The Anatomy of Neo-fascism - Part 3

The intellectual undercurrents of Neo-fascism: occultists, mystics, dreamers, hippies, rad trads, crunchy cons, cultural pessimists, and theo bros.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

—Ecclesiastes 1 : 9-10

This series has been exploring the connections between what I've been calling Twenty-first century Neo-fascism and its historical predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s. We've already examined many of the stylistic and philosophical similarities and why I think it's appropriate to use term “fascism” when discussing these modern political movements.

In our final (thankfully) chapters, we're going to look at some of the more unusual and esoteric intellectual roots of Neo-fascism, and how they bear uncanny resemblance to some of the intellectual currents which drove the original fascism in Europe between the wars. This is going to be a bit discursive and rambling, so I apologize.

1.

I've been an observer of fringe intellectual movements online for a long time. I guess you could call it a kind of weird compulsion.

Back in the day, there were a lot of writers commentating about the impending peak and subsequent decline of the world's oil reserves and the societal consequences that would follow. One of those was a chap by the name of John Michael Greer whose blog was called The Archdruid Report. At a time when the media seemed to be ignoring a potential civilization-ending catastrophe, Greer calmly assured his readers that it was only a matter of science, and backed it up with what appeared to be solid facts and figures and cold, hard logic.

But, perhaps just as importantly, he preached a radically different world view than what you found in the mainstream media in those days. He ridiculed the idea of “progress”—basically that everything was getting better and better for everyone promoted by the upper-class people and their pet intellectuals (most notably Bill Gates and Steven Pinker), and the idea that technology would save us and create a utopia on earth (promoted by people like Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil and—strangely—the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand).

Rather, he said, as energy declined humanity would revert to a previous form of societal existence centered around scratching a meager living from the soil as we had for generations prior. Eventually even the internet would go dark, he said, so he advised his readers to buy up old hand-cranked printing machines to spread the message, and perhaps learn to operate HAM radio. The future, he said, would look less like The Jetsons or Tomorrowland and more like the Amish. He published these visions in books like The Ecotechnic Future and After Progress, as well as works of fiction.

To people living in the Rust Belt who had seen their communities devastated by economic decline over the past fifty years, this message found a receptive audience. Communities where prosperity had receded like the tide dotted the American Rust Belt and rural towns and villages, leaving citizens to either flee to expensive big cities or fend for themselves among the ruins like peasants living in the later stages of the disintegrating Roman Empire. From this vantage, it was easy to see why Greer's message—filled with erudite and obscure references to history and philosophy alongside the science—resonated. Greer's interests ranged far and wide and frequently veered to spirituality: the “Archdruid” of the blog's title was a reference to Greer's own participation in the modern Neo-pagan druid movement.

When 2008 rolled around, these prophecies of gloom and doom seemed to be coming true. However, while the global economy careened into a mini-depression, the promised civilization-ending catastrophe never occurred. Fossil fuels did not, in fact, run out, and the economy slowly recovered thanks largely to the actions taken by governments. However, those same actions created anger and mistrust towards politicians and the financial system which lingers to this day, and in this soil was planted the seed of a new kind of angry, reactionary populism.

From 2008 to 2016, what remained of this community largely pivoted to talking about climate change, and how it was the real civilization-ending catastrophe that would finish us off long before the oil ran out. Then, in 2016 the Trump campaign arrived on the scene and this community fully climbed aboard right-wing populism.

From 2016 to 2020, these former peak oil writers became enthusiastic and vocal supporters of the Trump administration and the MAGA movement. Then came the COVID pandemic of 2020. Again, nearly all of these writers, without exception, became vocal and militant anti-vaxers, promoting a wide range of conspiracy theories. From 2020 to today, this community has once again become fully invested in Trump’s return to office in 2025.

This support for far-right populism was framed through the lens of “elites” versus the “common people.” In Greer's four-class partitioning of American society, for example, the “salaried and investment” classes had oppressed the “work and welfare” classes. In response to this, the salt-of-the-earth common folk chose Trump to stick it to the snooty, credentialed coastal urban elites and their “woke” values. In his book published during this time, The King in Orange, Greer claimed that Trump's election was the result of “meme magic” which he described as, “the magic of the powerless.” As evidence, he noted the similarity between the 4-chan character “Kek” and an ancient Egyptian god of the same name (seriously).

