Saturday, June 7, 2025
D+192/137/1323
1965 The Supreme Court decided Griswold v. Connecticut, effectively legalizing the use of contraception by married couples
2020 John Prine died
(Not) Taking care of myself. I forgot to take my fistful of 'other meds' yesterday: blood pressure (2), diabetes (2) (did I take my Trulicity injection???), cholesterol, prostate (2), gout, 325 mg. TIA aspirin, GERD, CoQ10, B6, B12. Better living through chemicals. Longer living through chemicals. To what end?
A fleeting thought, a fleeting heartache while driving driving away from the Chinese tailor shop after picking up trousers, thinking of my birth family, gone, and lyrics "I'm going home to see my father . . .
I Am A Poor Wayfaring Stranger
I am a poor wayfaring stranger
A-trav'ling through this land of woe.
And there's no sickness, toil or danger
In that bright world to which I go.
I'm going home to see my father (mother, sister, brother etc.)
I'm going there no more to roam;
I'm just a-going over Jordan
I'm just a-going over home.
I know dark clouds will gather 'round me
I know my way is steep and rough;
But beauteous fields lie just beyond me
Where souls redeemed their vigil keep.
I'm going there to meet my mother
She said she'd meet me when I come
I'm just a-going over Jordan
I'm just a-going over home. . . . .
Where'd that come from? Out of the blue. 'Brain noise', or more?
More from and about Is It Fascism? by Daniel Trilling in the current London Review of Books: Excerpts:
Like [Christopher] Hitchens, [Richard] Seymour is a former Trotskyite; he left the Socialist Workers Party in 2013 when it imploded over allegations of sexual assault by a senior member. Unlike Hitchens, or indeed Power, whose work has taken a reactionary turn, Seymour has not moved to the right. Instead, he continues to examine the reasons that, despite the economic and environmental disruptions of our time, the right keeps winning.
This is what makes him a useful, if sometimes frustrating, guide to the present moment. Having abandoned the boosterism of the revolutionary left – ‘One more crisis, comrades, and it’s our time!’ – he practises a radical pessimism. Capitalism, in his view, isn’t just an engine for human misery, but, through the burning of fossil fuels, a threat to human existence. Capitalist democracy, ‘an inherently contradictory and unstable formation’ which asks people to forgo equality in return for the promise of rising living standards, is ill-equipped to avert it. . . He is a co-founder, with the novelist China Miéville and others, of the political journal Salvage (‘The catastrophe is already upon us,’ one of its taglines runs, ‘and the decisive struggle is over what to do with the remains’), and his style has similarities with Miéville’s gothic-futurism. Seymour aims to provoke the reader – not least through the force of his rhetoric – into thinking about what might be round the corner. His efforts don’t always land, but when they do he can throw a murky picture into sharp relief: I have come across no better encapsulation of the nature of social media than ‘participatory disinfotainment’.
In Disaster Nationalism, Seymour attempts to fuse the two ways of thinking about fascism – the historically specific and the continuous – to show that some version of it is emerging today. As in the 1920s and 1930s, the expansion of far-right politics clearly has some link to the capitalist cycle: voters in Europe, for instance, have tended to move rightwards in response to financial crises since at least 1870; the emergence of today’s far-right populism can be traced to the 2008 financial crash. But Seymour follows the more supple Marxists, notably Gramsci, in stressing that culture and circumstance, as much as economic interests, shape our attitudes. For Seymour, the determining factor is neoliberalism, whose ruins we continue to inhabit, as governing elites have struggled in the aftermath of the crash either to shore up the system or forge an alternative. Neoliberalism, Seymour writes, drawing on the work of the economic historian Philip Mirowski, aimed to persuade the masses ‘to abandon tribal sentiments of solidarity and accept the law of universal competition’. The result, amid soaring wealth inequality, is a ‘paranoid system’: if everyone is a potential competitor, there can be no meaningful social sphere, public services will be corrupt and inefficient, and welfare recipients will be regarded as freeloaders. This is a recipe for ‘resentment, envy, spite, anxiety, depression and rage’, whose long-term effects – in the West, at least – are declining social trust, increased loneliness and a rise in political violence, even as other forms of violent crime have fallen. The wager of neoliberalism, Seymour writes, was that if voters were treated as consumers ‘their rational choices would keep politics in the consensual middle ground’, and perhaps during the boom years they did. But many people have now come to feel that the system is rigged.
