Rev Left Radio - The Political Right and Equality: Turning Back the Tide of Egalitarian Modernity

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

Professor Matthew McManus returns to the show to discuss his newest book "The Political Right and Equality: Turning Back the Tide of Egalitarian Modernity" Together they explore over 2,000 years of conservative, anti-egalitarian, and reactionary political thought to get a better understanding of what the political right believes, and where those beliefs come from. They discuss aristotle, the Englightenment, the French Revolution and the reaction it generated, Hegel, Dostoevsky, liberalism and socialism, Heigegger, and how conservative thought evolved throughout the 20th Century.    Check out more of Matt's work HERE Check out our previous episode on the politics of Nietzsche HERE Check out our episode with Corey from Existential Comics on the life and work of Dostoevsky HERE   Outro Song: Rebel Music by Bob Marley and Krayzie Bone ------------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/revleft  

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on the show, Professor Matt McManus, to talk about his newest book, The Political Right and Equality, Turning Back the Tide of Egalitarian Modernity. And in this book, Matt really goes through the long history of philosophical and ideological thought and pulls out, parses out the conservative, the reactionary, right-wing thought processes that have always been sort of present, especially in the Western philosophical tradition and ties modern-day reactionary thought into that deeper philosophical history so as to understand these ideas and deeper levels philosophically and also historically where they come

from. And we go through a lot of history and a lot of different topics and issues. We start, you know, in ancient Greece with Aristotle. We move up through the Enlightenment, talk about figures like David Hume. Of course, we mentioned Marx throughout the episode. Marxism is a, you know, a huge component in our discussion. Talk about the French Revolution. Edmund Burke, Thomas Payne.

We go through Hegel, go up to Dostoevsky, the 20th century right-wing thinkers and, you know, the various different strains of right-wing thought occurring there, how neoliberalism is a product of sort of Cold War anti-communist liberalism in a lot of ways and the sort of liberal anti-communist triumphalism that occurred in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And we talk about figures like Heidegger, like Nietzsche, Dugan, Karl Schmidt, etc. We really cover a large, large historical chunk of time and it's a fascinating, exhilarating right through these thinkers and what they've contributed to modern reactionary and right-wing political thought. So as always with Matt McManus, he's an absolute fountain of philosophical and historical

knowledge. It's always fun to talk with him. And if anything, the only problem is that there's so many things that get brought up in his work and his discussions that I want to take endless detours to discuss. But we keep the car on the road throughout this conversation, and I'm really, really happy with it. Now, I mentioned this many times throughout this episode, and I don't want to be annoying about it. But me and Matt McManus have also done an episode just on the politics of reaction of Frederick Nietzsche. And we did that entire episode, and while Nietzsche makes up a large part of the book that he writes here, we didn't cover it because we have that whole other episode. So if you're interested in that, I'll link to it in the show notes. And you can listen

to that as a compliment to this episode and to fill in that part of the text. Or you can just listen to it as a standalone episode because it was made with that in mind. So I'm really proud of that episode as well. All right. Well, without further ado, here's my conversation with Professor Matthew McManus on his book, The Political Right and Equality, Turning Back the Tide of egalitarian modernity. I'm Matt McManus. I'm a lecture on political science at the University of Michigan. And I'm the author of a couple of different books. Most recently, The Political Right and Equality for Rutledge Press. And I also had a little book that's a tribute to Michael Brooks that came out not too long ago with zero books, a how-to guide to cosmopolitan socialism. Yeah, absolutely. And welcome back to the show. I think this might be your third, if not your fourth time on the show. And we've had you on to talk Nietzsche. We had you on to the show. We had you on to the show. talk about the postmodern streak and modern conservatism. And I think that's it, but it's always a

pleasure to have you on. We always have really in-depth and interesting conversations you and I. Our audience loves it. And today we're going to be talking about your new book, the political right and equality, turning back the tide of egalitarian modernity. And this is actually, and we'll get to this little later, but our last episode on Nietzsche as this aristocratic radical that we did, you know, it kind of feeds into this broader. This is like, That was like one little piece of this broader puzzle that this book is, in a sense. And I'll encourage people later in the episode to check out the Nietzsche episode. I'll link to it in the show notes if you're so inclined.

If you find this conversation at all interesting, you'll almost certainly find that one interesting. But before we do all that, can you just kind of, just to kind of help orient our audience to this book? Can you kind of just tell them what this book's about, what you wanted to accomplish with it, et cetera? Sure. I mean, I love talking to you guys because every time we, chat, it's always about, you know, bad things and nasty people. You know what I mean? One of these days, you know, I'm going to have to come on to talk about, you know, Martin Luther King or, you know, the communist man of bestos. It's something I actually like. But, you know, the main motivation for writing this book was toothful, right? One was purely intellectual. And it's that, as you mentioned,

and I had released a couple of books, saw things like postmodern conservatism. People generally like them a lot, you know, talked about this kind of Jamesonian approach. to postmodern culture, drew a little bit on Mark Fisher to talk about why this leads to reactionary impulses. But the main criticism of those books was I wasn't really taking the arguments of conservatives seriously. It was more like I was pathologizing them as a symptom of postmodern culture and saying that if we resolve the kind of tensions that lead to postmodern culture, these reactionary impulses would go away. Now, some of these were just shitty, you know, bad faith kind of criticisms, but a couple of people actually made them.

you know, with a reasonable degree of seriousness. So I figured in part, well, you know, I'm going to actually take on the political right in a straight face kind of way, right? I'm going to look at their arguments. I'm going to try to present them as best as I can. And then I'm going to offer my criticisms of that, right? No materialist analogous, no pathologization, just real straightforward political theory. The second motivation for writing this book was that I was really inspired by other people who have tried to engage in a similar kind of project like Cory Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind, which is just a brilliant book, I think, or Dodd Herzog's Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders. But I felt that I had my own kind of things to say

about the political right that I wanted to get out there. Most particularly, this idea that the political right is motivated by this desire to affirm recognizably superior people. in any given social system, and to combat any kind of efforts to undermine the status, the prestige, the power, or the wealth of what they consider to be recognized of the least superior people. So, you know, this is my own contribution to really a very active, increasingly active, I've been to say left discourse that looks at right-wing ideas seriously, tries to criticize them and situate them in relationship to our own aspirations on the left. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And one thing you said there was sort of setting aside a

material analysis, which I think in your introduction, you say, I could do, I have done, but that's what leads to some of these people, you know, on the right being like, you're not taking our idea seriously. You're trying to sort of use underlying, you know, political, material, economic conditions to try to explain why these ideas come to the forefront, but can you take our ideas on their own face? Can you take them seriously as ideas? And that's what you kind of say in the intro, like, okay, I'll do that too. And so let's go back and look at these ideas then. And so, yeah, I find it an interesting approach for sure, but again, not to say that you can't or haven't done a more materialist account of these ideas, correct?

Oh, absolutely, right? I mean, Lenin once famously said that whenever you're engaging in any kind of critique, right, you lean on one side or the other, and, you know, either side usually has, you know, a virtue to it, but, you know, they also have defects, right? So my postmodern conservatism book really do engage in a kind of Marxist or broadly left kind of cultural and materialist analysis of why it is that particularly reactionary movements emerge right now because of the conditions of neoliberalism that have been with us since the 1980s. And if people are interested in that kind of stuff, again, I think that it's

really vital to engage in this kind of analysis. So they can check out my books on postmodern conservatism. And I'll probably do something like that again in the future. But this was a much more straightforward political theory. We're just looking at the ideational side of things, type of analysis, which I also do think is valuable because, one, it's important to understand the arguments of the political right as people on the political right understand them, rather than, again, just suggesting that it's all a kind of ideological ploy on their point. And secondly, I also think that if we're able to criticize and rebut the arguments of the political right as they themselves understand them, that will give us a leg up in the struggle for hegemony in

the 21st century. Yeah, definitely. And to sort of say that we've done the same thing, obviously, you know, we consider ourselves a Marxist sort of podcast, our related shows are as well, always engaging in materialist analysis. But we've also sort of taken the ideas on their face as well. We've covered, we did an entire episode on our sister podcast, Red Menace, on Julius Evela's ideas. We did a whole podcast on Carl Schmit's ideas, who appears in this book as well. So, yeah, it's useful in its own right, for sure. Absolutely, right. I really got to check out that of episode, that'd be some fucked up shit there. Yeah, it's wild.

But yeah, and I mean, look, I really think what I'm doing is not at all idiosyncratic. I really think that one of the great things about the left right now is that we are really taking right-winning ideas, seriously, but extremely critically, right? And, you know, there's you guys, there's, of course, you know,

the wonderful, know your enemy podcast, left-a-fill podcast is also doing some really good stuff there. And of course there's all the authors that I mentioned. People like, you know, Corey Robin, you know, being the gold standard with the reaction, I am I. But there's a really good book coming out soon by a Marxist friend of mine, Larry Busk,

on the right-wing mirror of critical theory, talking about how, oddly enough, you know, some of the more pessimistic and anti-Marxist leftists out there are making some very conservative-sounding arguments. And he does a comparison of certain left-wing arguments with the positions of people like Hayek and Schmidt and so on. Really, really good stuff. And really I'm fascinated again to just how rich the left analysis of the right is becoming.

Absolutely, yeah, that's wonderful. Yeah, and I'm genuinely a fan of Know Your Enemy in particular, listen to a lot of their episodes and find it incredibly helpful and useful. So anybody listening who hasn't checked that out, check them out. All right, so let's go ahead and get into your book, though. In your opening chapter, what does it mean to be on the political right? You state, quote, the political right is fundamentally a response to the moral project of modernity, and quote, the political right is simply more comfortable with the idea that people are unequal

and so should be treated unequally, end quote. What is the moral project of modernity? Where does it stem from? And what does it mean to be on the political right today? Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, this is one of the core themes of the book. So, you know, if people want the full flesh out argument, they can check it out. But the abbreviated version is I argue that in the modern world, we tend to take it as axiomatically true that all people are equal, right? I mean, this is such a powerful moral or ideological argument that you can see it expressed in everything from, you know, television programs to movies, to, you know, my undergraduate student work where people, you know, say Jefferson, you know, we call this truth to be self, that all

people have created equal, yada, yada, yada. In fact, it's so obvious to us that people are equal within liberal modernity, that we often forget that for a long time, the very opposite presupposition was the case. If you go back to the thinkers of antiquity, what they consistently stress is that people are, in fact, fundamentally unequal. And unequal, you know, not just in terms of their attributes, but almost in an ontologically significant way. So the book opens with a discussion of Aristotle. And before people get angry, I want to point out that, you know, Aristotle is a magnificent thinker. He was a profound influence on Merck for a lot of good reasons. There's a lot that left can learn from him, right? So what I'm talking about is this Aristotelian mindset that's been

influential on the right. What the Aristotelian mindset held was, look, there are higher and lower orders of being that map onto higher and lower kinds of animals and higher and lower kinds of entities. And similarly, you can map higher and lower kinds of human beings, right? And Aristotle is very expressed about this in the politics, where he says, there's certain kinds of individuals in any given society that possess an extraordinary capacity for a deliberative reason, reaching its apex, of course, and people who are capable of philosophical thought. And these people are supposed to make up your ruling class, or ideally would make up your ruling class. Then, you know, there's a kind of middle rung in society, mostly consisting

of women who possess a certain degree of capacity for deliberative reason, but not very much, right? and these people, you know, are entitled to a degree of autonomy, but, you know, they should be relegated to the private sphere, and they certainly shouldn't be involved in politics. And then he goes on to say that, look, in any given society, there are also people who are completely deficient and deliberative reason, and they should form a natural slave class. You know, their job should be cleaning the toilets and, you know, sweeping the floors, because every society needs something like that, and that's what these people are fit for. And this conception of people as fundamentally unequal, of course, mapped on to various social and political imaginaries. So drawing on the left liberal or social democratic philosopher Charles Taylor, I argued that you take this Aristotelian mindset seriously. And what comes to you is a social imaginary that's predicated on what Taylor calls hierarchical complementarity, which is this idea that society should be seen or conceived as a pyramid, that maps human hierarchies the way. that the universe or nature maps, you know, natural or ontological hierarchies. And every rung

of this pyramid, of course, means the other runs. You know, the people at the bottom, cleaning the toilets and sweeping the floors are necessary in a certain way, in the same way that the ruling class at the top is necessary. But these people are entitled to equal dignity or equal respect in any kind of meaningful sense. You know, there are some people who are intended to be the lords in any given society. And then they're the people who are the serfs. and that's entirely natural, maybe even divinely ordained. And what's emblematic of the story of modernity, amongst other things, because there are a lot of stories about modernity that you can tell.

