Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

by Elizabeth Sandifer

Like Vivian James, it is the negation of any sort of desire. It is a vision of video gaming reduced to passively accepting the products of big-name developers on the terms that are offered, without any sort of opinion or personal identity involved. That this reduces video gaming—a medium that has, since the heyday of the NES, in point of fact included countless women and minorities in its tens of millions of players, and currently shows a clear majority of women among console gamers—to a monoculture is irrelevant. They don’t care about the history of the medium, to the point that they targeted an academic focusing on video game archiving for harassment because he publicly stated that anxiety about Gamergate was making it harder to get funding, whose work they then declared was unimportant anyway. Not even a monoculture then—an anticulture, with Vivian James ironically its perfect representation. It’s a desire to befit their worldview, its adamance dwarfed only by its fundamental emptiness. There’s nothing there. There’s never been anything there. Except, of course, the trail of devastation left behind. The utter sludge of human misery brought down upon victim after victim over the course of this ghastly farce. Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, Sarah Nyberg, Randi Harper, Phil Fish, Alison Rapp, Veerender Jubbal, and so many more, an immeasurably vast ledger of people subjected to its brutality, every one of their stories with more weight and substance and meaning th...

an aesthetic wedded to a perversion.

The most perverse thing about him is that he does not actually value money so much as being rich. As he puts it, money is just a way of keeping score. This is not to say that he does not enjoy the material trappings of luxury, but he enjoys them primarily because they provide constant affirmation of the fact that he is a rich and powerful man. As far as the details, he knows what he likes, and has probably asserted the fact in those exact words. But the way in which this is true is almost base tautology. He recognizes the tingling of his lizard hindbrain when certain things happen to him, and he calls these things great. These things include but are not limited to: seeing his name in big, gold letters; a steak, cooked medium, with an overpriced California cult wine; telling someone to do something demeaning and having them do it, particularly when black men carry things for him; Dorian columns; when people break eye contact with him; seeing himself on television; groping women; the look in a man’s eye when he knows you’re screwing him over but goes along with it anyway; and Citizen Kane.

What’s perhaps most interesting here is the idea that the procurement of an adequate trophy wife is presented as business advice. On one level there’s an almost medieval sense of marriage as a political act, a transaction undertaken.

Where his sexism is object-oriented, his racism is fundamentally more structural. His positions relative to Muslims, Blacks, and Hispanics appear little more than the huckster continuing to say what the people respond to. That is not to say there’s no substance to them, but they are a byproduct of the larger process of deal-making. More interesting is where his basic inclination towards racial stereotyping originates from: the material realities of New York real estate, its patterns of historical ethnic migrations geologically stratified across the city’s expansion. The practical result: his career is a decades-long chain of talking about “the Italians,” “the Chinese” and, especially in the Manhattan real estate market in which he established himself, “the Jews,” a fact that explains one of the more idiosyncratic features of his specific racism. His is, in other words, a psychogeographic racism,

The Bush years were fundamentally the Reagan era’s reprise as farce,

And so in 2011 he turned on Obama, flirting provocatively with birtherism in a March 2011 interview on Good Morning America while doing his traditional pretending to run for president. He was hardly the first to do so—politicians like Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann all flirted with it to various degrees. But he was by some margin the most rawly famous person to indulge in the conspiracy theory, and Good Morning America was among the highest platforms the theory had ascended to. This got him attention, and by mid-April he was getting daily briefings on the “conspiracy” from WorldNetDaily founder and general conspiracy nut Joseph Farah. It’s hardly surprising that he loved the attention. He always loves attention, after all. If a rush of people cheer on something he says he’s basically incapable of not saying it again or of pushing it further to get more and louder cheers. But it’s a mistake to treat this as a cynically strategic pandering to what would eventually become his electoral base. There was nothing strategic about it. It was nothing more or less than the inevitable consequence of his particular pathologies set loose in the particular political context of the first black president slamming rich real estate speculators.

