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A World after Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right
A bracing account of liberalism’s most radical critics introducing one of the most controversial movements of the twentieth century
“Powerful. . . . Bracing. . . . Part of the book’s eerie relevance comes from the role Russia plays throughout.”—Ezra Klein, New York Times
“One of the best books I’ve read this year. . . . Its importance at this critical moment in our history cannot be overstated.”—Rod Dreher, American Conservative
In this eye-opening book, Matthew Rose introduces us to one of the most controversial intellectual movements of the twentieth century, the “radical right,” and discusses its adherents’ different attempts to imagine political societies after the death or decline of liberalism. Rose shows how such thinkers are animated by religious aspirations and anxieties that are ultimately in tension with Christian teachings and the secular values those teachings birthed in modernity.
“Powerful. . . . Bracing. . . . Part of the book’s eerie relevance comes from the role Russia plays throughout.”—Ezra Klein, New York Times
“One of the best books I’ve read this year. . . . Its importance at this critical moment in our history cannot be overstated.”—Rod Dreher, American Conservative
In this eye-opening book, Matthew Rose introduces us to one of the most controversial intellectual movements of the twentieth century, the “radical right,” and discusses its adherents’ different attempts to imagine political societies after the death or decline of liberalism. Rose shows how such thinkers are animated by religious aspirations and anxieties that are ultimately in tension with Christian teachings and the secular values those teachings birthed in modernity.
196 pages, Hardcover
First published August 3, 2021
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September 22, 2023
A quick, concise, and fair look at some of the leading thinkers behind the "radical right" from a Christian perspective. Rose sketches out the main thoughts and gives a quick outline of the arguments of Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist and Samuel Francis, all influential philosophers that were critical of liberalism, egalitarianism, democracy, materialism, and Christianity (which they believed to be the root of all of the preceding issues). Of these authors, I have only read Evola. Although I plan on reading Spengler soon-ish. I appreciate Rose's treatment of the these political philosophers, he showcases that although many people assume the radical right to be an intellectually shallow clown-show, it is far from being so, and all of these writers pose extremely urgent questions, and penetrating arguments. They are an intellectual force to be reckoned with, that we (more than likely) will be facing sooner or later. I mean, we're pretty much already there, considering the fact that Curtis Yarvin was on The Tucker Carlson Show two years ago. These thinkers are important. And we need to start evaluating their arguments.
Rose asks us to consider these arguments as Christians and prepare to hear them in political discourse as they gain ground with the post-Christian Right. He doesn't shy away from where these writers make good points, but points out that this good is mixed in with bad.
A post-Christian left is Christianity with it's head cut off (what we are experiencing now), Christian virtues running about in secularism with no root in Christ (extreme materialism, extreme individualism, misguided forms of justice, extreme egalitarianism, etc), but a post-Christian right is a return to the barbarism before the Gospel of Christ came to the gentiles. It is Babylon, and as I see it, both are missing the mark. As Christians our appetite for political perfection on this earth will only be satiated when Christ rules as King in our hearts.
Rose asks us to consider these arguments as Christians and prepare to hear them in political discourse as they gain ground with the post-Christian Right. He doesn't shy away from where these writers make good points, but points out that this good is mixed in with bad.
A post-Christian left is Christianity with it's head cut off (what we are experiencing now), Christian virtues running about in secularism with no root in Christ (extreme materialism, extreme individualism, misguided forms of justice, extreme egalitarianism, etc), but a post-Christian right is a return to the barbarism before the Gospel of Christ came to the gentiles. It is Babylon, and as I see it, both are missing the mark. As Christians our appetite for political perfection on this earth will only be satiated when Christ rules as King in our hearts.
December 24, 2021
A very eloquent set of essays about five representative thinkers of the radical right. I was familiar with all of them except Francis Parker Yockey, a martyr of the U.S. far right whose utterly incredible life and death was unknown to me before I read about it here. The other thinkers, from Evola to Alain de Benoist, are more well known but Rose provides very handy primers to each of them. Though he admires them as intellects and occasionally as martyrs, Rose is against the radical right due its fundamentally pagan and anti-Christian outlook. What many in the U.S. do not understand is that Christianity is viewed by much of the right as the seedbed of liberal universalism. Their hatred of it is borne of a desire to reinstitute a world-centric worship of race and mammon with each tribe unto its own. This does not mean that they are evil, but they have a fundamentally different conception of what constitutes a human being and gives meaning to their lives. Thinkers like de Benoist are concerned mainly with maintaining difference among tribes rather than establishing a Kingdom of God or homogenous liberal utopia.
Contrary to the stereotype of them as parochial hillbillies, radical right thinkers have often been worldly, brilliant, and even self-sacrificing. They are worthy enemies both to liberals and their religious universalist opponents. All in all this is an excellent contribution to understanding the post-Christian right in the West and an accessible introduction as one can find for those interested in the subject.
Contrary to the stereotype of them as parochial hillbillies, radical right thinkers have often been worldly, brilliant, and even self-sacrificing. They are worthy enemies both to liberals and their religious universalist opponents. All in all this is an excellent contribution to understanding the post-Christian right in the West and an accessible introduction as one can find for those interested in the subject.
August 1, 2022
نویسنده تا خرتناق توهمزده است. در روزگاری که حکومتها، بنگاههای تجاری و نهادهای آموزشی دارند دوریختی جنسیتی را فسخ میکنند و واژهی "مادر" را با "افرادی که میزایند" جایگزین میکنند و واژهی "زن" را با "افرادی که دچار قاعدگی میشوند،" نویسنده هول کرده که جناح راست رادیکال آمادهی تسلط بر فرهنگ و به دست گرفتن قدرت است؛ آن هم چهرههایی که به سختی میشود ربط و نسبتی میانشان با جامعهی پسالیبرال غربی جست. البته باید بگویم از نثر نویسنده و زبردستیاش در جملهپردازی لذت بردم
September 20, 2023
It's important to set the stage for understanding this book.
As a white child growing up in the 1950's in the United States, the world appeared to be made up of people just like me. There were no blacks or ethnic groups even though as I think back I realize many of the last names of friends in my neighborhood had a German origin. Homosexuality did not exist in my world. None of my friends or their parents had funny accents and nobody looked strange. While I knew that there were other people, Chinese, Arabs, Mexicans, etc., they were only to be seen in National Geographic magazine dressed strangely and usually looking poor and primitive; exotics that had nothing to do with the modern world.
TV shows extended this impression and though annual travel to the American south to see my grandparents revealed an accent, it was still the same people living the same lives albeit at a slower pace. Genuine poverty and black faces could be seen when traveling through the Ozarks, but discrimination was unimaginable. Everyone I knew accepted everyone else automatically.
It was impossible to feel fear of others. I knew I could go to any house if I needed help, that a mom would answer the door and she would not need to unlock it. There were few fences, so yards opened into one large green space for play. Everybody went to church. There were no places that were forbidden and our gang of kids ranged widely. At ten I was put on a long distance bus for my first trip alone and I felt no anxiety at all. The world was safe, secure and open to investigation with not a word about stranger danger. My parents never grilled me on where I had been as long as I showed up for dinner on time. I would have been shocked to hear of anyone having a gun in the house.
Growing up this way made us all liberals quite naturally. Of course everyone had equal rights. Of course each of us should do our best because not making an effort was all that could hold one back. Inequality didn't exist. Friendships came easily and trust followed. Cops were seldom seen and, in my experience, never needed.
I had no idea I was living in a protected, limited world, shielded from a larger reality that America was about to face starting with the collapse of trust in the government brought on by the Vietnam War in 60's and early 70's.
This book explores the thoughts of those who have reacted with fear to the end of the American world I knew. As US administrations have tried hard to force that world on various cultures that find it alien it has collapsed at home. Fear is rampant in the United States and, though crime statistics and reality don't support it, the mixing of different people has brought it on.
Matthew Rose presents the thinking of Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist, and Samuel Francis that have given rise to the alt-right. The common thread is fear of the decline of the West undermined by liberalism, the very thinking that my upbringing gave me and to which I adhere today. Some of the above put Christianity in the dock as well.
How can liberalism be bad? Doesn't proclaiming the equality of all promise a peaceful world where every person is respected as a human being with ethnicity and race disregarded? Those on the far right, drawing from the thoughts expressed in this book, would tell me that the world I knew as a child is the ideal, that I should reflect on the disappearance of that world and realize it has happened because others have been allowed in, that the assumed superiority of my limited world is necessary for life and that instead of welcoming the other as an equal I should know that equality is impossible. Cultures make the person, we are not free to establish our own agency as individuals, but must always and forever be the products a particular culture we are incapable of escaping. The model human being works on developing what his/her culture implants while holding others at a distance.
Christianity is at fault because it assumes the family of man. Every member of the family is equally capable of achieving life in the hereafter by treating every other person as a brother or sister in earthly life. Jesus did not accept any person or people as superior to any other, though he recognized that power could be had by some, the Romans, at the expense of others. His council was to accept that power would not be shared equally, but that it was not important. Those who are first in this life shall be last and those who are last shall be first (for eternity). One might be oppressed but the answer was not revolution. Instead one should accept one's situation in life, oppressed though it might be and vow not to oppress others.
A World after Liberalism invites the reader to understand how fear can create philosophies, how emotion can generate myopia leading to a fight against a future that offers unprecedented promise to a species with a history of strife and bloodletting in the name of asserting superiority. As a man who can certify his whiteness in all of his ancestry, I put my lot in with liberalism and the courage it requires to let go of one's own background and let in others whose cultures can have things to add to the future of humanity. If the fearful insist on taking the side of cultural purity and assertions of authority, then put me with the blacks, the browns, the yellows without distinction. Most of them know a life the opposite of the one I knew as a child, a life where one is forced to look up from below and about which not one of the people whose philosophies are featured in this book has any awareness.
As a white child growing up in the 1950's in the United States, the world appeared to be made up of people just like me. There were no blacks or ethnic groups even though as I think back I realize many of the last names of friends in my neighborhood had a German origin. Homosexuality did not exist in my world. None of my friends or their parents had funny accents and nobody looked strange. While I knew that there were other people, Chinese, Arabs, Mexicans, etc., they were only to be seen in National Geographic magazine dressed strangely and usually looking poor and primitive; exotics that had nothing to do with the modern world.
TV shows extended this impression and though annual travel to the American south to see my grandparents revealed an accent, it was still the same people living the same lives albeit at a slower pace. Genuine poverty and black faces could be seen when traveling through the Ozarks, but discrimination was unimaginable. Everyone I knew accepted everyone else automatically.
It was impossible to feel fear of others. I knew I could go to any house if I needed help, that a mom would answer the door and she would not need to unlock it. There were few fences, so yards opened into one large green space for play. Everybody went to church. There were no places that were forbidden and our gang of kids ranged widely. At ten I was put on a long distance bus for my first trip alone and I felt no anxiety at all. The world was safe, secure and open to investigation with not a word about stranger danger. My parents never grilled me on where I had been as long as I showed up for dinner on time. I would have been shocked to hear of anyone having a gun in the house.
Growing up this way made us all liberals quite naturally. Of course everyone had equal rights. Of course each of us should do our best because not making an effort was all that could hold one back. Inequality didn't exist. Friendships came easily and trust followed. Cops were seldom seen and, in my experience, never needed.
I had no idea I was living in a protected, limited world, shielded from a larger reality that America was about to face starting with the collapse of trust in the government brought on by the Vietnam War in 60's and early 70's.
This book explores the thoughts of those who have reacted with fear to the end of the American world I knew. As US administrations have tried hard to force that world on various cultures that find it alien it has collapsed at home. Fear is rampant in the United States and, though crime statistics and reality don't support it, the mixing of different people has brought it on.
Matthew Rose presents the thinking of Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist, and Samuel Francis that have given rise to the alt-right. The common thread is fear of the decline of the West undermined by liberalism, the very thinking that my upbringing gave me and to which I adhere today. Some of the above put Christianity in the dock as well.
How can liberalism be bad? Doesn't proclaiming the equality of all promise a peaceful world where every person is respected as a human being with ethnicity and race disregarded? Those on the far right, drawing from the thoughts expressed in this book, would tell me that the world I knew as a child is the ideal, that I should reflect on the disappearance of that world and realize it has happened because others have been allowed in, that the assumed superiority of my limited world is necessary for life and that instead of welcoming the other as an equal I should know that equality is impossible. Cultures make the person, we are not free to establish our own agency as individuals, but must always and forever be the products a particular culture we are incapable of escaping. The model human being works on developing what his/her culture implants while holding others at a distance.
Christianity is at fault because it assumes the family of man. Every member of the family is equally capable of achieving life in the hereafter by treating every other person as a brother or sister in earthly life. Jesus did not accept any person or people as superior to any other, though he recognized that power could be had by some, the Romans, at the expense of others. His council was to accept that power would not be shared equally, but that it was not important. Those who are first in this life shall be last and those who are last shall be first (for eternity). One might be oppressed but the answer was not revolution. Instead one should accept one's situation in life, oppressed though it might be and vow not to oppress others.
A World after Liberalism invites the reader to understand how fear can create philosophies, how emotion can generate myopia leading to a fight against a future that offers unprecedented promise to a species with a history of strife and bloodletting in the name of asserting superiority. As a man who can certify his whiteness in all of his ancestry, I put my lot in with liberalism and the courage it requires to let go of one's own background and let in others whose cultures can have things to add to the future of humanity. If the fearful insist on taking the side of cultural purity and assertions of authority, then put me with the blacks, the browns, the yellows without distinction. Most of them know a life the opposite of the one I knew as a child, a life where one is forced to look up from below and about which not one of the people whose philosophies are featured in this book has any awareness.
