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Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Unraveling the Complexities of Right-Wing Thought: From Nietzsche to Peterson with Matt McManus
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Are you prepared to have your understanding of the political right stretched and reshaped? That's precisely what our conversation with Mac Manus, a lecturer at the University of Michigan and author of The Emergence of Post-Modernity, promises to deliver. The episode explores the influence of key figures such as Nietzsche, Jordan Peterson, and Ludwig von Miesse on right-wing thought, unraveling the complexities of political ideologies. Mac’s unique insights from his forthcoming book, The Political Right and Inequality, form the foundation of our discussion as we traverse the realms of political overlaps, libertarianism, socialism, and the rise of populism.
In our deep dive into the ideological world of right-wing intellectual thought, we explore the allure of authoritarian figures, the emergence of post-modernity, and the role of conservative intellectuals in U.S. politics. We venture into the anti-abolitionist movement in the U.S., the shaping influence of the billionaire class on libertarianism, and the nuanced relationship between libertarianism and socialism. We also tackle the controversial critique of Christianity by Nietzsche, shedding light on his views about truth, power, and status. Our conversation aims to challenge preconceptions and provoke thought.
We wrap up our enlightening exchange by examining the appeal of hyper-conservative theories, the contemporary influence of right-wing intellectuals, and the impact of figures like Dugin and Adrian Vimule on the political right. We discuss the potential consequences of unchecked populism and the necessity of fostering dialogue between the Left and Right. We shed light on the legacy of conservative thinkers like TS Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Burke as we advocate for a considered response to figures more serious than Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, and James Lindsay. This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the nuances of political thought and the ideological landscape that shapes our world.
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Exploring Right-Wing Intellectuals and Criticism
Speaker 1Hello and welcome to Varnblog . Today I'm with Mac Manus , a lecturer at University of Michigan , author of the Emergence of Post-Modernity , and I believe you're still working on a book called the Political Right and Inequality , and your research has been on the right actually for most of your career , correct ?
Speaker 2Yeah , I'd say that's about right . I mean , I get enough fucking angry people tweeting at me being like when are you ever going to lay out like your own political philosophy ? When are you going to stop like dunking on these reactionary types to say that if that's the way the demost feels , then that must be right ?
Speaker 1It's funny because I'm like normally . When I first encountered you , it was us arguing the fine nuances of how liberal Marxism was or wasn't , and then I discovered your scholarship on the right , which I tended to more or less agree with . One of the things that I think has been more and more true , as it's been obvious to someone like Jordan Peterson , is a religious conservative who can't make himself believe in God , so he comes up with all kinds of oddly postmodern word salad to justify whatever religious position he's trying to miss to gog in any particular time we can be fucking foul with the word is means any longer .
Speaker 2Apparently , right , we got a fucking delve deep into interrogating that Martin fucking Heidegger . Shut .
Speaker 1Yeah , I mean , makes Heidegger look outright clear sometimes . Actually , I listened to one of one of his recent posts on religion and I was just like do you believe it got ? Do you believe in God , or don't you just say it ? Say it , don't talk about like the ontological whatever , whatever of whether or not we think a pen is like , just say what you mean , you heretic .
Speaker 2Oh yeah , actually considering how one of his fucking rules is you know , be precise in your speed and do not lie . It's like just give a fucking straight answer to a straight question , it's not that fucking hard . Or just say like I don't know . That's a very simple response , also like is there a God ? Don't know Maybe I hope there is , but not sure Easy .
Speaker 1One of the things that I think you've actually been known for , though , is , in some ways , being fair , or trying to be fair , to the political right . Now , you and I talked about this before . I have experience with the political right personally , and I think , actually , that inclines me to not be fair , like I am usually not the person to ask you to be fair to a right winger because I'm like I know them .
Speaker 2Was this a familiarity breeds contempt ? Right yeah , but I do sometimes think it's important .
Speaker 1For example , I sometimes would actually talk to our mutual friend Ben Burgess and say like I kind of wish you took conservative intellectual heavyweights more seriously , because a lot of people don't think they exist . And they do . They're not , admittedly , they're not common , but they do . And when you're constantly focused on someone like I don't know Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh , you can be very blindsided by a I don't know . You know Vermeul , or Patrick D'Aneen , or even someone who I can I consider myself collegial with , so Robbomari .
Speaker 2Like , yeah , you know , actually I know sorry myself and he's a pretty nice guy . It's been nothing but nice to me , despite the fact that I had some mean things to say about him back in the day .
Speaker 1So yeah , it's funny . I also know a lot of people who who I would think would agree with him hate his guts . It's really strange .
Speaker 2I think he's just a guy who likes living on the edge that way . Right , I mean my . Actually one of my conservative friends , nate Hoffman , who wrote on my postmodern conservatism thesis mid joke one long at the long time ago , is like listen , if you don't like so Robb's political positions , don't worry , give him a couple months and I'll come around to yours . So need to wait for the like lunar cycle to complete itself ? And it seems to be the way he's going . I'm reading and reviewing his book on tyranny right now , where everyone is a socialist or the very least like super super liberal , talking about workplace democracy and stuff . It's like if you are a conservative , you are very , very friendly to workplace democracy , worker ownership , the welfare state . So yeah , he .
Speaker 1I sometimes my very , my very uncharitable summary of so Robb , and I should be careful , because I actually am personally quite fond of him and I want to say that too . He was nice to me when my dad died .
Speaker 2That's nice . By the way , sorry for your loss . I didn't hear about that . Thank you .
Speaker 1So I don't mean to slander the man , but I do sometimes think I'm as like opus d a for social democracy , what it's got out there . So you know , if you had somebody with a Pionono tattoo but also it , but also a Bernie bro but wishes Bernie was more like a 19th century Pope , then boy , have I got a guy for you , yeah . But there are worse frenemies to have .
Speaker 2Oh yeah , definitely . And I mean , look on the broader question of like whether there are right wing heavyweights , that's 100% true that they are , and you know , if you read American Marxism or pretty much anything that Ben Shapiro writes , or God forbid you know many thing by Matt Walsh you will kind of Lindsay or or , or .
Speaker 1Yeah , exactly .
Speaker 2You will spend an awful lot of time kind of gaffine to yourself , rolling your eyes and almost feeling insulted as a reader not even as a leftist , but as a reader because you almost believe them and you're like , do you actually fucking think that anybody who reads this is as stupid as you make us out to be ? Because if that's the case , then your audience , you must have extraordinary contempt for your audience because you think that they're dumb as fucking bricks that they'll just buy whatever slot they give you . But like , look , I've read some really really very impressive conservative books in my time and I've read some very impressive conservative books from people who are still at work right now . And that's not to say that they're right or even that the left should kind of try to meet them halfway we shouldn't but we should definitely learn from them and learn how to criticize the heavyweights , just like we need to learn how to make fun of the middle weights and the light weights .
Speaker 1Yeah , I actually recently self criticized for being probably too slight on the German conservative revolutionaries , for example , and Speegler , who I was like you know . Actually I need to be fair . Like their points that they land , that I don't have an answer to , and most of our , our summarizations of , say , speegler's thought are not actually correct . That said , he's also probably more reactionary than we often say is to . So it's it . We have to kind of deal with this honestly and it's not always easy to do , like I said . And then there are , there are figures who are respected by both sides , who are hard to to categorize or categorize , and people get uncomfortable with that . I think the biggest one of those is the Lester McIntyre who , like Catholic traditionalist and Marxist like yeah , I mean , somebody asked him in the 1990s I think it was when he was in his most like trad cafes .
Speaker 2Like he's actually come back to Marx since 2016, . Like said I was wrong you know to abandon so much of my Marxism , but this was the 1990s and was asked what are your Marxist days ? Do you still carry forward ? And he's like you know I still wish I could hang every rich asshole from a tree . Still that I'm like a lot of leftist would sit there and be like well , even if you're doing in the name of God , there's still some . You still might be there with you , right ? Yeah , it's .
Speaker 1I think it's interesting . Another example of a person like that is David Bentley Hart , who I , who he's not a conservative , he's not even a theological conservative , but he is a traditionalist . You cannot call him a leftist , really , or Christopher Lash ?
Speaker 2is another one that I consistently point to right Like . It was kind of like a very , very conservative Marxist right or a very Marxist conservative who knows right and , to be fair , I have a certain amount of respect for that , because these people say whatever you want about them . They are independent minded and they're not afraid to piss pretty much everybody off by not conforming to these strict ideological guidelines . And those are people I genuinely think the left sometimes can learn from . Like there's a lot to . Let's use McIntyre's example , his critique . Mcintyre's example , his critique that any leftist , particularly those of us who are interested in normative theory , could pick up on , develop , learn from . Watch good stuff there .
Speaker 1Yeah , I was actually thinking about that because I'm after virtue and rationally dependent animals were both books that I was like , yeah , those are actually pretty strong . And I read a . I read a decent article in the Nation . I might link it in the show notes . Actually that was trying to go like well , but really Wardy was right and I'm like I don't know man . I think actually McIntyre wins that debate , like I would say so too .
Speaker 2Yeah , and I mean I like Rory Dio an awful lot . I've loved his writing style . He could actually be pretty funny , which very few academics can be , while also being serious . But yeah , like it might also just be that McIntyre had more time because Rory died , you know , mid 2000s , and Mac is probably just going to live forever is what he seems to have decided to do , so he's going to be able to push out more books . But yeah , I mean I'd say he's definitely the stronger political philosopher .
