Climbing off the Tiger

Reflections on politics after liberalism

In the 20th century, after the disasters of the world wars, and apparent destruction of European civilization, Julius Evola, a traditionalist philosopher beloved by the far-right, wrote a book called, “Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul.” The idea of “riding the tiger” was a metaphor for how people should navigate a global order defined by liberal capitalism and communism, powerful global ideologies that Evola viewed as chaotic and misguided, yet, ultimately, fleeting.

Evola wrote:

“The modern world is like a wild beast. He who rides the tiger cannot afford to fall off. He must learn to stay on its back until the beast, exhausted, collapses under its own weight.”

I was reminded of Evola’s metaphor recently while reading a book by the Turkish author Selim Koru, entitled “New Turkey and the Far-Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country.” Koru’s book is about a group of people who successfully “rode the tiger” of secular nationalist liberalism in Turkey until its collapse. The hardcore Turkish Islamists he profiles never succumbed or became liberals inwardly, and even played nice with the regime as long as needed. But they did this only until, as they predicted, the ideology eventually wore itself out, allowing a more historically familiar type of pure power politics to reemerge.

Some of the personalities that Koru writes about acknowledged this waiting game explicitly. One of them was Kadir Mısıroğlu, a polemical Turkish Islamist writer, who lived through the long decades of 20th century secular liberalism. Mısıroğlu viewed liberalism, communism, and even the hegemonic national cult of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, which seemed to have a fanatical hold on his fellow citizens, as merely passing fads. As he saw it, Turkey’s natural identity was that of an Islamic imperialist state, such as it had been for many centuries until its breakup after World War I.

Against the fashion of his time, which was secular and liberal, Mısıroğlu never wavered in his belief that the old era would come back. “When there is a solar eclipse, it stays dark for five minutes,” he said near the end of his life in 2015, when he felt that Turkey’s imperial Islamic identity had begun to reemerge. “Then, the sun begins to come out again.”

The Shot Heard Around the World

I have been considering the concept of ideological eclipse ever since the October 7 massacre in Israel, and subsequent Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. These events, I contend, will be looked at in future as being no less consequential of a historical turning point than the assassination of Franz Ferdinand that began World War I, with Yahya Sinwar serving as the Gavrilo Princip of our era. Watching the real-time reemergence of the worst horrors of the 20th century, endorsed, defended, and armed by nominally liberal Western states, has been a revelatory moment.

None of the old concepts seem to have force any longer. No amount of appeals to international law or human rights, themselves fragile creations of the postwar world, have halted the massacres in Gaza for even a moment. We are proceeding towards a denouement of mass ethnic cleansing, openly proclaimed by the perpetrators, and there is no sense that a line might ever be crossed. Being an expert in International Human Rights Law in this context seems about as absurd and irrelevant as having a doctorate in Scientific Marxism from the Soviet Union in 1989.

Despite that, many people have not gotten the memo. They are still sitting in the saddle of the collapsed tiger, exhorting it to roar back to life in the name of human rights, civil society, international law, and many other glorious-sounding ideological concepts. To reiterate, that is as likely as Lenin reawakening from his mausoleum in the Red Square and declaring the continuation of the global communist revolution.

Liberalism is dead, although we are still living with its corpse. The question now is, after the world has transformed, how should we live? Or, more pressingly, how do people survive in a world that is once again based primarily on survival of the fittest? That returns me back to Koru’s book which offers some ideas, case-tested in at least one country.

“Life is Like A Jungle Sometimes”

The core idea underpinning modern Turkish Islamist nationalism, and particularly its approach to foreign policy, is that the world is a jungle without rules or guardrails. Military strength, internal solidarity, and population size are the only factors relevant to living with safety and dignity. If the world is really a jungle, and liberalism is an ideological fad, as Turkish Islamists have always believed, then the legality and respectability of national conduct matters much less to a country than its internal cohesion, gross economic power, and the quality and proportion of its weapons.

With that in mind, the Turkish government promotes a highly militaristic, religious, and ultranationalist internal culture and political economy. Turkey has a developed rapidly-growing domestic arms industry, even becoming an exporter of military hardware to the European Union and the GCC. The country’s elites are fanatically committed to expanding their naval footprint over the Mediterranean and Red Sea, and have invested heavily in designing and producing drones, fifth-generation fighter aircraft, and electronic warfare systems.