Greer has since pivoted to a new blog, this time no longer about Peak Oil but rather “ecological spirituality in the twilight of the industrial age.” (he also hosts another blog of anti-vaccine content). His posts have returned to the original esoteric topics he specialized in before his writings about peak oil became popular such as magic, astrology, divination, tarot, alternative healing, folk remedies, casting spells, UFOs, and various other occult topics. In addition to writing, Greer also maintains a side gig as a “political astrologer” While Greer is deliberately coy about which political parties and candidates he supports, there is no doubt about the political slant of his readership. He hosts a monthly open forum on his blog, and the comments make for entertaining reading.

In between consulting the master over astrology, homeopathic remedies, communication with the dead, prayer circles, reincarnation, and similar topics, the readers of Ecosophia fret about the dire civilizational effects of “wokism” and the moral decay of the West, the replacement of ethnic Europeans by Muslims and foreigners, whether Democrats are literally demons, the sinister machinations of the Deep State, the evilness of vaccines and modern medicine, and the various conservative cultural outrages and conspiracy theories du jour. Basically Breitbart with magic.

My personal favorite is the reader who recently asked whether the “Deep State” exists on the astral plane and whether it can be combated there. One regular poster who signs all their posts “Northwinds Grandma” from Dane Country Wisconsin (!!) posts long, rambling diatribes against liberals, Democrats and “wokism,” and informed her follow readers that she was finally making her way through Mein Kampf. Here's are some samples from the latest offering:

JMG,

In some earlier comments I speculated on some of the reasons for the apparent collapse in the effectiveness and sanity of the Kamala Campaign. I won’t rehash those again but now another good reason for the bumbling of the Harris/Walz ticket has emerged. It appears that Kamala’s campaign manager and assorted upper toadies are effectively DEI hires. There is not enough information out there yet to determine their actual competence, but what we do know is that none of the upper echelon of the Harris campaign ever worked outside of the non profit advocacy sphere. As such they are totally out of touch with working Americans, and it shows.

Greer responds:

Clay, that makes an impressive amount of sense. It’ll be interesting to see if the Democrats can pull anything out of the dumpster fire they’ve ignited.

And in another response, Greer comments:

Ottergirl, yep. It was quite the spectacle watching Obama make a fool of himself lecturing black Americans, and even more of a spectacle watching the sulfurous responses he got. If the vote from people of color breaks significantly in Trump’s favor, I could definitely see leading figures in the Democratic Party slamming all the way over into hardcore white supremacism. We’ll be talking about that, among other things, next week.

Yes, that's right, apparently these “DEI hires” are all going to turn into “hardcore white supremacists” the minute they lose the election. Of course. And clearly it’s the sanity of the Harris campaign that has collapsed, not the guy who held an impromptu dance session for forty agonizing minutes. And this stuff is pretty par for the course for Greer's writing nowadays. Lately Greer has been pontificating on Wagner's Ring cycle which—given its rather dark historical associations—is, well, let's say an interesting choice of topics at this very moment. While constantly disparaging the Demoncrats, Greer depicts billionaire Trump as a sort of working-class hero—a middle finger to the feckless, incompetent “woke” PMC¹ and their antipathy to working class values.

Somewhat confusingly, Greer advises his readers to voluntarily adopt a third-world poverty lifestyle—in his words to, “collapse now and avoid the rush.” It's a bit confusing how one minute he blames falling living standards on declining oil supplies and the next minute on the PMC. If the energy isn't there to raise living standards in any case, then how can the elites be held responsible? And what exactly did the “salaried class” do to cause all of this in the first place? Moreover, what is the remedy? It's certainly not socialism—Greer comes across as a fairly staunch libertarian. There don't seem to be many answers to these questions aside from vague complaints about “big business” and handwavy support for “local economies.” Someone should tell Greer that nostalgia is not an economic plan.

Now let's take a look at a another writer with a similar audience who’s taken a similar trajectory.

Paul Kingsnorth became a novelist and writer of some renown in the UK and was primarily known as a staunch environmentalist and activist. Being something of a spiritual seeker, he initially embraced the Neo-pagan Wicca movement before enthusiastically converting to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, specifically the Romanian variety. The phrase “more Catholic than the Pope,” is often used to describe the zeal of a convert to their newfound religion, and it certainly applies to Kingsnorth, expect perhaps altered a tad to “more Orthodox than the Patriarch.” Along with his conversion to the Eastern Orthodox faith came his conversion to ultraconservative culture warrior.

