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- [00:00]
A
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
As we confront the rise of authoritarianism at home and abroad, we are presented with anti liberal leaders, ideas and movements which threaten to destroy the post World War II International System. To guard against these threats, liberal democracies must better understand the relationship between ideology and totalizing political systems. 20th century European history offers a glimpse into how reactionary political ideas and the turn toward political mythology can upend democratic societies at the very moment public intellectuals convince us we've reached the end of history. Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is Eli Karetney. I teach politics at Baruch College and have for years been a Deputy Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate center of the City University of New York. With our director John Torpy on sabbatical this year, I have the privilege of serving as the Institute's Interim Director, which means I have the honor of hosting this podcast today. On the podcast we have Distinguished professor of History and Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center, Richard Wolin. Professor Wolin is an intellectual historian who writes on 20th century European philosophy and ideology and has authored numerous books which explore the thought and influence of, among others, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, The Frankfurt School and Carl Schmitt and most recently his book Heidegger and Ruins Between Philosophy and Ideology. Hi Richard, thank you for joining us on International Horizons.
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C
My pleasure, Eli. Thanks very much for the opportunity.
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B
Let's start with the German and French intellectual sources of the MAGA movement's cultural conception of nationalism and its approach to politics and notions of greatness. Maybe you can give us a sketch of first German conservative revolutionary thought. Who were the key thinkers? What's their critique of liberalism and what makes them distinct from the Nazis who several of them would ultimately go on to support?
- [03:27]
C
Sure, I think that's a good way of formulating the problem or question as a point of departure because you know, circa the late 1960s are developed in Europe and now everything is so internationalized and globalized. Little surprise that, you know, the, the movements that. The recalibration of the right to a new right in French Nouvelle Dwight Dugin is the Russian representative and so forth. But their program was predicated on reintroducing the so called conservative revolutionaries of the interwar period. Figures like Oswald Spengler, Decline of the west and other books. Carl Schmitt, of course, Ernst Junger's Glorification of War and Combat and the figure of the warrior and other figures. I mean Heidegger figures in the mix as well. And in addition some writers who are not as well known, perhaps in English, but if you kind of glance at the, you know, leading representatives of right wing thought today, however you want to define it in, in even in North America, if you look at the right wing presses that are trying to, you know, recalibrate English language intellectual life to give it a right wing shift or slant. The term of art is a Gramsciism of the right to achieve some kind of cultural intellectual hegemony prior to any political action or involvement, you know, one will see they're reprinting volumes taken from Spengler and, and Junger and, and a lot of attention is paid to Schmidt too. These are the, the main figures. And basically, you know, as your question indicated, you know, Schmidt occupies a special role since, you know, of course there's also a left wing reception of Schmidt that's been ongoing since the 1990s in the English speaking world. But, but you know, in, in 1923, so approximately 100 years ago he wrote his famous book Critique of Parliamentary Democracy, which has a slightly different title in German. But be that as in May, making this argument that a rather heretical argument, but one that also caught on at the time, given the weaknesses as the 20s advance of of the Weimar Republic that liberalism democracy operate across purposes and and liberalism is a social, economic and kind of institutional form that short circuits the potential for homogeneous relationship between a leader. Of course in German the term is loaded even then Fuhrer and the people. So he reconfigures democracy as plebiscitary democracy or it's called leader democracy. So that's where we are today in many ways. Just open the newspaper. We're experience if you still want to call it democracy. Okay, that's a stretch. Republicans don't like that word. You know, there's a book out has been a book by Pat Buchanan already in the 90s. It's a republic, not a democracy pointing toward in an elitist direction. But the whole idea that you could have a meaningful democracy in the 20th century without any kinds of liberal safeguards such as institutional checks and balances, respect for constitutional principles, bills of rights, et cetera. We've seen how that works out historically and it hasn't worked out well at all. The fact that it's back in vogue now, not just in the US but has made these arguments have made so many inroads in European and Western democracies that are teetering on the brink with far right parties threatening the corridors of power, is quite alarming. So Schmidt from a political standpoint is clearly most relevant. And the reception of his work, which I've tried to trace for a project I'm working on since 911 and the debates over emergency powers, the Patriot act, et cetera, has been really skyrocketed. So it's an important issue.
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B
That's great, Richard, thank you for that. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves. By the end of our conversation we'll talk a little bit about Peter Thiel and his announcement several years ago he wrote about his realization about the incompatibility between liberalism and democracy has echoes of this kind of Schmidian political critique of liberalism. So we'll come back to that. But maybe you could say a few words about where the cultural. You talk about Gramsci and kind of the cultural analysis. Where does the German cultural critique of liberalism dovetail with Schmidt's political critique of liberalism?
