[music] Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the Editor-in-Chief of Current Affairs Magazine. It is my great privilege to be joined today by one of the left's finest writers. If you haven't read Richard Seymour's books, you really owe it to yourself to do so. He writes on many different topics. You can pick up his classic book on Christopher Hitchens. Unhitched, you can pick up his book on the Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon. According to the strange rebirth of radical politics, if you want to understand social media, you could pick up the Twittering machine, and you should also warn you, it's a bleak read, but it's a good read. You should also pick up his latest book, Disaster Nationalism, The Downfall of Liberal Civilization, available from Verso. What I love about Richard Seymour's writing is that it combines beautiful prose with depth of research. It's simultaneously accessible enough to read if you're not an academic, but it doesn't sacrifice that richness of scholarship, it ranges across and incorporates history, psychoanalysis, economics, sociology, anthropology. I would describe his writing mostly as rich with ideas. Richard Seymour, thank you so much for joining us on Current Affairs. Thank you, and thank you for that glorious introduction. Well, I forgot to mention the liberal defense of murder. That's probably my favorite of your books, the liberal defense of murder. Pick up that one too. God, on understudied book that one, it's one of my favorites. Yeah, today we're here to talk about Disaster Nationalism, and what you do is you help us understand. The reason I like your work and I'm telling people to read your work is that you help us understand what is going on, the historical currents of our time, that the world is a very confusing place. It means the application of intellect. That is what you do. You think about the world, you study the world, you help clarify things for us. So tell me to start, what is the phenomenon that you are trying to help us understand in this book, Disaster Nationalism? Yeah, people have been focused on understandably elected leaders like Trump and outcomes like Brexit, the Brexit vote. I suppose what I'm concerned about is what comes before the election of these leaders. It's the mass sort of ferment boiling away in wide populations, which leads to people making these political choices. And not just these choices, we've seen a number of violent outbursts in recent years. So pogroms in India, in the West Bank, of course, with settlers and soldiers joined in militias, seeing vigilante violence in the United States and in Brazil. These are our popular passions and its popular violence that's spilling out here, often with the help of the state. So that's quite crucial. And I suppose I want you to understand what is driving people to do that. And then of course, recently, and last I mentioned as being like four pseudo insurrections in the United States, in Brazil, where they tried to stop Lula getting in, in Germany, the so-called Reichsberger plot. And in Russia, where Prigojin led his army halfway to Moscow and then stopped, the idea in every single case being the good guys in the state are going to bail us out. They're going to complete the work of this right wing revolution. So I was curious about this. Where is all this coming from? What motivates people to want this and support it? And on the one hand, you could look for some sort of distorted expression of class interest, some sort of left-wing libido at work. Don't find very much evidence of that. And there's an argument that this is an expression of the left behind, right? That's a very peripheral Euro-American view based on the idea of the white working class. Actually, if you look across the world, and I basically scan across India, the Philippines, Brazil, and America, those are my key sort of- Talk about Israel as well. Yeah, Israel too. Although, to be honest with you, when I started writing the book, I didn't expect to talk about Israel very much at all. It's only because we ended up having a genocide, while I was complete in the book, that I decided to put it front and center, because why should this tiny country, until it's 11th, have such powerful reverberations worldwide? So anyway, I basically looked at Arthur Rosenberg's work on fascism. Arthur Rosenberg's sort of Marxist intellectual dissenting from the mainstream of the communist tradition. And he thought that it wasn't good enough to say, "Oh, this is just the despotism of finance capital and imperialism and monopoly capital and all the rest of it." He said, "You've got to understand that this required the mass buildup of low-kish racist nationalist ideology across masses of people for decades before this broke through." And I thought, "Okay, ideology is a good starting point, but actually we need to look deeper. We need to look at the passions." People often misunderstand Marx as a theorist of the interests, material interests, and all the rest of it. He's actually a theorist of the passions, a classical theorist. Oh, okay. Yeah. Sorry, there's a ton in what you're saying that's totally fascinating. One of the takeaways I got your book, I would summarize in order to understand fascism. You don't just need an economist, you also need a psychoanalyst. Yeah. To be honest with you, I deliberately didn't use psychoanalysis as some sort of master framework for understanding all this. I