Turkish elites have also engaged in ruthless devaluation of liberal norms that they see as weakening the national body. These have included procedural democracy, individual freedom, and human rights, all of which have been portrayed by Turkish leaders as delusional liberal fantasies unsuited for a serious civilization. As Koru writes, Turkish Islamists have instead dedicated their energies towards fostering social conservatism, religious revival, deployment of military force abroad, strategic use of soft power, and the fostering of state-connected industries intended to be used as sources of direct power for the regime.

In theory, these policies should produce a tightly-organized national body focused on self-strengthening, population growth, economic prosperity, and defense against external enemies. But ideas and reality don’t often match up very cleanly. Turkey’s birthrate continues to rapidly decline, inflation has left ordinary citizens in deep discontent, many urbanized youth are actually very secular, and the periodic purges required to maintain the loyalty of state institutions have deprived Turkey of the talents of many of its most vital citizens.

Despite the partly botched implementation, if liberalism, which has been reduced to a cult belief in the developing world, and is in deep crisis in its Western heartlands, is really expiring, its not clear Turkish Islamists have the wrong idea about how to organize a state. Their ideas have uncomfortable resonances with the historical far-right as Koru notes, which is rightly blamed for bringing Europe to disaster in the last century. But in a jungle-like world where there are no rules or institutions towards which the weak can appeal, focusing on maximizing collective strength at all costs may actually be a pragmatic decision. It certainly sounds more appealing than suffering the fate of weak peoples like the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh, or the Palestinians of Gaza, who have appealed to the world to stop their massacres and displacement on moral grounds, without the slightest response. It is better to have weapons, territory, and a large national economy, rather than counting on the United Nations to rescue you.

Turkey is not alone in this approach. Most states with long historical memories tend to view things the same way, treating liberalism as a passing fad in their much longer national histories. China today is run as a ultranationalist party state, with the nucleus being the Chinese Communist Party. That is also what Hindutva-oriented India, and other so-called “civilizational states” are currently aspiring towards. Despite being founded in part as a symbolic liberal penance for the Holocaust, it is even how contemporary Israel is governed, after the victory of revisionist Zionism as a vision of the Jewish future over liberal and leftist alternatives.

As these countries see it, they refused to ever swallow the Kool-Aid of liberal internationalism, even if they had to politely sip on it for awhile as the United States was watching. With the liberal era finally past, they are now discarding the pretense, and heavily arming themselves for the century of struggle ahead.

Climbing Off

I finished reading Koru’s book while wrapping up a trip to the Balkans, including Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnia, a country for which I have deep affection, is a place where another global ideology, communism, finally ran out of steam in the 1990s. What emerged in its vacuum were the fierce ethnic and religious rivalries that had characterized the region for centuries prior, and which the Titoist regime had only contained, never uprooted.

In my conversations with Bosnians, I found myself involuntarily cringing when I heard well-intentioned people continue to put their faith in the moral uprightness of the liberal European Union, which, they believed, would never again allow part of the continent to devolve into barbarism. Luckily for them, many others have realized that the liberal era is over, and are focusing instead on shoring up their internal strength in various ways. They are doing this not for aggression, but as a deterrent against the enemies that they know will always surround them. Hopefully, that way they can actually live in peace.

I’ve always considered myself a liberal, and have enjoyed my own ride on the tiger while it lasted. I am also deeply marked in a cultural way from spending my life in the Leningrad of global liberalism that is the coastal United States. But at the same time, after witnessing the annihilation of Gaza, and the speed with which liberal ideology could be jettisoned to help facilitate that, even in the U.S., I think it is simply impossible to take this ideology seriously.

Like Evola, Turkish Islamists, Chinese Communists, Israeli Zionists, and Indian Hindutvadis, each products of civilizations that long predated liberalism, all knew that the tiger of global liberalism would eventually tire itself out and collapse. You can call them whatever epithets that you want, and I certainly have a problem with many of them. But they saw the situation more clearly than others. The liberal era is over now, and we have an idea of what comes next.

If you haven’t gotten the memo about that, the sooner you wake up and do what is necessary to survive the better. “He who rides the tiger will not be spared,” Evola wrote. “But he will be different from those who are merely devoured.”