Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom, for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if a greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy. Frank Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man.
The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them every where brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society… So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts. James Madison, Federalist 10
So many right-wing crazies, so little time. This must be why I had not heard of “Bronze Age Pervert” until recently, courtesy of an Atlantic article by Graeme Wood, “How Bronze Age Pervert Charmed the Far Right.” Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP, is a slightly mysterious Yale-educated political science Ph.D who masquerades online as an unhinged, foul-mouthed purveyor of racism and misogyny, coupled with a love of bodybuilding and ancient Greece. Yet he seems to have attracted a large and loyal following among young right-wingers. Unraveling his attraction for today’s new-Right was the thread I tried to follow, leading through the labyrinth of modern right-wing thought.
Old and New Rights
In the United States, to be ‘on the right’ until recently meant that you were a firm supporter of a capitalist, free-enterprise system; limited government with low taxes and regulation; strong protections for individual rights with respect to property, speech, guns, etc.; and a believer in the rule of law. You were almost always a proud defender of the Constitution, the military and law enforcement, America’s leading role in the world, and the American business community. You endorsed a level playing field because you believed that liberty allowed natural differences in talent, drive, and intelligence to manifest themselves and rise to the top.
Today however almost none of this is true.
What we call the right today in America still has some of its classic features. But that is not where the grassroots energy is, not where the MAGA movement is, not where the intellectual fervor is. Increasingly it is found in support of formerly fringe positions: not limited government, but strong government empowered to enforce minority views on religion and morals; not the Constitution but the will of a demagogue; not universal individual rights but the rights of particular voices and groups; not a leader of the ‘free world’ but a selfish defender of national interests; not the military or law enforcement (see Senator Tommy Tuberville’s willingness to block military promotions); not even private businesses who insist on their right to hire and fire and appeal to customers as they see fit (see Governor De Santis’s fight with Disney).
Donald Trump, and not only him, makes no secret of his admiration for authoritarian tough guys like Putin, Xi, Erdogan and their ilk. This is largely because politics for Trump has nothing to do with policy, it is entirely about winning and losing—are you for me or against me. It is struggle for its own sake.
One way to sum up these changes is to say that the American Right now looks more like the old European Right. In Europe, the Right, since the terms Right and Left came into general political use with the French Revolution, has stood for hierarchy and the rule of the strong and privileged. It advocated for the close cooperation of church, state and business. It promoted a blood and soil nationalism based on affinities of language, race, and faith, and against dangerous mixing with inferior races and peoples. It fought virulently against advances for women, equal rights for gays, and other challenges to ‘traditional morality.’ It culminated in fascist regimes that glorified violence, struggle and war as ends in themselves.
That version of the Right seemed, after World War II, to be extinguished, never to rise again from the ashes of utter defeat and ignominy. But it has returned, in almost every European state. In Russia, Hungary, Poland, and now Italy it has taken power. In other states it is growing, including here at home.
Hungary in particular has become the model for America’s new right-wingers, who are envious of Victor Orban. It is nominally democratic but has been rigged by Orban to be a democracy in name only: The courts, the press, the universities, the legislature are all cowed or bought off. Xenophobia over a hyped immigration threat, and faux-indignation at having to abide by European human rights standards, help fuel Orban’s continued popularity. Freedom House now considers Hungary to be a ‘partial’ or ‘semi-consolidated’ democracy.
CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, an epicenter of today’s Right, in 2022 and 2023 held its annual conference in Budapest. One of its leading lights, Rod Dreher, has said “Right now, the political leader of the conservative resistance in the West is the prime minister of a small central European [country] that most Americans never even think about.”
Many of Orban’s most committed supporters are Catholic ‘integralist’ thinkers who want the state to explicitly privilege their faith, as is the case in Hungary. The integralists reject liberal pluralism as dangerous to conservative practice (on abortion, LGBTQ rights, etc.) and contrary to Catholic doctrine, and want to seize control of the state to impose the truth. Kevin Vallier, author of a recent book critiquing integralism, characterizes it this way: “’We’re going to take the institutions established by liberalism and socialism and we’re going to turn them to our own ends.’ This is the great danger of the American integralists because they’re bringing the ideas of Viktor Orbán into the Republican Party. They’re one of the ones who are most responsible for it.”
Integralists are not the only ones who dream of capturing state institutions for their own purposes. Trump has promised that if re-elected he will purge the government bureaucracy and change civil service rules to allow him to put his followers into every federal position. Trump seeks not the standard conservative goal of less government, but the new-right goal of my government.