November 30, 2021
"A World After Liberalism" offers political advice to Christians. The problem is, it’s not good advice. The author, Matthew Rose, ably profiles five Right philosophers of previous generations—but fails to link this past thought in any meaningful manner to today. He instead uses this historical survey to lecture Christians they must anathemize today’s fast-growing post-liberal Right, while he ignores that all present attacks on Christians come from the modern Left, the final form of liberalism. And he can’t bring himself to criticize the Left, so his book fails to provide prudent political guidance to Christians—a lack I will fix today for you.
Rose begins, not by defining liberalism with any precision, although he seems to equate it with the Enlightenment, and thus autonomic individualism and egalitarianism, but by saying that “liberalism is losing its hold on Western minds.” True enough. Rose notes the great diversity among post-liberals, “nationalists, populists, identitarians, futurists, and religious traditionalists,” and he offers a very short, but generally good, thumbnail sketch of this present-day ferment. Then he throws all his insights away, saying “history offers a guide to the destiny of ideas” and “this is not a book about a present generation of radicals, but about a previous one.” Whereupon he retreats a hundred years and only ever views the present through the dead past.
Rose’s premise, never quite made explicit, is that the dividing line between Left and Right is whether individual or collective identity should be the core of a society. While certainly atomized autonomy has always been the touchstone of the Left, and no doubt the Right thinkers he profiles regarded societal collective identity as crucial, Rose in practice equates collective identity with race—despite race being very secondary, or wholly unimportant, to nearly all of those he profiles. Why? Because Rose is trapped and bound within the frames of the Left, and the Left loves nothing more today than demanding the Right talk about race, with the sole goal of using it, in Scott Adams’s phrase, as a “linguistic kill shot,” obviating any need for facts and reason. Thus, Rose cites Saint Paul that there is “neither Jew nor Greek . . . in Christ Jesus,” but he apparently thinks that this means Christians must adopt the Left’s definition of racism, which is that white people are evil and must acknowledge this by hating themselves and handing over power, money, and honors they have earned to anyone not white.
Unfortunately, excessive focus on race is only the most glaring example of Rose’s frequent prostrations before the Left (even though I don’t think he’s a man of the Left himself). He offers repeated pre-emptive apologies, such as for daring to actually evaluate Right thinkers objectively. “I hope that in treating them seriously I have done nothing to normalize any of the perennial diseases of the human mind.” When you announce in your Introduction that you regard the thought you are studying as diseased, you undermine your credibility. The reader tires of Rose’s many other obeisances to the gods of the age, in major ways such as the laughable claim that “Christians must play an essential role in combating racism,” thereby ignoring that if racism is a sin, it is no special sin, merely one of innumerable manifestations of the cardinal sin of pride, and in minor ways such as by using “CE” instead of “A.D.” I suppose, though, all this may be just the cost of admission to being published by Yale University Press—and, to be fair, this book is susceptible to an esoteric reading, in which this is a smokescreen designed to support an attack on liberalism, though I don’t think that is an accurate reading.
At least Rose admits that the modern Left-dominated world has failed our young. “There are human needs that liberalism cannot possibly satisfy—needs that it now struggles to even acknowledge.” Among those are all the core needs of every human and every human society, “needs of the human spirit” he enumerates. Moreover, “To ask people to apologize for what they are right to value, and to be ashamed for what they are right to need, is to tempt political catastrophe.” Then he proceeds to ignore those needs and admonish us what we are right to value and right to need is only what the Left tells us we should need and value, or we’re racist. The reader sighs.
But let’s not complain too much. Rose offers competent sketches of five Right thinkers. True, I’m quite sure none of these men are actually any more relevant to today’s post-liberal Right than, say, Thomas Hobbes. Still, Rose is not wrong that talking about what the dead thought is a place to start addressing the questions that matter today.
He begins with Oswald Spengler, whose theory of history has indeed been getting attention lately, and who is the most mainstream of the thinkers Rose profiles. Spengler was the high priest of cultural determinism—both in that the characteristics of a culture determined its history, and that cultures pass through the same stages as all life. For Spengler, the “Faustian” culture of the West, which sprang not from precursor cultures but emerged as a new thing around the turn of the first millennium, is what made it successful, able to dominate the world. It challenged, even broke, the boundaries that other cultures accepted as immutable; it offered heroic self-sacrifice in pursuit of the infinite.
Spengler saw the West as remaking Christianity, from a religion of the weak to one of the strong, and thereby taking ownership of “its” Christianity. The decline of the West resulted from a reversion to an earlier Christianity, focused on levelling and hostile to heroic greatness. For Spengler, the civilizational winter of the West was imminent—meaning conflict, Caesarism, and ultimately, the birth of the new. This vision has a grand pull, whatever its accuracy as history, and no doubt this, combined with the very obvious biting frosts of civilizational winter, is why Spengler has gotten some modest attention on the Right of late.
Next we get Julius Evola, an Italian about whom there was some interest a few years ago when Steve Bannon mentioned him in passing, and it was perceived this could be used to attack Donald Trump. Evola disliked Mussolini because he wasn’t fascist or aristocratic enough. He spent his career promulgating a doctrine of individualist responsibility within a strong society, and his vision of that ideal society was heavily influenced by the cyclical, Eastern-oriented, pan-religious “Traditionalism” of Rene Guénon. Most of all, Evola complained of the collapse of spiritual meaning in the West, and he wished to turn back to a supposed earlier time where everything a man did was touched by meaning, by a spark of the divine. Liberalism disoriented mankind and loosed anarchy upon the world, but Evola also rejected Christianity as an excrescence upon earlier Tradition, as a religion that undermined both authority and enchantment. Return!, says Evola.
Rose then turns to Francis Parker Yockey, who committed suicide in 1960, of whom I had never heard, even though I have been a card-carrying member of the farther Right for thirty years. The inclusion of Yockey in this book appears to be made primarily to buttress Rose’s contention that race is the crucial matter for today’s post-liberals. He seems to have been Spengler-lite, with a generous helping of Jew hatred. This section adds nothing to the book; it certainly does not illuminate anything about the future of Christianity or the Right. Nor does the next section add much. It covers Alain de Benoist, leader of the French Nouvelle Droit, which is a quirky European movement with little relevance for the Anglosphere. De Benoist (who is still alive, the only one of the five thinkers in this book who is) tried to combine a call for paganism and cultural “identitarianism” while occasionally cozying up to the Left, both politically (claiming “anti-racist” bona fides) and philosophically (claiming nominalism as a first principle). What matters is collective identity based upon a culture’s unique, rather than universal, characteristics; for this reason Christianity, with its claim to universal membership, is his enemy.
Finally, we get the only American-focused writer, Sam Francis, who died relatively young in 1994. His main claim to fame is that he accurately predicted the America of today. Most of all, he is seen as prophesying the rise of Trump, or rather what is generically called Trumpism. Francis was a disciple of James Burnham, and adopted Burnham’s focus on power as the sole prism through which to view politics, notably conveyed in Burnham’s The Machiavellians. He recognized early that the catamite Right of Bill Buckley and National Review was in fact a tool of its putative enemies, and he advocated a political focus on what are today called the deplorables. Francis’s magnum opus, published after his death, Leviathan and Its Enemies, explained through the lens of managerialism and elite conflict how the Left ascended to dominate all the heights of power during the twentieth century.
As with the other men in this book, except perhaps Yockey, race was not a main focus for Francis. He seems to have been only exercised by race to the extent he noted, daringly for his time, that white people were treated as a group for purposes of obloquy but not allowed to be a group for purposes of political action, unlike all other racial groups. This was less a key for him to politics than an early recognition of what is poisonously obvious today. (Despite what their enemies say, most post-liberals of the present simply aren’t hung up on race, except to the extent they’re white and the direct target of the new Left religion of anti-white hatred.) Nor did Francis oppose Christianity—merely its modern incarnation as an arm of the Left, though Rose accidentally or deliberately blurs this crucial distinction. Most of all, Francis wanted to defenestrate the ruling class wholesale. Rose quotes him, “The issue [is] who in the wrecked vessel of the American Republic, is to be master?” I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Rose struggles with Francis, unable to find a stable place on which to stand to criticize him, but needing to, given his relevance for today. He settles for two rambling pages complaining that Francis saw conservatives as “beautiful losers rather than ugly winners.” Rose claims, without conviction, that “[conservatives] attempt to do what [Francis] could not: to transform the conversation of our common life, opening it to a vision of the world in which truth, virtue, and the highest good have a privileged and not merely permitted place.” This high-flown cant encapsulates what’s wrong with Rose’s entire approach to the Right—conservatives have, indeed, proven to be losers rather than winners in the acquisition and use of political power. And when you’re a loser, you don’t get to participate in any conversations or unveil any visions, as shown by what has happened to most conservatives of Francis’s day, who have become prison bitches, writing for the Bulwark.
While these sketches are interesting and well-done, after completing these five chapters, the reader wonders about the relevance of this to anyone other than Ph.D. students studying political history. Rose ignores everything of substance that has happened on the Right in the past twenty-five years. Nowhere does he discuss (although in his Introduction he does mention in passing) mainstream institutions leading today’s creative Right, such as the Claremont Institute. He passes over in silence post-liberal writers with large followings, both non-Christians such as Bronze Age Pervert and Christians such as Rod Dreher. For a book published in 2021, these are all crippling omissions. Instead, Rose obsessively searches for racism. He thus cites Biden supporter, federal snitch, and general clown Richard Spencer as a “leader” of today’s Right, and talks at length about several obscure white racial grifters as if they had any following. Whether this is deliberate misdirection or ignorance, it is hard to say.
Rose pulls it all together in the sixth, and last chapter—“The Christian Question.” What role can Christianity play in our future? He summarizes the sometime Right indictment of Christianity—that it weakens society by exalting the individual over communal solidarity, severing the bonds in which the individual was, and should be, enmeshed. Rose rejects this, but rather than pointing out, for example, that communal solidarity is the very essence of Christianity, and wholly compatible with recognizing that one’s own society is important and should be honored and maintained, he instead suggests power be handed to the Left by accepting their vision of what a Christian is allowed to be and how he is allowed to act. Rose ends his book with an explicit call to theosis—divinization. But the path he offers to theosis is a heresy; it lies through Christians prostrating ourselves before our, and God’s, enemies. No thanks.
Crucially, why he believes the actual, future post-Christian Right must end up anti-Christian, Rose never says—other than by referring back to the mostly dead, and frankly largely irrelevant, writers whom he profiles. Rose is worried about a pagan post-Christian Right, but he is more worried about a post-Christian Right that “could clothe itself in Christianity,” offering a “false nationalism” that tries to tie Christianity to a society, as did Spengler. One gets the very definite sense Rose is deliberately averting his eyes from the third possibility—a post-Christian Right that is post-Christian only in the sense of rejecting the Enlightenment venom that has falsely passed for Christianity, and has instead returned to a much older, much longer-pedigreed Christianity, that is both universal in its appeal and confident in its civilizational role, but rejects the Left entirely.
That Christianity says every person is equal before God implies nothing at all about the vaguely parallel Enlightenment ideas of unlimited emancipation and forced egalitarianism, and merely because our enemies have successfully blurred this basic distinction does not mean we have to blind ourselves. No Christian prior to the Enlightenment (except, perhaps, a few radical Protestant groups) would have found any contradiction between societal stratification, or social coercion to morality, and the equality of men before God. No Christian would have thought the commands of the Beatitudes dictated governmental confiscation and redistribution to parasites, or sexual confusion, or allowing infants to be slain in the womb, or that Christian universalism meant that atheist pedophile globalists should rule us, or that a society must collectively repent for the supposed sins of its ancestors. In short, the modern Left is not in any way Christian, in spirit, essence, or practice, and those who tell us it is are liars, whom we should identify publicly as such.
Christianity should reassert itself as a masculine, demanding faith, wholly compatible with a vibrant, achieving society—and also compatible with nationalism (Rose notes John Paul II’s strong endorsement of Polish nationalism, yet refuses to follow this example where it obviously leads). This Christianity will reject the Left, and the ground of its being, the Enlightenment, wholesale—together with the myth that the Enlightenment had anything to do with the rule of law, good government, rationality, scientific advancement, or any of the many other achievements of pre-Enlightenment Christendom for which Enlightenment propagandists take credit.
But maybe this will not occur. If we can’t, or can’t yet, bring about a rebirth of Christianity as the steel spine of our society, Christians should instead ally not with their mortal enemies, the Left, who desire nothing more than universal nihilism and the extinction of actual Christianity and Christians. We should ally with the pagans and the atheists on the Right, not treat them as boogeymen, even if they oppose Christianity intellectually, for they agree with us on much, and are both no threat to us now or likely to be any threat in the future, even if they rule. In fact, we should ally with anyone who helps us win, as the Right has always refused to do, instead eagerly policing our boundaries as the Left demands we do but never does itself.
The day is coming, and in many places is already here, in which Christians will have to choose a side in the wars to come, metaphorical or actual. All Christians should be proud to have as their brothers-in-arms men of honor, whatever their religion, who see the world clearly and will work with us to restore human flourishing. What faith will dominate the world after liberalism, we will see, but we can be certain that world will be more hospitable to Christianity, and more hospitable to mankind, than anything the Left has to offer.
Rose begins, not by defining liberalism with any precision, although he seems to equate it with the Enlightenment, and thus autonomic individualism and egalitarianism, but by saying that “liberalism is losing its hold on Western minds.” True enough. Rose notes the great diversity among post-liberals, “nationalists, populists, identitarians, futurists, and religious traditionalists,” and he offers a very short, but generally good, thumbnail sketch of this present-day ferment. Then he throws all his insights away, saying “history offers a guide to the destiny of ideas” and “this is not a book about a present generation of radicals, but about a previous one.” Whereupon he retreats a hundred years and only ever views the present through the dead past.
