The Anatomy of Neo-fascism - Final
How it all comes together in the end
“Every age that has historical status is governed by aristocracies.”
“Aristocracy with the meaning - the best are ruling.”
“Peoples do never govern themselves. That lunacy was concocted by liberalism. Behind its ‘people's sovereignty’ the slyest cheaters are hiding, who don't want to be recognized.”
“The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative.”
The Crunchy to Alt-Right Pipeline
Previously we looked at why a lot of groups that have traditionally been associated with the left-of-center politics have jumped on board with Twenty-first Century Neo-fascism. Among these are environmentalists, conservationists, nature-lovers, off-the-grid homesteaders, back-to-the-landers, home schoolers, neo-luddites, organic farmers, small-town communalists, locavores, anarcho-primitivists, and other similar groups.
These groups were at one time considered to be “hippie adjacent,” yet today many of them have enthusiastically embraced far-right reactionary politics. These are people who care deeply about the land and their communities. Who still have their copy of The Whole Earth Catalog. Who don't own a car and bike to work. Who install solar panels on their roof and eschew air conditioning. Who grow organic vegetables. Who realize that fossil fuels are finite and infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible. Yet a lot of them have embraced far-right politics, particularly what might be described as paleoconservatism. Rod Dreher—an example of this type of modern Neo-reactionary—has dubbed these people “crunchy conservatives,” or “crunchy cons,” and argues that they are a natural constituency for the MAGA movement.
While many observers were surprised by this development, previously we saw that there were lots of pastoral, Romantic, and back-to-the-land elements in the original fascism. During the interwar period, there was a widespread rejection of a society which seemed irredeemably decadent and in permanent decline, and many of the proto-hippies of this period would later become some of Fascism's most ardent foot soldiers. Clearly the appeal spans generations.
Traditionally, Conservatives have been associated with traits such as low openness to experience, high conscientiousness, and the desire to make lots of money. However, fascism is an altogether different form of right-wing politics, which may explain the attraction for people you wouldn’t normally expect. For example, people are often surprised learn that Hitler was once an aspiring artist before entering politics, a music lover, an animal lover, a vegetarian, and loved spending time in nature.
We also looked at people who take a mystical, anti-rational view of the world. This includes mystics, shamans, various occult and New Age practitioners, spiritualists, astrologers, naturopaths, yogis, gurus, neo-pagans, and so on. Once again, such people have traditionally been associated with the political Left, but when it comes to fascism, we see that the traditional left/right dichotomy breaks down. Instead, it is often habits of thought which determine political orientation rather than beliefs.
The habit of such people is to reject analytical thought, science and expertise in favor of Romanticism and a disparaging of empiricism. They tend to subscribe to what has been called the “paranoid style” of politics, steeped in emotion and conspiracy theories rather than logic or evidence. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, these groups have undergone a dramatic political realignment becoming some of most ardent supporters of far-right political parties around the world. This has led to the neologism “conspirituality” being coined to describe this potent mix of paranoid conspiracy theories and alternative health and spirituality practices.
These habits of thought have also led to an embrace of populism. It's unsurprising that people who believe that unseen, hidden forces control the world around us from the ethereal plane, or that our destinies are written in the stars, subscribe to the idea that unseen, shadowy forces like “the elites,” George Soros, or “the PMC” are controlling everything behind the scenes and are the cause of all of society’s ills.
So, along with the tree-huggers, the patchouli oil crowd has turned fascist as well. This may be best exemplified by the newly-appointed HHS secretary, Robert F, Kennedy Jr. a lifelong environmental activist who is now part of a political movement dedicated to rolling back environmental protections, maximizing fossil fuel extraction, banning green technologies, and pulling out of international climate agreements. Or Jacob Chansley, the so-called “Q Shaman,” who was emblematic of the January 6 storming of the Capitol in Washington DC. People like these are not normally seen in “conventional” right-wing politics.
