In brief: Over the past fifty years, the political New Right has taken on a number of different faces, often with the sole family resemblance being a conviction that man is a fallen creature, and that life in this debased state is a Darwinian struggle for limited booty. But the new New Right — the forces gathered around Trump — may, in truth, be the oldest Right of all.
Are you ready, Neo? Consider the following as you ponder Steve Bannon’s pledge to “deconstruct the administrative state.”
Excerpted from The Case Against Democracy: Ten Red Pills by Mencius Moldbug (in the role of Morpheus from The Matrix)
1. The Power Structure of the West
- take the blue pill: believe that power in the West is held by the people, who have to guard it closely against corrupt politicians and corporations.
- take the red pill: know that power in the West is held by the permanent employees of the state.
2. The Extent of the State
- take the blue pill: believe that the state consists of elected officials and their appointees.
- take the red pill: know that the state consists of all those whose interests are aligned with the state. This includes NGOs, universities, and the press, all of whose employees are effectively civil servants.
(The full text of the foregoing, and lots more, can be found here)
If you want to understand a political movement, look to its fringes. That’s where its most committed ideologues huddle: the true believers, the people willing to suffer scorn for its sake. If you’re politically engaged, you know all about the Alt-Right (or at least as much as your Facebook newsfeed tells you). You know about white nationalists, and you may have heard of people like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor, and their peek-a-boo relationship with Donald Trump. But they’re only decoys. There are far stranger things afoot, and far more subversive (and seductive) philosophers.
There had to be people like this in order for someone like Trump to get in. His money alone wouldn’t have been enough, nor his celebrity. Nothing so radical happens without a current of thought, and these days, without memes riding on that current. On the edges of the neo-nationalist/anti-globalist pond in the middle of which Trump sits as chief bullfrog, you’ll find some very odd ducks. Neoreactionaries, accelerationists, retro-futurists, and gay masculinists, to name just a few. They disagree about many things, but not about the fact that Trump rightfully commands the pond.
It might surprise some to hear that the movement associated with the rise of Donald Trump has an intelligentsia — a brain trust. After all, its figurehead carries his anti-intellectualism like the hammer of Thor. But so did Mussolini and Franco, and other champions of going back to the future. All of them had eloquent, sometimes erudite apologists. Even poets came to their cause. Trump doesn’t have any poets yet — not that I know of — but he does have intellectual accomplices. A significant number of these harbor views that are not just retrograde, but proudly anti-social, if not anti-human (in fact, anti-humanism is one of the sub-species in the taxonomy of the Alt-Right). The more wistful among them prefer the term traditionalist, a word that evokes golden-hued images of Tevye fiddling on the roof, but carries a more potent charge for its adherents. Traditionalism is a return: to the true path, and to a hierarchically ordered society reflective of Julius Evola’s Revolt Against The Modern World. The everyday version of this philosophy is, indeed, better labeled anti-modernism, because its driving intellectual reflexes are negative. Its foreground conviction is that we’re fucked. As in, “It’s a disaster. Chicago is carnage. Brussels is a cespool. Paris isn’t Paris anymore.” At least, we were fucked until Trump came along to save us from ourselves.
The tidal forces that carried Trump to power aren’t uniquely American, but you probably know that already. They have installed reactionary regimes in Poland and Hungary, and have attempted to do so in — of all places — France. They stirred up the harsh North Sea gusts behind Brexit, and have even threatened the cradle of democracy, Greece, by way of parties like the Golden Dawn. The spiritual father of this movement is, arguably, Vladimir Putin himself, who in the thrall of his court philosopher, Alexandr Dugin, has become the champion of neo-traditionalists throughout the West. Trump, of course, has his own court philosopher, the aforementioned Steve Bannon, prophet of the Fourth Turning and Clash of Civilizations. “I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors,” he says.
But Bannon seems to have chosen the wrong historical personage and period as his analogs. His goal, which at least in this respect is also Putin’s, isn’t reformation. It’s Restoration. (Here’s one of Bannon’s favored contemporary thinkers. Bookmark this for later)
The only viable path to restoration of competent government is the simple and hard way:
- Become worthy.
- Accept power.
- Rule.
