This book began as an article published in First Things, an ecumenical and interreligious journal, where the author also published other articles on the topic. The goal of the book is to introduce us to a series of thinkers who, according to the author, inspired (or, at the very least, predated) the main themes of today's far-right and, in particular, the so-called alt-right. Along the way, he also tries to show us what their post-liberal world might look like. Each chapter on the book is dedicated to a thinker.

As the author explains in the introduction (the bold is mine):

The thinkers of the radical right, as we will see, had different visions of political life. But they agreed that it stands on enforced judgments concerning what is higher and lower, excellent and base, friend and enemy. Politics is properly illiberal about everything, depending, from its smallest decisions to its highest goals, on judgments about human greatness. Liberalism, for its part, promotes the equality of lifestyles, declining to tell citizens how to become virtuous or great. And as a result, it slowly renders people incapable of answering life's most basic question.

(p. 10)

That abstaining from telling citizens how to become virtuous is, of course, a central tenet of liberalism and liberal democracy. As a side note, in this case, many Republicans do behave like true conservatives by pretending that the Government should indeed tell citizens what path to follow, at least when it comes to moral issues (e.g., their defense of posting the Ten Commandments at school or in Court). I make that point because, when it comes to economic policies, they behave more like classical liberals than conservatives. When we study American politics in Europe, we learn that the political choice over here is limited to a choice between conservative liberalism (Republicans) and social liberalism (Democrats). To be fair, if it weren't because we have a proportional representation system in most countries over there, our choice would be limited to the same. For the most part, we choose between conservative liberalism in the form of Christian Democratic parties, and social liberalism in the form of socialdemocracy. If anything, these latter parties (socialdemocracy) are more in line with what Bernie Sanders defends over here. So, they are decidedly to the left of the Democrats, but still clearly operating within the realm of capitalism. However, due to proportional representation, we have always been able to choose among a variety of other parties, some of which fall outside the realm of the liberal capitalist consensus, and they could always influence government to one extent or another by entering into coalitions, etc. In any case, I'd say the recent crisis across the board has been strengthening other choices everywhere, including the USA.

But I digress. The thing is that we must admit, I think, that the critics from the radical right do have a point there. In those countries where we have enjoyed liberal democracy (and an overall liberal culture) for a few decades now, we end up approaching a bit of an "anything goes" status that, to be honest, feels a lot like the complete dissolution of social ties of any sort. Not only does it promote a hyper-individualistic society, but it also undermines any sense of psychological stability (perhaps even well being) in the individuals themselves. The consequence of all this is an overwhelming social fragmentation, social anomie and, in general, disorientation. And yet, although their criticism sounds correct to me, their alternative (i.e., a conception of politics as a permanent conflict between opposed views that can never be reconciled along the friend-enemy lines) gives me the shivers.

The Prophet (Oswald Spengler)

Oswald Spengler is well known for his theory according to which there is some sort of "relay race" going on in world history where the relay is being passed from the East to the West. In other words, at any given time, the hegemonic civilization is to the west of the civilization that was hegemonic in a previous historical period. I don't think Rose ever mentions this in his book. In any case, we must admit that, although Spengler failed to show any real evidence to back up his theory, it does sound intriguing in view of what we see nowadays.

Here is the first quote I selected from this chapter (my emphasis):

He argued that there is no place outside of a particular culture from which human beings can think, feel, or communicate. To participate in a culture is not simply to understand its rules and mores, and it involves more than learning its history, mastering its language, and adopting its values. For Spengler, cultures were perceptual frameworks for understanding and interacting with the world.

(p. 24)

In other words, precisely the same thing postmodernism defends! I find that interesting, since, in principle, people from the far right disparage postmodernism. Not only that, but it is about the same as what the identity movement believes in. In other words, the far right truly has nothing against the identity movement itself. They just differ on which identity matters. To them, it's the national (or religious, or racial, as lon as it is limited to Christianity and the white race) identity that matters, instead of sexual identity, or that of racial minorities. Yet, as much as we may dislike the approach taken by Spengler here, we must admit that cultures are indeed perceptual frameworks. We must admit that the liberal (i.e., Enlightenment) idea of the universal is, to a great extent (I still refuse to believe it is fully so), a mere abstraction. In this sense, to me the challenge is not so much to reject postmodernism as to overcome it, to synthesize it and integrate it into a newer philosophy that manages to subsume those parts of it that are positive.