But what's emblematic about my story, of course, is how this idea that people are fundamentally unequal and that this should map onto society characterized by hierarchical complementarity is replaced by a notion that all people are, in fact, equal, and that our societies should strive to a higher level of inequality socially. Yeah, absolutely. And we're going to get into a lot of that history, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, et cetera. And we talked about this in the episode we did on Nietzsche. But Nietzsche, and correct me if I'm wrong, you know a lot more about him than I do, but would place this shift in human consciousness, this idea that, you know, humans are equal. He kind of placed it at the feet of the rise and the domination of Christianity, which asserts this idea that, you know, that we're all equal in God's eyes. We're all guys. God's children. Is that more or less correct, at least for the Nietzschean diagnosis? Absolutely for Nietzsche, right? So where this idea of human equality came from is widely

debated amongst scholars, right? I would argue that actually the Buddhist got to the idea first, particularly figures like the Buddhist emperor Shogel in the 4th century before the common era, where you advance this idea that look all light, the suffering, all people are inevitably doomed to mortality, and we should demonstrate a degree of compassion and respect for one on that basis. But in the Western tradition, Nietzsche traces the origins of the arguments for equality, of course, to Christianity and Platonism, right? There are different reasons for that. We can get into that more when we talk about Nietzsche. But, you know, in Plato, you find this argument, for example, that even Slates might possess the capacity for deliberative reason.

And this, of course, has a kind of egalitarian thrust to it. Plato also argued that women might have a capacity for deliberative reason. And so gender inequalities could be unjustified. And this kind of emphasis on the entitlement of all people who possess reason to have a say in politics or potentially to have a say in politics, regardless of their initial class situatedness, is of course a threat to an aristocratic outlaw. Christianity, of course, took these ideas and ratifies them far more extensively than Plato had ever been comfortable with, since of course Plato was very hostile, something like democracy, or, you know, expansive equality. Because, you know, for Nietzsche, you know, the fundamental characteristic of Christianity is exactly what the

Gospel of Matthew says, that Christianity is the faith of the wretched of the earth, you know, the poor, the discontent, the subservient. And one day, the wretched of the earth will know that God is on their side when the decadent and prideful kind of rulers are overcome by the the wretched of the earth, and God's kingdom is established instead. So that's kind of Nietzsche's story about where the origins of quality come from. In addition to the Bermudas example, I would also say that the Stoic tradition in Rome, particularly as advanced by Seneca, was very important, since people who've read Seneca will know that the Stoics also advanced this idea that we should reflect upon how equal people are, because everybody is destined to the same edge,

right, emperor or slave, regardless of who you are, we're all going to wind up in the ground. And for the Stoics, when you recognize that it should instill a sense of humility and a sense of cosmopolitan universality in our outlook around our moral obligations to other people. So lots of debates about where the origins of the idea of equality are. I've given you a couple of candidates here. But, you know, if people are really interested in this, it's something that I'm discussing a great life in my new book on the political theory of liberal socialism. That should be out to the next year. Nice. And that's a great segue because we're going to talk about that right now,

but I just wanted to just reiterate. Very interesting that you place some of these seeds of egalitarianism within Buddhism. Obviously, I'm very sympathetic to that idea. Seneca is also my personal favorite Stoic, so I like that as well. But yeah, you mentioned liberal socialism. So before we go further, I'm actually really curious about your distinction between and your unification among liberalism and socialists, liberals and socialists. In this book, you kind of lump them together in various ways, sort of as like a common enemy of the right, which of course makes sense. And I've heard you voice support for the theory of liberal socialism. For many in my audience, that phrase might raise some eyebrows. So of course, in the friendliest way possible,

what do you mean by liberal socialism? How does it differ from Marxism? And what are your thoughts in the relationship between socialism and liberalism in the context of this book? Yeah, I mean, that's a wonderful question. And it's one that my new book is spending pretty much since its entire duration answer, right? So stay tuned. And I hope to give you an even better answer than what I'll do here. But, you know, the short answer is in the political right book. It becomes really clear that for many on, you know, the right end of the political spectrum, there is a deep difference between liberalism and socialism. Both are egalitarian, potentially democratic doctrines. They want to. to reform or upend traditional hierarchies or inhibit the formation of new kinds of hierarchical organization that radicals all the right think would be more attractive, and both need to be confronted and ultimately overturned. And the further on the political right you go, the more this persuasion comes to the fore of their thinking, right? And you know, you don't need to take my word for it. You could just read the writings of somebody like Martin Heidegger, right,

a famous Nazi philosopher, an introduction to metaphysics. We'll talk maybe a little bit more about Heidegger later on, but in introduction to metaphysics, he says liberalism and socialism are metaphysically the same. They're both Enlightenment doctrines that are committed to this idea that all people should be free and equal and materially gratified. Really, the only dispute between liberals and socialists are technical disputes. Marxists think the best way to build a refrigerator and distribute it is this way. liberals think that the best way to build a refrigerator and distribute it is this way. And really for

somebody like Heidegger, he's profoundly unimpressed by this, right? So that's just one example of how the political right, particularly the radical right, will draw a deep symmetry between liberalism and socialism and really just see socialist as liberals, but in a great big hurry, right? Now, my own work menses these distinctions far more carefully because I by no means want to imply that liberalism and socialism are intrinsically connected. I think it's very clear that there are many species of liberalism and, indeed, many species of socialism that are completely incompatible with one another,

and understandably so, right? So, for instance, the militant classical liberalism or what C.B. McPherson calls possessive individualism of somebody like John Locke for a nascent neoliberal, like Ludwig von Misa, RFA Hayek, obviously, all of these liberal approaches are incompatible with the objectives of something like socialism, right? And I spent a lot of time in the book being critical of possessive individualism for exactly these reasons, particularly its contemporary neoliberal formulations.

For the people who don't know, CBN person was the great Canadian kind of Marxist, maybe Marxist, political theorist, author of the classic book, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. That's a sharp critique of Hobbs'Lock and certain kinds of early liberals. But McPherson also argues that starting in the 19th century, you can start to see new forms of liberalism emerge that are not only comfortable with socialist reform, but actually argue that the completion of the liberal project of achieving freedom for all and equality for all requires the adoption of a socialist economic system. And in my new book, Jawswit Mill, it is the figure that I locate as the real originator of the liberal socialist tradition. So many of your listeners might not know this, but Mill, in addition to being a whipping boy for Marx,

which for some good reason, I should add, also argued throughout his blatantly in his late career that he was a socialist, that he was committed to this idea of progressing towards an economy without capital. where firms would be governed by workers, and there would be a state that robustly redistributed wealth, particularly to emancipate the poor from the conditions of material deprivation that he felt they were not responsible for. And in fact, he was very critical of defenders of contemporary capitalism who argued that the poor situation was justified because they had to work hard or they were less rational or less talented, whatever it happens to be. And then from Mill onwards, I go on to discuss people like W.A. Du Bois, John Maynard Keynes, John Rawls,

Chantel Muth, Axel Honath, and a wide variety of other thinkers that I think belong in this liberal socialist tradition. And at the end of the book, I make the case for why I think there's a lot going for liberal socialism in terms of being the political theory that we should adopt. Because I think that achieving a liberal socialism understood by me is the attempt to kind of reconcile certain kinds of liberal political institutions with the democratization of the eponominy. It's an attractive idea. But I also point out that there are serious flaws with it at the end that we don't need to get into because I think that the political theory of liberal socialism as espoused by many of the people I talk about in my new book is deeply flawed and not Marxist enough. So at the end of my new book, I'm going to inject healthy doses of Marxist. into the The Theory of Liberal Socialism to try to fix what I see to be its fundamental defects. Nice. Yeah, very interesting. That's a really interesting sort of intellectual line of ancestry, if you will, that you're drawing there that you're mentioning. So I'm very excited to get that book. And I obviously would love to have you back on to discuss it at length when it does come out. Is it fair to say that in a very simplified sense of the term by liberal socialism? Are you trying to kind of stress the importance of sort of liberal political rights?

while also marrying that to a more robustly socialist economic system with democracy extending into the realm of the workplace and the economy? I think that's a very fair characterization. Yes. So Irving Howe wrote a very good essay on this in the 1970s for DeSept magazine about liberalism and socialism articles of conciliation. And one of the things that he pointed out is that oftentimes, if you were to press socialists to abandon some of their more militant,

kind of anti-bougeois rhetoric, and you ask them, you know, do you really oppose rights to freedom of expression or freedom of religion or freedom of assembly or voting rights? They would say, well, of course, we don't oppose those. If anything, the problem is that bourgeois society doesn't realize those rights sufficiently, right? And in a properly socialist state, they'll be more meaningful and people will enjoy them far more robustly. And I'm sympathetic to that critique, absolutely, right? But I also think that Howe has a point that most socialists accept a lot of these kinds of liberal reforms or liberal rights because there's a lot of value for them in establishing an egalitarian

society. And I also draw very heavily on the writings of a good friend of mine called Igor Shucket Broad, who released a wonderful book for Palgrave-McMillan called Revisiting Marx's critique of liberalism. People can check it out if they want. But one of the things that Shook-Broad stresses is that Marx would probably agree with how, right? If you look at Marx's career, he, of course, was a staunch proponent of defending things like Freedom of Assembly. certainly freedom of the press, right? And as a man whose newspapers were routinely shut down by reactionary states, how could he not be, right?

He also, you know, called for political activism and reforms in order to reduce things like the working day or the working week. So their point that Shuggen-Brog is making is that a complex or nuanced understanding of Marxist's critique of liberalism needs to take these simple, sympathetic commentaries into account and recognize that even he thought, of course, that in any kind of transition to socialism, a socialist state would be stamped with these features of the bourgeois state, which were progressive and emancipatory, and that would be carried on in a transition to a higher form of society. Yeah. Yeah, that's very, very interesting because I actually,

completely, as a Marxist, through and through, I would consider myself as such, I totally agree that in a socialist state, if we could have it in a vacuum or ideally, that, you know, freedom of organization, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, all these things would of course be part and parcel with our vision of the sort of world that we would like to create. And I know you're not disagreeing with this, you know, but of course historically the fact that those haven't necessarily been present in every socialist experiment is in large part, not entirely, but in large part due to imperialist attack. And this fear that, of course, if you open up freedom of the press, freedom of speech, that the imperialist powers are going to use their superior funds and organization to infiltrate

socialist society to undermine it within, which we've seen a million times. And moreover, these capitalist states will constantly use liberal political rights and the lack thereof in some of these places as the battering ram against socialist states without mentioning that the fact that a lot of those liberal political rights might not be present is because it's a defensive posture that these burgeoning socialist experiments need to impose just to protect the ongoing nature of their experiment. And so, you know, absent that imperialist, attack that immediately descends upon socialist experiments, we would, of course, I think, almost no Marxist that I know would disagree that those political rights that are considered liberal

freedom of the speech, freedom of press, et cetera, are completely compatible with our vision of socialism. Yeah, I would absolutely agree. And, in fact, I would turn things around on the imperialist states and say that in many ways we have done a really bad job securing equality of liberal political rights here in the United States, right? take you know the decision Citizens United in 2010, which essentially granted a legal fiction corporations, the right to politic, to spend money to politic, right? This established

extraordinary inequalities in democratic elections being carried out in the United States, because now some of the wealthiest companies in the country are able to hemorrhage that wealth in order to advance their political objectives, which of course, you know, are almost always coinciding with retrenching the power of the capitalist class, right? How could they not be? Right. And I would argue that this is a profound violation of certain basic radical left liberal precepts, which is this idea that society be should be conceived as a union of equal citizens who are partners in the establishment of government and whose rights, particularly their political rights, need to be symmetrical with one another. Otherwise, certainly,

forms of domination are going to reemerge that look very much like the kind of aristocratic forms of social organization that liberals were extremely critical of right and you know citizens united is just one albeit spectacular example of how liberal states are doing a very bad job being committed to radical liberal values but you know we can multiply this indefinitely so i think that rather than pointing out the flaws in other states which you know we should do in some circumstances but we should It's certainly foreground trying to live up to the best formulations of our ideals and our home countries. Definitely.