Rose’s premise, never quite made explicit, is that the dividing line between Left and Right is whether individual or collective identity should be the core of a society. While certainly atomized autonomy has always been the touchstone of the Left, and no doubt the Right thinkers he profiles regarded societal collective identity as crucial, Rose in practice equates collective identity with race—despite race being very secondary, or wholly unimportant, to nearly all of those he profiles. Why? Because Rose is trapped and bound within the frames of the Left, and the Left loves nothing more today than demanding the Right talk about race, with the sole goal of using it, in Scott Adams’s phrase, as a “linguistic kill shot,” obviating any need for facts and reason. Thus, Rose cites Saint Paul that there is “neither Jew nor Greek . . . in Christ Jesus,” but he apparently thinks that this means Christians must adopt the Left’s definition of racism, which is that white people are evil and must acknowledge this by hating themselves and handing over power, money, and honors they have earned to anyone not white.
Unfortunately, excessive focus on race is only the most glaring example of Rose’s frequent prostrations before the Left (even though I don’t think he’s a man of the Left himself). He offers repeated pre-emptive apologies, such as for daring to actually evaluate Right thinkers objectively. “I hope that in treating them seriously I have done nothing to normalize any of the perennial diseases of the human mind.” When you announce in your Introduction that you regard the thought you are studying as diseased, you undermine your credibility. The reader tires of Rose’s many other obeisances to the gods of the age, in major ways such as the laughable claim that “Christians must play an essential role in combating racism,” thereby ignoring that if racism is a sin, it is no special sin, merely one of innumerable manifestations of the cardinal sin of pride, and in minor ways such as by using “CE” instead of “A.D.” I suppose, though, all this may be just the cost of admission to being published by Yale University Press—and, to be fair, this book is susceptible to an esoteric reading, in which this is a smokescreen designed to support an attack on liberalism, though I don’t think that is an accurate reading.
At least Rose admits that the modern Left-dominated world has failed our young. “There are human needs that liberalism cannot possibly satisfy—needs that it now struggles to even acknowledge.” Among those are all the core needs of every human and every human society, “needs of the human spirit” he enumerates. Moreover, “To ask people to apologize for what they are right to value, and to be ashamed for what they are right to need, is to tempt political catastrophe.” Then he proceeds to ignore those needs and admonish us what we are right to value and right to need is only what the Left tells us we should need and value, or we’re racist. The reader sighs.
But let’s not complain too much. Rose offers competent sketches of five Right thinkers. True, I’m quite sure none of these men are actually any more relevant to today’s post-liberal Right than, say, Thomas Hobbes. Still, Rose is not wrong that talking about what the dead thought is a place to start addressing the questions that matter today.
He begins with Oswald Spengler, whose theory of history has indeed been getting attention lately, and who is the most mainstream of the thinkers Rose profiles. Spengler was the high priest of cultural determinism—both in that the characteristics of a culture determined its history, and that cultures pass through the same stages as all life. For Spengler, the “Faustian” culture of the West, which sprang not from precursor cultures but emerged as a new thing around the turn of the first millennium, is what made it successful, able to dominate the world. It challenged, even broke, the boundaries that other cultures accepted as immutable; it offered heroic self-sacrifice in pursuit of the infinite.
Spengler saw the West as remaking Christianity, from a religion of the weak to one of the strong, and thereby taking ownership of “its” Christianity. The decline of the West resulted from a reversion to an earlier Christianity, focused on levelling and hostile to heroic greatness. For Spengler, the civilizational winter of the West was imminent—meaning conflict, Caesarism, and ultimately, the birth of the new. This vision has a grand pull, whatever its accuracy as history, and no doubt this, combined with the very obvious biting frosts of civilizational winter, is why Spengler has gotten some modest attention on the Right of late.
Next we get Julius Evola, an Italian about whom there was some interest a few years ago when Steve Bannon mentioned him in passing, and it was perceived this could be used to attack Donald Trump. Evola disliked Mussolini because he wasn’t fascist or aristocratic enough. He spent his career promulgating a doctrine of individualist responsibility within a strong society, and his vision of that ideal society was heavily influenced by the cyclical, Eastern-oriented, pan-religious “Traditionalism” of Rene Guénon. Most of all, Evola complained of the collapse of spiritual meaning in the West, and he wished to turn back to a supposed earlier time where everything a man did was touched by meaning, by a spark of the divine. Liberalism disoriented mankind and loosed anarchy upon the world, but Evola also rejected Christianity as an excrescence upon earlier Tradition, as a religion that undermined both authority and enchantment. Return!, says Evola.
Rose then turns to Francis Parker Yockey, who committed suicide in 1960, of whom I had never heard, even though I have been a card-carrying member of the farther Right for thirty years. The inclusion of Yockey in this book appears to be made primarily to buttress Rose’s contention that race is the crucial matter for today’s post-liberals. He seems to have been Spengler-lite, with a generous helping of Jew hatred. This section adds nothing to the book; it certainly does not illuminate anything about the future of Christianity or the Right. Nor does the next section add much. It covers Alain de Benoist, leader of the French Nouvelle Droit, which is a quirky European movement with little relevance for the Anglosphere. De Benoist (who is still alive, the only one of the five thinkers in this book who is) tried to combine a call for paganism and cultural “identitarianism” while occasionally cozying up to the Left, both politically (claiming “anti-racist” bona fides) and philosophically (claiming nominalism as a first principle). What matters is collective identity based upon a culture’s unique, rather than universal, characteristics; for this reason Christianity, with its claim to universal membership, is his enemy.
Finally, we get the only American-focused writer, Sam Francis, who died relatively young in 1994. His main claim to fame is that he accurately predicted the America of today. Most of all, he is seen as prophesying the rise of Trump, or rather what is generically called Trumpism. Francis was a disciple of James Burnham, and adopted Burnham’s focus on power as the sole prism through which to view politics, notably conveyed in Burnham’s The Machiavellians. He recognized early that the catamite Right of Bill Buckley and National Review was in fact a tool of its putative enemies, and he advocated a political focus on what are today called the deplorables. Francis’s magnum opus, published after his death, Leviathan and Its Enemies, explained through the lens of managerialism and elite conflict how the Left ascended to dominate all the heights of power during the twentieth century.
As with the other men in this book, except perhaps Yockey, race was not a main focus for Francis. He seems to have been only exercised by race to the extent he noted, daringly for his time, that white people were treated as a group for purposes of obloquy but not allowed to be a group for purposes of political action, unlike all other racial groups. This was less a key for him to politics than an early recognition of what is poisonously obvious today. (Despite what their enemies say, most post-liberals of the present simply aren’t hung up on race, except to the extent they’re white and the direct target of the new Left religion of anti-white hatred.) Nor did Francis oppose Christianity—merely its modern incarnation as an arm of the Left, though Rose accidentally or deliberately blurs this crucial distinction. Most of all, Francis wanted to defenestrate the ruling class wholesale. Rose quotes him, “The issue [is] who in the wrecked vessel of the American Republic, is to be master?” I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Rose struggles with Francis, unable to find a stable place on which to stand to criticize him, but needing to, given his relevance for today. He settles for two rambling pages complaining that Francis saw conservatives as “beautiful losers rather than ugly winners.” Rose claims, without conviction, that “[conservatives] attempt to do what [Francis] could not: to transform the conversation of our common life, opening it to a vision of the world in which truth, virtue, and the highest good have a privileged and not merely permitted place.” This high-flown cant encapsulates what’s wrong with Rose’s entire approach to the Right—conservatives have, indeed, proven to be losers rather than winners in the acquisition and use of political power. And when you’re a loser, you don’t get to participate in any conversations or unveil any visions, as shown by what has happened to most conservatives of Francis’s day, who have become prison bitches, writing for the Bulwark.
While these sketches are interesting and well-done, after completing these five chapters, the reader wonders about the relevance of this to anyone other than Ph.D. students studying political history. Rose ignores everything of substance that has happened on the Right in the past twenty-five years. Nowhere does he discuss (although in his Introduction he does mention in passing) mainstream institutions leading today’s creative Right, such as the Claremont Institute. He passes over in silence post-liberal writers with large followings, both non-Christians such as Bronze Age Pervert and Christians such as Rod Dreher. For a book published in 2021, these are all crippling omissions. Instead, Rose obsessively searches for racism. He thus cites Biden supporter, federal snitch, and general clown Richard Spencer as a “leader” of today’s Right, and talks at length about several obscure white racial grifters as if they had any following. Whether this is deliberate misdirection or ignorance, it is hard to say.
Rose pulls it all together in the sixth, and last chapter—“The Christian Question.” What role can Christianity play in our future? He summarizes the sometime Right indictment of Christianity—that it weakens society by exalting the individual over communal solidarity, severing the bonds in which the individual was, and should be, enmeshed. Rose rejects this, but rather than pointing out, for example, that communal solidarity is the very essence of Christianity, and wholly compatible with recognizing that one’s own society is important and should be honored and maintained, he instead suggests power be handed to the Left by accepting their vision of what a Christian is allowed to be and how he is allowed to act. Rose ends his book with an explicit call to theosis—divinization. But the path he offers to theosis is a heresy; it lies through Christians prostrating ourselves before our, and God’s, enemies. No thanks.
Crucially, why he believes the actual, future post-Christian Right must end up anti-Christian, Rose never says—other than by referring back to the mostly dead, and frankly largely irrelevant, writers whom he profiles. Rose is worried about a pagan post-Christian Right, but he is more worried about a post-Christian Right that “could clothe itself in Christianity,” offering a “false nationalism” that tries to tie Christianity to a society, as did Spengler. One gets the very definite sense Rose is deliberately averting his eyes from the third possibility—a post-Christian Right that is post-Christian only in the sense of rejecting the Enlightenment venom that has falsely passed for Christianity, and has instead returned to a much older, much longer-pedigreed Christianity, that is both universal in its appeal and confident in its civilizational role, but rejects the Left entirely.
That Christianity says every person is equal before God implies nothing at all about the vaguely parallel Enlightenment ideas of unlimited emancipation and forced egalitarianism, and merely because our enemies have successfully blurred this basic distinction does not mean we have to blind ourselves. No Christian prior to the Enlightenment (except, perhaps, a few radical Protestant groups) would have found any contradiction between societal stratification, or social coercion to morality, and the equality of men before God. No Christian would have thought the commands of the Beatitudes dictated governmental confiscation and redistribution to parasites, or sexual confusion, or allowing infants to be slain in the womb, or that Christian universalism meant that atheist pedophile globalists should rule us, or that a society must collectively repent for the supposed sins of its ancestors. In short, the modern Left is not in any way Christian, in spirit, essence, or practice, and those who tell us it is are liars, whom we should identify publicly as such.
Christianity should reassert itself as a masculine, demanding faith, wholly compatible with a vibrant, achieving society—and also compatible with nationalism (Rose notes John Paul II’s strong endorsement of Polish nationalism, yet refuses to follow this example where it obviously leads). This Christianity will reject the Left, and the ground of its being, the Enlightenment, wholesale—together with the myth that the Enlightenment had anything to do with the rule of law, good government, rationality, scientific advancement, or any of the many other achievements of pre-Enlightenment Christendom for which Enlightenment propagandists take credit.
But maybe this will not occur. If we can’t, or can’t yet, bring about a rebirth of Christianity as the steel spine of our society, Christians should instead ally not with their mortal enemies, the Left, who desire nothing more than universal nihilism and the extinction of actual Christianity and Christians. We should ally with the pagans and the atheists on the Right, not treat them as boogeymen, even if they oppose Christianity intellectually, for they agree with us on much, and are both no threat to us now or likely to be any threat in the future, even if they rule. In fact, we should ally with anyone who helps us win, as the Right has always refused to do, instead eagerly policing our boundaries as the Left demands we do but never does itself.
The day is coming, and in many places is already here, in which Christians will have to choose a side in the wars to come, metaphorical or actual. All Christians should be proud to have as their brothers-in-arms men of honor, whatever their religion, who see the world clearly and will work with us to restore human flourishing. What faith will dominate the world after liberalism, we will see, but we can be certain that world will be more hospitable to Christianity, and more hospitable to mankind, than anything the Left has to offer.
December 23, 2021
The conversation on the political right, in America and throughout the West, is the most variegated, weighty, imaginative, and intellectually vigorous it has been in my lifetime. From my early childhood into my mid-twenties, the mainstream right was merely the economic half of the neoliberal consensus, favoring economic liberalization while offering only a simulacrum of resistance (and from its right-libertarian components, not even that) to the social liberalization championed by the left. From the late 1970s to 2016, to be a conservative in America was to support low corporate taxes, financial deregulation, “entrepreneurship”, the forceful promotion of liberal democracy abroad, and the individualist ethos that was claimed to be at the heart of American identity and was codified by the civil liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights. Republicans paid lip service to their Christian and social conservative supporters by voicing tepid opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage, but in every other respect they were as autonomistically “pro-choice” as their Democratic counterparts.
Though Donald Trump had little success in substantively changing the nation’s governing ideology—watch Sean Hannity reminisce about how Trump created jobs by cutting corporate taxes, increased domestic oil production, and projected American strength abroad, effectively repeating the Reaganite mantra as if nothing has changed—Trump’s freewheeling, heterodox, authoritarian, and at times ethnically-charged rhetoric shattered the establishment’s ideological canopy and allowed for previously-marginalized elements of the right to imagine new realms of possibility. In its public discourse, if not yet fully in practice, the American right has so far proven more willing to move in an authentically postliberal direction and to challenge establishment taboos than the left, perhaps in part because the latter remains under the thumb of a retreating bipartisan establishment that has now largely coalesced around the Democratic party.
