I noticed some years ago that the new far right was obsessed with fantasy scenarios of imaginary and extreme evil. FEMA death camps, “great replacement theory,” the “Great Reset,” fifteen-minute cities, 5G towers being beacons of mind control, and microchips installed in people through vaccines. In India, they have this theory called the Romeo jihad: that Muslim men are seducing Hindu girls and converting them to Islam, thus waging a sort of demographic war. Or take QAnon’s fantasies of satanist, communist pedophiles running the world. They are really enthralled and obsessed by hallucinatory scenarios of extreme disaster.

Why is this? There’s no shortage of real disasters: wildfires, floods, wars, recessions, and pandemics. Yet quite often they have denialist relationships with these disasters. Many say COVID-19 was just an excuse for the Fourth Reich, or that climate change is an excuse for a liberal totalitarian regime, a new form of communism, etc.

Right-wingers are really enthralled and obsessed by hallucinatory scenarios of extreme disaster.

I often take the example of the wildfires in Oregon. The fires ripped across the plains and through the forest and burned at 800 degrees Celsius. They were a real threat to people’s lives. But a lot of people refused to leave because they heard that it was actually Antifa setting the blazes and that it was part of a seditious conspiracy to wipe out white conservative Christians. So, rather than flee for their lives, they set up armed checkpoints and pointed their guns at people, claiming that they were on the lookout for Antifa.

Why do they go for this mass apocalyptic fantasy? Because it processes disaster in a way that is actually quite enlivening. Most of the time, when people go through disasters, it results in depression and withdrawing a bit from life and the public sphere. But the far right offers you a different way out. It says “those demons in your head that you’ve been wrestling with, they’re actually real and you can kill them. The problem is not anything difficult, or abstract or systemic, it’s just bad people, and we’re going to get them.” It takes all the difficult emotions that people deal with in the face of economic shocks and climate change and gives them an outlet that feels valid and validating.

So that’s what I call disaster nationalism. It’s not yet fascist because although it organizes people’s desires and emotions in a very reactionary direction, they’re not trying to overthrow parliamentary democracy, they’re not trying to crush and extirpate every last human and civil right — yet. They also lack the organizational and ideological maturity. We’re in a stage of accumulation of fascist force. When you go back to the interwar period, that accumulation process had already taken place, there had already been massive pogroms, there had been big far-right movements before fascism. And so, we are in an early stage of the inchoate fascism that I see developing here.

When I started writing this book I didn’t expect to say much about Israel. I thought it would fit in as a minor element in a global patchwork focusing on much bigger states. In the end, I had to write a whole new chapter because of the genocide in Gaza.

It’s been clear for some time that Zionism is always incipiently genocidal because its ultimate desire is that Palestinians should not exist. And there has always been elements of Hebrew fascism going back to the 1920s. Their settler-colonial dynamic, I would argue, is quite distinctive. You don’t see that in the United States: obviously, settler colonialism is a historical reality with ongoing reverberations, but it is not a live, present reality. Settler colonialism structures how the state is organized, it structures everyday life, you can’t exist in Israel without being aware of the Palestinians and their recalcitrant, infuriating desire to exist.

But there are other aspects that are quite similar to patterns overseas in the US, Britain, India, Brazil, etc. These patterns are the decline of the postwar system, in their case a corporatist arrangement between Jewish labor, Jewish capital, and the state achieved on the back of ethnic cleansing in 1948. That broke down in the 1970s and like everywhere else, they went neoliberal. Israeli Labor declined. They tried to adapt through Third Way politics, their last hurrah was probably the Oslo process. Today, they barely exist.

You’ve had these tendencies toward increasing pessimism and class inequality, and the old nationalist utopia of the postwar world is gone. The capitalist class is cosmopolitan and closely integrated with Washington, it’s not the Jewish-nationalist utopia they were trying to build. So, for some in the Zionist movement, there is an attempt to reconstitute that Jewish homeland, a Jewish safeguard if you like. The Right has said “No, we’re past that now. This is a situation in which we must settle the question with the Palestinians once and for all.” To them that means expelling the Palestinians and decisively colonizing every bit of land that they believe belongs to the Greater Israel.

