The Far Right Canon

Liberals, socialists and mainstream conservatives all have distinctive “canons” of great authors. For liberals Locke, Wollstonecraft, Mill, Mills, Hayek, Rawls, and Nussbaum are all essential authors. Anyone committed to the free development of each and all draws upon Marx and Engels, alongside Orwell, Bernstein, Tolstoy, Luxemburg, Robinson, Harvey and Fraser. Conservatives have long drawn insight from Burke, Adams, Stephen, Kirk, Eliot, Grant and Scruton. While obviously fluid and, when healthy, expansive the core members of these canons are quite well established and serve as a vital intellectual resource for new generations of liberals, socialists, and conservatives. 

By contrast the canonical intellectuals of the radical right are far less known to mainstream readers and even political junkies. One reason is historical. With the defeat of Nazism, the post-war intellectual climate became dominated by the world-historical rivalry between capitalism and communism. The global hegemony of these two Enlightenment doctrines was often resented by many far right intellectuals. But they remained unable to crack open the Overton window and regain anything like mainstream traction or respectability. As Matthew Rose notes in his far too sympathetic A World After Liberalism the "radical right is the true ‘other’ in culture. Unlike the radical left, its authors are not found in university curricula, and sometimes not even in university libraries. Nor are its ideas and believers thoughtfully depicted in our literature, entertainment, or art. We know them as moral monsters, as cynical exploiters of hatred, or as ignorant of the education and experience that disprove their errors."

A second reason is undoubtedly the generally low quality of radical right argumentation. There are undoubtedly some impressive, even profound thinkers on the radical right. Almost all happen to be German: Nietzsche, Schmitt and Heidegger. But as anyone who has been knocked asleep reading radical right influencer Auron MacIntyre’s The Total State knows, exceptions really do prove the rule. Mystification and the most bloviated abstractions abound, made all the more funny by shrill efforts to project profundity onto golden calf after fetishized idol. Appeals to “providence” and “instinct” and reifications like “organic unity” pervade much of their writing, by necessity substituting sloganeering assertions and abstractions for actual deliberative argumentation. Sometimes a deliberate embrace of unreal entities is even accepted. In a 1922 speech Mussolini acknowledged that

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality. It is a reality in the sense that it is a stimulus, is hope, is faith, is courage. Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, we subordinate everything else.

Why we can’t subordinate ourselves to anything actually real is left unexplained by Il Duce.  

Commentators often echo these observations about the radical right’s struggles to articulate itself beyond appealing to the gut and so speaking out the ass. The implication drawn is  that understanding its intellectual genealogy is largely a waste of time. Marx famously directed much of his ire towards bourgeois economists and pretty much every other socialist, regarding reactionaries as beneath intellectual contempt. Sociologist Michael Mann once quipped that fascism was the playground of the “lesser intelligentsia.” In his classic The Anatomy of Fascism Robert Paxton noted that fascism has “not been given intellectual underpinnings by any system builder, like Marx, or by any major critical intelligence, like Mill, Burke, or Tocqueville” and was an “affair of the gut more than the head.”  

Finally there are definitional problems in even defining the “radical right.” As Mark Sedgwick noted in Key Thinkers of the Radical Right there are “many problems of definition and classification involved in writing about the radical right. Terms such as ‘far right’ and ‘extreme right’ are widely used and are thus useful for denoting the phenomenon in question, but they are less useful for defining or delimiting it.” Compounding the difficulty is the fact that the “radical Right, too, has its own terminology. The term ‘New Right’ is often used, and the term ‘Alt Right’ has recently come into prominence. There are also nationalists, identitarians, libertarians, neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, counter-jihadists and neoreactionaries. These differ in important ways, but all have something in common.” The radical right is a liminal space. Compounding the difficulties is the tendency to lump everyone under the label “fascist” and be done with it. While there are a lot of good reasons to apply the term to what is happening today, as applies to dissident right intellectuals it fails to capture the current diversity on that end of the spectrum. Conservative authoritarians who want quiescent subjects are very different from fascists who want dutiful but passionate masses. White nationalists in the vein of Sam Francis are often far more willing to be critical of Christianity than religious chauvinists. Bordertarians citing Mises and IQ tests don’t have much patience for mystical MAGA evangelicals. Accounting for these differences is important in mapping the space. Oftentimes they’re less united on what they’re for than what they’re against. Namely, to invoke Rose, the dream of a world after liberalism where they are never compelled to comment about the casting in a Disney remake again. 

