Since at least around 2012, a good part of the youth in America and Western Europe has been in a state of revolt. Most people only became aware of this revolt with the ascent of Donald Trump; many Americans are probably still unaware of the depth of the problem. Since the end of 2016, various factions of the elite have been scrambling to find a response.
This response has consisted of trying to label this phenomenon of revolt the “alt-right” and designating as its leaders a few strange individuals, who had previously been known but otherwise made no impression on anyone before 2015. Almost all the youth involved have remained anonymous to this day, which frightens everyone far more than anything else. To de-anonymize is also to isolate and contain. At the same time, members of the intelligence community who came into the open, together with allies among politicians and establishment pundits both left and right, have pursued a parallel tactic of calling the revolt Russian subversion. They are now going so far as to call American teenagers and college-aged men “Russian bots,” in a desperate attempt to censor online and other forms of expression.
One humorous feature of the 2016 campaign was to watch anonymous teenagers socialized and educated on boards like 4chan routinely humiliate journalists on Twitter and other social media. “Intellectual authorities” on both the Left and Right experienced what can only be described as nervous breakdowns at seeing their understanding of the world fall apart and their fundamental assumptions about politics and human nature questioned for what was likely the first time in their lives. Many were exposed as what they are, that is, the type of people who either think that Ta-Nehisi Coates is a great intellect, or the types who have to pretend they think so.
This is unsaid now, but this was one of the chief causes of the Russia hysteria. People like Rick Wilson, among many others, who never really recovered from this assault on their egos, concluded that these could by no means have been Americans: “AnimePepe who asked what I have conserved as a conservative, and who knows all this history and about all these recent genetic studies, this is un-American. This has to be Russian intel.”
Indirectly, this is also how this very enterprising and impish part of the American youth contributed to Trump’s victory in a small way. By driving the solipsistic journalist class mad with teasing, Hillary Clinton was led into giving the disastrous “alt-right” speech (very likely written for her by Rick Wilson, Evan McMullin, or someone with connections to the “conservative” Straussian school). The effect of this speech on people who didn’t know about what was happening on Twitter—the vast majority of Americans—was to make Hillary look completely insane. She sounded like she was talking about them, about Americans at large, and was connecting them with this made-up “alt-right,” a Putinist global conspiracy, and cartoon frogs. It contributed much to the perception that she was, like much of the Left, unhinged and contemptuous of vast swathes of America.
What then is the “alt-right”? The label itself certainly points to something real, but it is a distortion, and in many ways a willful distortion. It’s an attempt—on the part of the media, of the media’s “sources,” of various opportunists—to re-brand the collapse of faith in authorities, to contain an incipient youth revolt in the West and call it by another name. For this reason, all attempts to “understand the alt-right” are sure to fail: thinkpieces approach this like a movement to be analyzed, with its ideology, its leaders, its various organizations. But none of this exists. Only the underlying causes that led to this collapse of faith in the establishment do.
Matthew Rose’s review of the intellectual sources of the “alt-right” in First Things is interesting and in some ways is the most generous take yet on this phenomenon, but is flawed for these same reasons. He engages Oswald Spengler, Evola, and Benoist, but even were he able to definitively prove them wrong in a couple of pages, it would mean nothing. None of these thinkers—especially not Evola or a nonentity like Benoist—have anything to do with the revolt against liberal authorities in our time. Nor are the youth who constitute this revolt anti-Christian, as he claims they are. The public figures he discusses have nothing to do with what, again, remains a largely anonymous revolt. Rose is certainly right that the “alt-right” is not stupid, and is remarkably well-read, but he doesn’t understand why this is so or who these people really are.
Regarding Christianity, most people on the “alt-right” are distinguished from the general population and from the mainstream of American conservatism precisely because they are religious, or rather, traditionalist. Matthew Rose might be acquainted with Twitter accounts like @NoTrueScotist (Tradical). These are not an exception, and are far more representative of the right-wing movement arising now in Western nations than anyone Rose mentions in the article.
