The far-right is on the march; the left has rallied to defeat it. In a month which has seen the Trump-Vance presidential ticket power into life and National Rally fail to gain power in France, two simultaneous and contradictory readings of the contemporary political crisis have emerged. One sees an unstoppable wave, heralding the return of fascism across the West. Another, witnessing the joyous singing of antifascists on the streets of Paris and Perpignan after Le Pen’s defeat, proclaims the emptiness of the threat. Which is correct? Is the far right already the beast at the door or, despite media warnings of a populist rising for over a decade, the dog that fails to bark?
The French case is far from unique. For over a decade, Le Pen’s party has consistently increased its share of the vote. At the same time, the global momentum of hard-right campaigns has barely relented, propelling Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Javier Milei to power. The Israeli far-right has also assumed an increasingly dominant role in Benjamin Netanyahu-led governments. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) beat Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats into second place in the European elections and polls second-place for the federal elections. And yet, Trump lost in 2020, Bolsonaro was out two years later, the Polish far-right has been kicked out of government. Narendra Modi failed to win a majority, and Le Pen’s coronation, the culmination of over a decade of “dédiabolisation”, was stolen from her at the last minute. It’s no wonder the movement has proven difficult to parse.
But to see where it’s going, you must first know what it is. Unfortunately, the conversation is skewed before it begins. As Aaron Winter and Aurelien Mondon have documented in Reactionary Democracy, the media and political class systematically talk up the far-right, its concerns and their supposedly proletarian roots. This results in comical yet dangerous efforts by centre-left politicians to “speak worker” by appropriating some of the far-right’s language. Far-right candidates are also relentlessly puffed by journalists and broadcasters who can’t resist the whiff of scandalised excitement, voyeurist fascination and nostalgie de la boue. And liberal politicians like waggling the threat of fascism at us as a goose farmer wields a stick, to keep us in line: wasn’t Macron’s election gambit precisely intended to force another dismal run off between the centre and the far-right? Isn’t that threat that was used for weeks to keep Democrats loyal to a visibly desiccating Biden?
As for the left, our conversation is often garbled by inadequate abstractions, be it the academic discourse of “populism” or the uninformative, parochial American pseudo-debate about whether Trump is really a “fascist”. As Marx would have said, the correct method is not to start with the abstraction but to “appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development and to track down their inner connection”.
What is distinctive about this new far-right and its growth? Notwithstanding wannabe “insurrections” in the United States, Brazil, Germany and even Russia, it remains largely parliamentarist for now. The new far-right provides an advantageous milieu in which neo-fascists can thrive but its immediate objective is not the overthrow of electoral democracy but a constitutional rupture breaking with all humane and “woke” constraints on the exercise of power. In most cases it starts out poorly organised, with meagre civil society roots, achieving what it does with an assemblage of online networks, media connections, sporadic street mobilisations, dark money, electoral campaigns and random violence. The one salient exception is India, where the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) gives Modi paramilitary heft. Otherwise this movement thrives less on its own inherent dynamism than on the decomposition of the old parliamentary centre, and on lurid apocalyptic fantasies: “white genocide”, “the great replacement”, “the great reset”. It is not yet fascism, but something else, which we might term “disaster nationalism”.
Disaster nationalism evinces not the least trace of the utopianism of historical fascism, with its colonial fantasies of living space and a “new man” equipped for global domination by race science. Rather, apart from the Israeli far-right’s expansionist vision for Gaza and the West Bank, it offers a meagre, defensive nationalism scaled to an age of deflationary politics. It doesn’t feign anticapitalism or proffer what Michael Mann calls “class transcendence”, as fascists did in both Italy and Germany. To the contrary, it defends a more muscular capitalism freed from “woke” constraints, albeit with ethnic protections. There is no sense of the futurist Aufbruch (departure)that Roger Griffin says characterised interwar fascism, apart from the pathetic, suicidal romance of the lone-wolf manifesto[RS1] . Tomorrow doesn’t belong to them; they don’t want tomorrow. On the flipside of their obsession with disaster scenarios is nostalgia for a version of normality that is slipping away.