The philosophy of the radical right 

The appeal of the far right to intellectuals is relatively easy to understand. I’ll offer three interrelated reasons, with the caveat that there are more and much is contextual.

The first is affective and existential. In his epic Civil Religion Ronald Beiner observes the longstanding power of right thinkers like Maistre, Nietzsche and Heidegger. 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…” On this understanding the scientific rationalism and universalism common to Enlightenment doctrines such as socialism and rationalism is inherently nihilistic, relativistic and egalitarian. In his essay “Message from Mars” the white nationalist Sam Francis sneers at liberal cosmopolitanism for its “abstract universalism, its refusal to make any distinctions among human beings. The brotherhood of man, egalitarianism, the relativization of moral values, and the rejection of conventional social and cultural identities as obsolete and repressive all derive from this universalistic tendency.” 

Responding to this alleged banalization is a core aspiration of the far right, though they disagree on how to achieve it. Though all are united by their anti-egalitarianism. From Carlyle to Nietzsche and BAP there is a tradition that calls for “heroic” or “higher” values that entail elevating superior persons over the “bugmen” who deserve little and will reap less.  Failure to do so will mean the disintegration of culture through decadent leveling and the catastrophic normalization of Gen Z Bosses and a Mini. The excitement and aspirations to this kind of  nobility, greatness and existential dynamism proposed by the far right has seduced many, including intellectuals. Others frame this in more pseudo-communitarian language. White nationalists from the Nazis to Sam Francis resent the cosmopolitan push to treat any and all others as we ourselves would wish to be treated, insisting that we owe primary obligations to those in our own nation and race. Failure to do so is regarded as a kind of dismal indifference, lacking feeling and connection. Very often this is aligned with an insistence on the superiority of one’s race over competitors, which entitles it to pampered treatment. 

That there is nothing particularly demanding, and an enormous amount that is intellectually and morally lazy, about the existential challenge of putting yourself first and saying you and those like you deserve it shouldn’t be lost on anyone. There is a reason the radical right thinkers from Heidegger to Dugin begin by calling for greatness while the movement ends by conscripting old men and boys to die for their peacocking dictators. 

The second major reason for the appeal is pathological, and is an extension from the first. The thinking of the radical right is pervaded by the language of personal or communal aristocracy and greatness. From Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism to Evola’s self-help guides to the “aristocrats of the soul” the hierarchical implication is that some people are simply better than others. More spiritually attuned, racially pure, intelligent, healthier—you name it. This aristocratic language will always be attractive to many intellectuals, who aren’t famous for their small egos. Some radical right authors like Heidegger or Dugin even offer up the philosopher as the key interpreter and visionary of his society, prescribing a “destiny” for the “swarming multitudes” of the mediocre. This megalomania is fantastic and often very funny, but needless to say can be attractive to the right personality driven by a visionary sensibility and a yearning for dominance. Everyone has encountered another person willing to list the reasons they’re better than you—just go into any dive bar after 11:00 PM     This is coupled with a deep sense of ressentiment towards being marginalized by democracy and the forces of equality—being dispossessed of an aristocratic heritage that should have been theirs. A key to the pathology of the radical right it offers both a powerful sense of aristocratic elevation and a deep sense of wounded victimization.  While in many senses contradictory, this combined sense of being better and being wronged is exceptionally attractive. Not coincidentally in his Oxford Fascism reader Roger Griffin notes revenge fantasies are very common amongst fascists. The same is true of many on today’s radical right. 

