Episode Summary
JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, is a newcomer on the political scene, and as such, a lot of people don’t know very much about his ideas. That’s concerning because Vance identifies with a reactionary far-right tradition that is explicitly and fundamentally at odds with American democracy.
Donald Trump, by contrast, has no core ideology and no core beliefs. His main goal at all times and all places is to advance his own personal interests, and that is literally it.
Vance isn’t like that. He comes from an authoritarian, reactionary tradition that explicitly rejects conservatism, liberalism, and democracy. Trump wants absolute power, and Vance wants him to have it to destroy what he believes to be a decadent and corrupt society.
On today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about some of the core ideas of this very old tradition (which both predates and includes fascism) and what it has in store for the United States, regardless of the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
Our guest on today’s episode is Matt McManus, he is the author of a book called The Political Right and Equality: Turning Back The Tide of Egalitarian Modernity, and a lecturer in political science at the University of Michigan.
The video of this discussion is available. The transcript of audio is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
02:29 — Distinguishing between conservatism and reactionism
06:34 — Why telling the difference between conservatism and reactionism can be difficult
10:53 — How the Cold War kept reactionaries in check within the Republican party
18:06 — How neoconservatives prepared Republicans for Trumpism
22:40 — Opposing "decadence" unites right-of-center philosophies
26:08 — Redefining "elite" is core to the reactionary project
33:41 — Why epistemic nihilism collapses into totalitarianism
40:17 — Anti-intellectualism and right-wing philosophy
46:45 — The paradoxes of left- and right-wing intellectualism
53:29 — JD Vance's deep connections to reactionary philosophers
59:14 — Why there are atheist and Jewish Christian nationalists
01:04:44 — As the right overtly embraces authoritarianism, the left can reclaim freedom
01:12:50 — The rise of the Nietzchean right
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So we have a lot to talk about here today. The political philosophy episodes are always one of my favorites, I have to confess, as my audience may already realize. But nonetheless, so JD Vance, we're kind of organizing the discussion here of reactionism and reactionary politics around him because I think he is very obviously the most prominent reactionary figure now in the United States.
So, but most people don't know a lot about what he thinks because I mean, he's a poor public speaker and, he's mostly known for kind of his bizarre interactions with people and writing a book.That's kind of the framework that I want to put this in. And then we'll come back to Vance later.
But the idea first I want to explore is that conservatism and reactionism are not the same political philosophies. They're very obviously adjacent and contiguous but they're very different from each other. And you have written quite a bit about reactionism and conservatism.
So let's maybe start the discussion off with that. What, what are the fundamental differences between conservatism and reaction in your opinion?
MATT McMANUS: Sure, well I think the important thing to note right from the get go, is that the political right broadly, is a vast and extremely diverse area of political ideologies. It includes everything from, fascists to moderate conservatives like Mitt Romney and arguably quite a few liberals would identify on the political right as well, people like F.A. Hayek, et cetera, et cetera. So at the core of being right wing, I think is Hayek's idea that you believe that there are recognizably superior persons within society and that those recognizably superior persons are entitled to more. Right? More wealth, more power, more status on generally aligned with.
This is a kind of moral view that we have recognizably superior persons in positions of authority on positions of status. Everything will go better for everyone else because you want power and you want status and you want wealth to accrue in the hands of those who are best exercised, wielded. But Who happens to be a recognizably superior person, how you make these kind of determinations.
That's where a lot of the enormous nuance and variation on the political right comes from. Now, one of the things that [00:04:00] distinguishes conservatives from reactionaries is generally speaking, conservatives tend to think that the traditional hierarchies and authority structures that have been present in society for a very long period of times are the ones that we should put our faith in.
For a variety of different reasons, but let's just point to, like, the Burkean tradition, right? A good Burkean would say, and this is putting it a bit simply, the reason we should put our faith in authority structures and hierarchies that have endured over a long period of time is because if they've endured for a long period of time, then they seem to be working reasonably well.
Right? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Now, that doesn't mean we can't tinker around the edges with things, but the main goal of a conservative is to change what must be changed in order to conserve what we can. And in the contemporary American scene right now, you still see a variety of different people on the right who hold this view.
George Will comes to mind. He wrote a big book called The Conservative Sensibility, where He kind of fused Burkean and more classical liberal ideas to say, look, in the United States, we're fundamentally a classical liberal country. The founders were classical liberals. So the job of a kind of conservative in the America is to conserve and to advance classical liberal principles and institutions like those that the founders created.
But that's not the outlook that many of America's reactionaries hold today. Many American reactionaries are fundamentally opposed to the liberal worldview for Again, a wide variety of different reasons, and this includes people like Vance, who's drank deep of the well of post liberal and anti liberal thought, and the goal of these figures is, in the words of Glenn Elmer's, to not conserve anything, right?
Conservatism is no longer enough, as the title of one of Elmer's essays went, because fundamentally, liberalism has been a destructive force, it's wiped out everything that's of value in the United States, and so what we need to do If you're a reactionary, of course is to advance a much more militant and even revolutionary or counter revolutionary program to try to set things right.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, there, there are significant [00:06:00] differences and you've described them well that yeah, conservatives, a conservative in the American sense. And, broadly speaking, maybe the.
Global sense at this point now is, is somebody who wants to conserve liberalism as it is, or maybe perhaps just recently was that's what a conservative is. And a reactionary is somebody who says, liberalism is wrong, and in many cases, democracy is wrong as well. And and we'll get further into that in the discussion here today. But so with with Vance he has a lot of connections to all of these emergent reactionaries.
Why telling the difference between conservatism and reactionism can be difficult
SHEFFIELD: And it's been kind of just both fascinating and dispiriting how a lot of political professionals, including people who are Democratic Party strategists and communicators and professional national journalists, they don't seem to understand this difference between conservatism and reactionism. Now, why, why, why do you think that is?
McMANUS: Well, I think there are a number of different reasons, right? One is that the American right for a very long time has presented itself as fundamentally a conservative movement. Right. Committed to at least market liberalism a fair degree of individual freedom and certainly the promotion of democracy around the globe.
Think back to the advent of Reaganism, right, where a lot of those kinds of tropes were put together. Now, if you're a critic of the American, right, that's more longstanding. Like myself, you might question the sincerity of a lot of those convictions, but that's at least the way that it's been presented.
And this kind of overtly reactionary, anti-liberal kind of muscularly counter revolutionary outlook. Comes quite a shock to a variety of different pundits, including many right wing pundits, people like Jonah Goldberg who were surprised, by what seems to have come out of the Republican party.
Now I would argue again, that if you look deeper into the history of American conservatism, people like Rick Perlstein would say All these kinds of ingredients for a counter revolutionary program were always [00:08:00] there, right? If you go back to something like Barry Goldwater's campaign in 1964, right?
Goldwater probably lost that election in no small part, not just because he was soft on civil rights and even opposed to civil rights but because he said things like, radicalism in defense of liberty or extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, right? It's not really a very conservative attitude endorsing these kinds of extremist views.
But, generally speaking this tended to be a rhetorically quiescent element of the right until comparatively recently, definitely it was less transparent before 2016 when Trump gave license to a lot of these people to become a lot more vocal.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah well, and, and it was both rebranding exercise as well on the part of the people that were saying, well, we're in favor of liberalism. I mean, for instance, obviously William F. Buckley, he presented as, That being his brand of, well, I'm just trying to conserve what we have in this country.
And but at the same time he was saying that he was also being in favor of segregation writing editorials saying that, well, actually segregation is good because black people are just not capable of governing themselves and, and being part of the economy. So this is for their own good.
Sorry, guys, you just, you're just SJWs are wrong. You need to leave it as it is. And, and, and he wrote a
McMANUS: to give another example during the, at the height of the AIDS epidemic William F. Buckley recommended that homosexuals, his term be tattooed above the buttocks, right? With a big warning label, right? And that kind of humor, let's call it that wouldn't be out of place in something like the contemporary Trump movement with this kind of vulgarity and it's just rote and callous dismissal of human life.
So again, I think if you look back, further and look more carefully at some of these figures we kind of view the past of American conservatism with rose colored glasses if we don't recognize that a lot of the seeds of Trumpism were very firmly planted well before he came onto the scenes.
SHEFFIELD: yeah. [00:10:00] And, and then also the fact that, I mean, the, the entire movement, which began calling itself conservatism. I mean, they, they didn't call themselves conservative. Like, that's an important point, which, because most political professionals, journalistic professionals don't know anything about it.
