On Disaster Nationalism & The Climate Crisis

The world abounds with disasters. According to the World Economic Forum, the rate of “natural” disasters in 2019 was three times that in 1989. The climate emergency has made wildfires, storms, droughts and floods more frequent and more severe — an effect that only deepens as time marches on. The relentless drive to turn every living process into a source of profit has increasingly put life itself under strain.

Yet despite these clear and immediate threats, the new far right crystallises in opposition to wholly imaginary horrors: the “great replacement” of whites by migrants, “cabals” of Satanist paedophiles and communists in power, a “Plandemic” to subjugate humanity, Jewish “space lasers" manipulating the weather, and a climate “hoax” to end fossil fuel-based freedom. Intriguingly, today’s reactionary political forces respond to real terrors by hallucinating even more extreme, lurid evils, against which it is possible to take arms.

I call this phenomenon, which has just propelled Donald Trump to his second term as US president with an outright majority of the popular vote, “disaster nationalism”. It is an inchoate fascism — itself a contested term — which, for the purposes of what follows, can be understood as a revolutionary movement of the right to crush democracy. As a political current that reaches from the corners of the internet to leaders in high offices of state, disaster nationalism does not have a formal political front that organises paramilitaries to overthrow democracy. Instead, it has a thin, networked civic base wrapped up in culture wars that periodically explode into violence, from lone wolf murders to pseudo-insurrections. Nor do its elected leaders — among whom we might count Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei, Viktor Orban, Rodrigo Duterte and Benjamin Netanyahu — incite against democracy per se. For the time being, their aggression is directed at the liberal state. If they periodically unleash popular violence, from the pro-Trump “insurrection” in 2020 to the attempt by Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters to overturn Brazil’s election results in 2022, the goal is to force a rupture that tilts the balance toward authoritarian, exclusionary democracy. 

Disaster nationalism and ecological crisis

We should not expect a nascent twenty-first century fascism to resemble the fascism of interwar Europe. That world — of colonialism, segregation, incipient revolution and intense industrial modernisation — is largely gone. Instead, the crises of the future will most likely erupt around the problems of ecological crisis and ensuing privation, and it is around these eruptions that a contemporary fascism will cohere.

Faced with this challenge, today’s far right largely espouses climate “denihilism”: a combination of overt denialism and perpetuation of the fossil fuel economy. In other words, drill baby drill, and party like it’s 1999. It primarily regards or represents climate change as a scam to transfer wealth from “the developed Western world to the third world”, as the manifesto of mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik described it, or from the “producers” to the “moochers” in the words of American far-right activist and blogger Pamela Geller. This representation, however, will become less persuasive as climate disasters mount. As an opposing current, there are signs of a growing “ecofascism”, for instance in the pastiche “manifestos” of “lone wolf” murderers like Brenton Tarrant, Patrick Crusius and Payton Gendron, which blame both immigrants and corporations for the destruction of nature and link environmental ruin to the fear of “white genocide”. 

Ecofascism implements what the nativist ecologist Garret Hardin called “lifeboat ethics”: in a planet under strain, he argued, the only appropriate action is to viciously protect one’s resources with total disregard for poorer populations, even if it means their death — for Hardin, an ecologically beneficial outcome. This sort of thinking is not entirely alien to the environmentalist movement, where eco-Malthusian arguments about overpopulation have long supported racist nationalism. For example, Dave Foreman, who founded the radical environmentalist group Earth First! in 1980, favours shutting the borders and, responding to the Ethiopian famine of the nineteen-eighties, suggested letting “the people just starve there”.

What is clear is that whether it favours fossil-fuelled denialism or ecofascism, “disaster nationalism” will be increasingly engaged with the climate and ecological crises as their impacts accelerate, and will always find a way to turn these into a problem of too many of the wrong people in the wrong places.

You can’t shoot climate change

Consider a recent disaster. In September 2020, the state of Oregon was hit by a wildfire bigger than any in living memory. In the Pacific Northwest, tonnes of organic matter dries out during the summer as hot dry winds blow in from the east. A spark can trigger a blaze that cuts through the forests and brush with teeth of flame tens of metres long. The intensity of these blazes has been increasing over the last three decades as the climate has warmed. In the summer of 2020, the wildfire swept over the Cascade mountain range in the west of Oregon, devouring slopes blanketed with fuel-rich pine forests and driven over the mountains by hurricane-strength Pacific winds, which blew the wildfires into megafires, some burning at up to 800 degrees Celsius. Ten per cent of the state’s population was forced to evacuate, thousands of homes were destroyed and thirty-three people died. 

It is a common refrain that disasters bring people together, but this truism is not borne out by the evidence. Kai Erikson, a sociologist specialising in disasters, found not a single example of this in his decades of study. While acknowledging it could happen, he argued this coming together would be the case only where the community was not already riven by ethnic and class faultines. Instead, Erikson found that in most scenarios, acute disaster compounds chronic disaster. The result is that when the acute disaster comes, people experience a kind of detachment and emotional flattening that he termed “psychological concussion”.