Nor is this confined to any one country. In Germany, for example, there have been many links between the vaccine-skeptic Querdenken movement and extremist politics, including the Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) and the Reichsbürger movement, which planned to overthrow the German state in 2022 and replace it with a monarchy (and were suffused with mystical beliefs as we saw last time). The most notable example is their attempt to storm the German parliament in Berlin in 2020. Via Wikipedia:
In the morning, 18,000 people had gathered in the city centre, planning to march from Unter den Linden to the Brandenburger Tor and Großer Stern...In the afternoon, 30,000 people gathered at Straße des 17. Juni and Großer Stern for a demonstration with several orators.
Among those addressing the crowd were the American lawyer and activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nephew of assassinated US President John F. Kennedy and son of the assassinated US presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy. Referring to the famed Ich bin ein Berliner speech that his uncle had given in the city in 1963, he told the crowd that “today Berlin is again the front against totalitarianism”, warning of a surveillance state.
Mainstream media reporting on this protest, in Germany as well as other European countries and the United States, laid more emphasis on what was called a “storming” of the Reichstag building (Parliament building) by a group of people associated with “far-right” or even “nazis” [sic] than on the concerns of most demonstrators over worldwide corona policies. In total, police made 316 arrests, among them vegan chef and conspiracy theorist Attila Hildmann. A substantial number of members of the extreme-right Reichsbürger movement was present at the rallies.
This connection between the far-right and this “crunchy” style of politics has recently come to public attention after laying dormant for many decades. In fact, many of the early Nazis embraced similar beliefs about alternative medicine, special proscribed diets, and similar “alternative” beliefs. Such ideas are au courant in today’s far right circles, including things such as “ball tanning,” extreme exercise, and eschewing seed oils to preserve masculinity. The “supplement” industry has long been a sponsor of “alternative” media outlets like podcasts and YouTube/Rumble channels which have supplanted traditional news media sources where most people used to get their information. Alex Jones sells every supplement under the sun, as do other right-wing influencers—Russell Brand even sells a magic necklace to ward off the evils of 5G and Wi-Fi radiation (can magic beans be far behind?).
Deus Vult
We also looked at the role various religious groups play in Neo-fascism such as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and the associated Seven Mountain Mandate. Although more confined to the American brand of Neo-fascism, these groups exert significant influence on the movement, including their embrace of Zionism as a result a belief in chiliastic “end times” prophecies where Christ returns to destroy the world. These apocalyptic beliefs are sobering in a world where nuclear war once more looms as a realistic possibility in a way it has not since the end of the Cold War. These groups have also been associated with the “Theo Bros,”—young, charismatic, Christian nationalist preachers who adopt a particular masculinist, patriarchal style of outreach targeted at rootless young males who form the vanguard of all fascist moments which are typically driven in one form or another by male insecurity and rage.
The movement was generally supportive of the presidency of Donald Trump, with member Paula White becoming Trump's spiritual advisor. White claimed that Trump “will play a critical role in Armageddon as the United States stands alongside Israel in the battle against Islam.” In 2020, Charlie Kirk said, “finally we have a president that understands the seven mountains of cultural influence” during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Some scholars have stated that “most if not all of the [Seven Mountain Mandate] leaders can be found within the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement.” It has also been described as holding “revelation status” in the NAR. Christianity Today has called the Seven Mountain Mandate an “ideological feature” of the NAR and Independent Network Charismatic Christianity parts of the Neo-charismatic movement.
Another similar group are Catholic Integralists, who believe that all aspects of society must once again be “integrated” into the Church. These groups do not believe in the separation of church and state or the viability of secular society and want to reestablish a Western European theocracy in line with Iran’s Islamic Republic:
The basic position of Catholic Integralism is that there are two areas of human life: the spiritual and the temporal, or worldly. Catholic Integralists argue that the spiritual and temporal should be integrated – with the spiritual being the dominant partner. This means that religious values, specifically Christian ones, should guide government policies.
Catholic Integralists share an opposition to liberalism. Generally, liberalism is understood as a political philosophy that supports limits on the government’s authority and constitutional protections for the rights of individuals and minorities. But Catholic Integralists argue that liberalism is incapable of establishing deep forms of human community because it values individualism and liberty above all things.