Here is a second quote (my emphasis, once again):

The Decline of the West opened with an attack, controversial in its day but conventional in ours, on two forms of historiography —one that recognized the nation as the basic unit of historical analysis, and another that placed Europe at the center of world history.

(p. 27)

I'm not sure this is a characteristic of the far right, is it? If anything, it is a characteristic of the identity movement that is usually identified with the far left here in the US. I certainly don't see American ultraconservatives (or, for that matter, Marie Le Pen, or Vicktor Orbán) defending multilateralism and a respect of other cultures. If anything, they see Western culture as far superior and, at times, with a right to impose itself on other cultures.

The Fantasist (Julius Evola)

Julius Evola is an even more interesting character (mind you, the list of thinkers shared by Rose includes a few weird characters). His mixture of a very subjective approach to history and philosophy with esotericism, mysticism, references to Eastern religion, together with a defense of the values of aristocracy, the heroic and the masculine, makes for a very strange mélange. And yet, to be clear, it's not as if many top Nazi officials (e.g., Heinrich Himmler) were beyond this type of weird cocktail of ideas. His was a reaction against the modern world in favor of a tradition that was more in his head than in actual history.

The world of Tradition differs from the world of modernity in fundamental respects. Because the "man of tradition" is preternaturally aware of a superior dimension of existence, he experiences nature, history, and society in altogether different ways. He follows what Evola called the "doctrine of two natures." He values the absolute over the contingent, tje invisible over the visible, the sacred over the profane, and being over becoming. Evola's doctrine was metaphysically simple. For the follower of Tradition, the phenomenal realm of daily experience is supported, sustained, and animated by a higher spiritual realm. "In the traditional world," Evola explained, "nature was not thought about but lived as though it were a great, sacred, animated body, the visible expression of the invisible." Evola possessed a command of ancient and modern philosophy, but he declined, at every opportunity, to offer a philosophical defense of his doctrine. The "daemon of dialectics" cannot demonstrate truths that can be perceived only by an elect few who are disposed by nature to see them. But the doctrine, treated as incontestably true, allowed Evola to make a fascinating interpretation of traditional life and its deepest purposes.

(p. 47)

Notice the elitist reference to the select few, a constant of all reactionary movements, as well as aristocratic spirits, such as Nietzsche. Evola, like Nietzsche, uses this elitism, this aristocratic mentality, to criticize Christianity:

Evola's deeper criticism was that Christianity is a solvent to political authority. Society needs to be governed by a spiritual authority, just as a human being must be governed by its soul (it is the error of liberalism to organize society around the needs of the body instead). But Evola denied that Christianity could provide this. Its cardinal heresy was that it divided spiritual and temporal powe, clearly separating priestly and civil offices. For Evola, there was no more insidious idea in human history, and he traced virtually all the secularizing tendencies in liberal culture to Christianity's fateful separation of spiritual and temporal authority. In dividing what belongs in perfect unity, it induces social schizophrenia, where no one authority possesses power over all human life. Evola insisted on the anomalous character of the Christian "schism" from Tradition, alleging that ancient Egyptian, Roma, Assyrian, Persian, and Hindu societies (indeed, seemingly every traditional society) united kingship and priesthood into a single office. He acknowledged that Christian history features eras of close cooperation between church and state, and he wrote wistfully of failed medieval attempts to absorb the church into imperial authority. The war between "Ghibellines" and "Guelphs," as he called it, was the most momentous intellectual battle in Western history, pitting defenders of imperial supremacy against defenders of ecclesial liberty. Evola understood that as a "Ghibelline" he had lost, and the church had retained its institutional autonomy.

(pp. 59-60)

Rose, the author, will return to this idea that the contemporary alt-right, in spite of what we may think, is actually strongly anti-Christian.