History they don't realize that Buckley and these other people, I mean, they were the point of what they were doing was to stop. The new deal was to roll back social security was to roll back, labor unions and minimum wage. Like that was always the goal, like, and they've never stopped having those goals.
And so, Yeah, it's just, it's pretty disgraceful, frankly, that a lot of, of people who pretend to be experts and put themselves forward as experts don't know any of this stuff. Pretty disgraceful, I think.
McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely, right?
How the Cold War kept reactionaries in check within the Republican party
McMANUS: So, once upon a time the American right, certainly the intellectual American right, used to be described as a three legged stool, right? So, One leg of that stool was militant anti communism which eventually transformed into this idea that America should have a kind of militant and muscular international relations policy in the 1990s and early 2000s when communism for the most part disappeared.
The second leg of the stool was the, evangelical Christian movement which always had a very, very, very pronounced kind of white nationalist undercurrent to it with its opposition to things like civil rights alongside, of course, more conventional kinds of oppositions to things like abortion or gay marriage.
And then the third leg of that stool were American libertarians, certainly right libertarians at the very least who, as you mentioned, were committed to rolling back the new deal or even going further than rolling back the new deal, going all the way back to invert something like The criticisms of the Lochner precedent from early in the 20th century, and as a lot of people have pointed out, the three legs of the stool were never exactly the same size, and the stool itself was always kind of shaky since it's not immediately clear.
What economic libertarianism or economic liberalism [00:12:00] has to do with support for white evangelism let alone the idea that America should use its military and cultural might to try to impose its value system, whatever that happens to be around the globe. Again, what I would argue is that the Shared through line of all these doctrines or all these elements of the classical American right was this conviction that there are superior people and superior countries for that matter on their entitled to greater status, greater agency, and they were hostile to a liberalism, which suggested otherwise.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I think that probably one of the other reasons that this distinction is harder for a lot of people to grasp is that these early branders and influencers for, for reactionism like Buckley they, they did explicitly market their ideas in the language of liberalism Because Nazism had so, overwhelmingly discredited fascism and authoritarianism as political philosophies in the recent memory of the people they were trying to convict.
McMANUS: Absolutely. Right. So David Austin Walsh has written a very good book about this, so I'm going to draw pretty heavily from that. So arguably the kind of unifying philosophy that was characteristic of the National Review crowd for a long time was Frank Reier's fusionism, right? For those in your audience who aren't familiar with it fusionism refers to this idea that we should combine a commitment to classical liberal liberties certainly economic liberties with this commitment to Judeo Christian virtues and Judeo Christian norms.
Now, again, this fusion of a commitment to a kind of social conservatism with a kind of liberalism, certainly an economic liberalism was uncomfortable, even in Meyer's work and there are enormous debates amongst the National Review crowd about which axes of this fusionist synthesis they should emphasize, right, because People quite rightly pointed out that if you're committed to things like liberal values, there seems to be something [00:14:00] contradictory in calling for banning pornography, for example.
And if you're an economic liberal, there seems to be something very unusual about allying yourself with people who say things like, we should ban pornography, or we should ban gambling, or whatever it happens to be. But I would argue,
SHEFFIELD: at school. Yeah.
McMANUS: yeah, exactly. I would argue following a lot of historians, that this is where the third leg of the stool came in despite all of these various differences and some of these debates were really quite intense and bluntly nasty if you look at the Meyer Kirk debate, for example, they were not nice to each other, a lot of them were papered over because the one thing the American right could do Absolutely agree on was that communism, socialism understood very expansively were bad things and extremely threatening.
Oftentimes they lump the New Deal in with that since or the great society programs of Johnson. And there's nothing like an enemy to kind of bring strange bedfellows together and allow a synthesis intellectually like, fusionism to function. As a kind of ad hoc philosophy for a long period of time.
And some people have pointed out that one of the reasons why the splits on the American right became more transparent as time went on is because without a international adversary like the Soviet Union to kind of band everyone together instead the American right started turning on more domestic enemies which of course leads to more existential questions about just what American conservatism is supposed to be and which elements of American society don't really belong.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I, I would think that that also, that sort of foreign policy component. Is probably what kept the other two from going off the complete deep end and embracing their inherent radicalism because you know it was it was run by the military industrial complex and their and, and their advocates within the, the, the Republican party that, by definition, they need a stable society and, the, as much as militaries in many countries, our forces for right wing authoritarianism, they also in many countries [00:16:00] do have an inherent apolitical mission and, and, and very often do in fact, are, are, are.
Can be a force for some sort of moderation within between different warring factions.
McMANUS: Absolutely. And I mean, there's no denying this, right? There are plenty of people within the Reagan administration, people like Buchanan or Sam Francis, who were a lot more hostile to liberalism and arguably even American democracy than they let on. But there was an awareness on the part of many of the Reaganites that in an existential battle with world communism, where communism had Quite a bit of appeal to many in the third world.
It was extremely important to position oneself as a defender of freedom, a defender of democracy, a defender of national self determination in some circumstances, right? And again, a lot of that disappeared with the end of communism and, depending on when you want to date it, the late 1980s, early 1990s, right?
As a kind of world historical force. Again, nothing really unites like a good enemy especially internationally. Without that it just leads you to turn inwards and reflect upon one's internal differences in a much more existentially, stringent kind of way.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and have to actually start developing your, your real ideas and your real values, which apparently have been pretty monstrous.
McMANUS: Exactly. So, in his new book when the clock broke, John Gans talks a lot about Pat Buchanan's early runs in the 1990s and you can read Buchanan's books. He anticipates a lot of the kind of philosophy, if you want to call it that, of Trumpism that later emerges.
But one of the reasons that Buchanan felt that there was this opportunity to run on a more stridently right wing kind of program in the 1990s, at least according to Gans is precisely because he felt, look, Communism is gone and the biggest untapped electorate in America, as he put it, is to the right of Ronald Reagan.
And now that we don't necessarily have to worry about trying to appeal to all the left wingers and appeal to all the people outside of the United States who might be concerned about us pivoting too far to the right it's time to tap that resource. So it's a very interesting thesis. And again, [00:18:00] who knows what would have happened?
If the Soviet Union hadn't fallen, definitely we wouldn't have seen something like Trumpism right now.
How neoconservatives prepared Republicans for Trumpism
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think so. There's there is an irony also in the, the the rise of, of reactionism or or fascism, whatever you want to call in the United States. It's, it is in many ways, kind of the The indirect creation of neoconservatism and it's very ironic because the neoconservatives were the very first people who were expelled once the Trump people took over the Republican Party, and, the,
McMANUS: him for it, that's for sure.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and and so, but the neoconservatives, as much as they hate Trump and hate this kind of fascistic form of politics that he's created this reactionary viewpoint in a lot of ways, they were the predecessors for it. And you talk about that in, in in your book. So let's discuss that further.
If you don't mind.
McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. I still think that the definitive book on the relationship between, say, the Bush administration, second Bush administration and the Trump administration has yet to be written. But, As you point out, many of the neoconservatives who kind of reached the apex of their influence and their power during the Bush administration deeply resented the Trump administration sidelining them and just pushing them out and tried to present Trump as some kind of aberration from what the Republican party once stood for.
I think about somebody like David Frum, right? Who basically writes op ed after op ed in the Atlantic, make exactly this case week in and week out. I would argue that that is a misconstrual of the real history. So. Look, neoconservatism emerged as a kind of distinct strand of conservatism that began to gain real influence in the 1980s in the American sorry, in the Reagan administration.
There's no doubt that many neoconservatives transitioned from the left, even from communism. If you think about somebody like Irving Kristol, who was once a Trotskyite towards a kind of classical liberalism with the Some conservative values. But this has led many people to misdiagnose neoconservatism as fundamentally a form of [00:20:00] liberalism in the clothes of a kind of re conservative outlook.
I don't think that that's true. I think that if you look deeper into the text of many leading neoconservatives, it's very clear that they hold Conservative views about a wide array of issues, Irving Kristol himself had a variety of different social conservative outlooks on things like homosexuality, or you can take something like the project for the new American century that released a important document in the 2000s that was actually quite upset at the fact that America had won the Cold War.
Now, this can seem odd. But what's articulated in this doctrine, sorry, document is this deep fear that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States is going to adopt an isolationist path, demilitarize, and this is going to lead to what on the right is typically called decadence, right? Americans are just going to focus on mindless consumerism.
