Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Aristocratic Radicalism: Nietzsche and the Politics of Reaction

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Apr 3, 2023 Professor Matt McManus returns to Rev Left to discuss his latest book, Nietzsche and the Politics of Reaction: Essays on Liberalism, Socialism, and Aristocratic Radicalism—a provocative collection he edited featuring diverse perspectives on one of the most misunderstood thinkers in modern philosophy. We unpack Friedrich Nietzsche’s actual political views, challenge the liberal and fascist misreadings, and explore what the socialist left can critically learn from him. From his attacks on Christianity and herd morality to his complex relationship with nihilism, the death of God, and radical subjectivity—we dive deep into Nietzsche’s legacy and wrestle with how the left can engage him without falling into reactionary traps. A rigorous and fascinating conversation for those who want to sharpen their understanding of western philosophy and break free from lazy and shallow interpretations.   Check out more of McManus' work HERE ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have another wonderful episode for you. Really excited to share this one. This is with Professor Matt McManus and his new collection of essays entitled Nietzsche and the Politics of Reaction essays on liberalism, socialism, and aristocratic radicalism. Really interesting deep dive on Nietzsche as a fundamentally reaction. reactionary thinker. We talk about how even though he is a reactionary thinker, many right-wing forces who try to appropriate him get him fundamentally wrong, from the Nazis to Jordan Peterson

and Dinesh D'Souza. We talk about how the left has tried to use him to various levels of success and failure. And we just talk about Nietzsche's criticisms of Christianity, how they dovetail with his criticisms of liberal democracy and socialism and communism. You know, the death of God and his predictions for the forms that nihilism will take. And it's just a very interesting, fascinating the conversation about a fascinating figure and really focusing on his actual politics and how they cash out in real life. I couldn't ask for a better guest either. We have a really, really fun engaging conversation. So without further ado, here is our episode with Matt McManus on his new book about Nietzsche as a fundamentally reactionary political thinker. Enjoy.

My name is Matt McManus. I'm a lecturer at the University of Michigan in the Department of Political Science. And I'm the author of a couple of different books. The one we're here to talk about today is a collection I edited called Nietzsche and the Politics of Reaction. And if people are interested in that, you can also check out my new book,

The Political Right and Equality, turning back the tide of egalitarian modernity that should be coming out in a few months for Rutledge Press. Oh, nice. Yeah, very excited to dive into that next book of yours. But this one, Nietzsche and the Politics of Reaction, is a really, really interesting one. It's one, again, in the title that focuses on his politics, and there's just so much here to talk to.

I really enjoyed your interview with, I believe, his name is Sean Elling from Vox's The Gray Area. I thought that was a great conversation, and I knew once I heard that, I had to have you back on the show, to discuss it because you were on once to talk about your book on postmodern conservatism, maybe

two years ago, maybe even more than that at this point. So long-time Rev-Lef listeners will be familiar with you. But today we are talking about Nietzsche. So again, let's go ahead and just dive right into it. Outside of the outline I sent you, maybe just for like the one to three people

out there who still might not know who Nietzsche is, can you just give us a quick breakdown of who he is and his place in the history of philosophy? Sure. Well, the simple answer is Nietzsche is a 19th century German philosopher, along with Nartz and Freud. He's considered to be one of the founders of the school of suspicion, as it's sometimes called. This kind of in-depth approach to looking at text and looking at philosophical problems that interrogates them with an attitude of cynicism or wariness of some of their more grandiose claims. And Nietzsche himself was a very complicated guy. Let's just put it that way. He started off early on being deep. religious, thought about going into the priesthood, falling in his father's footsteps. Later on became an atheist under the influence of a number of different figures, probably the most important one being Arthur Schopenhauer, and then he evolved into arguably the greatest

critic of Christianity who's ever emerged, although his critique of Christianity, as I'm sure we'll get into, has a lot of dimensions to it that goes beyond just a kind of Richard Dawkins-style critique of religiosity or theism. Absolutely. All right. And, Like I said, most people will be familiar for sure. We've done multiple episodes on Nietzsche. We've done an episode on Schopenhauer and his connection to Nietzsche, et cetera. So let's just go ahead and get into it because one of the things that we're going to talk about today, or the main thing we're going to talk about today, is his politics and your argument that comes out in this collection of essays and also articles and interviews with you on him,

that Nietzsche really is a reactionary political thinker, but there are ways in which the reactionary right today still get him. him wrong. So let's just go ahead and get into the book itself. Can you just, before we get into the details of it, kind of talk about the book and why you wanted to put it together? Yeah, sure. So the idea of the book came about around 2021 through conversations with a friend of mine called Ron McBeener, who actually is included in the collection. So Ronnie wrote a really good book called Dangerous Minds that people should check out. It's about Nietzsche and Heidegger's influence on the alt-right. Now, I've been entranced by Nietzsche since I was 18 years old. I've been reading them quite constantly.

And it occurred to me that there was a lot more to say about this issue of Nietzsche's politics, its influence on the alt-right, and the broader points that he makes about modernity. So, it's COVID, you know, we were bored. I sent an email around to some people being like, hey, I've got this idea for a collection. Would you guys like to be a part of it? And I was shocked by how much enthusiasm there was. I mean, I actually had to beat contributors off with a stick because there were just so many fucking people who were like, yeah, totally, I want to talk about that. So I'm very proud of where the collection wound up going. We have some great contributions in that.

Probably my favorite is actually by my friend Dave Hollins that talks about the influence of Nietzschean reaction in film. But you know, you've read the book and everyone I'm sure who gets to it will have the essay that intrigues them the most. Absolutely, yeah. So let's go ahead and talk about how Nietzsche is received in the West or the English-speaking world in particular. I, you know, primarily through his primary translator and popularizer, Walter Kaufman.

Can you, and I'm sure if anybody out there listening in the U.S. or in the English-speaking world has read about Nietzsche, you probably read the translations that Kaufman offered. So can you talk about Kaufman's impact on how Nietzsche is perceived and what your thoughts are on Kaufman's so-called perhaps sanitation of Nietzsche's politics? Sure. Well, it's important to note that early on Nietzsche's reception in the Anglo-American world was very much as a political thinker. He was seen as essentially the philosopher of Nazism or at the very minimum German imperialism. And you could find takes on him like Bertrand Russell's that kind of lean into a lot of those cliches about what Nietzsche believed and how he influenced German imperialism and militarism and that stuff. Kaufman really wanted to

resuscitate Nietzsche's reputation after it had been slandered in this way. So as you point out, He was a translator, first and foremost, so he was responsible for introducing Nietzsche's work to a lot of English-speaking audiences through his really seminal translations. But more than that, he was also an interpreter of Nietzsche. And he read Nietzsche pretty much as a kind of existential psychologist. Yes, he was critical of modernity. He was gloomy. He was pessimistic, and he was deeply worried about things like nihilism and how people

respond to that. But fundamentally, he was a pretty apolitical thinker, right? And Kaufman made a very convincing case that to the extent he was, he was a very important had any kind of political statements. They were idiosyncratic and not really central to his work, and also argued that the Nazis just completely got him wrong. So there was really no basis for reading him as a proto-fascist thinker. That interpretation was very popular for a long time in the English-speaking world, and I would argue it's still the one that most people kind of default to when it comes to thinking about Nietzsche, precisely because Kaufman has been such an influential

interpreter and translator of his work. Yeah, absolutely. And that's certainly sort of my basic interpretation of him was for a long time. You know, we would talk about things like his individualism and what the left can possibly take from him, et cetera, and I'm excited to get into that in this interview as well. But that was certainly my apprehension of Nietzsche for a very long time. And, you know, works like this that you put out have helped kind of change that in deep in my understanding of Nietzsche. So let's just go ahead and get into the core argument of yours and of this collection

of essays, which is that Nietzsche really was a truly reactionary thinker and his being taken up by the right is no surprise. So can you tell us the ways in which Nietzsche was a fundamentally reactionary thinker and what his political vision actually was? Yeah, so Nietzsche was profoundly political thinker. Actually, he was quite proud of that fact. If you read Eke Homo, which is probably the last thing that he wrote, there's some debate about that. It's kind of a little autobiography that both serves as a kind of culmination to his work and as an introduction to his life for new readers, if they happen to get to it. He talks about how he is going to be responsible, and it's also forecasting the emergence of great politics in the world for the first time, or at least since antiquity.