Finally, many on the radical right are deeply disturbed by what they take to be the metaphysical chaos of the world. This is often aligned with a sense of decadent forces being ascendent and the natural order of things coming under attack. When he was still Mencius Moldbug Curtis Yarvin’s writings were full of ruminations about how the Cthulhu-like left was bringing about chaos, while apparently also creating a total state where any and all discontent was silenced by the Cathedral before it even got started.  Because of this spreading chaos being conservative is “no longer enough” as Glenn Elmers puts it. A new sense of order must be created by transcending atomistic individualism and reorienting and reuniting the culture. In the hands of the most accomplished radical right thinkers, like Nietzsche, Heidegger and Schmitt, this is often responded to by calls for the self-conscious creation or discovery of new values and theologies. These have a radical contingency in being solely the creation of the great thinker, or a rejuvenation that calls for rejecting the long nihilism of Western metaphysics’  forgetting of Being going back to Plato. 

But more often than not the kind of radical contingency and/or rejection of millennia long traditions stressed by these deeper radical right authors is more than the ordinary Elon Musk stan can stomach. Even for its great thinkers the prospect of living in a world without clear metaphysical certainty is treated as a potentially enormous loss. Amongst the many lesser authors the enormous difficulties of determining the truth or falsity of moral doctrines, or proving the real existence of imagined communities like the nation, are short-circuited, usually by crude appeals to instinct plus experience, tradition, prejudice, providence, dogma or just owning the libs. If convincing oneself this orderly value system is real and true means rejecting rational arguments that it is not (often very easy to do) then so much the worse for “leveling” reason.

Maistre captured the sentiment well in “Against Rousseau” and other works where  he insisted that reason was a destructive force, and nowhere more so than when everyone saw fit to use it. Dogmas were preferable, and where that failed, the hangman could overawe opposition. In practice what this means is the radical right is often indifferent to, or hostile to, truth understood in any fallibilistic (let alone Socratic) sense. It is not to be debated and gradually acquired, let alone lie permanently out of reach. That Nietzsche sometimes implied this is one of the reasons his thought has been perennially bastardized for populist purposes on the radical right. For most on the radical right, appeals to “truth”  are not arrived at through deliberative and cooperative reason, but through fiats committing us to certainties. Willmoore Kendall’s musing that the Athenians were right to kill “revolutionary” Socrates is a good example. Mussolini’s insistence that we bow before an unreal “nation” created as myth is another. Dugin’s insistence that the Russian people or “Narod” must live authentically if they are to achieve their destiny as understood by the “single ones” (aka people like him) is a more modern one. These certainties are defended less because they are true than because they are edifying, appealing to the instincts and needs of the radical right. If skeptical desire for the truth undermines those certainties in a way that frightens the instincts, let doxa prevail. Facts very much care about right-wing feelings as it turns out.     

This may seem to constitute a kind of an anti-intellectual animus that would inoculate intellectuals from gravitating to the radical right. And indeed that is often the case. But the felt need for such certainties can also inspire intellectual efforts; occasionally even impressive ones. Living in Socratic uncertainty, fallibilistically questioning truth-claims, or opening up issues to reasonable democratic deliberation aren’t for everyone. The hostility is towards intellectualism as a continuing enterprise that throws up settled questions to political debate, controversy and potential dissolution, not to specific strands of intellectualism that offer sometimes creative apologias and affirmations, serving as a stimulus for action, nor, in rare cases, to radical right intellectuals of vision and grandeur who are to be revered and obeyed. As Gentile mused in The Origins and Doctrine of Fascism

Intellectualism divorces thought from action, science from life, the brain from the heart, and theory from practice. It is the posture of the talker and the skeptic, of the person who entrenches himself behind the maxim that it is one thing to say something and another thing to do it; it is the utopian who is the fabricator of systems that will never face concrete reality; it is the talk of the poet, the scientist, the philosopher who confine themselves to fantasy and to speculation and are ill-disposed to look around themselves and see the earth on which they tread and on which are to be found those fundamental human interests that feed their very fantasy and intelligence.