- [09:41]
C
Yeah, that's an interesting point because there's a little known fact here, which is that Schmidt, when he was just starting his career in 1920, so at which point he was born in 1888, so you know, he would have been 32, participated in one of Max Weber's last seminars in Munich, where Schmidt was had been stationed in the army and where he began teaching. And we, we know from materials that were left in his estate that Schmidt and Weber had a long discussion about Oswald Spengler and Decline of the west, which was one of the largest selling books in. In post war Germany for obvious reasons. It had been conceived in 1912 before the war. But this whole theory of. This couldn't be more current, this whole theory of decline and that the values of one of Schmidt's other his late books from 1959 was called the Tyranny of Values. We don't have to get into that right now, but of course it's Western values. It's a very Spenglerian argument. But this is really indispensable, this cultural critique for the anti democratic and illiberal right stemming from Spengler. There's a widespread reception of Spengler's thesis of decline and the notion of liberal democratic decadence. And that decadence really inheres in democratic egalitarianism and rights talk and notions of human equality in general that are inherited from Christianity idea that all persons are equal in the eyes of all souls are equal in the eyes of God. If you read the essays and books by the progenitor of the new right, Nouvelle Droit, Helene de Benoit, who now is translated into English, the formerly left wing journal Telos published his essays and. And had a special double issue on his work during the 1990s. You know, one of his books has to do with human rights droit de l', homme, which is, you know, honorable and much honored aspect of French political history, beginning with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and citizen in 1789. So this attempted to. And, and now it's. The American conservatives are all in on this notion that the Declaration of Independence, the phrase all men are created equal. This is just a meaningless piece of paper. This is. They call it the creedal version of American citizenship. This is superficial. And they imply. JD Vance said this explicitly in his Claremont Institute talk over the summer in July, that, you know, what good is a piece of paper? Before we got on the podcast together, I was thinking along the lines of this book I'm in the middle of writing on Schmidt and you know, the, you know, Nazi law, but not just Nazis, the conservative revolutionaries too, who were alive. Schmidt was a Nazi. Schwengler didn't join. He died in 36. That's another issue. But the ideas were more or less parallel, possibly with the exception of the rather exclusive emphasis on race. But one of their targets and polemical slights to liberal Law and constitutionalism was this notion. They called it in German. It's not, it is the same in English virtually. It was a polemic against what they called Peregrofenrest law that's articulated in the form of paragraphs. Well, it's a criticism of legal discourse and legalism and legalese. And just take my word for it, you can't find any legal text that's critical of Weimar democracy. So I just say after 1933, it doesn't include this kind of polemic. And we know again, we know where that ended up very quickly already in 1933, any kinds of checks and balances or opposition, institutional opposition to dictatorship was quelled, quashed within the first few months of Hitler's dictatorship. I'm not one who's big on the, you know, one to one parallels between what happened in 1933 and what's been happening in the US since, you know, Trump's second inauguration in January. Of course, we already had this debate on American fascism during his first term. But, but the systematic manner in which potential sources, institutional sources of opposition, I mean, we've seen it in the past week too, with the media have been cowed, intimidated, threatened to the point where if you can have these institutions censor themselves, all the better. Which is actually a sound bite from Trump yesterday. If they do it on their own. Speaking of major media companies, that's fine. If they don't, we'll have the FCC look into it. And, and then he qualifies. All this, he takes back with the other hand to preserve deniability with you. But I don't have anything to do with that. He's just spoken on it, right for a couple minutes and made all these threats. He's the chief executive of the United States. But I don't have anything to do with that. It's the chairman, the chairperson of the FCC who would take care of it. It's not with it, but he's already articulated his desiderata. So this is really pretty meaningless. But, but you know, it. We play out this thought experiment often these days and I, I know there have been actually RALPH Budget Institute podcasts to this effect earlier in the year about the parallels between 1933 and, and, you know, 2045. I think one, one could clearly go astray. We don't have, you know, a Sturmabteilung, the sa, you know, with, with millions of, of members. But, but that just for beginners or the, the heritage of World War I and all these warriors, the, the Fry Corps who are Looking for another war. But, but you know, we, we do have some, some lessons that we have to heed, I think, about how democracies fail.
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B
That's great, thank you for that. Maybe just to stay in the space for a moment longer, can you say a few words about where the conservative revolutionaries and the fascists and the Nazis, where there's an overlapping political and cultural critique of liberalism and modernity and where they kind of, and where there are lines to be drawn? Are the differences in the solutions, solutions they propose and the underlying critiques are essentially the same or are the differences deeper than that?