Take France as an example. The “alt-right” uprising in France precedes that in the United States, and began in 2013 with protests against the recently passed gay marriage law, and against mass immigration. Roughly 2% of France still believes in the monarchy—not a symbolic or constitutional monarchy, but the King in Versailles with the Church ruling France together with the army. A much larger percentage wouldn’t go so far but comes close. They reject the French Revolution, and they reject a Catholic Church that betrayed the monarchy and itself—not to speak of what they think about Vatican II. But these are devout Catholics, many of who belong to the Society of Saint Pius X. Many come from France’s oldest families, including those who founded the French presence in the Antilles and other colonies. Many of these youth form the backbone of organizations like Génération Identitaire in France, a group Matthew Rose would no doubt label “alt-right.” Their families have long-standing connections with Action Française, and more recently with Philippe de Villiers’ Mouvement Pour la France. It is an act of arrogance or of ignorance to claim that such people are less devout because they don’t embrace Catholicism in the same way Rose does.
Although it’s only mentioned as an aside in his article, central to Rose’s argument is the tired cliché, so beloved of polite conservatives and tamed traditionalists, that “racism is modern.” Rose makes this claim because he wants to argue that “racist” and “modern” thinkers like Spengler are the inspiration for the “alt-right.” Rose would like to paint the “alt-right” as a specifically identitarian or racist “movement” that is anti-Christian because it is racist. Rose’s article is very similar to many other recent polemics. All such polemics miss the critical aspect of the new thinking. They can’t respond to the science—of which they are largely ignorant—and don’t want to address the philosophical criticism, so they focus instead on the identitarian aspects that are the weakest part and the easiest to attack. Nevertheless, it’s worth addressing this cliché, however briefly.
The idea that “racism is modern” or “un-Christian” would be news to the devout Catholic Spaniards who spread Rose’s faith across the world and who came up with the concepts of limpieza de sangre, or with the casta system in the colonies and its myriad classifications like mestizo, castizo, zambo, and even more exotic, stratified in a formal racial hierarchy. It would be news to those very unmodern men who made the Law of Manu in India. The truth is what common sense would expect it to be: race is one of the oldest and most robust ways that mankind has had to distinguish different groups, and has always been central to the definition of peoplehood.
Rose gives the example of ancient Greece as the foundation not of racism but of a healthy nationalism, and points to the word ethnos; but as the other word genos implies, ideas of race existed even then. Plato’s republic was an idealized eugenic state modeled on the real-life eugenic state of Sparta, which continued a Dorian tradition of racial eugenics and concern with heredity explicitly promoted in the writings of poets like Pindar and Theognis. The fact that ancient peoples didn’t divide races in the same way we do is not surprising: they didn’t have much contact with either blacks or Asians, let alone Australian aborigines. But the claim that race is a recent invention and therefore can be looked down on by a Gentleman of Tradition is false. It’s a cop-out by weak conservatives who seek merely a kind of status in distinguishing themselves from “vulgar” racists. It’s a pose and affectation largely for display in front of the Left. In his Politics, Aristotle very clearly says that difference of race is a cause of faction in states, and one of the surest causes of their destruction; the fact that he believed even the different Greek lineages were bound to hate and fight each other does not support the claim, as Rose and other “traditionalists” imply, that they would have gotten along just fine with a Saxon, a Yoruba, or a Mapuche.
What Rose is definitely right about is that the “alt-right”—this meaning the broader rightist awakening, and not people who now go by that brand—is intelligent and well-read. But, again, this has a significance far beyond Spengler, Evola, or any one particular writer. Young men in America and parts of Europe, most of them indeed white but some Asian and others as well, are in a state of revolt against the academic and intellectual establishment that they know has cheated them of a genuine education and has also lied to them their entire lives. They are hungry for books—far more varied than Rose wants to admit—and for knowledge in general. They sense that reading and culture themselves are acts of dissidence against a sclerotic ruling class that has replaced education with propaganda.