The Anti-Semite (Francis Parker Yockey)

Francis Parker Yockey is an even more colorful character than Julius Evola. His involvement in the world of espionage and the fact that he was in hiding for a while until the US authorities managed to arrest him make him more the typical character of a James Bond movie than a thinker. On top of that, he had strange ideas to match his strange life. Thus, with regards to the Second World War, as explained in one of his books:

Imperium was a work of historical and philosophical revisionism. It offered an interpretation of events that Yockey acknowledged would sound absurd in 1950 but would be unassailable in 2050, he predicted. What had happened in the war? And who were its winners and losers? It did not make sense, he claimed, as a conventional military conflict. If the Western Allies had indeed prevailed, it was a strange victory that ultimately left them with less political power than they possessed at the start. Having entered the war to protect Central Europe, Yockey observed, they ended the war by relinquishing it. And as for their own empires, both the British and the French would see their possessions in Asia, India, and Africa begin to disintegrate almost overnight. The war's conclusion saw the West in geopolitical retreat around the globe, led by an American regime whose outer show of strength masked deep ideological weaknesses. Yockey's history was eccentric, but his point was to show that is "surface events" concealed their true philosophical meaning.

(p. 69)

To Yockey, then, the West was intrinsically imperialistic (which is ironic, taking into account that this is precisely the main accusation of the left, which most of the right vehemently denies). As Rose explains:

The West is an imperial culture. The idea of "world-domination" is the spiritual basis and goal of all its achievements. Yockey did not mean, and in fact strenously denied, that its culture serves to reinforce and justify the material interests of its ruling classes. That would be to say that what is seemingly "higher" in human life is merely an ideological reflection of what is "lower". Yockey saw the relation the other way around —it is not culture that follows power, but politics that follows culture. He argued that Western culture, in all its modes and styles,has an innately and uniquely aristocratic mission. It aims at being regarded as universally normative —as embodying the highest standards of excellence, truth, or beauty. The prestige that it seeks, in other words, is simply the universal recognition of its own supremacy. Yockey therefore read the history of Western civilization as the story of its insuppressible drive to see its ideas, values, laws, styles, and institutions triumph over others. While the activities of philosophers, missionaries, scientists, artists, and statesmen might look different, Yockey maintained, they were all motivated by the imperial dream to dominate rival ways of life and thought.

(pp. 73-74)

To be honest, I'm not sure I fully understand how Rose can describe Yockey's imperialistic philosophy that way and, at the same time, argue that this doesn't serve to reinforce and justify the material interests of its ruling classes or, at the very least, its peoples, as the Marxist tradition would argue.

In any case, where Yockey truly connects with the contemporary alt-right is with his views on the "culture wars" supposedly spearheaded by the left:

Yockey's arguments were crude, but they helped establish an influential discourse about what later came to be called "cultural Marxism." It claims that there is an intellectual movement, rooted in radical European thought, whose purpose is to dismantle Western culture through the remorseless application of critical theory. A prominent advocate has defined it as "a theory of criticizing everyone and everything everywhere," an "infinite and unending criticism of the status quo." The notion of "cultural Marxism" has been ridiculed by scholars, who mock its conspiratorial story of émigré scholars infiltrating American universities. But in the minds of believers, it describes a prominent feature of our public life. To them "cultural Marxism" is the massively influential project of redistributing cultural power and representation, especiall as it intersects with differences of race, sex, and gender. Yockey was one of the first to fabricate a counterdiscourse to it, one that identified its ideals not as part of the rich legacy of Western self-criticism, but as lethal to its very existence. By the late 1960s, his ideas (and image) would be invoked by campus activists claiming that tenured disciples of Marx and Freud were destroying American culture. They would not be the last.

(p. 79)

Incidentally, this criticism of "cultural Marxism" is also where Yockey connects with the anti-Semitic tradition of the West. Hence the title of the chapter chosen by Rose.

The Pagan (Alain de Benoist)

Alain de Benoist, a French journalist and philosopher, founded what was known for a while as the Nouvelle Droite, as well as the think-tank GRECE, well known in the circles of the European far-right. To be honest, of all the thinkers covered by Rose (with the exception, perhaps, of the first one, Spengler), Benoist is the one that makes the most sense to me.