Absolutely. Well, I have many more thoughts, of course, and I'm sure you do as well. But, I mean, that will come when we have the inevitable discussion about your new book, which I genuinely look forward to. But let's get back to the first one to get a copy. Yeah. Thank you. Awesome.

Let's get back to the one that we're talking about today. And let's just kind of get into that text. So you start your book by going all the way back, as you mentioned earlier, to ancient Greece in the philosophical work of Aristotle. You mentioned him a little bit. You mentioned some core ideas, but can you help orient our audience a little bit more to who Aristotle was,

kind of maybe even his timeline, and then explain sort of his legacy insofar as aspects of it live on in conservative politics today. Absolutely. So Aristotle was, of course, a classical Greek thinker who wrote and, you know, lectured to that,

lectured a lot during, you know, the golden age of antiquity. And Dante referred to him, as the master of those who know in the inferno. He still placed him in hell, but he was in limba, so it wasn't so bad, right, because he was a pagan. But, you know, calling someone the master of those who know as extraordinary praise. But Aristotle, in many ways, deserved it, right? Because he was probably the last man who was educated on every conceivable topic that could be of interest to someone,

and not just educated, but the deeply knowledgeable of any given topic. So, you know, his writings range from physics to biology to aesthetics to politics to metaphysics to ethics and then ethics again commenting on your family structures you name it you know Aristotle has some thinking on it right so again I want to stress that my book does not claim to do justice to the richness and diversity of Aristotle's law and it's also important to note that Aristotle has had a profound influence on many people on the left not least Marx right who regarded him as the kind of summit or the great thinker of antiquity and drew very heavily on some of his ideas about human flourishing, class divisions, and the nature of economic activity in the Greek

world throughout his own work, right? So the view of Aristotle that's advanced is one that's centered around what I call the Aristotelian universe, right, which has proven to be extraordinarily attractive to many conservatives. And the Aristotelian universe that is attractive to conservatives is one where there is a natural or teleological order that is ordained or set, and is not subject to human choice or human alteration, right? Basically, the idea is that everything has its place to play in nature. I'm sorry, everything has its role to play in nature. That's not something you get to choose at something that is determined by nature or by God for you. And to the extent that you perform the role that nature selects for you, you will flourish and society will flourish around

you. But if you deviate from it, that will lead to corruption and ultimately the downfall of society. And this is a very attractive worldview for many because it's an orally systematic teleological universe, anti-materialist in at least some respects, and everyone knows their place within it. Now, whatever you want to argue about the merits of this universe, it's very problematic for many on the left and very attractive for many on the right because it has two characteristics. One, again, is this idea of immutability would suggest that it is not up to individual human beings. It's certainly not up to the lower orders of society to tinker with where nature positions everybody, right? If you are delegated to be a

peasant or surf because you lack deliberative reason, that's just, you know, where you've wound up. And your job is to perform the role that nature has allocated to you and not to question it too much. And secondly, again, is this extremely hierarchical vision that Aristotle projects, you know, on to B generally, but also on to nature and onto humanity more specifically, where, you know, aligned with this view that each one has their place is this idea that some people have more dignity. station selected for them because of their innate capacities or because of what family they're born into or because of their superior virtues, whatever it happens to be. And these people are superior to other human beings and are entitled to form a kind of aristocratic ruling class.

And that, of course, is very attractive to many on the political right. And it's still a major fetish object for them to this day. Yeah. And there's so many different modern right-wing thinkers that take elements of this and promote it. One that jumps to mind, obviously, is like a Jordan Peterson type who... Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, with his lobster stuff, his natural hierarchical order,

this, you know, you're mentioning everybody is given a role and your job is to perform it, and that's kind of summed up in this sort of chintzy phrase, clean your room. And he always is saying, you know, don't you dare criticize society in its hierarchies until you've got everything in your life personally put in all in order?

I mean, he himself doesn't do this, but he tells others to do it. And then, of course, there's even more right-wing people. I forget his name. But who's the Longhouse guy? Oh, that's Long 37. We published an article and first things earlier this year, talking about, you know, how the Longhouse refers to liberal governance, right? But also to woke culture, liberal values, the spread of feminism. Pretty much everything conservatives don't like. And it's established a kind of of hegemony over our culture

that resists the male urge for conquest and hierarchy and striving and of course we need to reanimate this male urge for conquest and striving and hierarchy in order to resist the decadence of the Longhouse and what Lombs calls the

den mothers that rule it. Exactly. So these are just some modern sort of strains of right-wing reactionary conservative thought that you can at least trace back to some elements of Aristotle's philosophy. And we're going forward in time now, skipping many centuries coming up to the Enlightenment. So the Enlightenment has always fascinated me personally. And I spent many of my early intellectual years sort of obsessed with it and many of its main

figures. It inaugurated in many ways modernity and shaped the world that we all inhabit today. Now Marxists often see the Enlightenment as sort of hobbled, distorted, and half-born in the hands of liberal capitalists and imperialists and sort of in colonialists. And want to finish the Enlightenment project through the struggle for socialism and ultimately communism. But it's also just essential in understanding the evolution of right-wing politics. So can you talk about the importance of the Enlightenment in the context of your book? And importantly and particularly help us understand the role that David Hume plays in the two millennia long trajectory of conservative thought. Yeah, of course. So one of the arguments that my book puts forward

that might be controversial is that actually the modern political right. Now, I'm not talking about, you know, the political right generally, but the modern political right was actually born after liberalism. And the reason is that this old Aristotelian universe in many, many different variations, was hegemonic for a very long period of time. So it did require modern defenses of hierarchy in order to legitimate, you know, the hegemony of a hierarchical worldview, right? But with the advent of liberalism, starting in the 17th century, when you saw our

figures like Hobbes and Locke and Luchot, argue in fact that the basic structure of this Aristotelian worldview was fundamentally flawed. Hobbs, as a good materialist, was especially insistent on this, you know, saying at the conclusion of Leviathan, that there's hardly been anything put forward throughout human history. That's as ridiculous as Aristotle's metaphysics or as vacuous as politics or as, for the most part, useless as ethics, right? Really mean stuff. And the reason is that as a good of materialist, Hobb says, look, there is no teleology to nature. Nature is just matter and motion. There's also no set form that nature needs to assume.

It's subject to human contingency and human will and the will of a wide variety of others as well. And it's also the case that, you know, there is definitely no demonstrably superior people in society, or sorry, in nature. Because if we look at human beings in nature, we'll really come to. to the foreground for somebody like Hobbs is just how fundamentally equal we are. In fact, he's been expressed about that early in Leviathan where he says, for the most part, people are physically homologous to one another. Yeah, there are some slight derivations in terms of, you know, one person being stronger than another, but there's nothing that's all that significant about that, because even the weakest person could easily kill the strongest

if he just waits for the strongest person to go to sleep, or any two people can band together to take out someone who's much bigger than them. And on the question, of whether or not there are some people who have a kind of superior intellectual status that entitles them to higher orders of political power. Hobbs says that's even more ridiculous idea, right? Relative to the volume of what one could know that might be valuable about the world, even the smartest man knows very, very little, almost as little as a person who, you know, knows next to nothing about anything, right?

And he says, you know, look, every person flatters themselves that they're more intelligent than the next man, right? Nobody wants to think of themselves as a sucker. But that's not reflective of the fact that you are, in fact, smarter than the next man. It's just reflective of the fact that you share in a very human quality, which is this tendency to be vain, right, to have kind of sense of vanity about yourself and the people who agree with you. And this idea was carried on by Locke in different forms, where he says, look, in the state of nature, all people were equal, and all people were entitled to equal liberty, right? And to the extent that we create, create a new kind of society or create a civil society, it's going to be one that has to

reflect to a certain degree, respect for this natural right to equal liberty without impeding it in significant ways. Although, of course, Locke gave a lot of qualifications for this. And over time, these ideas about human equality and human liberty and the fact that nature and human society can be reformed or transformed through human will become extremely powerful. And they eventually lead to the revolutionary epochs that profoundly shake many people who are committed to the old hierarchical order. And here, you know, I'm talking about the American revolution, the French revolution, and the Haitian revolution, especially, right? And as a result of realizing that the old hierarchical worldview that had sustained society as a kind of ideology

for such a long time, was no longer convincing, particularly to the educated classes, what you see is the emergence of modern conservatism, which is going to try to offer new kinds of arguments for various forms of social hierarchy that simultaneously react against the egalitarian impulse of modernist daughters, but also draw insights from them in certain kinds of ways, which is, you know, where our good friend David Hume comes in, right? So Hume is an unusual thinker in the book, and I stress this, because on the one hand, it's very hard to find a figure who is much more modern than David Hume, right? He is an atheist in many respects. He is a deep skeptic that we can ever have certain knowledge about the world of

the sort that somebody like Aristotle would have thought absolutely essential. And he's also very critical of what you might call the doxatic. or hegemonic insistence on certainty and moral conviction that is so central to many reactionary institutions, like, say, the church in England. But at the same time, Hume relays a lot of these very modern-sounding arguments that could be used to advance radical political programs into what is ultimately a pretty conservative agenda. And how he does this is complicated, but many other reactionaries are going to follow him in this. So, for instance, one of the things that he says,

and this is putting it simply, always simply for him, is, look, you know, I've demonstrated why it is that it is very difficult to get certain knowledge about more or less anything that we might want to have certain knowledge of. But, you know, we shouldn't interpret this as a kind of baseline for a radical critique of society. Instead, we should interpret this as a reason to trust the social institutions and traditions into which we've been born, because to a certain extent, they have evolved or grown to meet human needs. And even if we can't provide a firm foundation for them, that's all that we can really expect, right? It's the best that we can do, right? And this, of course, has very conservative

connotations because it reflects a cautious attitude towards social change that, of course, radicals in the vein of somebody like Locke, right, would not accept in any way it should perform, let alone somebody like Rousseau, who was also writing at the same time as he. Right, right. So it's, it's, is it fair to say that out of David Hume's robust empiricism, that there are certain conservative conclusions drawn from, from this starting place of empiricism, right? Absolutely. I mean, this is where I would actually be a little Marxist and say that the problem with any kind of radical empiricism, uh, is, is that it will inevitably move into a kind of idealism, right, a reification of the world

as it is, and skepticism of our capacity to change it in any materially significant way, right? This is why, I think, dialectically, a mature empiricism has to move towards a kind of dialectical materialism, right? But that's, you know, a more subtle topic that really gets into the weeds. We don't have to address it. But, you know, I think that you can see a wide variety of different authors that also reflect this problem. You know, F.A. Hayek is another good example that I don't discuss in the book, but that Larry Allen talks about in his new book, the writing mirror of critical theory. Interesting. Yeah, and I know a lot of people who are listening to this, who are Marxists, who have read Mao, Lenin, Marx, they've almost, and maybe not have a lot of background

and philosophy. I've almost always come across this term empiricism being criticized in these books and maybe not have always understood exactly what's being critiqued or why a Marxist would have a problem with empiricism. I think you gave a very quick 101 version of why that might be the case, but just for people to keep in mind going forward. Another thing you said at the beginning of your answer is this sort of, you know, the enlightenment comes at the end of, you know, a millennia or more, at least in Europe and, you know, around the world of feudalism, of monarchism. And monarchism is completely in line with these sort of Aristotelian notions of natural hierarchies. And it's really with the Enlightenment that this critical analysis being turned around on that really begins to appear. And that's why we sort of jumped millennia to get from Aristotle to the Enlightenment, correct? Yeah, absolutely.

And I mean, you can see lesser figures advancing derivations of these Aristotelian themes prior to. the advent of modern conservatism. So one of the figures that I talk about that's probably less well known to your readers is Robert Filmer, right? So Robert Filmer was the whipping boy of Hobbes and Locke, right, throughout the 17th century because he wrote a well-known book called The Patriarcha, right? Which essentially argued in a kind of quasi-therstitian vade that, look, you know, God ordained everything in the universe to have its place.