And he says that there will be wars that the world has never seen, many of which will be fought in my name, right? And it's a chilling, stunning kind of statement. And what's all the more dramatic about it is most of the time when you hear somebody say there are going to be gigantic wars that are breakout, they're saying it as this kind of doomy forecast. Nietzsche is actually a bit excited about this. He says that the fact that there are going to be wars that the world has never seen, including some that will be fought in my name, testifies to, not least, you know, how great my thinking is, but also the fact that the human race is not exhausted yet.

It hasn't fallen so far into the nihilism of the last man that something new won't come into the world. And Nietzsche himself was not a systematic thinker, so it's hard to say exactly what kind of politics he wanted to endorse in terms of a program. but it's very clear what he was attracted to. One of his first fans, if you want to call it that, a Danish philosopher, wrote him a letter saying, I think of your philosophy as a kind of aristocratic radicalism.

Nietzsche actually wrote back to him saying, yes, that's very clever, and that's absolutely what I'm going for. And I think aristocratic radical is a good summation of Nietzsche's political disposition. For people who want more on this, they can read Dominica Lasserto's just truly gigantic book on the subject of aristocratic radicalism. it's a thousand pages so you know carve out a summer for it but we know we can dive into more details about it but i think that's the kind of general gist of what he's going for okay yeah i want to touch on also you know of course that people anybody that does know of nietzsche will know about the statement the death of god and his diagnosis of the threat of nihilism coming in the era of modernity specifically in the next century after nietzsche died and we certainly saw forms of

nihilism that nietzsche more or less predicted come to pass can you tell us the sort of different types of nihilism that Nietzsche was warning against and predicting might flourish in the wake of the death of God. Yeah, absolutely. So Nietzsche predicts that there are going to be a number of different kinds of nihilism that will emerge in the aftermath of the death of God. He's very much like Dostoevsky, another important reactionary thinker in that vein. And actually, at various points, he commends Dostoevsky as being the own psychologist that he can learn from. But putting it very briefly, and this is an exhaustive list, the kind of nihilism that Nietzsche is deathly allergic to as a kind of passive hedonistic nihilism, the nihilism of

the last men, as we might call it. This is going to be a nihilism where people think there is no purpose to life. There's no real reason for me to commit myself to any kind of higher or more advanced projects. So the most important thing for me to do will be just to settle into hedonistic rapture. So people do drugs, drink a lot. Nietzsche was really opposed to the use of alcohol probably for this reason, and, you know, just try to fill their days with as many low and gloomy pleasures as possible. The other kind of nihilism that he is deeply opposed to is this kind of depressed, melancholic nihilism that you can associate with Schopenhauerianism, for example, right? This idea that, well, hedonistic pleasure isn't even going to be all that gratifying.

So what I'm just going to do is sit there, try to dissociate for myself to the extent possible, bury any kind of feelings of regret that I might happen to have, listen to a lot of gloomy music, and wait out my days until the end comes. He associates this with the wisdom of Silenus that Schopenhauer often kind of reflected, the idea being that the best thing in life would have been to never have been born, and the second best thing in life would be to die in early death.

Another kind of nihilism that he's really opposed to, interestingly enough, is one I might call aesthetic nihilism. This is the kind of nihilism that insists that the only thing worth doing now is to try to apprehend the world scientifically. And actually, he sees this as a kind of residue of the botanic tradition. The idea being that the most important thing in life is just to know the truth and apprehend the truth and to regard it dispassionately. This is something that he sees in a lot of the kind of technical individuals that are emerging. And this critique will that are on, by the way, go on to influence Heidegger, who is also an important reaction. and he calls them kind of the new aesthetics. So all these kinds of nihilism are things that he

wants to reject. But I think the more interesting kinds of nihilism that he's concerned with are political forms of nihilism. And this relates back to his critique of the left. He's going to argue that for many people, they're not going to be able to deal with the fact that there is no transcendent foundation for their moral systems any longer. And there certainly is no transcendent foundation for moral equality that was rooted in the Christian ethic. So what they're going to do instead is create new egalitarian

ideologies like liberalism, democracy, and socialism in order to carry on the Christian project, but justify it in a more rationalistic basis. And he sees these as fundamentally nihilistic in very important ways, but I've spoken a lot, so I figure I'll let you ask a question. Yeah, no, that's great.

That's a lot more than I think is usually forwarded when it talks about the death of God and Nietzsche's diagnosis of nihilism. One of the things I'm wondering, and you're obviously much more well read on Nietzsche than I am personally, so he might have covered this, but I've always thought for a long time that one of the forms that nihilism has taken in modernity or in late capitalist America in particular is this sort of nihilism of capitalist consumption and worship of the self. Did he ever touch on the threat of nihilism lurking within capitalism itself, or is that something that was just sort of drawn out

by thinkers after him? No, he absolutely did, right? So there are authors, like Ayn Rand, for example, who've tried to read into Nietzsche a kind of support for capitalism, or at least interpret his thought that way. They see capitalist as embodying this kind of ubermanche ideal, you know, the creator who brings something new into the world through his or probably his own efforts, right? Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for that. There are a lot of reasons for this. One is that, you know, ultimately, capitalists, he thinks, are too egalitarian in their outlook, right? If you think about what a capitalist has to do, a capitalist basically has to placate their customers in order to profit. This means they produce venal or low kinds of commodities

in order to service the mass. Nietzsche, this is a good aristocratic radical, has nothing but contempt for this. And he's also very contemptuous of the kind of bourgeois culture that he sees emerging with capitalism. So one of his denigrations of the last men is that they'll have nothing but hedonistic outlooks, but the one morality that they will commit themselves to is health, because they'll want to live a very long time in order to consume as much as possible and enjoy as many pleasures as possible. And if you think about this emphasis on health is the kind of one ethic that they'll adopt, it's very coincident with what we call California kind of ethic, right?

This idea being that, you know, I'm going to go live a life of hedonistic consumption, indifferent to everyone else around me, but I'll also, you know, go jog 10 hours a day and try to live forever and, you know, maintain my youth up until my 50s, if I possibly can, because the most important thing is to live a long time and maximize my performance. pleasure for that length of time. Right. Yeah, that's really, really interesting. I think new forms that are perhaps emerging in the sort of late 20th and early 21st century is like, you know, things like transhumanism, sort of techno-escapism. Did Nietzsche see even the Vegas outlines of that sort of nihilism? Oh, absolutely. Again, if you think about the problem with the last men, right,

he thinks that one of the difficulties that they're going to face is precisely that technology makes their life so easy, right? And this means that they don't have to struggle and fight the way that earlier peoples would have had to because they were environmentally conditioned for that. Now, I want to stress, however, that people have read into this a kind of anti-capitalist critique. And it is an anti-capitalist critique. But people have been seduced by this into believing that Nietzsche is fundamentally a lequewing thinker, right? and that I think is entirely incorrect. He is launching a critique of capitalism and bourgeois values, but it's a reactionary critique of bourgeois values.

Again, the problem with capitalism is that it is too egalitarian since it's fundamentally about placating the needs of the herd or the mass with all their vulgarity, right? Through the production of commodities for the sake of consumption. And he's going to have a profound influence on a lot of other reactionate critics of capital in a huge number of different ways that we can get into if you want. Yeah, I think that's really important to understand that the critique of capitalism can and often does come from the reactionary and even fascist right. And we're going to talk about Evela in a second because I think I see Evela as one of those figures that really did try to carry through some of Nietzsche's politics, and I'd love to get your thoughts on that.

