This Far-Right Thought Leader Is Embarrassingly Vacuous

(Illustration by The Bulwark)

IT’S A CURIOUS TIME to be watching the far right. In days gone by, the far-right milieu produced intellectuals of the caliber of Carl Schmitt or Martin Heidegger. These intense critics of liberalism argued that the inauthentic nullity brought about by liberal metaphysics could only end in civilizational collapse. By contrast, the best that today’s far-right provocateurs seem to be able to muster is tirelessly repeating how casting black and gay people in Disney remakes can only end in civilizational collapse. Historically, the far right has been described as the ideological playground of the “lesser intelligentsia.” Today’s far right seems determined to prove that their standards can be lower still, or even that their standards can be broken faster than they can be lowered.

One far-right staple is to fantasize that the world runs on mystical cycles. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, Oswald Spengler hypothesized that civilizations went through life cycles much as biological organisms do. He fretted that the Western world was entering a winter in which it would be overtaken by a vengeful Global South. A decade later, the Italian reactionary mystic Julius Evola hypothesized that egalitarian modernity was a regression from a deeper aristocratic tradition, and augured a vital return to the latter in the form of a super-fascist SS. This cyclical thinking is celebrated by some of those on the far right who call themselves “traditionalists,” including, supposedly, Steve Bannon.

As I waded through the writings of contemporary far-right muse Auron MacIntyre I found myself reflecting on a somewhat less imaginary cycle: garbage in, garbage out.

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Who Is Auron MacIntyre?

The author of a column for the right-wing Blaze media company, which also distributes his eponymous podcast, MacIntyre is a former public school teacher who attributes his move to the far right to animosity toward the COVID lockdowns. (This self-description has been contested by critics.) Angered at state overreach pushed by nebbish liberals, MacIntyre began to search for a better way. He found it in the writings of sages like Curtis “Frankly, Hitler reads a lot like me, if I lost 25 IQ points from Drinking Lead Soda” Yarvin. For years blogging as a self-described “libertarian” under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin later concluded that only an authoritarian regime led by a corporate monarch could be called a truly free regime. (One suspects a fair bit of the aforementioned lead paint was involved in the evolution of Yarvin’s thought process.) Perhaps seeing Yarvin as something of a model, MacIntyre drank deep of similar waters, imbibing works by white nationalists Samuel Francis and Pat Buchanan, as well as other icons of the American far right. Over time, MacIntyre’s posts on social media, and then his writings on Substack and his Blaze output, made him something of a far-right intellectual influencer.

Like most influencers, MacIntyre weighs in on a lot. Topically his show veers pretty widely. He lurches day-to-day from interviews with far-right intellectuals like paleoconservative godfather Paul Gottfried and cyberpunk rightist Nick Land to histrionic broadsides against pop-culture ephemera. On one episode MacIntyre will be recommending Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli. The next, listeners are treated to the requisite Great Replacement fretting as MacIntyre worries about alien invasions and foreign flags being waved at protests. Come to hear MacIntyre whine about a black woman being cast in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey; stay to listen to him chum around with libertarian conspiracy theorists about why we can’t have a truly free society if there are too many Indians living next door.

The tone of MacIntyre’s show replicates the aesthetics of the very online right to a tee. Occasional moments of sneering sarcasm, one-sided erudition, and adulatory fawning break up the usual monotony as MacIntyre relentlessly recounts a grim chronicle of horribles. The driving emotion is resentment over dispossession: MacIntyre will rail against Democrats, democrats, and mainstream conservatives who are functionally liberals; he’ll excoriate “hicklibs,” who live in the country and behave like “cucks” despite being surrounded by better folks; and, perhaps above all else, he’ll blast immigrants, illegal and legal, who have the audacity to try and sell chaat and samosas around his Florida neighborhood. The overarching message is usually absurdly on the nose: The hour is late, maybe too late, and these progressive forces genuinely want everyone on the right dead. Unless radical action is immediately attempted to retake the country, remake the culture, and purge the unworthy, unwanted, and unwelcome, there soon won’t even be a white billionaire class anymore.

For anyone who’s ever slogged through Yarvin’s oeuvre, or the tirades of the similar formerly pseudonymous writer Bronze Age Pervert, it’s all pretty same-old, same-old by now. The most interesting moments of MacIntyre’s podcast come when the show threatens to become genuinely self-reflective. In February, while dialoguing with Dave Greene, a fellow far-right influencer and a fanatical Potterhead known as “The Distributist,” the dynamic duo mechanically jaunted through the New Right’s complaints with Bad Bunny’s record-shattering Super Bowl performance. In doing so, they very grudgingly admitted that the Turning Point USA alternative, headlined by a lip-syncing Kid Rock, probably won’t go down in history as an aesthetic peak. MacIntyre and Greene wonder why the right, despite obviously being smarter, better read (at least at its higher levels), and more eschatologically sensitive than liberals, can’t seem to manage better than Lady Ballers. As they ponder any number of solutions, they ironically muse that a smidge of liberal toleration for eccentricity and bohemian indulgence might be necessary for cultivating a right-wing counter to the progressive monoculture. Pluralism for we, but not for thee.