Gentile goes on to say that “anti-intellectualism” does not deny the importance of philosophy and science as stimulus for action and correct spiritual insights. The key point for most radical right intellectuals is that intellectualism must eventually come to an end—be closed off as it were. Even Nietzsche and Heidegger adopted the aristocratic view that genuinely open philosophy should probably be available only to a select elite, not the “mediocre” or herd who are better off submitting to their betters. Here the aristocratic sensibilities of the radical right fuse with this yearning for certainty to produce a stratification between the (at best) very few visionaries entitled to thought and agency and the herd who are either to be passive subjects or passionate masses, but who above all will obey their betters. The alternative is the disorder brought about by democracy, egalitarianism and women having control over their own bodies. Solid norms grounded in longstanding prejudices and hierarchies melt away. Everything comes up for dispute in democracy. A sense of the “high” values the community or volk is committed to disappears. And from there nihilism creeps in. 

Early radical right thinkers 

In the remainder of this essay I’ll briefly highlight some of the key thinkers of the far right and discuss their contributions. This will also avoid becoming too contemporary, meaning the likes of Curtis Yarvin, Sam Francis, Aleksandr Dugin and others will have to wait for another list. The canon is not meant to be exhaustive, but representative. The hope is to give readers a sense of what is out there, to better enable them to combat the rising tide of irrationalism.

Joseph de Maistre 

Lawgivers, strictly speaking, are extraordinary men, belonging perhaps only to the ancient world and to the youth of nations. Providence has decreed the more rapid formation of a political constitution, there appears a man clothed with an indefinable power; he speaks, and he makes himself to be obeyed. These lawgivers par excellence possess one distinctive characteristic: they are kings, or eminently noble; on this point, there is and can be no exception.

Joseph de Maistre, The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions 

Joseph de Maistre was famously described as the godfather of fascist irrationalism by Isaiah Berlin. This can give off the impression of a rigid author, which is untrue. Maistre is often caustic, funny and always exciting. Much of his appeal lies in an uncompromising rejection of liberalism, which he calls “Satanic” in its Luciferean willingness to rebel against God’s ordained order. While he aimed at systematicity in the St Petersburg Dialogues Maistre’s main insights were a combination of skepticism towards the claims of Enlightenment reason and dogmatic insistence on reactionary certainties. That combination of skepticism and dogmatism can seem contradictory until one follows Maistre in realizing that since reason can never answer any problems permanently, deference to authority is required for human life.

This of course included the authorities of throne and altar towards which one must be utterly obedient. Maistre innovated in trying to give reaction a counter-cultural appeal. He argued that monarchy elevated the people in a way democracy could not, since democracy divided power and so made it weak. By contrast monarchy allowed the people to participate in its splendor; albeit from a distance and lacking agency. Maistre also pioneered a kind of pseudo-punk attitude, often presenting his insights as dangerous and opposed to a rising tide of liberalism which Providence would eventually roll back. He admitted millions of Frenchmen would have to die for this to be accomplished, but that was a price Maistre was willing to have them pay for Louis XVIII to be hauled back onto the throne. He has had a major influence on writers like Schmitt, Evola and lesser fabulists like Auron MacIntyre. 

Thomas Carlyle 

Man, little as he may suppose it, is necessitated to obey superiors. He is a social being in virtue of this necessity; nay, he could not be gregarious otherwise. He obeys those whom he esteems better than himself; wiser, braver, and will forever obey such; and even be ready and delighted to do so.

Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present 

Thomas Carlyle was an important 19^th century author, well known for his extensive history on the French Revolution and writings on great men. Disdainful of democracy, Carlyle nevertheless worried that its time had arrived and was vexed on how to respond. One way was retreat into unabashed elitism. In “On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History” Carlyle insists the “history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.” Carlyle was also unapologetically pro-slavery, with his “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” prompting a fierce rejoinder by abolitionist J.S Mill.

In fairness Carlyle was not just willing to entertain slavery for non-whites. Carlyle gained a reputation for having some anti-capitalist musings, and he did indeed contemplate something like guaranteed work for the indigent. But while musing about the Irish potato famine he proposes forced labor for the indigent, mocking those who wish to move and sell their labor. Should they refuse Carlyle insists he would “admonish and endeavor to incite you, if in vain, I will flog you; if still in vain, I will at last shoot you—and make God’s earth, and the forlorn-hope in God’s Battle, free of you.” Carlyle is also important for the appeals to instinct and feeling as a basis for justification. When rebutting those who argue Christianity is against harsh punishments he writes “there is written in the heart of every man a copy” of the law of the universe demanding “Revenge my Friends! Revenge and the natural hatred of scoundrels.” That most people’s hearts wound up writing differently than Carlyle’s is a difficulty he never really tackled effectively. Carlyle would go on to influence the Nazis, though Nietzsche considered him still too vulgar and plebeian. 

John C. Calhoun 

There is another error, not less great and dangerous, usually associated with the one which has just been considered. I refer to the opinion, that liberty and equality are so intimately united, that liberty cannot be perfect without perfect equality.  That they are united to a certain extent—and that equality of citizens, in the eyes of the law, is essential to liberty in a popular government, is conceded. But to go further, and make equality of condition essential to liberty, would be to destroy both liberty and progress. The reason is, that inequality of condition, while it is a necessary consequence of liberty, is, at the same time, indispensable to progress. In order to understand why this is so, it is necessary to bear in mind, that the main spring to progress is, the desire of individuals to better their condition; and that the strongest impulse which can be given to it is, to leave individuals free to exert themselves in the manner they may deem best for that purpose, as far at least as it can be done consistently with the ends for which government is ordained—and to secure to all the fruits of their exertions. Now, as individuals differ greatly from each other, in intelligence, sagacity, energy, perseverance, skill, habit of industry and economy, physical power, position and opportunity—the necessary effect of leaving all free to exert themselves to better their condition, must be a corresponding inequality between those who    may possess these qualities and advantages in a high degree, and those who may be deficient in them.

John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government 

Calhoun was Vice President of the United States and a fierce proponent of slavery and the south. Also a political and constitutional theorist of some note in his day, Calhoun did much to cast the aristocratic sensibilities of the south in a more populist and American idiom. One of his most famous arguments in A Disquisition on Government is an insistence that liberty and equality cannot be squared, since giving liberty to fundamentally unequal people will inevitably produce unequal results. In right wing liberal hands a la Ludwig von Mises this is often appealed to as a justification for economic inequalities.

But Calhoun went further and insisted that political and legal inequalities were also permissible. In an 1837 speech he insisted that abolitionist “aggression” ought not to be met by “concession” and that those who “act on the opposite principle are prepared to become slaves.”  Not that Calhoun had any problems with slavery…for others. He insisted he did not belong to that school of thought that saw slavery as a transient or even necessary evil. Instead it was a “good” since the “low, degraded and savage” condition of Africans had been gentled and morally improved by white tutelage.

Calhoun’s work remains essential to understanding the American far right, particularly how appeals to localism and liberty are often aligned with support for enormously coercive forms of despotism. Freedom for whites to enslave is of course incompatible with the freedom of slaves, much like the right of reactionaries to banish trans people is incompatible with their right to exist. 