In the 1930s during the Great Depression small groups of Americans looked to foreign dictatorships on Right and Left—Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s USSR—as models for a troubled United States. But there is no precedent for the leader of a major American political party, millions of his followers, and its intellectual spokesmen, to openly prefer explicitly illiberal, foreign, political systems.
A number of different strands make up today’s right. (I have not found a satisfactory term to characterize today’s right-wing movements and thinkers: New Right is an old term, ‘alt-right’ refers more narrowly to white nationalists. The one term that does not fit is ‘conservative’—there is nothing conservative about today’s right, which is both radical and reactionary). But they increasingly overlap.
We have people of great wealth who, like the Trumps and Musks, cannot resist the temptation to meddle in politics and public affairs. They are convinced that they got rich because they are superior beings, and that this superiority is transferable to other domains. Many are openly hostile to democracy and see no reason for their inferiors to have an equal say in politics: billionaire tech-entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, for instance, wants to limit voting to those who can pass a civics test. Today many of the most brazen of these Gilded Age throwbacks live in Silicon Valley and are prey to anti-establishment conspiracy theories: as Paul Krugman wrote recently, “Arguably, the craziest faction in U.S. politics right now isn’t red-hatted blue-collar guys in diners, it’s technology billionaires living in huge mansions and flying around on private jets.”
We have conservative nationalists like Steve Bannon, part of the Orban admiration society. These are people who agree with Putin and Xi and Modi that the world is characterized by a ‘clash of civilizations’; we are divided into distinct religio-cultural spheres, each of which should be allowed to develop its own distinctive way of life. Liberalism is despised because of its claims to universalism and attempts to criticize and reform non-liberal regimes. Our sphere (the best of all) is Christian, white, and European. We should proudly uphold it and keep out people and ideas from all those ‘shithole countries’.
We have disaffected young men who rightly feel put upon by globalized capitalism, which has ravaged America’s industries and turned the once-proud working class into the precariat. Their place in the world is unclear, and it is easy to blame feminism and affirmative action for their problems. They yearn for some greater cause to provide meaning and belonging, and often find it in right-wing organizations and leaders like Trump, who tell them liberalism is the arch-enemy, a world-view that looks down on people like them. Embracing racism, anti-semitism, and misogyny and prepping for violence is exciting and fills the void that has opened up in their lives and communities.
And we have a small but influential group of intellectuals and ‘thought-leaders’ who find liberalism unsatisfying and yearn for alternatives, sometimes in a resurgence of traditional religion, sometimes in an anti- or post-liberal political order. These are people who want a great cause to support, who want a world painted in clear black and white, with enemies to defeat and battles to wage. Some see themselves as defenders of ‘true’ American values, but many are fascinated with theocracy and fascism.
The Common Thread: Hatred of Equality
What do these different strands have in common? The fundamental divide today, as for the last three centuries, is between those who accept and defend the fundamental equality of human beings, and those who do not. The United States has until now been the nation that most clearly falls in the first camp, at least in its creed and publicly accepted principles. The (many) deviations from this creed have come to be understood as mistakes that need to be acknowledged and overcome. But as liberalism has moved more forcefully to identify and rectify these mistakes—racism and sexism, the destruction of indigenous peoples, the piling up of massive fortunes—it has produced a fierce backlash. This backlash has now morphed from a defense of ‘classic’ American values, to a growing embrace of values that cannot by any stretch be called American.
The dividing lines between these groups are increasingly blurred as what they have in common, their hatred of modern liberalism and egalitarianism, pulls them together. This is aided by a powerful network of right-wing think tanks, institutes, and media outlets built up over decades and funded by wealthy patrons and businesses. These wealthy interests want above all to reverse the modern liberal project, understood as empowering government to use some of the wealth generated by the private sector to provide welfare and opportunities for the poor and disadvantaged. Even small steps to reduce inequality and check the power of the rich are characterized as socialism or communism.
(While wealthy liberals tend to fund foundations that do ‘good works’ and create detailed policy proposals, conservatives tend to fund politically-oriented organizations that aim directly at influencing elected officials. In Washington, the moderately-liberal Brookings Institution is a storehouse of broad-ranging policy expertise; its conservative counterpart, the Heritage Foundation, creates talking points for the House Freedom Caucus.)