The movement is laughably described as “populist.” For many, the term suggests a champion of “the common man.” Someone like Andrew Jackson. But this isn’t a movement for the people. Its philosophical foundations are still those of aristocratic conservatism, its forebears men like Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle, and its present-day flacks guys like Michael Anton, Trump’s ‘Deputy Assistant to the President for Strategic Communications,’ and author (as Publius Decimus Mus) of the notorious Flight 93 Election, who embrace “the people” only to rule them. This is a movement that makes use of the masses in order to achieve the desired regression. It is populist only in the crudest sense: the crowd wants bread, circuses, and sometimes, kings. We are suckers for royalty — even fake royalty (see: Ivanka & Jared).
The neo-nationalist movement values homogeneity over pluralism, security over freedom, and autocracy (in the name of individual sovereignty for the very few who can afford to “seastead” or book tickets on Elon Musks’s pre-colonization flights to Mars) over democracy. Its emotional base is founded on what (deposed) breitbart.com star Milo Yiannopoulos defines in An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right as “natural conservatives,” i.e., those “unapologetically embracing a new identity politics that prioritizes the interests of their own demographic.” In other words, people who prefer to live apart and/or among their own kind. This desire, at least, is recognizably human. We’re all partial to our kin. But it masks a far darker and more compelling nativism, and this is given voice once the movement’s high priests and rhetoricians, living and dead, are heard. We’re not talking about William F. Buckley’s heirs. These are not your grandfather’s conservatives (unless your grandfather is the type to keep the uniform of a 19th c. Prussian Guard commander or Teutonic knight in his closet). The new movement conservatives look to more rarefied reactionary sources, such as Evola (dead) and Hans-Hermann Hoppe (very much alive), as well as to contemporary evangelists like philosopher Nick Land and his Silicon Valley muse, the mischievous Mencius Moldbug.
Mencius Moldbug (note the fondness for imperial Latin pseudonyms) is the nom de blog of Curtis Yarvin, a west coast software developer whose URBIT operating system (still in development) promises to subvert the World Wide Web and create islands of personal sovereignty, and whose startup TLON has reportedly received an infusion of venture capital from none other than PayPal founder and Trump cheerleader, Peter Thiel. Yarvin, writing as Moldbug (at least until 2014) is the Thomas Paine of neoreaction (#NRx) and an advocate of what sounds an awful lot like cyber age feudalism. “Let’s start with my ideal world,” he writes,“the world of thousands, preferably even tens of thousands, of neocameralist neostates. The organizations which own and operate these neostates are for-profit sovereign corporations, or sovcorps.” Each “sovcorp,” of course, would have its CEO, and these are the nobles of the new feudalism. The vassals are what used to be called “citizens,” and each owns a share in the state. Moldbug doesn’t say, but one is left to assume that those who can’t afford to buy-in are the new serfs. In any case, democracy and republican government, as we knew them, are gone, as are what we now think of as civil liberties (no need for political freedom in a perfectly-run state). The exception to this strictly hierarchical order lies, of course, on the Web, where Moldbug’s new Magellans are free to roam the virtual seas and outer space like buccaneers, sovereign beings in their personal world-pods, waiting for the Singularity. Before we examine Moldbug’s connections to Thiel, Bannon, Trump and global neo-nationalism, stop a moment to appreciate the incongruity. Like men of privilege before him, Moldbug’s new man achieves his freedom by imposing tyranny on the rest. His libertarian utopia is underwritten by the wealth of the neostates, which are capitalized by well-behaving shareholders willing to forego freedom for security.
Moldbug/Yarvin, as said, is championed by Peter Thiel, advocate of seasteading and vampire immortality, and Thiel is tech sector consigliere to Trump’s White House. He won’t take an official role (as he’d have to divest), but his proxies include Michael Kratsios, “Deputy CTO,” Kevin Harrington, Senior NSC staff, and Mark Woolway at Treasury. All of them have longstanding relationships with Thiel, so he has plenty of muscle in the game. Thiel’s most widely quoted statement is drawn from his 2009 essay for the libertarian Cato Institute: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In fairness, you need to read the entire piece to know where he’s coming from, but it’s not a place of Enlightenment humanism. Thiel is a gay man of a very particular sort. A more soft-spoken Roy Cohn, but just as pitiless. Think of it this way: if he and Milo were a comedy act, they’d be The Smothers Brothers and Thiel would be Dickie. Brothers, nonetheless. Both are “masculinists” with nothing but scorn for “political correctness” and feminine energy (Thiel even derides the 19th Amendment). Then we have Bannon himself, to whose Strategic Initiatives Group Thiel’s soldiers will likely report, at least on matters of cybersecurity and innovation. Bannon has reportedly also shown interest in the Moldbug papers. Breitbart.com described Moldbug/Yarvin’s manifesto as “the first shoots of a new conservative ideology” as far back as March 2016, and a recent Politico story suggests an intellectual bromance may be budding between Moldbug and the new Cromwell.
