The Telos Press Podcast: Courtney Hodrick on Neoreaction, the Alt-Right, and Carl Schmitt

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Courtney Hodrick about her article “From Neoreaction to Alt-Right: A Schmittian Perspective,” from Telos 198 (Spring 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss Carl Schmitt’s understanding of the relationship between liberalism and democracy, and how the separation of the two from each other leads to two versions of extreme right thinking; the general outlines of Mencius Moldbug’s rejection of politics in favor of markets and the relationship between this approach and Schmitt’s understanding of politics as based in the friend/enemy distinction; why Moldbug is an example of what Schmitt defines as liberal; how Moldbug’s ideas contrast with those of Richard Spencer and the extent to which Spencer is a Schmittian; and Curtis Yarvin’s recent shift away from his previous rejections of nationalism and whether this shift represents a merging of neoreaction with alt-right populism. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 198 are available for purchase in our online store.

From Telos 198 (Spring 2022):

From Neoreaction to Alt-Right: A Schmittian Perspective

Courtney Hodrick

Introduction

In 2009, libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”^[1] Thiel’s statement challenged the basic premise of much of Western politics: the liberal democratic consensus that treats economic freedom and political democracy as two guiding stars to be pursued in tandem.^[2] In the decade since, the rise in conservative populist movements and leaders from Brexit to Bolsonaro, and particularly the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, led many scholars to conclude that the liberal democratic consensus had collapsed—or was never really a consensus to begin with.^[3] The question then becomes: what will replace liberal democracy?

The German political thinker and jurist Carl Schmitt offers an important framing of this question. Schmitt posited a dichotomy between liberalism and democracy that still resonates throughout the political spectrum. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Schmitt argues that liberal democracy is torn between two incompatible legitimating mechanisms. “The crisis of parliamentarianism . . . rests on the fact that democracy and liberalism could be allied to each other for a time . . . but as soon as it achieves power, liberal democracy must decide between its elements,” he writes.^[4] While democracy is driven by homogeneity of opinion, liberal parliamentarianism asserts that truth is found through disagreement and debate. Schmitt refers to democratic legitimacy as the “identity of governed and governing.”^[5] Liberalism, by contrast, holds in Schmitt’s view a single metaphysical grounding: “that the truth can be found through an unrestrained clash of opinion and that competition will produce harmony.”^[5] Although the two forces have existed in an uneasy suspension when allied against common foes such as traditional monarchy, Schmitt warns that such a political system cannot sustain itself inevitably. Eventually, one form of legitimacy must prevail over the other.

Schmitt’s work is as essential to this political moment as it is controversial. His critiques of Weimar parliamentarianism proved tragically prescient with the rise of the Nazi Party, which he joined shortly thereafter. Recent decades of scholarship have illuminated the complexities of his relationship with Nazism, most notably the work of Joseph Bendersky. Bendersky’s argument that Schmitt chose to collaborate with the Nazi regime merely for personal advancement, despite serious philosophical misgivings, forced a paradigm shift in Schmitt scholarship.^[7] Bendersky’s more recent work, focused on Schmitt’s diaries, has reinforced the image of Schmitt as a reluctant collaborator even as it has further complicated debates about the extent and nature of Schmitt’s antisemitism.^[8] Today, Schmitt remains not only one of the most controversial figures in German intellectual history but also one of the most influential. His concepts resonate across the political spectrum, and his thought has had as much influence on the left as on the right. With the center fracturing and the liberal democratic compromise challenged from every direction, Schmitt’s dichotomy between liberalism and democracy is a crucial tool for scholars hoping to analyze today’s politics.

This paper uses Schmitt as the key to understanding two extreme, dangerous attempts to propose an alternative to liberal democracy—neoreaction and the alt-right. Both are right-wing movements that emerged online, disseminating their ideas through blog posts, YouTube videos, and image memes rather than seeking power through traditional electoral channels. Neoreaction is almost exclusively the pet project of programmer Curtis Yarvin, who began blogging pseudonymously in 2007 under the name Mencius Moldbug and whose most striking stance is his full-throated rejection of democracy.^[9] With the exception of Thiel, who has invested in Yarvin’s software work, the movement has no famous sympathizers and has achieved little of political consequence. The alt-right, on the other hand, is an explicitly racist form of right-wing populism that, regardless of its level of concrete influence, has come to be viewed as symbolic of an ascendant global right-wing populism.^[10]

Scholars have treated neoreaction as merely a precursor to the alt-right.^[11] In particular, Angela Nagle, whose book Kill All Normies is the most detailed explication of radical online subcultures, focuses entirely on the aesthetic shift from neoreaction to the alt-right. “What we call the alt-right today could never have had any connection to the mainstream and to a new generation of young people if it only came in the form of lengthy treatises on obscure blogs,” she writes, disregarding any changes in content.^[12] Certainly, there are ideological and aesthetic similarities between the two movements. Both revel in breaking cultural taboos around race and gender and position themselves as epistemological outlaws disseminating knowledge forbidden by cultural progressives. And since both maintain an affect of “trolling,” intentionally saying outrageous things with the intention of “triggering” or upsetting liberal audiences, it is intuitive that scholars would focus more on affect than on content. After all, “the Kindle versions of [Moldbug’s] posts are published by the winkingly named TRO LLC.”^[13]