Choosing which refrigerator to put into their kitchen, and they're not going to dedicate themselves to bigger and more grand projects of the sorts that the neoconservatives found extremely attractive and extremely exciting and necessary in order to retain America's influence in the world. And Not surprisingly when the 2000 sorry, the 2001 terror attack took place many of them said, well, here's our moment.
We have a new enemy. We have a grand imperial project that we can use to elevate society above this kind of decadent libertine liberal outlook that they've associated with things like the Clinton administration. And, think about somebody like Karl Rove who in a New York Times interview in the mid 2000s it's allegedly Karl Rove, I should say said things like all of you people in the fact based community will sit there and say that, what we're doing is wrong or it's not based on the facts but we're an empire now and we create our own reality.
Oh, sorry, not the fact based community, the reality based community. We create our own reality now and all of you are just going to sit there and bear witness to what we do and chronicle it. That's very much a kind of Trumpy outlook, right? This idea that decadent libertinism and permissiveness is going to lead to the decline of American society.
What we need instead are things and [00:22:00] projects that are big and exciting and vital to elevate the masses above the stupor that they inexorably fall into. And combined with that is this ambivalence and even hostility towards the reality based community or the fact based community for pointing out that a lot of these grand projects are going to end in disaster, which is, of course, what eventually happened with the Bush administration because they're not interested in those kind of things.
They're interested in the excitement and the grandeur that they associate with these ideas and, of course, very much like Trumpism, neoconservatism, Found out that the reality of its program when implemented was a lot more banal and a lot more disastrous than they'd ever anticipated. And that's probably why the movement went the way of the dinosaurs and deserved it.
Opposing "decadence" unites right-of-center philosophies
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and this idea of decadence I mean, that is, really kind of, it is a, it is a fundamental belief across all right wing philosophies with this, in addition to being, the superior people, what makes people superior is their lack of decadence. And, their and, and, and this harkens back, even if the people saying it don't realize it, it harkens back, to the the, the, the ancient Greek ideal of Arete or As it's commonly rendered as virtue.
And like the, the people who are excellent, people will not be excellent unless they are forced to be excellent by external circumstances or by the government forcing them into better behavior or better thinking, or, something has to force people to be better because otherwise they're horrible and stupid.
McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. And this anxiety about potential decadence understood, and I should say in a, in a, Huge variety of different ways is pretty common across a wide array of right wing views and most right wing intellectuals will proffer theories of decadence and decline in one way or another. And they'll also, of course, offer solutions.
And this can be true even of what we might call more moderate [00:24:00] conservatives, people like say Edmund Burke, right? Many people associate with the defense of things like again, moderate conservatism Capitalism this idea that we can engage in incremental change but we shouldn't kind of rock the boat too much.
Much of which is true, but I think if you look deeper in his book there's a lot of anxieties about barbers, for example, getting too much power in political society because what they do is just mundane and banal and a barber doesn't need political power. And associated with that is the idea that What one needs in order to elevate a society and to attach people to systems of authority is to ascribe what he calls sublime qualities onto one's rulers and to the projects that those rulers engage in.
And what's very interesting about Burke is he never says that the rulers actually need to possess these sublime qualities and of themselves is, of course, what? Constitutes the sublime is in the eye of the beholder. What's just important is that you project those kinds of ideals onto them. And that's something that somebody like Donald Trump would understand extremely well, right?
In his book, the art of the deal Trump says that he engages in what he calls truthful hyperbole which is a bit of a contradiction in terms, but very Trumpy in that way. And he says, look most people don't really think very big. But they. Do really admire and want to follow people who do think big.
They want to believe that they are part of something that is the biggest and the most exciting and the most extravagant And of course trump has applied exactly the same kind of attitude towards his politics Always presenting whatever he's doing as some kind of sublime renewal of the country always associating himself with these kind of sublime qualities is the only person who can fix the country and of course serving as the The night of revenge for those who followed him on.
Again, there's a longstanding history of that in all permutations of right wing thought, and every conservative is going to associate this need for sublime figures and authority figures in particular and sublime projects with antidotes [00:26:00] for the decadence that they see creeping in society as the masses and their vulgarity gain too much power.
Redefining "elite" is core to the reactionary project
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And related to that though. And it's ironic because. As much as, as the philosophy, as the ideas of philosophy, the rhetoric are anti fundamentally anti democratic and authoritarian. They also are often treated and labeled as populist in a lot of the mainstream press because in fact, they do use.
And borrow, steal, whatever you want to say, they do in fact borrow a lot of of rhetoric and tropes from social democratic communistic traditions, critiques, and that was something that that Sam Francis did. I think he was the one that kind of. really injected a lot of that into the mainstream Republican discourse.
Yeah, but, but there were other figures as well. I, Joe McCarthy obviously is probably the most prominent early exemplar of that. But let's, yeah, let's, what's, what's the I guess, yeah, let's maybe talk about first the, what you see as some of the most. Prominent examples of that in the history of this idea of these borrowings.
And then maybe discuss, what why people in the contemporary press are so unable to understand that this is not populism.
McMANUS: Sure. Well, I mean, anxieties about populism in democracy go all the way back to ancient Greece, right? Many of the ancient Greek philosophers were deeply concerned with the demagoguery they associated with loose figures like Alcibiades, right? Who would say whatever they need to, to rile the people up to get what it is they want.
And of course the term populism comes from the Latin popularis which, was Express the kind of concerns in the Roman Republic about those who sided with the plebeians against the partitions. And a lot of this eventually contributed to the various civil wars that rocked the Republic in its late period.
But in the contemporary era, right, people like Jan Mueller in his book, What is Populism says that populism shouldn't be [00:28:00] understood as being necessarily a left wing or a right wing phenomena. It's more kind of rhetorical You And strategic style of politics where you set a pure and unadulterated people against a decadent and undeserving elite who have been in charge for far too long and usually present yourself as the figure that can Remove this decadence and replace the elite and set the country or set the Organ, you know the company or whatever it happens to be back on the right course And there are left wing populists in the world.
There's no doubt about it. Think about people like Alamo, in mexico, right? Some people have even tried to make the case that somebody like bernie sanders falls into this paradigm Although i'd reject that since sanders has always insisted that this movement is very much focused on the we rather than the I But, in terms of the right it's important to note that, the political right worldwide initially emerged in part as a movement that was hostile to democracy and any kind of attempt to appeal to the people.
Because there was concerns that appealing to the people for support would cede a degree of political authority and political legitimacy to democratic projects, but starting around the 19th century. The most savvy conservative politicians and most savvy reactionary politicians realized that there was really no going back to the ancien regimes of Europe where Lords and Kings could more or less just do whatever they want.
And the people just had to deal with it, right? The people have become a permanent constituent feature of modern political regimes as they, they started to look very cleverly in many cases for ways to mobilize mass support for conservative projects. And they were very successful at it. As we. See today, right now, one of the things that characterizes right wing populism ever and against left wing populism is left wing populism will typically present itself as agitating on behalf of people who have always and everywhere been benign political authority, social status, wealth, [00:30:00] Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
The dispossessed or the marginalized right wing populism usually moves in a much more nostalgic register, typically presenting itself as restoring to the people a degree of status, authority, and greatness that was once theirs and has been taken from them or corroded by the presence of liberal elites The swinish multitude and anyone else who's got a shot at power and status that they didn't really deserve.
And Trump was of course, a case in point with that, right? His premier slogan is make America great again. And so what he's really doing is tapping into this right populist sense that people have gotten a leg up who don't deserve it. This is in no small part, the fault of liberal elites allied with the most undeserving people in society.
Yeah. This is exactly what Charlie Kirk, for example, argues in his book, Right Wing Revolution. And Trump is going to restore to the people the status and authority over and above the undeserving that was wrongly taken for them. And of course, he is the only vessel that is capable of enacting this kind of restoration.
And Populism doesn't necessarily have to become anti democratic although it very frequently does but it's almost invariably anti liberal in the sense that populists resent the checks on state authority and on the leader's authority that, any liberal would think is essential to a well functioning democratic regime.
And partly because there is this hostility to liberal checks and balances it's very frequently the case, as Zach Beauchamp puts it in his book On the reactionary tradition that populist movements will eventually swallow the democratic element of their program and just transform into outright authoritarian regimes
SHEFFIELD: Hmm. Yeah, and I think another difference between, people who apply that label to themselves on the left and right, is that for the right when they claim to be the elites that they are attacking are not economic. are intellectual elites. Like that's, so in other words, like for them, the, the, [00:32:00] the bet noire is the, the university professor like yourself or the, or the, fashion stylist in New York or the the, the feminist Instagram.
model. But those are the real elite in society in, in, in this rhetoric.