What is Catholic Integralism? (The Conversation)
Catholic Integralists are often associated with people who hold radical traditionalist religious views, or "rad trads." The stereotypical rad trad is a young or middle-aged recent convert to an ancient spiritual tradition like Catholicism or Eastern/Oriental Orthodoxy who adopts the religion for personal aesthetic reasons as much as belief. Catholic rad trads typically reject the Vatican Two reforms, while those attracted to Eastern Orthodoxy see it as a sort of archaic, uncompromising “purer” form of Christianity uncontaminated by Western secular ideas like gender equality, individualism or commercialism. In this, they are idealogical allies with Putin’s Russia which embraces similar socially conservative attitudes and celebrates the nuclear family and religion (in their case the Orthodoxy) as the foundational basis of society.
All of these groups embrace “Clash of Civilizations” rhetoric where “The West” is portrayed as a distinct, monolithic entity at war with Islam from without and from secular forces within such as “post modernism” and “Neo-Marxism” which are out to destroy “Western Civilization” via immigration or fomenting guilt. As a result, they embrace “Great Replacement” theories and adopt extreme natalist beliefs. Many of these people view themselves as modern-day knights-errant who are on a kind of quest—indeed the manifesto of Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik was infused with this kind of rhetoric (or, more recently, consider the Crusader crosses and “Deus Vult” tattoos adorning Trump’s nominee to head the U.S. military).
What all of these groups have in common is a hostility to modernity writ large and a belief that rationalism and individual freedom must be abandoned in favor of religion or spirituality. It's notable that Leftist intellectuals who long for a “re-enchantment of the world” have also become enamored with many aspects of Twenty-first Century Neo-fascism, perhaps due to the mystical and Romantic views integrated into the fascist political style which are absent from mainstream technocratic politics (once again demonstrating that traditional left/right dichotomies are not always accurate when trying to understand these ideas).
During the inter-war period, European intellectuals like Alfred Rosenberg, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, Julius Evola, and Oswald Spengler integrated such mystical ideas into their philosophy, with Spengler using them to explain all of human history. We saw previously how much Spengler's ideas influenced German fascism (Nazism), especially the notion of pessimism and pervasive cultural decline and the need for a “Caesar” figure to rise up and restore Europe's lost greatness.
Similar cyclical pseudoscientific historical theories are once again very fashionable like “The Fourth Turning” by William Strauss and Neil Howe. We saw that Traditionalism is popular with the intellectual leaders of Neo-fascist movements worldwide, as documented by Benjamin Teitelbaum. Sir John Glubb, whose theory of history also centered around cultural decadence and decline, proclaimed that, “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.1” This aphorism has become pervasive in far-right and Neo-fascist circles, and a similar obsession with “strong” or “hard” men was also present in the original fascism. Today’s Neo-fascists see themselves as the “strong men” who will create “good times,” while in reality they will simply recreate the same hell on earth as the original fascists.
Against the Enlightenment
Essentially, all of these groups reject the Enlightenment and its core values. In this they are parallel to another popular movement which even more explicitly rejects the Enlightenment known as Neo-Reaction, or NrX (also called the Dark Enlightenment, the Grey Enlightenment, the Endarkenment, among many other names). This movement largely developed online and is associated with the philosopher Nick Land.
This intellectual movement rejects the very foundational values of the Enlightenment including the equality of men and women under the law, democracy, accountability, Liberalism and freedom, making it very similar to the reactionary, anti-rationalist, anti-Enlightenment views of the original Fascists as exemplified by the Goebbels quote above. Instead, it embraces a stridently hierarchical view of the world, where the strong rule the weak. Thomas Jefferson, an Enlightenment figure and U.S. Founding Father, could declare, “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” Neoreactionaries would laugh in his face and declare Jefferson a fool (and a hypocrite) for even entertaining such a notion. Instead, they would agree with the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue: “The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.”