Speaker 1Epistemologically I'd say Rory already wins , but yeah , I mean , you know , I was actually . I was actually thinking interestingly about McIntyre because I was reading McIntyre's engagements for Marxism is really excellent essay he wrote still as a Marxist in like 1950 . And I was like that man was 40 when he wrote this , holy shit .
Speaker 2He's old , it's like Habermas I . Sometimes I'm like you're still fucking alive and you're still going like just Jesus Christ , wow , like . And at that point it's kind of like you said , like you go through so many phases that you kind of just they kind of just know everything right . It's like you can't throw anything that they're going to not expect at some point Like back as big can sit there and be like I've been a Marxist , traditionalist , trad Catholic traditionalist , kind of halfway traditionalist liberal . By the time you get like who's justice , who's rationality back to kind of conservative mark , like gone through every evolution , right , so can't throw anything at him .
Speaker 1So I wanted to talk about one of the conservative traditions . There's a couple of things I've been wanting to get to you about , one of which is one of your interesting readings of Nietzsche but which I've been thinking about a lot for a week . But the other one , though I think is actually interesting , is you did a review for Jacobin of the individualist by Matt Zolninsky and John Tomasi , and you actually pointed out that the kind of character that we have of libertarians now , that they are always going to either become a standard liberal they are kind of liberal anyway , but still they're all just become a standard progressive liberal or they're going to become a nationalist , is not fair or true . Nor were they always just arguing for the dominance of the powerful . Historically , and if anything , that seems that latter tendency seems to be a post and Rand phenomenon . How has that been received ? I actually tend to agree with you , but how has that ?
Speaker 2been received . Actually , people tended to like that article and I think it's because the kind of person who's attracted to democratic socialism in the United States often feels very similar to the way I've noticed a lot of libertarians feel in the United States . There's actually a good article in the New Republic about this , in the sense that they're kind of adjacent to the mainstream , but not of the mainstream , and they have about comparable levels of support , depending on how you register it on any given day few hundred thousand , few million people pushing kind of these alternative ideas that are very clearly indebted to enlightenment thought but aren't necessarily acceptable to mainstream hegemony
Political Overlaps and Left-Libertarian Disagreements
Speaker 2or common sense . At this point and part of the reason that I decided to do that was well , just Jack , been asked me to . Well , this is my assignment , I'll go forth and do that . But I am interested in some elements of libertarian thought and there's definitely a lot of positions where leftist overlap with libertarians , particularly on issues like abortion , drug use , borders right just a battle off couple .
Speaker 1And I was kind of true . There's some weird ones we overlap with on them too , though , which I don't think is often paid attention to . For example , we don't like renties .
Speaker 2Or even I know some leftists who are really big into gun rights right .
Speaker 2Yeah , definitely some of the Marxist ones , but I mean . So this was the thing I was like . I'll read this book it's by left libertarians and I'll try to figure out what some of this overlap is and where the disconnect is . And what really struck me is Walensky and Tomasi both identify as bleeding heart libertarians , so on the very left end of the political spectrum when it comes to libertarians and they really tried pretty hard to pitch the book to a kind of left wing reader Like that's who I got the sense the book was aimed at , not like right wing libertarians who were there quite critical of , but a left wing skeptical kind of reader .
Speaker 2And my approach to something like that is , when somebody offers you an all a branch in politics , you don't spurn it and just say like , get away unless it's a fascist or something .
Speaker 2You try to consider whether or not there's some points of conciliation that you can agree upon , and so what I ended up talking about was that I think that there are points where democratic socialists and left libertarians can dialogue in constructive ways . Probably the clearest one that I can think of would be over things like workplace democracy , because one of the things that Tomasi and Walensky pointed out is there are good libertarian arguments you can make for things like voluntary unions , voluntary workplace co-ops , maybe even being critical of some of the forms of domination that emerge from expansive conceptions of private property . But I mean , there's really very little that democratic socialists or Marxists can say to the right libertarian von Mies , murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand tape , especially when you get into like paleo libertarian territory where you're basically just conservatives , except you want to call yourself something a little bit more hip and beat up immigrants a little bit more . Right .
Speaker 1There's just nothing to say about that I mean , yeah , you could be Hans Hermann Hopp and basically argue that feudalism is good because it's the ultimate expression of government as private property . Yeah , I think that's unlike .
Speaker 2Mitch's Mollbug right yeah .
Speaker 1Curtis Sarban .
Speaker 2Very much emerged from this kind of right libertarian tradition , before moving on to Karlai and authoritarianism . People think , well , that's a really strange transition If you read von Mies or any of the paleo libertarians , not really all that odd right . They have one sacred value , the protection of private property . And if they need a big authoritarian state in order to advance their respect for that one , the Biden principle , then by God they'll do it .
Speaker 1Yeah , I was actually thinking about the Italian elite school theorist Mosca , who was like I'm an anti-democratic liberal for those very reasons . Like no , it's interesting , I actually come out of an adjacent political world . That's sort of where I was at in my early 20s , not in the paleo libertarian , I was actually more in the even probably more problematic paleo conservative world , but I was familiar with that literature . You're absolutely correct about where a lot of it goes . I mean , I remember the scandal in Reason Magazine and this was over a decade ago now but broke like how much the Ron Paul campaign and Lou Rockwell , disciple of Murray Rothbart , had given , like Rush Dooney and Gary Norfin , these formal dominionists , so these formal Protestant theocrats who were arguing about the need , basically they wanted to privatize government so you could execute people for breaking theological laws . Actually , my first exposure to Stefan Malinu over 20 years ago now was in those circles , back when he was still , when there was no racial anything to his ideology .
Speaker 2Oh yeah , but it's not a huge surprise , though . The person that I always come back to as the grandfather of these kinds of movements is Ludwig von Miesse , who I wrote a very critical piece of for Jacobin not too long ago , because one of the things that's distinctive about Miesse is first off , he chastises earlier classical liberals for not being sufficiently dedicated to human inequality . Yeah , he does so . Imagine the kind of disposition you have to be to be like John fucking Locke , mr . If we need to go expropriate the indigenous people , that's fine . Human enslaved . They don't need to have any kind of basic rights .
Speaker 2He's too egalitarian for Ludwig von Miesse , and Miesse also supported various kinds of authoritarian regimes , including fascism , and people always find that highly unusual , and my response is it's not unusual at all .
Speaker 2He says very clearly that his liberalism has a core tenant , which is the protection of private property or private ownership of the means of production , and everything else flows from that , and the kind of right wing libertarianism that you see that emerges from this commitment to a core principle centered around property is that the marketplace is free in a certain sense , but it's also supposed to engender the proper social hierarchy by allowing resources , status and power to accrue where they best belong .
Speaker 2And a lot of these people end up becoming quite disappointed when the market doesn't operate that way or when democracy interferes with the formation of the kind of social hierarchy that they desire . So they went and allows people of color too much power , and so then they turn on a kind of market dogmatism or a libertarian dogmatism and they start saying maybe there is a place for the state to actually intervene and reestablish the right kind of social hierarchy , not by interfering with rights of private property , but maybe by interfering with certain kinds of free markets and things like labor , since that will entail too much respect for things like mass immigration .
Speaker 1Right . For example , we're willing to crush unions with the state because , even though we believe in free association , we don't believe in that free association , oh yeah , and .
Speaker 2Von Mies certainly didn't right . He endorsed the Austrian government sending in the troops to break up the striking workers and kill them if need be , because freedom of expression is an ancillary or subordinate principle next to the protection of that most sacred of things private property .
Speaker 1I actually point this out when people think of Von Mies as just another neoliberal , because I'm like no , he was a dude who quit them out apparently in society because he called Ludwig von Heidrich a communist .
Speaker 2Yeah , he thought Milton Friedman was too fucking socialist . Milton , fucking Friedman .
Speaker 1Right and he basically was against the state even intervening to set up non-coercive markets because that's too social . It's something that people just they're not familiar with .
Speaker 2Von Mies's and I will also say the Von Mies Institute doesn't really want you to be familiar with Von Mies's actual political history I would say just tweet out that fascism quote from his 1920s liberalism book where he says you know , there is no doubt that fascism , you know , has for the moment saved European civilization and the glory it is attenuated to itself while in jeer throughout history .
Speaker 2Just tweet that out and , like flies , they will fucking come to it . You know what I mean ? Just railing on you being like you need to understand that in context , and I'm always like what context ? The context where he very emphatically said I think that fascism has done a lot of good , albeit it is a safety measure , but it's still done some good . The context where he supported Austrofascism because he thought it was necessary to crush workers movements . Those kinds of contexts like come on , especially on noise means these are the same type of people who will fucking skim through marks , just looking for anything that is remotely negative and then use that to say aha , here this is proof of why it is that Marxism leads to the Gulag . But here's a guy in the 1920s saying an existing political movement called fascism that is clearly authoritarian , is good to cheers for it and that's going to be indicative of anything meaningful whatsoever .
Speaker 1Yeah , I think , I think we have to deal with that , but I do think we have to give certain libertarians their due . What do things I always point out when we talk about like classical liberals ? I'm like look , the pre-Marxist socialists and the early free marketers both went under the classical liberal moniker to some degree , particularly in the United States . Like it's not , that's a contest like both sides . I'm not willing to grant classical liberalism to just the libertarians , for example , but also because their aims were not entirely apart either , and I think that's harder to get people to see .
