Many commentators are now unsure what to make of the contemporary American right. Longstanding conventional wisdom suggested that the base of the American right could be typified by Ronald Reagan’s “three-legged stool.” Its “legs” were: right-wing libertarians, white evangelical Christians, and foreign policy hawks calling for a sterner attitude towards international communism, Islamism, or whatever other ism happened to be a geopolitical rival that year. On the intellectual side, there were a host of thinkers and influencers that any erudite conservative would know. As Matthew Continetti notes in his handsome guide The Right they included right-wing liberals like George Will, fusionist popularizers like William F. Buckley, neocons like Irving and Bill Kristol (father and son), tragedians à la Thomas Sowell, libertarians like Ayn Rand and the objectivists, and traditionalists from Robert Bork to Phyllis Schlafly. Dig deeper and the major philosophers on the American right included a motley mix of the homegrown thinkers and European imports: Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, Leo Strauss, Milton Friedman, the two Johns (Locke and Adams), the more conservative of the Founding Fathers, and of course Edmund Burke, William Blackstone and the Monopoly Man.
Of course, we all know what they say about conventional wisdom. Recent books by historians like David Austin Walsh and Quinn Slobodian have shown, in their respective Taking America Back and Hayek’s Bastards (which I reviewed here), that the intellectual permutations of the American right were always more expansive, weird, and often radical than was appreciated. In Fascism in America, editors Gavriel Rosenfeld and Janet Ward assemble a range of contributors to chronicle the enduring popularity of radical-right and Nazi ideas on the American right over the years. Many of these ideas were brought in from Europe. However, plenty emerged closer to home and were even, sometimes, outright exported to the fascists themselves à la the well documented influence of America’s Jim Crow policies on the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws. All this, the authors implore, helps explain why hard right ideas could not only find a receptive American audience in the 21st century, but could make their way all the way to the White House.
The intellectual permutations of the American right were always more expansive, weird, and often radical than is appreciated.
Still, there remains an enormous amount of confusion and even outrage over just what is inspiring many on the hard right. More than just swapping snippets of Capitalism and Freedom and circulating memes with botched quotes from Thus Spake Zarathustra, current hard-right influencers like Bronze Age Pervert, Adrian Vermeule, Aleksandr Dugin, Steve Bannon, L0m3z, Curtis Yarvin and others seem cut from a different cloth. They make no bones about their counter-revolutionary aspirations, which have since drifted into the more mainstream right. The motivation certainly does not begin with the Burkean “reform in order to conserve,” but rather the emphatic desire to smash what is variously described as the progressive cathedral, the longhouse, or the total state, lorded over by “bugmen” and (worse) modern multitudes of women. These influencers also drink heavily from darker streams of right-wing thought—streams that many thought could never find wide purchase in the United States and which draw us back toward the problems with conventional wisdom.
The German Conservative Revolutionaries
It is a serious mistake to assume that radical illiberals are incapable of serious thought (though admittedly, the vast majority of online radical “anons” would lead any thinking person to that conclusion). As political theorist Ronald Beiner notes in his epic Civil Religion, many of the “most interesting thinkers are radicals, prepared to follow their respective thought-paths as far as it takes them.” Indeed, a self-conscious radicalism can itself be seen as an antidote to the perceived effeminate lethargy of a sclerotic liberal order, which is doubtless a source of much of their contemporary appeal. According to Beiner, philosophers on the hard right, such as de Maistre, Carl Schmitt, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, fascinate and perennially excite because their “deepest objection to liberalism as a way of life is its deliberately nonheroic or anti-heroic attitude to life, its banalization of the problem of human existence…” The appeal is perennial, despite the fact that the “heroic” attitudes of the far right inexorably lead it to bloviation, cruelty, defeat, shame, and humiliation.
Many on today’s hard right are deeply influenced by thinkers of the “Conservative Revolution” and its antecedents in post-war Germany. Provoked and humiliated by the defeat of the German Empire and the rise of the Weimar Republic, many young German intellectuals looked upon the new liberal democracy (largely forged by the socialist Social Democratic Party) with disdain. They were alarmed at the mass enfranchisement of the demos—including women—and contemptuous of the spread of liberal individualism and a pluralistic political culture. But the conservative revolutionaries were not mere revanchists; many were convinced that older conservative elites had failed the country by letting the rot of bolshevism, liberalism, feminism, and democracy spread without inhibition. They began searching for a new kind of radical politics which would be more successful in challenging the left and restoring Germany—and even the entire West, in the case of Spengler and Heidegger—to greatness. Many became interested in once more raising politics to a level of metaphysical and theological intensity, as a way of offsetting a perceived decline.
Many on today’s hard right are deeply influenced by thinkers of the “Conservative Revolution” and its antecedents in post-war Germany. The conservative revolutionaries were not mere revanchists; many were convinced that older conservative elites had failed the country by letting the rot of bolshevism, liberalism, feminism, and democracy spread without inhibition.