Neo-reaction embraces a masculinist ethos of total and complete domination. It is also explicitly hereditarian, believing that genetics is destiny and that the “genetically superior” have a right to rule over the “inferior.” Following this idea, it rejects democracy in favor of absolutism, whether of a monarch, dictator, or chief executive. And since genes are inherited, it proposes a return to aristocracy as the ideal form of social organization. Heredetarianism also leads to a belief in superior and inferior races—identical to the original fascism, with some even sympathetic to eugenics. The ketamine-addled, billionaire psychopath Elon Musk, who has been inseparable from Trump since his election victory, has touted similar views:
On Sunday, Musk re-posted a screenshot of the theory – which appears to have been conceived on 4chan in 2021– on the social media site. The theory, written by an anonymous user, suggests that the only people able to think freely are “high [testostrone] alpha males” and “aneurotypical people”, and that these “high status males” should run a “Republic” that is “only for those who are free to think.”
Elon Musk suggests support for replacing democracy with government of ‘high-status males’ (The Independent)
This embrace of a pagan, “might makes right” Melian-dialogue ethos is also exemplified by another fringe intellectual very popular on the far-Right—the “Bronze Age Pervert,” whose manifesto, “Bronze Age Mindset,” is by some accounts “required reading” for Trump staffers. This review by a pair of right-wing hypernatlisists gives a good account of its contents:
Neo-reaction has recently come to the fore because one of its central figures, Curtis Yarvin, is something of a house intellectual to Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and far-right activist who famously declared that freedom and democracy are incompatible. Thiel has bankrolled the entire career of several far-right politicians in recent years, and his most successful investment by far has been in JD Vance, who is now the vice president-elect. Vance, who is one of the youngest vice presidents in history, is the successor to the oldest person ever elected as president of the United States.
And it is Vance who is the tie that binds many of these formerly obscure intellectual movements to the Trump campaign. It is doubtful that Trump himself—who is most likely illiterate—is aware of any of these intellectual currents which buoyed his campaign. Trump is merely a charismatic vulgar authoritarian who believes in nothing but his own absolute power and self-aggrandizement. He seeks only to indulge his appetites, immunity from prosecution, and vengeance. Vance, however, is thoroughly steeped in the various far-right subcultures we've been discussing, including Catholic Integralism and Neo-reaction. Vance also has ties to Christian nationalism and spoke at an event organized by Lance Wallnau, an NAR preacher who has “claimed Kamala Harris practices witchcraft and has written that the US is headed toward bloody internal conflict.”
JD Vance is, by his own admission, “plugged into a lot of weird right-wing subcultures.” His much-mocked comments about childless cat ladies and unassimilated Italian immigrants were made on a “masculinist” podcast. He doesn’t eat seed oils, a dietary restriction du jour on the extremely online right. When he was nominated to be former President Donald Trump’s running mate, his X following list included Bronze Age Pervert and Raw Egg Nationalist, two pseudonymous right-wing bodybuilders who often promote eugenics and the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. But perhaps no one online has shaped Vance’s thinking more than the neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, a former programmer with ties to Vance’s friend and benefactor Peter Thiel.
Yarvin — who blogged under the name Mencius Moldbug in the aughts and is now on Substack — has been a far-right public intellectual of sorts for a long time. His oeuvre includes musings about the correlation between race and IQ, calls for a “benevolent dictator” to run the US, and posts like “Why I Am Not A White Nationalist” (because white nationalism is “a very ineffective political device for solving the very real problems about which it complains”). He once wrote that the neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Breivik, who killed dozens of people in a series of attacks in Oslo, Norway, was ineffective because he “didn’t even make triple digits.”
There’s a tendency to not take people like Yarvin seriously. He and other far-right bloggers like Bronze Age Pervert position themselves as provocateurs and couch their work in absurd metaphors — it sounds inherently ridiculous to issue warnings about a guy who writes long essays about dark elves. And if you do take them seriously, they’ll say they were just trolling. But if you look past his edgelord posture and baroque prose, Yarvin has spent the better part of a decade clearly describing what he wants: a dictatorship...