McMANUS: Yeah, and they're very transparent about that, right? Just to give an example, in Ron DeSantis new book or not new book his last book Fire to a Failed Presidential Run he tried to present himself as fighting against the elites. But he makes it very clear in the book that an elite does not necessarily mean somebody who's reached the commanding heights of society.
Clarence Thomas Billionaires, they aren't necessarily elites. An elite is somebody who shares in the worldview of liberalism, which means that if you're a school teacher in West Virginia earning 35, 000 a year, but you want to talk about black like matters, from this DeSantis perspective, you're a part of the elite.
But the Koch brothers and Supreme Court judges aren't because they side with him, right? Now this is of course absurd by any metric, but again, this relates back to Mueller's point about populism. Populism isn't necessarily about trying to develop a consistent or logically plausible framework for understanding political reality.
It's rhetorical and strategic, right? And DeSantis doesn't want to attack and Trump does not want to attack the billionaire class. He wants to attack liberals. So it makes a lot of sense to them to frame elite status in this way, rather than going after what I would think are the real elites in society, which are, plutocrats.
The very rich Fortune 500 companies, that kind of thing.
Why epistemic nihilism collapses into totalitarianism
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly.
And related to that is that this is, very much an, an epistemic revolution in a lot of ways to reactionary take complete takeover of the Republican Party such that.
These borrowings that we're talking about here, they, they really are basically taking [00:34:00] from a tradition, which is very incoherent, but the only real thing that it has is that you, the individual person are always correct in that they, the unnamed, they, the, the people who control institutions or whatever, they are lying to you, they are controlling you.
And so as such. It's a as the graph we're showing on the screen shows that, these are our beliefs as you move further and further away from any sort of institutional trust that they are features of Marxism. They are features of liberalism, religious democracy, conservatism, libertarianism and then basically it kind of flips around to the other side there that once you do not trust any other institutions, then it.
Only the individual grade leader can come in and save you and save the society, which of course ends up in reaction aism and fascism and, and Marxist totalitarianism.
McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a lot to be said about that. Right. So, Let's just talk a little bit about right wing populism as an example. So John Gans points out in his really good book, again when the clock broke that there's a kind of oddity in some of the aesthetic tropes that you can find in Trumpism, at least a surface oddity where a lot of times Trump's followers will like to.
Characterize him as something like a gangster or a tough guy. You go to a Trump rally, you'll see him, on Scarface t shirts or Godfather t shirts, et cetera, et cetera. And Gantz points out that a lot of commentators have been bewildered by that. Cause they'll say, well, aren't you the party of law and order?
Aren't you supposed to believe in things like Checks and balances on authority and, that includes, the authority of criminals, but of course, the clarity of politicians and yes, points out that that's a pretty silly way of understanding right wing populism. The appeal of people like Vito Corleone Or Scarface, right?
It's precisely that they represent a different kind of authority to the one that, say, liberals would reverence. Procedural and institutional authority. It represents this very masculine kind of [00:36:00] authority figure. Who's not bound or checked by any kind of restrictions. But Shows a degree of loyalty to those who have followed him.
Doesn't really show a great deal of loyalty to everyone else. And is willing to do whatever it takes to advance those who follow him, the in group over and against the out group who are conceived as enemies. And this of course has an enormous amount of appeal to people. The MAGA and the political spectrum.
And it always has and there's deep rooted reasons for that. But there are antecedents and the political right as well. If you look at say the fascist movements of the early 20th century, and we can debate whether Trump is a fascist or not. One of the things that was consistently criticized by fascist intellectuals was the kind of slow.
ponderous, dull, decadent and nebbish quality, the nebbish quality that they associated with the talk shop of liberal parliamentarianism. And they said a leader will cut through all that and just get what done, what needs to be done while eliminating everyone that stands in his way and of course, reward those who's loyally followed him.
And it's important to understand that there's always been something appealing Particularly to right wingers about this idea, although it's not exclusive to the right. And that's why it's unsurprising that somebody like Trump would be associated with gangsters today. And sometimes proudly associated with gangsters, even by his own followers.
Because they embody exactly that kind of unconstrained, masculine ideal.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, And, and, and it's also not just about pa affecting the power of the, the persecuted the heron folk. But it's also that. That the, that when you move from when you, when your epistemology is entirely individualist oriented, eventually, it comes to that. Well, my authority figure is the source of reason and truth and that what he says is not is everything it is, the, the the, the idea of the, the, the great chain of being [00:38:00] divine command theory, that all of these, Things are all interrelated that, that nihilism collapses into totalitarianism.
McMANUS: Yeah, without a doubt. And sometimes they can be very expressive about this. As I was saying before we went on air, if you want, just read Charlie Kirk's new book, Right Wing Revolution. And I don't remember coming into Reading anything by Charlie Kirk if you're looking for deep insight into most subject matters, but if you want to understand how MAGA operates it's not a bad source, but in the most telling chapter of that book he says, look and he's speaking to his conservative readers, you might be beset by uncertainties at any given point but you must militantly, and this is his term, police those uncertainties away and chase an absolute conviction that you are right wherever possible.
And if you're not sure what that absolute conviction be, just look at what the left understood very broadly says, and you can know for sure that they are wrong and he says, what we need to do is chase a right, wrong, good or evil Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader kind of approach to every issue possible.
And he does, it says. We should do that precisely because it's easier to market such a worldview than one that is defined by the nuanced kinds of epistemologies that you're talking about. And of course, this is very coincident with what somebody like Trump wants. Trump is the kind of guy who would sit there and very clearly say, happily tell you who do you believe me or your lying eyes and try to convince you that your lying eyes aren't to be trusted.
But he is right. And there are a lot of different reasons why these kinds of epistemic outlooks can be appealing to people. One of them, I think, going back to people like Eric Fromm or Adorno is just that it's not, a lot of people aren't happy about being uncertain in the world, right?
Uncertainty can lead to confusion, it can lead to anxiety, and sometimes it's nice to chase certainty. But I think it's a very dangerous temptation to give into those impulses because the world is invariably far more complicated than we'll ever be able to understand and trying to reductively simplify it.
And I think that that's [00:40:00] one of the reasons why Trumpism is as childish and immature as it is
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is and, and, and related to that is that the the, the Trump, since as the Republican party has become, almost entirely reactionary and certainly in the power
McMANUS: Trumpified,
SHEFFIELD: a hundred percent. Yeah. That's right?
Yeah.
Anti-intellectualism and right-wing philosophy
SHEFFIELD: As this has, has happened, there has been just this overwhelming brain drain among Republican operatives, among Republican, I mean, they don't even Like they don't even try to have policy platforms anymore.
Like in, in 2020 famously, they had no platform at all. And then in 2024, they just kind of put a couple of wishlist items on a, on a, on a roughly, what was it like a five, eight, five. Page paper or something like that. It was very, very, very small, much, much smaller than, and then, and you see that with when Trump was in office, that he had problems getting people to work for him who had any sort of qualifications.
And, and even Republicans didn't want to work for him because they thought that he was, just stupid and, and they couldn't ever achieve anything meaningful to them. And I can say this myself that, I was friends at that time with somebody who, because, you know, as, as. I think I don't know if you would know, I'm trying to remember if I, if I told you or not, but like, I used to be a right wing activist myself.
So, yeah, so, so, when Trump first came into office, I was friends with somebody who was one of his top speech writers and he offered me a job in the Trump White House. And I thought about it for a second only because I thought, well, there's going to be a lot of really stupid people in there.
So maybe there should be at least, one or two adults in the room. But in the end I couldn't, I couldn't justify it to myself morally because I thought, well, to whatever extent I would have any. Influence, I would also be counting and seeing all kinds of horrible [00:42:00] ideas and whatnot and policies And so therefore I I couldn't do it and but that's it is a It's a conundrum that you're that you're seeing not just in the in the policy making realm but also in the in the media realm as well that the the very very well financed and Sort of remnant Yeah liberal reactionism, if you will, that, that prevailed before Trump, the neoconservative hierarchy, they still exist, but they have no influence on the party.
And it's almost, I don't know. It's like you read these people a lot. Like, do they. They know they don't have influence, but do you think that they think that they're ever getting it back?
McMANUS: It's a good question. So I think in order to start answering your question, we have to understand what the relationship between intellectuals and the writers, right? So many people have commented on how the political right has this kind of anti intellectualist quality to it going all the way back to people like Edmund Burke, right? But, there's deep rooted theoretical and practical reasons why the right would have this wariness and even hostility to intellectuals, which stamps movement like MAGA.