Very early on, we discover something sort of puzzling. Benoist is convinced that true conservative thought is rooted in the philosophy of nominalism, in spite of the fact that most conservative thinkers would actually consider nominalism the point where Western philosophy started going wrong (e.g., Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option, so popular in ultraconservative circles):

The proper foundation of rightist thinking, he declared, is that of nominalism. Nominalism is a metaphysicial doctrine, originating in late medieval theology, that denied the real existence of universals. It held that only particular beings or objects exist, and that universals are merely conventional names (nomina) invented by the mind. Because nominalism denies reason's ability to know universal truths or natures, it is often accused by conservatives of undermining natural order and denying a common good. Benoist stood such arguments on their head. Only nominalism, he maintained, can defend traditional ways of life and values such as excellence, heroism, and honor.

(p. 91)

It sort of makes sense, actually. At least in the case of thinkers who, like Benoist (and all other thinkers picked by Rose in this book) don't share the philosophical foundations of Christianity and prefer to defend a strong concept of identity that one might even call national tribalism.

But Benoist not only stands for a type of conservatism that owes little influence to the Christian tradition, he goes as far as defending paganism:

On Being a Pagan warned that the fate of Europe hung on a choice between two warring visions of human life: Christian monotheism and paganism. According to Benoist, pagan doctrine is simple: the world is holy and eternal, uncreated and imperishable. "Far from desacralizing the world," he wrote, "paganism sacralizes it in the literal sense of the word; it regards the world as sacred." For paganism, the divine does not transcend the world. It exists in the powers and mysteries immanent to human experience. Benoist had experimented with neo-pagan rituals early in life, but he did not endorse building altars to Apollo or reviving worship of Odin. He defended paganism as an attitude about the terrestrial sources of human value, and hence about the nature of political community. Paganism roots all value —all meaning, inspiration, and fulfillment— in our communion with the natural and social worlds. It places human beings on a continuum with nature and the divine, seeing all existence as alive with the sacred. Paganism is therefore a humanism. It recognizes human beings, in their social nature, as the source of the gods, who "exist" as models that we should strive to equal.

(pp. 92-93)

Interestingly enough, there are some connections here with the tradition of the New Age and some strands of environmentalism.

But Benoist makes an effort to be consistent with his philosophical approach: if universalism is false, then we should also drop any belief in universal ideals such as democracy, hard as that might be to most people these days:

Democracy is not the best of all possible regimes, nor is it a proper model for every developing society. Benoist rejected thinking about politics in universalist terms. Democracy is simply how the conscious practice of politics first and most influentially appeared in European history. Benoist turned to the democracy of ancient Greece as its paradigmatic instance. Its essential feature, he wrote, was its understanding of citizenship. In ancient democracy, to be a citizen was not to be an individual with rights and private interests of one's own. Nor did it presume membership in humanity as such. To be a citizen was to be a member of a particular people, with a defined territory and shared lineage, who exercise sovereignty over their political life. "Demos and ethnos coincide," he explained, and where there is no distinct "people," there can be no democracy.

(p. 95)

We may dislike his ideas, but he is correct to state that the old Athenian democracy did depend on an ehtnocentric point of view that, on top of that, subjected the individual (and its freedoms) to the interests of the community. As a matter of fact, the old Athenian democracy is something that most people would consider oppressively totalitarian nowadays. The idea of individual freedom was completely foreign to them. A citizen was a citizen only because he (and I mean he) was a member of the polis.

Now, this ancient approach to the idea of citizenship is what Benoist calls holism:

"Holism," as Benoist calls it, emphasizes that each human life is embedded in a social and cultural world, and that our "situatedness," far from being an impediment to self-realization, is what makes it possible. We come into the world with unchosen relationships and obligations, and we continue to exist only in and through them. Human identity is in this respect profooundly illiberal, being rooted in particular kinship structures, existing only in a sequence of generations, always as a child of a family, and invariably as member of particular communities and a stranger to others. At ourmost basic level, we are therefore beings who are entrusted. From the moment we are born and so long as we live, we are heirs to a culture —not as a possibility to be chosen or declined, but as a bequest that allows one to think, imagine, desire, and judge. "Everyone inherits a constituent community," Benoist claims, "which precedes him and which will constitute the root of his values and norms."

