Be honest with yourself. How many of these words do you know and how many of them have you used in the however many years since you left your mother’s womb?

Anonmic, regio dissimilitudinus, theodicy, deliquescing, misprision, cathected, apophenia, torsion, condign, homophilous and calefactory.

It is fair to say that a literate reader can go for decades without coming across any of them, so long as that reader doesn’t spend more than about half an hour reading Richard Seymour’s recent book Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization. More than once I was reminded of the scene in Blackadder where Robbie Coltrane’s Doctor Johnson was bragging about having completed his dictionary containing every word in the English language only to have his bubble pricked by Rowan Atkinson tossing made up words at him.

While the author might feel it’s his duty to extend our vocabularies, the sheer number of linguistic obscurities gives the reader a sense that he is determined to make a display of his wide reading in a number of disciplines from climate science, Christian theology and French philosophy, one of the more polarising fields of intellectual life.

This is something of a shame because it is an important book. This week the Tories are making a policy decision to carry on heating the planet with an intention of making much of it uninhabitable in the interests of capital accumulation. It is an idea they share with Putin, Trump and Farage and is the perfect encapsulation of the partial rationality and utter lunacy behind the political evolution of much of the international right into what Seymour memorably describes as disaster nationalism. He gives an example of conservatives in Oregon who persuaded themselves that the real cause of hugely destructive forest fires was not a heating planet, but supporters of the mythical Antifa. It is only a matter of time before Farage and Badenoch start blaming migrants for natural disasters in Britain. Recent weeks have seen them both try to hijack the lumpen, neo-fascist mobilisations against asylum seekers and this is their shared programme for the coming election.

My Desert Island Discs book

Seymour argues that a willingness to believe what looks like obvious bollocks is the “fulfilment of an unacceptable wish” which resolves an emotional conflict in “a dreamlike idiom”. He also seems to read a lot of psychoanalysis and there may be a range of views on how useful that is on explaining mass political phenomena. The far right has always leaned heavily on obviously absurd theories to mobilise people. Antifa starting forest fires is in the same tradition as the Bolsheviks, Jewish financiers and the Vatican all conspiring together to undermine western civilisation.

In the unlikely event that I am ever asked to appear on Desert Island Discs, my most likely choice of book will be Trotsky’s The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. Like Seymour he was trying to understand and explain the crushing of the working class and its parties by a collection of extremist freaks with dangerous ideas. For my money, this is not something that is helpfully explained by quoting Slavoj Žižek telling us that desire “intercalates itself in the interspace between the latent thought and the manifest text.” 

Seymour has a lot of value to say about the Philippines, India, the United States and Israel. An obvious similarity is that three of  those states have effectively legalised murder of political opponents and ethnic groups as a means of keeping the regime in power and have discovered that it is a key to electoral success. This success comes even when it is apparent that voting choices are even making those who support them poorer, so undermining the “it’s the economy, stupid” version of social democratic politics. It turns out ideology is frequently more important than bread, butter and meat.

If you make it to the end of the book, and you really must try, Seymour offers something approximating to optimism. He points out that there are modest signs of a resurgence of a radical left, having first reminded us that Rosa Luxemburg was tempted to kill herself when war broke out in Europe and concludes by reminding us that we have seen a version of this film before.