by WALDEN BELLO
The intellectual godfathers of the “alt right” and their descendants are on a fool’s errand: to rationalize irrational hatreds.
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.
Foreign Policy in Focus for more