In contrast, this paper takes neoreaction and the alt-right seriously as extreme cases of a process occurring at each level of political discourse: the attempt to reimagine the political foundations of society and construct alternatives to the liberal democratic consensus. I use Schmitt’s concepts to discuss the different political theologies underpinning neoreaction and the alt-right. Neither movement emerged in isolation from modern American conservatism, which, analogously to liberal democracy, has long been driven by multiple competing forces. Two of these, market libertarianism and religious traditionalism, make up the fusionist compromise as originally conceptualized by Frank Meyer.^[14] The accelerating rightward movement of the white working class since the 1960s has revealed a third: right-wing populism. I argue that neoreaction and the alt-right each represent a rejection of this tripartite compromise in favor of a single element—libertarianism and right-wing populism respectively. Treating the content of these radical movements seriously thus shows that the challenges to the liberal democratic consensus resonate fractally. The divide is not simply between left and right, but much deeper.

The dichotomy between libertarian neoreaction and the populist alt-right instead exemplifies Schmitt’s distinction between liberalism and democracy. This appears at first glance counterintuitive because Moldbug makes several intellectual moves that bear a debt to the anti-liberal Schmitt. He mobilizes a political theological analysis in his discussion of the debt that modern American liberalism owes to Protestant theology.^[15] Moreover, his rejection of democracy in favor of CEO-style executive power bears a surface-level resemblance to Schmittian decisionist sovereignty. Nevertheless, an analysis of neoreaction in comparison to the alt-right and in the context of Schmitt’s critiques of liberalism reveals that the political theology of neoreaction is a fundamentally liberal one.

Neoreaction not only rejects violence as the existential horizon of politics but also denies the friend/enemy distinction as the essential political dichotomy. It depoliticizes its concept of legitimacy by turning to markets as a legitimating function. Finally, it emphasizes migration and egress rights, mirroring what Schmitt in Land and Sea calls the maritime mode of politics. Each of these factors is a marker of liberalism in Schmitt. And in Schmitt’s view this liberalism is “not a contemptible political ideology . . . but the real adversary of the political.”^[16] By contrast, the alt-right contains not only the worst sins that Schmitt attributed to democracy but also its vitalizing spark. The relative success of the alt-right in comparison to neoreaction suggests that, in this instance, democracy won out over liberalism. The philosophy of Carl Schmitt is an important tool for scholars hoping to better understand, and combat, modern right-wing extremism.

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Notes

1. Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian.

2. This consensus seemed unquestioned in 1989, when the impending end of the Cold War inspired Francis Fukuyama to write the famous essay “The End of History?” Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18. Events such as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2008 financial crisis meant that history’s end was short-lived.

3. See, e.g.: Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2018); Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018); Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2019).

4. Carl Schmitt, “Preface to the Second Edition (1926): On the Contradiction between Parliamentarianism and Democracy,” in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 15.

5. Ibid., p. 14.

6. Ibid., p. 35.

7. Joseph W. Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Third Reich (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), p. 204.

8. Joseph W. Bendersky, “Schmitt’s Diaries,” in The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt, ed. Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016), pp. 134–36.

9. Yarvin’s blog is now hosted at https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/. In 2013, philosopher Nick Land brought the movement to new attention, and gave it a new popular name, with his essay “The Dark Enlightenment.” See Nick Land, “The Dark Enlightenment,” http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/.

10. See, e.g., Sanford Schram, “Russia Is Our Friend: The Alt-Right, Trump, and the Transformation of the Republican Party,” in #Charlottesville: White Supremacy, Populism, and Resistance, ed. Chris Howard-Woods, Colin Laidley, and Maryam Omidi (New York: OR Books, 2019).

11. George Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2017), p. 45; Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Winchester: Zero Books, 2017), p. 16; and Joshua Tait, “Mencius Moldbug and Neoreaction,” in Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy, ed. Mark Sedgwick (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2019), p. 187.

12. Nagle, Kill All Normies, p. 16.

13. Tait, “Mencius Moldbug and Neoreaction,” p. 198.

14. Frank S. Meyer, The Conservative Mainstream (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969), p. 29.

15. Mencius Moldbug [Curtis Yarvin], “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives,” ch. 4, “Dr. Johnson’s Hypothesis,” May 8, 2008, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/05/ol4-dr-johnsons-hypothesis/.

16. Thomas Petersen, “Political Unity and the ‘Existential Meaning’ of Conflict. On Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (with some remarks on The Dreyfus Affair in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism),” Politicka Misao: Croatian Political Science Review 55 no. 4 (2018): 69.