Claremont’s Turn to BAPism
One notable part of this right-wing network has been the Claremont Institute. Claremont began as a vigorous defender of the Constitution, understood as embodying natural rights, that is, rights ascertainable by reason and hence true for all time. Its teachings reached influential conservatives, notably Justice Clarence Thomas, a convert to the natural rights doctrine. In this vein Claremont has long opposed critiques from the left that question America’s principles, as well as most forms of affirmative action. It grounded itself in the ideas of Leo Strauss and his followers and often published interesting political and cultural analysis.
But Claremont’s mainstreaming of “Bronze Age Pervert (BAP)” reveals how this supposedly patriotic and intellectually sophisticated effort has lost its way. BAP has gained a cult following among some of today’s reactionary youth, reportedly including young staffers in the Trump White House. His writings, including a 2018 book, Bronze Age Mindset, are a melange of (often crude) meanderings that glorify eugenics, manliness, classical Greece, bodybuilding, and violence, while tearing into feminism, Christianity, the bureaucratic state, democracy, non-white peoples, etc.
In short, BAP is a Nietzschean. The essential Nietzschean assertion is that human equality is a myth, foisted on modern man by Christianity, abetted by Greek philosophy. This myth is destructive of all human excellence, a soul-sucking mistake that produces a world of joyless “Last Men.” Just as BAP is romantically attached to Bronze Age Greece, the time of the Iliad, when men were men who kidnapped women and then fought to the death over them, Nietzsche admired ancient Rome for its unabashed love of violence, conquest, and the right of the strong to do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must. BAP vilifies his contemporaries as ‘bugmen’ and dreams, vividly, of their violent demise.
Now there have always been American adolescents sitting palely in libraries, enamored of Nietzsche and his modern epigones, like the capitalism-worshipping Ayn Rand. Via Rand, Nietzsche has had considerable influence in promoting a hard-edged libertarianism. But his ideas have otherwise had little broader support in the United States. Until now.
In 2019 Claremont published a review of BAP’s book by Michael Anton (the author of a hysterical Claremont piece in 2016, “The Flight 93 Election,” explaining why voting for Donald Trump was the equivalent of the hijacked passengers on Flight 93 fighting back against their al-Qaida hijackers. Anton leveraged his article into a position on the Trump National Security Council.) Anton acknowledged BAP’s outrageous views but basically defended him, saying BAP “speaks directly to a youthful dissatisfaction (especially among white males) with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day: a hectoring, vindictive, resentful, leveling, hypocritical equality that punishes excellence…”.
Anton implies—more than implies—that BAP’s exhortation to his followers to infiltrate the military and security institutions and await instructions is an understandable move; it is certainly consistent with the message of “Flight 93.” It is also consistent with Claremont Board President and main donor Thomas Klingenstein’s claim that America is in the midst of a ‘cold civil war’ and that America is a de facto ‘totalitarian regime’ under the thumb of liberals and ‘woke communists.’ Anton purports to be concerned that young right-wingers are being drawn to BAP rather than Claremont’s Americanism, but this is gaslighting. Like many half-baked Straussians, Anton inserts numerous winks and nods to show that his surface reasonableness is just a facade, and what is really needed is an all-out war to overthrow liberal dominance.
Anton’s and Klingenstein’s dislike of liberalism is so great that anything is preferable, whether Trump, or an unhinged fascist like BAP. This mirrors the overall corruption of Claremont, as outlined in detail in Katherine Stewart’s September New Republic article, “The Anti-Democracy Think Tank.”
In Graeme Wood’s “How Bronze Age Pervert Charmed the Far Right,” he tells us that according to the political philosopher Bryan Garsten, BAPism is increasingly the choice of many of his top graduate students: “Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to enlightenment liberalism.”
The key point is that to these young thinkers, liberalism is no longer seen as a viable choice. It is felt to be exhausted, done in by a wearisome and gridlocked politics, pointless overseas adventures, and the triumph of special interests. Contemporary ‘wokism,’ which tries to shame infractions against progressive orthodoxy, is intolerable, on a par with the Gulag and concentration camps. Reform is not possible. The whole thing needs to be blown up.
This is perhaps the essence of the fascist mentality. A violent cleansing is needed, via war or revolution, to clear away the dreck of the existing order and create the intense national, spiritual, and racial unity that gives meaning to life. Various alien and subhuman enemies—the ‘bugmen’—must be identified and done away with. Accomplishing this requires a Leader before whom one can kneel.
