The more power the radical rightwing nationalists of our age accrue, the greater the risk that their destructive brand of politics becomes normalised. We should not, for instance, regard it as normal that the man in charge of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal casually promises “a whole civilisation will die tonight”. We should not accept that history’s first trillionaire is allowed to spread racist conspiracy theories to a hitherto unimaginable extent.
We should be alarmed that, here in the UK, a party tipped to lead a potential future government is trying to cruise to power in the slipstream of this international movement. In fact, we shouldn’t just be alarmed by such developments: we should stop them and urgently repair the damage already done. And what is the nature of that damage?
This bold, clarifying intervention from Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor provides some of the answers. Faced with a world coming under unprecedented strain from environmental shocks and an unequal, resource-hungry economic system, today’s reactionaries are effectively saying: bring it on. First are the religious fanatics who see each new disaster as a welcome sign we are entering the end of days, but find common ground with secular demagogues who promise a glorious, prosperous future on the ruins of our present.
Think, for instance, of the mirage of a “New Gaza”, a property developers’ fever dream that the Trump administration – heavily influenced by Christian Zionists – claims will arise from the wreckage of Israel’s US-backed genocide. Next are the new tech barons, who preach that only the AI “arms race”, as Klein and Taylor put it, can save humanity – even as its demand for water and electricity scorches the planet – while they themselves dream of sitting out societal breakdown in remote, fortified enclaves. Last come the political entrepreneurs who transform visions of disaster into votes by promising to turn their nations into bunkered garrison states.
Migration draws most of the attention, but you can also see this logic at work in an increasingly aggressive global scramble for natural resources: “supersized prepping at the level of the nation-state”, in Klein and Taylor’s words. This is nothing less than a revival of fascism, the authors argue – but only if we understand “fascism” as something broader and more persistent than the uniformed mass movements that once brought Europe to the brink of destruction. In their definition, it is a recurring tendency among elites that manifests when capitalism no longer works the way they would like it to, and they feel their positions are threatened.
Personally, I think we shouldn’t get too hung up on terminology – the important thing is to write in a way that makes people alive to problems around them and leaves them feeling empowered to respond. The authors succeed on both counts: Klein has spent almost three decades outlining the connections between unrestrained capitalism and violent, anti-democratic tendencies, while Taylor, a Canadian-American film-maker, writer and activist, is a veteran of movements for social justice. They set out how our economic system, “built on limitless growth, and on limitless wealth for the winners”, has collided with the reality that life on this planet is becoming harder to sustain.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