Most of the Conservative Revolutionaries were deeply impressed by older radical right thinkers from Joseph de Maistre to Nietzsche. De Maistre was an arch-Catholic reactionary of the 18th and 19th centuries who characterized the French Revolution as Satanic, insisting that providence would bring about the inevitable downfall of republicanism (given that France remains a republic today, one wonders if providence was in fact on the side of Robespierre?) De Maistre insisted that it was not democracy but monarchy that most elevated ordinary people, by allowing them to participate in its splendor. Ordinary people often didn’t feel the same way. In such cases, De Maistre argued (in his St. Petersburg Dialogues) that the hangman could be the glue holding society together, thanks to the human fascination with, and fear of, violence and death.
But in terms of influencing the Weimar right, few could compete with Friedrich Nietzsche, characterized by Danish admirer Georg Brandes as a vigorous proponent of “aristocratic radicalism.” The self-described anti-Christ was especially influential. Nietzsche characterized the modern world as an increasingly nihilistic wasteland overseen by gutless last men, brought about by the spread of secular Christian doctrines like socialism and liberalism. This fascinated generations of Germans raised on or in the shadow of the front. As did the late Nietzsche’s uncompromising rejection of democracy as rule by the “herd,” with its values grounded in ressentiment. In Beyond Good and Evil and other works, Nietzsche suggested that only radical aristocracy could restore Western culture, and even speculated about the breeding of such aristocrats.
Weimar Germany itself was not wanting in far-right philosophers. In Political Theology, Carl Schmitt mused that all political concepts were secularized theological concepts in existential conflict with one another. Political friends were those who shared our political convictions and were consequently willing to confront enemies who did not. Schmitt sneered at liberal democracy’s pretense to overcome such deep conflict through parliamentary dialogue and toleration, hypothesizing that when the chips were down, liberals would either repress their enemies or hold fast to their tolerant principles and be repressed in turn. Far preferable to this liberal-democratic state of affairs was the figure of a popular dictator, who could even be said to be more “democratic” than liberalism if he truly embodied and instantiated the will of the people (i.e., without any of the dull procedural constraints on executive power that liberals always insisting upon). Not coincidentally Schmitt later became a Nazi jurist who wrote anti-Semitic tirades in books like The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, where he blamed Jewish liberals like Spinoza for undermining the homogeneity of the community by propagating dangerous individualism.
Martin Heidegger was simultaneously a philosophic genius and a Nazi shill. Long downplayed, the depth of his engagement with Nazism has increasingly come to light. Heidegger followed Nietzsche in regarding modernity as a long fall into nihilism. But Heidegger went even further and characterized virtually the entire history of Western metaphysics—the real spine of history—from Plato onwards as a gradual descent. This decline was only partially offset by the glories of German philosophy and poetry. Heidegger saw modern life in particular as dominated by technical thinking which saw Being as a whole as nothing but a “standing reserve” to be manipulated to gratify human desires. Seen from this perspective, in Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger pooh-poohed liberalism and socialism as “metaphysically the same.” Both were decadent humanist philosophies whose allegedly “epochal” debate boiled down to technical disputes over how best to build and distribute toasters. By contrast, only Germany, rejuvenated under Hitler, was spiritually attuned enough to save the West by rejecting the reign of the inauthentic “mediocre.” Later in life, Heidegger distanced himself from Nazism. But this was less an outright rejection of it than the expression of a dual conviction: that Hitler himself turned out to be an example of the same metaphysical nihilism that Heidegger condemned, and that he himself had merely erred in assuming the solution to West’s spiritual decline had come so early. He expected to be vindicated in the fullness of time.
The Conservative Revolutionaries on the American Right
Through the latter half of the 20th century, the thinking of the German Conservative Revolutionaries was either dismissed for its alignment with Nazism or repurposed and sanitized. Spengler was dismissed as a hacky eccentric. De Maistre was famously outed as the irrationalist godfather of fascism by Isaiah Berlin. Schmitt became a persona non grata in polite company. Most unusually, Nietzsche and Heidegger were reinvented—largely by French leftists—as proto-postmodern bohemians. Of course, readings of them as right-wing thinkers never disappeared, but it was considered too dangerous to assert it forcefully.
Today, things have changed radically. Many of the major influencers on the American (and global) far right are themselves deeply influenced by the conservative revolutionaries and their antecedents. Usually, this comes in a very watered-down, populist form that can only be applied uncomfortably to resolutely aristocratic philosophers.
De Maistre has been notably lauded by far-right host Auron Macintyre. In his impressively lazy book The Total State, MacIntyre reads de Maistre as anticipating the rise of the titular liberal totalitarian state, which surprisingly still allowed him to publish his book and advocate for his causes. He’s particularly impressed by de Maistre’s insistence that a real constitution must not be written down but instead must lie in the organic feelings of its members. Appealing to such a sentimental account, MacIntyre laments how the written American constitution has been “twisted” by liberal leaders to support the secular pluralistic society that is the basis of the total state.
Steve Bannon has chummed around with Dugin due to their shared love of Heidegger and other far-right philosophers. They aspire to create something like a worldwide far-right détente.
