arguments, albeit in darker tones with more ambitious reach. Seymour’s concerns overlap with those of Jason Stanley in How Fascism Works, although Seymour assays to keep disaster nationalism analytically distinct from fascism. The heart of Seymour’s argument is that disaster nationalism animates leaders and their followers to instrumentalize the disasters they imagine engaging in undemocratic and at times violent thrashing at perceived enemies; trashing nations and social contracts to “save” them with a mutation of patriotism that resembles the “love” of the abuser.

Seymour argues that disaster nationalism aggravates passions with kernels of truth in exaggerated or unrelated contexts. “Real crises abound” while disaster nationalists displace them onto pre-standing rightwing obsessions (p. 191). For instance, Oregon wildfires (pp. 52-58) are not a natural disaster and/or efflux of climate change. For disaster nationalists, the fires were the handiwork of the mythologized Antifa militant whom one can personally confront. Thus, Oregon patriots deputized themselves to set up roadblocks to police imagined Antifa commanders posing as normal drivers. Real disaster (fire) nourished imaginary causes and solutions. 

Notwithstanding charades of working-class politics, another pillar of disaster nationalism is its enforcement of capitalism’s neoliberal socioeconomic model. Seymour posits the neoliberal variant of capitalism as disciplining workers and placing the steering mechanisms of society beyond the reach of the public and its representatives (also see Slobodian). In this view, neoliberalism is not and has never been an anti-statist doctrine, but a legalistic deregulatory regime waging the class war for the capitalist elite. By contrast, Keynesian social democracy conditions the market thorough substantive political oversight and provides insurance against ignorance, illness, and old age (schools, public health system, social security). Seymour asks whether human sovereignty has ever been as constrained as by the silent but ubiquitous machinery of globalized neoliberalism. 

If disaster nationalists align with economic elite interests, what are citizens getting when they vote (or bot or march or light fires) in support of disaster nationalism? Seymour contends that citizens may obtain the adrenaline jolt of bombastically barbaric discourse. Bank accounts may not bulge, but disaster nationalist publics may construe “psychic surplus” as a dividend.  In this vein, former Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte manufactured online abuse on an industrial scale, enabling “collective pleasure in shaming and bullying” for followers (p. 115). Moreover, in his fanatical anti-drug campaigns, Duterte pushed the high of crowd-sourced Purge-like mayhem through sanctioned vigilantism.  

Seymour announces that he finds “scant evidence” (p. 32) that the white working class across western societies is propelling extremism. Indeed, the last mainstream US Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney in 2012, attracted five percent more white working-class votes than Trump did four years later. Disaster nationalist leaders are indeed largely hostile toward policies that benefit the working people. National Rally in France supported criminalization of worker pickets —how anti-French can one be? —while Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazilian administration slashed workers´ rights. Nonetheless, disaster nationalists attract enough working-class support to beg questions. 

Disaster nationalism differs from traditional left-wing politics in emphasizing the nation over class. While unmoved by intense class division, disaster national helmsmen and helmswomen finesse economic striation by pushing an alchemized transcendence of class standing through nationalist identifications, a presumptively new relation between the subject and society. In turn, the new subjects of disaster nationalism can absorb the pleasure of performative politics that pantomime the “right” people winning the market game. In Trump’s zero-sum disaster nationalism, Mexico and China will not be “winners”—even if the US public loses as well.  

Seymour devotes lengthy discussion to disaster nationalism’s proximity to political violence, such as Brexit lone wolf terrorist Thomas Mair (pp. 118-123); lone wolves mobilized by the ongoing cacophony of disaster nationalist agitation, as its leaders and followers incite each other toward further extremism. In this vein, the profile of political violence in the US is unmistakable as rightwing extremists predominantly drive the mayhem with white supremacists leading the charge (Johnson; Jones and Doxsee).