use some psychoanalytic concepts to orient the analysis, like crucially, Sigmund Freud's civilization that's discontent. He makes the argument, he's writing this in 1929, just on the brink of the Wall Street crash on the rise of fascism. And he says, "We're noticing a revolt against civilization. Why would people revolt against civilization? Because it makes demands on us. It requires us to renounce instinctual satisfactions, erotic, and aggressive," and so on. And if it doesn't make good on that by increasing our overall eros, our social well-being, then you're going to see disturbances. And he was concerned, of course, that the first people to be, that would be taken out on, would be the Jews. And he was right about that, but he was wrong about the politics, because basically he got in for him to a distrust of socialistic ethics. He thought that that people wanting to be together, work together, and so on, would result in somebody being a scapegoat. Actually, it came from the other side of the spectrum. But that said, I thought, let's look at where the real instinctual renunciations are taking place. Work is the major thief of leisure in libido. That's a starting point. And it's in the injuries of class life. Broadly experienced, not just, you go to a factory and you get injured or whatever. It's the stress of having to deal with management. It's the feeling of social contempt. In France, for example, they say that one of the major recruiting sergeants for Marine Le Pen is precisely this feeling that blue collar workers have of social contempt of being put down. Then there's also the kind of feelings that you have if you're a petty bourgeois, middle, you're always on the brink of tumbling into the mass of toiling humanity and losing your relative privileges. And that produces a kind of an ethos of existential revenge. You want to take it out on somebody. So all this stuff has been building up under neoliberalism as it's become more unequal and more difficult. And top failure has become more toxic as well, because to be a failure is to be a loser. And to be a loser is to be dumped on by people like Donald Trump. Whereas we're told to emulate and aspire to be the winners like Donald Trump. That's the kind of situation that brought us to this. One of the takeaways I got from your book is that it is tempting to try and have easy explanations or simple explanations for the emergence of a new deeply alarming far right. And that these are often wrong or misleading. And in fact, someone might assume from what you've just said there that your explanation is about economic self interest. It's a crude like, well, as you have rising inequality, people are drawn to something that offers to, you know, there are these left behind people. One of the crucial things that you point out, however, in this book is that actually often people, first off, it's not always the left behind people who feel these things. It's people who are doing okay quite a lot of the time economically. And also, they are not pursuing their self interest. In fact, they are willing to jeopardize or even destroy everything in their lives. I mean, obviously, what Israel is doing is in many ways, like, not preserving their own security. It's suicidal for Israel. I mean, it's creating catastrophe. This disaster nationalism pursues, drives us towards utter catastrophe. So the kind of mystery, one of the puzzles you deal with in your book is actually why would people sacrifice their self interest and pursue something catastrophic? Well, there's the great anecdote told by a comrade, Tad Dilay, who's a psychoanalyst and theologian. And he describes a friend of his who needed healthcare in America, which is a bad situation to be in. And this friend, though he basically depended upon Medicaid, still opposed Medicaid as a program and thought it was a disastrous and evil thing. And the fact that he held on to that belief and passionately, even when he was dying, even when he was suffering and in need of Medicaid, told you something and Tad Dilay puts it wonderfully, he says, people prefer a win, even if they shall surely die. And I think it's this generalized sense of failure, which is toxic. The generalized sense of paralysis. There's Will Davies talks about modern depression, not being so much a kind of neurotic thing as the collapse of desire. I don't even know what I want anymore. I'm just stumbling through life like a zombie. And fascism comes along or what I prefer to call incoate or incipient fascism. And it offers you something that's really animating. It says those devils in your head, those demons in your head, they're real, they're out in the world, and you can kill them. And you know, you have Antifa allegedly setting blazes during the Oregon wildfires. That's one of the key examples. I think where people were told, leave your homes and get out of there, you're going to die. And a lot of them said, no, I'm not leaving. I'm not going anywhere, because these antifa are coming. And I'm going to shoot them if I see them doing crap. And that, it's much easier to deal with a personified figure of evil than it is to deal with systems that are remote and still evil. But you can't shoot capitalism. You can't take it to court, you shoot climate change, but you can shoot at Antifa. And then you can go down to the streets and shoot at Black Lives Matter. And then you can go to the Capitol and shoot at the Communists in