No shortage of people have speculated over whether he actually wanted to win. A perfectly plausible theory is that he was following the same path as candidates like Herman Cain and Mike Huckabee whereby the campaign is mainly a tool for building an e-mail list of people to sell shit to. It’s entirely likely he was planning to do something along those lines, perhaps launching a Fox News competitor at his most ambitious. But this seems impossible—he cannot have wanted to lose. The problem is really that he wanted to win the presidency as opposed to being president. The story of him offering John Kasich control of both foreign and domestic policy while he made America great again may well have been a spot of mischief from the Kasich camp, but it’s nevertheless devastatingly plausible. Literally no aspects of the job seemed likely to appeal to him.

this is a topic that has been extensively picked over in think pieces, the usual argument of which is some variation of “the Republican Party laid the groundwork for his rise.” And that’s true enough—eight years of pure opposition politics, often framed on racial lines, and on top of a decades-long strategy of stoking white resentment left the party vulnerable to a populist insurgent. With a field of candidates that was at once overcrowded and mediocre, 2016 was an obvious year for it to happen. And the result was always going to have a fascist sheen with a white nationalist core.

On one level, the answer is that for all his incompetence there are in fact a strange handful of things he’s good at, and this is one of them. Like replacing a tropical island in a well-defined reality TV format, quasi-fascist figurehead is a job that suits, if not his talents, at least his perversions. His always shaky relationship with any kind of truth or objective reality was by this point completely devastated; he was both willing and eager to throw himself into the passionate belief of whatever bit of outright lunacy the base felt validated by just so long as they cheered for him. As a racist, sexist bully himself, he could relate to them. And he was, if nothing else, a genuinely ideological autocrat who really did believe that he alone could save America. This was enough to establish a larger base within the narrow pool of Republican primary voters than the flaccid campaigns of Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or the others.

The basic fact of him remains. He’s an idiot drifting through history, suspended between the updraft of money’s tendency to sustain itself and the downdraft of his fundamental incompetence. Nothing can change this. Nor can the system be somehow rendered stable. Indeed, the presidency inherently marks a terminus for both forces. He has, at last, indisputably become a Great Man of History. Now all that remains is to define that in all its singular bigliness, and all that remains to define it with is his skill at overly predictable pratfalls. There is no way for this to end well for him or anybody else.

More broadly, the historical precedent for incompetence being a useful check on would-be autocrats is minimal to non-existent, at least in terms of the general population. Sure, his capacity for shooting himself in the foot can and will frustrate his agenda from time to time, but his agenda isn’t the only horrific thing about him. Just as ominous, if not moreso, is the corrosive effect of his very presence. This includes, obviously, the material problems of emboldened white supremacy, long-term damage to social norms, and, most importantly, the human misery inflicted by a government whose law enforcement agencies are under zero pressure towards basic humanity or decency. But it also includes the raw allostatic load of living under his rule; the basic psychological wear and tear of waking up every morning in a post-fact world dominated by a bullying narcissist. The act of living in a world where the basic validity of your identity is contingent and perpetually imperiled, where the very definition of “fact” is in dispute, and where a brutish logic of dominance and humiliation pervades the entire social order. There is no upside here. Nothing makes it better. Even the good outcomes are destructive beyond easy comprehension. One is left clutching at self-evidently absurd thresholds of acceptability—maybe it won’t actually be a nuclear war—the very contemplation of which represents a fundamental degradation. The truth is cold, brutal, and inescapable: we’ve lost.

Let us at least admit, then, that he made the 2016 election a genuine democratic choice—a decisive referendum on accelerationism. Clinton was the candidate of stasis,. Like Jeb Bush or a new Fantastic Four movie she was the revival of a brand nobody was particularly nostalgic for. She offered nothing other than the continuation of present circumstances with all their sense of imminent eschatology. And his sheer destructive potential offered a credible alternative to this. A vote for him was at least a vote for climax.

The only acceleration he can possibly offer is around the closed and sclerotic loop of his collapsing psyche.