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C
Right, well, some of these matters. There's a competition after a while. I mean Hitler, the young Hitler before the Beer Hall Putsch in the early 20s, Mussolini was his hero. And the Beer hall putsch in 1923 in Munich was an imitation of Mussolini's March on Rome a year earlier in 1922. But eventually these are different versions of nationalism and racism. And so although they ally in the 1930s explicitly and Hitler pays a famous visit to Mussolini in 1934, etc, but, but they have different worldviews. So there, I mean, and for example, the, the Nazis didn't want to be known as fascists. Of course there was anti fascism on the left which was another reason to distance themselves. But fascism was, you know, historically speaking an Italian intervention. And I think Italian scholars are somewhat proud of this in a way, in, in a strange way. But Nazism, one can't find too much after the fact to be proud of. But it's a very German movement. Even the Aryanism, white supremacy aspect of Arianism, the elite, the elect, the privileged, they weren't going to extend it really to Scandinavia, to other so called Aryan Nations. This was really about Germany even then the definition was kind of mixed up. But the conservative revolutionaries primarily Spengler for example, was an autodidact. He was an independent writer. He wasn't an academic, although he'd been trained. And Schmidt was one of the leading jurors of the Weimar Republic, which of course whose foundations he tried to SAP through Article 48 and Presidential Emergency powers. But he also engaged in a lot of writings in political theory. I mentioned the famous book on crisis of parliamentary democracy and also his writings on political theology from 1922 where he praises the counter revolutionary philosophers of state, he calls them, such as Joseph de Mestre and Louis de Bonal and Donaso Cortez with whom he's most close and writes a book on. So you know, the Nazis. There was also a breach between some of the shall we say lesser known conservative revolutionaries. The intellectuals around this right wing journal which is called the Deedat. They thought they never forgave Hitler for playing the parliamentary game after the defeat in 1923 for trying to craft supposedly normal Weimar era political party to gain power by legal means which as we know which as we realize now of course was successful. They thought this was a sellout. And of course there was kind of this strange spiritual aristocracy that the conservative revolutionaries and for example this very influential taught deed journal, I think they at the end of the the Weimar era they were selling like 30,000 copies an issue of this publication. They. They consider the Nazis to plebeian, you know for to their tates so they taste so that they believed in a new elite, a new spiritual aristocracy. There were some currents in. In Italy who, who distanced themselves like Julius Evola from. From Mussolini's version of fascism. They thought it was too much 20th century mass politics and you know, not in their sense, strange as it may sound, not principled enough. This is one of actually Spengler's disagreements with the Nazis in 3334 there were some polemics. So but frankly the ideational structure or armature of the considered revolutionaries and the Nazis they had much more in common than not. And Schmidt just to finish this played an indispensable role in early April 1933 in writing the like Shalton or elimination of political opposition legislation especially versus the individual German states to. To grease the wheels for a full fledged totalitarian dictatorship. And they put his legal expertise to good use and he made quite a career under you know, the Nazis accumulating offices and he was very content. Bertan, thank you.
- [22:58]
B
This wasn't an exclusively German phenomenon as you mentioned. Of course Italian Fascism was at the heart of this but we can't leave out the French. And interesting that you mentioned there was a kind of aristocratic perceptions among some of these movements that the German. The German expression of these ideas and tendencies was plebeian. I wonder if you can say a few words about what you've called French literary fascism. How does that play into this? And maybe you can elaborate in part of Your answer about 20th century French antisemitism and how that related to theories of okay, and be known as integral nationalism.
- [23:52]
C
Yeah, it's interesting that when we were talking just before the podcast kicked off, you were mentioning to me this list of books by Kostin Alamariu, AKA Bronze Age Pervert, his syllabus of recommended books and. And which I hadn't Seen it was interesting that the, the, this book by Louis Fernandez Celine who of course was a violent anti Semite in the 30s, but one of his books was on the list the, the book that's best known in the English speaking world and part of which takes place in the us Voyage aux de la Nuit, Voyage to the End of Night. But so this is very important and it bespeaks the strength of French fascism and also its weakness because there's a surprisingly widespread and vocal. This is characteristic of French political culture to begin with. I mean many French politicians from the Third Republic, even Leon Bloom, the leader of the, the Popular Front from 36 to 37 on the Socialist side, began his career as a literary scholar writing reviews and literary essays. Etc. This bespeaks, you know, French political culture and their literary predilections which derive from the Enlightenment and the accomplishments of the great 19th century novelists, et cetera. So they're very vocal and engaged people like Robert Brasillac and Drew de la Rochelle. Brazillac was executed in 1945 for collaboration. He was the editor of Justuis Partout which was virulently anti Semitic, et cetera. And the towering presence, and he seems to be coming back, died in 1952 of Shah Maurras, who was the leading intellectualite of Action Francaise. But what's in part interesting is that the younger generation of Morassian or partisans of Action francaise during the 1930s felt that morass was a monarchist. It's coming back into fashion in France today in ways that are quite remarkable. Action Francaise and we have, you know, post liberals, post liberal Catholics in the US such as the Harvard professor of Law Adrian Vermeule, who builds himself as a neo integralist and, and identifies very much with some of Morass's positions on political authority and political order and, and absolute values which have a neo Thomist, you know, pedigree as a rule. But the younger generation of Morassians during the 30s realized that monarchism really was going to be a hard sell. So they were very attracted. You were, you know, after the France's loss and the Franco Prussian War, all things German seemed poisonous, especially to Maurras personally. On the other hand, I mean, they were looking across the Rhine and seeing what they perceived as all this energy and unity and enthusiasm and political vigor which France in the 30s at the tail end of the third republic didn't seem to have. So they were, with one eye at least regarding these experiments to the east and the South, Mussolini's Italy and trying to figure out how this might work in, in France. And there were fascist political parties that, with whom they, you know, the, the literati were involved and many were collaborators. And, and you know, there's this famous dictum by shaw Maurras in 1940 at the Fall of France, because he got his start. Maurras got his start in politics at the apogee of the Dreyfus affair in 1898. 99, when he calls the fall of France un surprise divine, a divine surprise. He's been arguing against the Third Republic for most of his life. And finally, as a result of the fall of France, in June 1940, it came to pass. But there were some bitter pills hidden within the surprise as well. But maybe that would take us too.