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The Aesthetic Reactionary Ouroboros

One set of possibilities they don’t consider, something that never factors into these formulations, is that the personalities attracted to the far right may simply lack the requisite talent. Or that the kind of authoritarian culture produced by the hard right might further preclude achieving aesthetic greatness.

We don’t have to speculate on these points. MacIntyre and his ilk love to defend authoritarian conservatives like Franco while ignoring that creative figures like Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso balked at his repression (often fleeing or refusing to return to Spain if they could) and by and large greeted liberalization and democratization with relief.

Things were even more aesthetically humiliating in the fascist states of Italy and Germany, an irony given one of the self-stated aims of both Mussolini and Hitler was to inaugurate the “New Fascist Man” who’d break the stifling cultural shackles of bourgeois and Judeo-Bolshevik materialism and humanism. In his magisterial The Third Reich in Power, Richard J. Evans chronicles how the artistic productions of the Nazi Germany, in some respects once technically daring, rapidly diminished in quality. To put it plainly, state repression in the name of combating decadence and anti-nationalism created a stifling conformity. The Nazis produced a combination of bombastic propaganda chastened by consciously middle-of-the-road productions aimed at keeping the population entertained and docile. This climate contrasted sharply with the prior dynamic art scene in Weimar Berlin, against which the Nazis drummed up so much fear about transgressive cultural degeneracy. (Indeed, Schmitt and Heidegger, the most sophisticated thinkers in the Nazi firmament, both experienced career stultification and political frustration during Hitler’s reign.) The “order” that the right promises inherently comes at the expense of the freedom needed for genuine creativity. It rewards those willing to pander to power.

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Of course, there are deep ideological reasons for MacIntyre’s inability to understand the culturally stultifying nature of the authority to which he is so clearly attracted. MacIntyre fanboys over the Savoyard arch-reactionary Joseph de Maistre, who died in 1821. In The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions (1814), Maistre insisted that too much individual reason was dangerous, because it inspired people to develop a critical attitude toward tradition and its authorities. Rather than Enlightenment, what society needed was dogmatic conformity: The “nascent reason” of individuals, Maistre droned, “should be curbed under a double yoke; it should be frustrated, and it should lose itself in the national mind, so that it changes its individual existence for another communal existence.” Such self-conscious and moralizing insistence on demonstrating irrational fidelity to authority is totally antithetical to genuine creative spirits, from the Socratic critics to Romantic artists. To the extent the reactionary mind can endorse a creative sensibility, it is only in the venomous, but sometimes perceptive, reaction to a world not yet ordered the way it “ought” to be. But once in power, the ideology of the far right necessarily consumes the very stimulations that once fed its rise. Reaction can only work as antithesis. Bile is its natural muse.

The source of the problem that MacIntyre and Greene grope toward lies in the fact that, far from being countercultural warriors, they’re now defenders of a tottering regime presided over by an octogenarian president whose sense of beauty never evolved beyond the bikini wax.

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A Chud Manifesto

When listening to MacIntyre’s podcast, it can be hard to make sense of his ideological bearings, in no small part because his intellectual impulses so frequently contradict one another. In a very bad way, one is reminded of the tension in the conservative writer Russell Kirk’s classic The Conservative Mind. In his effort to chronicle but also theorize conservatism, Kirk proudly described the conservative as an anti-ideologue defined more by an attitude than a belief system. Immediately after, he lists six “canons” (later expanded to ten principles) that conservatives believe in.

MacIntyre has read but not synthesized his influences. Sometimes he invokes Machiavellian and international realism, describing America as an empire that conquered its neighbors (which he defends as part of the inevitable life cycle of strong states). In this mindset, if imperialism is “bad,” it’s only because an empire is doing it badly. Sometimes MacIntyre thinks it would be wisest for the United States to ignore the rest of the world while adopting an unashamedly extractive attitude toward the Western hemisphere by no longer even pretending to care about the needs of subject peoples. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” and all that.

But at other points our pseudo-Thucydides goes silk-pajama soft, describing himself as a true Christian believer in natural law, eternal verities, and dividing the world into the virtuous and the evil. In these moments, MacIntyre expresses his dislike for materialism and historicism of all sorts and stresses the need for transcendent spiritual and cultural dimensions of life.