Kingsnorth became a resolute and militant anti-vaxer, and his anti-vaccine writings are the most popular on his Substack newsletter. He advocated for Brexit, claiming that people need to be inherently tied to place, despite being married to an Indian immigrant (similar to JD Vance). He opined on transgenderism, claiming it was a form of “transhumanism” and that humans were making decisions properly left to God. And he adopted the usual culture war rhetoric against “wokeism,” “gender ideology,” “multiculturalism,” “immorality,” “placelessness,” and “open borders” that are de rigeur on the rightward end of the political spectrum these days, while penning regular articles for paleoconservative publications like Unherd and The American Conservative. Kingsnorth proudly styles himself a “reactionary radical.” Like Greer, he claims that Trump is a mostly harmless rebuke to the feckless, arrogant “elites” and their supposed abandonment of the working class—in other words, right-wing populism:

Incidentally, quite a lot of ‘English intellectuals’ have nothing to do with me anymore since I voted for Brexit, refused the covid jab and wrote several pieces defending populism, and indeed ‘Trump supporters’, back in the day. I've been writing about how globalisation screws ordinary people for 25 years. I'm not a Trump fan, but it's not hard to see his appeal for many people...The West as a whole currently suffers from being governed by rotten, self-serving elites with little to no understanding of the reality of their countries or people. This is not a situation that is going to go on for much longer. The only real question is how it's going to break down, and what will replace it.

All ‘populism’ is that same reaction. The demonising of Trump and his voters is just part of the propaganda system. That's a separate question from whether he's a good man who would make a good president. I do think change is coming. My feeling is that we're living in 1913, or 1916, or 1929. I don't say this is a good thing. But I do say that this situation can't continue indefinitely. It's true that most people don't think this way. But as we saw with covid, most people will tend to follow the herd...The interesting thing for me is that he almost roused them by accident. He's a figurehead, but the energy was waiting to be tapped into. He has a genius for tapping into it, and enough narcissism to endlessly feed off it. But that mass discontent is only growing everywhere. It's almost spiritual at this point. Strange times.

Strange times, indeed.

2.

But this isn't really about Greer or Kingsnorth, whom I've chosen somewhat at random because of my familiarity with their writings. Perhaps to help us understand these ideological currents a bit better, we might turn to another writer who links all of these ideas together with the actual Neo-fascist MAGA movement itself.

Rod Dreher is a former writer for The American Conservative who left when his patron decided that Dreher's posts were getting a bit "too weird" even for him. He's since decamped to Substack with all the other cranks (ahem). In a book published a full decade before Trump arrived on the political scene, Dreher coined the term “crunchy conservative” to describe a new breed of conservative who embraced ideas that had traditionally been associated with the left-of-center, including environmental conservation, organic gardening, homeschooling, alternative medicine, yoga, neo-Luddism (yes I'm aware of the misapplication of that term), natural building, alternative diets, homesteading, and a bucolic, back-to-the land existence. This certainly seems to apply to Greer as well as Kingsnorth, and many others.

Dreher's “crunchy cons” embrace traditionalist faiths like Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy and revere intellectuals like Edmund Burke, G.K. Chesterton, and Russell Kirk. In the book, Dreher lamented that such people were politically homeless, disgusted with the permissive social attitudes and big government programs of the Democrats, but also dismayed by the Republicans’ lionization of wealth and big business over community and their hostility to environmental stewardship. But that all changed after 2016, when this group became a part of Trump’s MAGA Movement. Dreher endorsed Trump for president in 2020 and 2024. More recently, Dreher has called on conservative Christians to secede from mainstream society because of gay marriage and secularism and form their own parallel counterculture, something he calls the “Benedict Option.”

Dreher provides a philosophical connection between Kingsnorth and JD Vance, Trump's running mate and heir apparent. Like Kingsnorth, Vance became an enthusiastic convert to traditional Christianity, in his case Roman Catholicism. Vance's Catholicism has been described as the “radical traditionalist” variety, aka “rad trad.” In a closed-door speech at a Catholic conference in 2021, Vance declared, “I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society.” Kingsnorth would certainly agree.

These religious Romantics see these archaic spiritual traditions as repositories of ancient wisdom as well as tools to rally the faithful to beat back the rising tide of secularism on one hand and radical Islam on the other (as former atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali noted of her recent conversion to Catholicism). Rad trads reject Vatican Two and prefer the Latin Mass, and they don't like the lax attitude the current Pope has taken toward social issues. Many of these converts advocate a “fire-and-brimstone” approach to religion for hip, younger crowds disillusioned with modern life—dubbed the “theo bros.” Dreher has long been a fan of Kingnorth's writing and was present for Vance's baptism into the Catholic faith. He wrote an article about it here.

