Richard Seymour is one of the most learned and provocative leftist writers in the world. He has written books on subjects ranging from social media (The Twittering Machine) to British Labour politics (Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics) to liberal apologists for imperialism (The Liberal Defense of Murder) to the career of Christopher Hitchens (Unhitched). On whatever he writes about, Seymour is well-read and thoughtful and poses challenging ideas in elegantly-crafted prose. Today he joins to talk to us about "disaster nationalism," the apocalyptic brand of right-wing politics that Seymour says is on the ascent and threatens to destroy liberal civilization as we know it. It's not necessarily an encouraging conversation, but Seymour encourages us to look honestly at the dark trends in right-wing politics in our time and to be cognizant of the extent of the threat we face. Helping us understand what the right believes and what it might be capable of, Seymour's warnings could not be more timely. Note: This interview was conducted prior to the November 2024 reelection of Donald Trump to the presidency.

NATHAN J. ROBINSON

Today we're here to talk about Disaster Nationalism. The reason I like your work is that you help us understand what is going on, the historical currents of our time, and that the world is a very confusing place and needs the application of intellect. That is what you do. You think about and study the world. You help clarify things for us. So, to start, what is the phenomenon that you are trying to help us understand in this book?

Richard Seymour 

Understandably, people have been focused on elected leaders like Trump and outcomes like the Brexit vote, and I suppose what I'm concerned about is what comes before the election of these leaders. It's the mass ferment boiling away in wide populations which leads to people making these political choices. And it's not just these choices. We've seen a number of violent outbursts in recent years: pogroms in India and in the West Bank, of course, with settlers and soldiers. We've seen vigilante violence in the United States and in Brazil. These are popular passions, and it's 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, I mentioned there's been four pseudo insurrections: in the United States; in Brazil, where they tried to stop Lula getting in; in Germany, the so called Reichsbürger plot; and in Russia, where Prigozhin led his army halfway to Moscow and then stopped. The idea, in every single case, is that the good guys in the state are going to bail us out and will 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. I don't find very much evidence of that. And there's an argument that this is an expression of those who are left behind. That's a very parochial 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—

Robinson 

You talk about Israel as well. 

Seymour 

Yes, 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 completing the book that I decided to put it front and center. Why should this tiny country in the Levant have such powerful reverberations worldwide? So anyway, I basically looked at Arthur Rosenberg's work on fascism. Arthur Rosenberg was a Marxist intellectual who dissented from the mainstream of the communist tradition. He thought that it wasn't good enough to say that 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 a 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 material interests and all the rest of it. He's actually a theorist of the passions—a classical theorist.

Robinson 

There's a ton of what you're saying that's totally fascinating. One of the takeaways I got from your book is that in order to understand fascism, you don't just need an economist, you also need a psychoanalyst.

Seymour 

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 and Its Discontents. He wrote this in 1929, just on the brink of the Wall Street crash and 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 that that would be taken out on would be the Jews. He was right about that, but he was wrong about the politics. Basically, he distrusted all socialistic affects. He thought 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.

So I thought, let's look at where the real instinctual renunciations are taking place. Work is the major thief of leisure and libido. That's a starting point, and it's in the injuries of class life broadly experienced, not just when you go to a factory and 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 surges 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 kinds of feelings that you have if you're petty bourgeois middle class: you're always on the brink of tumbling into the mass of toiling humanity and losing your relative privileges, and that produces 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 has 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.

Robinson 

One of the takeaways I got from your book is that it is tempting to try and have easy 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 crude, as in, you have rising inequality and there are these people that are left behind. One of the crucial things that you point out, however, in this book is that actually, often, it's not always the left behind people who feel these things. It's people who are doing okay economically quite a lot of the time, and also, they are not pursuing their self-interest. In fact, they are willing to jeopardize or even destroy everything in their lives. Obviously, what Israel is doing is, in many ways, not preserving its own security. It's suicidal for Israel. It's creating catastrophe. This disaster nationalism drives us towards utter catastrophe. So, one of the puzzles you deal with in your book is actually, why would people sacrifice their self-interest to pursue something catastrophic?

Seymour 

Well, there's a great anecdote told by comrade Tad DeLay, who's a psychoanalyst and theologian. 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 DeLay puts it wonderfully and 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.