JD Vance thinks monarchists have some good ideas (The Verge)
The final philosophy we want to consider is known as Effective Accelerationism, or e/acc (these nerds love referring to things by alphanumeric codes). This belief system is held by Trump's Silicon Valley billionaire supporters, dubbed broligarchs. We've already looked at their antipathy to Enlightenment values and democracy. Effective Accelerationism is also hostile to democracy, believing that it holds back Randian superheroes from transcending the limitations of the human condition and moving humanity beyond earth to the stars. It argues that any and all regulations or safety protections—including environmental protections—must be stripped away in order to maximize economic growth. It embraces an extreme form of libertarian economics even more radical than the already inherently right-wing mainstream capitalist variety.
This philosophy is exemplified by an essay written by one of Trump's most outspoken billionaire supporters, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. This bonkers 5,000 word manifesto (these guys really love writing manifestos), entitled The Techno-Optimist's Manifesto, is chock full of affirmations like “we believe” and “we agree” like a secular Apostolic or Nicene Creed. It is still available online. Among its many affirmations are:
Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die.
We believe growth is progress – leading to vitality, expansion of life, increasing knowledge, higher well being.
We believe everything good is downstream of growth.
There are only three sources of growth: population growth, natural resource utilization, and technology…And so the only perpetual source of growth is technology...
We believe this is why our descendents [sic] will live in the stars.
We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.
There was a foreshadowing of this same philosophy written over one hundred years ago by the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti entitled “The Manifesto of Futurism.” Although it was focused more on art, and was far more articulate, the sentiment was much the same: the celebration of untrammeled speed and power and the rejection of anything that might hold it back. Marinetti would later go on to be the co-author of another popular manifesto: The Fascist Manifesto, co-authored with Benito Mussolini. Indeed, the influence is not just my inference, but is acknowledged by the author himself:
The [Techno-Optimist Manifesto] pays homage to the Manifesto of Futurism (1909) by Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), who would go on to co-author the Fascist Manifesto a decade later, which was used to describe the political platform of Benito Mussolini.
In one part, Andreessen rewords Marinetti's manifesto in the context of technology, writing “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”
Andreessen ends the manifesto with a list of self-declared patron saints of techno-optimism, with Marinetti taking his place alongside philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the fictional character of John Galt, and the neo-reactionary philosopher Nick Land, among others.
Techno-Optimist Manifesto (Wikipedia)
And here we come to what got me started thinking about all this stuff in the first place. How are we to reconcile all these disparate elements of Neo-fascism whose supporters hold views which are often contradictory, if not diametrically opposed? How are we to reconcile the anti-democratic views of Silicon Valley accelerationists like Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk with the neo-Luddism and free market skepticism of paleoconservatives, rad trads, and crunchy cons? Consider that Paul Kingsnorth once compared encroaching technology and social media to a quite literal demon taking over our souls in an essay entitled The Basilisk. Or consider this from a more recent essay (my emphasis):
The serpent’s promise was that by rebelling against our Father we could become ‘as gods.’ How could we do this? By doing what gods do. And what do gods do? They create. If self-worship is the base layer of our anti-Christian and yet still Christian culture, and ideology its means of organisation and source of meaning, then the ultimate step is the creation of a whole new world - not simply through politics, but through technology. The remaking of matter and mind is our mission now - and this is where we come full circle, back to the notion of possession.
I wrote at length about the transhumanist project in my series on the Machine...our technological culture is at this point openly working to ‘build God.’ We believe we can rebuild matter itself from the atomic level, defeat death and upload our minds (read: souls) into a technological ‘heaven’ that will allow us to experience eternal life. This story - the eschatology of Silicon Valley - is almost a word-for-word retelling of the Christian story, only with humanity in place of God. Now, as we build machines to replace ourselves, we will in turn be possessed by our machines - or what they may be channelling. A new god may rise indeed: but it will not be us.
This, then, seems to me to be the state of play in the post-God Void. Believing ourselves to be rational creatures possessed of free will and limitless choice, we are in fact continuing to play out strange and twisted variants on the Christian story. The result is that we are putty in the hands of dark forces that we once believed in and now pretend not to. Whether you understand those forces as metaphysical beings, or prefer to rationalise them as aspects of the collective unconscious, the result is much the same, and it is the one Jung warned his readers fruitlessly about nearly a century back: we are in danger of being possessed by something that, in our weakened state, we will have no defence against.
