In the wake of Donald Trump's stunning election victory, the march of "disaster nationalism" and the far right increasingly defines global climate politics.
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.