Speaker 2Oh , absolutely . And I mean , look , I'm going to post all streams of libertarianism myself . Like I said , I have a lot of sympathy for elements of left libertarianism or bleeding heart libertarianism . In many respects I probably would support sort of left libertarian economic policies if democratic socialism wasn't on the table . Right , like I prefer workplace management . But if I can't get workplace management but I can get a UBI , I'd probably say let's go for the UBI as a kind of interim measure , right .
Speaker 2And I also have a lot of respect for people like Nozick or Hayek , right . Because both of them whatever criticism you want to level at them are very serious thinkers that have important objections and important insights that any leftist should take seriously and , for that matter , any libertarian should take seriously . One of my favorite parts of Nozick's work is when he points about how genuine commitments to private property and rights might need or might compel people to think a little bit about the rectification of historical injustices . And then he goes on in a very famous book don't say , in the United States we mistreated a very large group of people by enslaving them , segregating them , stealing their resources and stealing their land , and so libertarianism probably calls upon us to give them additional resources for several decades , well into the far future , well beyond any of our lifetimes , and Nozick is absolutely right that that follows from his principles . But you don't see an awful lot of right libertarians who worship the guy , referencing that footnote , because , say whatever you will about him , he was at least consistent and he had a significant integrity .
Speaker 1They referenced John Locke . But then when you say , well , you know , what about the labor of the indigenous people who were on this beforehand , which their ownership rights would actually have been paramount by your labor theory of ownership , and then they're like , well , we didn't do that ? And I'm like , yeah , so it's okay to benefit for coercion , but it's not okay to do the coercion . But you can incentivize the coercion . That's totally ethically fine according to you . But I have that argument as a conservative , matt , like I was like that doesn't make any sense .
Ideological Shifts and Influences
Speaker 1It's interesting that you mentioned bleeding heart libertarians . I'm surprised they still exist , to be frank . I remember they had a big moment in 2007 , 2008 . And a lot of those people became Center for a Stateless Society , which is basically a mutualist anarchist collective now , because they sort of just kind of gave up on classical liberalism , more or less . So they didn't have a soft bar for Gustave de Molinari , who I don't think we could . I don't think you know , if you mentioned the big , the big four individualist Hoskins , spencer , bastiat and Molinari . Spencer's the hardest to defend , although there's a lot to defend him . He's not just a hater of the little guy , that's not true . Bastiat's actually easier to defend in so much that he does represent kind of the bourgeoisie end of the French Revolution in a lot of ways . Oh , absolutely .
Speaker 2I mean , he was militantly anti-statist , and there's also something admirable about the fact that he really was genuinely committed to his economic program . He lived a relatively bohemian life , constantly struggling in order to advocate for his ideas , be clearly believed in what he was agitating for . So anybody who tries to describe him as some kind of bourgeois apologist cashing out is misconstruing Bastiat's contribution .
Speaker 1Yeah , molinari was , you know , an anarchist and at the time was not seen as significantly different from left-wing anarchists . It's just the individualist versus communist debate . He was on the individualist side .
Speaker 2Yeah , definitely , and this is one of the things , and this is why I recommend people read Zulinski and Tomasi's book .
Speaker 2They really go through this history very well and they point out that actually , in the United States , most self-described libertarians also consider themselves socialists .
Speaker 2Some of them even consider themselves Marxists . Right , and the reason is that in the United States in particular , libertarianism emerged principally as an anti-abolitionist movement or sorry , an abolitionist movement , excuse me and the general argument that the abolitionists made was that there was something deeply wrong with slavery because it entailed the expropriation of someone's labor and the domination of them by a master . And a lot of people picked up on this to say well , you know , there's a continuity between slavery and what's going on in the labor market , where once more , we see capitalists expropriate people's labor and subject them to less coercive but no less damaging forms of domination . And one of the things Tomasi and Zulinski point out and I'm not entirely sure I believe everything about the story is that it was really only in the but according to them , in the 20th century that you saw American libertarianism shift pretty firmly to the right under the influence and they admit this of gigantic sums of money coming from the billionaire class and the millionaire class .
Speaker 1You have this massive influx into it , basically as an anti-New Deal coalition , the same people who were often funding the birchers and , more radically , conspiratorial and militant groups . I think we have to deal with that . I think we also have to deal with that . There is a change in the nature of what they're defending , because you can say this about Nozik , but if you read , say , anne Rahn , there's no sympathy for indigenous peoples there at all .
Speaker 2I mean , I was on interview once with her where she was like I don't see why did she feel entitled to the land at all ? Because they just wanted to sit there and live like savages and set us in the most contemptuous middle class kind of manner that you can imagine . Right , it's like oh , I don't know , Rand , you know , maybe people are entitled to do with their property what they will , but I suppose not right , Right .
Speaker 1I think it's a very interesting scenario that somehow she became the most beloved libertarian figure . I mean someone that even someone as ghoulish as founder of the National Review , a Buckley yeah , buckley said smelt of the gas chambers Like you know it's . I think we , you know this is not me like celebrating libertarianism because ultimately I do think the reconciliation with private property is not something that Marxist can totally do . But I do think we have to be fair about where they come from and how they aren't . They are not entirely separate from us and the intellectual lineage . As for people who kind of develop out of and are a response to contemporary post-European liberalism , oh , I completely agree with you .
Speaker 2But I mean I stress this myself in the review right that Libertarianism , in a kind of idealized sense , is very much an enlightenment doctrine , as is socialism , as is martyrism , as is classical liberalism for that extent . So there's an elective affinity between their commitments and our own , right . Now that's in an idealized sense . When you get to people like Van Miesse or Ein Rand , I think that one of the reasons they become a lot more comfortable for reactionaries is there's an awful lot of nature in Ein Rand , right , but there's an awful lot of this kind of aristocratic ideal of market society in Van Miesse . That owes a lot to reactionary dispositions , right . So there we get into a number of cases . But in the case of like Swalinski , tomasi Hayek , I'm very critical of a lot of them , but we can dialogue with them on the basis of a shared commitment to certain kinds of enlightenment principles .
Speaker 1Yeah , for example , I'm usually open to the Quincy Institute , but , hayek , I'm willing to talk to the Quincy Institute libertarians and conservatives because at least in what I'm going to talk to them about , there's enough agreement that we can actually not just yell at each other .
Speaker 2Why , yeah , and I have good libertarian friends like Aaron Ross Powell , who is another left libertarian or bleeding heart libertarian , had me on the show a couple of times where I had an argument with Chris Freiman about liberalism , our market society , versus socialism , and we disagreed on a lot of things , but we did all agree that Trumpism was bad right and that we had to align ourselves together in order to confront it . Because this was still the 2010s sorry , yeah , the 2020 or so , and I think there is a reason for this elective affinity between our commitments . Aaron and I both agreed that we should be committed to moral equality and freedom . A lot of our discussion was just how best to go about demonstrating respect for those principles , not the idea of those principles . Those reactionaries would argue that those are the wrong principles to begin with , for the most part .
Speaker 1Yeah , I think that's fair . One of the things that I mean , you bring up the elephant in the room and it's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about and that's Nietzsche . I have always been under the assumption that Nietzsche is our best enemy .
Speaker 2Oh , yeah , definitely .
Speaker 1By that I mean , like when people go he's a reactionary , I'm like , yeah , but he's the most dangerous reactionary that's ever confronted the left and is one of the most persuasive ones . So much so that there is a tendency for most of the late 20th century to try to incorporate him into our own ideas as to weaken his critique . So I wanted to talk to you about that though , because it's interesting . I was reading your kind of statement about your response to the idea that socialists are like way too naive about human nature , and you actually kind of end up quoting Nietzsche in an interesting way .
Speaker 2So I'll let you state your argument there , sure well , I want to say that I completely agree with you , that I think that Nietzsche is , with Dostoyevsky , at the apex of the reactionary tradition and he really does demonstrate that reactionaries and I use the term very broadly here are capable not just of deep and powerful and persuasive arguments but even profundity , because I think there's no other way of describing Dostoyevsky or Nietzsche . But to put it really briefly , nietzsche's critique of the left really works well because he's willing to be radical in the conventional sense of the word , get to the root of something . And the way that he critiques the left is by saying that the left is mistaken as to its own genealogy , much like the right is because the left sees itself as being and this is putting it very simply a fundamentally anti-Christian , hyper-rationalist , very modern kind of movement that is committed to self-evident , or at least rationally evident , principles of equality and freedom and that by doing away with the traditionalist order and exposing religion as a falsehood , we will move towards a utopia here on this earth . And Nietzsche says actually , liberalism , socialism and democracy are all effectively secularized Christian doctrines . He puts this out the anarchists and the Christian have the same birthright or the birth , and the reason this occurs is because Christianity is essentially the world's first major slave revolt that is successful not because the slaves were able to overcome the masters , but because the slaves were able to turn their resentment and that's what it is about being slaves into a new form of morality . So there was a kind of creative reinterpretation or sublimation of their feelings . And they were able to do this so successfully that the masters came to internalize the slaves' morality , feel guilty about their aristocratic status and then eventually seed more and more power to the herd or the mass over time . And Nietzsche says that this was able to carry on over the course of Christian history
Nietzsche's Critique of Christianity and Truth
Speaker 2.