Even so, despite its clear limitations, disaster nationalism has mounted a spectacular critique of political orthodoxy. “It’s the economy, stupid,” said the old governing liberals, with their visions of mankind driven prevailingly by enlightened self-interest. People vote with their wallets. And then they had to watch as, serially, voters repudiated self-interest and flocked to projects and candidates, from Brexit to Trump, that experts said would wreck the economy. In truth, people scarcely ever vote for their interests, if that is interpreted as personal economic well-being. And incumbency has in most cases been kind to far-right administrations, notwithstanding declining living standards under Modi, Orbán and Bolsonaro, mass killings under Duterte, and paralysis segueing into chaos under Trump. Even where they have lost, it has been in circumstances where their vote was far bigger than expected: for example, Trump added 10 million votes to his base in 2020, racking up many of them in supposed Democrat strongholds in Florida and Michigan.
What the new far-right offers is, as Trump often puts it, “winning”. When people are victimised by remote, abstract forces like capitalism or climate change, they often feel impotent to do anything about it. For example, a 2022 study by the University of Glasgow found that austerity in the UK had caused 300,000 excess deaths. Many of us whose relatives died early would not have seen the social cause, only proximate causes like heart disease or drug overdose. We are aware of things gradually getting worse without seeing how. Even if we dimly sense that the system is to blame, we can’t take capitalism to court or have it shot. And where is the alternative? This is part of the general depression that is abroad. But disaster nationalism offers, instead, a politics of revenge. It identifies a series of phobic objects who can be punished and killed: migrants, “Antifa”, “cultural Marxists”, Muslims, “globalists”, Jews and “terrorists”. It offers an addictive cycle of threat and release, in which self-respect is transiently secured by the destruction of a neighbour.
Even the basic self-interest in living takes second-place to the adventure of revenge. During the Oregon wildfires in 2020, many who were warned to evacuate stayed put in the hope of killing imaginary Antifa arsonists blamed for the fires. The armed culture wars over Covid-19 interventions saw harassment and death threats against health professionals in the United States, while in Germany a petrol station attendant was murdered for denying service to a customer not wearing a mask and Querdenken-linked Telegram users plotted the assassination of a Saxony state leader over restrictions on the unvaccinated. The psychoanalyst Tad Delay remarks, about Americans who resist socialised medicine despite their own health needs, that we love a win even if we shall surely die.
Against all this, official liberalism has one move, which is to supplement its growth discourse by triangulating the far-right. Just as Biden had sought to neutralise Trump by appropriating parts of his border agenda, Macron’s government has tried to outflank Le Pen by, for example, calling her soft on Islam and fulminating about “Islamo-gauchisme”. This is a weird symbiosis, in which both the hard-centre and the far-right thrive on cultivating hopelessness and punitive desires: sado-pessimism. It legitimises the far-right, who take the win and demand more. Far-right voters aren’t placated because they’re addicted to the animating sense of threat. Meanwhile, liberal critique is neutralised, a fatalistic attitude to racism is engrained, and society is inured to the latest erosion of civilised norms. This is, after all, the pattern on which the far-right has thrived: the steady and accelerating involution of liberal civilization. There is no reason to assume this process has peaked, or that democracy will stabilise given the stresses the climate crisis will place on the system.
What may halt this process is not cynical appeal to self-interest or pandering to vengeful passions, but an equal and opposite force that eschews the pseudo-rebellion of the far-right for a real rebellion. Notably, the New Popular Front’s success in France was achieved with a programme that addresses people’s immediate needs through higher wages and price controls while attending to more collective, long-term desires. It defended migrants, for example, and opposed Islamophobia. It supported climate measures, a ceasefire in Gaza and recognition of Palestine. The programme will be hard to realise, and the Left will be resisted by those in power – but it cut through the hopeless synergy of hard-centre and far-right and showed that punitive nationalism does not enjoy anything like a monopoly on public desires.
There is an inchoate, global fascism in formation. It has expanded at an accelerating rate since the credit crunch, metabolising pervasive social misery, and its growth shows no sign of slowing. But there is a way out. As Will Davies argues in The Happiness Industry, unhappiness today often manifests “as a generalized deflation of desire and capability”. Neoliberal politics, telling us there was no alternative, left us nothing to wish for. Destroying our collective power, it left us nothing to do about it. We have been blackpilled into submission. Disaster nationalism has its remedy which, though it ultimately solves nothing, is more potent than CBT and happy pills. A radical programme, though necessary to reignite political desire, isn’t enough to cut through this. Desire has to be organised. People need to experience their collective power, and not only because it is the only way to enjoy some real victories.
[See also: An elegy for Bidenism]
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