Dreher recently hosted a sit-down conversation with Kingsnorth in Birmingham, Alabama (a city with a rather checkered history) to discuss Kingsnorth’s latest book. Kingsnorth is currently on a North American tour where he will give the Erasmus lecture in New York City (jackets are required for gentlemen and equivalent dress for women. Jeans and sneakers are not permitted—despite Kingsnorth wearing jeans and trainers in his profile picture).

Interestingly, all of these writers share a love of an obscure German intellectual who played a formative role in the development of European fascism between the wars named Oswald Spengler. Greer has cited Spengler's magnum opus, The Decline of the West, as the foundational text of his entire philosophy, and posters to his Ecosophia site regularly use obscure, insider jargon like “faustian” when discussing political affairs. But Spengler has also caught the attention of Kingsnorth, as Dreher wrote about using a rather—interesting—turn of phrase: Springtime for Spengler (winter for Marx and Engels?).

Spengler is one of a host of formerly obscure, right-wing European intellectuals who have been revived by today's Neo-fascist counterculture. The book Key Thinkers of the Radical Right lists Spengler alongside the Italian “ultra-fascist” philosopher baron Julius Evola, Ernst Jünger, and Carl Schmitt. Alfred Rosenberg's “The Myth of the Twentieth Century” could probably listed here too, along with the writings of Madison Grant and Houston Stuart Chamberlain, as well as Hitler's own tome (which “Northwinds Grandma” is currently working her way through). Another is a French mystic called René Guénon whom we'll be talking about in a bit.

Defenders of Spengler point out that he spurned the Nazi Party once they came to power, despite repeated entreaties for him to join. But this was less to do with philosophical differences than his disappointment that the reality did not match up to the intellectual abstractions in his head, along with their virulent antisemitism. But the reality is, Spengler's writings played a key role in the development of the Fascist thought, with its cyclical theories of history, it’s cultural pessimism, it’s predictions of inevitable decline, it’s hostility to democracy, and its desire for a strongman to arise and wield unchecked power to purge the society of subversive elements.

Spengler believed societies were exactly the same as biological organisms and that they passed through the same stages of life: “Every Culture passes through the age-phases of the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age.” Spengler hoped for a “Caesar-like” figure who could awaken Europe's flagging vital force, sort of like cultural Viagra. And although he rejected the “crude” antisemitism of Hitler, his writings had an effect nevertheless. Spengler claimed that Jews were consumed by “money thinking” (Gelddenken) and that they were “incapable of adapting to Western culture,” and represented “a foreign body in Europe.” Oswald Mosley cited The Decline of the West as the reason he converted to Fascism. Spengler died in 1936, before the outbreak of the War and the horrors of the concentration camps became widely known.

Commenting on Kingsnorth's conversion to Orthodoxy, Greer references Spengler's writings:

A fair number of my readers also follow the writings of the English writer Paul Kingsnorth, who writes from time to time (as of course I also do) on the future of industrial society...His conversion came as no great surprise either. What Oswald Spengler calls the Second Religiosity, the flight of the cultured classes back to traditional religion once yet another Age of Reason has ended in moral and intellectual bankruptcy, is a standard feature in the historical trajectory of every civilization. We’ve reached that point now, and Kingsnorth is part of the first major wave of dissident intellectuals following that time-honored path.

We're not trying to adjudicate or belittle these beliefs here, nor pass judgement. Instead, what we're trying to understand is why people who hold these views have gravitated to Neo-fascism, which I've described in my previous posts. What unites occultists with crunchy cons, rad trads, theo bros, Neo-luddites, back-to-the-landers and other ultraconservative religious types? Why do all them support Donald Trump? Moreover, why do people who claim to worship nature support a candidate who promises to “drill, baby drill and frack, baby, frack,” and claimed that windmills cause cancer and kill whales? Who promises to roll back environmental protections “on day one” and withdraw from the Paris accords? Who would add 4 billion metric tons of Co2 to the atmosphere by 2030? Why do people obsessed with the supposed “moral decline” of the West support a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein, serial rapist, and twice-impeached convinced felon who is currently facing dozens of legal battles and appears to be a personification of the Seven Deadly Sins made flesh?