Speaker 2And what's intriguing is Christianity self-secularized , because this Christian emphasis on truth at all costs eventually led people to what he calls the question against itself right , the question against Christianity , where people would say I am deeply committed to truth as a Christian . But now I have to ask the question is Christianity itself true ? And partly as a result of asking these questions , people cease to believe in the metaphysics of Christianity , the Christian God . But what's intriguing , according to Nietzsche , is that that did not mean that they abandoned Christian morality , the slave morality , this commitment to the equality of souls .
Speaker 2If anything , what's interesting is that we've seen secular instantiations of this Christian ethic or Christian morality in the forms of liberalism , socialism and democracy , and he wants them to just die . This is really the only way to describe it , because he says once you cease to believe in the metaphysics of Christianity , which held that there was an equality of souls , what we're left with instead is the world where the eagle looks upon the sheep . And , yeah , the sheep might sit there and say that the eagle is evil , but those terms actually have no meaning because the eagle is not evil . The eagle probably doesn't even think of the sheep , and if he does , he might even actually love them , because nothing tastes better than a little sheep . So from there he develops this new kind of anti-Christian morality that he describes I'm sorry that it was described to him , and he proved this as a kind of aristocratic radicalism , and it's a very , very potent alternative conception of what is of value in the world to what the left , in all of its secularized Christian forms , has to offer in his opinion .
Speaker 1Right , and I think that's important to understand the thing about . When delusions and Fakotians pull up his essay on truth , they are decontextualizing it from that project because he doesn't care about truth . What he cares about is power and the competition between elites . And , if anything , one of the interesting things about Nietzsche is he is an anti-capitalist , but because he sees it as too equalizing I mean , this is something that I don't think people really understand if they don't inquire deeply into the reactionary tradition either .
Speaker 2And there's a very good rock on this by Alex Ross called Against Fascist Creep , where he pointed out how fascists have been very adept at convincing certain leftists that their anti-capitalism is leftist kind of anti-capitalism , and to get them to hear them out on that basis . Nietzsche is militantly anti-capitalist because he says look , all that a capitalist is doing is providing services to the lowest common denominator in society . Capitalists are the kind of people that produce iPhones , cheap TV , all the kind of garbage that's pumped out by the culture industry , because that's what the mass of consumers want . So we shouldn't be capitalist . Instead , we should try to undermine anything that leads to the herd's value system getting instantiated in culture and replace it with an aristocratic culture that is committed to more rarefied kind of value systems than the herd can appreciate .
Speaker 1And it's very specifically that Nietzsche's class conceptions are basically elites and herds , and that's pretty much it . I mean , there's not a whole lot else there , and belonging to one or the other is actually just a matter of will and perhaps breeding , but mostly will .
Speaker 2Oh yeah , definitely . I mean , this is one of the interesting things about his characterization of truth that is so important , as you mentioned , right . So Nietzsche has a very interesting account of truth In his middle period . He tends to describe it , again , famously , as a moving army of metaphors , right ? Not something that can be pinned down , something that needs to be understood contextually , if at all , and that context will always change and shift depending on the circumstance .
Speaker 2But in his later work he adopts a different kind of view of truth , where he points out that there's a deep alignment between people's psychological dispositions , and even their political dispositions , and their yearning for big T truth .
Speaker 2Because the thing about big T truth , according to him and this is where he gets really profound of the sort that Plato argues for or can't argues for , is that big T truth has an inherently democratic quality to it , where we say if something becomes is evident to me , it should also be evident to you and it should be evident to anyone else , right .
Speaker 2And the same truth is true of a value system , right , where we want our value systems to be universal , because we say , in this very democratic fashion if something is good for me , it should be good for you and it should be good for everyone else also . And we require other people to affirm our value systems as true for this reason . Right , and Nietzsche goes on to say that an aristocrat does not need to have his conception of truth vindicated , let alone his value system , by the herd . In fact , if the herd vindicates his conception of truth or his value system , that's probably a good sign that he is not actually an aristocrat and he needs to do better , right ? So these conceptions get reformulated in the language of power and status in a very intriguing and very creative way in his later work .
Speaker 1So I mean , this is something that we kind of
Exploring Right-Wing Intellectual Thought
Speaker 1have to deal with . I think Nietzsche is an incredibly important thinker . I don't want to remove him from the canon but I do want to flag him as like this is a foundation of a certain kind of I'm going to say reactionaryism . As much as say , Demastra is a kind of reactionaryism . I can't even call it conservatism , it is something else , but it is not left wing at all , it is hyper aristocratic and it is not the only strain and say like conservative revolutionaryism and also fascism , which aren't the same thing . You should also make that very clear but it is a dominant strain in , I think cleanly , and conservative revolutionaryism and messily and fascism .
Speaker 2Oh , definitely . I mean there's no denying that Nietzsche had a profound influence on both fascist intellectuals and fascist politicians . Mussolini was enamored with him early on , even when Mussolini was going through a kind of socialist phase . It was very much a kind of serallian socialism with a huge amount of Nietzsche in it and socialism disappears as his career progresses towards fascism and is completely annihilated by the time you get to the 1920s where he actually talks in very Nietzschean language about how he is a kind of relativist quite shocking for Mussolini but a relativist who believes in creating his own mythology for the people .
Speaker 2Right again in this act of the aristocratic man willing his value system into being right . Julius Avola , martin Heidegger , all profoundly influenced by Nietzschean thinking . Now , they didn't receive him uncritically and they would usually break away from a kind of individualism . That is certainly one way of interpreting Nietzsche . But Heidegger's denunciation of liberalism and socialism as the kind of nihilistic philosophies of the mediocre which are spreading around the globe very Nietzschean language right . Avola's argument for a kind of super aristocracy , right , that is going to revere militarism and masculinity and issue the kind of effeminate qualities that he associates with Christianity very critical of Christianity , avola , right Again , all echoes of Nietzsche .
Speaker 1I mean , Avola criticizes fascism for being too conciliatory to the masses . It's funny because I'm like , yeah , Avola wasn't a fascist . He didn't think they were anti-modern enough .
Speaker 2I mean , I read a very good book by Matthew Rose recently . Matthew Rose is too sympathetic by about a million degrees to some of these figures , but he did have a very nice quote about Avola where he pointed out in an interview that Avola actually apparently conscious . As he said , I will never be outflanked to the right . I'm as right-wing as you go and having read some of Avola's work , I'm like I believe that I don't know if there's anybody more to the right than you . If there is , then fucking God , help us all , because there are levels of perversion left to be explored . But right now , that's the I don't want to call it the gold standard , the anti-gold standard for political theorists .
Speaker 1Yeah , I mean Rose is interesting . I guess we're referring to the book of world after liberalism which is . I consider that , like the pro to the con of Mark Sedwitz against the modern world , the study of radical traditionalism , which radical traditionalism is a call itself that anymore . But that was the old . When I was coming up in the Paleo-conservative world someone called themselves a radical traditionalist . You're like you're probably into Avola Debenost Spingler , yeah . All the other all the other , I'm not a racist , but crowd , you know . People who sometimes make Curtis Jarvin feel uncomfortable .
Speaker 2I mean you laugh . I mean in some of his old bull bug posts he'll actually sit there and be like I'm getting some creepy comments from people who are trying to push me in this direction or that direction and I always do kind of chuckle because I was like man , if you're too right-wing for Curtis Jarvin , then boy oh boy , are you out there on the spectrum , right yeah .
Speaker 1That said , if you want to know about the non-libertarian intellectual heavy rates of the right-wing culture , right , well , we mentioned a lot of them , not so much . I mean , fransse , pocke-yacke and Avola are not to say Avola isn't an intellectual sophisticated person , but there's a lot of spiritual beliefs you have to take with that .
Speaker 2And I think after his early work in idealism he made it very clear that he wasn't about arguing for his positions or not . Very similar to Spengler , right , it's a kind of poetic style of iteration where you either buy into it or you don't . And if you buy into it , you're affirmed as an aristocrat who understands that this is inviting you to these kind of aristocratic mindsets . And if you don't buy into it , well , it's because you lack an aristocratic tenor , right , right , yeah , it's a kind of playing to audience narcissism that makes these books appealing in that respect , I think , not necessarily their argumentative rigor . The things are very different if you look at somebody like , say , carl Schmidt or Martin Heidegger , who are also very right-wing thinkers , who do actually argue persuasively for certain kinds of hyper-reactionary positions . And personally I've always thought those are the more dangerous thinkers on the right , because they can appeal to people affectively the way Avola can , but also intellectually the way that , say , nietzsche can , for example .
Speaker 1Yeah , spengler depends on the time period . Like I actually think Prussian socialism is kind of an interesting book , but it is yeah , and credit where credit is due .
Speaker 2at least you didn't fucking buy into Nazism . You didn't buy into Nazism because it was Tupacian . But give him a little credit for that no-transcript .
Speaker 1However , elaine Dibonois or Benoit I'm never actually quite sure how to say his last name is a more serious thinker who does not . He actually does make arguments and also takes a lot of left-wing arguments , like there's a ton in him . Samuel Francis , if you've ever , if you've , read his Leviathan book , leviathan and Eminemis , he's also a serious thinker , although Very racist , extremely , I was going to say , although you know he got canceled by Buckley again for being too far , as did Joe Sobrin . Actually , it was reading Joe Sobrin and Sam Francis . It was like one of the many things that got me to turn away from the right .