But like any movement defined in oppositional terms, postliberals come in many varieties. As Matthew Rose puts it, “Nationalists, populists, identitarians, futurists, and religious traditionalists are vying to define conservatism in ways previously unimaginable.” The discourse of the postliberal right ranges “from a recovery of ancient paganism to defenses of the medieval papacy. They promote theories of elite dominance and rules for grassroots radicals. They imagine futures in outer space and on farms. They envision new industrial policies and new liberal arts colleges. Their debates feature atheists and Catholics, racists and minorities, coders and agrarians.” They are united only in their opposition to a hegemonic liberalism that abstracts individuals from their cultural, historical, familial, national, and intellectual inheritances and replaces the ennobling and edifying duties of imbeddedness with the superficialities of preference and self-making.
This book does not discuss contemporary thinkers of the new right, but instead offers an intimation of one possible trajectory of postliberal thought—bold and radical, but perhaps morally dubious—by surveying the writings of five of its intellectual forebears. This movement within right-postliberalism, which Rose calls the “Radical Right,” distinguished itself from its conservative counterparts by its distinctly non-Christian character and its embrasure of certain modernist, liberal, and materialist premises. The Radical Right accepted the subjectifying tendencies of liberal modernity—the disappearance of universally-recognized concepts of intellectual objectivity, spiritual transcendence, moral convertibility, and a unitary human nature—and repurposed them in the service of radically antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antiegalitarian ideologies.
Oswald Spengler, a German historian and lapsed academic, made use of cultural relativism by imagining cultures—and the civilizations they produce—as discrete and hermetically-sealed entities that provide “perceptual frameworks” through which all of reality is inevitably mediated to their adherents. There is no “objective” reality outside of these civilizational frameworks, and there is no transmissibility of symbolic contents from one culture to another. Spengler imagined cultures as pseudo-biological organisms with their own life cycles. Each culture is “born” (under somewhat mysterious circumstances), as a kind of form or world-egg that contains from its inception every possible expression of its core ideal or “prime symbol”. Western culture—Spengler terms it “Faustian”—has as its prime symbol an egoistic striving to propel oneself into the infinite through the self-driven surpassing of natural, intellectual, and spiritual boundaries. Rose quotes Spengler declaring, “The entire Faustian ethic is an ‘excelsior’—the fulfillment of an ‘I’. . . Here Luther is completely at one with Nietzsche, Popes with Darwinians, Socialists with Jesuits.” Faustianism is a war against human finitude.
The Faustian culture was not a product of Christianity; rather, Faustian man adopted Christianity, which had hitherto been the artifact of a Magian (Middle Eastern) culture centered around a dualism of man and God and the submission of the former to the latter, and refashioned it in his own image. Roughly a thousand years ago, Faustian man transformed Christianity from a religion based on the worship of God into an altar to his own self-transcendence. Spengler believed that the return of primitive Christianity in his own time, which he disdained as socialistic and bound by an earthly morality of compassion and egalitarianism, heralded the decline of Western civilization. He imagined God merely as human finitude itself, a natural taboo to be transgressed, and he set his cherished (and entirely invented) Faustian man in dialectical opposition to Him. He had no familiarity, it seems, with the Christian concept of divine-human union: the notion that God and Man are engaged in one work of human deification whereby the infinite fills nature as nature, hypostatized in Man, becomes sufficiently humanized, through the renunciation of the “Faustian” ego, to receive it.
Like Spengler, Julius Evola, an Italian esotericist and philosopher (and the only writer featured in this book who I’ve actually read), perceived a fundamental antagonism between the mundane and the transcendent. But unlike Spengler, who believed that each culture had its own version of transcendence that was inextricably linked to its own symbolic economy, Evola believed in a perennial unicity of transcendence; and following René Guénon, he theorized that an original prehistoric tradition, perfectly reflective of the transcendent order, could be discerned through esoteric readings of ancient texts. Whereas Spengler’s Faustian man transcended the God of Nature to grasp the infinite, Evola sought to reenlist the divine in service of a natural order that reflected a transcendent, immutable, and unquestionable blueprint for human civilization, and to the authority of which humanity was thus obligated to submit itself, or else fall into a state of chaotic barbarism described by various texts as the “Kali Yuga” or the “Age of the Wolf”.
Evola, much like Joseph de Maistre, was preoccupied with the question of how any authority could justify itself in a modern world with no universally-recognized transcendent horizon, in which men made their own laws and elevated their own leaders on the basis of their own disparate and irreconcilable wills. Men cannot really take seriously laws that they themselves have made; such laws will necessarily be seen as arbitrary expressions of the power of those who imposed them, and so an inherent lawlessness prevails in modern societies, dragging them into decay and dissolution. Accepting the modern premise that every society’s concept of the sacred order flows from political power, Evola’s project was to resacralize the state, making its authority absolute and unquestionable. Evola sought the restoration of the imperial cult; a photo negative of the self-referential groundlessness of political authority in modern life.
His primary enemy in this struggle was Christianity, which did not believe in the sacrality of the world as it is, but instead believed that the world was in captivity to malevolent intermediate forces and was thus in need of a spiritual liberation and redemption that could only break into the world in the form of a God who also transcended it. Christianity thus produced a bifurcation in Western culture between sacred and secular authority—Guelphs and Ghibellines. Evola, the consummate Ghibelline, would have liked to see the sacred subsumed under the secular. The Holy Roman Emperor, rather than the Pope, should have been the true Vicar of Christ. A thoroughgoing statist, Evola praised Mussolini’s observation that the state created the nation rather than the other way around.
In essence, Evola wanted to counter the perpetual questioning, bickering, and criticism of modern life by reestablishing the sacred character of the world as it presents itself to us:
“Evola did not live in hopeful anticipation of a better world after this one—the dream of heaven he called a ‘hallucination.’ He wished for a world after liberalism where holiness was again experienced in the otherwise cruel necessities of today. Both Christianity and liberalism teach us to see such necessities as things to be reformed and in need of redemption.”
The inclusion of Francis Yockey in this survey is curious, given that, as Rose himself admits, the contours of his thought are difficult to discern. Yockey was a Neo-Nazi who spent much of his intellectual “career” on the run from the authorities, travelling around the world under a plethora of assumed names and apparently working with both former Nazis and communist governments to advance his vision of a “red-brown alliance”—that is, a partnership between Western fascists and the Soviet Union—that he believed could counteract the decadence of Western liberalism, which he identified with a “Jewish spirit” of civilizational self-criticism that was corrosive to those vital instincts of nations that drive them naturally and appropriately toward world domination. Rose seems to find him notable for anticipating the prospect of an alliance between the Western radical right and a post-communist Russia, as well as for the way in which his peculiar antisemitism can be seen as a forerunner of the contemporary rightist concept of “cultural Marxism”. Aside from those observations, there is little of interest in Yockey’s writing, however much there was in his bizarre and fascinating life.
Alain de Benoist, a journalist and founding member of the French “New Right”, embraced the premise of multiculturalism and rebranded it with his own concept of “ethnopluralism”: the idea that the world’s ethnic groups, including white Europeans and Americans, have a fundamental right to ethnic autonomy and self-determination that is being undermined by the universalist egalitarianism of liberal democracy and the Christianity that shaped it. An irreligious neopagan, Benoist sees the cosmopolitan inclusivity of Christianity—the fact that the Christian convert becomes part of a new community that transcends cultural barriers and is open to all people everywhere—as the harbinger of a deracinating liberal imperialism that threatens the survival of the traditional cultures and ethnic identities that are necessary for a “holistic” human life. Every ethno-cultural identity depends on the exclusion of the “other”, and it is thus exclusion, rather than inclusion, that fosters the richness and profundity of the world’s multifarious peoples.
Samuel Francis was an American columnist who advised Pat Buchanan during his 1992 presidential campaign and likely influenced Buchanan’s legendary “Culture War” speech at that year’s Republican National Convention. Described by Rose as a “right-wing Marxist”, Francis rejected the ideological pieties of previous generations of conservatives, considering them hopelessly detached from the hard class struggles that were determining the fate of both the conservative movement and the nation as a whole. He theorized that conservatives and liberals were not followers of two different political ideologies engaged in debate over the role of government, but were instead different peoples, mobilized by competing cliques of elites, engaged in a long struggle for power.
Liberals represented the interests of the highest and lowest strata of American society, and their objective was to squeeze middle Americans out of their traditional position of political, cultural, and economic dominance. In order to survive, Francis believed, conservatives would have to awaken the class consciousness of what he called “Middle American Radicals”: middle and working class whites who were characterized by their self-perception as an abandoned and exploited caste—“excluded from real political representation, harmed by conventional tax and trade policies, victimized by crime and social deviance, and denigrated by popular culture and elite institutions,”—as well as by their “domestic ethic” that entailed “their instinctive defense of communal roots and their visceral opposition to cosmopolitan values”. Francis came to describe the struggles of Middle American Radicals in increasingly racialist terms, leading to his ultimate ostracization from mainstream conservative circles; and he died in 2005, a decade before his longed-for middle American class awakening came spectacularly to fruition.
Matthew Rose ends his book with a gentle response to some of the radical right’s criticisms of Christianity. He draws from Denise Kimber Buell, a professor of religion at Williams College, to argue that early Christians did not conceive of their religion as an abolition of ethnic identity, but instead viewed the Church itself as a race with an ancestral pedigree stretching back to the beginning of history. Furthermore, this ethnic kinship of the faithful was not only spiritual, but in some sense physical as well, since “the humanity of all believers, indeed all the saved, was included in the flesh of Jesus,” giving Christians a “sacramental kinship” that was at once embedded in history, culture, and tradition, and open to the transcendent dimension of life, which, in a Christian context, entails the deification of humanity and affirms a spiritual anthropology according to which “nothing merely material is fully human.”
The mystical body of Christ is traditional, communitarian, and solidaristic—at its best, a rock against the tides of modern vulgarity—without resorting to a reductive materialism that concedes far too much to that vulgarity. Rose also refers to the final book of Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity, in which the Pope drew from his own experiences as both a Polish patriot and a faithful Catholic to affirm the necessity of national and cultural self-preservation while warning against the bleak idolatry that must ensue if one’s “cultural inheritance” is not oriented toward the “divine inheritance” we receive through our participation in the Christian mystery. Nation, culture, ethnos, community, family, and authority are transformed by the Incarnation from idols into icons.
Though Donald Trump had little success in substantively changing the nation’s governing ideology—watch Sean Hannity reminisce about how Trump created jobs by cutting corporate taxes, increased domestic oil production, and projected American strength abroad, effectively repeating the Reaganite mantra as if nothing has changed—Trump’s freewheeling, heterodox, authoritarian, and at times ethnically-charged rhetoric shattered the establishment’s ideological canopy and allowed for previously-marginalized elements of the right to imagine new realms of possibility. In its public discourse, if not yet fully in practice, the American right has so far proven more willing to move in an authentically postliberal direction and to challenge establishment taboos than the left, perhaps in part because the latter remains under the thumb of a retreating bipartisan establishment that has now largely coalesced around the Democratic party.
But like any movement defined in oppositional terms, postliberals come in many varieties. As Matthew Rose puts it, “Nationalists, populists, identitarians, futurists, and religious traditionalists are vying to define conservatism in ways previously unimaginable.” The discourse of the postliberal right ranges “from a recovery of ancient paganism to defenses of the medieval papacy. They promote theories of elite dominance and rules for grassroots radicals. They imagine futures in outer space and on farms. They envision new industrial policies and new liberal arts colleges. Their debates feature atheists and Catholics, racists and minorities, coders and agrarians.” They are united only in their opposition to a hegemonic liberalism that abstracts individuals from their cultural, historical, familial, national, and intellectual inheritances and replaces the ennobling and edifying duties of imbeddedness with the superficialities of preference and self-making.
This book does not discuss contemporary thinkers of the new right, but instead offers an intimation of one possible trajectory of postliberal thought—bold and radical, but perhaps morally dubious—by surveying the writings of five of its intellectual forebears. This movement within right-postliberalism, which Rose calls the “Radical Right,” distinguished itself from its conservative counterparts by its distinctly non-Christian character and its embrasure of certain modernist, liberal, and materialist premises. The Radical Right accepted the subjectifying tendencies of liberal modernity—the disappearance of universally-recognized concepts of intellectual objectivity, spiritual transcendence, moral convertibility, and a unitary human nature—and repurposed them in the service of radically antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antiegalitarian ideologies.
Oswald Spengler, a German historian and lapsed academic, made use of cultural relativism by imagining cultures—and the civilizations they produce—as discrete and hermetically-sealed entities that provide “perceptual frameworks” through which all of reality is inevitably mediated to their adherents. There is no “objective” reality outside of these civilizational frameworks, and there is no transmissibility of symbolic contents from one culture to another. Spengler imagined cultures as pseudo-biological organisms with their own life cycles. Each culture is “born” (under somewhat mysterious circumstances), as a kind of form or world-egg that contains from its inception every possible expression of its core ideal or “prime symbol”. Western culture—Spengler terms it “Faustian”—has as its prime symbol an egoistic striving to propel oneself into the infinite through the self-driven surpassing of natural, intellectual, and spiritual boundaries. Rose quotes Spengler declaring, “The entire Faustian ethic is an ‘excelsior’—the fulfillment of an ‘I’. . . Here Luther is completely at one with Nietzsche, Popes with Darwinians, Socialists with Jesuits.” Faustianism is a war against human finitude.
The Faustian culture was not a product of Christianity; rather, Faustian man adopted Christianity, which had hitherto been the artifact of a Magian (Middle Eastern) culture centered around a dualism of man and God and the submission of the former to the latter, and refashioned it in his own image. Roughly a thousand years ago, Faustian man transformed Christianity from a religion based on the worship of God into an altar to his own self-transcendence. Spengler believed that the return of primitive Christianity in his own time, which he disdained as socialistic and bound by an earthly morality of compassion and egalitarianism, heralded the decline of Western civilization. He imagined God merely as human finitude itself, a natural taboo to be transgressed, and he set his cherished (and entirely invented) Faustian man in dialectical opposition to Him. He had no familiarity, it seems, with the Christian concept of divine-human union: the notion that God and Man are engaged in one work of human deification whereby the infinite fills nature as nature, hypostatized in Man, becomes sufficiently humanized, through the renunciation of the “Faustian” ego, to receive it.