Perhaps some history is in order.

4.

In fact, occultism was an ideological breeding ground for the German far-right since before the First World War. Charismatic gurus like Helena Blavatsky wrote about different “root races” and how each civilization had a unique “soul,” something Spengler would have certainly agreed with. There was a huge occult revival in the German-speaking countries from 1890 to 1910. Enthusiasts of magic and the occult flocked to secret lodges to study Ariosophy—the primordial Aryan wisdom, or embraced the spiritual teachings of people like Rudolf Steiner and G. I. Gurdjieff. Most important of these lodges was the Thule Society, which played a key role in the development of National Socialism. Occult ideas heavily influenced many of the more mystically-inclined fascists such as Heinrich Himmler, Dietrich Eckhart and Rudolf Hess². This is way too big of a topic to go into here, but I have written about this stuff before in my series of posts about my abandoned novel.

Alongside this occult revival unfolded a Romantic back-to-the-land movement which rejected the evils of modernity and embraced nature. Cities were portrayed as dens of filth and depravity where races mixed and “rootless cosmopolitans” served the interests of (mainly Jewish) finance capital. Cultural conservatives back then saw the countryside—depicted as full of sturdy Aryan yeomen, dirndl-clad tradwives, and apple-cheeked, cherubic kinder—as the ideal contrast to decadent cities filled with Jews, gypsies, bankers, homosexuals and foreigners. The rural peasants were the true German Volk, and the embodiment of the “soul” of the nation.

One of these movements was the Wandervogel, which was a part of the broader German Youth Movement. One scholar describes the German Youth Movement as, “a hodge-podge of countercultural elements, blending neo-Romanticism, Eastern philosophies, nature mysticism, hostility to reason, and a strong communal impulse in a confused but no less ardent search for authentic, non-alienated social relations.” In other words, not too dissimilar to Dreher's crunchy cons or Greer’s druids.

While it seemed to take people by surprise that yogis, mystics, shamans, and other assorted hippies flocked to MAGA, it really shouldn't. Many of the same kinds of people were irresistibly drawn to the Nazi Party’s Romantic, anti-rationalist, anti-modern world view and became its most fervent supporters, with the German Youth movement eventually transforming into the Hitler Youth.

One finds the lebensreform or Life Reform movement, which rejected urban, industrial civilization and sought a more natural and pure existence through vegetarianism, nudism, wild swimming, allotments, nature-worship, sandal-wearing, alternative medicine, health food stores and other pre-hippy innovations (the influence on Californian culture is direct — Germans from this movement emigrated to California in the 30s and 40s and spread the gospel of natural living).

Out of the lebensreform milieu grew the Wandervogel (‘wandering free spirits) movement, a in which thousands of young Germans joined together to ramble through the countryside, singing German folk songs. And the lebensreform movement also inspired radical ideas around healthy sex and reproduction — free love, liberated homosexuality, sexual hygiene and eugenics.

None of this is so very different from the spiritual revivals of other western countries during the same period. But the German occulture overlapped with the nationalistic and racist Volkisch movement, and spiritual ideas often took on a markedly nationalistic, far-right, racist tone. The Wandervogel movement, for example, has been described by historian Peter Staudenmaier as ‘right-wing hippies’ — many of its members later joined the Hitler Youth, and their favourite artist, the Theosophist Fidus, also joined the Nazi party (six of his drawings are shown below, the last is for a conference on eugenics).

Nazi spiritual eugenics (I): the German occulture (Philosophy for Life)

These same Romantic and anti-rationalist sentiments attracted mystics and dreamers to the original fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s which promised cultural renewal in face of perceived decadence and decline. Like today, there was a widespread feeling that modernity had somehow failed and what was needed was a return to the distant past—in other words reactionary politics. People fled the cities and joined communes or sought out remote cabins in the woods and mountains of Europe to live closer to nature. There was a strong desire to withdraw from mainstream society, similar to Dreher’s “Benedict Option” which is itself based on the Bruderhof Communities of interwar Germany.

Politicians who claimed the existing order was rotten to the core and needed to be torn out root-and-branch attracted people to radical movements like fascism and communism. Populists styled themselves as outsiders who would “shake up” the system which appealed to both anti-rationalists and contrarians. These populist movements argued that liberal democracy had failed and that it needed to be swept away for change to occur. This promise of cultural renewal caused people to overlook many of the unsavory aspects of these political movements, including their authoritarian tendencies and virulent racism. After all, they reasoned, someone needed to “restore order” no matter what it took.