Speaker 2Well , I mean when you're sitting there and starting to talk about how we need a white politics not because I'm racist , but because everyone else has their own kind of politics you're striding very close to the abominable right , and I'm not surprised that Buckley very , very , very optic-minded person that he was just decided , like you know , nip that in the bud .
Speaker 1Yeah , and when you read the Leviathan and his enemies , he's like well , racial nationalism won't work in America . But basically we need a virulently anti-cosmopolitan professional managerial class , like and the best way to do that is to get them to think that racial nationalism will work in America . And I'm like , oh man , it's even worse than I thought in some ways .
Speaker 2Oh , in some way . Yeah , exactly , so the people leading this won't be racist , because they'll know that's BS , but like they won't necessarily be opposed to mobilizing racist energies in order to get what they want . It's like , well , I don't know , man , that all sounds like it's going to amount to the same fucking thing in the long run . But you do , you , buddy .
Speaker 1Yeah , it's like . It's like you know , we're okay with it as long as you don't actually believe it , which , again , that's a tendency . That , going all the way back to James Burnham , after he flips in the new Machiavellian , he's like everybody has a religion , whether it's religion or race or whatever , and you basically have to use that to and I was like , oh wow , there's just a deep cynicism in some of this stuff .
Speaker 2I think there's a deep cynicism in a lot of right wing thought . I mean not certainly not all of it . Sometimes it's going to be extraordinarily sincere . But there are a number of conservatives who are very happy to argue for the efficacy of things like religious beliefs in engendering something like social traditionalism , and they don't really care whether the religious beliefs are true or not . What's valuable is their social function . In fact , this has gotten just got so bad at points that Leo Strauss had to chest I some conservatives for saying things like the metaphysics underpinning our religious beliefs don't really matter . The truth of them don't even really matter . All that matters is that people commit to them for moral purposes .
Speaker 1Yeah , strauss was like don't say the quiet part too loud . Yeah , exactly , although it's interesting because the Strauss versus Smith debates have always fascinated me , we don't have all of them .
Speaker 2No , I saw there was a new collection that was published not too long ago , like mid-2010s . I haven't gone around to that yet , but I mean it's not really surprised . I mean they're both emerged out of the German Revolution . Schmidt actually apparently , according to Emanuel Fay , had dialogued a little bit with Heidegger and certainly was aware of Heidegger's work . Strauss obviously was enamored with Heidegger and never kind of never fully escaped his influence . So there's definitely a lot that was probably said between them . That's a great interest . I just I need to read that book to get the full details .
Speaker 1Yeah , according to Paul Gottfried , a source that I don't know we can entirely trust , but who is a serious scholar and intellectual , In his book on Strauss he indicates that basically Strauss was still he was a conservative Democrat , but he still thought the popular legitimacy was important , whereas , like Smith done care about that .
Speaker 2No , Well , I would argue , actually , that what makes Schmidt dangerous is the fact that he does every now and then , offer some concessions to the idea of constitutional legitimacy , but in or sorry , popular legitimacy , but in a very warped way .
Speaker 2So in his book Constitutional Theory , he draws very heavily on Rousseau not at somebody , you would expect , but he does it quite a deptly to say listen , liberals have always been fixated on this idea that the people should rule . But the problem is that the people can't rule in a liberal democracy because at best all you get is majority ruling and will probably repress the remainder of the people . But in a dictatorship , where the leader constitutes the general will and genuinely is able to have all the people backing him up , that could actually be more democratic than a liberal democracy , because he does actually embody the general will and is able to execute the will of the people without any kind of inhibitions in this power , also like what you would require in a liberal democracy . And what's truly terrifying about this is this argument , for a kind of demonic authoritarianism is really making a comeback on the right right now , particularly in the work of people like Adrian Vermele and , to a lesser extent , people like sorry Patrick Deneen with his aristropopulism .
Speaker 1Yeah , I think this is actually really , really important to point out . This was not just arrived at either there . I mean , Robert Michel comes to a similar conclusion over in Italy . I mean that's why he backs the fascist , because he's like , well , oligarchy is always this . But maybe you can have popular legitimacy if you back a dictator , because the dictator can actually embody the people . And if you can't get rid of the oligarchies , at least you can have the will of the people as manifested in the dictator . Kick him around , Exactly right .
Speaker 2And I mean this is one of the things that I think is appealing not just in Smidian , for when it comes to Smidianism on the right , there are left-wing Smidians out there , right Because this idea of a leader who is unconstrained and embodies the popular will and who's able to execute that will without inhibition or without moral scruple can be very appealing to a certain kind of figure that just wants to see action and decision and isn't really entranced by what I would take the substance of democracy to be , which is actually deliberation , equal respect for our fellow citizens , that kind of thing .
Speaker 1I mean , I'm not going to name names , but a lot of Marxist-Leninists not all Marxists-Leninists , but a lot of Marxist-Leninists basically make this argument that you're going to have capitalist rotors emerge out of the bureaucracy and you just need a strong leader to kick him around . And that's what you have to have , Absolutely .
Speaker 2I mean , I don't agree with Nathan about everything , but Current Affairs published a very good piece on Stalin . It was by Nathan but by another author , and it was diagnosing the appeal of Stalin to the left and why some people still always come back to them Again . I have nitpicks with some of the elements of the article , but one thing that I did think that the author nailed effectively was Stalin embodied a kind of leftism that most people on the left don't think exist any longer . Like a leftist who could be brutal , attack our enemies , was stern and feared and , I suppose , respected . In a certain sense that can be very appealing to people who feel marginalized on the left and who want to feel that it's time to take the gloves off and just beat the crap out of our opposition . I think that's a temptation that we need to avoid at all costs , because down that road leads the gulag , that road leads down to the gulag .
Speaker 1To me it leads to George Sorrell . I mean , that's the Sorrellian argument . The myth has to substitute for the movement of history . That's how we get things .
Attraction to Authority Figures and Populism
Speaker 1It is something interesting about because this also comes up in the Chinese context , although more understandably . Frankly , there is something interesting about this because this was James Burnham's point .
Speaker 1I'm not a Burnhamite . James Burnham was like look , we have three case studies of societies that were , broadly speaking , democratic . Some of them have gone fascist , some of them have gone Marxist-Leninist-communist and some of them have gone liberal . All of them have had to basically assert some kind of voter-partist figure emerging out of this , of a managerial cadre . Burnham's conclusion , by the time you get to the new Machiavellians is and we should join that managerial cadre and make sure it comes out of the military , may a thousand eyes and howards bloom . It's interesting to me because Burnham in America is the figure that is shared by many of these different groups . I've even heard people try to argue that he was still a leftist and I'm like read his late work . He is not a leftist by the end of the life , that's for fucking sure , absolutely not .
Speaker 2But I think that's an important thing to note , though , because and this is what I'm getting at with this idea of an attraction to authority figures , because it is something that I have noticed I don't believe in this idea of a horseshoe theory that you move so far left that you become right , or you move so far right that you become left . That really dehistoricizes the difference between left-wing authoritarianism and right-wing authoritarianism , both in theory and practice . But there is a certain kind of personality that is fundamentally illiberal to its very core and feels deeply alienated or nihilistic in response to liberal modernity and democratic processes . There is a trajectory of figures who adopt this disposition , who will move pretty fluidly between right-wing authoritarianism and left-wing authoritarianism , not because they're necessarily attracted to the doctrine per se , but because they are looking for something that provides the best ammunition and solution to overcome what it is that they despise . These figures are individuals that we need to be sensitive to . Mussolini is a paradigmatic example of that .
Speaker 1The National Bolshevik Movement is another paradigmatic example .
Speaker 2Yeah .
Speaker 1And I think that's for a long time . I actually just didn't think those people were serious . To be frank , I was like they're not . No one's going to ever take them seriously . I'm wrong about that . I don't know how serious I ultimately think they are , but they are serious .
Speaker 2When my got communism emerged , I wasn't all that surprised . I mean , ben and I had laughed about it a little bit and I doubt it'll go anywhere . But if you look at the debate he had with the spokesman for MAGA communism , one of the things the guy said is well , what movement is actually doing something against this banal , manipulative , neoliberal status quo ? Right now , it's the MAGA movement . And there you see again very nicely embodied this idea that the fundamental problem isn't whether or not we should be MAGA authoritarians or communists . How do we get rid of neoliberal elites ? Whatever combination of movements we need in order to do that , then , by God , let's do it .
Speaker 1Which is where you get stuff like aristopopulism and left wing , right wing populist alliances . What are the things that I have said ? I actually take this from Chris Rolash . You might not know this about me , Matt , but I'm kind of a left wing lashian .
Speaker 2Oh , are you really ? That's cool . I didn't know that . Oh well , let me read it when you're done . I'd really be interested . But , there's a lot actually . Yeah , because you have a pretty eclectic array of interest , kind of like lash .