Because capitalism is the system Rothbard—and the entire Austrian School—is trying to justify, and it is also the system that—contra his wealth of assumptions—circumscribes a lot of what people do. Individuals can act all they want. They won’t make the end of the world go away, any more than their freedom to quit work can make them free to not starve—especially when the system that surrounds their individual actions convulses and crashes to the ground. Individual action is a singularly bad explanation for why, ten years ago, global society itself teetered on the brink of collapse because some people were sold mortgages they couldn’t afford.

Austrians are constantly predicting crashes. They’re worse than Marxists on that score, who, as the joke goes, predicted four out of the last three crashes. But the real irony is the idea of proving Austrian ideas true using evidence, given that the praxeological basis of Austrian thought means that the Austrians not only admit that their ideas are not based on evidence, but claim that evidence cannot prove or disprove anything anyway.

There is a spectre haunting the anthropocene—the spectre of the Austrians. But what haunts the haunter? What awful gothic horror might we find interred beneath Rothbard’s shining praxeological edifice?

Praxeology claims to be a method, but it’s actually a method of claims. It is an affect, an aesthetic, a way of making assertions. Famously, beneath its rhetoric, it amounts to a wholesale rejection of empiricism, made all the more impudent because the praxeologists make a habit of lambasting others (rightly or wrongly) for doing what they themselves do proudly. They began this, tellingly, by attacking Marxism, which was projection, as we’ll see.

Of course, it’s not that the praxeologists don’t think there are observable laws in how the world works. After all, they adumbrate their own. It’s just that they think all such laws arise from human behaviour that arises from subjective perceptions. So the laws cannot be scientifically comprehensible via statistical modelling, or even empirical observation.

It’s easy to never be wrong if you never say anything. Even Friedrich von Hayek, Mises’ protégé and successor, who nevertheless formally rejected praxeology, claimed, in Individualism and Economic Order: All that the theory of the social sciences attempts is to provide a technique of reasoning which assists us in connecting individual facts, but which, like logic or mathematics, is not about the facts. It can, therefore… never be verified or falsified by reference to facts. That isn’t to say it doesn’t seize upon anything that looks like proof when it can, but that’s because it’s an aesthetic pretending to be a method, and so the occasional scob of evidence makes nice decoration. In this, it resembles nothing so much as casuistry—religious apologetics, scholasticism—preserved into late modernity.

There is some attraction and superficial plausibility in the idea that you can’t quantify human actors with statistics, etc. This is part of why this ideology is so attractive to people who are in vested in their own individualism, rugged or otherwise. But, of course, the cult of individualism is based on the idea that the behaviour of some humans can always be predicted. The individualist is, by definition, the guy who stands apart from the common herd. He (because it is a gendered subject) likes to wax ruefully about accepting the reality of what ‘humans’ are really like as a way of ruling out utopias—but he implicitly separates humans into the schlubs and the inspired. Even the superficially liberatory idea of ‘self-ownership’ espoused by many praxeological Austrians and libertarians is a coy way of conceptualising people as commodities, which is probably how these supposed lovers of liberty so often end up defending slavery.

The excuse for this partiality to the rights and privileges of the ruling class, and the attendant indifference to those of the subject class (whatever the social content of these categories may be at any given time), is that private property is the basis of liberty. But this manages the impressive feat of being both a tautology and a contradiction. It’s a tautology because it assumes the point under question. It’s a contradiction because if private property, while conferring liberty on its possessors, also structurally curtails the liberty of the propertyless, then the concept of liberty becomes a luxury to be enjoyed by a few. From here the libertarian is inescapably pushed towards somehow justifying the inequity, towards explaining “Why yes, it is a luxury to be enjoyed by a few—and quite right too!” The justifications are easy to find. You need only look at the many and drastic specific inequities generated by capitalist society, generalise from them, and amputate history and context so that they appear to have no cause save for some primordial fact or another.

reactionary thinking is dependant upon amnesia.