Or consider the following from the “Archdruid” John Michael Greer:
All the recent rehashes of the typical future-fantasies of the mid-twentieth century—the faux-confident chatter about space travel, flying cars, robots replacing human jobs and other gewgaws which featured so heavily in the comic books and pulp entertainment of my childhood—thus can be seen as the cultural equivalent of comb-overs, facelifts, Viagra and Botox, the increasingly frantic attempts of the aging to cling to the scraps of a youth they no longer possess and pretend that old age is solely for other people.
It’s the same motive that leads universities to abandon the study of the artistic and cultural heritage of Western civilization: compare these to their recent epigones, and it’s uncomfortably clear just how absurd it is to insist that Andy Warhol and John Cage represent any sort of advance over, let’s say, Rembrandt and Bach. Get beyond the facile and fatuous insistence that the grand march of progress is still plodding away toward the stars, despite the growing mountain of evidence to the contrary, and Spengler’s vision offers a more meaningful way to make sense of the far future...
America and Russia: Tamanous and Sobornost (EcoSophia)
Seems a bit contradictory, doesn’t it? What unites these disparate people in supporting Trump and Neo-fascism? Is it just culture war grievance?
It is surely a coincidence of history that Kingsnorth happened to be in New York City to give the Erasmus Lecture2 the day before Trump's capstone rally at Madison Square Garden—the site of four previous pro-Nazi rallies including the infamous one in 1939. At that rally, Elon Musk—the richest individual on earth—leaped up and down on stage and declared, “THE FUTURE IS GOING TO BE AMAZING!!!!” Indeed, Musk has said repeatedly that electing Trump is the only way to ensure that humanity becomes a spacefaring civilization or will ever get to Mars, which I’m sure is a major consideration for Greer and Kingsnorth.
Joking aside, how is that rad trads, crunchy cons, anti-civ anarchists, Catholic/Orthodox Integralists, conspiritualists, Neo-reactionaries, effective accelerationists, venture captialists, and Silicon Valley broligarchs have all united under the same Neo-fascist banner? How is that people who have such radically different ideas of how society should be constituted are all part of the same political movement and all vote for the same candidates? What unites small-town organic farmers who eschew smart phones and technology with Andreessen and Musk’s desire to put computer chips into everyone’s brains and abandon earth for distant Martian colonies? How do we explain this? What holds them together?
An Architectural Clue
What got me interested in this was actually architecture, believe it or not. The first Trump administration issued an executive order which mandated that all new Federal buildings be built in Classical Style. At the same time, the Order disparaged modern architecture, especially Brutalism and Deconstruction, singling out works by Thom Mayne and Kieran Timberlake as particularly offensive. This sort of unusual focus on architectural styles on the part of a far-right administration reminded some people uncomfortably of the relationship between art, architecture, and the original fascism. Indeed, a hallmark of autocratic and totalitarian regimes the world over is an attempt to control aspects of culture normally considered to be outside the realm of politics like building, entertainment and aesthetics.
The original fascists also mandated officially approved artistic and architectural styles while degrading and forbidding others. Then, as now, this meant favoring classical and traditional forms of art, architecture and music while disparaging anything new and modern as decadent and inferior (reference Greer's complaints above). The Nazis famously closed the modernist Bauhaus art school and hosted an exhibition of what they considered to be “degenerate art,” or “Entartete Kunst.”
For me, this was a sign that we were dealing a different kind of political movement than anything we had experienced before. The United States has had several Republican administrations, of course, but none of them paid much consideration to art or architecture. I was also aware of the many accounts on Twitter (as it was then) which glorified Classical art and architecture while spreading far-right political propaganda including, in some instances, Neo-Nazism. But these concerns could always be waved away as, “Hurr durr, I like old buildings so I must be a fascist right, SMH LOL!” (as several people said to me online whenever I brought this up). But of course, that misses the point. Why did they care about it at all?