And that includes, you know, ordained. varying various kinds of patriarchal family structures where the man is supposed to be the head of the family. And much like the man is supposed to be the head of the family, right? So too is the king, the father of his people, entitled by virtue of lineage to be the head of his people, right? And he provides a number of different arguments for this, mostly of which are historical interest, right, of historical interest, right? Saying that, you know, if you go back to David and then back to Adam, we can see that it's very likely that contemporary kings are the descendants of kings who came from the past, which demonstrates that, you know, God intended these people

to, you know, be, you know, in charge since, you know, these family lines have continued for a long period of time, right? But it's this insistence that everything has its place, and that hierarchies are mapped at every level of human society and emulate one another, so that, you know, patriarchal relations exist within the family, much as patriarchal relations exist. governing society that is emblematic of filmers' work and that a lot of brilliant Enlightenment philosophers did their very best in order to undermine. Yeah, very interesting. Okay, so people now listening will have an idea of Aristotle, have an idea of the millennia of

monarchical feudalism that was sort of sandwiched in between Aristotle and then the Enlightenment, raising up these new critiques. But you understand, and we're moving on to the French Revolution here, listeners understand that after, you know, a millennia of these sort of structures, the divine rights of kings, et cetera, you have not, you know, the American Revolution is one thing. And it's certainly among the, it's the conservative revolution out of the three big ones at the time. But you can see the French Revolution is really throwing everything up in the air that has, that has been, you know, sort of bedrocked assumption by many people for a millennia. And you can see why this

was so profoundly disturbing to conservative thinkers, even a figure which we're going to talk about, now like Edmund Burke, who was very sympathetic to the American Revolution, given its overall relatively conservative nature, and was outraged and horrified by the French Revolution. So the French Revolution, of course, was a product of the Enlightenment, and its radicalism spurred, reactionary, and conservative, disgust and hatred throughout Europe and beyond. So can you kind of talk about the French Revolution and how a figure like Edmund Burke articulated a sort of conservative liberalism in its wake? Yeah, absolutely, right? So Burke, I want to be clear, as one of the summits of conservative or right-wing thought, right, along I died with Dusty Ska, Nietzsche, and a handful of others, right? And the reason is, even though Burke is, for the most part, a relatively unsystematic thinker,

nowhere can you find as many conservative or right-wing impulses articulated with such clarity and even with such honesty as in his works like reflections on the revolution in France, right? So you talked about how he made a distinction between the American Revolution and the French Revolution, right? And didn't quite support the warmer, but at least was sympathetic to it and defended in some ways, whereas being, he was, you know, skatingly critical of the latter. Well, the big reason is that in the case of the American Revolution, he thought that the Americans were being denied their traditional or inherited rights as Englishmen. And so had a right to complain against the English sovereign, right? And this is essentially Burkean idea, right? This notion that rights aren't natural or they aren't something that, you know,

precedes the state. There's something that is established by power and continuity. And if you are entitled to them as a result of this inheritance, then you can complain that they're being violated, but not aside, right, from that. And that's a pretty conservative view of rights. and this is why he had a pretty conservative view of the American Revolution as really a squabble within the family, right, rather than something that was going to be socially transformative as they expand rights to the lower orders in a way that it would find profoundly unpalatable.

And, you know, many Americans agreed with them, right? You know, John Adams' defense of the American Revolution was precisely on the basis that they weren't going to do anything crazy like expand suffrage to everybody in his famous phrase who didn't have a farthing to their name, right? So, you know, I have my own criticism is the American revolution on that basis, but we'll move on, right? The difference is, of course, that in Berksmine, the French revolution aimed at the radical transformation of every facet of society. And he really conceived it in apocalyptic terms in this way. So in reflection of the revolution in France, he talks about how, once upon a time, yes, there are problems in the French state with the French

aristocracy. It had certain corrupt features like every regime did, but more or less it was operating reasonably well and might have been reformed or tinkered to a higher degree of perfection. But with the French Revolution, and I quote here, he says, now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life and which by bland assimilation incorporated into politics, the sentiments which beatify and soften private society are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. He's talking about, you know, the Enlightenment of the philosophs, right? Then he has a long sentence in the middle of that, but he says, on the scheme of things, or on this

scheme of things. And again, he's talking about the scheme of the Enlightenment philosophs. A king is but a man, a queen is but a woman, a woman is but an animal and an animal not of the highest order, right? And this is a profoundly shaken man writing this, right? Where he's saying, yeah, might be the case that many of the antiquarian ideas about inequality that held that the king was some kind of superior being set by God. They're pleasing illusions, right? We think about what's happening when you're stripping them away, right? Everything that adds color and texture to life is taken away. And more importantly, if you take away this notion that the king is some kind of supernaturally ordained being entitled to rule, he's just a man.

like anybody else, you dissolve the kind of sentiments and affections that are so necessary in order to secure subordination in society, right? And Burke is very clear that subordination is required to have society run successfully, right? There needs to be a social hierarchy because unless there's somebody in charge who is able to tell other people what to do, then there's going to be chaos and disorder. So at other points in the book, he even recommends that if you are going to place man over man, what you really need to do is infuse the person that you're going to make an authoritative figure with what he calls sublime principles, these principles that make them seem larger than life, bigger than ordinary people, more extraordinary than the average man.

Because, of course, if you do this, people think, well, I should subordinate myself to somebody who is bigger and more powerful and more extraordinary than I am. And what's interesting is Burke never says that these people need to actually possess these qualities in and of themselves. It's just that the church or religion, for example, needs to infuse them with these kinds of qualities or project the image that they have, these kinds of qualities, right? So you are never going to see a clear argument for the need for ideology and reification and glamorization then in Burke. It's remarkably honest and remarkably transparent. And one of the reasons why I think every leftist should read his work careful, since it is essentially a manual

of reactionary techniques that conservatives and people on the right are going to use very successfully and their struggles with the left over many centuries. Yeah. And I mean, even to this day, you hear people call themselves a Berkey and conservative whether or not they live up to the intellectual heft of actually Edmund Burke's work is another question, but they certainly see themselves consciously in that tradition. Now, the French revolution is in and of itself a fascinating little page in history and we've done a full episode. I'm very proud of the episode we did on the French Revolution about a year or so ago, so I'll link to that in the show notes for anybody who hasn't heard that and is interested in it.

Right now, I'm pursuing a master's degree at the moment and I'm taking a high level, 4,000 level history course on just the American Revolution. So the entire semester is just dedicated to precisely that. And it is very clarifying on so many ways as like a Marxist in my mid-30s to go back and to do this deep dive into the American Revolution in particular. It's just clarifying on so many, on so many levels. One of the figures that emerges from that that I'm very sympathetic to is, of course, Thomas Payne, which I think you would obviously be very sympathetic to as well, given that he's articulating a sort of, a sort of maybe even an early prototype version of liberal

socialism or this at least a robust. He's actually the first person that I discuss in my book, the political theory of liberal socialism because I argue he is an antecedent into the tradition as a whole so you know you're absolutely right absolutely yeah yeah and there's a whole bunch of stuff we could talk about Thomas Payne maybe you and I can do an episode on Thomas Payne I've never done it even though I've really really enjoyed you know studying him and learning his work but of course in common sense and rights of man he does these devastating critiques that are viscerally fun to read about monarchism and how stupid it is and how irrational it is absolutely love it but in agrarian justice, he lays out a vision in the 1700s of a robust, you know, social

democratic welfare state. And it's so ahead of its time that it's really fascinating. And of course, he argued with Edmund Burke directly about the French Revolution, which is just an interesting historical note. Oh, absolutely, right. I mean, there's so much I could say about pain, but I'm a real admirer of his. In fact, in many ways, you know, I plagiarized a lot of my career off of pay since, you know, I'm arguing for a kind of liberal socialism and I spend a lot of time criticize the conservatives and trying to prick at their pretensions, right? But I think Payne is an emblematic figure of what was going on that explains a lot of why people like Burke were so apoplectic about the French Revolution, right?

Because what was telling about Payne's rhetorical style, and if you want, you can read Don Herzog's Poison the Line of Lower Orders, this is what really infuriated the aristocracy and frightened them. Pain never says, we are going to engage in a radical reconstruction of society that is completely transformative and that has never been studying for in human history, right? That is, of course, one of the implications, but oftentimes he'll say, look, it's just common sense to get rid of the aristocracy, right? The aristocracy is a drag on society. They're essentially not doing anything. He compares them to peacocks in a lot of, and some of his writings like the rights of men. You know, they're pretty and they prance around, but what do they really

contribute, right? So, you know, the most simple thing in the world, of course, according to him, will be get rid of the aristocracy, replace it with the Republic of the sort that, you know, he thinks human beings enjoyed in earlier stages of human history, and then everything will do better. And for many conservatives, the fact that Payne could write so confidently about how republicanism and equality were just common sense really demonstrated the degree to which the hegemony of notions of a hierarchical or aristocratic society had just been profoundly undermined and indeed deflated, right? Because Payne, when he was writing about the aristocracy, wasn't polite. He was just like, you know, what a waste of time and resources this all is, right?

It's almost amusing that it's lasted for so long, Ben, we finally just all woken up to how we're all going to be better off when this goes the way of, you know, Bain and Max or something. Right, right. Yeah, no, it's fascinating. And of course, because he was to the far, far left of his time and his sort of milieu he eventually was hated by even the founding fathers he was useful in the revolutionary and the revolution as a propagandist to sort of get people going you know he wrote those famous words these are the times that try men's souls but like john adams had nothing but dripping disdain for him and eventually he was completely pushed out of polite society and i think by the time he died um you know only six people three of whom were black because uh pain was an abolitionist

only six people attended his his funeral um and so it's just a very interesting story you and i will have more work on that. I did want to say one more thing, and I mentioned this in the class when we were talking about pain, is, you know, his work common sense is very ironic because it's not at all common sense, what he's saying, you know? But at the same time, he was so

confident that he was correct. It was common sense to him, and it would be common sense to posterity. So now we read the words of Thomas Payne and like, yeah, of course, this divine rights of king is utter bullshit, and of course as he says, they're more like an ass than a lion, these rulers. Of course, all

of it is common sense today. But at the time, it was anything but common sense. And I love that that was the title and the irony that was sort of embedded in that phrase. And that title is just so fun to think about and play with. Oh, absolutely. And I think this is a part because Payne had a really good sense of what the left needs to do to engage in what we might call counter-hagimonic activities, right? And this is something I actually think the left will learn from today. Right. So I think that one of the consequences, the bad consequences of the left essentially moving into academia and intellectual spaces through the 1970s and the 1980s is there's this real fetishization of things like novelty, creativity, radicalness for its own sake, and all the rhetoric that surrounds that, right? Or if you'll read any kind of left theory, you know, people will fall over themselves trying to say, I'm putting forward an even more radicalness. proposal than before, right? And part of the problem with this, from my standpoint,

and from Payne standpoint, is if you're rhetorically doing that, what you're doing is, of course, situating yourself as profoundly outside the mainstream and profoundly outside the purview of what most people think society should look like or does look like right now, right? Payne understood that if you're going to try to engage in counter-hegemonic activities, it could sometimes be way more effective to present your ideas as not necessarily radical at all, even if they are, right? But instead, as common-sensible, self-evidently obvious, right, reforms that have been a long time comment, because if you can actually make that work rhetorically, it really undermines the prestige and the forms of gratification that you're confronting. So I think that there's a real value in what

it is that he did, even if, as you mentioned, it was somewhat insincere to suggest that the kind of the transformative demands that he was pushing for were, in fact, just commonsensical in the 18th century. Yeah, yeah. No, I love that that approach, and I honestly genuinely think that I'm no Thomas Payne, but I try to, I try to emulate that idea that's like, present our ideas, our socialist, Marxist ideas as if they are common sense because, you know, not that they're these radical fringe, scary ideas, that's which is what our enemies want to paint them as, but that you really get into the minutia of them, they make so much more sense than this very irrational. system under which we live today. And so I think that's a great strategy. And Thomas Payne is a perfect example of just that. Absolutely. And I think Marx said his best was as well, right? Where, you know, if you would just often sit there and be like, look, you know, bourgeois society has made these promises to people. It is not fulfilling them, right? And so new East socialists are actually going

to fulfill the promises of bourgeois society, right? That is a very powerful argument because it engages in counter-hgemonic activity by presenting yourself as, you know, as the inexorable next stage in historical progression, right? Whereas presenting yourself as self-consciously radical and wanting to upend things in a profound way, that kind of presents yourself as outside of the mainstream. And, you know, I've often said that, right? I don't want democratic socialism to be a radical movement. I want democratic socialism to be, to use terms, common sense in America at some point.