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B
Far afield just to stay with the French fascists for a moment longer and maybe to connect some dots to our current situation, kind of the US political moment. Can you speak about how these reactionary French thinkers give fascism a makeover after World War II through ideas, theories, mythologies, like the Great Replacement Theory. You've written about this, and maybe just to draw those connections to anti immigrant American figures like Tucker Carlson, who privileges, quote, unquote, legacy Americans.
- [30:04]
C
Yeah, it's an interesting question because the, the French New Right, or Nouvelle Dwight, which, you know, really develops in the mid-1960s, early 60s and mid-1960s, comes out of right wing political figures and intellectuals, some of whom actually fought in the Algerian war to keep Algeria French and participated in the OAS Organization de l' Armee Secret, which was setting off terror bombs in metropolitan France to try to deter de Gaulle and the current French government from yielding Algeria back to the Algerians. The point is that, that the French New Right evolved from the OAS and the Keep Algeria French contingent or argument, these were militants. And so the whole problem of decolonization loomed large in their worldview. And they very quickly, and it can be readily documented, presented this, you know, this image of fear and terror, that there would be inundation by, you know, people from the third World in continental Europe, and that it's perversely fascinating the way they discursively reversed our inherited notions of racism as it emerges in studying colonialism. So it wasn't the colonists, European and Europeans who were the racists. It's the, you know, those who are colonized, who are rebelling against European rule and who of course, on occasion, to free themselves, will commit acts of violence and take up struggle, as happened in a number of cases, of course, not always. In the case of India, there was, you Know, a peaceful, you know, passive resistance and, you know, peaceable means, but, you know, orchestrated by Gandhi. So they're anti, it's anti white racism, anti European. I mean, they're the real racists, right? Those from the Tiamond or Third World. So they reverse this very quickly and it becomes a theory of white supremacy. So these are really the origins of the great Replacement, that there's this threat of inundation. There's this terrible book by one of the members of the literary representative of the Nouvelle Droit that's, that's cited often today from 1971, Jean Raspail's book that's supposed to be Bannon's favorite book, that, that tells the tale of inundation of Europe by, you know, these unkempt masses from the Indian subcontinent, et cetera. And, you know, this is, this is really a go to and off cited piece of literature in the European far right political imaginary today. Even nations with minimal immigration, such as Viktor Orban's Hungary, raise the specter of replacement theory, despite the fact that there are very few immigrants to Hungary or attempts to emigrate or immigrate to Hungary on the part of refugees from anywhere. But obviously from a demagogic standpoint, it's a very effective means of spreading fear of the other.
- [34:20]
B
And this brings us back to MAGA and the current moment. Let's talk about how these ideas are influencing right wing culture and politics here in the us. You've written about and just briefly mentioned bap, Bronze Age pervert, Costin Allemariu and how thinkers, German thinkers like Junger Schmidt, can help us understand Bapt's self proclaimed Nietzschean aristocratic spirit. So we can spend a little bit of time talking about the kind of the aristocratic element, the supposed aristocratic element in all of this. And as you mentioned, you know, we had briefly discussed before the podcast started that it brought to your attention that bap, in a tweet in the next post, openly seeks to convert what he calls sensitive and intelligent youth. And what he's trying to convert them to is, well, what he calls, quote, unquote, fascism or something worse. What is this something worse? But he offered this conversion package very explicitly and you mentioned a few of the books on this list. Let me just read the list for our audience. The conversion package includes the prologue to Nietzsche, Zarathustra, Celine's, as you had said, Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, Mishima's the Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea and Spring Snow, Junger's Storm of Steel, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and Nostromo and Loggerquist's the Dwarf. Anything in this starter pack jump out at you other than the, the books you've already mentioned?
- [36:13]
C
Well, it's an interesting list and there are definitely. There are, you know, thematic resemblances and continuities between the various writings. I mean, I guess Nietzsche's almost is. Is so such an obvious choice. It almost doesn't bear commenting on since the title of. Of Alimaru's dissertation, which was published a few years ago or self published was on selective breeding and the birth of political philosophy and, and you know, breeding or Zustong was. Was a concern of Nietzsche's and Will to Power. It's the title of one of the later sections. But Mishima Yuka Mishima is a very interesting figure who of course committed, you know, seppuku, eviscerated himself in, in a coup attempt in 1971 before the Japanese military academy. He had a, if you will, a kind of a Spenglerian critique of Japanese growing Japanese effeminacy under democracy, how it had lost the samurai ethos, et cetera. The important point here is that, you know, Mishima is really a saint and a go to figure in the manosphere online and among the. The men's movement for. For a number of reasons he's considered a very important progenitor. Jack Donovan, who has written a number of books such as no Man's Land. It's. It's first, you know, has photos online posted of himself in front of a huge image of Mishima. A few years ago I was working with a student at the graduate center who was doing a thesis on the relationship between German political ideas and Japanese political ideas during the 1930s, even before the access was officially agreed upon. I came across this book in 1936 published by the SS with a. With a preface by Heinrich Himmler called Der Samurai suggesting some kind of affinity between the. The SS thought of itself as an elite, a warrior elite, of course, and somehow that the samurai, you know, you think from a standpoint of, of race theory and pure Aryanism that might not exist, but there. There are other ways of conceiving it where, where it does work. But Mishima is lionized one of the, you know, you mentioned the French new rioter Neuville Droit that played such an important role here, like Alain de Benoit during the 1960s. Well, the, you know, Alain de Beau's benefactor who was an OAS fighter in Algeria, Dominique Venner, who committed seppuku or harikari in Notre Dame Cathedral in May 2013, trying to. And his suicide