Far-right populism, by contrast, offers what Seymour calls ‘muscular national capitalism’. Although its tools are those of orthodox economic policy – privatisation and welfare cuts for Modi; protectionism via tariffs for Trump; increased state direction for Orbán – they are being put to a very different end. Muscular national capitalism treats the economy ‘as a moral space in which it is argued the wrong people have been losing’. (The problem with globalisation, J.D. Vance said recently, wasn’t that it was unfair, but that it was causing rich countries such as America to lose their place at the top of the international pecking order.) Yet, as it turns out, its real economic benefits can be relatively meagre (average incomes in Brazil fell under Bolsonaro), since the true payoff is psychological. What far-right populists really have to offer is revenge: India’s frustrated Hindu middle classes will reap the benefits of growth if life is made intolerable for their Muslim neighbours; men in the Americas will become winners again when traditional gender roles are restored; cities in the Philippines will be regenerated if a war is waged on drug addicts; economically depressed regions of Europe will be revived by the mass deportation of refugees. The rhetorical tactics of far-right populism – the denigration of critics as traitors and Lügenpresse; the lurid claims about immigrants eating dogs; the obsession with ‘woke’ forms of social etiquette – are all ‘programmatic’, as Seymour puts it. They aim to channel the multifarious resentments of a population into a ‘revolt against liberal civilisation’; in other words, into ‘barbarism’.
Disaster Nationalism is part of a tradition that locates the roots of interwar fascism in the human psyche. The idea that civilisation makes us sick – that for all its benefits, it requires us to repress our aggressive and sexual urges, which reappear as various forms of unhappiness – originates with Freud. But where Freud focused on the individual, his successors Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm tried to understand the social character of support for fascism. For Reich, it was a form of ‘mass psychology’: the use of symbolism, emotion and sexual imagery to mobilise the people’s repressed violent urges. Fromm saw it in class terms, arguing that particular groups were drawn to fascism: authoritarians, certainly, but also defeated and dejected workers who had given up hope of social progress and put their faith in fascism’s promise of redemptive violence. Some have applied similar thinking to today’s far right: Wendy Brown identified ‘apocalyptic populists’ as a key component of Trump’s voter base in 2016, and her more recent work examines the mood of nihilism pervading contemporary political life.†
For Seymour, the key emotion of our time is resentment, fuelled by the insecurities and paranoia of class society and neoliberalism. It is an emotion we cannot do without, he notes, since it is essential to our sense of justice. We feel resentment at things we perceive as unfair and can feel it on behalf of others. But resentment can become an ‘emotional swamp’, leading in the most extreme cases to a ‘politically enabled passion for persecution’. Social media, which represents a shift in the way we communicate as significant as the rise of print newspapers was to the development of 19th-century nationalism, is an accelerant to this. Here, Seymour builds on his book The Twittering Machine (2019), which argues that the compulsive qualities of social media – its hall-of-mirrors narcissism, the dopamine hit of likes, clicks and follows – are used to manipulate our ‘fantasies, desires and frailties’ for profit. Participating in social media is to risk developing sadistic and self-harming forms of behaviour, since anger and conflict are often the quickest routes to online engagement: it is all too easy for social media users to find themselves subject to or joining in pile-ons, flame wars, trolling and other forms of online bullying. The industry has also proved a remarkably efficient conduit for the apocalyptic fantasies that sustain the far-right worldview. . . . .
According to recent polling by the anti-fascist organisation Hope not Hate, 40 per cent of British people would prefer a ‘strong and decisive leader who has the authority to override or ignore Parliament’ to a liberal democracy with regular elections and a multi-party system. The more pessimistic people are about their own lives, the poll found, the more likely they are to support [Nigel Farage's right -wing] Reform, to believe multiculturalism is failing and to oppose immigration.
From A Comprehensive Accounting of Trump’s Culture of Corruption the lead editorial in this morning's New York Times:
As his administration is negotiating with Vietnam to reduce the tariffs he imposed on the country’s goods, the government there is making way for a $1.5 billion golf complex outside Hanoi, as well as a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnamese officials said in a letter that the real estate project needed to be fast-tracked because it was “receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Donald Trump personally.”
Nearly 60,000 American KIAs, 150,000 WIAs, and 2,583 MIAs, including Bill "Moon" Mullen, The communists won the war, but capitalism and corruption won the peace.
A bad way to begin a sunny, warm Saturday in June is finishing the LRB article on fascism, reading the NYTimes editorial on Trump's corruption and defilement of the presidency, reading about the potential effect of the dispute between Trump and Musk on natioanl security and the public welfare, and writing notes about stages of decropitude on my iPhone for my upcoming appointment with Dr. Chatt.
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