How to Stop Fascism, page 5
Though labelled ‘Traditionalists’, these thinkers have in fact made an important change to the traditions of both fascism and conservatism. Hitler and Mussolini were, above all, nationalists: they proposed to replace the class struggle with a struggle to the death between nation states. For de Benoist, Dugin, Faye, Carvalho and their followers, the primary focus is ethnicity. Spencer’s alt-right movement emerged from a paleoconservative milieu that had been obsessed with preserving white America, and turned it into a global project to mobilize the ‘white race’, from Seattle to Vladivostok, for war against the rest of the world. And whereas twentieth-century fascism, as we will see, contained a strong dose of ‘reactionary modernism’ – extolling the virtues of machine power, fast automobiles and the cinema – the Traditionalist right is profoundly anti-modern.
Their intent, from the outset, was to create a far-right ‘metapolitics’ – a new common sense that would filter out of their alt-academy into culture and then into politics itself.11 They have succeeded. Today, the Traditionalist view of history forms the first ideological pillar of extreme-right thought and can be seen and heard everywhere in cyberspace.
The second pillar is pseudoscience about race and gender. Though it presents itself as science, its conclusions are the same as those arrived at through speculation in the nineteenth century: that ‘races’ exist and can be defined genetically; that cultural differences between ethnic groups are the product of genetic difference; and that racism is the result of biological inequality, not social injustice. Women’s oppressed and subordinate position throughout history is similarly conceived as ‘natural’, and feminism unnatural, since – it is argued – women have evolved to be subordinate to men through behavioural strategies that shaped the structure of their brains.
All of this, of course, is in conflict with the actual conclusions of science. Today, an overwhelming majority of geneticists and anthropologists accept that ‘race is not a genetic concept’.12 The international community, via UNESCO, declared that ‘the human race is one’ and that, while ethnic groups can be defined, and define themselves, ‘for all practical social purposes “race” is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth’.13
Yet in the decades after the war, racist pseudoscience and its concomitant strategy, eugenics, survived within semi-private academic networks, often funded by white supremacists in the USA.14 But it was the emergence of the academic subdisciplines of ‘sociobiology’ and ‘evolutionary psychology’ that created a new space for pseudoscientific claims about the social status of black people and women.
Given that our understanding of human behaviour remains incomplete, it is legitimate to ask whether advances in genetics should change our view of what determines behaviour. But if you create a new scientific discipline, fusing empirical research with speculative assumptions, you open a gateway for racists and misogynists that cannot be adequately policed using the traditional methods of academic peer review.
In the view of the new scientific racists, white Europeans are genetically superior because the stress of moving out of Africa 45,000 years ago, into the colder environment of Europe, meant that only the most intelligent survived.15 Since white skin pigmentation evolved only around 8,000 years ago in response to the environments humans moved into, this racist argument runs that black and white people’s brains may have evolved differently over the same timescale. As a result, the argument concludes, different average IQ scores between ethnic groups have a genetic basis, rather than being the result of social inequality or the racist framing of the IQ tests themselves.16 Unsurprisingly, these bogus claims have been widely and repeatedly debunked.17
In the 1990s, the return of race science was closely allied to conservative social policy. In their controversial book The Bell Curve, political scientist Charles Murray and psychologist Richard Herrnstein argued that welfare programmes for the poor should be ended in the USA because, being heavily used by black people, they ‘subsidised births among poor women who are disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution’.18
But as scientists rubbished The Bell Curve, the far right noticed the utility of operating within highly fragmented, often speculative scientific disciplines. A new figure emerged, generally white and male, with genuine scientific credentials, who could make a genetic ‘hypothesis’ about behaviour that enjoyed the same status as other hypotheses until it was disproven. As a result, major, peer-reviewed journals were, as the science writer Angela Saini records, bombarded with substandard and tendentious racist research.19
When this research was routinely rejected, a new kind of academic journal emerged: one in which peer review is nonexistent or carried out by ‘independent researchers’ – i.e. amateurs. A group of journals named OpenPsych, for instance, specializes in articles claiming to trace criminal behaviour or low intelligence to genetic racial difference.
But while it’s easy (though exhausting) to gatekeep a scientific discipline against a DIY journal, it’s impossible to guard the floodgates of the public sphere. Which is why the standard practice of ‘race science’ is to publish an outrageous claim, cause a public political furore, and turn this furore into an issue of academic freedom.
This is precisely what happened when the Cambridge University researcher Noah Carl, who wrote for OpenPsych and had spoken at a secretive eugenics conference in London, was sacked from his post in 2019. The Daily Mail ran headlines claiming he was a victim of political correctness, while a crowdfunder organized by a white supremacist-aligned computer programmer in the USA raised $100,000 for his defence. (At the time of writing, Carl remains in dispute with the university over unfair dismissal.)20
With anti-feminist science, meanwhile, it is the emerging discipline of evolutionary psychology, dubbed ‘EvoPsych’, that does the heavy lifting for the far right. Its premise is that while ‘races’ are the product of relatively recent human evolution, gender relationships should remain as they were programmed in the Stone Age. The behaviours that have been coded as ‘female’ over 40,000+ years of women’s oppression are, say some EvoPsych proponents, the result of brain structures inherited from women’s prehistoric social ‘tactics’.