point. Absolutely. Who knows that will happen, but let's hope. We'll see. Yeah. All right. So just to catch listeners up, especially people without a deep grasp of history or the history of ideas, we're taking a very chronological approach to these thinkers. So we start, you know, 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece with Aristotle, we move up through, you know, the medieval times, monarchy feudalism, into the Enlightenment and with a figure like David Hume. And then we move into the French Revolution and a figure like Edmund Burke, Thomas Payne, etc. And now at this point in your book, the one and only Hegel makes an appearance. And Hegel is, of course, a fascinating figure for many reasons, but one of them is because his philosophy has been found to be useful for the conservative right, the liberal center left, and the socialist left, spawning right-hagalians and left-Hagalians, and ultimately even Marxism. But Hegel is also a pretty conservative thinker. So can you talk about Hegel and his contributions to the evolution of the political right

and sort of help us understand his intellectual legacy? Yeah, absolutely, right? So Hegel is another one of those thinkers like Hume, right, where he has a large following on the left, and I think rightly so. And I also stress in the book that I think the proper interpretation of Hegel is as a left hegel, right? So I'm very sympathetic to the counts of people like Slavajijic, for example, in less than nothing, where if he characterizes Hegel rightly, not just as an antecedent to Marx, but as somebody who really contributes a lot to filling in the gaps within Marxism. So the tradition that I'm analyzing is the right Hegelian tradition, which has indeed been profoundly influential on the broader political, right? And what differentiates the left-wing reading of Hegel from the right-wing reading of Hegel is right-wing readings of Hegel almost always stress the importance of affirmation and an undermining of the power of the negative, right? And, you know, they will draw on some of the more conservative texts that Hegel himself put forward, like the philosophy.

of Wright, for example, that Marx himself was very critical of. But the general idea put forward by Wright Hagellians like Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton, or in America Paul Gottfried, right, is that what Hegel teaches us is that there is a necessity to every institution and every social practice that we see. This has come about as the result of a long history of historical transformation. And all that the wise philosopher can do, do is appreciate their own moment and thought and indeed affirm its necessity as a result of this long historical process. And as Marks points out in his critique of Hegel's velocity of Wright, this leads again to the idealist supposition that the only thing the philosophers

can do is reify their own moment in thought and describe why it is that it's generally something that we should conciliate ourselves too, at least in a given moment. That's the Owl of Minerva comment as well. Exactly, right? You know, the Al-Munurva only emerges at daybreak, right? And, you know, this kind of view is not necessarily an illegitimate reading of Hegel's text. You know, there's a couple of Ledergallians out there who'll probably shaking their face shake their fist at that, right? But, you know, people like Scruton or like Broadfried make their taste for why this is the proper reading of Hegel,

and they provide a lot of textual evidence for that, right? I think that they are wrong and that if one reads something, something like the philosophy of Wright carefully, even though it can present as a kind of conservative document, oftentimes what becomes very apparent is that Hegel undermines, sometimes in very subtle form, his own conservatism, even at the same time as he seems to be arguing for it. A good example of this is his infamous or famous defense of the monarchy, depending on who you talk to, right? So in the philosophy of right, he defends the idea of, you know, the monarchy as kind of an individuating embodiment of the spirit of the nation, right?

And many people at the time saw this as offering a philosophical defense of the Prussian aristocracy and the Prussian monarchical system. And Hegel probably intended it to be read read that way because he didn't want to end up, you know, getting in trouble. But at the same time as he makes this argument, Hegel immediately says, yeah, but you know, this person isn't supposed to do anything important. They're not really supposed to have any kind of power at all, really. All they're supposed to do is sign off on the kinds of laws and policies that are passed by the more authentic reflections of the will of the people, right?

Things like the legislature, for example, right? And, you know, the king will ultimately, you know, be relatively committed without the establishment of something like a bureaucracy that will mean that more or less all political power, well, the real political power will be concentrated in the hands of the middle classes. So that to me seemed pretty subversive in some ways. and kind of undermining of the conservative arguments that he puts forward elsewhere, right? But, you know, whatever your thoughts are on the proper reading of Hegel, I argue, you know, it's important to appreciate the significance and longevity of this right Hagellian tradition, which, you know, continues to have widespread number of adherence to this day. Definitely.

For Marxists in particular that have gotten into Marxism but have never gotten into Hegel because Hegel is, of course, very daunting, very hard to read, et cetera. Now in the modern day, there's so many amazing things on YouTube and podcasts where you can go and try to grapple with Hegelian philosophy and Hegelian idealism. But I encourage Marxists to do so because I think it's just very interesting to kind of see that intellectual line be made clear and see the ways in which Marx departs from Hegel, but also the things that he picks up from Hegel. One thing that is very common in today's world, and you'll hear it all the time, is this idea made popular by MLK and, of course, echoed by like, I remember even Obama. making a lot of great use of this term is like, you know, the arc of history is long but bends towards justice. And that is sort of a hagelian phrase. And just as a fun intellectual exercise, can you kind of explain to us why that is hagelian in a sense? Sure. So this is where some of the real

controversies around Hegel emerge, right? Which is his argument, uh, the arguments people ascribe to Hegel, uh, about a teleological vision of history, right? So, uh, Hagle, and it's important stress marks, uh, well, sometimes argue or right, uh, as though there is a necessary direction, uh, to history. Uh, and that this necessary direction is, of course, to a progressive while, right? Uh, and, you know, you can read, you know, Hegel's philosophy, a lectures on philosophy of history or the phenomenology of spirit, uh, but the end of the basic idea is that we blew from a period of less freedom, uh, and less self-consciousness, uh, to a historical, abhorpe defined by more freedom and more self-consciousness.

And there are consequences to this which can be negative because the further we move along this kind of progressive arc of history, the higher the states become. But at the same time, so too do the advantages that accrues to humanity. And, you know, Marx famously, you know, argued in some places that Hegel's argument that the Russian state represented the apex of history was just wrong, and that in fact the story of history's progress would continue with the transition from, you know, bourgeois society to a far higher social form, communism, right, where the state would wither away and true human history or self-conscious human history

would completely begin for the first time, right? And many people are now very critical of this idea that there is a kind of teleology, to history, because it just seems profoundly unrealistic, and even anti-materialist in some ways, because it implies that all the kind of matter of motion that we see moving around us, it's not just governed by physical laws, there's a kind of imminent necessity that seems very metaphysical that's looking within them, right? Now, I personally think that this idea that Hegelar Marx advanced a teleological vision of history is deeply flawed. I think that they sometimes write that way. There's no doubt about that, and we should be critical of them

for that. But any deep reading of their work really stresses the contingency within nature and the fact that there are no guarantees of anything, really. But, you know, that's just my own esoteric, or not esoteric. That's just my own take on their writings. I don't want to get into too much detail about this right now because we'll be here all day. But, you know, long of story short, I just think that the idea that there's a teleology to history is bogus, unfortunately. Yeah, yeah, and I would love, and of course, I would say this every question it feels like to do a full episode on Hegel. I think it would be very useful. We definitely mentioned him before.

We had Todd McGowan on to talk about the, yeah, to talk about the Hegelian conception of sort of contradiction and dialectics more broadly. I found that very interesting. People can check that out. But next in line is in our line of thinkers that have contributed to right-wing thought to this day, is Dostoevsky. And again, we've done a full episode on him with our friend, Corey from Existential Comics. Check it out if you're interested. But in that episode, we made it clear as you do that Dostoevsky was indeed a conservative thinker. There's no debate about that. So can you kind of talk about Dostoevsky and summarize some of his main points that you

address in your work on him? And what makes him kind of different is, you know, Edmund Burke, David Hume, Aristotle, Hegel. These are all like actual philosophers. And this is the first time that we're mentioning a sort of literary figure, but he did have this huge philosophical impact. So go ahead and take that wherever you want. Yeah, absolutely. So Dasekki, like I mentioned, along with Burke and Nietzsche, is at the apex of right-wing thought. And I dedicate more time to him in the book than anybody else except Nietzsche precisely because

I think it's so important to wrestle with the problems that he poses for the left, right? But, you know, part of the problems with thinking through his conservative arguments is that, well, he did write nonfiction, right? really his arguments at his position sparkle and resonate most strongly in the great works of fiction that he produced over the course of the 19th century, right? You know, books like notes from the underground crime of punishment, brothers care of myself, you know, obviously. So in the book, I try to reconstruct the claims that he makes in those books about liberalism, socialism, and modernity and in favor, you know, kind of conservative Russian orthodoxity. And I think I'd do as good a job as

certainly I'm capable of doing, right? But just by way of background, one of the reasons that I think Dostiaski is really at the apex of conservative thought is unlike 99% of conservatives out there. He really understood progressive ideas and their appeal in a way that very few reactionaries ever have, right? And part of the reason for this, of course, is that Dostezi was a radical early on in his life, right? So this is stressed by Joseph Frank, the great Engel commentator, on Doste where he points out that, you know, early in his literary career when he was writing socially conscious novels like Perfolk, Dostoevok, Dostoevsky could be identified as a kind of Christian socialist or, you know, Christian activist or Christian reformist, right, depending on how you want

to characterize it. And he really believed that a radical transformation in the Zara structure of the Russian Empire was absolutely required, right? And partly as a result of his association with a wide array of liberal anarchist and socialist reformers, he wound up in prison in Siberia for many years. And this is where he attributes his political transformation as coming from, because Dostoevsky, when he was in jail, realized two important things, right, according to him, at least. One is that as a kind of middle-class, radical intellectual, he had very little in common with the working classes that he was actually setting out to emancipate, right? And secondly, he came to the conclusion that actually a lot of the kind of working class people that he met in the prison certainly weren't going to produce a better kind of society if they were actually emancipated from the strictures of the Russian Tsarist regime because, you know, they were mean, cruel, heady, oftentimes extremely vulgar.

So Dostoevsky lost the kind of utopian allure of working class politics that had been central to his early radical outlook. But what I argue in the book is that this appreciation for the lower orders never quite goes away. It just gets transformed in a more reactionary direction in Dostoevsky's thought. So what you find argued for in the later novels is this idea that, in fact, left to their own devices, the Russian peasantry are generally quite pure and good-hearted. You know, they are devout believers in the Russian Orthodox faith. They accept contentedly the kind of humble role that God has ordained for them. And unlike so many people in the middle of classes, let alone the upper classes, they don't covet or strive for power or political influence.

But, you know, kind of perform the role or the duty that they see God as ascribing to them without, you know, complaint, right? And this is, of course, an extraordinarily dewy-eyed approach to, you know, the Russian peasantry. But it's one, you know, that many conservatives share, right, where they can often talk about the lower orders with a kind of paternalistic happiness or paternalistic pride, as long as the lower orders remain the lower orders and don't fundamentally try to upset things in any way, shape, or form, right?

