Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
Page 3
mainstream Republicans held) but on its history, on its white European
(and not just its WASP) heritage. He saw this heritage as threatened by
mass immigration, not of Muslims (as was the case with Faye) but of
Mexicans. He also feared an apocalyptic Death of the West (the title of one
of his most important books) through demographic collapse, at the root
of which he saw the influence of Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. As
Gottfried echoed Schmitt in suspicion of global liberal elites and the “man-
agerial state,” Buchanan took aim at the “placeless” managerial class. He
ultimately brought together three powerful ingredients: an emphasis on
the white European community, a hostility to globalist elites, and concern
with immigration. This combination would later— during Trump’s 2016
presidential campaign— prove to be a winner.
Taylor, in contrast to Gottfried and Buchanan, wrote especially about
race, an issue that has concerned parts of the postwar American Right
much more than it concerned the postwar European Right. This reflects
the specificities of American history, and the continuing influence of
such interwar American writers on race and eugenics as Madison Grant
and Lothrop Stoddard, thinkers who are little known outside the United
States. The approach taken to race by Taylor and many other American
thinkers of the radical Right contrasts with that of the classic thinkers of
the interwar period, notably Spengler, who criticized the idea of an Aryan
race and preferred to think in terms of independent “cultures,” and Evola,
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who likewise criticized the biological base of Nazi racial dogma. Taylor,
though recognizing the importance of culture and of the historical basis
of any nation, also stresses genetics. Despite the difference between this
view of race and French New Right views on ethnicity Taylor identifies as
an identitarian, formed links with the European radical Right, and is espe-
cially appreciative of Faye’s work. Like Buchanan, he stands against mass
immigration.
As Taylor drew on a distinctively American tradition, Dugin also
drew on the distinctively Russian tradition of Eurasianism, as well as on
Heidegger and the classic radical thinkers of the Conservative Revolution
and Traditionalism, and on the French New Right, especially de Benoist,
from whom he borrowed an emphasis on ethnopluralism. He adjusted
both classic and modern French thinking for Russian conditions, which
include a multiethnic state rather than a homogeneous nation, and for
contemporary international relations. His neo- Eurasianism also appeals
outside Russia in countries that are not comfortable with an American- led
unipolar world. He is now perhaps more influential abroad than in Russia
itself, due to the effectiveness of his activism as much as to his thought.
Faye was not the only modern thinker to focus on Islam and immigra-
tion. There was also Bat Ye’or, a thinker whose intellectual roots are very
different from those of the other key thinkers of the radical Right, and
who is also different in being female. All the other key thinkers discussed
in the book are male, which is not a coincidence, as will become clear
below. Bat Ye’or developed the ideas of “Eurabia” and “dhimmification,”
powerful representations of the threat thought to be posed to Europe by
Muslim states and immigration, a threat that for some took on apocalyptic
tones and is central for many parts of today’s radical Right. The threat
comes in part from Arab Muslims but most importantly from the “face-
less networks of a huge administration,”6 Bat Ye’or’s version of the global
liberal elites that had concerned Schmitt, Gottfried, and Buchanan. The
idea that while the distant threat comes from Islam, the immediate threat
that comes from one’s own liberal elites has become very important to
some sections of the radical Right. Bat Ye’or drew on other anti- Islamic
writers such as the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, but what was most
important for her work was probably her part in Israel’s struggles and
her position in Israeli politics. Her work was a major inspiration for the
Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. The extent to which fear of
“Islamization,” a form of Bat Ye’or’s dhimmification, has become wide-
spread among the general population of the West, and the consequences
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of this for mainstream politics, is an excellent example of metapolitics
at work.
The book’s final section looks at five “emergent” thinkers. It is of course
impossible to say which of these five will actually definitively emerge and
achieve status and significance comparable to that which the thinkers cov-
ered in the book’s first two sections have already achieved. They are all of a
younger generation, addressing today’s audience, mostly on the internet,
and have been chosen because they represent some of the directions
in which the thought of the radical Right is now developing. They are
“Mencius Moldbug” (a pen name), Greg Johnson, Richard B. Spencer,
Jack Donovan, and Daniel Friberg. All are American save Friberg, who
is Swedish. To some extent, this American emphasis reflects the way in
which the European radical Right is still dominated by thinkers of an
earlier generation, especially the French New Right and Dugin. It also
reflects the way that it takes time before an author who writes in a lan-
guage other than English is translated into English and can achieve the
sort of international readership that has been one of the criteria for inclu-
sion in this book. Friberg, like many Swedes, is as proficient in English as
in Swedish and has increasingly been writing in English.