(p. 100)

Notice how Benoist's idea is not only profoundly illiberal, as Rose states, but also strongly opposed to the very core of Modernity. It is the polar opposite of the idea of cosmonpolitanism, so popular these days:

Benoist's criticism is not that human loyalties are stretched too thin by being attached to cosmopolitan ideals. His objection is moral, not practical: the ideal of a universal community, open in principle to all people, is a moral evil. Because liberal ideals claim to transcend particular times and places, they must bring about a corruption of communal meaning and a perversion of human identities. They tempt a culture into seeing its way of life as universal, while inwardly depleting the particular attachments that make it possible. Benoist is for this reason vehemently anti-American. "The United States is not a country like any other; it is a land without a people," he has written, since it is founded on the illusion of self-evident truths. But whether grounded in biblical religion or its secular surrogates, universal truths cannot animate the spirit of a rooted people and its institutions, art, manners, and values. In Benoist's language, they are abstractions that sever the intimate bonds by which human identity is constituted. They make us strangers even in our earthly homelands.

(p. 103)

Not only would Benoist oppose cosmopolitanism, but he would also oppose transantionalism, together with projects inspired by such ideals, such as the European Union or, as Rose clarifies, even the American melting pot. In this sense, it seems clear that he does inspire the strong defence of national sovereignty among the contemporary populist right.

Now, the paradox of all this, of course, is that Benoist ends up defending, in the end, something that we could perfectly call identity politics, although defined in national terms:

Identity is a modern problem. A person who inherits a stable moral tradition, who accepts an ascribed social role, and who finds meaning in unchosen obligations —such a person, Benoist claims, cannot experience their identity as a genuine problem. It becomes so only with the uprooting of settled communities in the disappearance of traditional points of reference, which force individuals to look within themselves to discover who they are. For Benoist, this social revolution began with Christianity, matured under liberalism, and culminated in global capitalism. It imagined that individuals find their true identities only by being liberated from familial, civic, and cultural bonds.

(p. 108)

Let's be fair. That is indeed a good point. Identity is indeed a a modern problem. It wasn't a problem in the ancient age, and it wasn't a problem in the Middle Ages either. It is something directly linked to Modernity, liberalism, and its defense of the individual as the center of all meaning.

And, finally, we make it to the populist element in Benoist's thought which, paradoxically enough, connects him with the populism of the far left too:

Benoist's prediction, now being tested, was that our identitarian age would not feature a conventional contest between "left" and "right." It would stage a confrontation between an "above" inspired by cosmopolitan values and a "below" moved by tribal loyalties. Benoist tells us we will misinterpret the coming clash if we do not recognize its roots in something more primeval than partisan politics. At issue is the spiritual basis of human identities. Should we aspire to build a world on the basis of universal values that remove barriers to greater human inclusion? Or should we defend group identities and resist their assimilation into sameness? Benoist hopes for a peaceful rediscovery of group solidarities, but his proposals for its achievement are riddled with weaknesses. He seems to believe, against the weight of human experience, that social bonds can be strengthened when the values that support them are regarded as culturally relative. He does not seriously consider that his views will result in the continued erosion of traditions, resulting in growing isolation, not deepening fraternity. Nor does he seem aware that in inviting other cultures to adopt his pluralist vision, he is doing what he otherwise forbids —proposing a universal theory of identity whose intellectual home is on the Left Bank.

(pp. 109-110)

The Nationalist (Samuel Francis)

On Samuel Francis, paleoconservative columnist and political counselor. Among other things, he participated in Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign in 1996, helping shape its nationalistic approach. Personally, of all the thinkers portrayed by Rose in this book, I find Francis to be the most predictable and, perhaps, boring. If anything, perhaps his attack on the Welfare state accusing both the rich and the poor while defending the middle class is the most interesting aspect of his thought:

"The rich give in to the demands of the poor, and the middle income people have to pay the bill."

(p. 125)

So, in Francis' view, the welfare policies are not implemented against the wish of the wealthy elite and as a consequence of the struggles of the least privileged. Quite the contrary. They respond to some sort of unholy alliance between the rich and the poor against the midle classes. Somehow, to be honest, I find the whole approach quite unlikely to be true, although very promising from a purely political (i.e., electoral) point of view.

The Christian Question

And we make it to the last chapter of the book, which truly is present throughout the whole thing. For there is always this underlying belief on the part of the author that the core tenets of the alt-right are profoundly anti-Christian. To be clear, I think Rose overdoes this. Mainly because he chooses to ignore the strong connection between Christian integralism (especially in the Catholic tradition) and the far-right in countries such as France, Italy, Spain, or Portugal. Or, to put it a different weay, he cherry-picks those thinkers in the far-right who more clearly oppose Christianity while ignoring the ones who don't (or, as a matter of fact, the ones who even base their far-right convictions on a quasi-fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity).