The mainstream treats the Austrians as their bit on the side, only calling them late at night when they need something they’re not getting at home. Many Austrian ideas have been adopted by the mainstream, but generally their policy recommendations have not—probably because, being based on an extreme form of market subjectivism, they are not useful to actually existing capitalism. This is not to say that they haven’t had a profound impact on the real world.

For a philosophy supposedly based on human freedom, there is surprisingly little room here for real human agency. Individual human beings act, but they can’t direct the world—except blindly, in their own self-interest, and when themselves directed by market signals. And only some human beings’ actions are really significant anyway. But even here, the efficient managing comes down to responding to information we are fed by an impersonal and unknowable source of that might as well be God for all we can understand or influence it. The propertied will sometimes misinterpret the signals being sent. When this happens, the market will winnow out such mistakes via processes that, though often called Darwinian, are actually better described as Calvinist. As we will see, not only do Austrians consider this the best and only system, they also implicitly attach religious significance to it. Having ‘free will’ becomes all about interpreting correctly that which is revealed to us by an unseen higher power which, though essentially benevolent in effect, is actually impersonal, and ready to punish if displeased. The religiose affect is in perfect alignment with the praxeological method of revelation and scholasticism.

For the Austrians, democracy is to blame for capitalism going into crisis. Democracy breeds special claims by people who are not really concerned with making the choices that regulate the economy. The people without a big stake—the masses—thus destabilise the system. Democracy introduces things like central banks to monkey with the market. For the Austrians, this is where everything goes wrong. This is the fall; the expulsion from paradise.

Austrian economic theory as we know it is inherently anti-democratic. Opposition to democracy is entailed by the Austrian view of how capitalism works. Democracy is the rule of the ignorant and selfish public, and the state is their tyrannical arm. Moronic majoritarianism wields unjustifiable power over the propertied and the entrepreneurs

Socialism is thus the worst kind of tyranny. It is, as the Austrians understand it (and we have to admit that the history of ‘socialism’ has given some warrant for this misapprehension), the ultimate expression of statism. But they don’t hate statism because statism is undemocratic, but rather the exact opposite. They hate it because—as they see it—statism is democratic.

As intimated, crisis, in this Austrian theology, is divine punishment. As in other such theologies, it can be avoided if sin is purged. In the Austrian view, this means scrapping central banks, scrapping money controls, scrapping any government economic planning. The means to achieve this must be the scrapping of democracy.

there is a sense in which Marxists do the same. In both cases, the crisis is a confirmation of beliefs. In both cases, the believer sees the crisis as—in some way—a sign of the oncoming future. Endogenously unstable, irreformable, and ultimately replaceable; or perfect but for the artificial imperfections, forced on it by parasitic and unnecessary meddling. The Austrians are like the communists of the 20th century who, aware that Stalinist Russia had become a monstrous perversion, were still defending it as some form of ‘degenerated’ workers’ state, essentially saying that it might be a monster, but it’s our monster. That’s what the Austrians and libertarians et al say about capitalism. Compromised, ruined, monkeyed with by statists and democrats and demagogues and special claims, etc, it’s a garden of earthly delights overrun with weeds. Weeds, of course, can be killed.

We won’t prove or disprove Marx’s value theory here. The point is that Böhm-Bawerk’s objections come nowhere close to doing so either. But then, I suspect that for many of those who cite Böhm-Bawerk the point is not whether Austrian arguments actually do or don’t demolish Marx, but rather that they sound good. Superficially plausible arguments that appeal to intuition and prejudice are the stock-in-trade of the online Austrian. Flourishes of impressive names like “Böhm-Bawerk” and “von Mises”, etc, provide a plausible-looking facsimile of demolition. And indeed, most people who chuck Böhm-Bawerk’s name around online fail to understand him and offer vulgarised caricatures of his arguments. But that’s poetic justice.