Does that bring us to fascism? Not so long as they have various constitutional, liberal-democratic systems. It is an exclusionary democracy, and it is not unusual in that respect; America until the 1970s was an exclusionary democracy, actually I would say it still is today, just to a different degree. Israel has an increasingly racist and authoritarian and genocidal culture and it’s closer to a fascist coup d’état than anywhere else. I think the genocide and the radicalization process in the rank and file is going to be a process that leads to a Kahanist or far-right coup.

If you want to look at where fascism is quite advanced, I’d say it’s there, but also in India. All the alarms are crying out, “We’re on the brink of a genocide here,” where the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party], a right-wing authoritarian movement linked to historical fascism, has colonized the state and suppressed civil rights. This is a global phenomenon in which Israel has a unique and distinctive role. It is quite close to a millenarian fascist regime. In the medium term, that’s a live possibility and a dangerous one given that it’s a nuclear state.

They sometimes alight on quite important elements of reality. Take this stuff about fifteen-minute cities — it’s hallucinatory and delusional in terms of its belief that it is foreshadowing some kind of communist anti-car dictatorship. But at its core is a real threat to automobility, to suburban lifestyle, and to the relative advantages of having a car. If you build cities around convenience and around having cycle lanes everywhere, getting rid of pollution as much as possible, and removing parking spaces, that’s a problem if you’re someone who thrives on getting around everywhere by car. It’s particularly a problem if you start putting traffic barriers up to stop you driving down certain roads.

If you’re directly, personally affected you might feel that life is going to change drastically in the next few decades. And they’re not entirely wrong about that: climate change will necessitate vast structural changes. Liberals want to deny the severity of what’s coming and of the things that people are going through already. I think the left-wing response should be to say, “Yeah, you’re right, we’re going to utterly transform this thing, but it’s going to be much better for you. Here’s how.”

The example that always comes to me is Barack Obama in 2016. He made fun of [Donald] Trump for catastrophizing in his campaign, and he said in his wry ironic way: “The next day people opened up their windows, the birds were singing, the sun was shining.” The pathos he was trying to invoke was that people are actually pretty happy, everything is OK. Then in the election he got his answer: Trump won. For a lot of people, things are not OK.

Trump made his inaugural address with the speech written by [Steve] Bannon, talking about “American carnage,” which I think is a kind of reactionary poetry because carnage is not an inaccurate description of the destruction of industrial America. They alighted on a real problem, but their answer was to blame China, blame East Asia. Most of the jobs that were lost were lost through class struggle from above — downsizing, busting unions. There was an element of outsourcing, but the corporations are to blame not the workers in East Asia.

So, you see they can identify certain forms of disaster. What they can’t do is integrate it into any kind of coherent, solvent global analysis. All they offer, really, are symptoms designed not to solve anything, but which allow you to go out and butcher Muslims in India, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, to kill Workers’ Party supporters in Brazil, shoot, stab, or drive at Black Lives Matter [BLM] protesters in America, or have racist riots in Britain where they tried to burn asylum seekers in their hotels. This is what the Right offers as an alternative to disaster; better disasters, disaster in which you feel in charge.

I would say it’s the canary in the coal mine. Obviously, it’s far from the only relevant pogrom in India. They have a kind of pogrom machine: Paul Brass writes about this elegantly. Essentially, there had been a fire on a train, which killed a number of Hindu pilgrims. These were members of the VHP, a far-right organization, and the assumption made by the Hindutva [Hindu-nationalist] movement was that Muslims had caused the fire with petrol bombs.

