[The intellectual godfathers of the “alt right” and their
descendants are on a fool’s errand: to rationalize irrational
hatreds.]
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IDEAS, INCLUDING FOOLISH ONES, HAVE CONSEQUENCES  
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Walden Bello
November 22, 2022
Foreign Policy in Focus
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_ The intellectual godfathers of the “alt right” and their
descendants are on a fool’s errand: to rationalize irrational
hatreds. _

Oswald Spengler's "The Decline of the West" featured in the New York
Times Book Review, 1929, (Source: New York Times Machine)

 

Is the radical right pure hate and all emotion?

Well, they may start from that, but humans that they are, some of them
try to rationalize their hates and fears into theories that, though
detached from reality, literally provide the ammunition that enables
their followers to wreak havoc, like the guy did who descended on a
store frequented by Black people in Buffalo several months ago in
order to kill as many African-Americans as possible.

Matthew Rose’s _A World After Liberalism _(Yale University, 2021)
brings together and critically analyzes the thoughts of people that
most of us probably have not heard of but are worshiped in far right
networks around the world. Rose says we better listen to what these
guys are saying, even if we find them utterly distasteful, because
their ideas have consequences.

Steve Bannon, the incendiary Trump adviser, may be the best known
activist of the international far right, but he has derived
inspiration from otherwise little known figures on the fringes of
history, underlining the wisdom in Keynes’ well-known observation:
“Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling
their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

The first of these scribblers in Rose’s gallery is Oswald Spengler,
an intellectual outside the academy that captured the imagination of a
pessimistic post-War World I generation with his celebration of the
“heroic” culture of the West. Spengler asserted that culture was
in danger of being overwhelmed from within by lack of confidence and
loss of a sense of identity — and from without by the “downtrodden
races of the outer ring,” who had begun to move from the periphery
to the center, armed with the technologies shared with them by the
West owing to what Spengler characterized as misguided liberal values.

People of Europe had a shared, collective identity based on one
central _idee fixe_ — the “striving for the infinite,”
manifested in art, adventure, and conquest. This “Faustian”
collective identity, Spengler said, was threatened by the moral
sensitivity and self-doubt that liberalism had engendered and by
global immigration. The “Decline of the West” (also the title of
his key work) was inevitable, but he argued it could be postponed if
the peoples of Europe would recognize and embrace their common
collective cultural and racial identity and decisively reject the
corrosive influence of liberalism, with its leveling doctrines of
democracy and equality.

People studying the contemporary far right, observes Rose, are often
surprised to see the continuing influence of an early 20th century
figure like Spengler on today’s far right activists.

Another influential blast from the past is the Italian philosopher
Julius Evola. Evola adopted what was becoming early 20th century
sociology’s standard description of social evolution
from_ gemeinschaft_ to _gesellschaft,_ from traditional to modern
society. But instead of seeing modern society as a positive, with its
division of labor, economic development, democratic rule, and
evolution of the law, he saw it as a fall from grace. Tradition,
hierarchy, inequality, the superiority of the master class — these
constituted the natural state of community that liberalism, democracy,
and socialism had destroyed with their glorification of reason, which
drained the world of meaning.

For Evola, race is destiny, and he heaped outrage after outrage on
African Americans and Jews. His followers claim, however, that he was
not a crude racist, since for him race was not only biological but
“spiritual,” whatever that means. One might dismiss all this as
nonsense but one cannot dismiss its influence, for Evola has garnered
enthusiastic praise across the far right, from the Russian Aleksandr
Dugin to the Frenchman Guillaume Faye and to the alt-right Americans
Steve Bannon and Richard Spencer.

Spengler and Evola provided later theorists of reaction an explosive
legacy of ideas.

A virulent anti-Semite, Francis Yockey argued that world domination is
the essential drive of western culture, and the people of the West
must live up to that destiny or witness their culture lose its
“vitality.” Self-doubt engendered by liberalism was the first step
on a slippery slope to cultural self-destruction.

Alain de Benoist of France denounces racial equality, celebrating
instead, “racial plurality” as a “veritable human treasure.”
Benoist is said to have inspired the Great Replacement Theory, which
holds that immigration represents an “existential threat” to the
white community and is part of a conspiracy to water down and
eventually replace the white race as the dominant race in western
societies.

Samuel Francis died in 2005 at age 58, but his impact on the far right
continues to resonate. Like the famous sociologist C. Wright Mills,
Francis saw the rise to power and consolidation of a power elite. But
instead of moving left with this insight as Mills did, he moved right.
Fancisc depicted a liberal managerial elite determined to advance the
interests of a minority at the expense of an endangered white
majority.

Francis also pioneered the depiction of liberals and progressives as
promoting what eventually received the popular tag “cancel
culture.” As Rose points out, Francis saw in liberalism “a
coordinated project of ongoing cultural dispossession” that would
“eventually target every symbol and institution of an old social
order.”

Even if the Republicans won elections, in this view, the liberals’
policies would prevail because of their entrenchment in key unelected
positions in the government bureaucracy — another perspective he
shared with some on the left that was later popularized under as the
“deep state” that allegedly countermanded Trump’s exercise of
power.

Francis was among the first to uncover the political potential of the
demographic of lower and middle class white Americans, people he
termed “Middle American Radicals (MARS). His analytical work would
contribute to activating that demographic into the angry mass that
first took the form of the Tea Party Movement and later mutated into
the Trumpist base.

But for all his sophisticated theorizing, Francis was obsessed with
one idea, and this was that “the civilization that we as whites
created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the
genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to
believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a
different people.”

Though Rose tries his best to treat his subjects’ ideas with care,
his book serves as proof that Spengler, Evola, and their descendants
are engaged in a fool’s errand, which is to rationalize that which
resists reason. For reason is always critical and tied to a moral end:
to dissolve or dismantle the myths, obfuscations, folk foolishness,
urban legends, and outright falsehoods that stand in the way of the
realization and achievement of that most fundamental and primeval of
human aspirations: equality.

Ideas — even the most foolish, unfortunately — have consequences.

_FPIF columnist Walden Bellow is the International Adjunct Professor
of Sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and a
Senior Analyst for Focus on the Global South._

_Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) is a “Think Tank Without Walls”
connecting the research and action of scholars, advocates, and
activists seeking to make the United States a more responsible global
partner. It is a project of the Institute for Policy Studies._

_FPIF provides timely analysis of U.S. foreign policy and
international affairs and recommends policy alternatives on a broad
range of global issues — from war and peace to trade and from
climate to public health. From its launch as a print journal in 1996
to its digital presence today, FPIF has served as a unique resource
for progressive foreign policy perspectives for over two decades._

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