While often seen as obsessed with high-technology, speed and power, the Nazis also celebrated nature with many of the same sentiments seen in today's druid mystics, crunchy cons, and radical traditionalists. Historian Dr. Peter Staudenmaier writes:

In many varieties of the National Socialist world view ecological themes were linked with traditional agrarian romanticism and hostility to urban civilization, all revolving around the idea of rootedness in nature. This conceptual constellation, especially the search for a lost connection to nature, was most pronounced among the neo-pagan elements in the Nazi leadership, above all Heinrich Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg, and Walther Darré. Rosenberg wrote in his colossal The Myth of the 20th Century: “Today we see the steady stream from the countryside to the city, deadly for the Volk, The cities swell ever larger, unnerving the Volk and destroying the threads which bind humanity to nature; they attract adventurers and profiteers of all colors, thereby fostering racial chaos.”

Such musings, it must be stressed, were not mere rhetoric; they reflected firmly held beliefs and, indeed, practices at the very top of the Nazi hierarchy which are today conventionally associated with ecological attitudes. Hitler and Himmler were both strict vegetarians and animal lovers, attracted to nature mysticism and homeopathic cures, and staunchly opposed to vivisection and cruelty to animals. Himmler even established experimental organic farms to grow herbs for SS medicinal purposes. And Hitler, at times, could sound like a veritable Green utopian, discussing authoritatively and in detail various renewable energy sources (including environmentally appropriate hydropower and producing natural gas from sludge) as alternatives to coal, and declaring “water, winds and tides” as the energy of the future.

Today, just like back then, many of today's leading Neo-fascist thinkers embrace a mystical world view. This thinking is known as Traditionalism, and was developed by an obscure French mystic by the name of René Guénon. Guénon argued that there was a core perennial philosophy behind all the world's religious traditions, and he sought it out himself by converting to Islam, which he saw as more “pure” than other religions. A few years back, a music professor named Benjamin Teitelbaum who was studying the Swedish heavy metal music scene (!!) noticed that some of these eccentric beliefs were becoming very popular among the Swedish far right. This led him to go down a rather strange rabbit hole…

5.

The book he wrote, titled The War for Eternity, isn't nearly as well-known as it should be. Because Teitelbaum isn't a conventional journalist he was able to gain unprecedented access to a variety of far-right and Neo-fascist thinkers, most notably Steve Bannon who serves an anchor point for the text.

Like any belief system, Traditionalism is a big tent with diverse ideas but it has some core tenets. Traditionalists believe in a cyclical world view where in civilizations cycle through definite ages: a gold, a silver and a dark age, with modern society being a dark age. It is profoundly anti-modern and anti-rational. It is mystical, romantic, and fatalistic, seeing cultures as possessing their own unique “soul.” It preaches a rigid, hierarchical social order and strict gender roles. And it is decidedly apocalyptic.

“Traditionalism declares modern society meaningless on the grounds that our states and communities are increasingly based only on economics or bureaucratic formality rather than culture and spirit,” [Teitelbaum] writes. “The only bit of improvement for human society comes when the dark age explodes into chaos and the cycle restarts itself at the beginning of the golden age.”

Through exclusive interviews in esoteric salons and secret meetings with far-right thinkers from rural Virginia to Budapest, Teitelbaum makes the case that this obscure worldview is having a notable impact on global politics today...

Inside Steve Bannon’s ‘War for Eternity’ (University of Colorado)

Alongside Bannon, Teitelbaum profiles Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian ultranationalist philosopher known as “Putin's Brain.” Dugin's “Foundations of Geopolitics” is required reading in the Russian military and advocates, among other things, a cleavage of Britain from the European continent, stoking racial and social divisions in the United States, and the elimination of Ukraine. To underscore the point, in his younger years Dugin wrote under the pen name Hans Sievers—a direct reference to the head of the Nazi ancestral research division (Ahnenerbe) which carried out occult research and missions such as the search for the Holy Grail and the origins of the Aryan race. Dugin's philosophy is known as “Eurasianism” and incorporates a lot of mystical ideas similar to Spengler and the Traditionalists. Eurasianism is too complex to go into here, but the core thesis is one of a messianic national mission and a rejection of democracy, freedom and human rights—quite similar to the ideas of the Third Reich and other twentieth-century fascist powers.