There is scant evidence for this: impartial inquiries found that the fire was an accident. But they decided that there had been a genocide against Hindus and in the days following they incited the population to take up weapons and to hunt down and kill and torture Muslims. Which they did, directly organized by BJP members, incited by BJP leaders, and with the collusion and participation of police and businessmen who paid off individuals to go and take part.

It was a collective outburst of coordinated public violence, a permissiveness with a degree of control from above. The result was that the BJP’s vote went up by 5 percent when they had been expected to lose that state after having previously terribly mishandled a real disaster: an earthquake that had taken place the previous year.

So, you see the pattern here: there is a real disaster that affects people, the government handles it terribly, and then they instead offer a fake version of a disaster and they incite people to kill someone and it’s very exciting. It’s awful the things they do. They’re murdering babies in front of their mothers; they’re putting spikes between women’s legs; they’re cutting people in two with swords.

Obviously that had been building up for some time, and then Narendra Modi in the months after is doing these Hindu pride rallies and he’s telling people if we can restore pride in our Hindu people then all the “Alis, Malis, and Jamalis” will not be able to do us any harm — by which he obviously means the Muslim population who had just been through a pogrom. The fact that this was not discrediting but in fact electrified the BJP base and made Modi into a sex symbol for the first time, tells you something about this kind of politics.

We’ve seen that again and again. Without all the armed, anti-lockdown protests and violence against BLM protesters you wouldn’t have seen the bungled insurrection on January 6. Same thing in Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro was 20 points behind, he almost won in 2022 and got more votes than he did in 2018. How did he do that? A summer of chaotic violence in which he went around saying leftists should be machine gunned, and his supporters were either flashing their guns at Workers’ Party supporters or assaulting or murdering them. I’m not saying the Gujarat pogrom causally precipitated this other stuff, but it was an early example of where this was coming from, and as soon as Modi got elected in 2014 it showed that liberal capitalism would tolerate this.

I don’t think you would find that so much in Brazil or the Philippines. But you do find it for a whole constellation of states from India to Israel to the US and most of Western Europe, actually Eastern Europe, too. It’s not exactly the same thing in semiotic terms as the figure of “the Jew” because at the moment there is no sense in far-right discourse that Muslims, in addition to being the kind of wretched-of-the-Earth lumpen mass, are also in control of everything.

There have been attempts to develop a kind of conspiracy theory like that of Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia theory, for example. But most of the time it’s not the belief that Muslims are secretly in charge and running the financial system, but rather that they are a subversive, violent, abnormal, and inferior mass of people that needs to be subject to violence and borders to keep them under control.

That originates, I would say, with the 1980s turn toward ethnic absolutism, the coalition between Likudniks in Israel and Christian fundamentalists in America, toward a kind of identity absolutist politics where everybody has to be fitted into a particular box — there’s a kind of breakdown of the kind of unifying anti-racist solidarity that we saw during the Cold War era, in Britain taking the form of political blackness. That all broke down, and then you have the Rushdie Affair and Muslims categorized specifically as a problem.

It’s important that this is rooted in the daily experience of capitalist life. So in Britain, for example, people had been part of the same trade union in Northern cities or docklands, once those industries were shut down and the unions broken, they often went off into segregated areas of the economy and found that their housing was still segregated and the school system effectively segregated and that local councils were practicing policies of segregation and policing was segregationist in that sense, it was very racist. Couple that with austerity and there’s public squalor, nobody has anything, and you always blame the people down the road: “They get everything, I get nothing.” That’s when you start to see riots in Northern cities and then the war on terror catalyzes all of that.

So, it’s a global thing in which liberal civilization defined itself against “bad Muslims.” Initially there was this idea that the problem was “not all Muslims, just what we’re calling Islamic fascism”: George W. Bush made this point. But the way this was understood popularly and the way this was politicized extended it to all Muslims. So, the Muslim is a central figure, but I think we need to see it as part of a chain of equivalence with the “transgender bathroom predator,” the “cultural Marxist,” and the migrant. In the Philippines, the major category is the drug addict: those are the people who have been murdered. It can take various accents, but I will agree that globally, and particularly for the West, “the Muslim” coordinates all these other problems.