Washington, DC. And these fantasies are incredibly animating. And the idea of being threatened by somebody who can fight back, that's something you find in fascist psychology quite a lot. Or the pedophiles in the pizza shop, right? And Hollywood, and in the White House, and furniture retail. Soros, you talk about Soros in the book? That's a fascinating one, because that, you would think, given the way today's right-wing discourse skews, you would think they would steer clear of that, because George Soros is Jewish, right? And to be associated with anti-Semitism is a tent. But even the Israeli right is on to this. The Soros stuff begins in the early 1990s, when Eastern Europe is breaking up, and when the old nationalist forces are returning. And they see George Soros, who's always been promoting free market economics. The Open Society Foundation is basically straightforward, middle-of-the-road liberal capitalism. And he had very close relations with a number of dictatorships in Eastern Europe, with the aim of pushing those kinds of economics. The nationalist forces come out in Hungary, in Romania, across Eastern Europe, and say, this guy Soros wants to destroy the nation. He wants to subordinate us to Jewish finance capital. And then it becomes, he wants to bring Muslims into Eastern Europe, that's Orban's line. And Netanyahu and his son pick up the Soros stuff, and the Latin American far-right pick it up. And of course, Trump. So that's something that globalized. I think the point of which it globalizes is actually the global financial crash. It's after that that you see the Soros become the figure embodying all these parts of capitalism, that fascism cannot really acknowledge or tolerate. So in a way, there's an argument, and I think Schlab always usual, because I made this, that fascists want capitalism without the capitalism. In other words, they want to preserve the system, but they want to get rid of all the contradictory, antagonistic, nakedly exploited developments of it. And so the figure of the Jew and the Jewish financier functions for them in that way. You talk a lot about how the far-right today is not the ways in which it isn't a repetition of the classic fascism of the 20s and 30s. And it's not anti-capitalist in the same way. I mean, obviously Hitler did use the right, the Nazis were socialist. They did use the word socialist, which is interesting. Obviously, he condemned actual socialism, made it clear he wasn't talking about that. But that positioning as anti-capitalist is not the same in the contemporary far-right. Absolutely. We're saying that Ian Kershaw's history of Hitler and the Nazis points out that they were quite open internally that the use of the term socialist was nakedly opportunistic. They needed to indicate with workers. But it's certainly true that circa 1931-32, the Nazis are really pushing a hard revolutionary anti-capitalist line, albeit from the very far-right. And they propose an agenda of what Michael Mann calls class transcendence. This is not over throwing class. It's changing its spiritual meaning, nationalizing it through reforms, quite radical reforms, never actually implemented. Today's far-right doesn't mean bother with that. They don't need to. A number of reasons. First of all, if you look at where the far-right is growing most, I'd say it's in the global south. I mean, that's where it begins. I think Gujarat, the Gujarat pogrom, is the canary in the coal mine. And it's where all the techniques that we're seeing today begin. And it's where we first learn that popular violence is not discrediting to the far-right when it's associated with them. It actually can be an electoral advantage. And it was for the BJP. And it set the stage for the Gujarat development model, the mythical period of growth under Narendra Modi in the date of Gujarat and India before he became prime minister. So in this sense, it's hard muscular capitalism, the shorn of politically correct, welfareist, environmentalist, fluffy woke constraints. On the other hand, it's rained in a little bit by things like national preferences. But even that's uneven. In the global north, the new far-right talks about globalism. They don't talk about that in Brazil. They don't talk about it in India. They don't talk about the Philippines. They're not against globalism. They're against protectionism in those cases, because those are upwardly mobile, middle-income countries, and they want access. Whereas really, the stuff about globalism is an expressance of imperial decline. So very different patterns across the world. And the interesting thing is also the extent to which the far-right has been penetrated and permeated by neoliberal ideas. And it's predictable, because neoliberalism is counter-democratic in its founding ideas. It tends to racialize social questions and naturalize inequalities. It's hostile to the welfare state. It's only the institutional forms like the European Union and NAFTA that the far-right are really opposed to. So there are various forms of far-right political economy today, various forms of authoritarian neoliberalism that have been tried out in India, in Hungary, and have been experimented with by Marine Le Pen. That makes things very different. And there's just one other thing about this. Today's far-right to Wendy Brown is this great term, sociophobic. Today's far-right is terrified of anything that reeks of society. They're paranoid. Masks are muscles. Social