Speaker 1But one of the things that I actually get Matt lash for was the ban , and he is critique of populism . Later on he defends populism in his last two works Atron , only Heaven and the revolt against the elites , because he kind of flirts with communitarianism for a while and besides that's not really for him . And then he's like well , everyone's attacking the populist , this racist . Let me act and , I think , accurately present what they actually thought . Yes , some of them were racist , I'm not even going to hide that and but there's a lot more going on there . But his early work , when he was unequivocally a leftist , he points out actually an argument against Michael Harrington that populism introduces a kind of incoherence that has a tendency to degenerate into conspiracy theories and unsophisticated views of both the interaction between culture and politics . Ae , like basically like oh , look at , follow the money , but just follow the money , don't do any other thinking about power or anything like that .
Speaker 2Oh , I completely agree .
Speaker 2I mean , don't get me wrong I think that there's a place for a kind of left wing populism a la Bernie Sanders in the United States right or Jeremy Corbyn , for example , although you should be critical of elements of that .
Speaker 2But I think it is very dangerous , because what populist movements tend to devolve into are agonistic movements that very readily start saying that the only problem with our society is the persistence of this group of enemies or this group of , or the set of barriers , and all we need to do is overcome them , and then the will of the people can be truly expressed in a way that it never has been before and that's inherently unsystematic and undialectical . And enough of a Marxist to say we cannot do that right . So if we decide to go with the genie of populism , fair enough , but we better make sure that we can put this lack of systematicity back in the lamp when we're done mobilizing those energies and actually engage in the much more nitty gritty and much less glamorous activity of trying to reorient structures of power in society to inhibit the formation of new forms of aristocratic or class control .
Speaker 1Yeah , I think that's that's an important thing and I think that you know , I think Lash's defense of populism , like I said in his late work , is fair enough
Discussion on Populism, Fascism, and Politics
Speaker 1.
Speaker 1Actually a lot of what he says about it is true , but I'm always going back . But you said yourself that it degenerates into this other thing when it , when there's no movement compelling it it's , it's antagonistic , it's simple antagonism . It's not complex antagonism . It doesn't know , it doesn't have a complex or dialectical view of the way society works . It doesn't have a dial , complex or dialogue dialectical view of the way the culture works . It basically has a tendency , according to Lash's early work , to degenerate into like vulgar forms of X , usually conspiracism are , you know , and that's why it's given to racism , not because it's inherently racist . In fact , lash makes a pretty persuasive argument in his late work that it's not , but that it's just given towards an , you know , antagonistic politics period . That's what it does . If you don't have an elite and if you can't always have that elite be a specific group , it starts to like have trouble explaining what's going on .
Speaker 2Oh yeah , I would even add a Benjaminian critique . Benjaminio , in the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction , points out that one of the things that was fundamentally appealing about pop sorry , about fascism , which is a demonic kind of politics with a populist streak to it right Is the fact that fascism nothing else was entertaining . Right , it had a big picture narrative , it had heroes and villains conceived of the world often in these extraordinarily grandiose terms , and it generated the kind of thing that people inherently find entertaining . Just watch a movie , right , war , conflict , big success , great failure , darkness , light , all that kind of stuff . Good uniforms , wow .
Speaker 2Really shit uniforms in my opinion , but that's not to my taste . And he said that this kind of capacity for entertainment should never be underestimated in politics , and I think we could say something very similar about the inherent dangers of populism , because agonistic politics us versus them is way more entertaining and way more glamorous than we need to seriously rethink the bureaucratic structure of the administrative state , its alignment with economic class power , and find new forms of democratic organization that will not allow the re-solidification of class power once we take control of at least a branch of government or able to exercise political power effectively . Nothing very glamorous about that , nothing even really all that agonistic about it . It's just very nuts and bolts kind of politics , right . And so I think in that respect , the danger of entertainment and politics is a very real one for the left , because we can fall victim to it as much as anyone else . And yet we cannot deny the necessity of sometimes appealing to certain forms of populism in order to take that first step of can chaining political power .
Speaker 1So one thing I think when we talk about this , the kind of smithian state of exception comes to mind , and this is another element of smith , one that I think smith's actually scarily accurate about as a way politics actually functions , which is the purpose of sovereign exception . Now , I have recently just pointed out to people like , oh , we're always pointing out hypocrisies , both right and left , anyruly , thank you very much that and people are surprised that it doesn't do much . I'm like it really kind of shouldn't . Actually , if you understand this fundamental thing , because hypocrisy in the state of exception is actually proof that you have power , beginning to get away with it Like the sovereign is in charge , because they can set the exception , and partisanship , according to Smith , is basically what exceptions are you gonna point out , which ones are you're not ? That's actually . He goes so far to say that's like it shows your actual metaphysical values in political theology , which not gonna get into all that . That's a lot , but also very Nietzschean , frankly , the way he confuses that .
Speaker 2Oh , yeah , there's a very decision-less quality to Schmidt . That is very , very close to Nietzschean existentialism , or an existentialism sorry existentialist take on Nietzsche 100% .
Speaker 1But he's a Catholic fascist , so he can't totally go there with Nietzsche . He can't play Christianity . He might blame those dirty Protestants , but he's not blaming Christianity .
Speaker 2Well , I mean you pointed out , I mean you talked about the differences between Demetra and Nietzsche earlier on .
Speaker 2One of the things that I point out in my new book on the political right and the quality is , even though Demetra was definitely a Catholic traditionalist and Nietzsche was rabidly anti-Christian , there are elective affinities between their work , which explains why both of them have been appealing to fascists at various points .
Speaker 2Probably the clearest example of this is violence , right , where Demetra is emphatic about the fact that violence has very often been criticized by every political philosopher under the sun as a best of necessary evil and at where , something that we need to just completely eradicate from the world . If you're somebody like Emmanuel Kant , right , and Demetra says no , violence is edifying right . Violence leads you to focus your life in a way that elevates it to a new kind of existential pitch . And violence is also spectacular and consecrates authority with something like the power of God , because the executioner is somebody who has a kind of fraction of God's power , in that he gets to decide who lives and dies and takes life and grants life , and that's definitely something that Nietzsche could get on board with this idea that politics shouldn't fundamentally be about trying to placate human needs , but instead elevating at least a certain kind of people with spectacular projects , and the mass will follow suit .
Speaker 1I mean this is what Demetra argues that basically the revolution is actually God's will because we have to get rid of these old , long-singled regimes for not being powerful enough .
Speaker 2Yeah , absolutely yeah , and he describes it as satanic glory to the French Revolution . On that basis , right ?
Speaker 1Another thing that I think is interesting that is not totally there in Nietzsche , but why Demetra is attractive as opposed to most of the Catholic reactionaries is most Catholics are universalists and so they believe that the Catholic Church is the dominion of everybody , regardless of color and nation , that anybody can belong to the universal church . Demetra is interesting because he's like yeah , but there should be a German church and a French church because people are essentially different and unequal and we have to maintain that , like oh yeah , absolutely and very strongly , issues we might call Christian universalism at a deeper level as well .
Speaker 2Right , and I think this is very important in understanding his appeal to somebody reactionaries today , because one of the things that's really striking about his work is , more emphatically even than Burke he insists that , listen , people's capacity for reason is fundamentally very limited and we are not ultimately persuaded by appeals to people's rationalistic sensibilities . And if you submit authority to everyone's reason and they're allowed to criticize it , then it will diminish and desublimate authority . So instead we need is to treat religion like a dogma , and dogma is gonna look a little bit different everywhere , and what people accept as dogma is also gonna look a little bit differently everywhere . But there's a very , very striking denial of a universal capacity for reason on the part of Demetra and this insistence that the people who are entitled to be lawmakers or to create states are almost by nature , exceptional men , and he says they're kings without exception .
Speaker 1And this is an interesting thing about Demetra , because through the Demetra you can see someone actually being able to turn the impossible circle and turn it into a square by saying the anti-Christian Nietzsche is actually a reconcilable with an aristocratic Christian worldview , through someone like Demetra , which you have to kind of ignore A a bunch of Catholic social teaching and B Nietzsche's fundamental beliefs about Christianity to do . But Demetra gives you a way to do it , even though he's before that . I mean , it's just an interesting thing because when you do meet a lot of these , like back before they were called outright , they were called neo-reactionaries . But the neo-reactionaries have both the racial and the Catholic version . The Catholic version would do this Nietzsche-plus-Demetra and we can bring back reactionary Catholic social pot and I'm like . But to do that you actually have to reject , say , like equinism . You can't be an equinean and believe that you can't actually be in the mainstream of the Catholic church and actually hold that position without kind of being a heretic . But Demetra was okay with it .
Speaker 2So oh yeah , and I mean I've seen a lot of this recently .
Speaker 2So first thing's magazine , which is kind of the flagship of Catholic reaction in the United States , has recently published a number of what one alt-right person called Pagans .
Speaker 2To me this includes Lawm 37's essay on the Longhouse and Michael Lipperman's really shocking defensive duagonism .
Speaker 2And you might ask yourself , well , how is it that a Catholic magazine can endorse these very clearly Pagan figures who are highly indebted to Nietzsche , heidegger and a number of other anti-Christians ?
Speaker 2And I think , like you said , the Demetra connection is a very good one , where these people are all committed to this idea that the massive people cannot be convinced to submit themselves to proper authorities through appeals to their reason . They need dogma and mythology in order to do so , and they think they've convinced themselves pretty readily that , well , a kind of aristocratic Christianity is the right kind of dogma to convince people to submit to authority , because it's familiar to them , it's recognizable , and you can conceive of Christianity in these hierarchical ways with every leftist nose right . But then you can accompany that with the concentration of power in the hands of the truly worthy elite who are able to refue these hypermasculist great projects of the sort that reactionaries almost always find electrifying , and once the masses are similarly buttered up through this ideology , they're likely willing to participate in these grand projects , except in their proper role , which is subordinated to the great aristocratic men .