What did fascist architecture look like? While some of it was indeed Classicist, in reality it was a lot more modern than people think. In fascist Italy, the preferred architectural style was Rationalism, as exemplified by the Casa del Fascio in Como and the EUR district in Rome, which contains the Palazzo della Civiltà. In Germany, the preferred style was “stripped classicism,” which retained the forms and monumentality of Classical architecture but stripped away the ornamentation and filigree, exemplified by the New Reich Chancellery and the Olympic Stadium in Berlin.
Hitler himself had once been an aspiring architect (which he considered taking up after abandoning painting), and planned to build a new German capital with his favored architect Albert Speer, who later became the Reich’s armaments minister. The model of this proposed city, called Germania, was an example of idealized fascist architecture, with its long colonnades, imposing monumentality, and colossal dome which would have been the world’s largest. German fascist architecture was also deliberately designed to leave behind dramatic and aesthetic ruins, known as “The Theory of Ruin Value,” which gives you some idea of their underlying political philosophy.
But art historians note that fascist architecture was not just traditional or backward-looking, but also celebrated the sleek, powerful forms of modern technology and manufacturing like dirigibles, locomotives, steamships, airplanes, and factories, and often embraced a high-modern, minimalist tech aesthetic as well. This high modernist style might be best exemplified by the Lingotto building complex in Turin with its massive floor plate, gridded facade and roof-mounted racetrack, and the reconstruction of Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport.
So this odd combination of backwards-looking and forward-looking aesthetics is also reflected in fascist politics, and it is here when all of this finally came together for me. It's the same thing! The paradoxical combination of backwards-looking paleoconservative, reactionary social values with forward-looking high modernism and advanced technology is not unusual, or irreconcilable—rather it is the very definition of fascism! And it is here where we see the DNA of the original fascism of the 1920s and 1930s most perfectly reflected in its modern-day counterpart. Fascism as a poltical style is the union of these groups. Jeffrey Herf has described this as “reactionary modernism,” which he defined as, “great enthusiasm for modern technology with a rejection of the Enlightenment and the values and institutions of liberal democracy.”
That is, this same stew of eccentric, often contradictory philosophies which coalesced in the original fascism of the European post-war period—and which has proven so hard to define or nail down—has recreated itself almost exactly in our own time: Twenty-first Century Neo-fascism. That’s what we’ve been talking about this whole time. History is repeating once again, or at the very least, rhyming. And if you know anything about how all of this turned out last time, you ought to be extremely concerned.
Conclusion
So what is to be done? Do people really want to return the days when the boot of an overlord or aristocrat rested upon their neck forever? Where most people live and die as members of an oppressed underclass? Where the rich are above the rule of law and do whatever they please with no consequence or repercussions whatsoever? Where the law is basically the ruler's whim? Where the Church dictates what you can or can't do or say? A society modeled on medieval feudalism, except without the webs of mutual obligation and with advanced technology and intrusive surveillance monitoring your every move from birth to death in order to make obscene fortunes for the few?
Well, judging by the recent election, the answer seems to be ‘yes’.
But the reality is a bit more complicated. Did people really vote for this? Or did they think they were voting for something else? Was it all a bait-and-switch? What happens when Trump's used-car salesman, pie-in-the-sky promises fail to materialize? What then?
While writing this series, I ended up answering my own question. What is it that unites these disparate groups? I think it's that they all have an enemy. Their politics are driven by rage, fear and hate. The other is that they all want to tear down the existing society and erect a new one. Every group thinks that their particular idealized vision of tomorrow will be the one realized, but obviously they can't all be because they are mutually exclusive.
For the various Christian groups, their enemy is the secularism. They voted for Trump to tear down the wall between Church and state and persecute gay and transgender people. That's all they care about. For all their sanctimonious prattling about Christian morals and values, they voted for a convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender juggling multiple lawsuits who tried to overturn an election.
For racists and anti-immigration activists, it’s pluralistic society itself. They want to turn the United States back into a white ethnostate and Herrenvolk democracy. They voted for Trump to brutalize immigrants and herd them into concentration camps. For misogynists, the enemy is females, and they want women's rights to be rolled back and males to dominate all aspects of society—Gamergate on steroids.
