The Nihilist Style in Right-Wing Politics: Playing Villain (Part 2)
(Sketches for The Plato Option)
The terminal decline of the modern world breeds apathy. And with time having stopped at some point during the 90s and before 2001, all teenagers are middle-aged now. A mid-life crisis and a teenager’s rebellion of apathetic nihilism are one and the same. Some flee for the woods. Others choose to embrace teenagerdom. The teenager, remember, wants to fight the system because his unripe heart yearns for something he fails to understand. How do you fight the system in a right-wing way? You become edgy, of course. And you call that faux-rebellion against the system your “will to power”. The right-wing teenager can’t help himself from playing villain, because the easiest way pour épater les bourgeois in our age is to identify with a story’s villain. This is the premise of Breaking Bad. In his mid-life crisis, the man who has forgotten whether he ever was young, becomes a villain to make his rebellion against the system that turned him into a weakling. The prisoner of postmodernity breaks bad just to exert some will to power. Against the pious fictions of moralisers, who surround us from all sides and constrict us so as to steal our vitality, the very first option is being the bad guy. Smells Like Teen Spirit indeed, at 16 or at 60.
It is evident there are Nietzschean concepts in the air. And as we are, after all, dealing with philosophical underpinnings, we must ask: is the nihilist right the Nietzschean right? In large part they define themselves as such. In large part their language is Nietzschean. Can we grant them this identification? Is Nietzsche culpable for their errors? Can Nietzsche at all be a political thinker to the extent of becoming the founder of a political system? The nihilist style in right-wing politics is a broad phenomenon, but, I contend, it is above all a media phenomenon and not a philosophic phenomenon.
I invite you to read Josh Neal’s excellent article which looks at the most active parts of the nihilist right as it appears in online spaces from an American perspective. It will explain many things I do not touch upon here. His scalpel opens up the twitchy little beast and reveals it precisely for what it is: a performatively extremist media machine. This is the phenomenon’s essence, not Nietzschean philosophy. With this in mind, we must still explain why most who fly the banner of the nihilist right swear loyalty to Nietzsche.
Nietzsche and the irrelevance of any actual philosophical content
Nietzsche can be anything, for his essence is Protean. His very life was devoted to transformation, and his thought progresses, showing distinct phases that make him problematic to systematisers. His system reaches its final form right before his madness, but then is his final system tainted by the madness? Most Nietzschean systematisers, pathetic creatures through and through, shirk from the thought that the mad Nietzsche is the full Nietzsche. They prefer to pretend that unfortunate episode was unrelated to the man’s “system”. Unless of course they wish to slander him, to say that Nietzsche’s philosophy was just the ramblings of a madman. In fact, the very opposite is true: his philosophy is sane, all too sane, right until it becomes true, which is to say insane. In truth his system is a bridge, a bridge over an abyss, linking the reactionary to the Baccheutes. His first phase, that of his childhood, is Christianity. This is his thesis. His second phase is curious philosophical questioning, maturing into open anti-Christian reactionary rebellion against all his teachers and all certainty. This is his antithesis. His third and final phase is Dionysian madness, uniting the Crucified with the breaker of all bonds. This is his synthesis.
His systematisers prefer to limit themselves to his second phase, particularly its outer edges, speaking of “the mature Nietzsche”. Here he is primarily a Protean and forceful individualist. Nothing beyond these two characteristics matter as regards the new Nietzschean right, for they too belong to the systematisers when they turn towards Nietzsche. They can make of him whatever they need, holding onto nothing but style, because he is an individual too strong to pin down. In reality, he can never be a political thinker—being Protean, he will slip away by turning into different forms, being forceful, he is too loud for polite company, and being a consummate individualist, his system is by design a one-man show. Nietzsche at a town hall meeting is a laughable image, because he doesn’t want to be there. It is precisely this Romantic image of the great man who can never suffer himself to grow small enough to accommodate the lesser and the busybodies of the world that makes him the “philosopher of choice” of the nihilist right. Their project rejects philosophy; they want an aesthetic posing as philosophy, and the name they give to this aesthetic is “Nietzsche”.