I think two of the clearest figures that make express where this anti intellectual impulse comes from are Joseph de Maistre and Yoram Hazony. Right. So for those of your listeners who don't know Joseph de Maistre is usually considered to be the godfather of the reactionary tradition, a fierce critic of the French revolution and a fierce critic of enlightenment reason.
And he's very express about why he's a critic of enlightenment reason. Because he says, look enlightenment reason or what is ignorantly called philosophy is fundamentally, and this is his term, a destructive force, right? When people are. Told to use their own reason to assess what society is doing to ask themselves what kind of political authorities that they want.
Then what we wind up with is an endless series of debates, discussions, and deliberations about who should be in charge and why that will go nowhere and that are toxic [00:44:00] to the establishment of any kind of lasting authority. And so he says very bluntly that we need to treat existent authorities like dogmas, right?
Adopt an almost religious attitude of fidelity towards them not question the foundations of our political order all that substantially. And he pointed out in other works, like the St. Petersburg Dialogues, if that doesn't work, well, the hangman or the executioner will, should always be available to kind of overawe anybody who might be asking too many questions about the order.
Now flash forward to the present day. You have Intellectuals like Yoram Hozoni, who make very similar points, albeit less dramatically, let's call it that because Hozoni says, look one of the things that characterizes liberalism and the left is this endless propensity to want to engage in critical reasoning and Hozoni says there's always, there always should be a place for critical reasoning, but critical reasoning can be very destructive, right, because it leads people to ask Endless questions, one after another, about why we should have this authority, what were the actual facts of our history other reasons to be skeptical of the long standing traditions that we have.
And he says, after a certain point, asking these questions, one after another, after another is either a waste of time or positively dangerous. Which is why, at a certain point, you just have to stop and take things on faith. Which again, has this pronouncedly anti intellectualist attitude. And, you see this expressed policy wise in a lot of the hostility that the right shows towards things like, say, critical race theory or critical theory more generally, right?
Because they don't want people asking this endless series of questions about their society, its history the role of slavery in American life and its enduring impact because that leads to uncomfortable questions about whether existing authority structures and hierarchies should exist. have the kind of legitimacy that the right wants to ascribe to them.
Now, I want to be very clear, there are enormously interesting and profound right wing intellectuals out there. Going from Edmund Burke to people like Casoni or Patrick Deneen and of course, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, the rest of the canon, right? But the right, by and large, has been a lot more [00:46:00] wary of the role intellectuals should play in society than liberals or the left, who tend to welcome or even encourage the
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
McMANUS: of people's critical faculties, since many people in the liberal tradition or on the left really like this idea that we should have an endless debate about things like first principles, authority structures, hierarchies.
Think about somebody like John Stuart Mill, for example, the emblematic left wing liberal, right? Who said, we should encourage free speech in part because we can never be sure whether our own ideas are the right one. And even if we are pretty sure that our ideas are the right ones, there's always something to learn from combating the other side.
Society should be an endless and critical debate about just these kinds of things. That's a much more liberal attitude. And of course, it's much more conducive to somebody like my taste, somebody like me and my taste.
The paradoxes of left- and right-wing intellectualism
SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm. Yeah, and it's also that, that core difference, though, that you just talked about, it is kind of a flaw, I think, in a lot of left wing attempts to scrutinize right wing politics in that they project. That love of intellectual debate and such that and they don't understand that, like, and I see this on on some podcasts and articles or whatever, where they will go and analyze these.
People like Patrick, the Dean or whoever, and impute all kinds of influence to them when in fact they don't actually have almost any influence on Donald Trump or the people who work for him.
They're
McMANUS: Donald Trump is not flipping through why liberalism failed late at night and being like, yeah,
SHEFFIELD: This guy has a point. No, they're, they're not. And like, but to the extent that they have any influence, it is. The reverse of how things work on the left with regard to intellectuals that for the right you have until influence if you rationalize the ideas of the leader, whereas it works the other way around on the left that, what, what the leaders, at least.
Supposed to be doing on the left is that they are, sort of effectuating the ideas of, of, of the people who created the [00:48:00] ideas. Whereas on the right, the ideas are ex post facto, they are rationalizations for the desires of the
McMANUS: yeah. And sometimes progressive intellectuals can be quite vain for this reason, right? Just to pick on my own side a little bit. I mean, I'm a very left wing guy. John Maynard Keynes famously once said that a lot of politicians that scribble insights late at night are the slaves to some distant and long dead economist or philosopher or whatever it happens to be.
And, if you want to go more radical still think about something like of organic intellectuals who gradually overcome the hegemony of capitalism on replace it with a more emancipatory culture. Now again, these arguments are more in my taste because I do think that intellectuals have a role to play in society, but it can be very substantially overstated.
But there's no doubt that the left is And liberals are considerably more receptive to intellectuals playing a pronounced role in society than the right is. Although I want to stress again the right certainly post 18th century has recognized the need to have an intellectual cadre of its own to combat the seemingly ever growing, at least in its eyes cabal of left wing intellectuals that are kind of nebulously probing holes in authority structures and hierarchies within society and need to be confronted on that terrain if necessary.
I mean, even look at somebody sorry, just like, Thomas Sowell who's emblematic in that respect, right? I wrote a big review of Thomas Sowell for Jacobin Magazine, some people might be interested in. But one of Thomas's biggest books is a book called Intellectuals in Society which is a book about why intellectuals should play no role in society.
Now, of course, He's almost invariably singles out liberal and left intellectuals for the destructive role that they play and chastises them for engaging an interdisciplinary sweep where not that's not warranted before he goes on to talk about everything from the economics to history, to military strategy, to politics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But, this kind of. I'll be paradoxical stance on the part of a right wing intellectual simultaneously chastising the [00:50:00] influence of intellectuals in society while recognising that he needs to exist precisely to combat left and liberal intellectuals is very characteristic of the right. Yeah,
SHEFFIELD: And there's also a paradox, even as. Let's say philosophically that the left is more open to the ideas of, or to intellectualism. They are less willing to actually support financially things like think tanks. So like, for instance, if you look at on the right, there's just this multiplicity of, of advocacy organizations that they may not be necessarily coming out with policy papers, but at least they're making, the vague noises about policy.
And there, and there are, Probably in D. C. alone, probably like at least a hundred of these organizations with a cumulative budget of probably, something like 500 million a year whereas on the left, there's almost nothing in comparison to that, because like, because like to a large degree, I think that, especially this is more true of
McMANUS: if I could just give you one quick anecdote that makes them. That kind of makes this point.
SHEFFIELD: Mm hmm.
McMANUS: so, back in the day, I used to write some articles for the intercollegiate Institute, which is a conservative organization. Mostly about Edmund Burke and post modern conservatism. And I just want to say they were very nice to me, right.
Despite me making my own orientation clear. One of the reasons I did this was I just wanted to see, like, can I actually present conservative ideas to a conservative audience in a way that they would seem palatable? But you know, I got paid about 400 an article writing for them, which is, Really very good.
And considering how poor I was at the time was helpful. I'll just be candid about that. I've written, 50 pieces for Jacobin magazine soon. I probably made about as much for all 50 pieces as I did writing one thing for Intercollegiate Institute, right? So just to give you a sense of the funding dynamics there, right?
And again, that's not a knock on Jackman. They've been very happy to support my work. It's just, there's, there's no money for advancing those kinds of policies. [00:52:00]
SHEFFIELD: Yeah,
McMANUS: to the right.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and it's, it is paradoxical because I do think that the, a lot of progressives. They don't understand what the purpose of universities is that it is not to be a factory or prom promulgator of progressive ideas. They don't understand that. That's not what universities intend to be.
And so as such, you should not. Outsource your political popularizing or theorizing to them because they're not going to do it and the people at the top in most universities, in fact, are conservative and because they hobnob with billionaires and oligarchs to grow their endowments and that's, that's how they operate.
Like these are conservative institutions inherently.
McMANUS: Yeah, I always think it's funny whenever sometimes I like reading conservative media because in conservative media, People like me and my friends are made out to be basically in charge of the entire world, right? We're liberal college professors and apparently we're brainwashing generations of students and to becoming, little postmodern neo Marxist to use the Jordan Peterson term.
And when I get back to the real world, I'm like, God, I can't even get people to read the Federalist Papers from beginning to end, despite my sitting there being like, please, please, please, this is your prostitution. We need to read Madison to understand it and your grade is dependent upon it.