note replicated Renaud Camus great replacement theory. So he wanted to turn it into a political act. We later found out he was terminally ill. So I guess he wanted to go out with a bet. Literally a bang. By the way, the Heidegger's name was in the note. He said it was an idea because the, the next scheduled demonstration of the anti gay marriage movement which he was trying to reach. This, this anti gay marriage. Anti gay marriage movement that convulsed Paris in 2013. The next schedule was, was on the day Heidegger had died, May 26. So it's, it's peculiar. There were all these Heideggerian motifs about being toward death, right, and a heroic death which defines life, etc. I mean, at a certain point, I think some of this becomes a little banal. But, but I mean, anyway, Dominique Venner, his autobiography is entitled Un Samurai de l' Occident A Samurai of the West. So this figure really is quite widespread and Mishima is quite a demigod among the men's movement. And to really cut to the chase here, what's important about it is, of course, there's so much misogyny spread about among the, the New Right and the maga movement and you know, these astonishing proposals last spring that, you know, Trump's neo pronatalist ideas to, to, you know, award $5,000 to women who have an extra child or to have mandatory, you know, menstrual cycle classes for women. So, I mean, you know, obviously much of this is sheer provocation, but, but still certainly needs to be taken seriously. At the same time, it's, it, it's not mere rhetoric when it's coming from the, you know, chief executive of America and the United States. So this, this is the, the anti. Misogyny and all these, you know, conspiracy theories. The effect that, you know, take the dictum BY, you know, J.D. vance that came up so often in the 2024 electoral campaign that, you know, men have to wake up. They're being ruled by childless cat women. And where does this come from? I mean, personally, I'm allergic to cats, so I really don't have much to say about it. I don't have much experience. But, you know, this is the tip of the iceberg and this antipathy to, I mean, it's, it's, you know, the, the, this incel. Phenomenon and this, this men's movement known as Men Going it Alone, you know, I guess they don't have Social skills or, or, you know, couldn't bond with their sister or something. I don't know. Whatever, whatever the basis is, you know, it's very widespread and it's, it's intensely ideological in the sense that it's conducive to false consciousness about what other people are and how one individuates oneself as a person or as a male. It's very defensive in many ways. So there are all these cult like aspects of the new vogue of masculine masculinism on, on the right and Alamariu, of course, with this text that was promoted by the Claremont Institute in one of their organs, the, the American Mind by, by Michael Anton, who is now Director of Policy Planning in the State Department. Alamari, whose book works, you know, books have been extremely influential and popular. So, you know, one wishes one could ignore it at one level, but it's omnipresent among certain quarters of the young American, you know, male. Right.
- [44:17]
B
You mentioned Michael Anton. It's interesting. I listened to a podcast he did. I think it's about two years ago now, before he returned to power, as you say, in this prominent position out the State Department where he was, he was discussing BAP and he was notably ambivalent. And my sense was this was a kind of, a kind of Straussianism he was displaying. There was a kind of, you know, withholding from the public the full extent to which he, you know, supports, you know, BAPS commitments. You know, so he tried to present it in a kind of cautious way and you know, we, we need to steer people away from this explicit and vulgar, you know, kind of fascistic violence. And yet you can detect just below the surface a kind of admiration or even a kind of puzzlement as to, as to how, you know, why it's taken root. So I don't know, this kind of ambivalence was. I wonder if you can say something about that. Surprise you at all?
- [45:38]
C
No, not at all. Especially if you're hoping for a position in a, you know, eventually in the next Trump administration. He, he occupied a role in the first Trump administration until, you know, a new Secretary of State or, or, you know, Director of National Intelligence had been named. But in fact, in the original article he wrote on this, you know, at the time, anonymous treatise, Bronze Age mindset, he, he claimed with false humility that he really didn't know what the alt right was or he hadn't read any of their texts. And it's, it's an interesting fact. So he had the same kind of hesitancies to preserve deniability or distance. And interestingly, it was Curtis Yarvin, the point person for so called Neo Reaction, who also is kind of a representative of, as it's called, techno fascism, who knew Alamariu had clued his friend Michael Anton in about the existence of this book. It's how Anton find out about it. But, but even in the articles he wrote in the American Mind, Anton professes the same kind of ambivalence because obviously there's a juvenile quality and a transgressive and violent aspect to the treatise that, you know, he didn't want to associate with himself. Absolutely. Yet he did this. It's, it's as a result largely of this series of articles in the American Mind that Bronze Age mindset became, you know, well known on the right. And so there, there and, and after the fact, I think he was somewhat explicit, Antonio, that is about, he and Yarvin agreed that this would be a mechanism or a means or a vehicle to stimulate interest among young American males who were potential Trump voters, to light a fire under them. And the Claremont Institute Strauss did the same thing, the political philosopher Strauss. Whereas Claremont Institute is, they're known as West Coast Rouseans. But, but he knew that the way to perpetuate his legacy and his ideas was to cultivate younger generation of scholars and to populate universities and even small colleges, you know, throughout North America in order to, you know, popularize and spread his ideas. So I mean Claremont, you know, you, you associate it with a doctrine that's at some level, you know, fetishizes the classics and certain texts of Plato, etc. Of course there is this ethos about the Natural Rights Republic, etc. They try to reconcile Strauss's doctrines with American the thought of the founders, et cetera, Harry Jaffa, his book. But they're very astute in realizing that one of the keys to making Trump successful already during the first presidential run was to really try to reach younger college age men with ideas who felt at some level challenged by sexual equality and feminism, et cetera, especially I guess in so called red states to bring them in to the political fight and to get them to vote. And you know, one can't place too much accountability on actions by a think tank in Southern California, but certainly contributed in many ways to the success of maga.