Nietzsche himself is an excuse. For postmodernists who genuinely believe in the Void, any philosophy is no more than excuse. Foucault is a far more politically influential figure in the sophistic tradition of deconstruction, and one who carefully dissected assumptions—instead of attacking them with an unsharpened axe as Nietzsche, that old Romantic, was fond of doing—yet it would be a waste of time to trace any connections. Was Foucault the man Nietzsche called upon to continue his work, the philosopher of the future? Let the systematisers answer that based on their preferred Nietzsche. For the nihilist right, Nietzschean epigonoi are as irrelevant as the original. The postmodernism of this new strand of the right is lived, it saturates their bloodstream and fills the pores of their organs, and as such it need not be given a genealogy of thought. It suffices to say that the entire project, whatever its philosophical backing, is one that fully accepts modernity, rejecting only the pious humanism of the masses. Philosophy is not in its family tree, but modernity qua condition is. These are children of the Godless world through and through, and they insist on living over thinking. In practice, this looks like no more than just modernity but edgy.
When I speak of their nihilism, I mean it exactly as Nietzsche did not want it defined: not as pessimism regarding life, but as denial of transcendent order. In Nietzsche’s formulation, that is not nihilism at all, but to understand why, we would need to investigate his path (what others mistake for a system) as a path of inversion. Since the path of Nietzsche is to the nihilist right excuse and only excuse, such an investigation is needless at this juncture. In Nietzsche’s name, these people have made themselves into cartoon nihilists. Whatever idiosyncratic formulations of nihilism they carry with them are irrelevant. They are armed with philosophies the left has integrated fully and indeed deployed against its enemies, and their only contribution is a gross caricaturisation. If you reach the conclusion that these people exist to lose, you will have unlocked something crucial about their psychology and their motives.
But Nietzsche himself was a man of the right, you might say. But fascism was Nietzschean, you might say. Are these not right-wing credentials of the highest calibre? First of all, you would be wrong on both counts: Nietzsche was a merely apolitical sympathiser of a hereditary aristocracy he recognised was gone by the time he was born, and fascism is Sorelian and Gentilean (in an unfinished construction sort of way in both cases) before it is merely Protean (and therefore also Nietzschean, according to the conscience of each individual fascist, many of whom—particularly among the French—were indeed trueblooded Nietzscheans). National Socialism is even more Protean, and is Nietzschean only in the sense that a caricaturised version of Nietzsche also swam in the philosophical porridge the Führer cooked up. It’s an 'inspired by Homer's Iliad' situation. It is Nietzsche’s Proteanism that allows him to pop up wherever he may be called.
Different selective readings will conjure up different Nietzsches. Just as his extreme contempt for the brainlessness of the masses and for Christian morality greatly endeared him to Hitler, his violent pragmatism, his extreme perspectivism, his psychological approach, his anti-metaphysical odium, and his vitriolic, totalising critique of Christianity—indeed religious thought itself—have, throughout the 20th century, greatly endeared him to the left. Even if they had not, it’s a natural fit. No empty metaphysics, just HERE and NOW. It matters little how much Hitler may have liked Nietzsche because to the victor go the spoils, and even if Nazism were Nietzschean, Nazism lost more violently than any ideology has lost in living memory. This being the post-war world, everything is measured according to the dictates of the winner, and if you insist that the nihilist right has a good philosophical case because Nazism and/or its unhappy parent fascism is Nietzschean and Nietzsche was a right-winger, you demonstrate that you have failed to fathom the left’s will to power, and the immensity of its victory despite Nietzsche’s assurances that the “Christian” faith in morality would wither much sooner without God.
The right, in this as in all other things, is fighting against a more powerful opponent. However much a right-wing nihilist may insist that Nietzsche was “a man of the right” (whatever it is they precisely have in mind when they say this about someone they see as a rabid atheist trying to slaughter European sacred cows, but they’re a queer lot), Nietzschean critiques will never be unwelcome in the left’s soil, because the left is master of not only deconstruction, psychologisation, anti-metaphysicalism and anti-theism, but also of the keys to the kingdom. If an “evil right-winger” saying cartoonish things like “kill everyone, power needs no justification, slaves exist to be raped and submit” comes up before society’s eyes against a left-winger armed with Nietzsche, do you believe there will be any conflict at all? Are you not familiar with The Authoritarian Personality? What does it matter what Nietzsche was—some biographical detail for the footnotes—when his toolset is POWER in the hands of the left? The left knows how to psychologise away its enemies, and Nietzsche has been a good tutor.