So I'm, I'm begging you. So, sometimes it's quite flattering to imagine myself in this conservative vein being like, Oh yeah, I'm just molding hearts and minds. So, it's, it's kind of funny irony that way.
JD Vance's deep connections to reactionary philosophers
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and JD Vance, just to bring him back in here that, he, I think, is. He really is kind of emblematic for much more than almost any other Republican politician of this reactionary sensibility that has become so regnant under Trump. And he has specific. Personal connections to a lot of these reactionary far right thinkers, anti Democrats, monarchists.
Can you talk about some of those connections? [00:54:00] Because I mean, gosh, they they need to be known. Like, every person should know this stuff. I feel like because it's so it's so dangerous.
McMANUS: Sure. Well, I mean, a lot of people have talked about how. The influences on JD Vance's worldview are very online kind of influences, and there's some truth to that. Listing all of them would take too much time, but just to kind of give a short list, right? He was very influenced by Peter Thiel, who he worked for for a long time, and Thiel is, An eclectic billionaire who likes to think of himself as an intellectual.
But one of the kind of through lines to his worldview from the very beginning has been a hostility to democracy. So you can go back and read, I think it's a 2009 essay that Teal wrote called the education of a libertarian where he basically says the prospects for libertarianism in the United States, certainly post Obama are pretty much nil, and he's very transparent that one of the reasons for this is Post, women be gaining the right to vote it's just very unlikely that there's going to be a coalition to support unbridled libertarianism to roll back the New Deal since women, in his opinion, are more likely to support left wing policies.
And so, he expresses a Deep hostility to democracy on that basis because he thinks that democracy is just never going to be conducive to libertarianism. And if that's the case in his mind, at least so much the worst for democracy. Now, of course, this is extraordinarily self serving, and some people pointed out, I try to characterize it as ambiguous.
I don't think there's much ambiguity about a billionaire thinking that a billionaires should have more power, more influence in society. But there's no doubt that this kind of anti democratic sentiment that's been pervasive throughout all of Pierre Attil's permutations has stamped some of Vance's worldview.
Another important person is Curtis Yarvin, our Menchus Nullbug who was also financed, I should say, by Attil, right? It's not clear how, but he's received a lot of money from him. So for those who don't know Really, we're fortunate enough not to know Curtis Yarvin or Mencius Moldbug is the monarchist that you talked about, or the Neomarx monarchist.
He started a blog in the late 2000s, essentially arguing that [00:56:00] American society was pervasively left it was dominated by a kind of left cultural hegemony by Associated with liberal elites, they called the cathedral on DH. There was really no way of breaking through this without the formation of a bunch of different dissonant right intellectuals who took the red pill.
He was one of the people who coined that phrase saw through the kind of illusions that were promulgated by the left wing procedural and recognize that Democracy and socialism and liberalism were really all species of the same kind of bad thing this movement towards what he considers chaos and the only way to offset that would eventually be to transition to something like a neo monarchy now he has a lot of different things and a lot of different flavors of this idea that he's put forward over decades now.
But the basic idea is that somebody like once upon a time it was Steve Jobs. Now, somebody like Elon Musk should take control of the country for the most part Reduce the influence of the people because the masses suck in his term to nil and just do what needs to be done in order to bring economic prosperity and authoritarian order to the state chilling idea, right?
It's important to note though, that, Yarvin is so reactionary that he says that he's Not even anti French and American Revolution. He's anti English Civil War. He's a Jacobite, right? So that's how far back he wants to get. Another important influence on somebody like Vance would be Patrick Deneen, who we mentioned before.
Patrick Deneen is a University of Notre Dame professor, author of a book Why Liberalism Failed. That is actually quite an interesting book and I think correctly diagnoses certain problems with what's called classical or possessive liberalism. But since then he's released a book called Regime Change that calls for exactly what it sounds like, right?
Essentially replacing what he considers to be a decadent neoliberal elite with a conservative aristocracy what he calls aristopopulism that he thinks is going to Be more conducive to passing legislation that'll be for the common good, which in practice is going to mean implementing social conservative policies without the kind of nebbish liberal [00:58:00] restrictions that older conservatives would think are so important given the nature of the American Constitution and American culture.
Now there are other influences that gone into JD Vance's worldview. But we'll just stop there. Cause I think that three is enough for your audiences to be subjected to today.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and it's, and it's important to note that like he specifically cites these people by name
McMANUS: Oh yeah, no, this isn't speculation, right?
SHEFFIELD: inferring that these are where he got his ideas from. He says this himself.
McMANUS: Yeah, I mean, look, Jarvan back in the day, used to try to be a little bit more covert I think part of that was also a marketing ploy on his part, being dark and mysterious and a dark elf, as he once used to call it, right, kind of operating in the shadows but, These people are not shy about expressing their intellectual influences.
If you push them even take somebody like Chris Rufo, who had a dialogue with Yarvin not too long ago, right? And once you recognize that these are the people that they are looking to for inspiration it should be concerning. Although like you, I think it's very easy to overstate the influence.
These intellectuals have on shaping the worldview of somebody like say Donald Trump or even shaping what somebody like JD Vance would do once he gets into office, if he gets into office. Let's pray to God he doesn't.
Why there are atheist and Jewish Christian nationalists
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and speaking of God, there is the, there's an interesting dichotomy between a lot of these reactionary writers in that position of religion vis a vis themselves. So Yorubin has said repeatedly over the years that he is an atheist and does not believe in religion and any of that stuff.
And, but then, but then by contrast, nearly all of these sort of as they're, I guess, currently calling themselves national nationalist right or whatever they want to call it, national conservatism. Almost all of them are Catholic with the one exception of I'm concerning who is a Jewish and, but at the same time he says he's, he's a Christian nationalist who is a Jew by his [01:00:00] own admission.
So these atheists and catholics are kind of Inheriting control of the intellectual right such as it is from the neoconservatives who tended to be either Jewish or non religious, like not atheist, but like just specifically non religious.
And then the shock troops had always been the evangelicals and the evangelicals never have gotten a shot at the intellectual leadership. And I think there's a lot of reasons for that, but I'm curious what your, what your thoughts are and why not?
McMANUS: Well, I think part of the reason is that there's a long history of Catholic reactionary thought that many of these figures can draw upon in a way that there isn't quite as deep a reservoir of evangelical reactionary thought. It's definitely there, right? But it's not as sophisticated or as long standing as, what you find in right wing Catholicism, at least.
And I want to stress right wing Catholicism, right? I know a lot of left wing Catholics Catholics and Christians out there who would deeply resent, needless to say, being associated with somebody like Dineen or Adrian Vermeule. But look, in terms of the role that religion is playing on the contemporary right, it's extremely variated, right?
Some of these people are, without a doubt, true believers. Think about somebody again, like Patrick Dineen or Adrian Villemula, right? Who's flirted with advocating for integralism, basically the idea that the United States and the American government should be subordinated to, or at least put on a position of equal standing with the Catholic Church which is the arbiter of truth and goodness in the world per se.
Probably not Pope Francis's Catholic Church, but a suitably reactionary Catholic Church and the Miller's opinion. But others are just very overt about the fact that they don't personally believe in God but they nonetheless want to advocate for a kind of social conservative Christian or Catholic morality because they feel that this is a necessary to kind of bind society together and.
Eliminate disorderly kind of libertinism on also because they think that a commitment to Christian morality will be good in alleviating the decadence that they see as [01:02:00] sweeping society by committing people to hire a more grand kinds of projects, which include, for instance, producing Enormous numbers of Children.
And I suppose the third thing that we can point about that's some of the darkest of strands of writing thought out there. Many also endorse return to these kinds of religious principles because they're worried about the demographic decline or the great replacement of white Americans by non white Americans or non white immigrants.
And they think that Christian morality can provide an antidote to that. And many are pretty overt about the fact again, that they don't believe, or again, that they question whether there is a God people like say Richard Spencer one of the founders of the term outright characterized himself as a cultural Christian Douglas Murray in the United Kingdom also characterized himself as a cultural Christian.
But I think Yoram Hazony had the kind of best. articulation of this outlook where in a number of essays, he says, look, if you're a conservative that doesn't believe in Christianity again, in great Kirk like language, he says you should kind of sideline those concerns and ask yourself whether the country would be better off committing to Christian principles and returning as he understands at least to the traditions associated with that rather than continuing on the liberal path that it's, that has led it to darkness.