Will Davies talks about modern depression not being so much a kind of neurotic thing but the collapse of desire: I don't even know what I want anymore; I'm just stumbling through life like a zombie. And fascism—or what I prefer to call inchoate or incipient fascism—comes along and offers you something that's really animating. It says, those demons in your head are real. They're out in the world, and you can kill them. And 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.

It's much easier to deal with a personified figure of evil than with systems that are remote and still evil. But you can't shoot capitalism. You can't take it to court. You can't 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, D.C. These fantasies are incredibly animating, and the idea of being threatened by somebody who you can fight back against, that's something you find in fascist psychology quite a lot.

Robinson 

Or the pedophiles in the pizza shop.

Seymour 

In Hollywood and in the White House and furniture retail. 

Robinson 

Soros—you talk about Soros in the book. 

Seymour 

That's a fascinating one. You would think, given the way today's right-wing discourse skews, they would steer clear of that because George Soros is Jewish, and to be associated with antisemitism is a taint. But even the Israeli right is on to this. The Soros stuff begins in the early 1990s, when Eastern Europe is breaking up and the old nationalist forces are returning. George Soros, who's always been promoting free market economics—the Open Society Foundation is basically straightforward, middle of the road liberal capitalism—had very close relations with a number of dictatorships in Eastern Europe, with the aim of pushing those kinds of economics. The nationalist forces had come out in Hungary, Romania, across Eastern Europe, and said this guy, Soros, wants to destroy the nation and to subordinate us to Jewish finance capital. And then it becomes, he wants to bring Muslims into Eastern Europe—that's Orbán’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 at which you globalize this is actually the global financial crash. It's after that happens that you see 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 Slavoj Žižek has 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 exploitative elements of it. And so the figure of the Jew and the Jewish financier functions for them in that way.

Robinson 

You talk a lot about the ways in which the far right today is and is not a repetition of the classic fascism of the '20s and '30s, and it's not anti-capitalist in the same way. As the right would say, the Nazis were socialist. They did use the word socialist, which is interesting, but obviously, Hitler condemned actual socialism and made it clear he wasn't talking about that. But that positioning as anti-capitalist is not the same in the contemporary far right. 

Seymour 

Absolutely. Ian Kershaw's history of Hitler and the Nazis points out that they were quite open, and internally, that the use of the term socialist was nakedly opportunistic. They needed to communicate with workers. But it's certainly true that circa 1931-32 the Nazis were really pushing a hard, revolutionary, anti-capitalist line, albeit from the very far right, and they proposed an agenda of what Michael Mann calls class transcendence. This is not overthrowing class. It's changing its spiritual meaning, nationalizing it through reforms—quite radical reforms never actually implemented.

Today's far right doesn't bother with that. They don't need to, for a number of reasons. First, if you look at where the far right is growing most, I'd say it's in the Global South. That's where it begins. I think the Gujarat pogrom is the canary in the coal mine, and it's where all the techniques that we're seeing today begin. 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 state of Gujarat in India before he became prime minister. So in this sense, it's hard, muscular capitalism, shorn of politically correct welfarist, environmentalist, fluffy, woke constraints. On the other hand, it's reigned 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 they are in upwardly mobile, middle income countries, and they want access, whereas really the stuff about globalism is an excrescence 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 that'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 foreign 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 [in France]. That makes things very different.

And there's just one other thing about this. Today's far right is—Wendy Brown has this great term—sociophobic. Today's far right is terrified of anything that reeks of society. They're paranoid. Masks are muzzles. Social distancing is communism. Everything is communism. Anything that might require you as an individual to sacrifice something for somebody else is totalitarian. That's very different from the interwar era.

Robinson 

Help me understand how that is reconciled with nationalism, which is a philosophy of all being in it together, being part of one unit that you sacrifice your individuality for.

Seymour 

It's not reconciled. But it's a good question. I think, ultimately, when you opt for that kind of formulation—anytime 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 rest on an idea of civic nationalism. But when you get ethnic nationalism, not only do you get the idea of an external enemy—a nation to fight overseas, which would be congruent with a kind of traditional Cold War militarism, the kind that Biden and Kamala Harris want to promote—you get internal civil war. And that's the really interesting thing about Donald Trump compared to Biden. Biden really wants to externalize it. He really believes in American nationalism, and he believes in Americans being in it together. Donald Trump wants to bring the war home, and that's consistently what he has 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, make a huge amount more money than left-wing accounts.

Robinson 

Have I noticed? I resent this every day of my life.