Speaker 1Right , which is a slightly different from some of the people in the same tradition , such as , like to some degree , michael Lynn , who think , oh no , we don't need subordination , we need collaboration and class collaborationism between these groups of people . But you could use the same argument for that effectively , which is why some of these people are political allies , even though they don't seem like they should be . Oh yeah , but I'm with you on that . I've noticed that for a while . I mean , I've actually seen that in Dugan himself , because one of the things about Dugan he's just kind of moved from a pagan background in his earlier coffee house reactionary days into a more Orthodox Christian one , albeit one dressed in Heidegger and Derrida . Then he was actually read Dugan . He's a lot of . It's a very interesting cacophony of stuff in there .
Speaker 2I mean , that's one way to put it and the way I would describe it is you know , if you fucking drop acid and teleport yourself back to like 1930s Germany and you'll get a good sense of what Dugan is and is like .
Speaker 1Yeah , I mean , you know he's one of these people who actually like Avola . His criticism and people don't realize this his criticism of fascism is like well , national Bolshevism is okay for Western Europe , so we're gonna encourage things like Golden Dawn . Also , it's been weird because like people like Dugan's an anti-fascist and I'm like what Like he's explicitly endorsed fascist parties in Europe before .
Speaker 2And I mean he also endorsed fascism in the , the USSR and Russia also . So let's be very clear about this .
Speaker 1But his critique of fascism in a fourth political theory is basically like it's too liberal and too racialist . It doesn't understand the spiritual dimension to . That's totally Spiegler and Avola , oh yeah .
Speaker 2I mean it's a . Terry Eagleton , in his book Materialism , has pointed out that , broadly speaking , people on the left tend to lean towards endorsing various kinds of materialism and people on the right tend to lean towards embracing various kinds of idealism . Now , there are exceptions to this , and he points out that Nietzsche is a spectacular example of somebody who , for the most part , seems like materialist , who belongs very clearly on the far right . And of course , there are plenty of lefty-gallion idealists . Even in my own country there's a really proud tradition of lefty-gallion idealism that we won't get into right .
Speaker 1But the reason for the sorry , yeah , charles Selle , exactly .
Speaker 2Yeah , rc B Mifersen right , and the reason that he says this is like , look , materialism foregrounds , the kind of things that people for the most part tend to share in common , and so there's a demonic quality to it . Because you need to eat , I need to eat , we both need running water , we both probably want to live in a house rather than be exposed to the elements . Running water is a pretty nice thing , that kind of nuts and bolts stuff . Reactionaries tend to be attracted to idealism , according to Heidegger , because it moves one word in a certain kind of way towards sublimated , rarefied value systems that are the creation of superior kinds of individuals and that separates them from the herd or the mass which share all ideas in common .
Speaker 2Right and Dugan is and Evola were both spectacular examples of Eagleton's insight , because what's very clear with both of them Evola , from his early idealist days endorsing magical idealism to his self-conscious creation of mythology is this idea that in Evola , that what separates the superior man again is this capacity to discover and create new kinds of traditions that are unavailable to the mass of human beings but in which the mass of human beings can be participate if they are the lead by the right kind of super aristocracy or super fascism and Duganism is very similar in this regard .
Speaker 2If you read his book on Heidegger , he talks about the swarming masses who really don't have any thoughts of their own , but they can be given a destiny by the right kinds of intellectuals by which he means himself , of course who can see what the future needs , even if the massive individuals can't . And the basic people are getting any choice in what this destiny is going to be because they're not creative enough to imagine it , so it needs to be imposed upon them by this kind of intellectual cadre that has a great deal of authoritarian force backing it up .
Speaker 1Yeah , but I think that's why we see I mean , this is interesting , because that ambivalence , however , in Dugan is how you can have a bunch of people who pull explicitly from Dugan and yet claim to be leftist .
Speaker 2Oh yeah , and I mean no Like . I mean Dugan , in the fourth political theory and in this introduction to Eurasianism , makes so many signposts about why this should be impossible that anyone who doesn't take them seriously is just being naive , right ?
Fascist Intellectuals and Conservative Thinkers
Speaker 2Probably the clearest example of this is he says the road from the third political theory by which he means fascism to the fourth political theory is a lot shorter than the road from the second political theory or the first political theory .
Speaker 1So yeah , the first political theory is liberalism , the second is Marxism , the third is fascism and the fourth is the perfect one Eurasianism or fourth positionism .
Speaker 2Exactly right . And he also points out that one of the projects that he's consciously trying to do in a very abominable way is to construct a hyper-conservative theory , particularly when it comes to conceiving of conservative conceptions of time as sictical rather than progressive . He constantly refers to himself as a follower , disciple of Evola , Guillaume , Feiland , de Benoit , all these new right figures or post-war right figures . So he is very much a right-wing figure , and this is again another example of a fascist intellectual in this circumstance who is capable of leaning into a kind of anti-capitalist aristocricism , gesture towards the left and say see , listen , we're committed to the same things and have a lot of leftist buy into that right . But this is not a Marxist anti-capitalism and it is certainly not a socialist anti-capitalism .
Speaker 1It is a rightist anti-capitalism at most , and we should have no truck with it If it's even anti-capitalist in every sense , either yeah .
Speaker 2I would even dispute that right , because he's had nothing meaningful to say about Russia's domination by a plutocratic elite class that backs up the current administration . He'll sometimes gesture towards their spinelessness and be critical of their kind of covetous materialism , but the fundamental problem isn't that there's a plutocracy , it's just that the plutocracy isn't committed to the right value systems and able to see the glorious destiny that Dugan wants to rule out for them , and leftists shouldn't think that way . The problem with plutocracy isn't that they don't have the long value systems . The problem with plutocracy is fucking plutocracy right , and we need to get rid of it .
Speaker 1Well , this is the thing like having come out of a paleoconservative world . I know these appeals . If someone starts asking about your metaphysics as a leftist , you know where they come from . So I guess this leads me though , because I wanted to do my survey of people we take seriously . We haven't actually talked about many traditional conservatives we should take seriously , and I can only really think of . I used to take Ron Dreyer more seriously than I currently do .
Speaker 2Well , I mean , I found a masturbation thing , yet it's a little difficult .
Speaker 1But I think about , unfortunately , when I and maybe this is our own , you know , maybe it's because I have a deep seeded hatred of the English too . I don't know I always like when I talk about it when I pull from my my smart conservative enemies bag who are actually conservatives and not reactionaries and the way we've been talking about the day are libertarians . I'm always like Roger Scruton .
Speaker 2Oh yeah , roger Scruton , 100% was a really smart guy . Not only that , what fucking pisses me off about him is he wrote really well . You know what I mean . Like some of his essays are a little clunky here and there , but like , if you read his stuff on art or you read his critique of the left , like Fool's Frogs and Firebrands , or you read his book on how to be a conservative , they're really crisp , they're really deep , they're poetic at parts . They're not afraid to like reference complicated thinkers but like make them accessible . If anything , I really think that the left could learn from Roger Scruton when it comes to how to actually present progressive ideas in a way that's deep , smart , funny and even poetic at points .
Speaker 1Yeah , I mean , I think you know . My other example of that is Hitchens Peter Hitchens , not Christopher , oh yeah .
Speaker 2I was gonna say yeah fucking , ben Burgess would just be sitting there like swooping down , being like God , dare you fucking .
Speaker 1Yeah , ben's waiting for me to start a fight with Hitchens . No , it's Peter Hitchens , because Peter Hitchens , even , you know , even though he's a starch Catholic rector I did a show on him once where he actually called my assessment fair . Oh really , yeah , I was like ha , because I'm like yeah , he's reactionary , but like he does believe in peace , he actually does believe , he really seriously believes in , like , preferential treatment for the poor . He's also a nationalist and says ridiculous things about liberal values .
Speaker 2And the definitely and yeah , and LGBT rights in the Nazis but , yeah .
Speaker 1Absolutely but .
Speaker 1I would say , if you want , like you , talk about living conservative ish thinkers , not like hardcore reactionaries not conservative , Because one of the things right now in America is , I will admit , the conservative small C brand right now is pretty much popularly represented by morons . So and and I don't think it's actually it doesn't prove serious leftists to constantly fight with morons , because we will eventually meet someone who is smart from this political tradition and we're used to dealing with somebody arguing that , like gender Marxism is why you know well , hooks and Disney are communist , like you know are . You know the various Rhonda say , not that we shouldn't take Rhonda Santas's hypocrisy one not seriously , but like like in some , in some degree , if we're constantly fighting that we're actually weakening our ability to fight , like not the public demagogues but the people who are actually smart behind them .
