Word of the Day: Nostalgie de la Boue
Yes, it's a French phrase, not a word. Deal with it.
nos·tal·gie de la boue nȯs-täl-zhēd-lä-bü -zhē-də-
: nostalgia for mud
: attraction to what is crude, depraved, or degrading
For over a decade, Le Pen’s party has consistently increased its share of the vote. At the same time, the global momentum of hard-right campaigns has barely relented, propelling Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Javier Milei to power. The Israeli far-right has also assumed an increasingly dominant role in Benjamin Netanyahu-led governments. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) beat Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats into second place in the European elections and polls second-place for the federal elections. And yet, Trump lost in 2020, Bolsonaro was out two years later, the Polish far-right has been kicked out of government. Narendra Modi failed to win a majority, and Le Pen’s coronation, the culmination of over a decade of “dédiabolisation”, was stolen from her at the last minute. It’s no wonder the movement has proven difficult to parse.
But to see where it’s going, you must first know what it is. Unfortunately, the conversation is skewed before it begins. As Aaron Winter and Aurelien Mondon have documented in Reactionary Democracy, the media and political class systematically talk up the far-right, its concerns and their supposedly proletarian roots. This results in comical yet dangerous efforts by centre-left politicians to “speak worker” by appropriating some of the far-right’s language. Far-right candidates are also relentlessly puffed by journalists and broadcasters who can’t resist the whiff of scandalised excitement, voyeurist fascination and nostalgie de la boue. And liberal politicians like waggling the threat of fascism at us as a goose farmer wields a stick, to keep us in line: wasn’t Macron’s election gambit precisely intended to force another dismal run off between the centre and the far-right? Isn’t that threat that was used for weeks to keep Democrats loyal to a visibly desiccating Biden?
| Richard Seymour, The rise of disaster nationalism