I would say that just in terms of the libidinal economy of this new far right, their underlying premise seems to be that someone always gets violated and the problem is that “communists” (by which they mean Kamala Harris, etc.) want the wrong people to be violated. The incel movement, the men’s rights advocates, etc. often try to justify rape. There is a kind of contradiction in this libidinal economy between renewed severe prohibitions — no more gay marriage, no more transgender, wives back in the kitchens, trad-wife fetishism — on the one hand, and on the other, total predatory freedom for males, selective permissiveness. It’s unsurprising that you see that in war zones. Wars generally see a lot of rape: the victimization of the enemy particularly involves the brutalization of women.

I was recently researching perpetrators, particularly relating to the genocide in Gaza and one of the things that comes up is what Klaus Theweleit talks about, which is the idea of the dangerous woman. In modern terms this is the social-justice warrior, shrieking with red hair, etc., but in the time that he was writing about, the Freikorps movement of the 1920s, the dangerous woman was a communist who had a gun up her skirt. She’s someone that you want to get close enough to kill. That dangerous proximity is enthralling because you get close to the danger then you overcome and you take what you want, in the worst way possible.

I would guess that a lot of male right-wing politics today is an attempt to overcome a feeling of inefficacy, helplessness, paralysis, and so on. And frankly when they talk about rape, the implication is they are really horny and desire a lot. But the evidence suggests that young men, young people in general, are not as interested in sex as previous generations. They’re not as interested in sex, they’re not as interested in romance, there’s nothing very sexy about contemporary life.

One of the things here is that they are blaming women for the fact that they don’t desire, and they’re saying, “We’re involuntarily celibate.” They say if women were coming on to them, they would be up for having sex all the time. I doubt that. They are as troubled, as thwarted, and fucked up as everybody else — more so. But I think they’re trying to reinflate their desire by turning it into a demonstration of power, of efficacy, of potency. There’s a lot of that going on, and I think there will be specificities in Gaza, because the whole business about Israeli soldiers filming themselves in the stolen lingerie of Palestinian women, it’s obviously parodic, it’s genocidal, but there’s something about that which implies an unconscious identification with the victim.

There’s two angles on this question. Liberal centrists as individuals and as a group and their symbiotic relationship with the far right, the second is liberal civilization. The second is my focus in the book, on the failures of liberal civilization. The barbarism inherent in it as manifested in imperialism and war, in its racism, its border sadism, in work and exploitation, but also in class hierarchies and the miseries that that creates. So then the question is how we get to specific situations in which people like Obama, Hillary Clinton, and now Kamala Harris and Joe Biden actually help midwife this new formation into power.

I would say that there’s an interesting question that philosopher Tad DeLay poses in his amazing recent book, The Future of Denial about climate politics, where he asks, “What does the liberal want?” It’s a good question because liberals repeatedly proclaim their affinity with egalitarian and libertarian values. They claim to support action to tackle climate change but also oppose any effective means of doing so. Increasingly I think that when push comes to shove, liberals do not want liberalism. Obviously, certain distinctions have to be made because there are liberals who are genuinely philosophically and politically committed to liberal values and will fight for them and will go Left if they have to. But there’s also the kind of hard centrists whose politics is organized principally around a phobia of the Left.

Here, I talk about hallucinatory anti-communism, mainly in connection with the Right, but liberals have just as unrealistic a sense of the Left and its supposed threat. It would be nice if the Left was stronger and we were about to bring about a communist revolution, but that’s not the case. But when Bernie Sanders was running, I remember the panic from American liberals. There was a broadcaster who was concerned that once the socialists took power, people would be up against the wall and shot. Then also consider how the hard center (center-left and center-right) has promoted conspiracy theories like, for example, in Britain, Operation Trojan Horse: the idea that Muslims were taking over Birmingham schools. That didn’t come from the far right but from the government.