In simple terms, the argument—which, as will be clear, is derived directly from Austrian first principles—runs thus: a society must be able to allocate its resources efficiently by making economic calculations. To do this you have to know what the ‘primary factors’—the big, important resources that form the basis of all production, such as land, steel, and capital itself—are worth, and thus the best use to make of them. You derive this knowledge from prices assigned by the market. But if such primary factors are communally owned, they are not subject to a market, which means they do not end up with prices which accurately reflect their values, thus making it impossible to calculate how to allocate them efficiently.

Indeed, contrary to the assumptions of almost everyone—anti-Marxists and Marx’s supposed supporters alike—Marx makes it clear that the active, collective, and democratic participation of the working class in planning is not only morally desirable but practically essential to socialism—far more so than any legal change concerning who owns what. At the very least, the knowledge—tacit or otherwise—of the working class at large can be brought into the planning process. Indeed, this was Trotsky’s solution when he originally made the argument against Stalinism that Hayek is ripping off here. Deliciously, Hayek ends up—at least in some ways—agreeing with Marx over the ‘Marxists.’

In the end, Trotsky was right, and so, by extension, were Marx and Hayek (which is an enjoyably outrageous sentence to type): ‘really existing’ planning was centralised and undemocratic. Without the ‘tacit knowledge’ of workers in localities, planning broke down, replaced by top-down command which increasingly failed to keep in touch with reality. This is not the place to go into the nature and failings of the Stalinist system, but suffice to say: there is a lot of historical context left out of the above, and the more fundamental failures of such ‘state capitalist’ bureaucratic capitalist systems are—in one of the great ironies of history—powerful empirical confirmation of Marx’s theories of capitalism.

But evidence isn’t a consideration, as we’ve established. Instead, the reasoning is from first principles, i.e. democracy leads to totalitarianism. Hayek gets this from Mises and reiterates it throughout his work. He sees central planning as the result of democracy, central planning as socialism, and socialism as inherently totalitarian. So he supports the authoritarian crackdown. As Hayek said in a 1981 interview with Renee Sallas of Chile’s El Mercurio newspaper: “I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking in liberalism.” The Austrians have a history with this sort of thing. Mises served as an advisor to ‘Austrofascist’ dictator of Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss, who saw Nazism and Communism as the same, and Austrofascism as an emergency measure.

In his apologia for Pinochet’s tyranny, Hayek is clear that it’s a stopgap, and all the fault of the left. The class nature of the ideology is clear when you remember that Hayek lambasted left-wingers who were prepared to countenance the idea of ‘temporary’ suspensions of democracy as ‘stages’ towards socialism. Neoliberal praxis is thus based on Hayek’s extreme right-wing critique of democracy, itself based on that of Nazi jurist and legal theorist Carl Schmitt, whom Hayek praised. The logically consequent idea that emergency dictatorship may be necessary to preserve liberal society from democracy is in neoliberalism’s source code. Neoliberalism, contrary to myth, is an authoritarian ideology, committed to defending property and wealth by violence both physical and structural. This isn’t ‘because’ of Hayek in any crude way—unlike him, we must eschew the ‘great man’ theory of history—but he was a vector. In short, the Austrian School’s historic role as an ideological centre of gravity to the right of the bourgeois mainstream enabled it to both influence the rise of neoliberalism and then become a stern ideological critic of actual neoliberal praxis from the right. Just as the original Austrian School was marginalism-but-more-so, its later form continues to serve as fanatical boosters of capitalism while also lurking at the extreme rightward fringe of capitalist society’s intellectual, ideological, and political range of what is acceptably avowable. Its position explains it...

The Austrians’ continuing position at the far rightward end makes them obvious neighbors to fascism—which is the furthest ideological extreme of bourgeois ideology, and another resource for capitalism in time of crisis. This is why, in the age of neoliberalism, Austrian dogma metastasized into something extremely dangerous and reactionary: paleolibertarianism. And we’ve arrived back at Rothbard.