In Oregon, the acute disaster of the wildfire built upon a series of chronic disasters: the financial crash of 2008 followed by economic depression, escalating poverty rates and joblessness especially in rural counties, suicide rates soaring, pervasive alcoholism, and, at the time, the second highest addiction rates in the United States. The far right seized on the opportunity to rage against disaster. In this case, it took the form of a spontaneous, mass apocalyptic fantasy spread through social industry networks and ultimately echoed by figures in authority, from local police to Donald Trump.

The origins of the false narrative could be found in rumours, dating back to 2017 and spread via far-right social media channels, which predicted that a seditious group called “Antifa” was planning a massacre of white, conservative Christians with the aim of imposing a liberal tyranny. When the wildfires started, the rumour spread that they were caused by Antifa arsonists. The fires, they reasoned, were too intense, too numerous, to be caused by natural processes — the cause had to be terrorist mercenaries, ostensibly on the payroll of the Democratic Party, going to war on the heartland. Vigilantes set up armed checkpoints. Some people refuse to evacuate. A man told to flee for his life said: “I’m protecting my city. If I see people doing crap, I’m gonna hurt them.”

As the work of Kai Erikson highlighted, it is not intrinsically exciting to undergo disaster. However, as Michael Billig’s work on fascism shows, it can be exciting to be threatened by people. Indeed, the response of vigilantes and conspiracy theorists to the Oregon disaster was not the “psychological concussion” that many victims experienced as they fled. Instead, it represented an exciting alternative. Psychoanalytically, disaster nationalism allows something that is already there to enter conscious experience: the sense of threat. Politically, it provides a target against which to hit back. You can’t shoot capitalism or climate change, even if you were to acknowledge them: they are large, abstract forces. But you can shoot Antifa, or march on the Capitol in the hope of stringing up the communists in charge. 

Even now, as storms Helene and Milton assail the continental United States, a variation on this strategy is articulated by Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (behind the Jewish “space lasers” theory). “They,” she argues (withholding further detail on who “they” are), “can control the weather.” And if “they” can do that, plunging tens of thousands into crisis and killing hundreds, then “they” can also be stopped without anything more fundamental needing to change.

Liberalism and the roots of disaster nationalism

Disaster nationalism, then, threatens to morph into green or brown fascism. In some ways, especially in aspects of its ideology, it is already incipiently fascistic. But fascism only becomes a “real historical force”, as Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective put it, after some time accumulating momentum. The nationalist, racist and anti-republican ideologies that flowed into the historical fascism of the twentieth century had to circulate and simmer among millions of people for decades before they were capable of guiding mass action. Anglo-liberal orthodoxy only began paying attention to the far-right threat after Brexit and the ascent of Donald Trump. In fact, its origins can be traced to the endlessly misremembered 1990s and the peak of liberalism.

It was in these years of neoliberal consolidation that a new far right began to emerge. In Ayodhya, northern India, Hindu nationalists demolished the Babri Masjid, an ancient mosque that the Hindu right claimed was built on the birthplace of the deity Rama. In the US, while Clinton reigned, Pat Buchanan registered a surprisingly strong vote in the Republican primaries on a platform opposed to migrants, gay rights and abortion. In Europe, Austria’s Freedom Party, which had been founded by a former Nazi functionary and positioned itself to the far right, came second in the country’s elections. Subsequently, liberal states embarked on an era of open-ended global warfare under the rubric of the “war on terror”. The state was hardened through practices of torture, extraordinary rendition, black sites, police shootings and renewed ethnic repression. 

The financial crash and depression of 2008, though initially benefiting the hard-centre electorally, was quickly metabolised by liberal states through austerity projects that brutally pared back public services, eviscerated state capacity, and caused a surge in excess deaths and poverty. As advocates of austerity blamed the undeserving poor and those on welfare for the crisis, there was a direct correlation between austerity and an increase in hate crimes. Civil society, meanwhile, was being drilled with anxiety in a series of moral panics. In the ensuing social decomposition, lone wolf attacks, which had been on the rise since the 1970s as Mark Hamm and Ramon Spaiij document, increased sharply after 2010. Internationally, a major legacy of the war on terror was the birth of a garishly cruel, fascistic movement beginning in the pulverised north of Iraq, spreading to Libya and spawning a series of terror attacks in the West: the so-called “Islamic State”. 

Ultimately, the decisive breakthrough of the disaster nationalists was neither Trump nor Brexit but the election of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister of India in 2014. As candidate of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Modi had built his career on a precocious form of disaster nationalism. In February 2002, when Modi was the chief minister of the state of Gujarat, the BJP was tanking in the polls. His government’s mishandling of a real disaster, an earthquake, the previous year, had made them very unpopular. They therefore revived their fortunes on the back of an imaginary disaster: an alleged Muslim attack on Hindu worshippers on a train. The train fire was an accident, but BJP officials called it "inhuman genocide". Along with local police and businessmen, they incited and helped Hindu activists hunt, torture, rape, burn, cut to pieces and kill Muslims, including infants. The BJP vote, instead of collapsing, rose by five points. The increase was strongest where the violence was most intense. Here was a cruel object lesson: popular violence, far from electorally damaging a far-right party, could energise its base. In the end, the bloody basis of Modi’s success was quickly forgotten by the claque of political leaders in the liberal West who celebrated many of his economic policies. And if liberal capitalism could make peace with Modi, it could hardly put up much resistance as Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte and Jair Bolsonaro took office. Nor did it.

