The distribution of nationalist and racist discourse

摘要

Bart Cammaert's galvanising analysis of what he terms 'neo-fascist discourse' sets out a framework for understanding the reproduction of what appear to be strikingly congruent modes of nationalist articulation across otherwise disparate political contexts. His argument is bracingly normative and political, calling for a defence of democratic public cultures against the 'recent worldwide rise of neo-fascism'. His two contexts of analysis underline the political and analytical challenge posed by this conjunctural pattern of divergence and convergence, a complexity too often veiled in narratives of contemporary authoritarian nationalist ascendance. Centre stage, inevitably, is the opportunistic and careering nativism of Donald Trump in the United States, who, from his campaign onwards, recognised the political value of overtly staging the racism of American imperialism, of rendering discursive those forms of violence that have habitually proceeded through elision and euphemism. His scattergun scapegoating, in this late phase of his presidency, seems increasingly machine-generated from a word cloud of his tweets. The implacably material and social demands of the Covid-19 pandemic have, despite the political labour invested in racialising the disease, proven difficult to navigate for a range of authoritarian and 'populist' actors (Gerbaudo 2020). For Trump, enemies and conspiracies have consequently proliferated. Fake scientists, and fake science, coming between a president and his people - even as Trump calculates, in plain sight, just how many of these people can be relegated to what Achille Mbembe, in Critique of Black Reason, terms the 'superfluous humanity' increasingly extraneous to the needs of capital (2017, 3).