But before we do, I'm really curious in your opinion, this dichotomy between a conservative and a reactionary. because, you know, I think at least in theory, you could be a conservative sort of liberal person without being a hardcore reactionary, and many reactionaries don't consider themselves conservative, but there's obviously some overlap. What do you think about, just personally, what do you think the differences are between just like a conservative thinker and a fundamentally reactionary thinker? Well, the difference is a little bit blurred, right, as it is on all ends of the political spectrum, right? But the simple answer is that a conservative is somebody who wants to do what William Buckley once said he wanted to do, right? To stand a thwart history and yell, stop. And this usually takes the form of trying to inhibit the egalitarian thrust of modernity from advancing any further, or even very gently pushing back against it, right? A reactionary or an aristocratic radical, as Nietzsche would call him, self, is a very different kind of personality.

An aristocratic radical holds that society has been so mutilated. related by the impact of egalitarianism, that there's really nothing worth conserving any longer, right? We've reached the point of decadence and nihilism long ago. So the only thing to do right now is to engage in a kind of radical politics that will completely overturn the egalitarian thrust of modernity, and that's necessarily going to entail bringing something new into the world. And Nietzsche himself was deeply contemptuous of conservative figures, like say Bismarck, for example, for being too soft on the left. In Twilight of the Idols, and think about this, right?

He's talking about reactionary imperial Germany and how its leaders are too soft on the left. Yeah, yeah, right? So commenting on Audubon-Bismarck and the Kaiser-Rite regime, he says, what are you doing allowing the workers anything like social insurance, anything like a right to participate in politics, even nominally, and I want to stress it, was just nominal. You should be training them to be slaves instead by even implying that they have some entitlement to good treatment. They're going to start getting uppity

and demanding all kinds of things from you. What you need to do is just put them right back down and tell them that they're not getting anything that isn't entirely a gift from their betters. So that should really tell you something, right? When your Otto von Bismarck, the quintessential conservative is not right-wing enough for you. Boy, oh boy, are you on the extreme end of the spectrum.

Absolutely, yeah, that is wild. All right, so let's go ahead and get into that thing Because in your work, you've argued, quote, both the left and the right get Nietzsche's politics wrong. In fact, his political vision is one that neither would like. You've certainly laid out some of the foundations of what his, you know, as you called, his politics of aristocratic radicalism are. So let's take the left and right in turn, starting with the right. How has the right tried to claim Nietzsche, but fundamentally got him wrong? Well, the big way is that they've tried to combine various forms of Nietzschean critique and Nietzschean theories about Superman.

to various forms of nationalism, particularly ethno-nationalism, right? Now, Nietzsche would have had nothing good contempt for the kind of white identitarians, as they kind of bullishly like to call themselves, or white nationalists who appropriate his thinking. Because for Nietzsche, nationalism is just another herd ideology, right? A nationalist is somebody who doesn't have the balls to actually will their own value system individually and live by it. They need to say, well, look, everyone around me also shares in,

my value system. And if everyone around me doesn't share in my value system, that's precisely why I need to expel difference and impose homogeneity, particularly ethnic homogeneity. Anichie had nothing but contempt for this. He called himself a good European quite consistently. He was far more entranced by France than he was Germany. He used to call German nationalists, you know, kind of sad, pathetic little figures. And he also had nothing but contempt for what we might call a kind of crude racism of the sort that somebody like Arthur de Gobino or the Nazis would later put forward. Now, that's not to say that Nietzsche is in any kind of egalitarian, right? He calls for slavery. He says, goest thou to women, make sure you bring a whip. But this idea that you can

determine who the Superman would be, by looking at their genetics, would be something he would have no truck with. So in that respect, a lot of the kind of right-wing takes on Nietzsche that try to combine him with these nationalist and racist outlooks are doing a disservice to his work. In fact, I'll go one further and saying they're hideously perverting it. But that doesn't mean we should let Nietzsche off the hook or think that he's some kind of cozy bohemian liberal, let alone a leftist radical. Yeah, that's really, really well said. And yeah, the Nazis, their German nationalism, their ethno-nationalism, their mass base of support. You know, the idea that even the street sweeper in Germany is higher than the highest prince in the global south or whatever Hitler's, you know, quotes about this were, the anti-Semitism, all these things, you know, the Nazis did were antithesis.

in a lot of ways to some core things that Nietzsche believed but a figure like and I was you know kind of alluding to this earlier Julius Evela seems much more in line and I'd love to get your thoughts on this you know Evela talked about being the aristocrat of the soul you know criticize the Nazis for precisely this being too modern caring too much about the working class you know I think Evela said there I don't know if he was repeating a joke or he was saying the joke but what's the difference between a communist and a fascist state well in a communist state it's run in the interest of the proletarians, and then the Nazi state is running the interest of the proletarians, and he was dismissing them both as being too worker focused. So does somebody like

Avela more or less get Nietzsche right in a way that Nazis did not? It's hard to say. I mean, I want to point out that if you read Avala, Evala is kind of a fool, right? I just want to put it that way. Dork. He's, yeah, he's a clownish figure next to Nietzsche, and I don't want to apply there's any kind of symmetry between them in terms of their intellectual caliber, right? I think Nietzsche was, I'll just use the term, an evil man, who was espousing an evil philosophy, and I'm not afraid of the connotations of that term. But there's no doubt that he was a genius, right? I mean, the well of creativity that he was drawing upon was inexhaustible, right? In 1988 alone, he published something like five classic books, all of which are worth reading, right?

When you think that many of us would be happy with one classic phrase that people would remember us by, that's truly astonishing, right? Abelah was a kind of tinkerer, syncretic thinker, jackass amongst everything. But to put it really simply, right, there is definitely a symmetry between what he was arguing for and a kind of bastardized version of Nietzscheanism. So, Niche, or sorry, Ivolo characterized himself as a super-fascist on various occasions. And he does echo Nietzsche in the revolt against the modern world, where he is extremely critical of Christianity, because he sees Christianity as the root of modern.

and egalitarian movements for undermining this kind of aristocratic ethic that he associates with more antiquarian periods. And in fact, at one point in revolt against the modern world, he even talks about how this might seem contrary to his admiration for the Middle Ages and his desire to turn things like the SS into kind of modern Teutonic order, for example. And he says, no, no, no, no, no, everything that was good about the Middle Ages was anti-Christian. It's focused on aristocracy, it's focused on this kind of warrior ethic, and to the extent that there was a Christian basis to life in the Middle Ages, that's what eventually led to the emergence of egalitarian modernity.

So you can see a lot of Nietzsche in that, coupled with a lot of Demetra and coupled with a lot of bullshit. Let's just put it that way. But it is an indicator of how his thinking and these lines of critique that Nietzsche develops are going to be taken up by a variety of right-wing thinkers, including one in the who are deeply inferior to Nietzsche in terms of the caliber of their thought. Yeah, absolutely. Just with that in mind then, is there anyone else that jumps to mind any group or any individual on the modern or close to modern far right that does get Nietzsche more or less correct or that actually puts him into service of their right-wing politics in a way that doesn't radically deform Nietzsche's basic philosophical assertions?

I wouldn't say so. No, I mean, and part of the problem is, again, that Nietzsche wasn't a systematic thinker, but what he did consistently insist on was a kind of radical individualism, right? His aristocratic radicals would be hard to pin down precisely because they wouldn't be characterized by any kind of group qualities, right? They would be rarefied and elevated. And consequently, people who belong to the herd

couldn't even predict what they might look like. And it's very hard to mobilize a group politics on the basis that only a few select individuals are worthy to engage in great politics. Particularly in the modern world, you need a kind of mass base of support, which is why I think it's so tempting to try to align his aristocratic theories with various forms of nationalism, with various forms of racism, with various forms of identitarianism, is the new PC word that they sometimes use. And none of them are sincere to his thinking.