What the thinkers who constellate the Alt-Right/Anti-Globalist universe seem to have in common is a disdain — no, let’s call it what it is: contempt — for the ideal of egalitarianism and its political expression as democracy. Almost all the key tropes of the NRx worldview — opposition to political correctness, feminism, LGBT activism, wealth redistribution, and dilution of the gene pool (masquerading as the “Human Bio-Diversity Movement” or HBD) — can be traced back to the belief that we are not, in fact, “created equal.” Many are born to serve, some to prosper, and a very few to lead. (Moldbug/Yarvin is an admirer of Thomas Carlyle, who is usually given credit for the “Great Man Theory”; Thiel appears to believe that a small cadre of tech-geniuses ought to rule the world — a twisted take on Plato’s philosopher king). On the timeline of history, the political reflexes underlying neoreaction, anti-humanism, and what is known as right-accelerationism not only antedate the American Revolution and the Enlightenment that spawned it, but the Renaissance! Neoreactionaries, to steal a line from Pulp Fiction, intend to “get Medieval on our asses.” They’d warp speed back to the Crusades, or at least to the Spanish Inquisition, when men were men and sheep were frightened. To read their tracts, however, is to conclude that much of their “philosophy” stems not from boldness, but from despair. They’ve given up on the world, and specifically, on the notion of progress and the vital faith that some kind of teleological god-thread is drawing humankind forward into a brighter and more cosmically conscious (and therefore, more truly human) future. This they dismiss as “Whig history.” Spiritual virtue is behind us, not ahead. Ahead lies only darkness and decay: a borderless world without racial distinction or ethnic pride through which there roams a zombie-mongrel horde, devoid of the virtues of personal responsibility, ambition and enterprise, and probably blasting multicultural death metal hip-hop as it ransacks the once gracious homes of former “wealth creators.”
And what do neo-reactionaries hold at principal fault for this devolution? Humanism, Modernism, and Democracy. I’ll give them this: it’s difficult to defend the consumerist nightmare that modernism has spawned, not to say its spiritual emptiness. But democracy…that’s another matter. Granted: it isn’t perfect. Even Pericles knew this. But one would think that in 2017, with global communism defeated and the ghastly 20th century behind us, serious doubts about whether constitutional democracy is the best — or at least the least bad — form of government would have evaporated. One would be wrong. Spend a few hours on the right subreddit and this will be clear. Spend a few hours examining the work of British anti-philosopher Nick Land and you may begin to wonder why we ever thought democracy was a safe bet. Land’s blogosphere opus, The Dark Enlightenment, is a kind of summa of neoreactionary thought, much of it a paean to Mencius Moldbug. Nick Land is both Boswell and Saint Paul to Moldbug, his high-flung prose and awareness of postmodern theory lending gravitas and glow to the words of the San Francisco geek-prophet. “It is necessary to go back,” Land writes, “beyond the origin of Enlightenment, because Reason has failed the test of history.” And on democracy itself: it is “not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative.” Indeed, for Land, the only hope is to run for the exits, to “take the red pill” of dark enlightenment, then strap ourselves in and get ready to ride the “time-twisted vector that spirals forwards into the past, and backwards into the future.” There is much talk of “exit” in Land’s dismal prose, some of it sounding more than a little like suicide. Unlike many others in the movement for restoration, Land and Moldbug are atheists, and they go Nietzsche one better: God is dead, ecce novum hominem: Trump and Putin.