In any case, we have to agree with Rose that, for the most part, media has chosen to disparage the alt-right as idiotic when, in reality, it has some serious and solid philosophical foundations:

Almost everything written about the "alternative right" has been wrong in one respect. The alt-right is not stupid; it is deep. Its ideas are not ridiculous; they are serious. To appreciate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its presence on social media, where its obnoxious use of insult, obscenity, and racism has earned it a reputation for moral idiocy. The reputation is deserved, but do not be deceived. Behind its online tantrums and personal attacks are arguments of seductive power. The alt-right entices through an appeal for fairness (an ideal it otherwise questions) and a rejection of double standards (a tactic it otherwise condones). It complains that identity politics is a weapon used to protect and celebrate certain groups, and to deconstruct and demean others. It is permissible to speak positively about gay rights, Black Lives Matter, or Zionism, the alt-right claims. But to speak positively about whites as a group, or to express pride in being white, is to invite ostracism and loss of livelihood. Whites should simply enjoy what minority groups possess, the alt-right insists —the ability to organize around a shared identity.

(pp. 137-138)

Perhaps the confusion stems from the fact that, unlike the criticism of Christianity that comes from the secular left, the alt-right criticizes it for something fundamentally different:

But in criticizing Christianity, the radical right comes from a radically different perspective, one so opposed to dominant assumptions as to be incompatible with them. To understand these thinkers' angle of vision, and to perceive Christianity as they do, requires more than intellectual curiosity. It requires the ability to see modern society and to read secular arguments from a potentially disorienting vantage point. To state their views succintly, if also crudely: the radical right critique Christianity for nurturing individual freedom, not suppressing it; for undermining human inequalities, not upholding them; for being rationalistic, not irrational; for its openness, not its exclusivity; for being apolitical, not political; and for living up to its ideals, not betraying them. What is shocking about these formulations is that they invert the conventional terms of intellectual discussion. They accuse Christianity of being the cause of modern values it is often blamed for impeding or rejecting.

(pp. 140-141)

Or, to put it a different way, the alt-right criticizes Christianity for being... too liberal.. As Rose explains:

It is Christian assumptions about human beings, and not Christian beliefs about God, that allegedly make it so. Today, we see human beings as individuals defined by their ability to reason and choose, capacities that endow them with an underlying equality. We see them as persons with interior identities that go deeper than their external relationships. Although these assumptions are largely taken for granted, the radical right argues they are anything but self-evident true. They are simply tenets of faith, whose forgotten origins lie in Christianity's anthropological revolution. This revolution introduced ideas about human nature and history that gradually transformed Western society, giving rise to the political mentalities that dominate modern life. It saw human beings as individuals, equal in dignity and worth, who are to recognize all men as neighbors. It saw history culminating in a universal community, uniting people from every nation and land.

(pp. 141-142)

And, therefore, their criticism of Christianity and liberalism end up being one and the same:

Liberalism aspired to order society around a vision of human beings, abstracted from all attachments, whose fundamental needs are for prosperity, peace, and pleasure. It imagined human beings as rights-bearing individuals who could pursue their own understanding of good life. If liberalism is in crisis, it is because this picture of human life has proven to be impoverished. Human beings are not defined through acts of individual choice and self-expression alone; they are social creatures who find meaning through relationships they have not chosen and responsibilities they cannot relinquish. Human identity is in this respect irreducibly illiberal, being embedded in lines of kinship and descent, existing only in a sequence of generations, always as a child, and invariably an inheritor of a particular cultural and social patrimony. It is an irreducible part of our nature, an absolute given, that we owe our existence to parents and peoples we did not originally choose.

(p. 154)

Say what you may about the alt-right, but none of this is idiotic. There is some serious content there. Their frontal attack against liberalism and modernity is serious and deep. What could our response be? Is there a way to defend both the integrity of the individual and a sense of belonging? Is there a middle path? Could communitarianism have a say?

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Entertainment: 6/10
Content: 7/10

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