Like Spengler, Julius Evola, an Italian esotericist and philosopher (and the only writer featured in this book who I’ve actually read), perceived a fundamental antagonism between the mundane and the transcendent. But unlike Spengler, who believed that each culture had its own version of transcendence that was inextricably linked to its own symbolic economy, Evola believed in a perennial unicity of transcendence; and following René Guénon, he theorized that an original prehistoric tradition, perfectly reflective of the transcendent order, could be discerned through esoteric readings of ancient texts. Whereas Spengler’s Faustian man transcended the God of Nature to grasp the infinite, Evola sought to reenlist the divine in service of a natural order that reflected a transcendent, immutable, and unquestionable blueprint for human civilization, and to the authority of which humanity was thus obligated to submit itself, or else fall into a state of chaotic barbarism described by various texts as the “Kali Yuga” or the “Age of the Wolf”.
Evola, much like Joseph de Maistre, was preoccupied with the question of how any authority could justify itself in a modern world with no universally-recognized transcendent horizon, in which men made their own laws and elevated their own leaders on the basis of their own disparate and irreconcilable wills. Men cannot really take seriously laws that they themselves have made; such laws will necessarily be seen as arbitrary expressions of the power of those who imposed them, and so an inherent lawlessness prevails in modern societies, dragging them into decay and dissolution. Accepting the modern premise that every society’s concept of the sacred order flows from political power, Evola’s project was to resacralize the state, making its authority absolute and unquestionable. Evola sought the restoration of the imperial cult; a photo negative of the self-referential groundlessness of political authority in modern life.
His primary enemy in this struggle was Christianity, which did not believe in the sacrality of the world as it is, but instead believed that the world was in captivity to malevolent intermediate forces and was thus in need of a spiritual liberation and redemption that could only break into the world in the form of a God who also transcended it. Christianity thus produced a bifurcation in Western culture between sacred and secular authority—Guelphs and Ghibellines. Evola, the consummate Ghibelline, would have liked to see the sacred subsumed under the secular. The Holy Roman Emperor, rather than the Pope, should have been the true Vicar of Christ. A thoroughgoing statist, Evola praised Mussolini’s observation that the state created the nation rather than the other way around.
In essence, Evola wanted to counter the perpetual questioning, bickering, and criticism of modern life by reestablishing the sacred character of the world as it presents itself to us:
“Evola did not live in hopeful anticipation of a better world after this one—the dream of heaven he called a ‘hallucination.’ He wished for a world after liberalism where holiness was again experienced in the otherwise cruel necessities of today. Both Christianity and liberalism teach us to see such necessities as things to be reformed and in need of redemption.”
The inclusion of Francis Yockey in this survey is curious, given that, as Rose himself admits, the contours of his thought are difficult to discern. Yockey was a Neo-Nazi who spent much of his intellectual “career” on the run from the authorities, travelling around the world under a plethora of assumed names and apparently working with both former Nazis and communist governments to advance his vision of a “red-brown alliance”—that is, a partnership between Western fascists and the Soviet Union—that he believed could counteract the decadence of Western liberalism, which he identified with a “Jewish spirit” of civilizational self-criticism that was corrosive to those vital instincts of nations that drive them naturally and appropriately toward world domination. Rose seems to find him notable for anticipating the prospect of an alliance between the Western radical right and a post-communist Russia, as well as for the way in which his peculiar antisemitism can be seen as a forerunner of the contemporary rightist concept of “cultural Marxism”. Aside from those observations, there is little of interest in Yockey’s writing, however much there was in his bizarre and fascinating life.
Alain de Benoist, a journalist and founding member of the French “New Right”, embraced the premise of multiculturalism and rebranded it with his own concept of “ethnopluralism”: the idea that the world’s ethnic groups, including white Europeans and Americans, have a fundamental right to ethnic autonomy and self-determination that is being undermined by the universalist egalitarianism of liberal democracy and the Christianity that shaped it. An irreligious neopagan, Benoist sees the cosmopolitan inclusivity of Christianity—the fact that the Christian convert becomes part of a new community that transcends cultural barriers and is open to all people everywhere—as the harbinger of a deracinating liberal imperialism that threatens the survival of the traditional cultures and ethnic identities that are necessary for a “holistic” human life. Every ethno-cultural identity depends on the exclusion of the “other”, and it is thus exclusion, rather than inclusion, that fosters the richness and profundity of the world’s multifarious peoples.
Samuel Francis was an American columnist who advised Pat Buchanan during his 1992 presidential campaign and likely influenced Buchanan’s legendary “Culture War” speech at that year’s Republican National Convention. Described by Rose as a “right-wing Marxist”, Francis rejected the ideological pieties of previous generations of conservatives, considering them hopelessly detached from the hard class struggles that were determining the fate of both the conservative movement and the nation as a whole. He theorized that conservatives and liberals were not followers of two different political ideologies engaged in debate over the role of government, but were instead different peoples, mobilized by competing cliques of elites, engaged in a long struggle for power.
Liberals represented the interests of the highest and lowest strata of American society, and their objective was to squeeze middle Americans out of their traditional position of political, cultural, and economic dominance. In order to survive, Francis believed, conservatives would have to awaken the class consciousness of what he called “Middle American Radicals”: middle and working class whites who were characterized by their self-perception as an abandoned and exploited caste—“excluded from real political representation, harmed by conventional tax and trade policies, victimized by crime and social deviance, and denigrated by popular culture and elite institutions,”—as well as by their “domestic ethic” that entailed “their instinctive defense of communal roots and their visceral opposition to cosmopolitan values”. Francis came to describe the struggles of Middle American Radicals in increasingly racialist terms, leading to his ultimate ostracization from mainstream conservative circles; and he died in 2005, a decade before his longed-for middle American class awakening came spectacularly to fruition.
Matthew Rose ends his book with a gentle response to some of the radical right’s criticisms of Christianity. He draws from Denise Kimber Buell, a professor of religion at Williams College, to argue that early Christians did not conceive of their religion as an abolition of ethnic identity, but instead viewed the Church itself as a race with an ancestral pedigree stretching back to the beginning of history. Furthermore, this ethnic kinship of the faithful was not only spiritual, but in some sense physical as well, since “the humanity of all believers, indeed all the saved, was included in the flesh of Jesus,” giving Christians a “sacramental kinship” that was at once embedded in history, culture, and tradition, and open to the transcendent dimension of life, which, in a Christian context, entails the deification of humanity and affirms a spiritual anthropology according to which “nothing merely material is fully human.”
The mystical body of Christ is traditional, communitarian, and solidaristic—at its best, a rock against the tides of modern vulgarity—without resorting to a reductive materialism that concedes far too much to that vulgarity. Rose also refers to the final book of Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity, in which the Pope drew from his own experiences as both a Polish patriot and a faithful Catholic to affirm the necessity of national and cultural self-preservation while warning against the bleak idolatry that must ensue if one’s “cultural inheritance” is not oriented toward the “divine inheritance” we receive through our participation in the Christian mystery. Nation, culture, ethnos, community, family, and authority are transformed by the Incarnation from idols into icons.
April 4, 2023
"A World After Liberalism" is a collection of essays edited by Matthew Rose, published in 2017. The book features contributions from various conservative thinkers and intellectuals who argue that the liberal political and cultural order that has prevailed in the Western world since the end of World War II is in crisis and needs to be rethought or even overthrown. The essays cover a wide range of topics, including the meaning of freedom, the role of religion in society, the importance of tradition and community, and the dangers of multiculturalism and globalism. Some of the authors propose alternative visions for the future, such as a return to classical conservatism or a new synthesis of Christianity and liberal democracy. The book received mixed reviews, with some critics praising its insights and others criticizing it for being too abstract and ideological.
GPT
GPT
June 21, 2023
A summary of five radical right wing philosophers/thinkers who influenced the alt-right today. The radical right is largely against free market economics and Christian conservatism, and wants to restore some form of white supremacy. The book is kinda bleak; the alt right is probably a much bigger movement that we think, and it has a large (but mostly invisible) influence on politics today.
October 29, 2022
this is really two long essays in one book: an excellent overview of radical right wing thinkers, and a surprisingly sturdy argument for the radical position of Christianity regarding one’s ethnos. Rose draws from Origen and other early church fathers to call for a Christian unity in an ancestral inheritance, a “race” that transcends and sanctifies all biological inheritance. Really striking.
December 4, 2022
Very interesting and well written book. It shows how all these figures are in effect anti-Christian and pagan. They all seemed to be have been angry and unhappy people as individuals
September 19, 2021
I was pleasantly surprised by how good this book was. Concise, objective and well written I couldn't recommend a better introduction into radical anti Christian and anti liberal thought.
April 16, 2024
A few years ago in one of his most prescient columns (which I can't find right now) Ross Douthat warned about what the post-religious right would look like. Many might think such a phenomenon impossible, used to the bully pulpit belligerence of Jerry Falwell Sr. AND Jr. and the myriad of think tanks, ministries, and other organizations that train and deploy conservative Christians in the culture wars but in 'A World After Liberalism: Five Thinkers Who Inspired the Radical Right' Matthew Rose profiles a cabal of philosophers, scholars, and activists who have exerted an influence on right-wing discourse. Often consigned to the far-right fringe of the right, the works of Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist, and Samuel Francis have attracted recent attention.
Rose, like Arlie Russell Hochschild in 'Strangers In Their Own Land,' admits he is more liberal than the figures that he profiles and he forthrightly condemns many of their views as hateful and heinous. But he insists we cannot simply spurn these men because their ideas have occasionally offered genuine insights and we need to understand why their ideas have appealed to the masses. In this, Rose does a good job of not caricaturing his subjects; he attempts to objectively portray their beliefs while providing his own commentary and critique.
Spengler, Evola, Yockey, de Benoist, and Francis (Yockey and Francis being American, the others European) do not agree on everything (some like Evola dabbled more heavily in paganism and Yockey apparently lent his skills to Marxist causes in the Third World) but they generally were critical of liberalism, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and democracy. More tellingly, they all condemned Christianity and saw in it the roots of very liberalism they opposed. Egalitarian culture seeks to universalize but this very universalism was born out of Christianity's universalism as it welcomed all into the family of Christ (it is hard to prioritize ethno-nationalism when the Church catholic is more crucial to one's identity). Ironically, Rose contends that the stalwart Roman Catholic pundit Michael Brendan Daughtery is responsible for reintroducing Samuel Francis' thought back into the public square (a further irony - or perhaps indication of how politics makes curious bedfellows - is that the atheist Francis was good friends with the Catholic, paleoconservative Pat Buchanan).
Rose ends the book with a chapter on "the Christian Question" where he discusses how in Christianity one need not even fear that one's ancestors were consigned to damnation; Rose adopts the longstanding view that there is possibility for those who did not hear the proclaimed Gospel might still have hope of salvation (this is important to the radical right because it strongly emphasizes national culture). I did wish there was more commentary on these thinkers' influence outside of what I assume to still largely be the "intellectual dark web." One wonders too about how the likes of other irreligious right-wing figures like Pascal Bruckner or Michel Houellebecq might factor into the conversation.
With conservatism worldwide making gains and undergoing transformation along nationalist and populist lines (and one might add new phenomenon like "barstool conservatism" that leans more raucously libertarian) this is an important book to understand right-wing movements.
Rose, like Arlie Russell Hochschild in 'Strangers In Their Own Land,' admits he is more liberal than the figures that he profiles and he forthrightly condemns many of their views as hateful and heinous. But he insists we cannot simply spurn these men because their ideas have occasionally offered genuine insights and we need to understand why their ideas have appealed to the masses. In this, Rose does a good job of not caricaturing his subjects; he attempts to objectively portray their beliefs while providing his own commentary and critique.
Spengler, Evola, Yockey, de Benoist, and Francis (Yockey and Francis being American, the others European) do not agree on everything (some like Evola dabbled more heavily in paganism and Yockey apparently lent his skills to Marxist causes in the Third World) but they generally were critical of liberalism, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and democracy. More tellingly, they all condemned Christianity and saw in it the roots of very liberalism they opposed. Egalitarian culture seeks to universalize but this very universalism was born out of Christianity's universalism as it welcomed all into the family of Christ (it is hard to prioritize ethno-nationalism when the Church catholic is more crucial to one's identity). Ironically, Rose contends that the stalwart Roman Catholic pundit Michael Brendan Daughtery is responsible for reintroducing Samuel Francis' thought back into the public square (a further irony - or perhaps indication of how politics makes curious bedfellows - is that the atheist Francis was good friends with the Catholic, paleoconservative Pat Buchanan).
Rose ends the book with a chapter on "the Christian Question" where he discusses how in Christianity one need not even fear that one's ancestors were consigned to damnation; Rose adopts the longstanding view that there is possibility for those who did not hear the proclaimed Gospel might still have hope of salvation (this is important to the radical right because it strongly emphasizes national culture). I did wish there was more commentary on these thinkers' influence outside of what I assume to still largely be the "intellectual dark web." One wonders too about how the likes of other irreligious right-wing figures like Pascal Bruckner or Michel Houellebecq might factor into the conversation.
With conservatism worldwide making gains and undergoing transformation along nationalist and populist lines (and one might add new phenomenon like "barstool conservatism" that leans more raucously libertarian) this is an important book to understand right-wing movements.
October 2, 2022
Objectively, I found it deeply fascinating and thought-provoking until the final chapter. I fell off there.
Subjectively, it is terrifying to me how fascinating the book is because the ideas proposed, in a well-presented and critical manner, lead to some truly appalling outcomes.
The thinkers examined do have some legitimate observations and critiques of liberalism, and yet, their proposed solutions are worse than any shortcomings they identify.
