By Sivamohan Valluvan and Luke de Noronha
Richard Seymour’s recent book, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization, tracks the de-civilising pleasures of fascist desire, where a burgeoning disenchantment culminates in the liberation of hitherto largely repressed passions. This is what Seymour calls the ‘subversive’ (versus ‘enlightened’) register of self-interest. The anachronistic conceits of liberty, equality, reason and civility are unlearned, allowing for a more naked embrace of those yearnings and passions that aren’t about materialist uplift or abstract rights but about kicking someone further below oneself and revelling in the humiliation of others.
In the UK, this is overdetermined by anti-migrant revanchism and the seemingly cathartic attachment to the violence of the border as a satisfying end in itself. It also surfaces in the mocking of climate activists and Palestine protestors and the railing against so-called gender ideology, do-gooder NGOs, and university campuses and curricula. Importantly though, there is little reference to ‘bread and butter issues’, no real expectation that things will get better. Instead, Seymour rightly reads disaster nationalism in relation to the distinctly fascist emotional keys that emerge from a sense of frustrated or thwarted entitlement, where the masochism of perceived decline and loss sublimates into the externalised sadism of nationalist identity and demagoguery. In other words, this nationalism doesn’t actually intend for anything to get better per se; it is about the righteous dignity of one’s own nationalised ‘white working-class’ pain being visibilised as the only authentic, deserving grievance.
But amid all this diffuse nihilistic ressentiment, we must account for the parallel ways in which today’s nationalist politics also avow something. Nationalist-authoritarianism, as much as it seems to thrive amid the breakdown of 20th century liberal norms, is also in part an ostensible answer to that breakdown. It presents itself as an alternative to the late modern exhaustion of the individual who is asked to compete for everything and have nothing. What gets lost therefore in much critical analysis, including our own past efforts, is a more lucid sense of what reactionary formations might also affirm. In short, today’s consolidation of fascist sentiment also hums at a quieter and ultimately deeper register. What most interests us here is how might we source in everyday culture alternative answers to this same exhaustion, answers that happen to be more socialist in temperament.
William Davies’ recent essay on Faragism and Tik Tok helps open up some of this ground. The Reform-friendly digital content he investigated didn’t just amplify atomised, hypercompetitive individualism but also sought to answer it, to act as its exit ramp:
Things no longer add up. For many, work no longer pays well enough to secure a family existence. Someone somewhere is clearly getting richer, but it isn’t clear how or why…I was struck by the recurring assumption that the ultimate prize was exit of some form or other: retiring to live off passive income or emigrating to a less broken society with better weather.1
The desire for exit from the rigged, corrupt scam we call “society” is more often written through the designs of libertarian elites, who capitalise (quite literally) on nationalist-populist sentiments in order to realise further market liberation. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor draw attention to the forms of “exit” propounded by the Silicon Valley libertarians, who ‘dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies’ (see also Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-up capitalism). But while we acknowledge elite programmes of exit, there is a demotic, mass (bottom-up) dreamscape of exit too that is being forged in the same moment. As hinted at in Davies’ scan of Faragist Tik Tok, this is dreamt as exit from the individual, from democratic dysfunction, and from the squeeze of downward mobility.
Much of the cultural positioning of the right emphasises the lapsed virtues of national integrity – consider, for instance, Tory MP Danny Kruger’s not entirely charmless book Covenant, subtitled ‘Home, Neighbourhood and Nation’ – and the danger is that the right is making more compelling appeals to meaning, value and virtue beyond the individual, offering a different kind of stabilising promise. Indeed, at some basic level, new right offers might be construed as an ‘order fetishism’ – appealing to the mutually reinforcing fantasies of a social order that national cohesion, a stable gender regime, and strongman decisionism all shape to bring into fruition. While order is not a concept we can leverage comfortably, part of what people seek through order is some set of meanings that exceed self-actualisation – some sense, perhaps, of the good life. As the writer Jonas Marvin put it recently, ‘a vision of the Good Life must prioritise interdependency against the productive/parasitic divide. It must seek to re-conceptualise space and time around leisure, care and public affluence against loneliness, sickness and privatised luxury.’2 The task of the left is herein a delicate one. We know that exit cannot be a return to the nation or its proxy normative ideals. It is instead the move towards the social, the public, the collective and the planetary that is our terrain. But in refusing the nation we might still identify some salutary instincts that such a postliberal communitarian politics partly speaks to.
It might even be suggested that the softer key in nationalist appeal frequently speaks to the individual who wishes not to be excellent but ordinary. When more and more people seem quite indifferent, almost dulled or inured, to the virtues of equality and freedom (which might be described as a kind of ‘orphaned liberalism’), we also detect in our conversations with university students, friends and family members a subtle desire for social role, clarity and instruction, for some collective sense of duty and acceptance that relieves us of the burden of self-discovery. This is partly evidenced, perhaps, by renewed curiosity in organised religion.3 While it remains a distinctly “progressive” habit to emphasise the primacy of individual expression and self-actualisation, and important as such appeals can be, it is noticeable that such assertions no longer enchant as automatically as we would like to believe. Indeed, we might detect something of the exhaustion of the individual in the move from universalised posting and sharing online to muted, cynical scrolling: ‘I will not tell you who I am or show you my life, I am just trying to work out what I am supposed to do/buy/have’.
What we want to ask therefore is what cultural circuits are still available to us that might open up different conceptions of life beyond the individual, without recourse to order and other reactionary dead-ends. In other words, how do we tune into those everyday rehearsals of shared life and guidance that are not derisory of freedom and equality but is also not entirely reliant on such abstractions when asserting life’s routine value and charm?