And, you know, this also comes through in Dostoevsky's novels, like in demons, where, you know, in instances where there are efforts made by people who have been marginalized to try and completely change or upend the status quo, all of a sudden it becomes far more, critical and far more skeptical of the, right? So I have more to say about this, but I'll just pause there in case you have a question. Yeah, well, one thing that jumps to mind is the sort of

right-wing reactionary, conservative, you know, you sort of patronizing amusement or pride in or love for the lower classes as long as they stay in their place. And I think one way that you can see that in the modern American context is, you know, especially over the last several years, as we live in the wreckage of neoliberalism, there's been a sort of articulation by members of the political right, in particular the GOP, the Republican Party, where, you know, there is this, this honoring of the nobility of the working man, right? They want to prop this working man up as like, you know, this is who we care about. You know, this is a, this is real America, right? You can picture like a white guy jumping out of a truck with a hard hat on or going out into the field. And so there's

this romantic picture of him. But don't you. you dare push it, right? Like, stay in your place as this honorable, noble, working class man, but once you start organizing, once you start saying that society should be fundamentally changed, once you start threatening the hierarchy of power and class, then the same people who romanticize you become your number one political enemies. And we've seen that very clearly over the past couple years. So I think that's just one example of how that manifests today. Oh, absolutely, right? And this is one of the reasons I included so many sections on Dosteuski, right? Because Dostoevsky embodies this ethos far more clearly and far more profoundly than

somebody like Donald Trump, for example. But fundamentally, it's the same ethos, right? Where, you know, Trump will say things like he loves the lower educated or the less educated, right? And sometimes put on a hard hat and stand as somebody who respects the lower orders, right? And this is one of the reasons why I claim Dostoevsky can teach us a lot about the structure of right-wing populism, because as you mentioned, as long as the lower orders are willing to conform to the subordinate position that conservatives situate them in, then they can be objects of respect and even populist mobilization, right? But in instances where the lower orders decide that actually they don't just want to be as a recipient of the noblese dege of conservatives or support

conservative politics, then all of a sudden they become, you know, Evan Burke's swinish multitude, right? You know, not, you know, the uneducated that people love, but, you know, the uneducated who don't know how to run the country, actually be kept as far away from power as, you know, humanly possible. And Roger Spruton probably made this more clear than any other conservative writer I can think of in his book, The Meaning of Conservatism, where in a very honest moment, he said, conservatives have good reason to phrase what he called unthinking people, right? particularly in the lower borders, who bear the burdens that life imposes upon them with tranquility without trying to politicize them and kind of go about fulfilling their

role in society without trying to change society structures in any kind of meaningful way, which means the hierarchies that make up society. This veneration of unthinking people that understand their place is so important to many conservatives. And my response to it always is that I don't want a kind of deferential working class. What I want is a working class that acts for itself and actually demands what it has long been entitled to. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, from somebody born and raised in the working class, like these people, these GOP politicians, these rich assholes, like they're not better than us by any means. And we talked about this in our Nietzsche episode is like these elites that

think they're elites and they deserve to be elites and it's the natural. hierarchical order. It's like, you know, there's nothing about you that that even is a pretense of the idea that you could possibly be my genuine natural superior. But that's exactly that sort of working class mentality that turns a romanticized working class person into a rabble rouser and an enemy of law and order, which is very interesting. So I've always seen this pattern in American political life. I've always identified it. But I think you're the first one that's really helped me understand that a lot of this can be traced back to the work of Dostoevsky in particular, and that's incredibly fascinating. You made that link for me that was never there before.

Yeah, thanks. And I mean, I want to make clear that, again, Dostoevsky is a far richer and more profound thinker than, you know, Donald Trump of Ronda Santos, right? But you know what Ronda Santos says things like, you know, we need to, we conservatives need to confront the elites in our society. But by elite, I don't mean the wealthy. I also don't mean people like Justice Clarence Thomas, who he singles out, you know, as an exception. What I mean are people who hold to the ideological convictions of, you know, the elite class, by which it means any kind of liberalism or progressivism, right? You know, that's, again, the sentiment that not necessarily Dostiaski himself, but many people who are in that same kind of mindset would share, right?

And it's a ridiculous notion in a lot of ways, right? Because, you know, on this dissentious reading, a teacher making $35,000 a year and living out of her car as an elite if she, you know, happens to hold to certain ideas about LGBGQ inclusion, but a multi-billionaire who, you know, is president of the United States, is not part of the elite because he doesn't share these kinds of ideological outlets. It can get very silly in many ways. Absolutely, absolutely. It falls apart under even the tiniest critical thought. but another version of this you mentioned clarence thomas and this is you know the the racial version of this sort of patronization that we're talking about with regards to working people is like you know especially for the political right in this country in the gop they're sort of like the good black people clarence thomond is one of the good black people candace owens thomas soul and then they try to go back in history and reclaim a figure like martin luther king as one of the good ones because he's now so wholeheartedly respected by the entire world and all of america that they're They have to try to now shoehorn him into a sort of conservatism in retrospect, even though

while he was alive, they fucking hated him. But yeah, if you fall outside of those bounds, if you fall outside of what they consider the good black person who knows their role and perpetuate certain ideologies that they find acceptable, then you're lauded and you're lifted up and you're put in front of the cameras. And like, this is a wonderful spokesperson who we love. But the moment you start diverging from their material interest and their ideological bedrocks is when you start being called a terrorist, you know, a radical communist, a piece of shit, not a real American, et cetera. So it's another way in which there is that sort of patronizing,

here are the good ones and here are the bad ones, right? Oh, you're absolutely right. And I want to say, I think that one of the weaknesses in my book is the fact that I don't take black conservatism, nearly, I don't analyze black conservatism nearly as extensively as I should, right? And that's a weakness many of us on the left share. there's increasingly good work being done about the kind of conservatism that you can see emerge in what we might think of as subaltern or marginalized groups, right? For instance, some really great work being done recently on people like Phyllis Schlaefley and why many women will support conservative policies, even anti-feminist policies.

There's some interesting work done by Cory Robin, right? All of Clarence Thomas and Black conservatism. But the field is so really early, right, and really underdeveloped. and I think that's reflected as a weakness in my own book. So I'm hoping in the future to kind of rectify that by talking more about it because it is a fascinating and very serious dilemma. Because you're right, right? There are sometimes people who emerge from conditions where we might expect them to adopt

left-wing views who instead develop profoundly kind of conservative outlooks that abet what appear to be the various systems of domination that held them down in the first place. why that occurs, really a very intriguing question, one that we need to spend a lot more time thinking about on the left. Definitely, definitely. Including me. All right, well, let's go ahead and move in, because in part two of your book, Entering the Wasteland,

and this is probably the biggest question I've asked in an interview full of huge questions, but in entering the wasteland, you walk us through the entirety of the 20th century. Clearly, we're not going to be able to parse through all the thinkers and the important intellectual events of this century, and I deeply encourage people, as always, with these with these interviews about books that if any of this interest you, to actually go get the book, support the author, and dive into these arguments in more detail. But as best as you can, can you please summarize the sort of trajectory of right-wing thought throughout the 20th century, just highlighting some of its main thinkers and ideas, etc.

Sure. Well, like I said, this is where a lot of the meat of the book is. It's also where I think there's so much more to say, right? I mean, my book is almost 30 pages long. I was able to negotiate an extra 10,000 words from the publisher, which is very nice of that, right? But boy, boy, is there just so much left to say. But the trajectory of 20th century conservatism that I trace in my book is actually one that should be depressing for a lot of leftists, because a trajectory that moves from a feeling of defeat and marginalization to triumph, ascendancy, and radicalization on the right, which is not what anybody wants to see.

Right. So what is emblematic of many early to mid-20th century conservative thinkers and rightly thinkers is their sense of themselves as being history's losers in many ways, particularly after the Second World War. And you don't need to take my word for it. You can read Russell Kirk's, the conservative mind, for example, where he opens it up by describing conservatives as losers, essentially, or history's losers. and he says, look, over the past 200 years or so, conservatives have struggled mightily against the political left. We won the occasional partial victory here and there, but by and large, the history of the political right has been won of defeat after defeat after defeat, right? To which I say, you know, if only, right? And, you know, very similar sentiments are present in the writings of people like T.S. Eliot or Michael Oakeshott or, you know, Strauss, right? who's a seminal thinker of antiquarian thinking,

even left and learned from, I should be clear, right? There's this real pessimism and melancholy that they've lost the plot and that everything is going to hell, and there's very little that they can do to stop it, right? This begins to change in the United States, certainly, though, quite radically in the 1960s, where people like Bill Buckley, for example, or Frank Meyer or Kirk, are able to stiff together a new right-wing coalition that consists of what they famously call a three-legged stool, right?

This three-legged stool that makes up the American right in the 20th century or the mid-20th century consists of radicalists who are foreign policy talks, libertarian pro-capitalists who are very, very upset about the expansion of New Deal and Great Society legislation, and probably most problematically, Southern white conservatives who are deeply concerned about the spread of libertine anti-Christian wars and also deeply concerned about the push for racial equality that they associate with the civil rights movement, right? And this three-legged stool serves as the coalition for Barry Gould Waters' presidential campaign in 1964, which is a great big flop, not least of which because he presents himself as a radical and for an extremist. defense of liberty, and Johnson just punishes it very heavily for this. But by the time the 1970s rolls around, and you see Richard Nixon be elected, what you start to see is this huge run of

conservative electoral victories that culminates in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Brian Marroni in my own country, and a host of other kind of conservative figures. And then there's the fall of communism in the 1980s, to be exact. And the consequence of this is that by the end of the 20th century, a lot of the doom and glue that you characterize the thinking of the right at the beginning of the 20th century is gone. And what's replaced it is this feeling of triumph, right, that we did it. We roll back the tide of egalitarian modernity, particularly in its socialist forms. And bigger victories still await us.

right, if we just had the yearning to seize them. Now, this is a simplistic version of the story at all because there are refills to it. But I think in many ways they were right to feel this way, right? Because there is no doubt that the left experienced a series of profound setbacks after kind of peaking in the 1960s. And we've all been living in the consequences of the neoliberal and neo-conservative moment that was instantiated through the 1980s since then. And it's not a good thing, right? And we need to do everything that we can to try to roll things back. And that's where a lot of political strategy comes in that we can talk about at the end if you want.

Yeah, just as a quick aside or follow-up question, do you see the current moment and the current crisis that we're living through as some sort of reckoning with that 20th century legacy, particularly in the U.S., neoliberalism, sort of seems like it's on the ropes, like it's dying, like it maybe has been dead since 2000. and Aden is living on in zombie form? What are your thoughts on what the current set of crises says about the 20th century and the right-wing ideology that emerged in it? Oh, I absolutely think it's loving on my support. And I think that's a good

thing, right? Although partially a good thing because, as we know, you know, opportunity for left-wing activism is also opportunity for right-wing radicalism, right? And we can't necessarily be sure who's going to win out in these kind of circumstances, right? But I think that there are a lot of different reasons why, neoliberalism became ascended and eventually provoked so much hostility, right? One of the reasons that it became ascendant is that I think Samuel Moyne is very right in his book, liberalism against itself, where he points out that through the

20th centuries, one of the kind of odd things that characterized the then-dominant liberal tradition was that liberals internalized a huge number of conservative arguments in their struggle against socialism, which made liberalism, especially in the United States, considerably less ambitious, considerably less optimistic about the future, and considerably less committed to actually living up to its principles of trying to establish a society committed to freedom and equality for all. And one points out that there's a tremendous irony here because you had social democratic and democratic socialist politicians throughout the mid-20th century that expressed deep fidelity to liberal political institutions.

while also constructing robust welfare states that were imperfect in many ways, but were definitely one of the closest approximations of an egalitarian society that was well-functioning that have ever been achieved. And Cold War liberal intellectuals would have none of it, right? And so what ended up happening is many of them sided with very conservative authors about issues like the rise of the welfare state, And gradually, this kind of ideological coalition between Cold War liberals and conservatives was successful in providing enough hegemonic energy for politicians like Reagan, Thatcher, Moroni, and, you know, their successors in various centrist parties like Tony Blair to roll back the achievements of things like the welfare state, decrease union density, you know, restrain any effort to resolve the environmental prices. And, you know, intervene to undermine attempts to expand various foreign mechanisms of democratic legitimacy.

And I think that people very rightly became very frustrated at these kinds of reforms and came to associate neoliberalism with a cruel and harsh kind of competitive society where the poor are frequently blamed for their own misfortune. and the rich are consistently told that they have done everything to earn their rarefied position in society and own nothing to the people at the bottom. And unsurprisingly, starting in 2008, there was widespread mobilization to resist this, which baffled many neol liberals but shouldn't have, right? Because the vision of society that they were articulating, based on the combination of conservatism and Cold War liberalism, was profoundly unattractive and profound unjust.

Now, what's going to replace this in the future? I really don't know, right? I'm hopeful that we'll see democratic socialism continued advance in the United States and elsewhere, but there are no guarantees about something like that. Yeah. Yeah, and I think it's really interesting to connect that Cold War anti-communism to the rise of neoliberalism.