Heidegger’s thinking, for its part, has had an enormous influence on far-right influencers like Aleksandr Dugin, Michael Millerman, and Steven Bannon. Aleksandr Dugin is a Russian firebrand and far-right philosopher. Despite vehement anti-Americanism, he’s had a waxing influence in the United States. Tucker Carlson even hosted a fawning interview with him. Dugin’s Canadian disciple, Michael Millerman, was involved in a minor academic scandal and has since offered classes on political philosophy, mainly catering to a right-wing audience. He’s worked hard to popularize Dugin in the United States through outlets like First Things. Dugin and Millerman have both written lengthy books on Heidegger (I’ve grappled with them here and here) that have excused his Nazism as an unfortunate error, all the while defending his rejection of liberalism and democracy as essentially correct. For a long time, Dugin identified overtly with a Heideggerian-inflected version of fascism, though this was later rebranded with the terminology of “fourth” political theory. Most readers of Dugin note that these calls for a political theory which goes beyond liberalism, communism, and fascism could more accurately be called…fascism. As chronicled in Ben Teitelbaum’s War for Eternity, Bannon has chummed around with Dugin due to their shared love of Heidegger and other far-right philosophers. They aspire to create something like a worldwide far-right détente, though Teitelbaum’s account suggests a combination of mutual ego and nationalist tensions poses a barrier.
But without a doubt, it is Schmitt and Nietzsche with whom the contemporary American right is most infatuated. Schmitt has found a receptive audience for his claim that liberalism is an inherently hypocritical doctrine, including in popularizers like MacIntyre but more importantly in politicians like Vice President JD Vance (who invoked him recently). Schmitt has found more haute proponents as well. Harvard University’s integralist Adrian Vermeule has cited Schmitt as an influence on his own characterizations of American liberalism as despotic and totalizing, seeing him as a useful thinker for how to bring about a theocratic integration of right-wing church and state. Vermeule’s “common good constitutionalism” takes a dim, instrumental (at best) view of democracy. He has been vocally critical of any calls to restrict presidential authority through boring things like adherence to legal procedure, echoing Schmitt’s fascination with demotic executive power wielded on behalf of a decisionist theology.
Nietzsche’s influence has been even more enormous. In its more “moderate” expressions, “reformed” white supremacists like Richard Hanania call for a kind of “liberal Nietzscheanism” instantiated through the market, where the best will rise and fall through creative competition. For those who want harder drink, Bronze Age Pervert’s best-sellers, Bronze Age Mindset and Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, take Nietzsche’s aristocratic disdain for the ordinary “bugmen” to extremes. His self-consciously trollish elitism strips Nietzsche of much of his profundity. Nevertheless, Pervert has found an enthusiastic audience amongst young right-wing men eager to hear why they have been dispossessed of their noble title by being told to get a job at Panda Express. Unsurprisingly, much of this has overlapped and married with overt racism and misogyny. Plenty of people align BAP’s calls for the breeding of an aristocracy with various nativist and white supremacist complexes, no doubt egged on by his falls for fascism or “something worse.”
Bronze Age Pervert’s best-sellers take Nietzsche’s aristocratic disdain for the ordinary “bugmen” to extremes. Nevertheless, Pervert has found an enthusiastic audience amongst young right-wing men…
Reinvigorating Liberalism
In 1987’s The Closing of the American Mind, the Straussian Allan Bloom decried the import of German philosophy for corrupting young, mostly liberal, students. Its dangerous influence could be seen in everything from libertine relativism to their fixation on Mick Jagger’s utterly hypnotic hips. Bloom’s book was wrong on several fronts. Firstly, he wildly overestimated the importance of philosophy in shaping the culture of the times. This is a very common indulgence of philosophers, including many of the Germans mentioned, who are often too removed from material forces to recognize their importance. Secondly, Bloom failed to recognize how, while calls to reject Enlightenment and even Platonic rationalism might have a transitory (though real) appeal on the left, they would eventually gravitate back to their natural home on the right. As Richard Wolin has observed, “the seduction of unreason” has always held enormous attraction among conservatives, too.
If we’re ever going to regain our footing, those of us committed to the Enlightenment project must reacquaint the young with the erotic charms of reason itself.
If we’re ever going to regain our footing, those of us committed to the Enlightenment project must reacquaint the young with the erotic charms of reason itself. Liberals have spent a long time defending a kind of nebbish technocracy, where expert managers will oversee an unequal, increasingly oligarchic economy and every four years redistribute some of its goodies to any coalition large enough to secure them a victory. Liberalism as technocracy is crouched and uninspiring, and in many ways so was Reagan’s neoliberal conservative stool. If the American right’s new adventures in Revolutionary Conservatism can teach us anything, it’s that we need to offer those who might be seduced by unreason a more affirming, ambitious creed. Let’s set that as a new task for our own era.
Matt McManus is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Political Right and Equality and recently The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, among other books.
Image made by Aaron Irion using “Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche,” by Gstatic licensed under CC Attribution 2.5 Generic; “Heidegger 1 (1960),” by Willy Pragher licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. Any other images used are in the public domain.