- [50:08]
B
I'm thinking about the samurai spirit, the supposed aristocratic spirit and how that ties into the warrior ethos exemplified in Baps writings, Bronze Age perverts writings and posts about quote unquote, brotherhoods of men and You've written about how this idea is. You just mentioned you called it juvenile. It's a kind of vulgarized and sophomoric expression of some of the ideas that were coming out of the German conservative revolutionaries here. Specifically thinking about Junger's Forest rebel and Schmidt's partisan. Can you say a little bit more about that where he's a kind of derivative of these. Yeah, German ideas.
- [51:01]
C
Yeah. What, what makes it for. For me, given my background in, in German right wing thought of the 1920s, to make sense of Alamariu and, and this document, Bronze Age mindset, is that he's a. An educated person who knows his Leo Strauss and knows his German sources and certainly knows his Junger quite well. And this is a model for him. One thing I'd like to point out though is that, yeah, this figure of the male grouping, I think in English she usually use the word menerbund, society of men. Okay. This is a term that comes from the German youth movement, pre World War I youth movement because they were, you know, had separate groups for men and women, et cetera, male bonding. And the point of reference became the community of the trenches, as it was called the male bonding of the trenches. And then after the war, the so called Freikorps, these veterans who, you know, couldn't live without fighting, who sought battles against communists and communism in Eastern Europe, et cetera. And there are, you know, a lore developed among them and you know, the aspirations of their generation that were kindled by Junger's glorification of combat, you know, was the Third Reich. And just one quick footnote to this background is that the leading philosopher, most influential philosopher under National Socialism, who'd written this study of Nietzsche in 1931 on Nietzsche and the will to power, Alfred Boimler, who was also an editor of Nietzsche's papers and up until a point a good scholar. He did a Bachofen anthology that was highly regarded colleague of Heidegger's. He was, along with Rosenberg in charge of National Socialist education. And he wrote a lot about this figure of these male societies, the basis Menebund as the basis of German education. Okay, so it's something that's a figure that's ambivalent only in the sense that the education is also geared for war. Okay. It's also geared, you know, you have marching, you have retreats that are, you know, where you do military exercises and physical exercises. This isn't inherent in the notion of the menerbond or male society. There's, you know, of course there was A big literature on this in Germany and Junger perpetuates it after the war in this book that is translated into English. I think it has a couple translations in German. It's Der Waldgang, the forest passage. And the protagonist has been translated as the forced rebel. Well, rebel doesn't belong there, but real quick, you know, it's written by Junger in 51. And Junger styles the forced rebel as a resistance fighter, Wiederschamp's Kamper. And it immediately conjures to mind, you know, the plot of the General's plot. July 20, 1940. Anti Hitler. But who are they? Who are they resisting against? They're resisting against the Federal Republic of Germany, resisting now against German democracy. That's. That's the antagonist. So it's this, you know, seductive kind of conjecture about going out beyond the corrupt metropolis that are infused with industry and usually according to German conservative thought, dominated by Jews, into the German nature. But more than German nature, it's the German forest, the German vault, which has terrific amount of lore going back to the. The Battle of Arminius against, against the Roman legions in, in 8 AD Lioness by Tacitus, which was a great, you know, book for German nationalists beginning already in the 17th century, etc. You know, Tacitus praise of the, you know, rugged indomitability of the. The, you know, German forest dwellers and barbarians, their individualism, as opposed to the corrupt nature of Rome under Augustus and the empire, etc. It's moral slackness. This was an important ideological point of reference in German for the development of German nationalism. So Junger plays on this concept is very important of the. The German forest. I mean, it still has these mystical kind of the Black Forest that still has these important mystical connotations. So it's. And you know, at one point in the book Junger speculates that, well, you know, might. Might occur that it's a short book, but at one point, you know, one forest rubble will encounter another forest rubble and then maybe another, and pretty soon you'll have a movement, an oppositional movement of forced rebels to contest. Of course, Germany is not only a Federal Republic at this point as of 1949, but it's also occupied by a horror of horrors, American liberal technocrats. This is a fate worse than death, really. Everyone knows that Americans are culturlos. They have no culture and no civilization practically. So, you know, this is a recipe for a long and slow death. If you're, you know, someone you know from a European standpoint or a fake.