Friedrich Nietzsche 

The poisonous doctrine, ‘equal rights for all,’ has been propagated as a Christian principle: out of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and distance between man and man,  which is to say, upon the first prerequisite to every step upward, to every development of civilization—out of the ressentiment of the masses it has forged its chief weapons against us, against everything noble, joyous and high-spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth.... To allow ‘immortality’ to every Peter and Paul was the greatest, the most vicious outrage upon noble humanity ever perpetrated.—And let us not underestimate the fatal influence that Christianity has had, even upon politics! Nowadays no one has courage any more for special rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of honourable pride in himself and his equals—for the pathos of distance.... Our politics is sick with this lack of courage!—The aristocratic attitude of mind has been undermined by the lie of the equality of souls; and if belief in the “privileges of the majority” makes and will continue to make revolutions.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

A thinker of genuine profundity and genius, Nietzsche would probably be unhappy being on a list with many others he’d consider mediocrities. Under the influence of translator Walter Kauffman, Nietzsche was long considered an apolitical existentialist, or perhaps even a quasi-left bohemian critic. Recent work by Bull, Losurdo, Beiner and others has done much to reintroduce Nietzsche as a radical right thinker committed to “aristocratic radicalism.” Nietzsche insisted that the aristocratic ethics, or master morality, of antiquity had given way in the modern world. Through the admonishments of Christianity and secular offshoots like democracy, socialism, and liberalism the instincts for mastery had given way to the values of the herd. Often sublimated as a higher kind of morality, in fact egalitarianism concealed a hidden ressentiment and desire for revenge by the sick and weak against their betters.

Nevertheless Nietzsche acknowledged that Christianity had deepened the soul of humankind, and sought a new aristocracy combining the will of Caesar with the spiritual creativity of Christ. This aristocracy would not be bound by a morality of compassion or pity. Slavery, great wars, misogyny, and the breeding of future aristocrats would all be on the table. In the posthumously assembled The Will to Power Nietzsche mused that the “great majority of men have no right to life, and serve only to disconcert the elect among our race; I do not yet grant the unfit that right. There are even unfit peoples.”

Hugely influential and creative, Nietzsche lies at the summit of right wing thought alongside the very different Burke and Dostoevsky. His deep ruminations on the Christian bases of liberalism, socialism and democracy have provoked many historical responses. He had a knack for psychological insight, as when he noted that those put in positions of subordination often seek a psychological and cultural form of revenge by framing themselves as morally superior to their oppressors. The irony is that this reintroduces a kind of hierarchy of valuation while posing as rejecting it. Wrestling seriously with him is an essential task. 

Twentieth century figures 

Oswald Spengler 

[Intellectual and trade freedom] together constitute liberalism (in the broad sense); that is, freedom from the restrictions of the soul-bound life, be these privileges, forms or feelings—freedom of the intellect for every kind of criticism, freedom of money for every kind of business. But both, too, unhesitatingly aim at the domination of a class, a domination which recognizes no overriding supremacy of the state. Mind and money, being both inorganic, want the State, not as a matured form of high symbolism to be venerated, but as an engine to serve a purpose.

Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West 

Spengler was an auto-didact whose epic book The Decline of the West captured and systematized many strands of radical right thought. Deeply influenced by Goethe and Nietzsche, his melancholic tale of cultural decline captured the feelings of post-war German conservative revolutionaries effectively. Per Rose, Spengler applies to “history the biological concept of living forms. It is an idea he borrowed from Goethe’s philosophy of nature but put to original purposes. Since cultures are product of human artifice, he reasoned, their histories have the shape of a human life.” For Spengler Western civilization was a unique and almost biological entity, interacting with but still separate from others. He at times implied a kind of egalitarian relativism to all cultures, while at others insisting that the “men of the Western culture” were exceptional. Their Faustian yearning for knowledge, power and transcendence generated enormous dynamism.