Seymour 

I'm preoccupied by things like this. 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 like "88," meaning Heil Hitler. And the pleasure that they get from that, combined with the money that they're giving, tells me something. First, they are most comfortable with social relationships that are mediated by the cash nexus. 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 individualistic form of nationalism that's quite unlike the nationalism of interwar fascism.

Robinson 

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 previously in The Twittering Machine, is about social media and the way ideas spread. 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 has a little switch in their head that switches on and has the same ideas. The ideas spread through networks. And 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 come to us. Let's discuss 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 a far right movement?

Seymour 

Okay, that’s a good one. So, first, 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 sources 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. It's very exciting disinfotainment. And you know what is so exciting, actually, about it? 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?

Robinson 

Quite quickly, not eventually. I found myself being taken in these directions real fast.

Seymour 

Oh, yes, the algorithms are working based on assumptions about connections between data sets which reveal preferences—what they infer based on past behavior, past clicks and so on. There's something exciting about this stuff. There's something thrilling, and I guess there's the lure of transgression, forbidden knowledge, that kind of thing. But I think fundamentally, fascistic ideas, what Deleuze and Guattari would call microfascisms, circulate all the time anyway. We will have, to a greater or lesser extent, a jackboot 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. 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 that you can't talk about this if you're not willing to talk about liberalism It's liberal civilization that is involuting here. It's liberal civilization, through its successive periods of warmongering, Islamophobia, austerity and so on, that has created the basis 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 know about emotional contagions. These happen—an emotional contagion can happen in any species. It's not specifically human. It's just the automatic sharing of emotions across a network of people. You add the Internet to that and 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 Behring Breivik’s sort of 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 has just cut bits out of various right-wing think tanks across Europe, documents he's found online, and then added to that science fiction fantasy about futures in which the traitors and the multiculturalists will be killed and gassed and have nuclear weapons used against them and so on—all that kind of stuff. But what happens then is that people start emulating him—specifically, lone wolves started referring to him in their manifestos, copying his lines in their manifestos. The next wave comes, and we're talking about the forums like 8chan, where people organize on a kind of anti-social basis—a trolling basis. They make fun of one another. Anybody who 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. 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. So, basically, a trend—whether it's a fashion trend, a political trend, whatever—spreads along quietly and then suddenly surges, and then plateaus. 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 a crude economistic 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.

Robinson

You discuss a phenomenon that I've puzzled over for a while in the book, which is QAnon. When I wrote about it, I was mystified about it because it was so transparently wrong and dumb that I couldn't understand. So with QAnon, 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. Q drops something like 50 drops—it's like a classic, almost bad magician, or a mentalist, trick where you give people 50 things, then 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 by it? Help me better understand how QAnon could become a thing.

Seymour 

It's a live action role playing game in which you, somebody 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 bloodbaths, roundups, leftists deported to Guantánamo; there's going to be a dictatorship, and 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. 

Robinson 

Helen Keller.

Seymour 

Helen Keller—well, that's that's the young, the millennials, who are into that one.

Robinson 

I hadn't heard of that one until your book. 

Seymour 

That's such a weird one, too. But the idea is that Obama's birth certificate was faked. The COVID pandemic wasn't real. Everything that we have been told is false. The term I'm looking for is pseudo-Gnostic. Gnosticism 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 if you don't want to go to the effort of reading history books. And 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 many adults these days scarcely know how to take care of themselves—they're frightened of adulting, let alone paying attention and learning 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 not only do you think you know something, you think that you have the situation in hand and there's a practical way forward. Just keep reading the Q 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.

Robinson 

George Orwell once wrote this review of Mein Kampf, where he puzzled over the question of why anyone would support Hitler. Because, he said, what Hitler promises very openly is what Orwell called 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 Hitler is pretty open about that. But 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.

One of the things that you do in this book is to try to understand what the appeal here is. Why are these things happening? 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? What could happen here that we should be concerned about?

Seymour 

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. Adorno talks about this in relation to antisemitism. They start off with a mild kind of resentment of Jewish people in general, and then they end up in a position where nothing that can be done to the Jews would be enough. And this is how we respond to a 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, are not all, let's say, illegitimate. The ideas of racism and sexism are clearly illegitimate ideas. Naomi Klein has this wonderful line in her book: 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. You'd watch people die deaths of despair—from addiction, from poverty—and now you've got this unprecedented wildfire. And so it seems to me that the left, possibly on one hand, should be a bit less frightened of dark emotions. 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 a good or a bad thing, it's just basically a rejection of the self that you've come to know. It destroys itself. So it basically poses a question of, never mind appeasing other people, never mind what you're supposed to want—given that you've reached this point, this impasse, and given how bad things are, what do you really want? What would you like? And let's see what we can do about that.