That's far. And he says, if you do think that that's what we should do, then you should go to church. We should pray. You should essentially parrot the language of religion, even if you yourself aren't a believer. Now, to me, that's a horrific idea. And, I believe I have my own kind of religious views, but a lot of them are centered around authenticity, right?
This idea that you should believe because you are wholeheartedly committed to this, the idea of taking a functionalist approach to religion or saying, I'm going to kind of parrot the language of religious belief because it's useful is deeply repugnant to my left liberal outlook. I draw upon people like Charles Taylor here who's a left wing Catholic but you know, it makes a lot of sense if you're a conservative to kind of articulate this kind of vision because you're saying, look, we just need to get as many people on board with this as possible.
If you feel [01:04:00] that we need to return to tradition but you sort of don't believe in God, just don't worry too much about the theology of that right now do what needs to be done as it were.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah,
And Dennis Prager is another example of that, that he, he in fact wrote a column urging non religious conservatives to raise your children as Christian. Because if you don't, then they're going to become liberals. Basically was the was the crux of that column. And it's in it. It's a an interesting admission inadvertent admission on his part, I think, because like, that's that is the kind of the core threat that they feel like that.
They're this. Hierarchical authoritarian sensibility cannot survive on its own merits.
As the right overtly embraces authoritarianism, the left can reclaim freedom
SHEFFIELD: It's so hilarious that, people like Jordan Peterson or whoever are often using the phrase that, that they want a marketplace of ideas, but the reality is that. We, we, their ideas were tried in the marketplace of ideas a hundred years ago and were failed.
They're, they were rejected because they do not have philosophic or empirical merit. And so as such, they lost and, and, and people are not interested in subscribing to those ideas because they're unsupportable. But they, they can't see that this is irrational fundamentally.
McMANUS: yeah. I mean, to paraphrase my friend Nathan Robinson, who writes for sorry, the editor of current affairs, there's something deeply ironic about some of the loudest and best known people in the world constantly complaining about how their ideas are being silenced and haven't been tried yet. Despite the fact that, they'll go on Joe Rogan and they have podcasts that reach millions of people and many people try them and just don't actually happen to find them all that appealing.
Right. Now I want to be clear, right. I don't think that there's anything wrong. From a liberal standpoint with people living a social conservative life, if that's what they so choose to do, right? And I know many people, back at home who find that actually very fulfilling for a wide variety of different reasons.
You do you. But you know, I agree with John Stuart Mill that people are very different in terms of [01:06:00] what is good for them, What their personality gels with, what their aspirations are in life and what they were going to find fulfilling. I would not find a socially conservative lifestyle fulfilling in any way, shape or form.
And I know because, I was raised Roman Catholic and I tried it for a little while and I found it very boring and spiritually unfulfilling, right? Because I'm just not that kind of personality. And I think our society needs to create space for people to pursue, The vision of the good life that they think is conducive to their well being and to their flourishing within reasonable limits, obviously.
Right?
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and so long as they don't impinge on other people's ability to do so.
McMANUS: You're part of the if your vision of the good life includes being a member of the Klan and lynching people, then no. But, if you want to fast for 40 days and go to Mass five times a week and listen to it only in Latin, then by all means do so, right? Perhaps you find something fulfilling in that, that I'm sorry, perhaps you find something fulfilling in that, that I simply do not or simply have not recognized yet.
SHEFFIELD: yeah. And that's what actual freedom looks like. And it's yeah, and there's this, Like, you mentioned Eric from he wrote a whole book called escape from freedom and that, like, that's what a lot of this is, is that the freedom to a reactionary is imposing their opinions on someone else, like, They don't, and Tony Perkins, who is the founder of the Family Research Council, or at least the president, I'm sorry, of the Family Research Council, he had said that if we cannot legislate our opinions in society, we don't have freedom, which is inherently, anti liberal and frankly, anti American.
McMANUS: Oh, I completely agree. I mean, Adrian Vimiole is probably the one who's most express about that, where he's Consistently declaimed that his religious liberty is violated. If he's not allowed to pass legislation or people like him aren't allowed to pass legislation, [01:08:00] restricting LGBTQ rights.
Now I do think that democratic freedom or social freedom. If you want to call it that is a kind of freedom, right? So to a certain extent, he's not wrong. And I think as liberals, we should acknowledge that. Right. But the question then becomes is what is more important to a society committed to liberty AGM Vimula is right to pass religious legislation that is going to restrict people's basic liberties to love who they want or people's liberty to love who they want, right.
Without interfering with anyone else. And I think that's a very, very easy question to answer. Right. Because, Vermouli can very easily live the kind of social conservative lifestyle that he wants within a liberal society, while complaining about how he can't pass legislation to discriminate on the basis of his prejudices.
But LGBTQ persons would not be able to live in a Vermoulian society and love the kind of people that they love. And it's not a hard question for me, which is, are those societies more committed to freedom at all?
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and, and that's been interesting to see the Democratic Party actually finally starting to make that argument under Kamala Harris as the candidate that, that freedom, this is the first time in decades. That that had been a theme at a democratic political convention. And it's, it's a welcome development in my opinion.
McMANUS: It is, right? And look I have my problems with Kamala Harris. I'm a born, I'm a Bernie guy. But I do welcome this transition to a kind of rhetoric of joy and optimism that you've seen in her campaign. I mean, part of this is, I think is that Biden, just because of his age did himself a disservice by constantly focusing on the threat that Trump posed to democracy.
Cause it really kind of cast this atmosphere of doom, gloom and decline around the Democratic party that, because Biden was so old was not really a great. Look, let's just call it that but I think that fundamentally Americans, and this is a point that my good friend Alexandre Lefebvre makes in his Liberalism as a Way of Life are committed to a kind of comprehensive liberal worldview.
They find sustenance and meaning in being liberal, [01:10:00] and liberalism can be a very joyous philosophy in many ways it's a glass half full kind of outlook in many cases, although it's not naive about human nature. And that's why I think many people, certainly after decades of Trumpism find this rhetoric of joy resonant.
Because I think that, people want to look forward to the future and they want to think that their tomorrow is going to be better than today. And when they are constantly confronted by politicians that say everything is bad and everything is trash and everything needs to be changed it can become a bit of a downer and become a bit exhausting after a certain point Probably the most emblematic moment for me, at least with the N.
C. campaign is when Barack Obama went up and gave a speech and he talked about Trump and he's like, Trump shtick is getting a bit old, isn't it? And as somebody who's been writing about Trump now for the better part of a decade and has two books out on postmodern conservatism I can say I'm pretty much done talking about it and then move on to something else.
Right.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and, and ultimately the, the reorientation toward freedom and, and joy like that is political parties and ideologies do best when they, when their message aligns with their core. Emotional and psychological argument so that, what it boils down to is that hope is progressive and despair and nihilism is reactionary and Biden kind of disrupted that by not by departing.
McMANUS: Oh, without a doubt. Right. The reason, the moment I thought, I mean, I've done have a crystal ball, but I figured that Biden was going to win in 2020 was When Trump was attacking him, I think it was in the first debate over Hunter Biden and Biden just sat there and he's like, my son struggles a lot, he's all right.
And I'm proud of him for doing that. I thought to myself, the country right now, not even America, but the world is going through a horrible pandemic. Many of us are very anxious about what the future I was living in Canada at that point and my grandmother who was 86 was like, I've never seen anything like this before.
Right. And there was something that was ordinary and [01:12:00] comforting about this kind of outlook because he just seemed like a normal guy who was proud of his son, a little bit worried that was going around. And he hit a note that really worked with the message that the democratic party needed to hit at that point which is that things are bad right now.
But they're going to be okay and we're going to get through this, right? And that was a fine message in 2020 but it's 2024 now and comfort, comfort coupled with doom and gloom and apocalyptic anxieties about democracy. Even though I share a lot of those anxieties isn't what we should be going for.
People, I think, want something to look forward to. They want to believe in politics again. And I don't know if the Harris campaign is going to be successful in pulling that off, right? There's still two months before we get the election but they seem to be doing a pretty good job. So far, right.
And again, though I have deep reservations about the Harris candidacy that stem from my own leftism certainly I prefer to be in office to Donald Trump. So,
SHEFFIELD: Yeah,
McMANUS: I want to see happen.
The rise of the Nietzchean right
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and just wrapping it up here like this, this idea of hope and despair and sort of the, the mutual collaboration between atheist reactionaries and, and Christian authoritarians. Lot of this it goes, it derives from, or at least is, is, sensible to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, and who was, of course, famously not religious himself.