- [57:28]
B
European standpoint, so this brings us to Peter Thiel. I know I promised we'd be about an hour and we're running a little over, but it's a fantastic conversation and I hope, and I can't let you go without addressing, you know, how this all leads to Peter Thiel, J.D. vance, and the future of the Maga movement, as you've written. And it's been noted that Peter Thiel has openly admitted that he finds some of Bronze Age pervert solutions, quote, unquote, tempting. We had Damon Linker on the podcast last week, as I discussed with you, and he talked about Claremont, the Claremont Institute's influence on Trump, baps misreading, let's say, the Thrasymachean misreading of Strauss or Strauss's Plato and the links between Strauss and Schmidt. You see these connections differently than Linker does. So I wonder if you can say a few words about these links and what they tell us about Thiel and Vance and what's coming.
- [58:45]
C
Sure. I know that Damon Linker, whose work I respect considerably, is working on a book on Strauss's influence on the American write. And I think there's a important and extensive story to be told there. And I'm not sure I've seen, you know, articles he's written on it. So I just, I did listen to the podcast, as I was instructed to do, you know, over the course of the week, and I am kind of fascinated. I went back and reread this, a 2007 essay by Peter Thiel, who is German born, on the Straussian Moment, which is actually written in the aftermath of 9 11. And I think that the point of commonality, I mean, you mentioned in the podcast quite correctly that Strauss had written a very insightful critique of. Well, he actually, yeah, wrote a critique of Strauss, wrote a critique of Schmidt in 1934, calling Schmidt a liberal. And so there are obvious differences between them. And Schmidt allegedly said after the fact that actually Strauss had him dead to rights. Some of these, you know, questions on, you know, metaphysics and worldview are important, but I think ultimately to make a political decision or maneuver might not be as important because, you know, we know from reading Plato that politics is a realm of compromise and, and, you know, we're in the realm of the sensibles and we're permitted to tell noble lies and the myth of the medals because the, the cave dwellers and the hoi polloi won't understand what the forms are about or what real truth is about. So we, we have to disguise our, our, the way we communicate these ultimate truths that, that can never be realized in the, the, you know, it's in the seventh letter of Plato, quite eloquently phrased that he owes it to the. Socrates owes it to the polis, not to just enjoy the forms, to dwell in the ether of pure forms because the polis nurtured him and raised him. So he still owes the polis something, but of course it cost him his life at the same time. But I think that Strauss and Schmidt agree on the state of exception. And there's a cynicism about liberalism and Schmidt put it, coined the phrase Das Politicia or the political, that they do share and a skepticism about liberal democracy. I mean, Strauss was a witness to the undoing of liberal democracy at the hands of, you know, a far right party. And we, we saw where that led. So there was a skepticism of his generation. I mean the, the great political scientist and fellow immigrate Hans Morgenthau, you know, who founded of sorts American realism and political science came out of the same experiences. You can't trust international organizations and liberalism is, is, is weak. And hence the notion, this notion of militant democracy in German Zwehr Democratie emerged in the 30s. You have to be, you know, treat anti democratic parties differently than you treat those who accept the constitutional value system which is, you know, inscribed in the German constitution today. So I think that, I mean, Thiel's reading of Schmidt and Strauss in this essay is very suggestive because to cut to the chase, it's a justification of the state of exception and secret services who operate beneath the radar to do their duty. I think he's enamored of Schmidt's notion of the state of exception. And he's very critical, this is Thiel again, of the response of the western democracies to 9 11, the lack of agreement. Even the Bush administration feels this is too timorous. He doesn't think liberal democracy can stand up. He views it, I think, teal, as a class of civilizations between Islam and the west, although at certain points he hedges his bets. So. And what, what. Okay, so I did my homework. I went back and read the Teal essay, which was, I hadn't read for a few years. And shockingly, at one point he quotes the sensational conclusion, if I can call that of Spengler's Decline of the west, which is an appeal for Caesarism, okay, for a new Caesar or a new dictator to take over, that's what we need. But he also leaves it in the original German, which I found both fascinating and disturbing because this is Kind of a Straussian move. I mean, what if you can't read German? And, you know, who can? Who can really read, you know, if you're trained. Okay, but an entire paragraph in German, you can look it up. There's no translation. So he wants to be seen and not to be seen. He wants to be understood. And this is. We've been there before, right? In our conversation. He wants to be understood, but not to be understood. He wants to be understood by certain people. It's so strange for someone who was born in Germany. From what I know, he came over at a very young age, but obviously the family continue to speak German. But this is probably the most forgettable. There are many forgettable aspects, I would say, to Decline of the west, beginning with the title Untergang, is just apocalyptical, right? The teal essay, by the way, appears in an anthology called Politics and the Apocalypse. This summons for a Caesar, a new Caesar. It seems incredibly clairvoyant in light of the direction that American politics has gone and in light of Thiel's current status, as you can read the newspaper articles as the Republican Party kingmaker was at Thiel's behest. Thiel funded, of course, J.D. vance's Senate campaign in Ohio three years ago, contributing $15 million. And apparently he was a very important voice in spring 2024 persuading Trump to, you know, advance teal to the ticket that year, since he's advanced as a teal protege. So there's some eerie precedents here and correspondences that, you know, I'm sure that Damon Linker will sort many of them out when he finishes his book. Book, you know, but there, there's a lot. There's a lot there.