In this view, the structure of the female brain explains why men are more likely to sleep around, have casual sex, pay for sex and regard women possessing the traditional attributes of ‘beauty’ as attractive. ‘It’s all completely hardwired, guys,’ is the message to misogynists. Year after year, the EvoPsych bandwagon produces new hypotheses, always premised on the assertion that social norms, cultures and conditions have no bearing on the tendency of men to oppress, rape and physically assault women.
The usefulness of EvoPsych to the far right is obvious. If ‘race science’ shows that laws mandating racial equality are unnatural, then it is also against nature for women to have equal property rights, civil rights and control over their own bodies.
Not all those involved in pseudoscience are motivated by right-wing politics. But the far right has greedily amalgamated their work into its project. In the process they have created a ‘counterscience’ movement: dedicated teams of amateurs, armed with long lists of scientific ‘references’ torn out of context, churning out what one psychologist called ‘little turds of tainted data’.21 Their narrative is that science has been hijacked by political correctness, cultural Marxism and wokeness, and that the scientific method itself is a defence mechanism for the elite.
If Traditionalism functions as the far right’s theory of history, pseudoscience functions as its theory of injustice: one in which the main victims are white men. All it needs to be a complete worldview is a theory of politics, and for this it has returned to the Nazi source material.
Until the second Iraq War, political theorists to the right of mainstream conservatism were heavily libertarian, demanding a minimal state and maximum individual freedom in pursuit of people’s ‘natural rights’. But from the mid-2000s – and especially after the financial crisis hit – libertarianism became a gateway drug to right-wing authoritarianism.
Observing what he called the ‘libertarian to alt-right pipeline’, journalist Matt Lewis advanced a sociological explanation: both ideologies attract young, white men critical of the status quo. But there is a simpler explanation: the logic of libertarianism just does not work in conditions of crisis.
Ultra-libertarian economics says that a market, left to itself, creates a spontaneous order. Where disorder exists, it’s because states intervene to provide welfare for their citizens, or because pressure groups (such as black people, women, trade unions and the poor) distort the market’s priorities. The libertarian prescription for all economic crises, then, is ‘less state’.
But the collapse of the financial markets in 2008 made the whole of capitalism suddenly dependent on ‘more state’. Economic libertarianism under these circumstances would produce more chaos, not order. And as the crisis triggered resistance, filling the public spaces of the world with tent camps and anti-capitalists, a large, militarized and repressive state looked like the best option for defending the ‘natural rights’ of billionaires.
Some libertarians were ahead of the game. In 2001, the right-wing thinker Hans-Herman Hoppe wrote a book arguing that even the smallest democratically run state is too restrictive for capitalism.22 Though all states were bad, said Hoppe, if you have to have one, better to make it a monarchy.
Then in 2007 Curtis Yarvin, a software engineer in Silicon Valley, started a highly influential blog under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, pushing Hoppe’s ideas to their logical extreme. Yarvin, like many in the tech industry, had started out as a libertarian. Now he wanted an autocratic state.
Libertarianism, he wrote, works only where there is order. Amid the disorder following the 2008 crash, democracy could benefit only the left: human rights laws, judges and democratic voting systems would always constrain the executive in its task of sweeping away barriers to the market. So, argued Yarvin – and not ironically – the right should become ‘royalist’:
As a royalist, I favor absolute monarchy in the abstract sense: unconditional personal authority, subject to some responsibility mechanism. I am not an adherent of any particular dynasty, nor do I favor the hereditary principle as a method for royal selection … I feel the State should be operated as a profitable corporation governed proportionally by its beneficiaries.23
The task of the monarch would be to launch a savage crackdown on all sources of disorder. Riffing on lines from the movie Taxi Driver and the Dead Kennedys single ‘Kalifornia Über Alles’, Yarvin wrote:
Unleash the blue wave! As Travis Bickle put it, someday a real rain will wash all the scum off these streets. That rain is on the way. Its name is President Brown. ‘You will croak, you little clown / When you mess with President Brown!’ And after that rain, preventive-detention facilities will spring up like puffballs, as America’s streets are scrubbed clean as diamonds and left as safe as the White House lawn.24
This lyrical paean to fascism proved influential, especially in Silicon Valley. In 2009 Yarvin’s friend the Paypal entrepreneur Peter Thiel wrote that, because of the scale of state intervention required after the crash, ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.’ The extension of voting rights to women and welfare to the poor, he wrote, meant that a libertarian party could never win elections in conditions of crisis.25
At this stage Thiel, despairing of a political solution, urged libertarians to create communities of survival, not resistance; this is the rationale for Silicon Valley’s obsession with building undersea cities and space travel. Yarvin, too, advised his followers in the Neoreactionary (NRx) movement to remain passive and wait for liberalism’s eventual collapse. But on election night in November 2016, they would together celebrate the victory of a man who made their political fantasies come true. ‘President Brown’ turned out to be real. Only his name was different: Trump.