Liberalism and its Discontents
This is not the first moment in modern times in which dissatisfaction with liberal democracy, and life under advanced capitalism, has been used to justify violence or tyranny. It in fact appears to be a regular and inevitable accompaniment to life in a liberal democracy. It has often been pointed out that liberalism is thin gruel, prioritizing as it does compromise, toleration, negotiation, and peaceful conflict resolution. Liberalism teaches that no one has a monopoly on truth and we must live with ambiguity. Those who yearn for moral intensity, great deeds, the triumph of good over evil, find this deeply unsatisfying.
In Europe the period at the end of the 19th century and up to WWI was a time of such dissatisfaction. Europe had largely been at peace for 100 years. The bourgeoisie—smug, narrow-minded, and materialistic—were triumphant. The great critics of the bourgeoisie, Nietzsche and Marx, disagreed on everything except their disgust at complacent modern European man.
Partly as a result, a generation welcomed war as a catharsis, a romantic escape from boredom and pettiness. What they got, however, was a catastrophe that (for a time) discredited all such romantic notions. While all existing regimes were damaged by the Great War, the biggest losers were the most reactionary and un-democratic. Great oppressive Empires collapsed: Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans. America rose.
The interwar period saw another surge in anti-liberal sentiments. Liberal democracy in the 1930s seemed to be on the ropes. The Depression caused many to question whether it was up to the task of creating prosperity and national unity. Fascism, communism, and militarism seemed to be the wave of the future, offering meaning and purpose.
Once again, however, the supposedly decadent and divided democracies rose to the challenge. In WWII they reduced the cities of Germany and Japan to smoking ruins, then occupied them and, in a final twist of the knife, transformed them into liberal democracies. Then in a burst of creativity they birthed modern welfare states, built powerful militaries, and held on doggedly to outlast communism too.
After the collapse of the USSR it seemed that the last word had been written on the seeming flabbiness of liberal democracy and the superiority of various forms of authoritarianism. In the contest to see which regime could best mobilize and harness the energies of its people to produce prosperity and national power, the democracies with their combination of individual freedoms, competitive politics, and private enterprise had clearly triumphed.
But apparently not forever. As we have seen before, liberal success contains seeds of discontent. For guidance we can look to the ur-text of modern liberal triumphalism. Frank Fukuyama became famous in the early 1990s for describing the “end of history,” where major conflicts would cease, drowned in a wave of success as democracy and capitalism joined hands and the world’s great powers converged in agreement on the path to prosperity and stability. Major conflicts between and within states would diminish as all people gained ‘recognition’, the equal rights as citizens that would satisfy them and do away with the primary cause of war and rebellion.
The Perennial Right-Wing Challenge
But the millions who read and praised (and and have since largely turned on) Fukuyama’s thesis, failed to read his text to the end. Remember, the title of the book was: The End of History and the Last Man [emphasis mine]. The Last Man was Nietzsche’s sarcastic term for the bourgeois, pleasure-loving, pain-avoiding human being spreading rapidly over modern Europe.
Fukuyama saw, at the moment of its apparent victory, that the combination of liberal democracy, capitalism, and scientific/technological progress could still be challenged. From the Left it was vulnerable to ever-increasing demands for equality. These would bump up against natural human differences—we are not equal in looks, in talents, in basketball-enabling height, in emotional stability, in mathematical intuition, and all manner of other characteristics. The most important of these differences, as Madison understood, relate to the acquisition of wealth or ‘property’: “From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results: And from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.”
Ameliorating the resulting inequalities via the modern welfare state is one thing. But eradicating them requires a monstrous tyranny, as we saw in the Soviet Union. Short of tyranny, constantly harping on every instance of inequality quickly arouses irritation and anger and becomes counter-productive. Fukuyama correctly foresaw the dangers from the always-woke, finger-pointing, micro-aggression-cataloguing vigilantism that is damaging life on college campuses, and beyond.
But Fukuyama also correctly foresaw that the greater danger would come from the Right. “Liberal democracy could, in the long run, be subverted either by an excess of megalothymia, or by an excess of isothymia—that is, the fanatical desire for equal recognition. It is my intuition that it is the former that will constitute the greater danger to democracy in the end.” (Last Man, p. 314). Megalothymia is the desire to be better than others, to gain not equal but greater recognition—status, fame, glory, wealth, power. It is impossible and undesirable to eliminate this desire, which exists to some degree in everyone, and to a very large degree in some. Wanting to excel and be recognized for excellence is the great motor of progress and innovation.