distancing is communism. Everything is constant. Anything that might require you as an individual to sacrifice something for somebody else is totalitarian. That's very different to the interwar era. Help me understand how that is reconciled with nationalism, which is kind of a philosophy of all being in it together, being part of one unit that you sacrifice your individuality for. It's not reconciled. It's not a right contradiction. But it's a good question. I think ultimately, when you opt for that kind of formulation, any time you have nationalism, you're going to need enemies, internal and external, because what are you uniting against? There are patriotic projects, I would say, like Scottish nationalism, Palestinian nationalism, Catalan nationalism, which are not necessarily oppressive in that way, and sort of rest on an idea of civic nationalism. But when you get ethnic nationalism, you not only do you get the idea of external enemy, a nation to fight overseas, which would be congruent with traditional Cold War militarism, the kind that Biden and Kamala Harris want to promote, you get internal civil war. That's a really interesting thing about Donald Trump compared to Biden. Biden really wants to externalize it. He really believes in American nationalism. He believes in Americans being in it together. Donald Trump wants to bring the war home. And that's consistently what he's tried to do. So I would say that what unifies these people is not any kind of social contract, where they're all in it together. It's who they're against. And then critically, one other thing, I don't know if you've noticed this, but far-right social media platforms, YouTube accounts, and so on, they make a huge amount more money than left-wing account. Have I noticed? I resent this every day of my life. I'm preoccupied by things like this, because one of the ways in which they do it, of course, is that they solicit super donations on YouTube. How do you do that? You leave a message, and quite often they'll put a message that is basically a crypto, hit the right message, like 8-8, meaning "high" or "hitler." And the pleasure that they get from that combined with the money that they're giving tells me something, first of all, that they are most comfortable with social relationships that are mediated by the cash nexus. I mean, that's pretty crucial for them. So they don't really object to being in a society with other people, but they don't want to be in a social relationship that isn't mediated by cash. Now, that's a very atomic, individualistic form of nationalism, quite unlike the nationalism of intellectual fascism. You don't even get the benefit of the nationalism, which is the community. It sounds horrible. You mentioned YouTube there, and one of the things you discussed in your book, and you're previously in the Twitter machine, you've written about the social media and the spread, the way ideas spread, too. So I want to talk to you about the side of it that is, you've talked here about some of the underlying structural economic forces that give rise to the far right, but it's not like once you have those forces in place, everyone simultaneously a little switch in their head goes and they get the same ideas, the ideas spread through networks. And you talk in one of the fascinating things that you bring up in your book that I've written about is the way that none of us actually check our facts. We all just get things from trusted sources. And so the survival of fact depends on the survival of a certain social structure where we trust things to be true that are come to us. Let's talk about the part of this that is about how these ideas, how the ideology actually spreads from person to person. What is causing people to sign on to far right movement? Okay, it's a good one. So, I mean, first of all, in terms of the collapse of trust, it's a well-known thing in the sciences. If you can't trust, you can't know, because quite often when you're studying something complex, you rely on experts in other fields to work with you. You don't necessarily know them. You trust that they're doing their work properly and you trust their results. If we had to check everything that the news tells us or the experts tell us, we wouldn't be anywhere. We rely upon a huge body of knowledge that we get from other people. So, the corrosion of social trust and trust in doctors and trust in experts can be productive for the left in some ways. It can open up avenues of critique. But frankly, the major effect today is that it leads to generalized cynicism. And in conditions of generalized cynicism, people are willing to believe almost anything if they find alternative sorts of trust. So, what's really happening here is you've got these social media vectors where people engage in DIY investigation. They engage in a kind of symptomatic reading of the news, pointing out its holes, its flaws, and coming up with alternative explanations. And it's very exciting, disinfotainment, right? And what is so exciting actually about it? I mean, that's one of the crucial things for me. Why is it that when you go on YouTube and you click on one thing, eventually it'll take you to something like Holocaust denial or whatever? Quite quickly. Not eventually. I've found myself taking these in these directions real fast. Oh, yeah. The algorithms are working based on assumptions about connections between datasets, which reveal preferences. Okay. So, what