Kingsnorth echoes Traditionalism—and Dugin—when he writes:

“Nature, though, abhors a vacuum. A void will in the end be filled. All cultures must have a set of spiritual beliefs and practices undergirding them if they are to survive. This, in fact, is what a culture is at root: a cult. Social norms, architectural styles, family arrangements, legal systems, moral frameworks, even the shape and nature of nations and states - these are by-products of the religious system they grow out of, which is itself a product of religious experience. Culture is downstream from faith. Faith is downstream from mysticism.”

Teitelbaum’s book was published in 2020 before JD Vance launched his political career (with the generous backing of Peter Thiel). But Vance’s rhetoric seems to be very much in line with Traditionalist thought, so much so that anyone familiar with its ideas or who has read The War for Eternity would certainly recognize these sentiments:

…after paying tribute to his wife, Usha—the child of immigrants from India—and their three biracial kids, Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”

To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”

Many of these authors see Russia (and, to a lesser extent, Hungary) as their ideal model society, the antithesis of the “woke” West. They depict Russia as safe, prosperous, stable, and secure, where strong leaders embrace Orthodox Christian values—a veritable utopia for white male patriarchs. Russian leaders are portrayed as diligent and hypercompetent, similar to how fascist leaders were portrayed in sympathetic publications in the 1920s: “They made the trains run on time!” Tucker Carlson has extolled the virtues of Hungary and Russia on his broadcasts, including famously visiting a Russian supermarket in an interesting inversion of Cold War propaganda. Putin is seen as a “manly” father figure and his citizens like his children—pay no attention to the oligarchs falling out of windows or the critics of the regime sent to Siberian prison camps.

This view leads these writers to support Russia politically. Greer, for example, is an ardent supporter of Russia’s ethnic cleansing in Ukraine and touts the Kremlin line to his readers—that the invasion is a defensive “proxy war” against NATO aggression and expansionism. The Ukrainian people themselves have no agency whatsoever—they are merely “puppets” of Western imperialism and their government the illegitimate result of a Western coup expressly designed to “weaken” Russia by sinister Western elites. Greer's mystical, Spenglerian world view comports well with Dugin's Eurasianism, and it is surely a coincidence that the two bearded mystics look like twins separated at birth. MAGA, of course, idolizes Putin and opposes support for Ukraine's defense.

6.

And herein lies the common denominator. All of these writers embrace a mystical, magical world view wherein we live in an enchanted universe where unseen forces battle for control over our souls—whether extra-dimensional demons and spirits in Greer's druidry or God and Satan in Kingsnorth's eschatology (or the rad trad view of JD Vance). What all these authors share is cultural pessimism, a pervasive sense of decline, a puritanical obsession with “decadence,” a disdain for rationality, and a hostility to modern life. While not necessarily fascist by themselves, these ideas make one predisposed to modern Neo-fascism, as obsession with humiliation and decline, anti-modernity, Romanticism and palingenetic ultranationalism are all core aspects of historical fascist movements as we’ve seen previously.

This also leads to a hyperconservative world view. Men and women must reclaim their traditional gender roles—men as hardened warriors battling it out in the arena of war and commerce; women as demure, supportive mothers and housewives. Extreme natalist beliefs are shared by today's Neo-fascists and their historical counterparts alike. Modern art and architecture are “degenerate” and we must return to classical forms. The West is under constant assault from hostile forces—from materialists, Marxists, and immigrants within, and Islamists and Oriental barbarians from without. These ideas are a long way from the traditional mundane concerns with tax rates, wages, and trade policy that used to be the remit of political conservatism in the United States. Clearly there’s nothing “conservative” about these views in the traditional sense of that term—rather, they seem like the radicals.

During the interwar years in the upper-class salons of Europe the fashionable topics were impending collapse of European society and eugenics, an eerie parallel with the present day where hip, Manhattan nepo babies and Silicon Valley venture capitalists and techbros discuss race realism and the coming American civil war in today's nightclubs and salons (and podcasts). There wasn’t the same anti-immigration hysteria back then, as the flow of migrants in those days was out of Europe to places like the New World and Australia; but the question of what to do with “inferior” brown races is pretty much the same.