Climate crisis as force multiplier

Climate crisis does not, by itself, produce any given political outcome. It acts, rather, as a force multiplier, potentiating the familiar crises of late capitalism: stagnant investment and labour productivity, parliamentary paralysis and social breakdown. It imposes a new rhythm of periodic emergencies, in which natural disasters create supply shocks, droughts threaten food supply and mass extinction threatens the material basis of civilization. Undermining the energetic foundations of contemporary economies, it raises the prospect of drastic and disruptive changes: relative and absolute deprivation, the loss of familiar freedoms associated with the age of fossil fuels like the car and the airplane, a struggle over the global distribution of costs, and the fortification of violent borders as refugee flows expand. It primes the existing crises for explosion.

By 2050, 1.2 billion people are predicted to have been displaced by climate change and natural disasters. The core capitalist states, committed to fortifying their control over a threatened resource base, construe even the tiny proportion of global refugee flows to their countries as a “crisis” to be deterred with a growing apparatus of expulsions and exclusions. This normalises the predicates that the far-right radicalises: consider Marine Le Pen’s assertion that migrants are “nomads” who, lacking a “homeland”, do not care for the environment, or the ecofascist fear of what Chetan Bhatt calls "white extinction". The history of ecological thought — from Ernst Haeckel and Ludwig Klages to Garret Hardin and Dave Foreman — is already pregnant with such themes.

There is little reason to believe, given the parlous state of capitalist democracy, that it can survive the coming trials without serious disturbances. Capitalist democracy is, after all, a contradictory formation: an engine of inequality welded to political equality. Since 1945, it has stabilised itself through the promise of perpetual growth; so long as the pie continued to grow, it wouldn’t matter how big any one person’s slice was. Growth also promised that, in principle, poor people and nations could always “catch up”. Yet the secular religion of growth is now experiencing a crisis of faith: endless growth, as Vaclav Smil demonstrates in Growth, his detailed study of growth patterns in nature and human society, is a contradiction in terms. 

The rise of disaster nationalism is a manifestation of the crisis of growth ideology. For while the far right has for now embraced fantasies of virile, muscular, fossil-fuelled growth, it has also upended the inherited orthodoxy that when it comes to winning politically, “it’s the economy, stupid”. Those who vote for rightist parties or causes do not do so for economic gain. A majority of Brexit voters, for instance, were prepared to endure “significant damage” to the economy, and 39 per cent even said they would be willing to see themselves or a family lose their job. Slumping consumer spending under Modi did not prevent his winning a second term in office with a larger share of the vote. Likewise, in the Philippines, while Rodrigo Duterte’s approval rating hovered around 90%, the number of Filipinos rating themselves “poor” reached a five-year-high of 54%. In short: it was never the economy, stupid. 

Millions will sacrifice “growth” and even personal wellbeing for that abstraction called “the nation” because what we want when we want growth is a share of the good life — not just material incentives but a sense of justice which may be more or less universal. Class society oozes resentment from every pore not for a lack of consumer goods but because of its deep, bitter unfairness. Lacking political expression, resentment can circulate amorphously. This is a “libidinal economy” — an economy constituted, in this case, by the desire for revenge — and it is this economy that disaster nationalism puts to work.

The history of fascism tells us something about how disaster nationalism will evolve if, catalysed by ecological crises, it morphs into fascism. Historical fascism did offer its supporters certain material incentives. However, as the historian Richard Grunberg wrote of public opinion during the Third Reich, “the psychological improvement” outpaced “the material advantage.” In fact, while the Nazi regime promised improved living standards, by 1938 the average worker was still consuming significantly less than in 1928, the year before the Wall Street crash. The main beneficiaries of economic recovery were capitalists. In fascist Italy, popular living standards did not improve at all. 

To what, then, did the psychological surplus correspond? Social life, though violently invigilated, was energised for the regime’s supporters by the construction of a collective identity around destroying the nation’s enemies. Ecofascism, treating the climate crisis as a result of conspiracy against the nation rather than as an industrial byproduct of capitalism, creates plenty of opportunity for such invigorating bloodshed.

As large capital is freed to squeeze every last drop of value out of the biosphere, while displacing the costs onto those who bear least responsibility, ecofascism will turn the problem into one of zero-sum combat for the remaining goods of the earth. It will offer the illusory prospect of biological thriving in ethnically-cleansed zones behind increasingly militarised borders, while the rest of the world is plundered and left to perish. This is what it is to live in a dying civilisation.