can they infer based on, you know, past behavior, past clicks, and so on? There's something exciting about this stuff. There's something thrilling. And I guess there's the law of transgression, forbidden knowledge, that kind of thing. But I think fundamentally, the fascistic ideas, what they're losing what Ari would call microfascism circulates all the time anyway. We will have, to a greater or lesser extent, a jackboot's made for us. We all have ideas that could be politically regressive, certain types of authoritarianism, conformism, and so on. Some people are more susceptible to misogyny, transphobia, racism than others, right? But they are circulating out there anyway, because that's being produced by the society in which we live. One of the things I keep going on about in this book is you can't talk about this if you're not willing to talk about liberalism, because it's liberal civilization that is enveloping here. And it's liberal civilization through its successive periods of war mongering, Islamophobia, austerity, and so on, that has created the base for this. So that's already circulating out there. Then the question is, how does it get spread? And there I rely on the idea of the social contagion. We already knew about emotional contagion. These emotional contagion can happen in any species. It's not specifically human. It's just automatic share of emotions across a network of people. You add the internet to that. You can create regular cycles of emotional chaos, which is apparently very enjoyable for the people who are addicted to it, but always exhausting and depressing at the end of the day. You turn it into the circulation of memes and ideas. And this was Anders Berring Braevich's innovation, if you like, with his mass murder and manifesto. He said the mass murder is the marketing for the manifesto. Now, the manifesto is a cut and paste piece of literature, where he's just cut bits out of various right-wing think tanks across Europe, documents he spawned online, and then added to that science fiction fantasy about futures in which the traders and the multi-culturals will be killed and gassed and have nuclear weapons used against them and so on, all that kind of stuff, right? But what happens then is that once people start emulating him specifically, Lone Wolf will start referring to him in their manifestos, copying his lines in their manifestos. The next wave comes out, and we're talking about forums like Aitchan, a sort of gamer forum, where people organize on a kind of anti-social basis, a trolling basis. They make fun of one another. Anybody who has shows any vulnerability is ruthlessly put down. They don't know each other, but somebody who becomes a mass killer, a Lone Wolf killer, can become a legend on one of these platforms, and that happened repeatedly. And so you had these Lone Wolfish communities, egging on the killers, telling them to get the high score, making it a gamified thing. And so the manifesto became a mimetic thing that was deliberately spread in the fashion of a social contagion. And if you look at the pattern of a social contagion, I'll just finish on that point. There's usually what you call the S-curve, right? So basically a trend, whether it's a fashion trend, a political trend, whatever, spreads along quietly, and then suddenly surges, and then we'll find a plateau. If you look at it over the last 20 years or so, you can see where the inflection in the S-curve is for things like Lone Wolf attacks, far-right voting, and so on, pogroms included, and it seems to be around 2008. And again, I agree with you that we mustn't have accrued economic reading of this, but then it's a mistake to read the credit crunch as simply an economic happening. This was a crisis for a whole edifice of civilization. It challenged everybody's assumptions, their security, their ontological security, even, but just their assumptions about how things would go on, how things worked. And you saw these ideas start to spread at that point. You're listening to Current Affairs. Current Affairs is a non-profit left-media organization supported entirely by its readers and listeners, with no corporate backers or advertising. We depend on your subscriptions and donations. If you're enjoying this program and you're not a monthly subscriber already, please consider becoming one at patreon.com/currentaffairs. And if you are a podcast subscriber, check out everything else Current Affairs offers, including our flagship print magazine, which comes out six times a year and is loaded with beautiful art and insightful essays. We also offer a twice-weekly news briefing service that will keep you up-to-date on everything happening in the world and the stories you won't find in your morning newspaper. You can sign up for those at currentaffairs.org/subscribe. And if you just want to help us keep building independent progressive media because you understand how vital that project is, go to currentaffairs.org/donate, where you can read more about our work and make a monthly or one-off contribution. Current Affairs is a 501c3 non-profit organization and donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowable by law. Now back to the program. You discuss a phenomenon that I've puzzled over for a while in the book, which is QAnon, which when I wrote about it, I was mystified about it because it was so transparently wrong and dumb that I couldn't understand why... But so with