But, a lot of people, I, I, who don't, who haven't actually read
McMANUS: Don't, don't tell that shockingly to the expansive number of right wing Christians, so called who seem to find a great deal of value. I wrote an article about this for the Institute for Christian Socialism, but it's truly baffling to me that people like Jordan Peterson or Charlie Kirk or Jonah Goldberg will all cite Nietzsche extraordinarily positively while calling themselves Christian thinkers or at least beholden to a kind of Christian ethic, seemingly unaware of the fact that Nietzsche despised Christianity, characterized himself as the Antichrist.
Partly ironically, partly sincerely and also famously once said that it was socialism and liberalism and democracy that they're [01:14:00] the clearest descendants of the Christian worldview albeit secularized in the contemporary era. Anyway, sorry, just go on, just a bone that I always have to pick.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, Well, and it's like the, but the fundamental point for Nietzsche as a non religious reactionary was that religion was the only thing. That what, or at least religious hierarchy was the only thing that was standing between, the emaciated denuded slop of liberal democracy and the great imagined past, which he believed that humanity had departed from and that that ultimately is why I think that, so many non religious reactionaries are, have decided, well, I think these doctrines are nonsense, but I'm going to get behind these guys because at least It, to paraphrase the dude, at least it's an ideology.
McMANUS: Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look the rise of what I and others have called the Nietzschean right Certainly intellectually is a very intriguing development in American circles although as one wit put it a lot of American conservatives seem to have traded not reading Locke, but talking a lot about Locke for not reading Nietzsche and talking a lot about Nietzsche.
I think that the American Nietzschean right right now Fundamentally doesn't really take on board a lot of Nietzsche's distinctive ideas, actually. And this relates back to my earlier point about people like Peterson or about people like Kirk or even for that matter, people like Douglas Murray, right?
Who will draw on certain Nietzschean tropes about resentment without taking a lot of the more interesting material on board. But fundamentally, what they are intrigued by is this Nietzschean insistence that people are fundamentally different and they are different in a way that makes them unequal.
Right? Some people are more worthwhile and more valuable than others on. That's very conducive to a wide array of night right wing thinkers who will want to Divide the world up according to IQ or divide the world [01:16:00] up according to a racial hierarchy or divide the world between men and women with men put on top or all of the above, right?
Many of the people who are sympathetic to the one are sympathetic to the other two as well, right? And we can go on and on and on. And deeply funny because rather like how Nietzsche would have been appalled at how fascists banalized his ideas in this kind of populist way. There's no doubt that he would have found it both very funny and deeply frustrating that his work was so profoundly banalized by a lot of what the Nietzschean right in America right now is doing.
But perhaps that's the inevitable legacy or the inevitable endpoint of any intellectual who comes up with a sufficiently interesting set of ideas. Eventually they're going to wind up with proponents and disciples who are just. caricatures of what those ideas once stood for. And I think that's what you see right now.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is important to note also, to be fair, that there are, quite a few people who do read their Nietzsche as being in favor of socialism and progressive values in some sense or another, and that they will, and there's an argument to be made, and in fact has been made about that the posthumous writings of his were edited by his sister who was basically a Nazi and she distorted their meaning.
So I, I do want to make sure to point that out.
McMANUS: Oh yeah, I just want to be clear about this because there's actually people, much like people aren't really aware of some of the inter scene intellectual debates that go on in the American right. There's not a lot of transparency on some of the Quite nebbish and hyper intellectualist debates that go on on the American left.
But right now the American left, indeed the worldwide left, is going through a kind of process of denichification. So, if you're like me and, you're a millennial you probably went to college and you would read people like Michel Foucault or Gilles Deleuze for example who were kind of left wing Nietzscheans, right?
I mean, Foucault was very overt about that, right? He said in the interview, I am a Nietzschean. And you might've just assumed that Nietzsche is [01:18:00] fundamentally a left wing thinker because he's anti bourgeois. He's got a very punk mentality. And he really advocates for these kind of grand sweeping transformative projects, right?
That, you might associate with a certain kind of leftism. But recently there's been a lot of intellectual work done by people like like Daniel Tuts myself, I should add Domenico Lacerto, Malcolm Bull Ron Beaner Nancy Love we've all written books talking about how, well, yes, Nietzsche, was interested in being anti bourgeois.
Yes, he was also interested in these big transformative projects but he was also very insistent that an aristocratic society, indeed a radically aristocratic society was the only kind of setting where these kinds of changes could take place. And he was very, very prone to saying things like, Hey, slavery would be a good idea, right?
All these kinds of ideas that would be fundamentally hostile to the left. So it's a very interesting conversation that's going on in the left, on the left in American society right now as many people who once upon a time were weird and left wing flavors of Nietzscheanism become increasingly hostile to the guy.
And I don't know where that's going to go, but it's certainly, it's not something I would have predicted back in the 2000s.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
Yeah, no, it is interesting to see and and I do think that sort of debate also does is why you have seen some people aside from the fact that they can get massively rich from flattering Trumpist fascism, like. Matt Taibbi or some of these other people that they did have kind of this more that they were, they were, they were on the left if they were ever at all, but let's say they were, if they were on the left, it was only because of the anti bourgeois sensibility.
And then eventually, once they realized, oh, Donald Trump and his supporters hate America also. And so, hey, we're going to go over there.
McMANUS: Yeah, and actually, this is a good place to wrap up because this is why I wrote a book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism that's coming out soon, right, to kind of stress to my fellow leftists and my fellow liberals that there's a deep elective affinity between the two traditions that makes them quite different from what you find on the [01:20:00] right.
Now, I just want to be clear, right, Horseshoe Theory, as it's sometimes called I think is a very bad way of looking at the world Partly for the reasons I just mentioned, right? But there is no doubt a certain kind of intellectual, or just a certain kind of personality, that is fundamentally anti liberal and anti bourgeois, and can shift, usually from left to right, although not always, and the one constant that remains in their outlook is this kind of anti liberal mentality, right?
Think about somebody like Sourabh Amari, who I had a debate with, in December 2023, right? Similar kind of attitude towards certain things, although I'm very liberal, and he's certainly not. But, you see that in his transition, right?
He went from being a kind of hardened leftist interested in Trotsky and Foucault and all these things to a very reactionary Roman Catholic and now he seems to have put the two together, and, he'll write a book about, why we should combine Marx with Age of Immunity and Reactionary Catholicism, and see what we can get, right?
And the constant through line, of course, is the kind of anti liberal mentality. So, definitely not possible impossible and there's definitely personalities that are like that. But just to your listeners, Portrait Theory is not a good way of looking at the world. And I think that a lot of centrist commentators rely on this idea that if you go too far left, you eventually end up right, or too far right, you eventually end up left in lieu of serious analysis of what makes these different ideologies discreet.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, I agree. It's, it's, it's less about the ideologies and more about the psychologies is, is how I would put it. But yeah. All right. So, well, you, you have plugged. so, when is your book? Here's this other book, that you were talking about here. When's that coming? Yeah.
McMANUS: The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, is coming out late November, right? If people want to check it out, they can pre order it on Amazon or on the Rutledge website and I imagine, for a lot of your listeners there might be a little bit of wariness about the socialist label but one of the things that I point out is that there are many, Constructive and liberal forms of socialism out there, just like there are many forms of emancipatory and egalitarian liberalism out there, and I think it's very worthwhile to put the two traditions into dialogue with one [01:22:00] another, since both are ultimately enlightenment doctrines that are committed to humanism, reason, and liberty, equality, and solidarity for all, and there's a lot to be gained by Dialogue with one another.
And frankly, what could be more liberal than that?
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and then the other book, which has kind of sort of been the subtext of the discussion of this episode today that you've got, which is already available and has been for a little bit. It's called the political right and equality. turning back the tide of egalitarian modernity. And then on social media, what's your where are you posting that?
for people who want to keep touch with you there?
McMANUS: Sure. People can add me at Matt Paul prof on Twitter. I'm never going to call it X. And the more Elon Musk's insist that I call it X, the more it's going to be Twitter. I can be spiteful that way. Or people can email me at Matt McMahon is 300 at gmail. com. And I do my best to get in touch with people by email.
If they reach out to me.
SHEFFIELD: Okay. Sounds good. And I will commend people to do that. So, thanks for joining me today and we'll stay in touch. I look forward to it.
McMANUS: Thanks, man. Good conversation.
SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the discussion, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show. You can get the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And my special thanks to everybody who is a paid subscribing member, you get full unlimited access to the archives of the program. And I also encourage everybody to go to Flux.community where you can get access to all the other programs and articles that we produce at Flux.
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