There have also been attempts by people like, say, Jordan Peterson, for example, to turn Nietzsche into this kind of soft conservative figure. At one point in maps of meaning, Peterson even describes Nietzsche as a friend of Christianity because he's trying to wean it off of its more sentimental sides and reconnect it to a kind of individualism. But this is also a deep misreading of Nietzsche because for Nietzsche,

Christian civilization isn't the antidote to modern egalitarian movements and their sentimentality. Christianity is at the base. of these egalitarian movements. And so if you want to get rid of woke culture, what you need to do is tear Christianity up from the root and demolish it, is really the only way to describe it. Yeah, well, we're definitely, the next question I think we're going to get into

is the Christianity one after this one about the left, because I do want to kind of explore that a little deeper. But, you know, kind of sticking to this right-left dynamic, we talked about how the right has tried to claim Nietzsche and got him wrong, the fundamental problem of trying to take Nietzsche's hyper-individualist, and turn it into a group or mass politic, et cetera. So in what ways have the left tried to claim Nietzsche, and how do they also get him wrong? Well, I think there are a number of ways.

And I want to say, I'm not sure that the great thinkers in the left tradition necessarily get him wrong. What they're doing is essentially creatively adapting certain Nietzschean ideas for more radical purposes. And I think that's an entirely legitimate theoretical exercise in some respects. What's problematic about this is it has become so popular to kind of take Nietzschean tools, put them to radical purposes, that people just assume that Nietzsche himself would have been happy with that.

So just to give two examples, right? In the 1960s, there was an attempt by a wide array of French thinkers to politicize Nietzsche, but to politicize him for the left. Probably the two most important figures in this respect were Gilles de Luz and Michel Foucault. So Gilles de Luz wrote a very interesting book on Nietzsche where he talks about him as a philosopher of difference. That's one of Deleuze's key words, right? And obviously the left can argue for a kind of politics of difference that can be inclusive, tolerant, or even see diversity as testament to some kind of human flourishing, right?

Foucault once famously said that he was a Nietzsche in an interview in the 1970s, and what he really picks up from him is this technique of genealogical construction and an understanding of systems of knowledge as deeply, aligned with, indeed, inseparable from systems of power and domination. Now, these are both creative appropriations of Nietzsche, but they are put to a politics that he would have been fundamentally opposed to, whether we're talking about a politics of difference that is about inclusion and toleration and even sentimentality towards those who have been dispossessed, and he would have had nothing but contempt for Foucault's attempt to read genealogy or or to use genealogy to demonstrate why it is that there are still too many forms of coercive and domineering aristocratic power in society.

So if we're going to interpret Nietzsche the way or use Nietzsche the way that these figures do, that's fine, right? I have no problem with that. But we should be very aware that we are appropriating tools and setting them to purposes that the inventor himself would have been rabidly, and I do mean rapidly opposed to. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that that's really important to remember. One of the ways that Nietzsche has had some influence outside of politics,

and I know this is sort of outside of the context of what you're focusing on in this collection of essays, but is his influence on the psychoanalytic tradition that, you know, kind of reached a pinnacle and Freud and then Jung, and both of which, you know, incidentally were conservatives politically for what that's worth. Do you have any thoughts on that psychological track from Nietzsche to Freud and Jung and kind of laying out what the influence there exactly was? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's no doubt that Nietzsche had a profound influence on psychoanalysis

and all of its labors, right? Not just on the more conservative or liberal takes of Jung and Freud, but also on radical psychoanalysts like Eric Fromm, Lacan, you name it, right? But just to give one example of how it is that he influenced the tradition, in the genealogy of morals, Nietzsche has this extraordinary analysis of how it is that guilt and the conscience were invented. And he argues that guilt and a conscience aren't natural to human beings. There's something that had to be drilled into us, as it were, by the propagation of slave morality.

And once guilt and conscience were invented, Nietzsche actually thinks that it had a kind of dual effect. On the one hand, it actually benefited humankind. And this is one of the few things that he commends about Christianity because the inventions of the guilt and the conscious consciences, or conscience, excuse me, deepened the human soul by instilling in us a sense of reflection on our inner life that he didn't think was present before. On the other hand, he points out how the creation of guilt and the conscience also weakened our kind of vital instincts and undermined this drive for superiority that you could find in antiquity. So the deepening of humankind can also mean we become more impotent in the face of ourselves. And this is something that he is deeply critical of, particularly because he associates it with the spread of slave morality or herd morality. And you can see how this notion of the invention of an internal source of judgment would be very influential on people like Freud when he's developing his concepts of the super ego, for example, as a kind of moral lawgiver in the conscious mind that punishes people for giving in to the instincts of the id.

Yeah. I always find that fascinating, that line of, you know, intellectual ancestry going back to Nietzsche and up through various forms of psychoanalysis. I've always sort of been interested in that. So let's go ahead and get back to Christianity because I think this is something that I find very interesting. And, you know, as my political progression has developed, I used to be very much one of these crass new atheists in my youth and have definitely come around to seeing the importance of the religious impulse and finding beauty in the traditions of Christianity and Islam and Buddhism, etc. But all of that aside, how does Nietzsche's criticisms of Christianity dovetail with his criticisms of liberal democracy and socialism? And you can kind of turn this also into what Nietzsche thought of communism and Marxism and so far as he had any engagement with it. Well, he didn't have very much good to say about it, but absolutely, right?

So here I think it's important to talk a little bit about the left critique of religion, right? So leftists have long been critical of organized forms of religion. And I think this is a tradition that really dates back to the French Revolution, because reactionaries would often appeal to this combination of throne and altar revanchism to try to agitate against progressive ideas. Somebody likes to say Joseph de Maestra is exemplary here, right, where he talks about how it is that these universalistic rationalistic impulses that are motivating the French revolutionaries need to be checked by instilling in people this kind of dogmatic faith that God has consecrated the institutions into which they are born with a sacral quality, especially the monarchy, and they are engaged in, and this is his term, a satanic kind of rebellion if they wage war against the Achean regimes of Europe. Europe. So that's a very typical kind of reactionary, progressive binary. Nietzsche breaks out of this fundamentally by saying, no, no, no, no. Religion is not the handmaiden of reaction, and it isn't

going to serve as a long-term glue that will hold hierarchical societies together. Christianity is fundamentally an ultra-egalitarian creed, and the various forms of modern radicalism that are emerging are just its secular offspring. So his shorthand definition of liberalism, sorry, socialism is Christianity with the residue of Rousseau. This is in the will to power. And in the Antichrist, he says that the anarchist, the socialist, and pretty much every other kind of radical you can think of, all share this genealogical link to Christianity. And this is a quote from the Antichrist where he says, the rabble of socialist, the apostles of Chandela, who undermine the working man's instinct, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existent, who make

him envious and teach him in revenge. Wrong never lies in unequal rights. It lies in the assertion of equal rights. What is bad, but I have already answered, all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge. The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry. Right. So there's a very clear example of him kind of conflating anarchism, labor movements, and socialism with this kind of Christian ethic, right? And he thinks the same about democracy, liberalism, more or less every other egalitarian doctrine that has emerged since, at the very least, the French Revolution,

probably going back to the 17th century. And so he argues that in order to permanently get rid of liberalism, socialism, democracy, anarchism, and all these egalitarian movements, we need to tear up their Christian root and replace slave morality in Christian society, with master morality and radical aristocracy. Yeah, so there's lots of thoughts to say here.