QAnon, they had this supposedly. There's this person inside the White House dropping these prophecies that then come true. But when you look at it, you realize that it's so obvious that these, you know, Q drops like 50... It's like a classic, almost bad magician's trick, where you give people 50 things or a, you know, a mentalist trick, where you give people 50 things and the one thing that comes true, you go, "Ah, well, it came true." And I was thinking, "How could people be drawn to this? How could people be convinced? Help me better understand how QAnon could become a thing?" It's a live action role-playing game in which you and nobody who knows nothing about politics can be involved in the most important things that are happening in the world, in which there is an apocalyptic crescendo at the end. There's going to be blood baths, there's going to be roundups, there's going to be leftist deported to Guantanamo, there's going to be a dictatorship, the good guys are going to take charge. And I think fundamentally, there's a kind of pseudo, I don't even know the word that I'm looking for here, but there's an idea that the fabric of reality itself is false. Everything we take to be real is fundamentally wrong. The moon landing didn't happen. Helen Keller. Helen Keller, well, that's the young, that's the millennials who are into that one. I haven't heard of that one until your book. That's such a weird one too. But the idea is that Obama's birth certificate was faked, COVID pandemic wasn't real, everything that we have been told is false. And so therefore, the term I'm looking for is pseudo-nostic. Nosticism is based on the idea that we're trapped in a false reality by a devil, and the real divine reality is beyond this one. And I think that's kind of the idea that there's going to be some sort of ecstatic rupture at some point. And so it's thrilling. It's really exciting. And if you don't want to go to the effort of reading history books, and you know, the politics is deliberately made boring to keep us out of it, let's be honest. They pretend to be much more interesting than they are, but we are deliberately bored and denied access. And a lot of adults these days scarcely know how to take care of themselves. They're frightened of adulting, let alone pay attention and learn about global politics. But this was an easy way in. And that's what YouTube accounts are about. You can watch these guys. And after imbibing this for a while, you kind of think you know something. And you think not only do you think you know something, you think that you have the situation in hand, there's a practical way forward, just keep reading the queue drops and expose the reality and everybody's doing it together. And it's a way of being together while being alone, which is very congenial to a lot of people. George Orwell once wrote this review of my cuff, where he puzzled over the question, why would anyone support Hitler? Because he said what Hitler promises very openly, is he called it a horrible, brainless empire in which nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon fodder. And he's pretty open about that. But he said, you know, Orwell said, well, the problem is that whereas socialism says to you, I offer you a good time. Hitler says to you, I offer you struggle, danger and death. Now, I think that one of the things that you do in this book is in much more depth, you try and understand what the appeal here is. Why are these things happening? I don't think you get to and we can't get to it. The whole other thing, how on earth do we deal with something like this, which is very, very compelling? I want to close here by asking you a different question, which is, given how compelling it is, given the forces that are pushing things in this direction, have we reached an inflection point on our S curve where it plateaus? Or is this exponential? Is this a we headed towards what could happen here that we should be concerned about? I don't think we're anything close to the end of this. And I think that it has its own internal spiral. It's addictive compulsive because Adorno talks about this in relation to antisemitism. They start off with a mild sort of resentment of Jewish people in general. And then they end up that, you know, in a position where nothing that can be done to the Jews would be enough. And this is kind of like how we respond to phobic object. If you're frightened of spiders, it doesn't matter how many spiders you kill. It's not going to solve the problem. And so this is a symptom, if you like, that is designed not to solve anything. It's just designed to keep perpetuating itself. And so therefore, the only thing that could disrupt it, I think, obviously would be productive defeat. It would shake a lot of people out of their delusions. But it does seem to me that fundamentally these passions, these ideas, that they're not all, let's say, illegitimate. The ideas, racism, sexism, these are clearly illegitimate ideas. But the feelings, Naomi kind of has this wonderful line in her book saying they get the facts wrong, but the feelings right. The feelings are legitimate frequently. If you were in Oregon in 2020, you had a reason to feel you had enemies, because you'd watch people die from the deaths of despair, from addiction, from poverty. And now you've got this unprecedented wildfire. And so it seems to be that the left, possibly on one hand, should be a bit less frightened of dark