Moldbug and Johnson are both former libertarians. Moldbug draws
on Gramsci’s analysis of hegemonic intellectual elites, and Johnson draws
directly on the French New Right and on the idea of metapolitics (as
well as on Heidegger and Traditionalism). Moldbug, like many other key
thinkers, warns against progressive elites and their universalism, the egal-
itarian rhetoric that conceals their rule, and the “feedback loop” of which
they are part, which he labels “the Cathedral.”7 He goes farther than most
on the radical Right in directly and explicitly condemning democracy as
a mask for the Cathedral, preferring hierarchy (like Evola) to democracy.
Johnson, who runs the important website Counter- Currents, is perhaps
the most radical of the contemporary thinkers of the radical Right, cer-
tainly in ethnic and racial terms. He is unusual in being distinctly anti-
Semitic, a position held otherwise only by Schmitt, and then really only
during the Third Reich. As well as subscribing to the Traditionalist nar-
rative of inevitable decline, Johnson sees an apocalyptic risk of “demo-
graphic Armageddon,”8 and calls explicitly for forced population transfer
and the nonlethal ethnic cleansing of both Jewish and black Americans
to allow a white “ethnostate,” with bl
acks getting their own ethnostate
in the American South, and Jews moving to Israel. It is Johnson who,
alone among modern and contemporary key thinkers of the radical right,
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expresses sympathy for Nazism. In a typical month in 2017, his Counter-
Currents website attracted two hundred thousand visitors who viewed
1.5 million pages of content.
Spencer, who like Gottfried claims to have invented the term “Alt
Right” (and who did establish the website AlternativeRight.com), is prob-
ably America’s best- known radical- Right figure, largely due to the scandal
that followed the use of the Fascist salute in conjunction with calls of
“Hail Trump” at an event he organized in late 2016. His positions closely
resemble those of Johnson, down to the ethnic cleansing, and he too
combines American and European influences, and has worked with both
Gottfried and Taylor. He follows Buchanan in stressing white America’s
European heritage, and also claims to be inspired by Nietzsche, the
Conservative Revolution, Evola, the French New Right, and Dugin. It is
not clear, however, what he is really closer to— the New Right or classic
American white racism. He has something of a portmanteau approach,
which includes concerns about Muslim immigration, more appropriate
for European than for American circumstances.
If Moldbug, Johnson, and Spencer in some ways all resemble familiar
“white nationalist” figures, Donovan is distinctly unusual: a homosexual
man, he prioritizes gender over race or ethnicity.9 Questions of gender
were, of course, also important for the radical Right before Donovan. The
martial virtues that mattered to Jünger and Evola are associated with men,
and gender was explicitly a major issue for Spengler, who saw the mature
phase of any culture as “virile, austere, controlled, intense”10 and identified
the feminine with anarchy, and for Evola, who identified the male with the
upwardly directed heroic, and the female with the earthward and down-
ward. Evola also wrote about the metaphysics of sex as a means of access
to the transcendent. Modern and contemporary thinkers also address fem-
inism, which for Buchanan is one of the causes of the demographic col-
lapse of Western Europe and the consequent risk of the death of the West,
and which for Taylor has led to out- of- wedlock births and consequent so-
cial problems in America. Johnson also attacks feminism. For all these,
however, gender is ultimately incidental, while for Donovan it is central.
For Donovan, the threat of apocalypse comes from feminism and
“globalist civilization,”11 and also from liberal elites motivated by their own
economic interests. The key political community, based in the end on the
same distinction between friend and enemy that Schmitt developed, is
the all- male gang or the tribe. Donovan is, like Evola and de Benoist, a
self- declared pagan, belonging to a neopagan group that draws on Evola.
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xxiii
He has sometimes written approvingly of the European New Right, but
is perhaps more influenced by what he calls “Ur- fascism,” the fascism
found in various countries between the 1920s and 1940s.12 He for some
time cooperated closely with Johnson and Counter- Currents. Although in
some ways Donovan’s thought seems unusual— especially given that to
be openly homosexual is not a stance that is generally welcomed on the
Right— it is also in some ways the culmination of other trends noted in
Key Thinkers of the Radical Right.
The last of the book’s emergent thinkers, Friberg, is, as has been said,
a Swede. Metapolitics is central to his thought, and most visible in ac-
tion. His Nordiska förbundet (Nordic League) promoted Traditionalism in
Sweden and the Nordic region, and operated an alternative to Wikipedia,
called Metapedia, that soon had three hundred thousand articles in six-
teen languages. His English- language Arktos then became the world’s
largest publisher of radical- Right and Traditionalist literature. In 2017, he
formally joined forces with Spencer.