Subjectively, it is terrifying to me how fascinating the book is because the ideas proposed, in a well-presented and critical manner, lead to some truly appalling outcomes.
The thinkers examined do have some legitimate observations and critiques of liberalism, and yet, their proposed solutions are worse than any shortcomings they identify.
February 13, 2022
Court scribes, like Rose, are so tiresome.
January 12, 2024
cultures are organisms, with life cycles that imitate the people composing them. great book
May 21, 2022
One of the most brilliant books I've read this year, just utterly fascinating from start to finish. The fact that the Trump-curious Rod Dreher and the wonky liberal Ezra Klein both gushed over this book shows that people from multiple backgrounds can get a lot from it, even if we might like and dislike different aspects of it. At less than 200 pages, it's also a quick and efficient read that doesn't bog you down in too much political theory.
This book profiles 5 thinkers on the illiberal, largely anti-Christian right in the 20th century: Spengler, Evola, Yockey, Benoist, and Samuel T. Francis. These thinkers cluster around a certain set of ideas that force liberals like myself to re-examine our core assumptions about human nature, rights, political authority while doing similar things for Christians (a group I do not belong to). Rose wisely stresses that while their ideas may be abhorrent, we have to study them and take them seriously because they keep popping up throughout history, showing that they have recurring resonance by attacking some of the inherent weaknesses/blind spots of liberalism and by appealing to certain aspects both of human nature and specific contexts, including cultural change, social disorientation, globalization, and other forms of upheaval that prompt people to look for more grounded forms of identity and community. I'll tackle those themes piece by piece:
1. The rejection of liberalism: It's easiest to see what liberalism is when you see it refracted by those who reject it. These thinkers object to liberalism in a number of ways: liberalism atomizes people, theorizing from the individual up to larger social forms (think Lockean social contracts) when in reality people are embedded in identities, communities, religions, nations, etc that they did not choose. Moreover, these thinkers believe part of the suffering and disorientation of the modern world is that people are asked to critique and choose membership in a variety of bodies that people didn't question at all in the past. As Evola argued, for example, people are happiest when they are locked into . Liberalism is a project of emancipation from hierarchy and various forms of tyranny of the majority: it challenges aristocracy, racial and gender hierarchies, class divides, and non-democratic forms of government so that the individual can find liberation, self-creation and direction, and then choose more consciously what groups, traditions, hierarchies, etc she wants to participate in. Consent is the key word here. These radical rights thinkers find all of this objectionable, and in their rather condescending view of human nature, immiserating for people who are better off not choosing these things. The value here is challenging liberals to think about just how much choice and individualism should be valued and whether or not these things always bring about greater human happiness
2. The rejection of Christianity: these thinkers in a way see liberalism as a product of Christianity: Christianity is leveling (everyone is equal in God's eyes), it erases us-them boundaries by creating a theoretical universal human ethical code and community, and it emphasizes humility, forgiveness, and care for the stranger. Of course, there are many, many versions of Christianity, but the point here is that these thinkers believe modern liberalism's emphasis on equality, the alleviation of suffering, and the pursuit of justice on earth ultimately stem from Christianity. Christianity saps people, especially men, of the brutish willpower needed to compete and dominate in a fallen world full of barbarians at the gates. It is part of the moral disarmament of the West, an emasculating creed that erases boundaries where, in fact, boundaries between cultures and peoples need to be erected and defended. These thinkers are thus crucial to understanding the modern alt-right, which is actually quite anti-Christian for these reasons.
3. Race and Culture: These thinkers are all racist in some way, but most of them don't primarily view the world in terms of race. They are not biological essentialists like the scientific racists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rather, they are cultural essentialists: every culture (usually closely tied to an ethnic group) has developed a certain way of thinking, valuing, acting, symbolizing, etc that is incommensurable with other cultures. In a weird way, they are cultural relativists but anti-multiculturalists: a Chinese person and a European have totally different values, cultures, and perspectives, and they can't really communicate across these boundaries much less mix into a multicultural society that finds common ground in shared values. Thus the modern, liberal dream of combining many cultures under a set of common values (creedal nationalism or liberal patriotism) is a chimera that is more likely to contaminate and weaken Western culture. They clearly see Western culture as superior and seemingly have no problem with the West dominating the rest; in fact, thinkers like Spengler and Benoist saw the decline of empire as a catastrophe for Western power and identity. However, their imperialism would be based on brute force and necessity rather than ideals; they would totally rejected a liberal imperialism that sought to spread WEstern culture/values like democracy to the rest of the world. This is part of why thinkers of this ilk like Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Sam Huntington rejected the Iraq War as a foolish liberal quest to spread values into a culture where they make no sense, like trying to spend U.S. dollars in a country that takes only yen.
4. Concern for the local/regional over the international/cosmopolitan: All of these thinkers are vehemently anti-immigration and highly concerned with maintaining the uniqueness of local and regional cultures, similar to what the scholar Ole Waever calls societal security. Spengler sees a tide of "dark peoples" coming in the future who will adapt Western technology to push back on Western power. I think this is an under-examined aspect of 20th and 21st century conservative thought that I hope to explore in my own research. Francis, for example, sees local and regional cultures in the US as under attack by a globalizing elite using neoliberal economics, cosmopolitan values, anti-racist and feminist ideology, and ultimately the great replacement of whites with non-whites. He was probably the most dangerous and abhorrent thinker of the whole book, especially given the salience of replacement theory in the modern right (now mainstreamed by DJT). Liberalism and Christianity are the justifying ideologies of this war on tradition, local culture, and purity, which is why these thinkers, especially Francis, reject both and have tried to form a new type of conservatism.
There's a lot more in this book I could unpack, but this review is getting long! This book challenged me to go back and examine my first principles as a liberal, and it frames the intellectual origins of the modern alt-right and nationalist right in a compelling historical light. Rose is more interested in defending Christianity than liberalism, and I think at times his view of liberalism is a bit more thin than the way I look at it. To me, there are 2 basic ways of looking at liberalism: a structure and a form in itself. Liberalism as a structure is best described as a meta-morality: liberalism is about creating norms, rules, and principles that allow people to interact, exchange, converse, cooperate, etc peacefully even when they come from different backgrounds and value systems. It is a morality of moralities that permits this co-existence by focusing on preventing harm and ensuring basic rights for all rather than dictating what is right and true for all.
This is how Rose seems to view liberalism, and you could see how this definition could be wanting. What about family, community, faith, heroic striving? What is the point of this system other than to prevent groups from tearing each other apart? Where will meaning, identity, and purpose come from? In a liberal structure, people are of course free to choose all of these things, but choice is not always the highest human good, and many people don't want it at all times, nor do they want to constantly critique the communities and value systems they inhabit. However, what I think Rose misses is the other, thicker definition of liberalism, as something with moral content and purpose of its own rather than just rules of the game. Liberalism is also a project of human emancipation and self-determination. It asks and challenges us to justify hierarchies, traditions, and moralities that restrain human beings by defining their essential roles, cause suffering, and hoard power. It promulgates universal principles to which our social and political systems should conform or else must be reformed, and it does all this with without the hubris and impatience of the revolutionary. It does not accept the world as it is; it works for justice of all kinds.
Pursuing these changes is, to me, to lead a life of great meaning, and they can be essential parts of community, nationhood, and international connection. LIberalism, at its core, asks a lot from human beings, and all 5 thinkers in this book are united by the common view that the average person is not capable of self-direction, self-creation, and choice about the groups and identities they will participate in. I can't help but acknowledge that all five of the thinkers complaining about liberalism in this book were white guys, mostly of considerable means (Yockey aside) who were scared of the onrushing demands of the poor, women, immigrants, non-whites, and others. The radical right, for all of its blandishments about the "forgotten man," is actually a highly elitist project that seeks to shove people back into their boxes and hierarchies, to choose for them what life will mean, what "the good" is, and so on. In this sense it is as dangerous and totalitarian as one of its greatest foes, communism.
Ok I have gone on a while here. As the length of this review suggests, this book made a huge impact on me, and I'll be referring back to it a lot in my writing in the future. Hats off to Matthew Rose for this outstanding study that anyone interested in the far right, alt-right, or whatever you call it, should read.
This book profiles 5 thinkers on the illiberal, largely anti-Christian right in the 20th century: Spengler, Evola, Yockey, Benoist, and Samuel T. Francis. These thinkers cluster around a certain set of ideas that force liberals like myself to re-examine our core assumptions about human nature, rights, political authority while doing similar things for Christians (a group I do not belong to). Rose wisely stresses that while their ideas may be abhorrent, we have to study them and take them seriously because they keep popping up throughout history, showing that they have recurring resonance by attacking some of the inherent weaknesses/blind spots of liberalism and by appealing to certain aspects both of human nature and specific contexts, including cultural change, social disorientation, globalization, and other forms of upheaval that prompt people to look for more grounded forms of identity and community. I'll tackle those themes piece by piece:
1. The rejection of liberalism: It's easiest to see what liberalism is when you see it refracted by those who reject it. These thinkers object to liberalism in a number of ways: liberalism atomizes people, theorizing from the individual up to larger social forms (think Lockean social contracts) when in reality people are embedded in identities, communities, religions, nations, etc that they did not choose. Moreover, these thinkers believe part of the suffering and disorientation of the modern world is that people are asked to critique and choose membership in a variety of bodies that people didn't question at all in the past. As Evola argued, for example, people are happiest when they are locked into . Liberalism is a project of emancipation from hierarchy and various forms of tyranny of the majority: it challenges aristocracy, racial and gender hierarchies, class divides, and non-democratic forms of government so that the individual can find liberation, self-creation and direction, and then choose more consciously what groups, traditions, hierarchies, etc she wants to participate in. Consent is the key word here. These radical rights thinkers find all of this objectionable, and in their rather condescending view of human nature, immiserating for people who are better off not choosing these things. The value here is challenging liberals to think about just how much choice and individualism should be valued and whether or not these things always bring about greater human happiness
2. The rejection of Christianity: these thinkers in a way see liberalism as a product of Christianity: Christianity is leveling (everyone is equal in God's eyes), it erases us-them boundaries by creating a theoretical universal human ethical code and community, and it emphasizes humility, forgiveness, and care for the stranger. Of course, there are many, many versions of Christianity, but the point here is that these thinkers believe modern liberalism's emphasis on equality, the alleviation of suffering, and the pursuit of justice on earth ultimately stem from Christianity. Christianity saps people, especially men, of the brutish willpower needed to compete and dominate in a fallen world full of barbarians at the gates. It is part of the moral disarmament of the West, an emasculating creed that erases boundaries where, in fact, boundaries between cultures and peoples need to be erected and defended. These thinkers are thus crucial to understanding the modern alt-right, which is actually quite anti-Christian for these reasons.
3. Race and Culture: These thinkers are all racist in some way, but most of them don't primarily view the world in terms of race. They are not biological essentialists like the scientific racists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rather, they are cultural essentialists: every culture (usually closely tied to an ethnic group) has developed a certain way of thinking, valuing, acting, symbolizing, etc that is incommensurable with other cultures. In a weird way, they are cultural relativists but anti-multiculturalists: a Chinese person and a European have totally different values, cultures, and perspectives, and they can't really communicate across these boundaries much less mix into a multicultural society that finds common ground in shared values. Thus the modern, liberal dream of combining many cultures under a set of common values (creedal nationalism or liberal patriotism) is a chimera that is more likely to contaminate and weaken Western culture. They clearly see Western culture as superior and seemingly have no problem with the West dominating the rest; in fact, thinkers like Spengler and Benoist saw the decline of empire as a catastrophe for Western power and identity. However, their imperialism would be based on brute force and necessity rather than ideals; they would totally rejected a liberal imperialism that sought to spread WEstern culture/values like democracy to the rest of the world. This is part of why thinkers of this ilk like Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Sam Huntington rejected the Iraq War as a foolish liberal quest to spread values into a culture where they make no sense, like trying to spend U.S. dollars in a country that takes only yen.
4. Concern for the local/regional over the international/cosmopolitan: All of these thinkers are vehemently anti-immigration and highly concerned with maintaining the uniqueness of local and regional cultures, similar to what the scholar Ole Waever calls societal security. Spengler sees a tide of "dark peoples" coming in the future who will adapt Western technology to push back on Western power. I think this is an under-examined aspect of 20th and 21st century conservative thought that I hope to explore in my own research. Francis, for example, sees local and regional cultures in the US as under attack by a globalizing elite using neoliberal economics, cosmopolitan values, anti-racist and feminist ideology, and ultimately the great replacement of whites with non-whites. He was probably the most dangerous and abhorrent thinker of the whole book, especially given the salience of replacement theory in the modern right (now mainstreamed by DJT). Liberalism and Christianity are the justifying ideologies of this war on tradition, local culture, and purity, which is why these thinkers, especially Francis, reject both and have tried to form a new type of conservatism.
There's a lot more in this book I could unpack, but this review is getting long! This book challenged me to go back and examine my first principles as a liberal, and it frames the intellectual origins of the modern alt-right and nationalist right in a compelling historical light. Rose is more interested in defending Christianity than liberalism, and I think at times his view of liberalism is a bit more thin than the way I look at it. To me, there are 2 basic ways of looking at liberalism: a structure and a form in itself. Liberalism as a structure is best described as a meta-morality: liberalism is about creating norms, rules, and principles that allow people to interact, exchange, converse, cooperate, etc peacefully even when they come from different backgrounds and value systems. It is a morality of moralities that permits this co-existence by focusing on preventing harm and ensuring basic rights for all rather than dictating what is right and true for all.