emotions. You know, to some extent, part of what we need to be doing is provoking the death drive and directing it in a more productive way. The death drive is not good or a bad thing. It's just, it basically is a rejection of the self that you've come to know. It destroys itself. So it basically poses a question of, never mind appealing, appeasing other people, never mind what you're supposed to want. Given that you've reached this point, this impasse, given how bad things are, what do you really want? What would you like? And let's see what we can do about that. You know, I finish on the idea that really, it's not about bread and butter. You know, we do, we like bread and butter. We need bread and butter. It's a good thing, but we don't love it. If you love your children, you don't love them because they increase your free time and energy and money. They absolutely do not do any of that the opposite. The things that people love are the things that they sacrifice for. And so essentially, we're going to think about what is it that people are prepared to sacrifice for? We found that people are prepared to sacrifice things for Brexit. If we stop patting people and saying, we'll give you bread, we'll give you a bit more money in your pocket. And talk about what is it that you would actually be willing to die for? I think we'll get further along in that direction. Well, a couple of things go to my first, not bread and butter, but bread and roses, you know, the romantic side of life, you have to speak to that. It strikes me that what you said, first off is similar to the conclusion a little bit that William James comes to in the moral equivalent of war where he says, I'm an anti militarist, but God, you got to understand why militarism is so appealing and unless you have something else that is that appealing, you are never going to attract people into the pacifist camp. And also it suggests to me that Kamala Harris making a little bit of a mistake by now by going like, well, we're going to bring down the price of groceries by 15% because we see that the polls tell us that the economy is the number one issue that voters say they're concerned about. Whereas, and so she says, well, I have an anti price gouging measure that we're going to implement. And Trump says, the world is being destroyed, join me in this apocalyptic fight with the forces of evil. Right, exactly. I mean, it's retail politics, and basically it fundamentally misunderstands what people think the economy is. Most of the time it's not about jobs, statistics, and so on. It's about how do you feel? I don't need to be patronizing about that. In a way, that's how anybody would read the economy. How does it make you feel? And how do you feel about your prospects, your future? And if you look at the society, no matter whether your wages have gone up a little bit in the past year, if you think my kids are going to be 10 times worse off than me, you might think the economy is doing rather badly. And there might be, in some cases, a latent anti capitalism there. But I think also you're right, what do Trump say? He said, I will be your vengeance. That was an incredible one. I mean, he has an idiot's grant gift for this sort of thing. People want someone to be their vengeance. Now, I don't think that's the answer. Right? But you see, who's going to be my venture? Who's our vengeance? I want the vengeance. We have to be our own vengeance. But I think we obviously need something other than vengeance too. Otherwise, it's just a circular firing squad. But I also was alarmed when they started doing this thing about joy. We're going to have joy. I'm all for joy. Joy is a good thing. But I don't think people mobilize for abstract nouns or, you know, such abstract qualities. Joy is something that is a product of something else, like happiness. It comes from engaging in something together and building something together. And unfortunately, the models that we have for togetherness in neoliberal capitalism, now that the unions have been destroyed and the cooperatives have been destroyed and socialist parties get, you know, I mean, they're making a comeback a little bit. But basically, they're national spectacles. It's like the Olympics football. It's flag-waving. And you can understand, I don't think people want to go to war today. And I think that's very telling young, you know, like the kind of recruits of fascism mostly don't want to, you know, actually put on a uniform and strap on a rifle. Although they probably are up for the adventure of some recreational killing and, you know, destruction of the enemy. But I do think we need something more motivating than vote the Democrats in your winner toaster or well, I've been strong. I want to write about the fact that the Democratic Party, I mean, I constantly get emails and texts from the Democratic Party. And I really interested in the fact that they never asked me to participate in anything. They asked for money. Every time they want money, every single text is, can you chip in? Can you chip in? Can you give his money? Can you give his money? You want a campaign of joy? And yet the only thing you'll ever ask me, you don't ask me to show up to do work, to be part of something, to experience something. Oh, they don't want, they don't want you involved, Nathan. They'd be terrified if you showed up. I know. But corporatism was very different in that respect. That's right. That's right. It was