Well, one way to go is, insofar as there's this criticism of Christianity's egalitarianism, giving rise to democracy and socialism, and people still, especially in the United States, on the political right, who love to claim exclusively, you know, their dominion over Christianity as a conservative, you know, family value-oriented philosophy. Can we take this Nietzschean critique, turn it on its head, and accept it that yes, the communists are the true Christians, and the left should fight on the religious terrain to our own political benefit to claim the tradition, a little, I mean, claim, you know, to lay stake to the radical egalitarian impulse within Christianity and the message and life of Jesus Christ against our political others? Well, you know, I thought about that at points, and I do think there is definitely strategic terrain, where the left could,

reclaim a kind of egalitarian Christianity to its benefit. And I don't think that's just hypothetical either. It's important to note that the most successful radical movement in the United States in the 20th century was the civil rights movement, right, which had a Christian basis, but was also mobilized to demand things like civil rights, obviously, for people of color, which have been denied for far too long. And it's important to note that MLK was also a democratic socialist. And had he lived, who knows what might have happened. He might have helped popularize Democratic socialism in the United States aligned with this kind of Christian ethic and created a new kind of political coalition to demand racial and economic equality and democracy.

So that's kind of my alternate history, right? I do think that we need to be careful, though, because Marx is absolutely correct that religion can very often be mobilized into fetishistic or idolatrous forms that serve to conciliate individuals to the conditions into which they are born, rather than to mobilize them into action for demanding a more just world. And this is related back to his famous characterization of religion as the heart of a heartless world and the opiate of the masses. If the left is going to align itself with a kind of religious ethic to demand social change,

we need to be very clear that this is going to be a liberatory kind of Christianity, not a Christianity that is intended to conciliate and placate to the world as it exists right now. Right. Yeah, treating it as like a vehicle of liberation of all the oppressed as opposed to a salve to make, you know, these unhuman conditions more bearable. You can see this even happening with, you know, corporate America's attempted co-option of things like the yogic and Buddhist traditions where those things are just completely stripped of all their depth and used as like little ways to make yourself feel better in the deteriorating conditions of late capitalist American society. And so I totally agree that we should always be on a lookout for that. But one of the things I really appreciate about you and that echoes some sentiments that I've uttered before is I think I've heard you say, and I think you were alluding to it there, that MLK, in the American tradition, it's probably the closest thing to a Jesus-like figure that the United States has had. And, of course, being that figure, he was also crucified by a white supremacist society that wasn't, you know, accepting of his ideas, showing, I think, in a lot of ways how if Jesus really came back in modern America and he took the form of the marginalized, of the vulnerable, of the oppressed, it would be people who claim to operate in his name that would be his most vociferous critics and haters. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. I don't know if you ever seen the show The Boondocks. Yeah, it's an amazing show. they actually had a funny episode come out in the 2000s where MLK wasn't killed he woke up from a comma in Bush's America

and he does his normal thing of arguing for peace and love and you know inclusion and it's right-way media that leaps on him immediately and denounces him most voicelessly so absolutely I think that's what would happen I've always said if he came back

he would be crucified again but this time by people with crosses hanging around their necks 100%. One of the things you do on Twitter that I really like is that you bring this sort of fight to the figures like Jordan Peterson and Dinesh D'Souza, which really try to claim this Christianity as if it is in the life and message of Christ, as if it is this bulwark against quote unquote wokeism. Can you talk a little bit about the ways that Peterson and DeSuzza sort of try to employ Christianity in this right-wing way and how they get Nietzsche's criticisms wrong in the process trying to claim Nietzsche while. also trying to claim Christianity? Yeah, well, I think that this just testifies to the extraordinary laziness, even on the intellectual right at this point, or the so-called intellectual right, precisely because from Nietzsche's standpoints, people like Desoza and Jordan Peterson

really don't have any kind of balls, right? They're not willing to take the force of his critique on board because they want to have it both ways, right? On the one hand, you can also put Douglas Murray into this category, particularly this book The War on the West. On the one hand, they want to appropriate Nietzsche's critique of the last. left, particularly its denunciation of last men and his characterization of the left is motivated by Rizantima.

So, for instance, in his book, United States of Socialism, Dinesh De Sousa appeals to Nietzsche to say, even if it was the case that socialism could work, like it seems to work pretty well in the Nordic countries, why would we want to live there, right? Do we want a society of last men named Sven? It's this kind of crappy joke about Nordic social democracy, right? And Peterson, of course, will sit there and say, the left is motivated by this pronounced sense of Rizantimae towards the established order. It should be grateful for what it is given to them.

And if you put these people who are motivated by these feelings of Rizantemaa in power, they're to become little Stalinists. What Nietzsche would say to them all is, if that is what you are genuinely committed to, preventing a society of last men for emerging, or chastening these egalitarian movements motivated by Rizantan, then what you have to understand is, of course, these are all offshoots of this fundamentally Christian ethic.

Because in many respects, the woke activists are more Christian than the conservatives that people like Jordan Peterson and Judexasusa claim to speak for, right? Because the woke activists, civil rights activists, social justice warriors, whatever you want to call them, really take this Christian message that the wretch of the earth will know that God is on their side very seriously. and they think it's important to achieve equality and toleration and love and fraternity in this life now,

because things should be on earth as they should be in heaven, right? An Nietzsche would say we should totally reject that ideal, and to do so again, we need to reject the Christian ethic and go back to a more aristocratic kind of master morality that'll be rabidly anti-egalitarian and anti-Christian in its outlook and develop a new kind of value system that is appropriate to that. So, yeah, that's really interesting, and I think you've even made the point that, you know, even the social justice warriors, quote, unquote, are those people just fighting for basic equality in a highly unequal society?

Even when they are explicitly atheist agnostics or non-Christians, they're actually acting in the world in a way that is much more Christian than these pious right-wingers who, you know, are talking endlessly about their Christianity, but yet operate in the world in a way that is anathema to the message of Christ themselves. And I always thought that was very interesting. Yeah, I mean, a good example that I bring up in my class at points is people when they hear the Wretcher of the Earth on the left right now will almost invariably think of France Fonan. And understandably, right? The Rhetter of the Earth is a great book of Post-Colongot theory, right? But what they forget is that Phonon was appealing to the Gospel of Matthew, which is where this quote comes from, where Jesus says, go out there and look upon the lame, the lebers, the deaf, the poor, and the dead.

these are the people who will know the wretched of the earth that God is on their side, and I'm paraphrasing here. And that's a great example, for Nietzsche, at least, of this egalitarian basis to Christianity. And it's why Christianity needs to go, along

with all its egalitarian offshoots, including people like Phenon, of course. Yeah, yeah, of course. So you've been kind of talking about what Nietzsche's outlines of the solution to the problem of the death of God, and the subsequent nihilism would be, certainly we've made you know we sort of criticize these sort of people who claim that they can maintain Christianity and a Nietzschean criticism can you kind of flesh out a little bit more in aristocratic radicalism and I know Nietzsche also probably wasn't very specific in what would come after but insofar as you can tell based on your readings what is sort of Nietzsche's ultimate solution to the problem of the death of God and nihilism just to make it as clear as we can yeah I mean it's a great question and here I think he really didn't have a system

answer to it. He still seemed to be working things out when he descended into madness. And of course, as many people know, his planned opus, the will to power that was intended to offer both a systematic critique of all systems and layout. A kind of new vision for the future was never completed. And what was published under that name was a kind of collection of notes assembled by a sister to try to present him as a more nationalist or proto-Nazi thinker than he actually was. But, you know, Nietzsche does offer some clues. about what he thinks an aristocratic radical will look like individually, even if he doesn't lay out how he is going to mobilize politically or what kind of great politics will advance.

One of his most important observations is that an aristocratic radical isn't going to look like an aristocrat from the era of master morality, somebody like Achilles, because while Nietzsche is very admiring of the kind of Homeric aristocrat, ideal, this person who is virile, violent, consciously prideful. It's also the case that Nietzsche thinks, A, too much time has passed for us to go back to that, and B, these kind of Homeric aristocrats lack individual depth to them. They have no real internal life. If you read somebody like Homer or Virgil, Aeneas and Achilles and Odysseus are pretty flat figures. They might be intelligent, but they have no rich inner life and no capacity for self-reflection.

