A World after Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right by Matthew Rose

4/5

The popular image of the political right in the United States is understandably dominated by the nauseatingly loud Republican Party and its media activists. Anything beyond typically classed into the intellectually irrelevant realm of skinheads and illiterate hillbillies – a security threat at most rather than an ideological one. The reality is a bit more complex. Believe it or not, the extreme right, people we never really hear about, also have erudite intellectuals and scholars. Many of them have raised sophisticated and even poignant criticisms of liberalism no less learned than those of the academic left. While you can go to any university campus and still hear the most refined arguments that Marxists can muster, their far-right intellectual counterparts are so marginalized few of us are even aware that they exist outside of stereotypes. As Matthew Rose notes in this book, the radical-right is the true Other of American intellectual life.

This book is an eloquent set of essays about five representative thinkers of the radical-right that aims to give an overview of their thought. It’s a critical book and by no means a sympathetic one. But it does seek to understand the right on its own terms. The men profiled were all opponents of liberalism first and foremost. Rather than being parochial and insular, many of them were distinguished polymaths, linguists, historians, and world travelers. The men that Rose profiles are Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Samuel Francis, Alain de Benoist, and Francis Parker Yockey. I will give small snapshots of all below.

Oswald Spengler was a popular historian in interwar Germany, and among the first Europeans to write about the perceived decline of Western civilization. This decline was already visible to Spengler at Europe’s peak in the early 20th century. Spengler wrote about familiar romantic themes like the negative impact of technology on the spirit of modern European man. He was a critic of the way that modernity seemed to sap away the vital energies that had given birth to it in the first place. The work he is most famous for however was The Decline of the West, published in 1918 at the tail end of the First World War. Its scholarship feels somewhat dubious to modern eyes and bases its arguments on the existence of unverifiable civilizational categories and Hegelian notions of history and cultural destiny. The basic premise of the book, though, that the West was eventually doomed, was so provocative at the time that it became an instant hit. The Decline of the West became a touchstone for Western “declinist” thinkers for decades. They seemed to be rather haunted by it. Unbeknownst to me, Spengler was also one of those early to warn about global demographic change and what it meant for the West, foreseeing the inevitable rise of the “darker races” at a time when the globe was still dominated by white Westerners. I suppose you could say that he was the intellectual grandfather of contemporary Great Replacement theorists, though, in reality, that idea had many parents among Spengler’s generation.

Julius Evola, recently popularized by his fan Steve Bannon, was a strange and charismatic Italian intellectual who mixed spirituality and politics in a manner that was was common to fascists movements during his lifetime. Evola was an adept of a movement called Traditionalism, which still exists today and has followers from a surprisingly diverse selection of humanity, including many intellectual Islamists. Evola wrote of the need to promote spiritual values under assault by liberalism, and how and why mankind must maintain them in the face of civilizational collapse. He was a neo-pagan who had no time for Christianity and saw the modern world as essentially a giant wreckage. Evola meant to express that the world was a cultural and spiritual wreck because of certain metaphysical shortcomings, but his arguments about decline and resurgence seemed to make much more sense to people after the real-world disaster of the Second World War. Evola told his followers to remain patient for a time when liberal modernity had exhausted itself with its ceaseless exertions and the world could return to an era of traditional heroism and spirituality. If you hear someone talking about “Riding the Tiger,” they are citing Evola’s advice to continue to bearing with modernity, holding on and simply surviving, until the modern world finally exhausts itself and collapses. This would make way, finally, for a new world to be born.

Samuel Francis was a white-nationalist American journalist and later advisor to Pat Buchanan who popularized the term “anarcho-tyranny” to describe life in the contemporary United States. Francis argued that white communal consciousness was under assault by liberal society, to their great detriment. All other communities in America were allowed to maintain their particular identity except whites, and this was slowly transforming them into a despised underclass within the country that they had founded. Anarcho-tyranny was a system by which the American legal and administrative state punishes and prevents people, specifically white people, from organizing themselves in an effective political manner on behalf of their interests, while at the same time leaving them unprotected against the stochastic terrorism of violent crime usually committed by minorities. Like other radical-right thinkers, Francis was completely opposed to liberal universalism, which he saw as merely an ideological bludgeon to attack the majority community. Despite being drummed out of mainstream conservatism for his openly white nationalist statements, Francis became a patron saint of the U.S. far-right. Although he was a disturbing figure on many counts, I’ve noticed that even his enemies at places like the SPLC seem to grudgingly respect him as an intellectual adversary. I plan to read more of his work in future to understand some of the rhetorical signals and terminology used on the contemporary American far-right, where he is indeed still widely cited.