Yes, Nietzsche was an anti-egalitarian to the marrow of his bones, but you think, deluded right-winger, that this will stop those stronger than you from using him as a weapon against you? So little do you understand power? You fail because you tried. The living cartoon has discredited himself merely by showing up. This would be a “contest” between the very institutions of the modern world and outsider performance art. It would be a laughable vision of a David reject the mighty Goliath can’t even see for his minuteness, and who thus can’t hope to even bother the giant, leaving the task to the true King of Israel. And it is precisely because, in the barren wasteland of postmodernist dissatisfaction with the world, some of those who lean right are vulnerable above all to a well-told story, that this very thing, turning right-wing politics to outsider performance art, has been realised before our incredulous eyes. For make no mistake: it does not matter whether Nietzsche belonged to the right or to the left because the so-called Nietzschean right are children of liberalism, the edgy sons of bored affluence engaged in outsider performance art. They are not a revolutionary vanguard; they are hipsters venting their frustrations into a grotesque art project.
The need for stories
The disaffected men and women of modernity hunger for stories. And if you can tell a story wherein the aesthetics are by themselves the thematic core, you can convince them that aesthetics can replace politics. This is the seductive tale with which those vulnerable to nihilism are being lulled at this very moment. And they have been massaged to this point since birth via the stories that the media broadcast, which, as is to be expected of liberalism’s products, more often than not cast as villains the enemies of the liberal order. The idea is Choose Your Own Adventure, and the plan is to corral those open to right-wing messaging away from any paths that might lead to dangerous outcomes.
In modernity’s mythic stories, a cartoon version of the Nietzschean man has become the chief stock villain, because such a man rejects liberal and Christian morality (if there is a difference other than the presence or absence of the Christian God). The evil nihilist equipped with Nietzschean-sounding aphorisms of the popular media mirrors the new right-wing nihilists who pop up all over, and most of all those right-wing nihilists who have erected online temples to mere bravado, rejecting theory and other decadent pursuits. The one thing they have not rejected is the power of stories. The stories through which they are themselves made into villains.
Modernity’s heroes are limp-wristed defenders of the status quo. In the ennui of history’s end, modernity cannot imagine any other heroes. This is why the villains are given nuance and philosophical depth, but with a murderous twist. The Hollywood villain will have good reasons for doing what he does, he will engage the audience with his arguments, he will even stir their hearts, but then will turn and say, “this is why I must detonate a hydrogen bomb in every major city of the world”. In this way, the milquetoast nobodies cast in the role of the hero become heroic, and the threat of the villain’s arguments is nullified. Every villain is beguiling, and every hero boring. This is a well-laid trap. The enchanting speeches of villains (whether consciously or unconsciously from the perspective of their creators) serve to diffuse feelings that might lead modern consumers to alternatives. In the stories they take in, the villains may make sense, but their methods are always horrific. Liberal morality thus reinforces itself without need of strong heroes. In many cases, it even gets to say heroes themselves are a dangerous concept through its stories.
Today’s popular heroes don’t waste energy justifying themselves beyond the utilitarian. “Many will die if we don’t act” is their go-to line. That is very much the best they got. The coherent Weltanschauung is reserved for villains. And notice how often the villain echoes points that can fairly be termed Nietzschean. Look for Nietzsche at the database of tropes in media, and you will notice that reference to his work is the easiest way to explain the motivations of most nihilistic villains in popular art. Some have spun elaborate theories based on observations such as these, but I do not mean to echo such arabesque schizoidalities. Joker isn’t meant to be the Overman, and there is no conspiracy to discredit Nietzsche. The liberal order is simply a living beast, and it breathes massive quantities of artistic air through its lungs; whoever challenges any of its assumptions will inevitably cause the great beast to exhale in disapproval. But what interests here is that “nihilist rage” speaks to the audience. The reason for this is simple: nihilism has the audience in its grip. The liberal order has no problem with nihilism, so long as it gets to filter it, and thus sort out the bad guys from the good guys.