For crypto bros and Silicon Valley vulture capitalists, the enemy is the regulatory state. They voted for Trump to repeal any and all constraints on their ability to use technology to amass more and more wealth by stripmining society and restrict anything the government can do to protect ordinary citizens from their predation.
Reactionaries simply want to roll back the clock like a DVD on the rewind button. They want to go back to the social relations of yesteryear, with women in the home, gays in the closet, and the triumphalist version of history taught in schools. They hate modern art, architecture and entertainment, and want to go back to a simpler, less technological world, with some even longing for a return to the Middle Ages (in this, they are aligned with the effective accelerationists, except for the technology part). For accelerationists of all stripes, like Christopher Nolan's Joker, they just want to watch the world burn, with each group thinking they will inherit the ashes.
All of these groups seek to channel Trump’s Neo-fascism for their own ends. The broligarchs seek a feudal cyberstate where they can rule like absolute monarchs, live forever, and expand throughout the galaxy. The religious fundamentalists and theo bros want a Handmaid's Tale theocracy where religious officials control everything based on their interpretation of Scripture. The crunchy cons want a bucolic Front Porch Republic that looks like the Amish where technology is banished and society once again revolves around the church, the farm, and general store. The working class seeks a return of high-paying manufacturing jobs to the Rust Belt. As long as each group thinks they are getting something they want, however insignificant, they might all remain in the coalition despite its inherent contradictions. But who will ultimately prevail? Given the ubiquitous presence of Musk, and Thiel's long-term sponsorship of Vance (“a generational bet"), it’s likely that—as always—big money will prevail, despite MAGA’s claim to supposedly care for the “working class” and the “forgotten man.”
And make no mistake, this administration will founder and fail. Authoritarian regimes always fail because they reward loyalty over competence, and sooner or later that incompetence catches up with it. The generals who weren't loyal enough to Stalin were purged from the Red Army. A lot of them also happened to be the best generals, which left the military weakened and unprepared when the Third Reich invaded.
Furthermore, the authoritarian leader is surrounded by sycophants and yes men who only tell the leader what he wants to hear. That's why Hitler’s generals told him that armies that had long since surrendered were still advancing on the Eastern Front (“Mein Führer, Steiner...”). Although much less dramatic, we saw an example of this when Trump incorrectly declared that a hurricane was heading towards Georgia. When a map showed otherwise, his flunkies quickly drew an “expanded” hurricane path using a sharpie marker because the Dear Leader can never be wrong in a scene reminiscent of autocracies the world over. They also tend to govern based on ideology rather than reality.
While we’re not fighting a war (yet), all these problems will manifest domestically. What's it going to look like when the Trump staffers who have read Bronze Age Pervert start jockeying for dominance via incessant infighting and backstabbing? A party composed exclusively of right-wingers is one where everyone is out to zap one another and has all the stability of scorpions in a vat. Dark Triad (or even Dark Tetrad) personalities may be very good at acquiring power, but they are incompetent at wielding it for any but their own benefit, which will become a nightmare for the rest of us. What happens when deporting millions of people, cutting billions from the budget, and steep tarriffs fail to lower prices, bring back manufacturing jobs, or ignite economic growth?
This need for an enemy fits with Trump's own nihilistic ruling style and zero-sum world view, where society cannot be run for the mutual benefit of all citizens but must be a neverending war-of-all-against-all, with clearly defined winners and losers. What happens when more and more people find themselves on the losing end of that deal? Will the normies fight back? Or will they acquiesce?
There’s lots more to say about this, but we'll have to leave it there. We can already see from the loyalists and cronies handpicked to lead the incoming administration, and the statements that have come out so far, that we're heading into a very, very dark and scary future for this country, and a very, very dark future for the entire planet. But, of course, that is what people chose.
I had thought this phrase originated with Glubb, but an internet search attributes it to G. Michael Hopf, accurately or not. In any case, I think it is an accurate summary of Glubb's ideas.
Kingsnorth's lecture is worth listening to, and is, in fact, a stern rebuke to those who wish to wield Christianity as a political weapon such as Jordan Peterson and Steve Bannon. Will his fans heed that message, though?