And of course, it's no coincidence that neoliberalism proper, as articulated under figures like Reagan and Thatcher, were coming at the end and we're really turned, at least an American, to a bipartisan consensus after the fall of the Soviet Union. So you have the Cold War liberals, you know, anti-communist ideology, et cetera. And then you have the collapse of the Soviet Union. There's this external pressure has been relieved from the capitalist liberal West.

And then you have this moment of anti-communist post-Cold War triumphalism that takes the form in a lot of ways of neoliberal policies. And so it's very fascinating to understand it in those terms. yeah so thank you for that yeah let's go ahead and we got one more question for you before we wrap up and reflect on the text as a whole and now of course your book covers many more figures right it covers

in this section in particular Nietzsche again check out the episode me and Matt did on Nietzsche's politics if you want to fill out that because it is a large portion of this book in this chapter so it's consequential so I really urge people to go check that out as a compliment to this episode

and of course as a standalone episode in its own right. You cover figures like Carl Schmitt, Dugan, both figures that we've covered on this show and others that people can check out. But one major figure that you mentioned earlier and that I've never really talked about on the show. And honestly, even though I have a background in philosophy, I've never personally studied or read any of his work is Heidegger.

And you spend some significant time on him in the book and you mentioned him earlier. So can you kind of help us understand who Heidegger was and why his contributions to not only conservative ideology, but to far-right fascist ideology are? Well, it's important to understand Hidegger right now, because Hidegger has had been frowned, in fact, on the contemporary Anglo-American right, especially the alt-right. You know, people, figures like Steve Bannon, right, have cited him as an influence. People like intellectuals like Michael Milliman and Alexander Dugin, right, have propagated his ideas, you know, as wide as possible.

Darren Beattie, who for a little while was an official at the Trump administration and has since become an intellectual voice on the alt-right, completed his PhD on Heidegger and propagates his idea. So he's everywhere, right? And beyond just the kind of strategic necessity of talking about Heidegger, one of the reasons that I chose to write so extensively about him is that I actually had dead butt as a Heideggerian earlier in my life, right? So we won't go into like all more than details about my biography, but, you know, very conventionally, I was raised Roman Catholic, I struggled with my faith, you know, when I was, you know, about 18 or 19. I read a lot of Heidegger, so much Heidegger, right?

And, you know, learned about Heidegger, took classes on Heidegger, because he seemed to speak to some of these existential issues that I was dealing with in a very profound way. And for a while, I got quite lost in his thinking, even as I was very disturbed by his association with Nazism and some of his absolutely anti-humanist positions, right? And over time, I came to reject Heidegger under the influence of a lot of other people, but his appeal was always evident to me, right, which is one of the reasons I think it's so important to inoculate people on the left against him, because he can be seductive, right? So in the book, I tried to summarize the bases of his political thought as economically but comprehensively as possible, right? And the short version of the long of story that I tell is, for Heidegger, more or less Western civilization since Plato has been a long story of dissent from the originate greatness that was present in antiquarian societies.

Now, this doesn't mean that he doesn't think that things to learn from Plato, I can't, and everyone else. But there has been this descent from the kind of autological glory. that was present in the past. And this reaches its apex in the modern world, where he thinks that the fundamental metaphysics of the modern world, as embodied in the thinking of people like Descartes or liberal philosophers and Marxist philosophers alike, is one where being is understood primarily as nothing but matter in motion.

And matter and motion exists only as a kind of standing reserve for the manipulation of Cartesian subjects to ratify their hedonistic urges, right? But simply, you know, all of us look at nature as a bunch of stuff, and it doesn't have any kind of intrinsic meaning or any kind of intrinsic value to it. It's just there for us to take or expropriate and then turn into so many different commodities so that we can gluttonize or ratify our gluttony, right, for our, always more, right? And partly as a result of the ubiquitacy of this metaphysical outlook, Heidegger thinks that many people are now incapable of leading authentic lives, right,

particularly in large urban spaces, since rather than focusing on ontologically weighty issues, like the finitude of our own life, instead we focus on rabifying these kinds of materialistic urges or hedonistic urges, and trying our best to conform to the banalities of liberal or socialist culture, right, entering into the world of the day, as he sometimes calls it. And Clydeger argues that in order to overcome this decadence, what we need is for the spiritually attuned country of the center, existing between the pincers of Russia and America, to rejuvenate itself, consequently to rejuvenate Europe and the entire world. And of course, he associated this with the rise of the Nazi party and the rejuvenation of Germany in the aftermath of its crushing

defeat in the First World War. Now, there's been a huge amount written about this by a wide variety of very popular scholars, including Richard Wolin had a recent book about Heidegger. That's very good. Oron Beiner, my good friend, wrote the introduction to this book, has another good book on this called Dangerous Minds. But, you know, there's short thrust of it is that Heidegger, as a German nationalist, thought that Hitler and fascism would reignite something like the Antiguan spirit that he associated with the pre-Socratics, because rather than focusing on the banalities of material consumption and gratification, the way liberals and socialists did, the fascists were invigorating the people, committing them to brand historical

projects that required life and death decision-making that brought life into focus in a way that was impossible in democratic societies. And Heidegger also thought that with the rise in the Nazi party, you saw the establishment of a kind of hierarchical elite that was the more appropriate ruling class for a country that was spiritually treated like Germany than what he called the rule of the mediocrity that was present in the Weimar Republic. And we all know where this wound up, right? The Holocaust, genocide, authoritarianism, and the complete discrediting of these far-right ideas for much of the 20th century, right? And Heidegger's response to a lot of this was as cruel and as superficial as one could imagine, right?

Because he was an extraordinarily vain man, there's no doubt about it, right? And on some of the few occasions where he did talk about the Holocaust or Nazism, you saw this expressed very clearly, right? So, for instance, at one point when he was talking about the Holocaust, he said, well, really, ultimately, you know, all these people die isn't particularly important because the industrial murder that took place is metaphysically exactly similar to the advent of industrial agriculture, right? They're all emblematic of the same kind of problem. So fixating on the Holocaust as a topic or an issue that's important in and of itself misses the broader

kind of metaphysical picture that real thinkers are supposed to focus on, right? And that's, of course, extraordinarily reductive and inhumane, really, since, of course, there's a profound difference between industrial agriculture that's intended to feed people, right? And, you know, the use of death camps to murder people at a scale of thousands of people per day, right? But, you know, more tellingly, Pardiger would often say things like, look, the Second World War didn't decide anything in favor of liberalism, socialism, and a democracy, because history will still vindicate me in the long run. And it was quite hypocritical about this, because when the Nazi panzers defeated the French army in 1940, he spoke about it

euphorically as a vindication of his own philosophy and proof that the country of the French Revolution had been described to defeat it decisively by the spiritually attuned country of reaction, right? but of course, you know, the Second World War, where the spiritually attuned country of the century was defeated by a coalition of liberals and socialists, will that prove nothing, right? And he expected fully that by the time the 21st century rolled around, people would get tired of talking about his association with Nazism. They would focus on the metaphysical qualities of his writing and that he would ultimately be vindicated in his critiques of liberalism, socialism, and democracy.

And of course, that's what many of his contemporary disciples absolutely argue in attempts to rehabilitate his reputation and push his thinking in new directions to critique what they take to be the contemporary inauthenticity and decadence of society. That's a very worrying trend because they're harnessing his philosophical prestige to push extremely far-right kinds of projects. and it's something that the left needs to stop and combat as effectively as it possibly can. Yeah, wow. Very, very interesting stuff.

Now, you mentioned in the very beginning of that answer, Michael Millerman, and I just wanted to kind of convey my introduction to this guy because I was, you know, just like on YouTube or something searching certain philosophers, whatever, just like, you know, you get on YouTube and you search shit up. And he came across my screen, and there was like he was talking about some philosopher. I forget the details. But then I was like, okay, I'll give this guy a chance. You know, maybe he'll teach me something.

And then having no clue who this guy is. And then I listen to about five minutes, and I'm like, oh, this guy's a fascist. And I don't know if that's totally fair. That's my only really interaction with him. But like, can you tell us who Michael Miller meant in? Because he's like this PhD in political science. I think he's a professor. He has these credentials.

But when I listen to him, not knowing any of that, I just thought like this is like an alt-right fascist guy trying to teach other alt-right fascist guys the sort of philosophy that will bolster their ideology. Am I wrong on that perception? Yeah, so this is actually a kind of funny story because this was something I was actually not involved in, but aware of because of my own social circles, because, you know, I did my PhD in Toronto at the time this whole controversy occurred, right? So Michael was a PhD student at the University of Toronto.

It was actually initially being supervised by the guy who wrote the introduction to my book, Ronald Beener, who, if your audience don't know, is a really fantastic political theorist and commentator on the right. We don't always agree about things like socialism and left from politics, but this work on the right is superb, right? Strongly encouraged people read Dangerous Minds. But, you know, Michael's thesis was going to be on the reception of Heidegger by different, more contemporary thinkers. And Ronnie was deeply concerned that the one that Michael seemed to have the most sympathy for was Alex Ander Duket, the fascist Russian philosopher, right?

Now, Millerman at the time denied that he was trying to offer a reading of Heidegger that was Duganesque, our Duginish, right? Essentially, you know, foregrounding the kind of fascist elements in his thinking. But Ronnie, you know, decided that he wasn't going to be supervising anything like this. So eventually, you know, Michael got a new supervisor. He graduated from the University of Toronto with a PhD, but because he chose to publish his book with Artis Press, which is a far-right press. more or less, you know, this opportunity to get an academic job was pretty much, you know, squat, right? So, you know, since then, he's been running a variety of different, you know, kind of independent forums to make money, you know, that are a lot more uninhibited than what you see in the PhD thesis, right? Just making outright cases for right-wing or far-right interpretations of various philosophers, defending, you know, right-way philosophy, that kind of thing, right?

And this, you know, really reached its apex in a book he published just last year, actually, about Alexander Dugan, defending his appearance as a philosopher and offering a defense of, you know, the reactionary policies of the Putin administration from, you know, a Dugan-ish, or Duggenite perspective, right? So, you know, that's just a little bit of gossip for you. Yeah, very interesting. Fascinating. It is, yeah. But, you know, he's definitely become a major intellectual figure on the far or the alt-right, and particularly as popularizations of people like Dugan and Heidegger. I see, you know, iterations of this kind of claims in a lot of the online discourse. So somebody that the left should also take concern with. Yeah, definitely. And the sort of thing that was like sticking out to me and disturbing to me when I first came across them was like this, yeah, this very academic sheen and this clear. background of knowledge that he does have that you don't often come across on the reactionary right and it was like oh yeah this is like it's very pristine it's presented very professionally he speaks knowledgeably and then yeah when you listen to what he's saying it's like Jesus Christ

all right man so yeah very interesting that you have like sort of almost personal history with him that's that's crazy well no I mean I never met the guy personally right I was just kind of aware of what was going on because you know the university sorry the Toronto academic scene is a pretty, I don't want to say insular, pretty close-knit space, you know what I mean? And when something is dramatic as, you know, a major, you know, political theorist, not wanted to complete a PhD because it's associated with the far right happens, you know, where it gets around and spreads in our circles. But, you know, a lot of my friends are at the University of Toronto, people like, you know, they're to Burzoni. And, you know, they were much closer to this and, you know,

filled me in what was going on. I had no idea, you know, at the time that Michael would go on to have this career as a kind of alt-right proprietor, but, you know, it doesn't surprise me. Yeah, very interesting. Now, one thing that comes out in Heidegger and Nietzsche and a lot of these reactionary thinkers, even today, like you see this on Twitter with these, like, these stupid fucking Twitter pages that are like, you know, what has the world become? We used to make great things. It's this idea of like achieving great things and democracy and liberalism and socialism.