This is how Rose seems to view liberalism, and you could see how this definition could be wanting. What about family, community, faith, heroic striving? What is the point of this system other than to prevent groups from tearing each other apart? Where will meaning, identity, and purpose come from? In a liberal structure, people are of course free to choose all of these things, but choice is not always the highest human good, and many people don't want it at all times, nor do they want to constantly critique the communities and value systems they inhabit. However, what I think Rose misses is the other, thicker definition of liberalism, as something with moral content and purpose of its own rather than just rules of the game. Liberalism is also a project of human emancipation and self-determination. It asks and challenges us to justify hierarchies, traditions, and moralities that restrain human beings by defining their essential roles, cause suffering, and hoard power. It promulgates universal principles to which our social and political systems should conform or else must be reformed, and it does all this with without the hubris and impatience of the revolutionary. It does not accept the world as it is; it works for justice of all kinds.
Pursuing these changes is, to me, to lead a life of great meaning, and they can be essential parts of community, nationhood, and international connection. LIberalism, at its core, asks a lot from human beings, and all 5 thinkers in this book are united by the common view that the average person is not capable of self-direction, self-creation, and choice about the groups and identities they will participate in. I can't help but acknowledge that all five of the thinkers complaining about liberalism in this book were white guys, mostly of considerable means (Yockey aside) who were scared of the onrushing demands of the poor, women, immigrants, non-whites, and others. The radical right, for all of its blandishments about the "forgotten man," is actually a highly elitist project that seeks to shove people back into their boxes and hierarchies, to choose for them what life will mean, what "the good" is, and so on. In this sense it is as dangerous and totalitarian as one of its greatest foes, communism.
Ok I have gone on a while here. As the length of this review suggests, this book made a huge impact on me, and I'll be referring back to it a lot in my writing in the future. Hats off to Matthew Rose for this outstanding study that anyone interested in the far right, alt-right, or whatever you call it, should read.
April 15, 2024
A very charitably written survey of some fundamental figures of the radical right, what they believed, where it goes wrong, and how Christianity speaks to the void they leave in their wake.
September 8, 2021
What, no Curtis Yarvin?
No Hans-Hermann Hoppe?
No Peter Thiel?
No Gamer Gate?
Not a single Austrian or Chicago school economist, even?
If this is supposed to be covering the various changes to the right in the West, well it is sorely lacking in completeness or scope.
There is some half-hearted plea towards religious people towards the end, and that is the only actual effort this exceedingly lazy writer has put in.
Honestly, it feels like a few copy-pasted biographies of Julius Evola and Oswald Spengler, the current state of affairs within the so called radical right is barely covered, perhaps the writer would be well served by reading Michael Malice's The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics
No Hans-Hermann Hoppe?
No Peter Thiel?
No Gamer Gate?
Not a single Austrian or Chicago school economist, even?
If this is supposed to be covering the various changes to the right in the West, well it is sorely lacking in completeness or scope.
There is some half-hearted plea towards religious people towards the end, and that is the only actual effort this exceedingly lazy writer has put in.
Honestly, it feels like a few copy-pasted biographies of Julius Evola and Oswald Spengler, the current state of affairs within the so called radical right is barely covered, perhaps the writer would be well served by reading Michael Malice's The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics
December 31, 2021
I like it for the fact that it has compiled and provided insight on some of the intellectual heft that has shaped what has become the new right and in doing so, gives someone like me a better understanding of their grievances and the issues that animate the ideology.
It does so without demonizing the proponents and even the believers of said ideology, but counters with thoughtful insight on the shortcomings of said ideology.
It does so without demonizing the proponents and even the believers of said ideology, but counters with thoughtful insight on the shortcomings of said ideology.
February 5, 2024
Conservatism lives in this paradoxical spot where it is both a consequential political ideology and the least well-studied one (I mean studying in its own terms instead of leading with its pathologies). Given liberal scholarship’s preoccupation with the emancipatory project, conservatism is often merely understood as either reactionary (hence always derivative of something more exciting); or pro-status quo. But this image of stasis and passivity does not quite capture the current vigour of right-wing politics. It certainly says very little about what Rose calls a “new conservatism” that is coming into view, one that reconsiders previous taboos, rehabilitates banished authors and reopens the intellectual space (p. 3).
Peering into this obscure and esoteric space is the main contribution of “A World After Liberalism”. Composed of what appears to be a collection of essays about five thinkers, Rose traces an alternative history of the 20th century that eventually fed into what we call today ‘alt-right’ politics today. This genealogy helps us look beyond the toxic, pugnacious, and often juvenile online environment to see the Alt-Right’s ideas for what it is: deep, serious, and morally appealing for many (yet reprehensible for many others) (p. 137). Discussions of Western decline, sacred hierarchies, rights to Identity, the threat of cultural Marxism and the managerial class, and the merger of protectionist economics and nationalist populism, are all featured in this alternative history that stretched from the 1910s. In other words, theorisations that led to Trumpist politics have long preceded it. Not only that, Rose captures the incendiary nature of present alt-right politics by showing how the disillusionment of (neo)liberalism as the vessel for “individual liberty, limited government, and free trade” (p.3) have fuelled strands of radical conservative thought that aims to dismantle more than it conserves. If one goes by the dictum that any massified ideas require a sophisticated core, then Rose’s book shines light on this core in both a compelling and courageous way.
It doesn’t have to be, but I can see this book as a longer and more comprehensive version. This can be done in three ways. First, I find Rose’s Christian Humanist-entry point fascinating, especially in his highlighting of how all five radical right thinkers have profound suspicions of Christianity, never mind their association with White supremacist movements that are historically entangled with a constellation of white churches. What one hopes for is that Rose makes the case for this viewpoint at the very beginning of the book, so that it forces secular-minded readers to see the radical right in a different light. That, it is both for, and against tradition. That, when liberalism is seen as the status quo, a space opens up for the radical reinvention of traditions.
Second, if this book is aiming to illuminate the lives and thoughts of these obscure thinkers, the former deserves a deeper treatment. Often, the thoughts of these thinkers appear on the pages as sanitised of their politics. Evola’s relationship with the fascist movement should be elaborated more. De Benoist’s position within the French far right today deserves a discussion. Third, since all these thinkers champion for some kind of hierarchy and segregation (if not outright domination) in social life, their views on race, gender, and sexuality deserve greater exploration. After all, racial, gender, and sexual minorities are often the first victims of resurgent conservative politics. The lack of discussion of what these thinkers think of gender, or feminism, is glaring in this context. Some reconciliation with the role of capitalism in creating liberal alienation would be welcomed, but that might be beyond the remit of this book.
Reading for knowledge aside, what to do with this book is a question for anyone who is concerned about the advances of the radical right. Observers of Asian politics can tell this body of anti-liberal ideas infuses religio-nationalist movements too in their appeal for tradition, rigid hierarchies, mythic purpose, and accelerationist action, ironically creating a global footprint for an anti-globalist movement. If what this book argues is true, that liberalism, or at least the liberal international order, suffers from a crisis of meaning and solidarity, the role of the scholar is probably more relevant in addressing the former. We may do so via epistemologies and methodologies that reemphasises meaning-making (and not rational self-interest seeking) as the core of human politics. We may reinterpret ideas of security from one that is grounded in freedom from physical harm to one that is about freedom from anomie. Maybe a book about a world after liberalism can prompt us to ask, what is scholarship after liberalism?
Peering into this obscure and esoteric space is the main contribution of “A World After Liberalism”. Composed of what appears to be a collection of essays about five thinkers, Rose traces an alternative history of the 20th century that eventually fed into what we call today ‘alt-right’ politics today. This genealogy helps us look beyond the toxic, pugnacious, and often juvenile online environment to see the Alt-Right’s ideas for what it is: deep, serious, and morally appealing for many (yet reprehensible for many others) (p. 137). Discussions of Western decline, sacred hierarchies, rights to Identity, the threat of cultural Marxism and the managerial class, and the merger of protectionist economics and nationalist populism, are all featured in this alternative history that stretched from the 1910s. In other words, theorisations that led to Trumpist politics have long preceded it. Not only that, Rose captures the incendiary nature of present alt-right politics by showing how the disillusionment of (neo)liberalism as the vessel for “individual liberty, limited government, and free trade” (p.3) have fuelled strands of radical conservative thought that aims to dismantle more than it conserves. If one goes by the dictum that any massified ideas require a sophisticated core, then Rose’s book shines light on this core in both a compelling and courageous way.
It doesn’t have to be, but I can see this book as a longer and more comprehensive version. This can be done in three ways. First, I find Rose’s Christian Humanist-entry point fascinating, especially in his highlighting of how all five radical right thinkers have profound suspicions of Christianity, never mind their association with White supremacist movements that are historically entangled with a constellation of white churches. What one hopes for is that Rose makes the case for this viewpoint at the very beginning of the book, so that it forces secular-minded readers to see the radical right in a different light. That, it is both for, and against tradition. That, when liberalism is seen as the status quo, a space opens up for the radical reinvention of traditions.
Second, if this book is aiming to illuminate the lives and thoughts of these obscure thinkers, the former deserves a deeper treatment. Often, the thoughts of these thinkers appear on the pages as sanitised of their politics. Evola’s relationship with the fascist movement should be elaborated more. De Benoist’s position within the French far right today deserves a discussion. Third, since all these thinkers champion for some kind of hierarchy and segregation (if not outright domination) in social life, their views on race, gender, and sexuality deserve greater exploration. After all, racial, gender, and sexual minorities are often the first victims of resurgent conservative politics. The lack of discussion of what these thinkers think of gender, or feminism, is glaring in this context. Some reconciliation with the role of capitalism in creating liberal alienation would be welcomed, but that might be beyond the remit of this book.
Reading for knowledge aside, what to do with this book is a question for anyone who is concerned about the advances of the radical right. Observers of Asian politics can tell this body of anti-liberal ideas infuses religio-nationalist movements too in their appeal for tradition, rigid hierarchies, mythic purpose, and accelerationist action, ironically creating a global footprint for an anti-globalist movement. If what this book argues is true, that liberalism, or at least the liberal international order, suffers from a crisis of meaning and solidarity, the role of the scholar is probably more relevant in addressing the former. We may do so via epistemologies and methodologies that reemphasises meaning-making (and not rational self-interest seeking) as the core of human politics. We may reinterpret ideas of security from one that is grounded in freedom from physical harm to one that is about freedom from anomie. Maybe a book about a world after liberalism can prompt us to ask, what is scholarship after liberalism?
July 3, 2022
Rose undertakes the unenviable task of describing the ideas of some of the farthest right thinkers of the past century. One can see why, while many (including those within the far right) do not often cite these figures, there ideas are pervasive in our current political climate. The right wing ideology that lifted Trump to the presidency and has continued to fuel the Republican party's courting of fascism are within these pages. It is a disheartening read, albeit informative.
The thinkers profiled all set their sights on moving the world past liberalism. Liberalism is routinely identified with a crisis in authority, identity, and culture. While Rose finds their thinking to be repulsive, he does grant that they are latching onto a common problem that is not merely an obsession of the far right. He asserts that we all suffer from similar crises (though most of us do not reach for the language of fascism or racism to resolve these tensions). Rose outlines his own response to both the radical right and liberalism in his final chapter. Much of it strikes me as rehashing older postliberal arguments. He does make some interesting theological moves that I think might work to buffer those feeling the effects of modernity's crises from drifting to the radical right. However, postliberalism is not a new phenomenon. One has to wonder if the ascendancy of postliberalism has permitted the space in public dialogue for these more radical expressions to enter the mainstream.
I think this brings up another weakness in Rose's treatment of the subject at hand. He profiles only anti or post-Christian thinkers. These are right-wing intellectuals who feel Christianity has valued weakness or been too concerned with universalizing at the expense of particularity. If I were a conservative Christian, I might--like Rose--seek to offer a Christian alternative to these anti-Christian ideas within the right. However, I think he has failed to grapple with how prevalent conservative Christians are on the radical right and the ease with which they've adapted these ideas to their own political ideology. I think his constructive moves in the final chapter will fail if he doesn't take into account this fact.
Despite these criticisms, if one has the stomach for it (I confess at numerous times I felt overwhelmed by the toxicity of the ideas), I would recommend this book. It seems it might be helpful to understand the internal logic of the radical right as we continue to confront the rising tide of fascism in the United States. I also think it might be provocative reading for liberal and leftist alike. They might feel uncomfortable with the eerie similarities between right-wing thinkers and current (more socially acceptable) critiques of the Enlightenment's inclination to universalize.
The thinkers profiled all set their sights on moving the world past liberalism. Liberalism is routinely identified with a crisis in authority, identity, and culture. While Rose finds their thinking to be repulsive, he does grant that they are latching onto a common problem that is not merely an obsession of the far right. He asserts that we all suffer from similar crises (though most of us do not reach for the language of fascism or racism to resolve these tensions). Rose outlines his own response to both the radical right and liberalism in his final chapter. Much of it strikes me as rehashing older postliberal arguments. He does make some interesting theological moves that I think might work to buffer those feeling the effects of modernity's crises from drifting to the radical right. However, postliberalism is not a new phenomenon. One has to wonder if the ascendancy of postliberalism has permitted the space in public dialogue for these more radical expressions to enter the mainstream.
I think this brings up another weakness in Rose's treatment of the subject at hand. He profiles only anti or post-Christian thinkers. These are right-wing intellectuals who feel Christianity has valued weakness or been too concerned with universalizing at the expense of particularity. If I were a conservative Christian, I might--like Rose--seek to offer a Christian alternative to these anti-Christian ideas within the right. However, I think he has failed to grapple with how prevalent conservative Christians are on the radical right and the ease with which they've adapted these ideas to their own political ideology. I think his constructive moves in the final chapter will fail if he doesn't take into account this fact.
Despite these criticisms, if one has the stomach for it (I confess at numerous times I felt overwhelmed by the toxicity of the ideas), I would recommend this book. It seems it might be helpful to understand the internal logic of the radical right as we continue to confront the rising tide of fascism in the United States. I also think it might be provocative reading for liberal and leftist alike. They might feel uncomfortable with the eerie similarities between right-wing thinkers and current (more socially acceptable) critiques of the Enlightenment's inclination to universalize.