In superhero and spy stories, the villain will attack modernity with great eloquence, only to point a semi-automatic at a bus full of schoolchildren in the next scene. In teen comedies, the stock characters of the jocks will embody caricatured visions of vitality only to prove their internal shallowness against the more vital energy of the oppressed nerd (and this type of story is indeed experiencing some mutations in the last few years, with nerds absorbing the external characteristics of the jocks more and more). In all cases, the villains are the ones declaring the evangelion of naked power, and the heroes are the defenders of “common-sense” liberal morality. This, socially speaking, is high mummery, in which the audience is called upon to dance with one side or the other, but one of the options is a trap.
This is the trap into which fall the “sensitive young men” whose hearts flutter rightwards. Seduced by a Hollywood caricature of Nietzsche the nihilist, they learn to empathise with villains, and thus open themselves up to becoming liberalism’s villains. The genuine article, the real Nietzsche, not only contains nuances that are quite beyond them, but proves yet again utterly irrelevant. Who reads books nowadays anyway? The Pied Piper trawls the streets of social media.
Dread it, run from it... The medium is the message all the same.
Marshall McLuhan’s approach to the study of media seeks not so much to explain away society by looking at technology, the way Nietzsche explicitly seeks to explain away all previous philosophy by psychologising the philosophers, but to illuminate technology as embedded in the tendons of society, and not a mere tool or expression of it. This is why he can so eloquently offer an explanation for why moderns are so vulnerable to their media, deriving their politics from popular entertainment and making social media their pretend-salons. Nietzsche insisted that everything is art, because he saw in art—and indeed in make-believe—a creative impulse more proper to life than in cooking up ethical schemes and vivisecting reality. But a century of mass media has proven the creativity of art too weak to stand up to the might of instrumentalisation and beyond that, the almighty media massage effect that takes root inside the mind. Life does imitate art, to the point where you forget your personality was made in film and television, in Twitter and Facebook.
“Aesthetics above all” is no longer a subversive message, for it has burrowed into the brains of the masses. They believe it unconsciously, because they follow only wisps of colourful smoke, which are sold to them as ideology. It is for this reason that the nihilist right, as a primarily youthful phenomenon, is best understood through the lens of the media-massage. The people who fall into the trap of playing villain have already been unconsciously converted via their use of media. They have not “consumed” media which then “shaped them”, they are themselves encrustations ON media. They are media-zombies pretending to have chosen their views. In types like these, Nietzsche’s psychological observations shine with a magisterial lucidity, for it is in the more hollowed-out forms of human life that we best see how the human animal is a twitchy jumble of often contradictory impulses making up involved theories after the fact to explain away its involuntary jolts. Nietzsche cares not about such types, of course, he only cares about bringing down the haughty ethical philosophers from their lofty perch, but that is his own temperamental urge, and we should leave him to it.
If we follow McLuhan’s advice and look for clues in the media, what will looking at, say, Socrates tell us? That he privileged dialogue is a profound insight into his philosophy, which in fact Socrates himself (Plato, naturally) tells us. What about Nietzsche? His chosen medium is the printed word in the form of the polemic, and we know his books failed to make the impact he wished to see, which tells us much about his loneliness and his violent temperament as a thinker. If we don’t allow this hermeneutic to become a gross reductionism but keep it within its proper bounds, we see it can have great value. And what will looking at the media footprint of the nihilist right tell us? That they are such trueblooded exiles from the desert of the real they openly preach an evangel of no content. They preach anti-politics while claiming to be a political movement. They speak of ancient values through a lens of a postmodernism so pure it is often willing to denounce all of recorded human history as an aberration from man’s primal instincts. They preach a caricaturised villainy because they have internalised reaction to such a degree they are content to live as caricatures.
If you want to understand these people, look not to Nietzsche or any other philosopher, but to Revenge of the Nerds inverted, a vision wherein “the jocks were right all along”, look to the Sigma Male edits of Christian Bale playing some psychopath or other, look to the various iterations of “he’s just like me fr” featuring Ryan Gosling driving around or smiling sadly with his sadly-smiling eyes, look, above all, to inflammatory cartoon aesthetics AS the message. Hypnotised by mimesis into an antisocial social media stupor—this and NOTHING ELSE is the essence of it. Yes, it does Smell Like Teen Spirit. But it has become old.