But he worried that as its spiritual roots began to decay through the ascendance of Enlightenment rationalism, this energy gave itself over to the hedonistic pleasure seeking of socialism and liberalism.  He worried that Western civilization had entered a period of terminal decline, and fretted about a “colored world revolution” that would end it permanently. Alternately Spengler mused that a Caesar and national socialism might present themselves as solutions. But when Hitler and his cronies did rise to power, Spengler largely dismissed them for their crude pseudo-biological racism and plebianism. In some respects the Nazis calls for a racial aristocracy of “pure” Germans was too inclusive for Spengler, in others too radically unappreciative of other culture's contributions. As an accurate historical picture The Decline of the West is hugely speculative, filled with reifications, often speeding past relevant counter-examples and relentlessly idealist. But its tragic tone and sweeping totalizations offered succor to many in the gloomy early days of the 20^th century. 

Carl Schmitt

“Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal, but unequals will not be treated equally.” 

Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy 

Carl Schmitt is another formidable thinker who, like Nietzsche, must be wrestled with by thoughtful liberals. Beginning life as a conservative reactionary influenced by Maistre, Schmitt joined the Nazis in the 1930s and published numerous antisemitic works like Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. He was later banished from the Nazi party for being a fellow traveler rather than a true believer, but never repented. At the core of Schmitt’s outlook is an agonistic view of politics as the site of existential and theological struggle. In Political Theology Schmitt insisted that all modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts, who attract believers and fundamentalists on their behalf. This divides politics into friends who believe with us and enemies who do not. Liberalism was distinctive in pretending to overcome this friend-enemy distinction, assuming that toleration and deliberation could settle political disputes instead of confrontation. Schmitt thought that was nonsense, and insisted liberals would too when push came to shove. Either they would banish threatening illiberal doctrines from their states, or be overcome by them and so cease to cherish liberal toleration.

Schmitt held ambiguous views about democracy that can go some way to explaining the populist dimensions of fascism at a theoretical level. He often insisted that genuine democracy might be in conflict with liberalism, since liberals cherished treating people equally as rights bearers whereas democrats accepted that members of the democratic community were entitled to agency while others were not. At times Schmitt mused that even a dictator could be a democratic figure if he genuinely implemented the will of the people. Often presenting his views as a realist vision of the world, Schmitt’s politics is in fact totalizing and often simplistic. He fails to appreciate how toleration exists as a matter of degree, and projects onto everyone else his own distinct need to banish competing theologies from the public square. Nevertheless Schmitt’s thinking poses a problem for liberal democrats they need better answers to. 

Martin Heidegger

Europe, in its unholy blindness always on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in the pincers between Russia on one side and America on the other. Russia and America, seen metaphysically are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and the rootless organization of the average man. When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically…when a boxer counts as a great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for?—where to?—and what then? The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline.

Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics 

Martin Heidegger was, like Nietzsche, a philosopher of genius. His pioneering work in Being and Time has been a great stimulus to creative thinking about art, the philosophy of mind, and computing. Heidegger was also an unrepentant Nazi who as late as his 1966 Der Spiegel interview insisted that he remained unimpressed by democracy. As Alexander Duff points out in Heidegger and Politics, Heidegger’s thinking isn’t co-extensive with his Nazism and can be read with profit by anyone. But the depth of those Nazis commitments becomes more clear with each passing decade. Richard Wolin’s Heidegger in Ruins is just the latest book-length chronicle of his antisemitism and authoritarianism. 

Starting in the 1930s Heidegger’s thinking takes an unapologetically idealist term common to many on the German right from right-Hegelianism through Spengler and Jung. History is understood with metaphysics as its spine, and for Heidegger is a long regression from the glory days of the pre-Socratics where Being itself was contemplated more directly. Today modern metaphysics barely rises above seeing the world as “standing reserve”—matter to be manipulated to gratify the desires of a faceless swarm of the “mediocre.” Liberalism and socialism are very much the same in their unaware reliance on this technical metaphysics, and must be replaced by a more spiritual connection to Being by a more authentic people. Heidegger’s candidates for this were of course the Germans, and the “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism lay in rejuvenating the country.