This is the relationship: the far right takes the predicates that have already been set up by the liberal center and radicalizes them and makes them more internally coherent. Some years ago, early on when New Labour was in power, they started having a real crackdown on asylum seekers. They would regularly stage news shots and angles where a minister would be down at Dover looking for asylum seekers in people’s vans and stuff like that. When all that was going on the British National Party (BNP) was growing and in interviews they said, “We love what they’re doing, they’re legitimizing us.” They took concerns that were at the bottom of people’s agenda in 1997 and they were pushing them right to the top, and that was giving the BNP legitimacy.

For their own reasons, they tend to amplify reactionary currents that were already circulating. Then when the far right grows off the back of that, they then tend to argue that “that’s a good reason for us to go further in this direction because that shows that if we don’t tackle this issue the far right is going to grow even more.” It’s a resonance machine, they sort of bounce off one another. So, one of the problems between having to choose between a centrist Democrat and a far-right Republican is that that choice is predicated on the exclusion of the Left. Structurally both thrive on that, but also the beneficiary in the long term is the far right.

I should have used that metaphor in the book: “bread and roses” is a good way to put it. I think there is a legitimate, innate striving toward transcendence that is immanent to life as such. In other words, to be alive is to be striving toward ever another situation. Life is a teleological process where we are striving toward a certain developmental peak. But also, striving toward knowledge, striving toward the other — that’s the social instinct, striving toward, in Plato’s language, the good, the true, and the beautiful. I think that’s in everyone and in every living thing.

I would say that you can see this when we have these left-wing ruptures, like for example the Sanders campaign. It’s all very well to talk about bread and butter. There were good things in there that people need like health care and a higher minimum wage, tackling exploitative employers, also beyond that tackling border sadism saying to people you want to live in a decent society.

Anyone with any decent instinct was drawn to that campaign, electrified by it, because ultimately what did he say? He didn’t say vote for me and you’ll have more material goods, he said vote for me and you’ll have a political revolution. And don’t just vote for me, be in a political movement with me, take power, overturn all the decrepit, sadistic elements in our society, and deepen democracy. He talked about an improbable journey together, of remaking and transforming the country.

People do really have that longing to work together to achieve something higher. One of the pathologies of modern life is that people feel frustrated, paralyzed, inefficacious. His characteristic mode of address was “if we stand together” — and when he said that the crowd would erupt. That’s just one example of a left-wing rupture, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has his own style, Jeremy Corbyn had a very different style, but it always had the same basic idea: the social ethos, striving together.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels talked about this dialectic where you join a union initially for something like higher wages, a shorter working day, things that you basically need, but then you develop other, richer needs. Quite often workers will go on strike to defend their union even if they’ll lose wages and their objective material conditions will get a bit worse. They need one another, they need their union. It can go further; it can be politicized in a much deeper way. The most radical need is the need for universality, in a Marxist sense.

When people glue themselves to the street to stop climate change, they have in mind living in a world of plenitude, not necessarily one where they have all the gadgets and commodities that they need, but where everybody and every species has a chance to thrive and flourish. That’s a normal thing, I would say. The question is how that instinctive baseline communism, as David Graeber puts it, is thwarted, crushed, and diverted. How is that impeccably respectable need neglected and pathologized, so people don’t dare even think it, let alone express it? So that people adopt a kind of cynical posture.

I think that the roses we need are the ones that come from our togetherness: I mentioned the Platonic terms the good, the true, and the beautiful. Think about culture and that work we do together, think about the search for truth in sciences and that work we do together. Our efforts to raise moral standards by trying to stop violence, stop rape, and end racism are intrinsic capacities that we all have. It’s a given that we also fall short, that we can live privative existences where we are selfish and hateful and resentful. But that’s not all there is to it. If it was, we might as well give up.