And I even listened to an interview with the Bronze Age Pervert who made this he made this argument very explicit. He says Marxism, communism, this is a retirement home of political philosophy. Everybody has full bellies. Everybody's taken care of and everybody just kind of sits around and does nothing. And in contrast

to that idea, we want these like, you know, these these adventurers, these explorers, these conquerors, these great men of history to be unleashed from these democratic fetters and these fetters of human rights and democracy and accountability so they can go and achieve great things. And I just, you can maybe speak on this, but I sometimes think like, well, if you look at like the Soviet Union turning like a backward peasant country into a superpower racing the United States to the moon, it's like, is that an achieving of a great thing, you know, is like even

liberal capitalists have achieved great things in a sense right um and so it's kind of interesting what they do deem as as great things you know the pyramids built by slaves this is great because this lives on for millennia but you know maybe what the space station created by liberal capitalists and the so you know this this whole movement in history this is not a great thing so i don't know can you kind of talk about this this obsession with achieving great things and how it sort of made sense of in this right-wing ideology? Yeah, absolutely. So I should say I have a piece on Bronze Age Pervert

that's coming up relatively soon in Common Wheel magazine. It's kind of a comprehensive overview and critique of his work. So I won't spoil too much by giving away everything that I'm going to say. But I think that the conception of greatness that's articulated in a lot of these vulgar Nietzscheans

really just isn't all that impressive, right? This idea that greatness consists and the cultivation of hyper-masculine virtues and to invoke Lone 37 and his essay on The Walk House again, you know, engaging in acts of expansion and conquest. It just really doesn't impress me at all, right? I mean, I'm sometimes tempted to say that I've seen that Zach Snyder film. It was three hours long, and I was really, really, very bored by it

because any kind of brute can exercise physical force against another person and try to oppose their will upon them. and produce nothing that's of lasting value as a result of that, right? Which includes many of the figures that BAP reveres over the course, not just of his Bronze Age manifesto, but even in his thesis, right? By contrast, I think that real greatness in a society emerges by how well you treat the least well off amongst it, but also, you know, the quality of life and human flourishing that you're able to establish for everybody, right?

And this isn't just because I think it's important for each individual person to at least have the opportunity to lead a good life. I think that if you establish the conditions for human flourishing, then you will see people produce things that are more impressive, more creative, and more elevating than what came before, right? So there's this wonderful line in Capital Volume 3,

where Marx kind of breaks character as a critic of capitalism for a moment and talks a bit about what a socialist future might look like. And he says that the difference between a socialist future and life under contemporary capitalism is that under contemporary capitalism, humanity's powers are so often exercised and deployed, not in the service of human ends, but in the service of capital, right? We're all subject to its mute compulsory. to use sore and Mao's terms and produced for capital because we're unable to escape the kind of reified prison that it establishes for us. By contrast, he says that in a socialist society, for the first time, the cultivation of human powers will become an end in and of itself, right?

Not cultivating human powers so that it can become productive for capital, but for the sake of the individuals that make up that society. That is a vision of human flourishing that really wants to activate human potential in a way that has never been seen before. And I think that if anyone is concerned with the greatness and dignity of humanity, that is the vision of the future that we should pursue. Not one where, you know, fucking, you know, a bunch of, you know, Spartans come to burn down a vision, a village, because I think that happens to be a great deal of fun. And then, you know, afterwards end up going and drinking themselves into oblivion. Right, right. Yeah, it's a joke. It's a caricature. And a lot of these guys that talk about this stuff and emphasize these masculine, virtuous traits, I mean, they themselves don't create anything great or anything that's going to outlive them in their life. I mean, what BAP creates this sort of, this screed that is written at a fourth grade reading level, and this is his great achievement. It's just kind of, it's a joke in and of itself in a lot of ways. But yeah, I totally agree with you that I'm not against achieving great things culturally.

I would love for the great thing that we create to be this amazing, liberated, egalitarian human civilization that is actually worthy of going into the stars and calling itself intelligent life. And it's not going to happen through the barbarism of great men, as you say, ransacking towns or whatever the fuck they have in their mind of these great things that they can create, but it's going to come by liberating the masses of humanity from needless toil so that they as individuals and as a collective human species can create, things much, much greater than anything that's been created thus far. And that that creation would take the form, I would hope, of a beautiful civilization worthy of calling itself human, right? Absolutely. This is actually a great point for me to cite Michael Brooks, right? So, yeah, Michael had this wonderful anecdote that I like to tell about a guy in a New York bar who was watching TV and he saw the Spite-Ex satellite kind of in space for the first time. And the guy's had cheering, and he was like, you know, we did it, we did it, we did it, right?

And the people at the bar looked at them and were like, what are you talking about? You know, the Soviets put the satellite up in space, you know, there are enemy and we shouldn't be, you know, plotting this. And he's like, no, but I'm talking about the human species, you know, we've been limited to this planet and there we go. We've done the kind of things that the ancient Greeks that back revere so much only ever dreamed we'd be able to, which is actually to navigate the stars, right? And, you know, that was done not by, you know, single great individuals, but by pooling society and humanity's resources together in order to achieve something collectively that none of us would have been able to do individually, right? And that's the kind of thing that I think is inspiring to me about humanity and this quest for human greatness. Ransacking a village and burning it down and drinking and hearing the lamentations of their women just does not impress me. and I don't think should impress anybody who's over the age, frankly, of 12 years old.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, and even like the Gothic cathedrals and the pyramids that are so often pushed forward as like high architectural, artistic cultural achievement is created by the toiling of the masses. It's not these great men that build it, even if they come up with the idea and they have enough stolen loot to fund it. It's the people that actually build it and make it a reality instead of just an idea. And so that also pushes against their entire bullshit. I think that one of the most obnoxious things that I see said, or that I see articulated in the world today, as when people say, well, that billionaire created thousand jobs by building those warehouses. My response is, well, I actually know the thousand people who are working for him

made that person a billionaire and built that warehouse that he then profits from, right? And once you re-articulate that emphasis, it becomes a lot more clear how intubendent we really are and how we can really achieved great things. But nobody achieves great things by themselves. Definitely, without a doubt. And to the Michael Brooks point, I've actually been loving going back and looking at some of, this whole conflict in Palestine is occurring right now. And so like YouTube algorithm will throw up some stuff and it knows I like Michael Brooks. It knows I like these conversations. So I've actually watched like some Michael Brooks, just last night by myself watching Michael Brooks debate, this right-wing Zionist. and god damn he was so good

he was so good he was so articulate he doesn't take their shit he talks shit but then he addresses all their arguments in such a wonderful way extemporaneous speaker I mean we really really lost a real gem for the left with Michael Brooks and we'll never forget his contributions oh yeah man he was so cool

I mean I saw that exact debate you're talking about right just sits there a smile on his face handles any kind of shit that they can throw out of them with the extremely amount of grace and humor, right? I hope that we can live up to his legacy in every way that we can, because I don't think he would want otherwise. But there's definitely no replacing Michael, right? He was one of a kind, and we're all poor without him. Yeah. And people, I really encourage people, go on YouTube, search up Brooks debating Zionist or Brooks on Palestine or whatever, and you'll

find a bunch of videos. One of the funniest parts in that particular debate is, as they're getting heated, his interlocutor, like sort of reaches over as he's talking and touches. Touches Michael Brooks, and Michael Brooks just says, don't fucking touch me. I broke out laughing. It was so great. But yeah, he's wonderful, man. Look, and the apartheid word specifically is both used by people who were crucial in ending apartheid in South Africa, like Desmond Tutu or Ronnie Casriles, who served as intelligence minister under Becky, who I've interviewed. And the other main people who use the apartheid word are Ehud Olmer and Ehud Barak. So it is what it is, and I don't support second-class citizenship and occupation and sieges for anybody, no matter who they are.

Are you not concerned about the binary between either condemning Israel entirely being also a stance that a lot of very strong and notorious anti-Semitic people agree with versus, like, you know, seeing this as more of a complex issue where it is wrong what's going. going on and that there's also a way to do this that Israel still exists and is supported? So it's not a complex issue. That's the big thing. It's super simple. There's one group that has enormous power. It's the most powerful country in the Middle East. It's backed by the United States. It acts on another population of people with total impunity and is never held accountable for anything. So there's no symmetry in the relationship, period. And just as like a thought experiment, IDW people, if we know that if somehow a population of Jewish refugees ended up in West Bank in Gaza and an

Arabic government in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv had an open-air prison in what you know Jewish Gaza which they bombed white phosphorus they killed civilians indiscriminately and they had no provisions for medicine they had an embargo that blocked food that electricity wasn't running that there was an over 48% unemployment rate life expectancy and malnutrition statistics were horrifying the one of the major policymakers in this hypothetical Arabic-Palestinian state said, we need to put those Jews on a diet. In the West Bank, there was another Jewish area where there was a little

bit more autonomy, but there was regular Arabic settlements where they pulled up the Jewish farmers' foods. They terrorized them with rocks. The security forces broke children's bones, and they couldn't drive their own roads. We'd all have no problem understanding what that was. So there's no thing complex about it. The second part of your question, it's a pure asymmetry relationship and the question is rights or not so that's it it's not complicated the second part of your question at this point there's always been there's always going to be crackpots who are anti-Semitic who condemn Israel that's not what drives the movement it's particularly in the United States if you

work around most people who are concerned with this issue it's actually populated with a lot of Jewish people the real question we have to ask is why is it that APAC is hosting a information minister for Slobodan Milosevic. Why is it that there's relationships between the Israeli government and far-right parties in Europe? Why is it that Benjamin Netanyahu's son is posting borderline alt-right memes? Why is it that Israel is an alt-right state, even though it is from the descendants of the victims of one of the greatest crimes in history? That's a serious question, and that's inseparable from the racism of the project, which goes back to the first part that we have to solve.

But thank you. Shalom. And I am serious about it coming from Jewish values. Like Tony Jut, my reading to the extent I do, which I actually do have some connection to that in a religious sense, it's unacceptable for me. I agree with me. Yeah, no, I know. But it's not complicated.

But okay. We're over two hours. Very, very, very appreciative of your time, of your knowledge. Not a lot of people in this world could walk us through 2,000 plus years of philosophical history and tie it into the ideologies of the present and speak with such fluent knowledge as you can, Matt. I really mean that. So I'm always impressed by your breadth of knowledge. Always have a place here at Rev. Left for you to come back anytime, especially that new book. By the way, when does that new book come out again? I'm handing it in May, so I'm guessing it'll probably be out, maybe this time next year. Okay. I'd say it's probably good bet. Cool. Well, I'll have you back on when that happens, absolutely. But as my final question for you, as sort of a wrap-up of this conversation, ultimately, what do you hope people to take away from this important work of yours?

And what can those of us on the egalitarian and revolutionary left gain from understanding this long history of conservative and reactionary thought? I think that there are two things that I want people to take away from this, right? one is that it is very easy to make fun of conservatives in the political right for being dumb right and oftentimes you know a lot of people that it'll argue with online are pretty fucking dumb and annoying right and you know there's a long history of left wing you know critiques of the exact at this point you know john stuette mills used to call conservative stupid party uh carol marks actually once said that reaction areas are just beyond you know beneath argumentation which is why he was going to focus on, you know, bourgeois thinkers instead, because at least they deep arguments

for, you know, their positions, right? But I actually disagree with Marx and Mill, you know. I think that what I hope the book presents is that there are many intelligent, thoughtful, reflective, and even profound people on the, thinkers on the political right, and the left has a duty to answer them, right? Now, that doesn't mean we need to agree with them because I don't, right? I think that they're all wrong fundamentally. But answer them. we need to do. And the second thing that I would hope that people would take away from the book is the kind of unity that one finds on the political right. So the political right is extremely diverse in a lot of ways. And it's extremely diverse because every right-wing thinker and every

right-wing movement has a different conception of what body or what group they think is recognizably superior in a title to a higher degree of status, wealth, and power in society. But they are all unified by this conviction that there is such an individual, there are such groups and that they are entitled to higher degrees of affluence, more political power, more dignity, and more status, right? And understanding this unity, I think, is the core contribution that I hope the book would make. Beautiful. So the book is the political right and equality, turning back the tide of egalitarian modernity by the one and only Matt McManus. Thank you so much, Matt. Amazing work. I really look forward to having you back on to discuss your

next book. Yeah, thanks, Matt. It's been a great time, as always. Rebel music to get you ready for the Rebel Music To get you ready for the Rebel Music Oh, why can't we roll There's open country Tell me why can't we be what we want to be We want to be free 3 o'clock

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