All these key thinkers of the radical Right have something in common.
They are nowadays read by the same people, and they read each other and
refer to each other. They also have major themes in common. The four
key themes in their work are (1) apocalypticism, (2) fear of global liberal
elites, (3) the consequences of Schmitt’s friend- enemy distinction (which
include ethnopluralism), and (4) the idea of metapolitics.
Apocalypticism starts with Spengler’s Decline of the West. The war that
Jünger wrote about was inherently apocalyptic, and there was also some-
thing of the apocalyptic about Schmitt’s vision of the transformation of
the State of Normality into the State of Exception. Evola’s vision of postwar
modernity was also apocalyptic, as were de Benoist’s fears for the extinc-
tion of European civilization during the Cold War, and fears for the extinc-
tion of European (or perhaps Judeo- Christian) civilization as a result of
the mass immigration of Muslims, found in Faye and Bat Ye’or. Similar
apocalyptic visions of decline are found in Buchanan’s The Death of the
West, in the work of Dugin, who follows Evola, and in Moldbug, Johnson,
and Donovan.
The apocalypse is often associated with liberal elites, concern about
which starts with Jünger’s fear of the rootless global cosmopolitan elite
and continues in Schmitt’s struggle against liberal universalism. In the
postwar period, the same concern is found in de Benoist and in Buchanan’s
fear of the “managerial state,” in Gottfried, and then in Moldbug’s “the
Cathedral,” and subsequently throughout the Alt Right.
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Introduction
Schmitt’s friend- enemy distinction gives rise to a conception of the po-
litical community that fits neither the classic conceptions of the state nor
of the nation. In the postwar period this conception, whether or not taken
directly from Schmitt, is one of the sources of the French New Right’s con-
cept of ethnopluralism, a concept shared in different ways with Buchanan,
Gottfried, and Dugin, and which then becomes hegemonic in the Alt
Right, which combines it with interwar American writing on race.
Most hegemonic of all, though, at least in the postwar and contempo-
rary periods, is the French New Right’s concept of metapolitics, developed
from Gramsci by de Benoist and Faye and others, then used by Moldbug
and especially Johnson, and finally the basis of Friberg’s thoughts and
activities.
In addition to these four major key themes, there are also a number of
other, less prominent, recurring themes. One of them— the respect for he-
roic struggle that starts with Jünger— is found in Evola’s individual riding
the tiger of modernity, and is again found in Donovan’s fighting gang. This
is related to the views on gender of Spengler and Evola, and views on gender
are in turn linked to the antifeminism of Buchanan, Taylor
, Johnson, and
Donovan. Another recurring theme is the concept of tradition that starts
with Guénon and is developed by Evola and used by Dugin, Moldbug, and
Donovan, which should not be confused with the Traditionalism of Gottfried
and Buchanan. Evola’s Traditionalism is linked with his paganism and in
the paganism that is also found in de Benoist and Donovan.
Finally, there are the distinctively American recurring concerns with
race, found in Taylor, Moldbug. Johnson, and Spencer, and echoed by
Donovan, and the distinctively European concern with mass immigration
and Islam, found in Faye, Bat Ye’or, and Friberg. These concerns, which
are not found in the classic thinkers of the radical Right, combine with
concerns about apocalyptic threats and liberal elites, and with the friend-
enemy distinction.
Race, Islam, and elites are especially important issues today because,
more than the other themes common to the key thinkers of the radical
Right, they have easy resonance at the street level, and in electoral poli-
tics. Apocalyptic visions of decline certainly played a part in the US 2016
election but have less wide appeal. Concern with gender has some reso-
nance, but little wide appeal, and respect for martial virtues and reference
to transcendent tradition have no appeal for contemporary electorates.
They may, however, still be important to the private views of political ac-
tors who themselves have wide appeal, and Evola has been recommended
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on the websites of two European political parties, Golden Dawn (Chrysí
Avgí) in Greece and Jobbik (Right Choice) in Hungary. Golden Dawn has
never won more than 7 percent of the Greek national vote, but Jobbik won
20 percent of the Hungarian national vote in 2014. Jobbik’s leader Gábor
Vona wrote the foreword to an Evola collection published by Friberg’s
Arktos. Almost none of Golden Dawn’s or Jobbik’s voters will have heard
of Evola, and even fewer would share his views on gender, war, or pa-
ganism, but Evola’s thought is still of indirect importance for Greek and
Hungarian politics, as it undoubtedly is for the politics of other countries
whose politicians are more cautious about what they put on their websites
and which authors and publishers they write forewords for. In the US, for