While conjuring phantom disasters, the extreme right has also proven to be tragically inept when real crises erupt. Seymour cites the weak response of Narendra Modi’s Gujarat state government to a 2001 earthquake that killed an estimated 14,000 people. A year later, Modi was more animated around stirring pogroms against the state’s Muslim minority on specious pretexts (pp. 124-128, pp. 136-142). Other instances of rightwing extremists who ignore the public’s plight during genuine disasters are legion: think of G.W. Bush´s somnambulism during pre-9/11 terrorist chatter (Clarke) and after Hurricane Katrina, Bolsonaro during coronavirus, or Partido Popular’s Carlos Mazón during Spain’s deadly 2024 DANA floods in Valencia. Extreme right leaders hype faked crises to which they have the pretensions of answers while behaving like snails caught in superglue when people’s lives are on the line; part and parcel in my view to extremist disinterest in the mechanics of governmentality for public benefit in favor of the sheer exercise of power and opportunities for enrichment (Pilkington).

Alongside provocation and insight, Disaster Nationalism presents flaws. Seymour under-defines the book’s titular term with tactical vagueness around disaster nationalism vis-a-vis fascism. He suggests that disaster nationalism resembles an anteroom to fascism as it is “not yet fascism” (p. 191), despite surges of Manicheanism and mayhem that he documents. Elsewhere, Seymour posits that we are in the early days of a “new fascism” (p. 12) through the activation of a nasty variant of nationalism. While not a flaw per se, one-sixth of the volume (pp. 155-189) narrates the long transcript of Israel-Palestine confrontation across decades and into the intensifying horror of the present (Ganguly). While bracing, disaster nationalist themes generally drop from sight in this long passage.

After 200 pages of collating illiberal horror, Seymour focuses on disrupting what he calls molecular flows of disaster nationalism. While disaster nationalism resembles dreamwork, he emphasizes that (psycho)analyzing it is not a cure. Moreover, Seymour warns against propping up the existing, debilitatingly ill system currently gamed by extremists. 

Seymour argues that like the fascism it resembles but is not, disaster nationalism overreaches—albeit, with collateral damage for innocent people’s lives. Disaster nationalism also miscalculates through mythopoetic caricature of its designated enemies. Internal divisions may cleave disaster nationalists between the libertarians and authoritarians. Finally, disaster nationalism is riddled with contradictions and wishful thinking. For example, indignantly “protecting” women from Others positions awkwardly alongside coddling incel rage. Sleepwalkers do wake up.  

Rather than follow the disaster nationalist playbook by “coldly disillusioning an oppressed and heartbroken people” (p. 201), Seymour proposes positive steps. To start, undo the conditions prompting disillusionment through palpable bread-and-butter improvement in people's lives. The social and emotive dimensions of fightback also demand attention. The experience of communal activity, interdependence and simple enjoyment are antidotes to people angering “alone together” on social media (p. 65). Robust labor unions are a start but not a panacea. Participating in collective action brings engrossing dramas of sacrifices, ingenuity and improvisation, obstacles encountered and overcome, compelling human drama that transports and transforms people.   

I will also add that disaster nationalism perversely brings shambles not only to the public through misrule—but on occasion to its own ringleaders. Following publication of Disaster Nationalism in late 2024, signature disaster nationalists—Bolsonaro and Duterte—respectively face prison time and prosecution because people in Brazil and The Philippines were resolute in pursuing a properly lawful order. Then again, Trumpian MAGA may substantially succeed in wrecking the US patrimony (universities, free speech, widely dispersed authority, scientific acumen, global soft power); a disaster nationalist masterwork that surely exceeds Sino-Russo-North Korean maximum dreams of stripping a once hegemonic US down to a lividly divided, violent, corrupt, diseased, polluted authoritarian dumpster fire.  

In any event, Seymour eschews facile optimism. Without deux ex

machina flourishes, Disaster Nationalism provides outlines for hope that Martin Luther King’s long arc of history will bend toward justice—if we make the requisite effort, starting now. 

Brian Goss, Ph.D, is associate professor in the Department of Communication at Saint Louis University, Madrid. His research focuses on political communication, journalism, new media, film and television with an international accent. He is the author of The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era (Peter Lang 2020), Rebooting the Herman and Chomsky Propaganda Model (Peter Lang 2013) and Global Auteurs (Peter Lang 2009).

The OCC publishes a wide range of opinions that are meant to help our readers think of International Relations. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and neither the OCC nor Saint Louis University can be held responsible for any use which may be made of the opinion of the author and/or the information contained therein.

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