That is until and unless someone has the audacity to suggest the United States is a “propositional nation,” with values that anyone could in principle internalize and embrace. When that happens, things like race and heritage naturally become important, even healthy, for MacIntyre to consider.

Perhaps most glaring of all is MacIntyre’s thoughts about elites. He’ll podcast himself breathless condemning the progressive liberal state and its elites for their hypocritical authoritarian and even totalitarian impulses, while at the same time routinely musing that the only solution could be the elevation of a new elite who will embrace unabashed authoritarianism à la Franco and other tin-pot dictators. This latter isn’t so much a theoretical contradiction as a contradiction in practical reason; MacIntyre wants freedom for those like him who deserve it, and either doesn’t much care or is actively hostile toward anyone else enjoying it.

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At some level MacIntyre seems to recognize these tensions. In 2024 he inflicted a book, The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, on the world. Despite being widely lauded by the far right, the book is not especially original. Condensing major tropes that had circulated on the online right for years, it is less a working through of the far right’s ideological tensions than taking an “everything, everywhere all at once” approach to affirming their precious instincts.

Following Samuel Francis and his posthumous 2021 opus Leviathan and Its Enemies, MacIntyre posits that the liberal democracy we live under is already, or at least is very nearly, a totalitarian state. The total state is ruled by a managerial elite that has concentrated power in their hands by appealing to the need to satisfy the will of the demos. Over time, as ever more interest groups demanded entry into the democratic arena via women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement, the state and its managerial elite expanded its power to gratify these needs while eroding traditional and local sites of authority. Following Yarvin very closely, MacIntyre posits that this undesirable state of affairs is upheld by a “cathedral” of cultural discourse, produced by elites in academia, the media, Hollywood, journalism, and so on. While nominally committed to Brat Summers and DEI, the cathedral in fact propagates a concealed but nonetheless tyrannical homogenization of morality and culture. A monoculture that ends not with a bang, but with New Yorkers embracing a Muslim mayor and with Elliot Page being cast in The Odyssey.

In my initial review of MacIntyre’s book two years ago, I described its overall argumentative quality as unusually poor, even factoring in my very limited expectations. The book went semi-viral recently when liberal commentators chuckled over the fact that its entire bibliography took up less than a page and included a YouTube video. Sometimes the fabulism is very obvious, like when MacIntyre described the January 6th riots that resulted in several deaths as a “protest at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021 [that] ended with participants entering and taking pictures.” By that logic, I suppose Jeffrey Dahmer was just walking about looking for a bite to eat.

The book is full of theoretical banalizations that are deeply insulting to the richness of the Western canon. MacIntyre will cite the seminal communitarian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (no relation) to the effect that tradition is needed to combat relativism. But in doing so, he ignores the philosopher’s insistence in After Virtue that Burkean traditionalism was an ideology (in the full Marxist sense) unworthy of serious defense, or his barb that being asked to die for the nation-state and its imperial projects was like being asked to die for the telephone company. The biggest dreams of the far right are small indeed. . .

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But ultimately the quality of argumentation isn’t really what sells a book like The Total State to far-right audiences. Despite hilariously posing as a kind of middle finger to the system, the book is nothing more than another opiate for the mass of alt/new/reactionary/dissident or whatever other flavor of right they now want to identify as. The only level at which the book works minimally hard is in affirming the far right’s every instinct, prejudice, and grievance, one after another, while generating a kind of pseudo-unity through agonism.

In the far-right mind, all social problems can be reduced to a fairy story of decline and fall brought about by the wicked. The Total State neither challenges nor induces critical thinking. Its effect is precisely the opposite, negating the need to ever again think at all. No wonder it has been so welcomed by a grateful far-right audience.

I want to return to the striking juxtaposition between MacIntyre’s appeals to ruthless realism and his sentimental need to bifurcate the world into the pure and impure, the good and evil, the Heritage Americans and unworthy browns. There is a sense in which these two valences require one another: There is nothing more self-flattering than the fabulist pretension of imagining oneself to be an aristocrat of blood and soul, intended to belong to a purer world. Anyone who brings this fantasy to politics is destined to be disappointed when confronted with the reality of diverse human complications. The denizens of the far right haven’t reconciled themselves to this, and it feeds into the anger that something was taken from them and destroyed by decadent unworthiness. The far right’s attraction has always lain in its coupling of aristocratic haughtiness with the resentment of dispossession. Adherents enjoy the appeal of superiority and the moral baptism of victimization. The feeling of urgency these affects engender, and the need to gratify them, always lead the far right to conclude that all means are justified to smite their foes and bring about their Valhalla.

This drive means, in the end, that the far right will always promise a phoenix-like fiery rise, right before realizing they can only ever deliver ashes.

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Matt McManus teaches at Spelman College and is the author of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, among other books.