They have kind of two modes of interacting with the world. I'm the biggest and the baddest, and everybody will bow before me, and this kind of austere magnanimity, right, where they're content with what they've achieved for a while and are resting. What Nietzsche wants instead is, as you close at one point, a kind of Caesar with the soul of Christ, an aristocrat who is prideful, who is violent, who is terrifying, to the masses below him, but nonetheless has an inner depth to them,

the soul of a poet, if you want to put it that way, right? And who consequently is consciously reflective of the value system that they are bringing into the world, rather than just living a kind of value system by instinct, if that makes sense. So Caesar with the soul of Christ, I think, is the best summation that he gives of the kind of personality that he's looking for for her Superman. Yeah, super, super interesting stuff there. I know some weirdos in the modern right sort of think in these terms or try to think in these terms.

I think like a Peter Thiel is trying to beat a Caesar with the soul of Christ, but he's neither a Caesar, nor does he have the soul of Christ apparently. But he has the ego to think of himself as something in that vein, though. Oh, absolutely. And I mean, this is where I think we should be critical of Nietzsche. I mean, Nietzsche was aware, as you put it, that bad things would be done in his nose. name. I'm not sure if he was aware of quite how many bad things would be done in his name. But look, you know, any philosopher that puts forward a convincing view that there are Superman out there is going to attract personalities that think, boy, boy, do I fit that ideal,

right? Nobody who reads Mitch's book and is convinced by them comes away with the conclusion that, oh, I guess I belong in the herd, and I'm destined to be enslaved because I'm really not all that great, and so I'll await the Superman with a kind of trepidation and fear, right? They're going to read it and think, well, whatever it is that I believe and I do conforms to this model. And as you pointed out, most of the people who do aspire to this kind of Nietzschean standard seem to fall really fall short of it. Sorry, seem to fall very short of it. And I'd like to point out humorously that that includes Nietzsche himself, right? He was often aware of how the philosophical ideals we project into our work, often very contrary to the way we ourselves

live. And if you read Nietzsche's book, or books, and he presents these images of resentment-free, strong, healthy, virile masculinity, that's very contrary to who he himself was, which was a kind of nerdy, sick, involuntarily celibate kind of guy who spent most of his time getting involved in nebish and nerdy discussions about Christianity with no one but himself, because nobody else wanted to listen to him. You know, Nietzsche himself fell into this pattern that his work would later generate. Yeah, I find that very, very amusing, very funny. It is.

Absolutely an in-cell and was angry about it. Yeah, I mean, this is one of the things that I point out, right? And my new book, actually, that you probably like on the political right, which is Nietzsche will often say things like, we should evaluate the quality of a philosopher's work by how healthy it is, sometimes even in this very physical sense. And the irony of this is that he's very critical of Plato, as I'm sure you know, right? He sometimes characterizes Christianity as Platonism for the masses in the negative sense. The funny thing is that Plato was actually an aristocrat. He was a wrestler and apparently extremely strong and very handsome.

And he was this, you know, very virile, very powerful thinker who generated all kinds of new ideas, right? The irony being, of course, that Nietzsche was a sick little man, who's apparently only sexual contact came from a prostitute that he contracted. syphilis from. So you don't get much more of an inversion than that. Right. Yeah. Talk about the psychologist needing a psychologist. Yeah. But I also think your point about when you read Nietzsche and then sort of like the less profound forms of like right wing thinkers like Evela or Anne Rand, there's this sense in which you feel as a reader if you're taking on board their stuff non-critically or, you know, sort of going with it, that you're in on a secret and that you are special. Evela talks about,

you're an aristocrat of the soul, rebelling against modernity. I mean, really, you're just a dork with no friends, but you can read that and feel like I'm in on a secret, and I am one of these special ones. And that is a very compelling strategy for any author to take, because it does work, and it does make the reader feel as if they're in on something and that they are, you know, fundamentally unique. Oh, absolutely. Anisha isn't the only right-wing author that accomplishes this, as you point out. I mean, his work isn't intended to be flattering to its audience. In fact, he consistently points out that you should not misunderstand him and you should read him carefully and perhaps even critically, right? I mean, he himself chooses a desire for disciples

because he sees disciples them as a kind of crass status. If you really understand Nietzsche, you'll kind of approach his work like Wittgenstein approached the tractatus, right? His works are a ladder that you rise to the summit of and then you cast it aside and you will your own value system. But, you know, other far-rightly. authors that will do this, sometimes are much more self-consciously flattering of their audience. Iron Rand, I think, he brought up as a great example, where everyone who reads her work, particularly businessmen, thinks of themselves as Howard Roker, John Galt, right? Especially people like Peter Till, right?

And I think that she intended that in a way that Nietzsche didn't, or certainly she wasn't afraid of the checks that people would cash for her when she flattered businessmen in this way. Right. Yeah, absolutely. One thing you brought up throughout this episode, you touched on it, is resentment. And this is, I don't really know much about how this functions in Nietzsche's philosophy. Can you kind of talk about resentment and how he thinks about it and how that might be applied to his criticisms of the left and maybe the right as well? Sure. Well, Resonty Mal is a key Nijian term.

It's probably most developed in the genealogy of morals, although you'll see references to it elsewhere. And I think that actually ContraPoints did a fantastic video on this. So I'll just deploy her interpretation of it, where she says, we need to understand that Nietzsche does not mean by Rizantima what most people think he means by it. Most people think that what he means by Rizantimau is envy, right? And envy just means that if you have something that I want, it's going to stir kind of covetous in me, covetousness in me, right? I want what you have.

And what contra points out, and I think Nietzsche would agree with this, is in this respect, envy can actually be a productive emotion to have. have, right? If you sit there and you can lift more weights than I do or you have more money than I have, that might actually motivate me to hit the gym a little bit harder or to work an extra five hours a day at the office, right? And so envy can spur me to higher forms of activity or greater efforts. Resentimo is not like that, right? Resentimo follows the logic of if I can't have something, then nobody can have it. Or I begrudge you the fact that you have something that I don't have and I want to take it away from you so that you will suffer

and I don't need to feel like you're inferior any longer and this is a very negative toxic emotion that Nietzsche associates first and foremost with a yearning for revenge right so Nietzsche says that slave morality and Christianity emerged out of this desire for revenge on the part of the slaves against the ruling classes of the time and because the slaves lacked the gall to actually revolt against their masters because that could lead to their death, what they did instead is turn these desires for revenge creatively. And he points out this is an extraordinarily creative act into a moral system that was the inversion of the master morality that was present at the time. So he says, look, what the slaves did is say that what the masters

think of as pride is actually a sin. And what they think of, as power is actually also sinful because it's associated with violence and the infliction of pain. And what Nietzsche says is incredible is they were so successful at this creative act of turning their desire for revenge against the aristocrats into a moral system that they eventually convinced the aristocrats themselves that they were bad men and that they needed to cede their power to the herd. And this is where you get Christianity emerging from.

