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The political economy of hopelessness

Richard Seymour on what happens when centrists triangulate against the far-right in the interests of electoral pragmatism. The part in bold is particularly bleak:

Against all this, official liberalism has one move, which is to supplement its growth discourse by triangulating the far-right. Just as Biden had sought to neutralise Trump by appropriating parts of his border agenda, Macron’s government has tried to outflank Le Pen by, for example, calling her soft on Islam and fulminating about “Islamo-gauchisme”.  This is a weird symbiosis, in which both the hard-centre and the far-right thrive on cultivating hopelessness and punitive desires: sado-pessimism. It legitimises the far-right, who take the win and demand more. Far-right voters aren’t placated because they’re addicted to the animating sense of threat. Meanwhile, liberal critique is neutralised, a fatalistic attitude to racism is engrained, and society is inured to the latest erosion of civilised norms. This is, after all, the pattern on which the far-right has thrived: the steady and accelerating involution of liberal civilization. There is no reason to assume this process has peaked, or that democracy will stabilise given the stresses the climate crisis will place on the system.

What may halt this process is not cynical appeal to self-interest or pandering to vengeful passions, but an equal and opposite force that eschews the pseudo-rebellion of the far-right for a real rebellion. Notably, the New Popular Front’s success in France was achieved with a programme that addresses people’s immediate needs through higher wages and price controls while attending to more collective, long-term desires. It defended migrants, for example, and opposed Islamophobia. It supported climate measures, a ceasefire in Gaza and recognition of Palestine. The programme will be hard to realise, and the Left will be resisted by those in power – but it cut through the hopeless synergy of hard-centre and far-right and showed that punitive nationalism does not enjoy anything like a monopoly on public desires.

https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2024/07/the-rise-of-disaster-nationalism

I hope Labour won’t do this but it’s hard not to infer they will, particularly if the recomposition of the right (i.e. a more or less functional alliance between Conservatives and Reform) happens more quickly than expected. Perhaps Macron’s fate will illustrate how short-sighted this is as an electoral strategy?

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