The question then arises: if not liberal, globalist democracy, as typified in consolidations like the EU, what? For many on the Alt-Right spectrum, the Holy Grail is ultimately some form of anarcho-capitalism, often wrapped in ethnic nationalism and/or separatism. They make it sound pretty cool, what with those awesome seasteading islands and sovcorps with their latter-day dukes and viscounts, executing heroic feats of arbitrage. But how to get there? Here the weather gets stormier in Westeros, because the road to this libertarian dream leads us back through some manner of monarchy. You see, it takes a strongman to implement such a drastic change: to vanquish once and for all the scourges of multiculturalism and liberal democracy. Once this is accomplished, they theorize, the monarch will happily abdicate and leave this brave new world to these brave new men, restored to virility and brimming with disruptive innovation. It sounds more than a little like the Marxist/Leninist notion of a transitional vanguard regime to install “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” A like-minded proposal, advanced by economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, envisions covenant communities with express legal right to exclude anyone and everyone not of their kind. You see where we’re going, right? You can’t come in our clubhouse.
It’s all sounds very boyish: equal parts Lord Of The Flies and Swiss Family Robinson. It’s not entirely surprising that a generation of boys reared on World Of Warcraft and Game Of Thrones, who have spent their weekends on solipsistic thought-islands and know nothing of the female psyche or anatomy that hasn’t been revealed to them by Internet porn or the Twilight series, much less about the lives of people in Aleppo or even South Central L.A., might see appeal in this sort of existential cosplay. It’s far more troubling to witness grown men like Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, Sebastian Gorka, and Peter Thiel playing dress-up and king of the hill. And who is the reigning king-of-the-hill? None other than he who CNN recently crowned “The Most Powerful Man In The World”: Vladimir Putin.
Whispering in Putin’s ear is the man Steve Bannon alluded to when he said to the 2014 Vatican conference of the right-wing Catholic Human Dignity Institute: “He (Putin) has an adviser (Alexandr Dugin) who harkens back to Julius Evola and different writers of the early 20th century who are really the supporters of what’s called the traditionalist movement, which eventually metastasized into Italian fascism. A lot of people are attracted to that. I’m not justifying Vladimir Putin and the kleptocracy he represents… However, we in the Judeo-Christian West really have to look at what he’s talking about as far as traditionalism — particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism. Putin’s…very, very, very intelligent. I can see this in the United States where he’s playing very strongly to social conservatives…” And here is what Putin’s Rasputin has to say about the shape of things to come:
“Putin and Trump are in two opposite corners of the planet. In the 20th century, these two extremes were embodied by the most radical forms of Modernity — capitalism and communism.
Now they have turned into two eschatological promises: Putin’s Greater Russia and America liberating itself under Trump. The 21st century has finally begun. All we need now is the Fire.”
Dugin, a National Bolshevik and an apostle of Martin Heidegger, is a charismatic figure, and it’s not hard to see how he might have woven his spell around Putin. Of course, flattery doesn’t hurt. He was quoted in 2007 as saying, “There are no more opponents of Putin’s course and, if there are, they are mentally ill and need to be sent off for clinical examination. Putin is everywhere, Putin is everything, Putin is absolute, Putin is indispensable.”
The notion of a return to tradition has enormous emotional appeal. What romantic wouldn’t like to spend a season in King Arthur’s court, or stand astride Alpine summits as imagined by Caspar David Friedrich, his breast swollen with Nietzschean will-to-power? But beware: no sentiment is so easily stirred by demagogues, and attempts to impose a Dark Age mindset on the modern world have generally not turned out well for humanity (the Islamic State, the Khmer Rouge, and of course, the Third Reich are all examples of killing the flame in hopes of restoring purity).
There is much confusion about political labels these days. What may clear the air a bit is to remind ourselves of the historical origins of the terms “right wing” and “left wing.” When the National Assembly met during the French Revolutionary period of 1789, the supporters of the Ancien Régime — of the King, of Tradition, of Hierarchy and Order — sat to the “right” of the president of the Assembly. The supporters of the Revolution — of Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité — gathered on the “left.” In important ways, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
No return to tradition is tolerable if we have to go there in a ship of sociopaths, and no restoration that invites tyranny will ever again be acceptable.
Some years ago, in my second novel, The Last Days Of Madame Rey, the protagonist, private investigator Stephan Raszer, took his own “red pill” and discovered a bifurcation in the human line which had led to a sub-species lacking the capacity for empathy. The Stumps is what he came to call them, for anatomical reasons you’ll have to discover for yourself. It’s a book full of anagrams, cyphers, gematria, and verses written with tarot cards, but the final three letters in Stump — u, m, p — should require no decryption.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
— W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming
Sources