And it's also Nietzsche thinks why doctrines like socialism, liberalism, and democracy can have such a grip on the imagination, even of the ruling classes themselves, who are all too willing to cede a lot of the moral high ground to the left in a way that Nietzsche thinks is noxious. One of the problems I feel like I see in, you know, Nietzsche's sort of stressing on, you know, these elites and the Uber Menches and these aristocrats is fundamentally better human beings and above the herd, whether you're talking to. in feudalism or you're talking under capitalism is that when you look at the ruling class elites they're they're not that impressive they're not these super intelligent forging their own moral systems and super talented and multi-dimensional they're often stumbling failing upwards have families with connections i mean feudalism is literally you know hereditary lines of domination and you know somebody's fail son is now the king of the fucking land and under capitalism it's like the kid of the rich privileged kid of, you know, wealthy parents with good connections, getting to a good

school, fail upward, and now they're running the government or running big corporations or whatever. So I just always thought that like, you know, it'd be a lot more convincing if the ruling class elites were these obviously better people, but in so many ways they're inferior to like working class people just getting by with profound moral intuitions and deep wisdom that can sometimes not even be fully articulated, et cetera. I find those people to be more impressive, but that just might be my leftism coming out and shaping the way I think about people. What do you think about all that? Oh, no, I think you're 100% right. I mean, there's a really funny line, and Adam McKay's don't look up. Adam McKay is a great Democratic socialist

filmmaker, where Jennifer Lawrence is talking to a bunch of people about these different conspiracy theories about what the ruling class is doing, and she's like, listen, these people are way too stupid to pull off the kind of plans that you're thinking about. There's not some grand conspiracy here to do something that you aren't expecting. They're really just motivated by the crassest kinds of human greed, and they have no idea what they're doing because their selfishness blinds them even to the reality of the situation, right? And that's been my experience with a lot of people who think of themselves as part of the ruling class, right? And I think that's the kind of irony of this flattering that Nietzsche's work can affect on its audience

is just as you mentioned, that the irony is that a lot of people who present themselves a preen as UberMensch really don't look all that impressive when you just peek a little bit beneath the surface, right? Think about somebody like Elon Musk, or better yet, Peter Thiel, right? Peter Thiel will often use this kind of Randian language of Superman with a bit of a libertarian flavoring to it. And my response to that is, boy, do you really think there's anything all that creating? and a value system that says I'm a rich man and I should be richer and I also don't particularly like

woke culture or unions because they eke into my profit margins and they might impose some kind of limitations on what it is that I'm going to do just doesn't impress me all that much right but I think this actually gestures to a deeper point about how it is that we think critique Nietzsche

from the left which I'd like to talk about if we have a few seconds but before that I know you have a few questions left. Well, you can go ahead and go into that. I mean, just to base, bounce off what you're saying, just to reiterate, he didn't live up to his standards and the elites that he would say are the best chance at living up to his standards, haven't, and still do not live up to his standards. But yeah, you can go ahead and get into that point, though I'm very interested. Sure. Now, I want to point out, I think that Nietzsche was a genius, right? And I think that it's important for a leftist to recognize that the political right is capable of mobilizing

men and women of great talent to intellectually defend its projects, right? And this is why I think it's so important to do what people like Cory Robin, for example, are doing or Wendy Brown are doing, which is to offer incisive critiques of right-wing intellectuals like Nietzsche and his various kinds of right-wing disciples, right? And I'm very happy that more of us seem to be doing that, and I'm looking forward to a great deal more of it. But in terms of the sharpest critique of Nietzsche that I've encountered from a leftist, is probably from Wendy Brown and her book

In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, which I strongly recommend everybody read because it's just a brilliant book by a brilliant political theorist who I think has a lot more to offer us in the future. But what she says is that Nietzsche is absolutely right. She does offer him disconcession in arguing that there are

degenerate forms of left-wing politics that are motivated by resentment rather than a sincere desire for justice. And leftist movements that are motivated by resentment very quickly turned reactionary or they become impotent and disgraced. And that's why we need to reject those kinds of impulses, even if they can be very powerful motivators at any given moment, right? That's going to eat the rich mentality. But the more important thing that she does in this book is offer a critique of Nietzsche by saying that Nietzsche is really one-sided in his

analysis of Rizantimau. He assumes that Rizantimau will only ever emerge in the herd, right? and consequently be aligned with and motivating left-week movements. And what she points out, and I think that we should all be familiar with this post-Trump, is the fact that reactionary, conservative, and right-week movements are profoundly motivated by Rizantemaugh, right? Just two examples that we can talk about are think about the reactions that you saw online to Biden's forgiveness of student debt. Some conservatives tried to say this is too expensive.

Some conservatives tried to say, well, you know, There are other ways that we could go about fixing a broken system, which can include just not letting anybody go to college, which is kind of, I would imagine, DeSantis would want. But the most compelling conservative responses to student debt forgiveness was, I had to pay for my college, and they should have to also, right? And that is very much a statement of raison d'Iman, right? That is a statement of, if I didn't get something, they don't get to have it either, right? If I had to suffer by paying for school, they should have to endure that as well, right? An even more telling example, though, would be George Wallace, who was the governor of Alabama during the civil rights era. Wallace famously said segregation now, segregation forever, right?

But one of the most remarkable threats that he made when he was told, one way or another, desegregation is coming to Alabama's public schools. He said, okay, fine. if we have to integrate public schools then I'll just destroy the public school system nobody will go to public schools any longer and that way there'll be no reason to integrate or there'll be nothing to integrate, excuse me that is a remarkable statement of Rizantema

of a burn the world down in order to prevent egalitarian reform from taking place and you see all kinds of instantiations of right-wing Rizantimant today in fact I would say that it is Qua Brown, the primary motivation driving a lot of right-wing politics in the 21st century. Yeah, I completely agree.

You know, another example of that is the drained pool politics, you know, where there's this, for those that don't know, during the civil rights period, you know, black people were legally allowed to engage in public institutions like the public pool, the community pool. And obviously, we've all seen those horrific pictures of like white people pouring bleach into the pool with like black children swimming around and one of the solutions to this problem from the reactionary right was say fuck it there's no more public pools we're closing them all down now we have private pools you have to pay and you can get a membership and we get to approve you or not to come swim at the pool and that that politics which actually ends up hurting right white people at the

lower rungs of society but that is a fundamental part of right wing politics to this day and a lot of libertarianism, I would also argue, partially emerges out of this realization that the federal government taking steps to ensure equality and help people out, that is really the problem. But instead of saying we're deeply racist and don't want poor black people to have the same stuff that we have, they're going to talk about big government tyranny, please don't tread on me, you know, that sort of stuff. And you can see how libertarianism emerges out of that. I mean, even out of slavery, the libertarian argument or right-wing arguments are like, It wasn't about slavery.

It was about, you know, our freedoms as the South to run our societies how we wanted and stuff like that. So do you more or less agree with that? Oh, absolutely, right? I think you see so many instantiations of this that there are volumes of work that you could produce on the Rizantema-driven basis of writing politics, both in the 21st century and beforehand, right? But how this bears on Nietzsche is that Brown points out that if it is the case that a resentment-driven politics is, the unhealthy politics that is going to be conducive to the most crass kinds of culture, then a left Nietzschean view would be to say that actually we need to be very critical of our

wannabe aristocrats because they are making our culture more degraded than it would need to be than it would otherwise be. And I think that she's absolutely correct about this. And it's a short book. I strongly recommend all your leaders listen to it if they get the chance. Again, that's in the ruins of neoliberalism by Wendy Brown, because I think that it's just a prophetic analysis. And it demonstrates really sharply how it is that someone can engage Nietzsche seriously on the left, draw insights from him

while offering the deepest kinds of criticism of the aristocratic inclinations of his work. Absolutely. I'm going to read that book as soon as I can. Sounds very interesting, and I would obviously love to have Wendy Brown on the podcast at some point. A couple more questions as we're wrapping up here. I mean, I know you just sort of answered this from the direction of Wendy Brown's criticisms and solutions, but is there anything else, anything at all, that those of us on the egalitarian left can take or learn from Nietzsche, even if it's just those parts of his works that maybe aren't concerned with politics or those parts that diagnose the problems of nihilism without taking on board any of his solutions or half solutions, or is even that ultimately a dead end in your opinion? No, I think there are a lot of things that a thoughtful leftist could pick up from Nietzsche's analysis, right?