Speaker 2Well , I'll give you a list of five people . Then , okay , rain is Lee who I think are I mean , I've criticized all their books , but they are bright guys . So your Amazonie , probably not that book , the virtue of nationalism , which I think just has so many historical problems in it that it's been criticized to death . But as recent conservatism , a rediscovery that argues for historical materialism , or sorry , historical materialism , historical empiricism has gained a lot of attention for good reason , and it warrants a considered leftist response
Conservative Intellectual Figures in the US
Speaker 2. Then Adrian Vimule , who you mentioned , who's at Harvard Law and it's kind of America's resident Schmidean . He's a clever guy . And not only is he a clever guy , but he is really willing to draw liberally from the progressive legal arsenal in order to agitate for reactionary positions . This is really into the weeds of legal philosophy . But he leans very heavily on a guy called Ronald Dworkin to critique originalists for not being conservative enough in his book Common Good . Constitutionalism Sounds really fucking weird , but it's actually a fairly compelling argument and it needs a systematic critique .
Speaker 2Then I would argue that the next person that is really out there in terms of the quality of his work would be somebody like Sorab Amari .
Speaker 2I think Sorab is doing a good job .
Speaker 2If he is still conservative , he seems to be moving more into that kind of last territory , but historically , his book on Broken Thread also did a good job of incorporating religious insights from a wide variety of traditions into a kind of considered traditionalism that's also evocative and appealing to a wide variety of people .
Speaker 2The next person that I would add on to the list would probably actually be Curtis Yarvin . I pointed out that his work is of a very low quality intellectually , and it is in my assessment of his work . The next thing that is problematic about what he is doing is that it's very eclectic , and so there are a lot of hooks that people from a wide variety of different intellectual traditions can get caught on . Once they buy into the broader ecosystem that he lays out , they're pretty much lost . If he has his libertarian hooks , his traditionalist hooks , his race-realist hooks you name it Somebody that we definitely need to confront and deal with very seriously , then I suppose the last person that I would put on that list would be , I'm trying to think of somebody on the Nietzschean right , since that's a little bit underrepresented right now .
Speaker 1Are there any religious ? I mean , I guess for me LA is actually a religious rightist .
Speaker 2Oh , I didn't mean . Yeah , give me a second .
Speaker 1Who's the current editor of First Things ? Mark Borderlin .
Speaker 2Oh , there's RR Reno , rusty Reno and Justin Lee are there .
Speaker 1Yeah , mark Borderlin's book the Dumbest Generation is actually kind of funny yeah .
Speaker 2I mean , I could think of some of the bar Watered-down figures . It's time for me to stick with anybody on the Nietzschean right in the United States right now who's doing impressive oh no way , actually , don't Michael Millerman , who's done a really who's done dangerous work popularizing Heidegger , nietzsche , strauss to contemporary , millennial and Gen Z audiences . I think he's somebody who you do need to confront seriously as an intellectual force Also .
Speaker 1I think yeah .
Speaker 2That's also why I was bringing that up , because the thing about what Michael is doing is beyond just popularizing various streams of right-wing thought that we're already familiar to the right in the United States and Canada . What he's also doing is incorporating people like Dugan into the tradition and giving them a voice to an audience that they wouldn't have had otherwise . So he's a very dangerous figure that I think the left needs to offer systematic responses to , particularly since he's having an influence on young writers in particular .
Speaker 1The person I would say that I would add would be Paul Godfrey . Oh .
Speaker 2Paul Godfrey . Yeah , I mean he pissed off James Lindsay for just being honest , I remember that Paul Godfrey was like quit saying that all this is Marxism .
Speaker 1It's not . And Lindsay was like who is this liberal ? He's an idiot . I'm like oh my God , you have no idea what you're talking about .
Speaker 2Yeah , that really was surprising . Yeah , I'm like Godfrey is fucking a serious scholar , like his book on the post-war influence of Hegel on the American right is probably still the most lucid exposition of the importance of this tradition . And I was like , yeah , james , if you're fucking deciding that you're going to pick a fight with Paul Godfrey about who's more conservative and who is more respected by conservatives , you're going to fucking lose badly . Godfrey will just trash you . So understand your place in this fucking ecosystem . You're the guy who writes the race Marxism books , saying everything and anything that I don't like is woke and cultural Marxist . He's the guy who writes the fucking books on Hegel , and you both have your roles to play , but don't fucking go after him .
Speaker 1It's not going to end well . He also writes what ? The strange non-deaf of managerial liberalism , aka the smart version of what you do , james Lindsay . But yeah , there's two thinkers that I would maybe add , but I'm not sure . I'm a conservative , so I wanted to throw out . Do you think Michael Sandel is a conservative as a communitarian ?
Speaker 2No , not at all . I mean , he's made it very clear that he's a left communitarian Again , in tradition of people like McIntyre or , for that matter , in the kind of left-arist Italian tradition that emphasizes equality of resources . And I would say that , if push comes to shove , he would probably say that he endorses liberal institutions and liberal rights , but he feels that they need to be complemented by community-oriented localism , a respect for the other that you don't see under meritocratic liberalism , and we need to . The liberal institutions need to wean themselves off of various neoliberal conceits . So no , I wouldn't say so .
Speaker 1Yeah , I wasn't sure either , because I do know he has a soft spot for Confucianism , for example , and stuff like that . But I pretty much consider him a left liberal communitarian .
Speaker 2Oh yeah , I mean his book the Tyranny of Merit is actually a very sharp critique of meritocratic mythologies , but it's worth noting that he speaks very respectfully both of Hayek and Rawls , points out that one of the interesting things about 20th century liberal theory is that it's two greatest proponents both not only rejected meritocracy but said that meritocracy is just an inconceivable idea , it's never going to happen , right ? If anything , it's kind of a pre-liberal idea . And then he kind of builds on the writing of Rawls and Hayek to make this argument that they don't go far enough and they still are too enamored with certain kind of individualist ideas of the sorts that meritocrats use in order to argue for meritocracy .
Speaker 1But again , it's very much a kind of left communitarian , sympathetic treatment of liberalism rather than to the pigs with you , and the last one I would mention would be Richard and his son , eric Posner . Do you think they are ? Oh , richard Posner .
Speaker 2No , I wouldn't say so . I mean even Richard Posner , his economics of justice book and some of the other stuff that he did for law and economics definitely had a pronounced influence on right . We thought for sure , exactly .
Speaker 2But I mean circa 2008, . He actually said that he was wrong about free market absolutism and started endorsing various kinds of welfare as performism . And I'd say , even in his heyday , when he argued for wealth machinization over and against things like utilitarianism , he still very clearly fell within this kind of libertarian enlightenment framework . So , regardless of the influence that he had on the broader right , I don't think he ever really sat very comfortably there and you know , and you know support for , you know , market society .
Speaker 1And you don't feel that way about his son , Eric , either , who wrote a book with Adrian Van Niel . So I don't know .
Speaker 2I haven't read any of Eric Posner stuff , so I can't actually say intelligently anything about him . Yeah , I think maybe he's closer to Richard .
Speaker 1Posner in that he's probably some kind of pragmatist and that's actually kind of hard to pin down . But and also let's let's be clear here Many people have written books with Adrian Vimule who are not reactionary , such as Cass Sunstein . Yeah , that's what I say . Cass Sunstein wrote a book with Adrian Vimule .
Speaker 2And there's no , there's no human being more centrist than Cass Sunstein , right Like I'm pretty sure if you flip through the dictionary and you're like centrist political figure , Cass Sunstein's figure is right there . I'm sorry , pictures right there holding up a copy of like Nudge Economics , Right ? So no , yeah .
Speaker 1I mean , he's basically a it's like the Obama Blairist center position , encapsulated in a human being , exactly .
Speaker 2Like , if you wanted to , if you were to like , anthropomorphize the centrist fallacy , the centrist fallacy , it would take the form of Cass Sunstein .
Speaker 1Yes , oh , thank you so much . I'm going to list to some of your recent work in Jacobin when do you think your book on conservatism and inequality will be out ?
Speaker 2Oh yeah , so my book , the Political Right and Equality is coming out in July 2023 . I'm really excited about it and , listen , I should say I am very critical of the political right throughout that book and I make no bones about it . But I think I use the word genius at least four or five
Learning From and Critiquing Conservative Thinkers
Speaker 2times . Describe a number of the different figures in it , particularly TS Eliot , dostoyevsky , nietzsche , even people like Burke get quite a lot of love , and that's not to say that they are right or even that the left necessarily should try to learn from them . Maybe it should learn against them . It is to say that they offer considered , deep and often very funny objections to progressive thought and , like you said , we need to be able to answer these systematically . It's not enough just to dunk on the Ben Shapiro's and Mark Levin's and James Lindsay's of the world . I mean , lord knows , I do that myself and you know I have a good time .
Speaker 2I mean it's fine , don't get me wrong .
Speaker 1But it is fun .
Speaker 2I mean , it's like playing on easy mode . Who doesn't like doing that every now and then and just feeling like you know he can fucking do anything ? But you know we need to offer considered objections to these more serious figures . And I should say that one of the inspirations for the book beyond just , you know , corey Robin and Albert Hirschman and all the other leftist who have written good books on the political right was actually Roger Scrutin . I really conceived of this as my attempt to kind of do what he did in Fool's Fruits and Firebrands and , you know , with the same kind of sense of humor if possible , right ? So in a weird way Scrutin inspired this book on the political right and I would hope that if he were alive he probably would have gotten at least a few laughs of it . So I'm hoping that conservators will read it and maybe find something of value to it .
Speaker 1All right . Well , thank you so much , Matt , and have a great rest of the day .
Speaker 2You too , buddy unintelligible .
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