an inspiring and heartbreaking four years. Oh, I know. They ended in the worst way possible. Oh, yeah. They did it to themselves. You know, I mean, you can blame the enemy. You can blame capitalism. You can blame the right-wing press. But ultimately, a number of decisions were made that were shooting themselves and that's why it's tragic. But I remember the 2019 campaign, and it still helps my heart because even though it ended in disaster, I remember the heart of the people fighting in that campaign. I remember young people wearing the Labour Party badge with pride. When I was growing up, nobody under the age of 30 would be seeing dead wearing a Labour Party sweater or a Labour Party hat. But they were proud because it's something. And it didn't just mean, you know, we're going to nationalise this and that it was about building a society. And there's a huge appetite for that. But we, we are not well organised. And we have had this suspicion of organisation, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union, probably for some good reasons, you know, nobody wants to go back there. But the suspicion of organising has been an active impediment, I think, at this point. And if all the people who still basically agreed with the ideas of Corbynism and just talking about the UK now, if they were organised in a party of their own, they would make a hell of a dent. And instead, we're all distributed arguing reactively on the internet, complaining on TikTok and Twitter, and fighting with one another. In some ways, we make the job of the far right a lot easier for them than it should be. Well, you know, there shouldn't be a realistic possibility of someone like Nigel Farage having a successful political career. But here we are. We should be able to, and Donald Trump is another one where you go, this, you can't beat this guy. He's like, what's on the, he's a cartoon of your boss. We're like, he's like the worst, but his slogan is you're fired. If persona is actually Mr. McMahon, you know, the WWE persona, he's basically the evil billionaire boss. I get Trump more than I want to, like, but I watch him as a part of me that goes, okay, yeah, I get this. And so I can see the emotional appeal in a way that the liberal technocrats like Obama can't think that's one of their weaknesses and why they keep getting beaten. But you're right. I mean, look at 2016, Hillary Clinton should not have lost that election. She had everything on her side. She had all the money. She had all the media. She could have mobilized just a few critical groups of voters. Wasn't interested. She was stuck in her delusions of mobilizing suburban white moms. And I think to some extent, we may be facing the same situation today. I mean, I don't think that debate where admittedly, Kamala Harris did a fairly good job of provoking Trump. I don't think that debate is the end of it at all. I think he's smarter than they realize. So if there were a candidate who knew how to excite people rather than pacify them with platitudes and with minor monetary offers, I think Trump should be easy to defeat. Yeah. This is not true, by the way, for someone like Narendra Modi or his successor, Bong Bong Marcus and the Philippines, or Jair Bolsonaro, they have a real demagogic sort of relationship to the darker passions of their audience. They're much more challenging, I would say. Striking that even Lula only barely beat Bolsonaro, which I think took me by surprise because you know, the most popular politician in Latin America and the last, I don't know how many decades, and squeaked in. And he had a 20-point lead months before. You know what changed it? I mean, this is what I argue in the book. Changed it was a summer of extreme violence. It was really energizing for the right. The summer of assassinations of murders of workers party supporters. So basically, in any warlike situation, it tensions on spreading fear, pessimism, confusion and demoralization in the enemy, and courage and aggression and daring on your own side. And that's what this does for them. So this idea that we've inherited from the past that popular outbursts of violence should be discrediting for the right, not true anymore. We have to conclude here. I should have ended it one question earlier because we were on kind of an uplifting note and like, "Oh, if we only had an aspiring person," and now you're like, "Well, also when they kill people, they do better." So thank you very much, Richard. See more for joining us on current affairs today. In the introduction, we've only really touched the surface of your book, which is deep with insight in every paragraph. And so I really think that people are to understand the darkest forces in our world today to really get the foundation that you're going to need in order to counter these forces. Wait, I mean, we didn't even talk about the sex part. Sex is really important to all of this, too, you argue. So read the pick up, but that's people going to have to pick up the book so they can find out how sex comes into it all. Richard Seymour, thank you for joining us on current affairs today. Thank you so much. The current affairs podcast is a product of current affairs magazine. If you are not subscribed to current affairs magazine, visit currentaffairs.org/subscribe today and get our glorious print edition. The current affairs podcast is released regularly every week on patreon.com/currentaffairs. Thanks for listening. [Music]