Slowness, sociability and socialist virtue
In this context, we might do well to consider left cultural politics as an attempt at ‘slowing things down, increasing the friction, applying the break’.4 Paul Gilroy writes about music-centred perspectives as those which ‘accentuate the work of culture and refer us to the places where textuality, commodity, and signification all break down, where real-time, uncompressed, face-to-face performance takes wing in transfigurative collaborations between singers, musicians, dancers, and their participating audiences’.5 And yet in the same essay – akin to arguments made by Malcolm James in his excellent Sonic Intimacies – Gilroy tracks the ways in which contemporary music cultures are more visual than auditory, more curated for atomised listening than shared participation, and too saturated in brand, characterised by ‘the erasure of the line between advertising and entertainment’. It is thus not clear if music still inhabits a prized cultural and potentially utopian location.
But taking Gilroy’s framing of a public slowness as a politically generative experience, it seems permissible that some other staging grounds might be highlighted as entry points into weighing today’s conjunctural affordances. The writer Sita Balani proves instructive when she suggests that the ‘interstitial leisure spaces of pubs, parks, gyms and shared residential worlds, not least what remains of social housing, must become again our analytic domain, and be attentive to tease out ideals beyond grievance but ones suggestive of other companionships outside of the nation, race, and other defensive identities.’6 The point is that to refuse, to step outside, and to be “anti”, is the easy option. Indeed, as cultural studies remind us, it is easier to be right than to map out the mass in all its real-time contradictions.
Vallu, Amit Singh and James Kneale’s work elsewhere has been attempting to signal the ways in which much pub life, when seen beyond the embedded conceits of nationalist mythmaking and racist defensiveness, is often indicative of usefully latent socialist-minded dispositions – at least in terms of how time, leisure and sociability is experienced. In a recent Guardian podcast, the host interviewed Gen Zs, wondering whether the gym was the new pub and if so why. In a telling excerpt, a young woman suggests that people her age drink less because of their social media fuelled ‘isolationist and self-protective obsession with self-betterment’ (note the quickfire double ‘self’):
‘I mean, my gym subscription is like £28. And I can drop that in a flash on a birthday pub event at a London pub, especially where the pints are, like, almost seven pounds. Outrageous. It’s also, not to keep harking on about it, but like this thing that I see on social media about people saying, if you do this and you do this and you do this, then you’ll feel better and then you’ll look better. It’s, like, framed as this mental health advice. But it, it feels like it all boils down to being a kind of the best version of yourself. And that feels like inherently capitalist. And inherently individualistic and I think the reason why I still go to the pub is because I feel nostalgic for the time where I would hang out with my friends in a space that was, like, void of any, any of that. Like where there wasn’t necessarily, you weren’t getting any anything out of the conversation. You were just there for the sake of it.’7
In a similar vein, one of our friends had a passing conversation with a divorced man in his 50s who has become interested in church again. But after church he goes to the pub, alone. Across the two, he has a sense of comparable companionship that is undemanding. Like the Gen Z quoted above, who feels nostalgic far too soon, he is happily inadequate, ‘pedestrian’ to use his choice term, alongside everybody else is who is also ordinary.
This might all seem very banal. But it is important to remember that the nation too is a remarkably abstract reality — you can’t feel the nation on the high street. It is something that gets politicised, a set of fears and passions through which the high street is then read and interpreted. In that spirit, we too need alternative passions, or maybe something short of passions, and we feel them sometimes in the rhythms of life. The digital is certainly bad news in this context, because, whatever its other generative qualities, it is nocturnal and alone. But what about where people do still socialise, where public space is experienced slowly? How might we get better at narrating, scaling and politicising the appeal of such experiences?
We all will have our own favoured attachments, not merely by the vagaries of taste alone, but because they also help re-enchant residual or emergent ways of life that offer a form of contentment less reliant on the affirmation of the self (for these authors, test cricket holds pride of place, insofar as it demands a slowing of attention). What is the quality of these engagements? And what contemporary contingencies allow them to be sustained, allowing the social to remain a key terrain where fascist solace might still fail to land? Perhaps to this end we have to dispense with the subversive gesture, the quest for spaces that are in direct opposition, always but impossibly alternative. We must be willing to wade back into proximate ordinary spaces that might otherwise be too easy to foreclose – the gym, the pub, church and mosque, the unremarkable high street, the municipal leisure centre – precisely because these are spaces where we might glimpse alternative rehearsals of the public and the shared, however markedly non-alternative, non-utopian, and fraught with the danger of encounter and discomfort.
- William Davies, “TV Meets Fruit Machine,” London Review of Books, June 26, 2025. ↩︎
- Jonas Marvin, “Resisting Faragism Means Rescuing the Good Life,” Proletarian Blues (Substack), February 16, 2025, https://www.proletarianblues.substack.com/ ↩︎
- George Sandeman, “Navigating Religion and Relationships,” BBC News, June 1, 2025, https://www.bbc.co.uk ↩︎
- Paul Gilroy, “‘Rhythm in the Force of Forces’: Music and Political Time,” Critical Times 2, no. 3 (2019): 384, 388. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Sita Balani, “Not Normal but Ordinary: Living Against the Culture Wars,” Radical Philosophy, no. 218 (Spring 2025): 12. ↩︎
- Guardian Today in Focus Podcast, “Is the Gym Gen Z’s Pub?” April 18, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2025/apr/18/is-the-gym-gen-zs-pub-podcast ↩︎