THE BIRTH OF IDENTITARIANISM:

His presence has grown so ubiquitous that commentators are now regularly talking about the "Nietzschean" right and its influence on American politics. It can be juxtaposed against the more religious "post-liberal" right of figures like Patrick Deneen, or the "national conservatism" of Yoram Hazony as the third leg of the new three legged stool of the American right. In theory the overt religiosity and communitarian ethos shared by post-liberalism and national conservatism should inhibit a tight embrace of Nietzschean tropes. In practice things become more complicated.

In an amusing twist, the nominally Christian magazine First Things has published figures who offer discounted Nietzschean bombast like Lom3Z. In his essay, Lom3Z condemns the "Longhouse," which encompasses  "technocratic governance" but also "wokeness"and all that is  "progressive" "liberal" and "secular." This needs to be confronted since it "distrusts overt ambition. It censures the drive to assert oneself on the world, to strike out for conquest and expansion. Male competition and the hierarchies that drive it are unwelcome. Even constructive expressions of these instincts are deemed toxic, patriarchal, or even racist."  This shows the extent to which the Nietzschean right has become a major cultural player. 

The modern Nietzschean right was willed into being by proponents like Richard Spencer and the alt-right, who leaned heavily on the thinking of the "Conservative Revolution" in Weimar Germany. Nietzschean ideas have since gained traction through popularizations like Bronze Age Mindset, which includes truly endless whining about the influence of soft progressive "bugmen" and calls for a new aristocracy of coconut oil glazed musclemen. These ideas have gained considerable traction with young conservative radicals in search of a more muscular rejection of liberal "effeminacy" and its replacement with a butch ethos of unconstrained power. That many of the proponents of these views are terminally online nebbish intellectuals who'd struggle to cosplay as "super-duper" Conan the Barbarians is a major paradox of praxis the Nietzschean right has yet to resolve.  

The American Nietzschean right once more combines Nietzsche with various forms of nationalism and crude racist biologism. This is the temptation generations of interpreters tried to ward off because of its transparent Nazi associations; usually by pointing to Nietzsche's condemnations of anti-Semitism and his cosmopolitan insistence on being a "good European" in Beyond Good and Evil. But the allure of a more populist Nietzsche remains an enduring idol, and its not hard to see why. One of the major tropes of right-wing populism has been the struggle to extend notions of aristocracy and status downwards to build support for hierarchical policies amongst the lower orders who may feel invested in upending them. Not coincidentally Southern antebellum racists were particularly gifted at this, with James DeBow insisting that "the color of the white man is now, in the south, a title of nobility" and observing that poor whites in the North are "at the bottom of the social ladder, whilst [their] brother here has ascended several steps and can look down upon those who are beneath him, at an infinite remove." 

Nietzsche offers an aristocratic grammar and outlook that can be extended to the national level through proclamations that one belongs to a great people who have been humiliated and shamed by decadent and corrupting egalitarian enemies. Once these enemies are overcome by a rarefied elite of super-duper men, this Eminem blonde people can once more fulfill its grand destiny through palingenetic renewal. While technically at cross purposes with Nietzsche's exclusion of all demotic politics, this offers a useful way to drum up popular support for the far right in the same way figures like DeBow hoped to induce poor whites to fight and eventually die for the slave system that ultimately benefited the masters above all else. Bronze Age Pervert even concedes the need for these kinds of Nietzschean compromises with Machiavelli. In Bronze Age Mindset, when he isn't congratulating himself for coming up with coining some neologism as an insult, Pervy the Populist encourages his followers to "make alliance with people who otherwise wouldn't be your friends. I believe that democracy is the final cause of all the political problems I describe here, but in the short run democracy--the will of the people--is on our side because the democracies have been hijacked by a stupid and corrupt elite.

The nations face extinction and an era of permanent civil war because this elite wants to pillage and pillage: and wants to flood them with the shit of the world. This is the immediate threat, and on this you can be allied with people who otherwise may not shoot for the same star you do. If Ann Coulter or Pat Buchanan were in charge, you would get 99% of what you want. Therefore use them as models to solve the problems that face you, and don't scare the peoples with crazy talk if you want to move things politically. Let the normies have their normal lives, and paint our enemies as the crazies...which they are...and as the corrupt vermin they are. If you haven't compromised yourself go into political life maybe, and use Trump as a model for success." [...]

The poison of the doctrine 'equal rights for all'--this has been more thoroughly sowed by Christianity than by anything else, from the most secret recesses of base instincts, Christianity has waged a war to the death against every feeling of reverence and distance between man and man, against, that is, the precondition of every elevation, every increase in culture--it has forged out of the ressentiment of the masses its chief weapon against us.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ 

Nietzsche is the greatest right wing thinker of all time because he had the audacity to go further and more boldly where other defenders of aristocracy and hierarchy still fear to tread. His originality comes from the sweep and depth of his critique of egalitarian modernity, which inverts the progressive liberal and socialist trajectory to characterize history as a long fall into nihilism. 

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