I finish on the idea that really, it's not about bread and butter. 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. They do the opposite. The things that people love are the things that they sacrifice for. And so essentially, we've got 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 patronizing people 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, organizing in that direction.

Robinson 

Interesting. Well, a couple of things. First, not bread and butter, but bread and roses—the romantic side of life—you have to speak to that. It strikes me that what you said 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 have 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 is making a little bit of a mistake now by saying, well, we're going to bring down the price of groceries by 15 percent because we see that the polls tell us that the economy is the number one issue that voters say they're concerned about. So she says, I have an anti-price gouging measure that we're going to implement, and Trump says the world is being destroyed, so join me in this apocalyptic fight with the forces of evil.

Seymour 

Right, exactly. It's retail politics, and basically, it fundamentally misunderstands what people think the economy is. Most of the time, it's not about job statistics and so on. It's about, how do you feel? I don't mean 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 your kids will be ten times worse off than yourself, you might think the economy is doing rather badly. There might be, in some cases, a latent anti-capitalism there. But I also think you're right. What did Trump say? He said, I will be your vengeance. That was an incredible line. He has an idiot's gift for this sort of thing. People want someone to be their vengeance. Now, I don't think vengeance is the answer.

Robinson 

Who's going to be my vengeance? Who's our vengeance? I want the vengeance.

Seymour 

We have to be our own vengeance. But I think we obviously need something other than vengeance. 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 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 and the cooperatives have been destroyed along with the socialist parties—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. The recruits of fascism mostly don't want to actually put on a uniform and strap on a rifle, although they probably are up for the adventure of some recreational killing and destruction of the enemy. But I do think we need something more motivating than vote for the Democrats and you win a toaster.

Robinson 

I want to write about the fact that I constantly get emails and texts from the Democratic Party, and they never ask me to participate in anything. They ask for money. Every time they want money. Every single text is, can you chip in? Can you give us money? You want a campaign of joy, and yet you don't ask me to show up, to do work, to be part of something, to experience something. 

Seymour 

They don't want you involved, Nathan. They'd be terrified if you showed up. 

Robinson 

I know!

Seymour 

But Corbynism was very different in that respect. 

Robinson 

That's right.

Seymour 

It was an inspiring and heartbreaking four years.

Robinson 

Ended in the worst way possible. 

Seymour 

Oh, yes, they did it to themselves. 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 in the foot, and that's why it's tragic. But I remember the 2019 campaign. 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 seen dead wearing a Labour Party sweater or a Labour Party hat, but they were proud because it meant something. And it didn't just mean we were going to nationalize this and that. It was about building a society, and there's a huge appetite for that. But we are not well organized, and we have had this suspicion of organization, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union, probably for some good reasons. Nobody wants to go back there, but the suspicion of organizing has been an active impediment, I think, at this point. And if all the people who still basically agree with the ideas of Corbynism—and just talking about the U.K. now—if they were organized 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 than it should be.

Robinson 

Well, there shouldn't be a realistic possibility of someone like Nigel Farage having a successful political career. But here we are. 

Seymour 

Here we are. 

Robinson 

And Donald Trump is another one where you go, you can't beat this guy? He's a cartoon of your boss, the worst boss. His slogan is, you're fired.

Seymour 

His persona is actually Mr. McMahon, the WWE persona. He's basically the evil billionaire boss. I get Trump more than I want to. When I watch him, there's a part of me that goes, okay, yes, I get this. And so I can see the emotional appeal in a way that the liberal technocrats like Obama can't. I think that's one of their weaknesses and why they keep getting beaten.

But you're right. 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.

There was 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. This is not true, by the way, for someone like Narendra Modi, or Duterte or his successor Bongbong Marcos in 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.

Robinson 

It’s striking that even Lula only barely beat Bolsonaro, which I think took me by surprise. Lula is the most popular politician in Latin America in the last I don't know how many decades, and he squeaked in.

Seymour 

Squeaked in. And he had a 20-point lead months before. Do you know what changed it? This is what I argue in the book. What 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 hinges on spreading fear, pessimism, confusion, and demoralization in the enemy, and courage, 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 is not true anymore. 

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.