April 7, 2022
This is a really eloquent and concise survey of late 20th Century neo-fascist thought, with a specific highlight of the anti-Christian influence in contemporary far right philosophy. There has been a lot written about the origins, rhetoric, and political habits of the alt-right that emerged around 2016 or so. This book contributes something additional to that discourse because it describes the political thinking of five fairly obscure far right thinkers from the 20th Century. While they are not cited by alt-right that operates in our politics today, their lives and beliefs give a lot of insight into the logic that drives what can often seem like incomprehensible political behavior of the far right actors in our politics.
The far right is characterized by a deep disgust with and alienation from modern society. Their pessimism is so extreme that see politics as a way to accelerate the collapse of modernity and to return to a purer pre-modern era of group solidarity and inter-group competition. As these far right thinkers were all of European ethnic descent, a common theme was that Europeans were destined to dominate others if only they are allowed to. They see conflict, rigid hierarchy, inequality, and even suffering as more inherently human than the institutions that liberals build to mitigate those conditions. They see a liberal, egalitarian society as inducing stagnation since only conflict and force can advance the most worthy. Many far right thinkers were romanticists and mystics. Their pessimism led to fantasies about strife, violence, and conflict. The author of this book is not himself a far right thinker and he states clearly that the views of these theorists do not accord with his own. It is fascinating to get insight into the pessimistic thinking that drives the embrace of authoritarianism in liberal societies. That said, reading this book is a sobering and even chilling experience.
This book also addresses the anti-Christian aspects of recent far right thinking. I thought this was interesting since in the U.S. we often associate the far right with Christian fundamentalism. Rose's book shows how this distorts the real picture. Some neo-fascists see Christianity as Nietzsche did, which is that it induced a kind of subservience that prevented people from becoming their strongest and dominating other people. Rose describes why these thinkers believed that Christian theology was a key obstacle to spread of their views.
This book is definitely unsettling but Rose writes eloquently about the need to understand this kind of thinking in order to refute its logic and develop compelling alternatives.
The far right is characterized by a deep disgust with and alienation from modern society. Their pessimism is so extreme that see politics as a way to accelerate the collapse of modernity and to return to a purer pre-modern era of group solidarity and inter-group competition. As these far right thinkers were all of European ethnic descent, a common theme was that Europeans were destined to dominate others if only they are allowed to. They see conflict, rigid hierarchy, inequality, and even suffering as more inherently human than the institutions that liberals build to mitigate those conditions. They see a liberal, egalitarian society as inducing stagnation since only conflict and force can advance the most worthy. Many far right thinkers were romanticists and mystics. Their pessimism led to fantasies about strife, violence, and conflict. The author of this book is not himself a far right thinker and he states clearly that the views of these theorists do not accord with his own. It is fascinating to get insight into the pessimistic thinking that drives the embrace of authoritarianism in liberal societies. That said, reading this book is a sobering and even chilling experience.
This book also addresses the anti-Christian aspects of recent far right thinking. I thought this was interesting since in the U.S. we often associate the far right with Christian fundamentalism. Rose's book shows how this distorts the real picture. Some neo-fascists see Christianity as Nietzsche did, which is that it induced a kind of subservience that prevented people from becoming their strongest and dominating other people. Rose describes why these thinkers believed that Christian theology was a key obstacle to spread of their views.
This book is definitely unsettling but Rose writes eloquently about the need to understand this kind of thinking in order to refute its logic and develop compelling alternatives.
June 11, 2023
The book covers the following; Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist and Samuel Francis.
Sometimes you find just what you were looking for and for me this was it. A great series of portraits of some key figures in the far right political world from past to present and a sober take on all of them (often in these kinds of books the polemic against their views drowns any actual factual assessment of them). Rose makes sure to keep them from falling into a big slurry of some nebulous far right spectre; in fact it is the diversity bordering on total incoherence that is the theme of this series of snapshots. You have the obvious racists and anti-semites, but also those taking a stance against the concept of race, preferring a culture-centric view. You have an attempt at historical analysis in Spengler, and a mystic view of the destiny of peoples in Evola.
This motley set of ideas and ideals make it hard to pin down any real constants in the far right world. All the thinkers covered have their fans among groups in that sphere but how those intersect and how they manage sometimes completely contradictory views is the real question (though outside the scope of this book). A picture emerges of something closer to the extremist left where you have long standing internecine wars between rival factions and interpretations - except lacking the defined borders and definite answers, the far right is an ideological realm without a spine. More of a handwaving direction of similar themes than clear competing worldviews.
If there's any criticism to be had it's simply in the limits of the scope and selection; are these really the best representatives or sum of the far right ideologues? It's more "some" philosophers of the radical right than "the". How the far right handles the ideological flora was only touched upon. Though with that scope creep it might have been twice as long and not suitable as an introduction.
Sometimes you find just what you were looking for and for me this was it. A great series of portraits of some key figures in the far right political world from past to present and a sober take on all of them (often in these kinds of books the polemic against their views drowns any actual factual assessment of them). Rose makes sure to keep them from falling into a big slurry of some nebulous far right spectre; in fact it is the diversity bordering on total incoherence that is the theme of this series of snapshots. You have the obvious racists and anti-semites, but also those taking a stance against the concept of race, preferring a culture-centric view. You have an attempt at historical analysis in Spengler, and a mystic view of the destiny of peoples in Evola.
This motley set of ideas and ideals make it hard to pin down any real constants in the far right world. All the thinkers covered have their fans among groups in that sphere but how those intersect and how they manage sometimes completely contradictory views is the real question (though outside the scope of this book). A picture emerges of something closer to the extremist left where you have long standing internecine wars between rival factions and interpretations - except lacking the defined borders and definite answers, the far right is an ideological realm without a spine. More of a handwaving direction of similar themes than clear competing worldviews.
If there's any criticism to be had it's simply in the limits of the scope and selection; are these really the best representatives or sum of the far right ideologues? It's more "some" philosophers of the radical right than "the". How the far right handles the ideological flora was only touched upon. Though with that scope creep it might have been twice as long and not suitable as an introduction.
February 13, 2023
I thought this was excellent. Rose has read and tried to understand five radical right-wing philosophers (Spengler, Evola, Yockey, de Benoist, and Samuel Francis) so that we don't have to.
The premise is that ideas matter, that the ideas these writers articulated, influence the current manifestations of the radical right, especially in the USA. I'm not sure I buy it entirely and I'm inclined to think of support for the right as phenomena rooted in socio-economic conditions rather than deep, if warped, thinking.
Rose draws attention to the most repellent parts of their output, especially racism and anti-semitism, but he doesn't dwell on this. His focus in on the aspects that have some coherence and especially those that reflect reactions to liberal-individualism.
An important aspect of the book is its discussion of the deeply and explicitly anti-Christian nature of the radical right philosophers: "It is impossible to study the radical right without noticing it's profound suspicion of Christianity, which it identified as the original source (and continuing inspiration) of liberal values. In this respect, it diverged fundamentally from a post war conservatism that saw Western civilization as dependent on Christian inspiration..."
Rose, I think, a thoughtful conservative Christian scholar. This is very different from the philosophers he discusses here, but he shares to some degree their issues with liberal individualism: "There are human needs that liberalism cannot possibly satisfy -- needs that it now struggles even to acknowledge. Our need to bond with a family, community, and nation to the exclusion of others; our need to protect and pass on an inheritance; our need to celebrate exceptional human beings and inequalities of achievement; our need to experience self transcendence through self sacrifice; our need to exhibit loyalty to those especially like us -- these are needs of the human spirit that liberalism has often chosen to ignore or impugn."
The premise is that ideas matter, that the ideas these writers articulated, influence the current manifestations of the radical right, especially in the USA. I'm not sure I buy it entirely and I'm inclined to think of support for the right as phenomena rooted in socio-economic conditions rather than deep, if warped, thinking.
Rose draws attention to the most repellent parts of their output, especially racism and anti-semitism, but he doesn't dwell on this. His focus in on the aspects that have some coherence and especially those that reflect reactions to liberal-individualism.
An important aspect of the book is its discussion of the deeply and explicitly anti-Christian nature of the radical right philosophers: "It is impossible to study the radical right without noticing it's profound suspicion of Christianity, which it identified as the original source (and continuing inspiration) of liberal values. In this respect, it diverged fundamentally from a post war conservatism that saw Western civilization as dependent on Christian inspiration..."
Rose, I think, a thoughtful conservative Christian scholar. This is very different from the philosophers he discusses here, but he shares to some degree their issues with liberal individualism: "There are human needs that liberalism cannot possibly satisfy -- needs that it now struggles even to acknowledge. Our need to bond with a family, community, and nation to the exclusion of others; our need to protect and pass on an inheritance; our need to celebrate exceptional human beings and inequalities of achievement; our need to experience self transcendence through self sacrifice; our need to exhibit loyalty to those especially like us -- these are needs of the human spirit that liberalism has often chosen to ignore or impugn."
September 9, 2023
Really fascinating look at some of the thinkers on the far-right, a world I rarely come into any contact with. I appreciated that the author tried to dig through the muck of racism and violence to find the ideological principles worth upholding from the far-right-- like deep love and commitment to friends and community, the idea that true life involves not only security and freedom but also risk and dynamism, or the deep human desire for strong leaders.
The book took an interesting turn towards the end, presenting an argument that Christianity is a way to meet the longings of the far-left and the far-right: Christ as a King who loves but never infantilizes, who cherishes each people group yet is creating a new people from every nation and tongue, a strong King who leads by laying down his life. I took some issue with the Catholic emphasis that "Christianity" as an institution is the solution, rather than my personal view that it is King Jesus himself and us in right, personal relationship with God through the Cross.
favorite line: "No serious account of political life can be built solely on our needs for life, liberty, and property. For we desire more than small pleasures in the routines of life; we also seek great challenges in the face of death. And here, Christianity speaks another and no less demanding language. 'When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.''"
The book took an interesting turn towards the end, presenting an argument that Christianity is a way to meet the longings of the far-left and the far-right: Christ as a King who loves but never infantilizes, who cherishes each people group yet is creating a new people from every nation and tongue, a strong King who leads by laying down his life. I took some issue with the Catholic emphasis that "Christianity" as an institution is the solution, rather than my personal view that it is King Jesus himself and us in right, personal relationship with God through the Cross.
favorite line: "No serious account of political life can be built solely on our needs for life, liberty, and property. For we desire more than small pleasures in the routines of life; we also seek great challenges in the face of death. And here, Christianity speaks another and no less demanding language. 'When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.''"
May 7, 2022
You likely have never heard of the 5 thinkers discussed in this book, but their ideas inform much of the current hard right political theater. The issues addressed include Universalism versus ethnic identities, egalitarianism versus natural differences in individuals, and the promise of Universal Salvation versus the ties of kinship and blood.
The surprise that I encountered in reading about these men, was the hostility of these authors to Christianity, which when looking at our current political drama, seems joined to the hip of white nationalism. But these theorists recognize that the Pauline doctrine of the erasure of differences in the eyes of God and giving of Christ to all peoples, as a threat to the world view that they advance. The author of the book calls this the "Christian Question" (in the same manner as the "Jewish Question").
This is not an easy book to read. Some ideas are either so complicated or so alien to "enlightened" minds as to be impenetrable. But I was curious about the roots intellectual ideas behind our current political worldwide situation, and this book gives us clues.
The surprise that I encountered in reading about these men, was the hostility of these authors to Christianity, which when looking at our current political drama, seems joined to the hip of white nationalism. But these theorists recognize that the Pauline doctrine of the erasure of differences in the eyes of God and giving of Christ to all peoples, as a threat to the world view that they advance. The author of the book calls this the "Christian Question" (in the same manner as the "Jewish Question").
This is not an easy book to read. Some ideas are either so complicated or so alien to "enlightened" minds as to be impenetrable. But I was curious about the roots intellectual ideas behind our current political worldwide situation, and this book gives us clues.
December 5, 2023
A fascinating read on the intellectual movement behind the Alt-Right. I appreciated the author's critical yet humble approach to these thinkers who have rendered pretty disturbing ideas. I have yet to contemplate the shortcomings of liberalism as it relates to the human need for fulfillment, belonging, and accomplishment, so in one sense, their critiques of the current system are well taken, yet their solutions are worrisome, to put it lightly. I appreciated how the author made clear the inherent contradictions of these teachings with Christianity and these scholars unanimously despised the faith for its principles of equal human dignity and anti-authoritarian tendencies.
July 28, 2022
Definitely illuminating and an introduction to a lot of political thought about which I was completely unaware. It fell a little short though - in trying to explain the philosophers of post-liberalism, the author paraphrases so much of their work that it becomes hard to clearly understand what made them unique. More quotes would have illustrated first-hand what they offered. The book also positions the thinkers of the radical right in opposition to Christianity - an argument I don't totally buy, and one that ignores the religious wrapping of the movement.
December 27, 2023
The ideology of the alt-right remains loathsome and repulsive to me, but I finally feel like I understand where they're coming from (even if I do still fundamentally disagree with both their starting premise and the conclusions they draw from it). If I were grading purely on how informative this book was, it would get five stars, but as it is I just felt so gross while listening that I can't give it full marks. Listening to this on my drive to work felt like showering in crap every day, and left me feeling deeply cynical about both human nature and the possibility of peace in our lifetimes.
September 30, 2023
This book was ok. Matthew Rose takes a look at five thinkers who were precursors to the alt-right. While initially I did not see the value in looking at a handful of goofy crackpot theorists from the twentieth century, the book gets more interesting when Rose turns to America and in particular Sam Francis, who in some respects anticipated Trumpism. A Catholic, Rose acknowledges the allure of the nativist right but ultimately judges the movement as falling short of Christian ideals.
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