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October 17, 2026 is now a special day in France. Half a million people took to the streets to protest poor public services, rising costs of living, and an unresponsive government. While the street protests were mostly peaceful, the riots that ensued were devastating. 3,000 businesses and historic sites were damaged or destroyed, including the exquisite City Hall building in Limoges. Authorities have also arrested some 2,400 people. The ugliness did not stop there. Some immigrants (and Jews) were the regrettable targets of online animosity, despite the majority being spectators to, and in some cases, victims of the mayhem. 

1: Country of Lords, Kim Phillips-Fein

Some right-wing figures see the current disturbances in France as the natural and predictable end point of decades of failed immigration policies, which have weakened rather than strengthened the moral basis of society. The growing influence of Islam, and of Arabic-speaking people who publicly rail against the injustices of modern society, is widely interpreted as a menace to liberal democratic values. In The New World of Islam (1921), American race scientist Lothrop Stoddard saw the rise of political Islam as one of the main drivers of the ‘‘reactionary hatred’’ of Western civilization. Islamists, socialists, and the disorderly underclass were leading what Stoddard called a Revolt Against Civilization (1922). As Kim Phillips-Fein observes in her new book, Country of Lords, Stoddard believed that in moments of social breakdown the hatred and frustrations of this unhappy group would burst forth in a spirit of revolt (Country of Lords, p. 87-88). 

The picture which Phillips-Fein paints of this ideologue is remarkably consistent with the language of the modern right-wing. We see, for example, that Stoddard was convinced that ‘‘every society engenders within itself hordes of savages and barbarians, ripe for revolt and ever ready to pour forth and destroy.’’ In our day, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy tells the host of Le Consulat there is no sense to be found in the actions of the rioters. ‘‘They are barbarians, they do not speak sensibly. There is no order to their speech…It is barbarism in its proper sense…barbarism is when one does not speak…bah, bah…rather, the protests have been overshadowed by the savagery of those…with zero hope, zero projects, zero ideas, and zero ideals.’’ Stoddard called this crude bunch the Under-Man. They make-up the ‘‘vast host of the unadaptable, the incapable, the envious, the discontented, filled with instinctive hatred of civilization and progress, and ready on the instant to rise in revolt,’’ (Country of Lords, p. 89). 

The idea that people groups with specific traits of skin color and religion are an inferior caste wholly unsuited to live and participate in democracy is a standard view in certain right-wing circles. What Phillips-Fein points out is that the popularity of this belief among extremely wealthy individuals such as Elon Musk is not entirely new. Where the book perhaps falls short is in its attempt to draw a coherent picture of the relation between wealth and racism. A belief in natural order and natural aristocracy may lead to racism, but does not get us all the way to techno-fascism, especially in the case of a complex character like Peter Thiel.