However, any stable society, and especially a liberal one, must check megalothymia. Modern liberal democracies can divert this drive towards productive or harmless activities, like business or science or sports or Tik-Tok influencer, or even democratic politics, properly constrained. But if they are to survive they must put limits on certain kinds of ambition, in politics or military affairs, and must insist on equality in ways certain to rankle those who want more than equality.
Especially important are limits on the acquisition of wealth and how wealth can be used politically—limits that America today has failed to enforce. As we see every day, the Trumps and Musks and Klingensteins cannot resist the temptation to meddle in politics and public affairs. Above all they want to consolidate their positions by shaping public policy to protect and grow their riches, thereby entrenching inequality. (Hence actions like the recent $1.5 billion bequest to Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo—the largest ‘charitable’ transfer in US history—from an Islamophobic, climate-denying Chicago businessman who was able to engineer a $400 million tax break from his blatantly political donation.)
Once these ‘malefactors of great wealth’ (to quote Theodore Roosevelt) have unleashed their resources to defend their interests, the cat is very much out of the bag. The money spreads into unforeseen nooks and corners, activating more and more extreme views, drawing in equality-hating ideologues, conspiracy-theorists, opportunists, and madmen.
It is difficult to put limits on the ambitions of people in the grip of the Nietzschean, BAP mindset. They are motivated largely by resentment at what they see as the failure of society to give them the rewards and recognition that their moral or intellectual or racial superiority deserves. No one who feels the clouds have parted after reading Thus Spake Zarathustra, or Atlas Shrugged, or listening to a Steve Bannon podcast, ever feels that they are not one of the elect (this is the real meaning of the right-wing meme ‘to be red-pilled’). If they haven’t gotten their due, it can’t be their fault—someone else must be to blame. Today a young white man with limited education (or with an advanced degree but no job; see historian Peter Turchin’s increasingly fashionable theory of elite overproduction), will quickly find all manner of tempters—talk radio, FOX News, the Claremont Institute—eager to persuade him that his problems are all due to feminism, anti-racism, immigrants and progressive ideology.
This resentment rarely issues in any productive or serious policy proposals. The energy, the focus, is entirely negative.
To some extent we must tolerate youthful exuberance and try to tame it for better ends. But liberalism became intellectually complacent after the Cold War. It is now on the defensive. It doesn’t matter that what makes the modern right apocalyptic is, in the scheme of things, trivial and overblown. We aren’t at each other’s throats in America over real issues like slavery or Vietnam, but over same-sex restrooms and elementary-school textbooks. But this reveals the actual challenge, which is not policy differences but the drive for respect and recognition, for a life of meaning and challenge—or for raw power.
Liberals are frustrated when Americans vote ‘against their self-interest,’ meaning against all manner of benefits they could get from good liberal policies. But they underestimate how much people see their life in terms of values and identity. Backing Trump is exciting, it makes your enemies furious, it gives you a reason to get up in the morning. You feel seen. If you are an intellectual you see opportunity to be one of the shapers of a new order after MAGA victory sweeps away the flabby elites in academia and government. (Hint to intellectuals: No, you won’t. You’ll end up in the gulag.)
Whether liberalism can get its mojo back is one of the key questions of our time. Joe Biden has done excellent things in terms of policy: inflation is down, job growth is strong, support for Ukraine has been solid and effective, long-term investment in manufacturing and sustainable energy is through the roof. But his popularity remains low. Enthusiasm is lacking, and not just because he is old. Donations to progressive groups have fallen sharply. Perhaps this will change as the reality of good times sinks in. But man does not live by bread alone.
The best case is that the brazenness of the attack on liberal values will rouse its defenders. Openly embracing racism, violence, Christian nationalism, and obeisance to the superior man, is astonishing. The task of defending liberal democracy and the Constitution in the face of January 6 and the Trump takeover of the Republican Party should bring excitement and unity back to American liberals who have become mired in minutiae and infighting.
Abroad, foreign leaders like Putin and Xi are openly contemptuous of liberalism and democracy and expect to ride a wave of tyranny that ousts the US and its allies from global leadership. They claim their versions of efficient one-man rule are superior to liberal democracy’s messy collective decisionmaking.
We have seen this movie; Hitler and Stalin made identical claims. Supporters of democracy have rallied before and can do so again. Already Putin and Xi have committed the predictable error of authoritarian over-reach, Putin in Ukraine, Xi in fighting Covid. But it seems every generation has to learn these lessons anew.