It’s not hard to see the parallels. Multiculturalism takes the place of “race mixing” in today’s discourse. Today’s foreign entity “polluting the bloodstream” of society is non-white immigrants rather than Jews (homosexuals are perennial targets). In place of Social Darwinism we have “human biodiversity” and “race realism.” In place of vegetarianism, folk remedies, and biodynamic agriculture we have seed oils, ball tanning and organic gardening. In place of rootless cosmopolitans and finance capital, we have the “globalists” of Alex Jones. Instead of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, we have “The New World Order” and Agenda 21. Instead of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle, we have JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which has become something of a secular Bible for the far-right around the world. Instead of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, and Germany representing the ideal society; we have Foundations of Geopolitics, Vladimir Putin, and Russia.

If, like these authors, you believe that unseen forces control humanity’s destiny, it’s easy to see how this habit of thought drifts into populism where everything that’s wrong with society can be blamed on mysterious, shadowy “elites” who secretly control everything. You need not actually question capitalism or interrogate its perverse incentives, even as the richest person on the planet claims that he, too, is battling against these same so-called “elites.” It's the politics of the stupid—it is anti-politics. Such attitudes are guaranteed not to improve the lives of the “working classes” that Greer and Kingsnorth supposedly care so much about. Rather than a desire to genuinely improve people’s lives, Greer and Kingsnorth’s politics are driven by grievance, bitterness, and resentment against people who’ve made different choices and a desire to impose their own morality on the rest of society “for their own good.”

So this, then, is one current of Neo-fascism—reactionary, anti-modern, anti-rational, populist, mystical, hierarchical, resentful, bitter, angry, obsessed with decline and humiliation—all the hallmarks of the original fascism and of Neo fascism, and it’s why these sorts of people have gravitated to the MAGA movement and Donald Trump, despite him being diametrically opposed to most of the things they claim to believe in.

Now, this shouldn't require saying, but I don't think anyone critical of modern society is a Neo-fascist, especially since I’m one of them! Anyone who reads me knows that I share many of the same concerns about the loneliness and alienation of modern life, the industrial food supply, and increasing rich people’s portfolios as the sole purpose of society. Nor do I think that anyone who reads Spengler or has conservative social values is, by definition, a fascist, to be clear. I’m talking about something very specific.

In fact, the reason I cited the writers I listed above is because I learn a lot from their writings, even if I find some of their political views abhorrent and I don't share their fundamentalist religious beliefs. I read them because I don’t want to shut myself in an intellectual echo chamber as these writers have apparently done, where they never have to defend their beliefs and only talk with friendly audiences. I’ve also included plenty of links to their writings so you can read them for yourselves instead of just hearing my interpretation. I guess my concerns about these topics have pushed me in a more socialist, anti-capitalist direction, unlike these authors.

However, my reading of history must be profoundly different than theirs, since I see Neo-fascism a dire existential threat to American democracy, if not the very survival of humanity itself, rather than something that should be encouraged, trivialized, or rationalized away. We’ve seen how that film ends.

I think a lot of these people are going to be sorely disappointed seeing Trump as a savior for reasons we'll talk about next time. It turns out that some of Trump’s other supporters believe the exact opposite than what they believe, and those supporters are far more wealthy, influential, and powerful. Next time we'll take a look at some of the other intellectual facets of Twenty-first century Neo-fascism, specifically Effective Accelerationism and Neo-Reaction.

1. The "Professional Managerial Class"—a term coined by the late leftist sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich. The PMC has become an all purpose stand-in for the "elites" and are the cause of everything wrong with American society today in populist discourse, sort of like the "Deep State."

2. The connections between the far-right and occultism never went away. The Reichsburger movement, which tried to overthrow the German state in 2022 and reinstate the monarchy, had a "militant" and "esoteric" wing, which counted astrologers and alternative healers as members. In fact, the coup attempt was delayed because of bad star signs (or something), giving German authorities time to bust the plot. Some have argued that the timing of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union had as much to do with astrology as the amount of daylight.

Among those on trial in Munich are Hildegard Leiding, 60, a member of the rightwing AfD party and an astrologer, who was allegedly destined to become the group’s “trans-communications minister”.

Together with a welder from the Bavarian rocker scene, Leiding was said to have used “spiritual criteria” to pick out appropriate candidates for the future government, including a celebrity cook from Austria, tasked with feeding the new regime a healthy diet, and a practising GP, described by former patients as “established and respected” in her community.

The woman, who is said to have become radicalised during the pandemic and specialised in a method of predicting the future through reading eggs, known as oomancy, was expected to become the health minister. She had donated €47,000 of her own money to the plot, most of which went towards arms training, prosecutors say.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/18/trial-begins-of-eight-accused-of-plotting-to-overthrow-german-state