Again, sometimes people send me really angry emails, and I kind of get why being like, well, you want to cancel Nietzsche, or you're saying that Nietzsche or something like that, right? And that's not what I'm saying at all, and I'm certainly not saying don't read Nietzsche. In fact, I think that most people who read Nietzsche will get a lot from it, including me, right? What I'm saying is that if you're a leftist who is reading Nietzsche, be aware that, that you are going to be appropriating tools that he develops and putting them to uses that he himself did not intend. And as long as you are cognizant about that, there's nothing wrong with appropriating bits of his work

to agitate for egalitarian causes. So two of the most important examples of this, I think, again, are the adoption of the genealogical method that has been extremely helpful for leftists in analyzing the integration of systems of knowledge with systems of power. This is, you know, a very fruitful line of analysis that was initiated by Foucault, inspired by Nietzsche, and that has generated some of the most exciting theoretical work on things like the carousal state in the 20th and 21st century.

So that's a great example of picking up on this Nietzschean technique of genealogy and using it to theorize about issues in a way that I don't think we could have if it wasn't for that influence, right? Another thing that I think Nietzsche teaches the left that has been less appropriated has been the centrality of a certain kind of religious ethic to the outlook of progressive movements. And I think that this is something that has long been marginalized in left discourse, probably because of the ubiquity of the Marxist critique of religion, which I want to say, again, has a lot of power to it. So I'm not being critical of it here, right? But, you know, if we take Nietzsche seriously, one of the things that has left us we have to acknowledge is that there is a kind of religious basis to a lot of what we're arguing for, or at least there could be. And I don't think that that should even be necessarily controversial, right? I mean, one of the great points that Pollyani makes in his fantastic book, The Great Transformation, is that the first socialist in the world were probably Quakers in 17th century England who mobilized a Christian ethic to our world. argue for a more fair approach to the economy that put the poor at the center of economic

analysis and a political life. So I think that there's a lot of fruitful work to be done here. A great book on this subject that I strongly encourage people to read is Gary Dorian's massive history of democratic socialism in the United States that really looks at how it is that Christian socialism was important and inspiring a lot of American radical movements. but you know there's just so much more to be said about this that i'll just stop there yeah go ahead very nietzschean idea right look at the centrality of religion to egalitarianism right yeah the famous quaker that jumps to mind um that was arguing for a robust social democracy early early on in the american um republic was thomas pain yeah you know no coincidence he comes out of a quaker

background and then john brown i think he was a calvinist but still motivated to do what he did um out of his you know christian faith and everything all his explanations on why he was doing what he was doing where all came back to his belief in the basic message of Jesus and what his duty was as a Christian on this earth. And so there's lots of stuff throughout our history, even just American history

that we can look at and see, you know, this connection here. And, you know, take that up on board and be proud of it. Yeah. Or even look at probably the most influential Democratic Socialists in the United States today, aside from Bernie Sanders. Sorry, Democratic Socialist intellectual is Dr. Cornow West. Yes. Right.

Dr. West is a remarkable figure with a truly expansive view of what politics could be, not to mention extraordinarily erudite, right? And he makes no bones about the Christian basis for his agitation for socialism and indeed for racial equity, right? And I think that his approach is a very inspiring one. I'll have a few critiques of it here and there, but he could serve as a model of a kind of radical intellectual that takes on board this Nietzschean claim that there's an association between Christianity and egalitarianism. but doesn't do so in a crass or unsophisticated way

and also acknowledges that religion can very much be used as a tool of reaction and conservatism. Yeah, absolutely great example. I love Cornell West. He's an influence on me. I'm a bit more of a shit-talker, but like the way that he is so able to just treat everybody with deep human decency first and foremost

and the way that that opens up his opponents to his critiques and to his ideas instead of putting them on their back foot and in a defensive posture is something we can all learn from. and he's wonderful with that yeah all right my friend well one more fun bonus question before we wrap up here and this is why did nietzsche go crazy was it simply an impact of late stage syphilis or was his philosophical musing so profound that even his own brain couldn't

ultimately take him and snapped under the pressure uh it's a good one i'm gonna go with the second one. I'm in a good mood today, right? You know, he was a very complicated guy. I think that he had a really rich inner life that nobody could have mastered successfully, really, certainly not without the aid of an awful lot of drugs and alcohol. And, you know, it's no coincidence that he loved opium, right? And I think it's really telling that in his last sane act, I don't sure people know this, but Nietzsche was walking down the street and he saw a master whipping his horse really violently, right? And Nietzsche apparently ran. in front of the horse got beaten the crap out of and fell weeping with this animal in his

arms, right? And then he, you know, never had a sane thought again. But it is really telling that a philosopher who railed against pity, compassion, equality, all these things that we associate with the left, and his last sane act demonstrated a profound sense of sympathy towards the least among us, in this case an animal that was just being horribly mistreated by its master. And I don't want to suggest that there's some kind of deathbed conversion or on his part here. But I think it shows that he was a guy with infinities and multitudes within him. And I have a lot of sympathy for him. I really wish that he'd gotten to live the life in some respects that he was aspiring to.

It's a shame that he didn't. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And the ultimate irony of his last act being, you know, seeing a master whipping a herd animal and going to, out of peer empathy, the side of the herd animal is deeply ironic given the rest of his philosophy, as you're saying. So I think that's absolutely fascinating. Yeah, it's a beautiful act. All right. Well, the book is Nietzsche and the Politics of Reaction, essays on liberalism, socialism, and aristocratic radicalism. Thank you so much, Matt, for coming on. I always

enjoy your work in general. I always enjoy your voice in general, whether it's on interviews or on Twitter. And I love having these conversations with you. It's always a great time. You're welcome back anytime. But before I let you go, what recommendations would you offer to someone who wants to wrestle with the work of Nietzsche, maybe find a way into his work, and then also where listeners can find you and your work online? Sure. Well, you can find me at Matt Paul Prof. And like I said, if people don't want to get the essay collection, because it is super expensive, and I understand that. Don't send me angry emails. I don't make the price, right? My publisher does. The best thing to do would be to probably contact their local library, and I'm sure that

you could get a copy, floated your way, right? I'd also really encourage people to check out my new book. This is a shameless plug. The Political Right and Equality, turning back the tide of egalitarian modernity, because it's kind of my bigger take on the political right. My longest book so far, and I'm pretty proud of it coming out this summer for Rutledge.

But in terms of what people can look at if they're interested in learning more about Nietzsche, I'll just throw out a few books. So really recommend the Wendy Brown book. Can't recommend that enough in the ruins of neoliberalism. I would also suggest my good friend Ronald Beaner's book, Dangerous Minds, Nietzsche Heidegger, and the alt-right. It's a very short book, really well written, and it does a great job of foregrounding the kind of anti-egalitarian thrusts of Nietzsche and Heidegger's thought, and its influence on people like Dugan and Bannon and so on. If people are really feeling ambitious, like I feel it being really fucking ambitious, you've got a lot of time on your hand.

There's no book that you can read that is better on this topic than Domenico Rosardo's. Nietzsche, the aristocratic radical, or Nietzsche aristocratic radicalism, depending on how it's translated. It's a thousand fucking pages, so don't leap into it without, you know, a big pot of coffee and a lot of time on your hands. But, you know, it's a thousand page read on Nietzsche discussing his alignment with the right. You can't get much more fucking comprehensive than that. And Lesotho does a brilliant job of showing both how Nietzsche is a right-wing thinker and how he is not a conservative thinker, while also situating them in the broader tradition of reaction. Very cool.

I will definitely be on the lookout for that if I can never scrape out the time to read another 1,000-page book. But thank you so much for coming on. This summer, when your new book is released, I'll absolutely be in touch to have you back on to discuss that. Keep up the amazing work, my friend. Yeah, thanks, buddy. Left is best. Thank you for listening. Rev. Left Radio is 100%.

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