From 2016 to 2020, Trump’s ‘blue wave’ of police and immigration crackdowns was like a laboratory experiment for the form of governance advocated by Thiel and Yarvin. He did, indeed, try to rule like a monarch, nominating his own children to key posts, overriding the constitution, and acting as if he personally embodied the state. As Yarvin had envisaged, he ran the state like a private business. He also followed the NRx playbook by unleashing a ‘hard rain’ of Federal law enforcement against anti-racism protesters and migrants, separating thousands of innocent immigrant children from their parents as families attempted to cross the US border, and locking them in detention centres. Though Trump was voted out democratically, his administration created a template that will be used throughout this century, both in the USA and elsewhere, wherever right-wing populists gain executive power.
However, a blog and some intuitions do not constitute a full-blown political theory. And so, as electoral successes multiplied in the mid-2010s, far-right ideologists inevitably returned to the fountainhead of authoritarianism: the works of the Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt.
In the last years of the Weimar Republic, Schmitt provided successive right-wing governments with the legal justification for suspending parliamentary rule. Once Hitler took power Schmitt joined the Nazi Party, became its most influential legal scholar and issued a series of opinions backing its actions, ranging from the extrajudicial murder of Nazi dissidents in 1934 through to the 1941 Nazi invasion of Russia (on the grounds that ‘great spaces’ need a single government).26
Schmitt survived the war, avoiding trial despite his culpability, and installed himself in West German academia. There he continued to riff on his three main themes: that every state is defined by its enemy, that sovereignty is determined by the ability to suspend democracy, and that mixed societies don’t work.
The authority of a state, wrote Schmitt, derives not from laws or constitutions but from its power to impose dictatorship. Rejecting the separation of powers between judges, ministers and parliaments, he taught that sovereignty resides only with the person who can pull the plug on democracy. And the authority for pulling the plug is ultimately derived from the existence of an enemy:
The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.27
It is hard not to read that passage, written on the eve of the Nuremberg Laws, which in 1935 withdrew German citizenship from the country’s Jewish population, as justification for what followed.
Of course, ruling by decree while overriding the rule of law, through a state defined by continuous war against its internal enemies, is not the preserve of fascism alone. In the early twenty-first century, Schmitt’s political philosophy has also become a manual for authoritarian conservative rule. Today he is as popular in the Kremlin and among the intellectuals of the Chinese Communist Party as he was in Trump’s White House.
But it is Schmitt’s third concept, logically underpinning the other two, which puts those who follow him today on a trajectory towards fascism. Schmitt believed democracies can work only if they are ‘homogeneous’. There can be no radically conflicting values within a democracy, he wrote: it requires ‘first homogeneity and second – if the need arises – elimination or eradication of heterogeneity’.28
There were two main sources of ‘heterogeneity’ in the Weimar Republic: Jews and Marxists. So it was entirely, if grotesquely, logical – and not some kind of excusable accident, as claimed by his supporters – that when the Nazis imposed his theory of ‘homogeneity’ Schmitt rushed to legitimize and support them, organizing a conference designed to purge Jewish ideas from German law and to get Jewish books listed in a separate library catalogue.29 Unsurprisingly, both the American fascist Richard Spencer and the AfD in Germany claim Schmitt as an inspiration.
The resurgence of Carl Schmitt is a danger signal. His mission was to convince Hitler to present a legal justification for the crimes of the Third Reich. He failed because, as we will see, fascism in power was radicalized and amorphous. It had no use for a regularized legality – and this lack of a legal underpinning became the source of extreme instability within the Nazi regime once it went to war.
Yet Schmitt’s work outlived the Nazi regime. Today, it provides right-wing populism, extremism and authoritarian conservatism with a common theory of what constitutes political legitimacy. Their attachment to Schmitt’s ideas signals that this time around the fascists intend to ‘do it right’: to achieve through legal rigour the thousand-year structure that Hitler failed to cement.
If they ever gain power, twenty-first-century fascists intend to create a permanent and orderly dictatorship – not the chaotic and unstable muddle that was the Third Reich – and with the textbooks of Carl Schmitt as their handbook. All the actions of the ethno-state against its enemies will be justified using Schmitt’s arguments. It is his theory of politics that forms the third pillar of the fascist thought-architecture.
THE MYTHOLOGY OF MODERN FASCISM
Over the past twenty years, then, far-right thinkers have assembled an internally coherent theory of history, justice and political power. It is systematically both anti-liberal and anti-Marxist, and – though deranged – attracts people precisely because liberal ideas are in disarray, the orthodox version of Marxism unpersuasive, and social democracy an ideological dead-zone.