Alain de Benoist is a contemporary French intellectual and one of the most influential radical-right activists still living. Like many French thinkers, including those on the left, anti-Americanism is an essential part of de Benoist’s work. He is against universal liberalism, of which he sees America as a violently imperialist exemplar, and also against the multicultural idea of liberal democracy, which again, he sees contemporary America as most embodying. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s work on international relations and law, de Benoist has written books denouncing the violent excesses and illegalities of the U.S.-led War on Terror that would not be out of place in a leftist bookshop. His thought goes much deeper than just anti-Americanism, however: de Benoist is fundamentally opposed to the idea that human beings are part of some type of universal community, or that they should be forced or expected to have the same values. By extension he is against people from different cultures living together under the same political or legal regimes. He is against this not just because it would cause conflict, but because it will inevitably homogenize their distinct cultures into oblivion and make humanity poorer as a result. de Benoist wants to preserve particular cultures in their particular places, while not judging one superior over the other. As a result he is against immigration as much as liberal imperialism, and an exemplary opponent of the European Union.

Francis Parker Yockey was the only individual in this book profiled whose name I had never even heard before. Yockey was an American intelligence officer in World War II, whose sympathies secretly lied on the German side which he saw as the more effective bulwark for preserving white European identity. Its in dispute as to whether he actually collaborated with the Germans during the war, but after his disillusionment with America’s liberalizing political drift, he became a dissident underground intellectual known for his anti-liberal, anti-Semitic, pan-European writings. Yockey went much further than garden variety racism, however, and called for a global alliance of the far-right and far-left to combat liberal imperialism, even supporting Third World liberation movements as an important means of beating back a tyrannical, globalist United States. Unlike many “slacktivists” then and today, he actually put his money where his mouth was in terms of his beliefs. Yockey left the United States, where he had become a fugitive, to become an activist in Soviet Bloc countries, including in the Arab World where he worked for Gamal Abdel Nasser writing anti-Zionist propaganda. After years on the run, he was arrested by the FBI while traveling back to the United States under a pseudonym and died in jail under murky circumstances. While unknown to most Americans, he is revered as a martyr on the radical-right.

**

Though Rose admires these men as intellects and occasionally as martyrs, as a Christian writer he is fundamentally against the radical right due its pagan and anti-Christian outlook. What many in the U.S. do not understand is that Christianity is hated by much of the far-right for being the seedbed of liberal universalism. The idea that we could all be brothers in Christ just bleeds a bit too easily into the idea that we can be brothers in humanity. (Islam has the same universalist tendency as Christianity, but for whatever reason it did not give birth to liberalism as an ideological offspring. For that reason, it is actually looked upon sometimes favorably by the radical-right, even if they don’t want too many actual Muslims around.) The hatred that the radical-right has towards universalism is borne of their desire to bring back into existence a pagan world of culturally distinct, physically separate tribes negotiating their relations at arms-length. This also seems to be the goal of at least some secular far-left activists on race today who view distinct racial categories as immutable or even desirable. The Nation of Islam was an example of this type of anti-liberalism when it explored the prospect of making common cause with the American Nazi Party. If they read him, contemporary race activists might find an unsettling sense of common cause with men like de Benoist, who are more concerned with preserving and celebrating difference among cultures than establishing a Kingdom of God, or universal secular liberal utopia.

Do not underestimate them: The radical-right are worthy enemies both to liberals, leftists and religious universalists. Contrary to the stereotypes, many of them have been brilliant, worldly, erudite, and even self-sacrificing individuals. Their persistent influence is visible online, and even in post-liberal intellectual circles on the contemporary right. I find them worth reading even thought I consider them political opponents. This is not out of sympathy, but because their writings offer a completely different perspective on humanity and its first principles – not just at odds with liberalism but also divorced from both mainstream conservative thought and even monotheistic religion. I try to analyze things in the abstract, setting emotion aside and understanding people on their own terms, no matter how different or even hostile they may be. These guys really are the Other, but it’s only by studying those that are truly different from us that we can learn more about ourselves and what we truly believe. All in all, this book is an excellent contribution to understanding the post-Christian right in the West, and as accessible an introduction as one can find for those interested in the subject.