Like many on the far right the mysticism in Heidegger’s thinking allowed him to be selective about what counted as metaphysically significant. When the Germans occupied Paris he declared victory, while later deciding that the German defeat in WW2 signified nothing of long-term consequence. Heidegger was confident he’d be proven right in the long run, which was all that mattered. This combination of philosophical creativity with mystified nationalism and declinist severity has made Heidegger very influential on figures like Aleksandr Dugin, Steven Bannon and more. They often swap their own volkish nationalism for Heidegger’s and insist their brand of authoritarianism will lead the country and the world to the same heights Germany ascended to under the Nazis. 

 Julius Evola 

Like the true state, the hierarchical, organic state has ceased to exist. No comparable party or movement exists, offering itself as a defender of higher ideas, to which one can unconditionally adhere and support with absolute fidelity. The present world of party politics consists only of the regime of petty politicians, who, whatever their party affiliations, are often figureheads at the service of financial, industrial or corporate interests. The situation has gone so far that even if parties or movements of a different type existed, they would have almost no following among the rootless masses who respond only to those who promise material advantages and ‘social conquests.'

Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger 

Self-described “super fascist” Julius Evola drew heavily on Nietzsche and Maistre to develop an elaborate, mystical defense of tradition that is relentlessly hierarchical and aristocratic. Originally attracted to Italian Fascism and Nazism, Evola was especially impressed by the warrior class he saw in the SS. Apparently their “heroic” implementation of terror did it for him. But he was disturbed by fascism’s concessions to the herd. The implication of biological racism was of course that anyone belonging to a “master race” was entitled to superior treatment. By contrast Evola appealed to a “spiritual racism” that drew distinctions based on aristocratic spirits. In his Revolt Against the Modern World Evola develops an elaborate, alternatingly very funny and very tedious, mythology to account for why these aristocratic fascist souls are no longer atop the pecking order. The answer lies in a distortion of the “integral tradition” by corrupting influences which has (you guessed it) led to the decline of the West.

In particular Evola singled out Christianity, which felt “hatred” toward “any form of virile spirituality” and chastised its “stigmatization as folly and sin of pride anything that may promote an active overcoming of the human condition.” To the extent figures on the right admired aspects of Christian culture, like chivalry or the Crusades, this was because they focused on pre-Christian warrior elements that had been coopted by Christianity while missing its long-term anti-aristocratic impulses. Evola’s cute little mythology is just that, and there is a reason Sedgwick discusses his “magical” writing style in Key Thinkers of the Radical Right. One is tempted to rebut him by insisting his fans lay off whatever they’re overindulging in. Nevertheless, Evola has had a longstanding influence on Dugin, Bannon and many others on today’s right. 

Conclusion

My goal in this essay has been to introduce liberals to their opponents so they will be better equipped to respond to them. In The Political Right and Equality I offer a more thorough analysis and critique of many of these figures. But I’ll offer one rejoinder drawn from conservative thought.

One easy way to rebut most of these arguments is to point out the extent to which many of them are based not on careful reasoning but on an often desperate form of wish fulfillment. Unable to live with the high ethical demands of modernist universality, or the unease provoked by an openness to Socratic uncertainty, many on the radical right retreat into an easy solipsistic nationalism and myth-creation to provide a sense of certainty and aristocratic self-worth. Even great intellects like Heidegger were not immune. But, to adapt Strauss from Natural Right and History, a wish is not a fact. Simply asserting one’s need for these cheaply-gotten certainties and feelings of aristocratic elevation only establishes that the need exists and one wishes it fulfilled. That does not mean it can be fulfilled with any intellectual honesty while retaining ethical seriousness. Surrounding reifications like the nation or race with desperate flourishes like “organic” and “spiritual” and “traditional” in a Pinocchio-like effort to make them real no more makes it so than a bad drunk can make themselves emperor of the universe by declaring it so.

Featured image is a collage of, left to right, "Portrait of Joseph de Maistre" c. 1821, "Friedrich Nietzsche" (date unknown), and "John Caldwell Calhoun" c. 1843.