Classical music is said now to be “white supremacist.” Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, given a platform far beyond what her intellect on its own could ever warrant, spreads the claim that Greek and classical antiquity as such is “white supremacist” or fascist. People are warned that young men who listen to classical music are possible thought-criminals. People like Ta-Nehisi Coates, who boasts of never having read Augustine, are promoted by “literary elites,” who seem to celebrate prideful ignorance. Professors at the United States Naval War College write thinkpieces about the historicity of Wakanda. High school teachers have, it appears, entire year-long classes on the foundations of modern secular religion like the Holocaust and the Underground Railroad, but are unable to place continents on a map. Is it any wonder why young men, hectored and aggressively indoctrinated in high schools, have turned to learning and great books as an act of rebellion? One doesn’t need to read Spengler today: listening to Brahms and reading Stendhal is enough to make one a “white supremacist.”
Some of these youth, it must be repeated, are devout Catholics, and love the books of Carl Schmitt, Joseph de Maistre, and other reactionaries. One must wonder why Rose doesn’t deal with their arguments or views, or even acknowledge their existence. I’d say Schmitt is far more of an “influence” on the movement he talks about than Spengler is. I can’t imagine why Rose or Adrian Vermeule can’t even admit such youth exist.
If rebellious youth are sometimes turning to scary writers like Schmitt, Spengler, Nietzsche, Maistre, Mishima, Houellebecq, and others, this is because these have been banished (or in the case of some, like Nietzsche, edited) out of the curriculum, or vilified when they are mentioned. It’s the same reason that the quasi-religious denial of sexual and racial differences has made such knowledge interesting and irresistible to the young, especially as genetic science has made such great advances lately. But they also read and quote Locke, Hume, and others who are claimed as forefathers by liberals. It’s just that, if one were to consult these thinkers on their opinions about the differences between peoples, the sexes, and yes, races, one would have to classify them all as “alt-right.” The tradition of American political thought from Lincoln to Truman is also “alt-right” when it comes to the question of race and nationality. (Do conservatives like Rose have any idea what Teddy Roosevelt, to take just one example, said about the relationship between American democracy and the white race?)
What is the “altright” then? It is, again, an incipient revolt, a reaction to a decrepit and senile ruling class and the devastation it is causing. This class preserves its status and privileges with a thorough-going repression of speech and thought when it comes to the discussion of natural differences—not just racial, but most especially sexual. It is actually jealous of any natural excellences in general. It’s not just casually egalitarian: it promotes with great force the misshapen, freakish and the ugly because it sells itself as their liberator. The intellectual foundation of the revolt against this worldwide process of managed decivilization isn’t therefore identitarianism as such, but a thoroughgoing criticism and satire, scientific and philosophical, of every modern idol. Chateau Heartiste, and similar anonymous blogs, have led more young men, of all races, to rebellion than anyone Rose mentions in the article.
Of what does this rebellion consist? The real revolt is an intellectual and spiritual revolt against the repression of distinction—“cut down the tall trees” is the motto of our elite as of every tyrant in history. Rose dismisses Nietzsche, but without giving any reasons, or giving any evidence that he read him. Nietzsche helps us understand the resentment that drives much of the modern so-called elite’s “globalism.” The origin of the modern Left’s as well as the neoconservatives’ vindictiveness in a feeling of resentment against a civilization they sense to be superior, but which they would like to appropriate or redefine, at times to exploit, at times to replace, whose very existence and history humiliates them, is central to understanding our condition and why the “alt-right” exists. The resentment against health and every form of natural excellence or distinction, together with the assault on Christianity, has gone a great way to forcing this most vital part of the youth into a virtuous reaction: this recently-spread meme is, in fact, the truth, or not far from it.
Well-meaning intellectuals, some on the Left, some on the Right, are trying to understand what’s going on, and can’t be blamed for trying to grasp this “movement” of the “alt-right.” Those in the senile elite who came up with the construct in the first place are less innocent. To try to redefine or contain this revolt as a “movement” is useless. It is like shooting a bullet at a hill, or trying to fix a BandAid to a bleeding gash. You can’t redefine the collapse of your own credibility, herd it into a “movement,” and try to control it. The “alt-right” is just a placeholder label for a feeling that haunts the senile elite, Right and Left: “you have lost the youth.”