- [66:35]
B
Let's finish off with one, one final teal question. And it's interesting you bring up this, this dichotomy, this kind of Straussian dichotomy between being seen and not being seen. Presenting some piece of the story and withholding some supposedly deeper truth. It's been recently reported the New Republic has a piece out right now, and it's widely known. He's let it be known that he's giving these closed door lectures about the Antichrist in really prominent places, Harvard Club, elsewhere where our listeners can take a look. He's let it be known that these talks are being given, but of course, what's being said in these talks is being concealed, as it were, or only revealed to the elect who've been invited to these closed door talks. But I bring this up because there's something eerie as you say, but also important, I think, about the theme, the theme of the Antichrist and intention with what he calls Armageddon, the Antichrist and Armageddon on opposite sides of some invisible line in his imagination. And I wonder if you can speculate a little bit on the significance of this, the connections maybe to some of the thinkers we've been talking about today and if I can just myself speculate about what might be going on. Are there maybe elements of kind of demonization of out groups that we see in other political mythologies like, you know, we've talked about today, the replacement theory? Is this about, you know, kind of political maneuvering, seeking to align various factions within the kind of American conservative landscape, especially the techie elite and the kind of Christian nationalists? Is this about a kind of politics as holy war? You know, is he quote unquote, tempted like, like Bath to declare war on, on all of mankind or, or, or at least on the bug men who sound a lot like Nietzsche's last man. Is this really like you said, also is this about existential crisis which justifies a suspension of the Constitution and maybe an acceleration towards fundamental regime change? Like what's going on here? What do you think?
- [69:28]
C
Well, since, you know, to my dismay, I haven't been invited to any of these private seminars, you know, given by Peter Thiel. It's really hard to know. But some of the themes in terms of the Antichrist and obviously are related to a figure that's highly Schmittian, the notion of political theology. And Schmidt does address these themes in his later work in Nomos of the Earth and in some of his diaries and notebooks, Glossarium and where he talks about this notion of the catacomb from the New Testament and the Epistles of Paul, where the catacomb is described as some presumably secular, this worldly force that stays the hand or the triumph of the Antichrist before, so that prolongs. He's a delayer or prolonger with the expectation that the parousia or the second coming of Christ will emerge after this delay or prolongation by the catacomb is successful. So Schmidt seems to have put a lot of weight on this figure. He, he really didn't dabble much in quote unquote, political theology. After this work of 1922, the political situation had changed and Schmidt was excommunicated from the church in 1925. I think it was when he was divorced and, and couldn't receive an annulment. So but, but he returned to it as did, did many figures on the German right, namely to figures drawn from Christianity in order to oppose secularism and the modern world. So part of it was, was highly strategic. And it wouldn't surprise me at all with my incipient knowledge of some of Peter Thiel's background, especially his having studied with the French literary scholar at Stanford, Rene Girard. This conference he organized in 2004 on Girard's work on Apocalypse and politics. So there's already a political theology involved there. And it's a. Girard's theory is very pessimistic. It dwells on the inevitability of mimesis and competition and conflict and suggests that whereas Christianity had, and previous societies had emphasized sacrifice, a sacrificial victim that could expiate sins and therefore resolve the tensions of these conflicts, modern society lacks, which is secularized, lacks this capacity. So I guess that could be argument for finding some other form of catacomb, but catacomb, but, but I think it also fits in and here I'm, I'm just speculating. There's a very common, whether or not it's explicit or not Spenglerian aspect to the discourse of cultural criticism on the part of the American right in the alt right and so called hard right with Alamariu and, and you know, Curtis Yarvin, that believe that contemporary society, American society, American liberalism especially, is entirely decadent. And so you need strong medicine and strong measures and authority to confront and respond to this decadence. And this is a theme that's also in Christian nationalism, of course, which is coming back especially with these national conservatists, of course, some conferences that Thiel has been funding and JD Vance has been a speaker there, as has several other members the post liberals such as Deneen, Patrick Deneen, who wrote Regime Change and why liberalism failed, etc. So this discourse of Untergang or decline, that was very common currency in among the German conservative revolutionaries and referred to their bete noir liberalism, okay, and democracy. So it's coming back into. And also the Schmittian motif of friend enemy. Tell me who your enemy is and I'll tell you who you are is a famous motto watchword of Schmidt's. So you need enemies. Vance in podcasts referred to Schmidt and the friend enemy distinction. And so there's some knowledge there and unsurprisingly since Thiel has written on Schmidt, so I think, you know, some of the, you know, present day or contemporary expressions or citations or renditions of this literature and of these theories might be, you know, watered down and tailored to circumstance. But, you know, it is disturbing, given the, the political allegiances and, and orientation of the conservative revolutionaries we began talking about earlier, that they be, you know, considered as, as some kind of valuable touchstone of political, you know, political life and political virtue, to use a Straussian word. So there's, there's, you know, potentially a lot there, and it's, it is disturbing.
- [76:03]
B
Well, thank you very much, Professor Wolin. This has been a fascinating discussion. Thank you for joining us on International Horizons and look forward to seeing you in and around the CUNY Graduate Center.
- [76:17]
C
Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it. Eli, thanks for your questions.