Rothbard is the most important link in any chain drawn between the Austrian School and the fringe right. And his creation of paleolibertarianism was a key step in this. Framed as an “Outreach to the Rednecks” strategy, paleolibertarianism aimed to promote the relatively unpopular extreme free-market dogmas of libertarianism by joining them tactically to America’s powerful trends of post-1960s reaction. In practice, this meant cooing appreciatively about David Duke and striking an alliance with Pat Buchanan, who you may remember as the guy Trump confidently predicted he could beat to the 2000 Reform Party nomination because of his excessive fondness of Hitler. The formal alliance fractured not long after Rothbard’s death when Buchanan fell out with Lew Rockwell, and the remaining network of influence was pushed to the margins a few years later by the rise of neoconservatism under Bush, but it continued to seethe gamely on the Internet, where it proved popular among a certain strand of geek. There it interbred with fascism and white supremacism, becoming one of the strands that eventually coalesced into the alt-right.

Saying that without state interference the market would be free is like saying that without the soil, the vegetables you eat wouldn’t need washing.

Locke did not, of course, think that what native peoples did with their land constituted ‘use.’ Nor did he mean that the people who actually worked the land owned it; he meant the employers of those people. Once again, the premises are carefully chosen to lead to the correct conclusion. And in this case, the conclusion was the moral justification for black chattel slavery and the appropriation of land from natives by white imperialists. The dirty truth about Locke is, in essence, the dirty truth about classical liberalism: it arose from capitalism, and its project was to help create and legitimise the new forms of class and racial hierarchies generated by capitalism. It existed as a theoretical and ideological justification for European capitalist imperialism, which many libertarians now profess to oppose.

For all the bullshit, Rothbard and his theories proved a seductive mix. With its built-in aura of both the intellectually-elite and the non-mainstream, its pretensions towards being anti-establishment, and its claims to brusque and impatient rationality mixed with a moral defence of liberty and property, Rothbardian reaction has an image that works. The hard-nosed defence of free markets has the right dose of machismo while also retaining a glamour of bespectacled, book-wormish intellectualism. But there are no sums to do, of course. Praxeology sees to that, along with serving the instinct to make reductionist statements about people based on the idea that they all have free will, a concept easily adapted to excuse whatever injustice needs to be excused. It’s free will, and also it’s always been like that; a classic reactionary contradiction that could be embraced unabashedly. The racism inherent here can be adapted silently, or not so silently, as strategy demands.

Paul has run for the Republican Presidential nomination several times, and always attracted millions of dollars of donations, and a fanatical—often young—fanbase. He pitched himself to the young white men of the internet as a rebel right-winger, using libertarian ideas. His was to be a ‘Ron Paul Revolution’, storming the barricades for a paleolibertarian manifesto. The ideas were a concoction of small-government, ‘taxation is theft’, free-market rhetoric with hardline conservative stances such as opposition to abortion. The signature of paleolibertarianism is this very fusion.

The disproportionate number of former-libertarians in American fascism is revealing because conservatives are far more numerous in America than libertarians, which suggests that libertarianism is statistically over-represented.

The ‘Cultural Marxism’ conspiracy theory is enormously popular on this spectrum. Like anarcho-capitalism, it would be superfluous to debunk since it is ridiculous on its face. Nevertheless, it’s worth saying that, insofar as it attributes the origins of the conspiracy to the Frankfurt School, it isn’t just wrong—it’s exactly wrong. The accusation is that Cultural Marxists are deliberately putting anti-family, anti-male, anti-straight, anti-white, anti- capitalist messages (the only grain of truth here is the assumption that, in some sense, all these antis are compatible) into popular culture in order to erode the dominant—and of course proper—institutions and hierarchies of Western culture in order to impose communism. The trouble is that the Frankfurt School’s dominant current believed that revolutionary transformation of Western capitalism was now all but impossible, that the masses were no longer capable of becoming revolutionary subjects, and that this was attributable—to a huge extent—to the inherently paralysing and soporific effects of mass popular culture. Their critique of Hollywood, etc, has some points to make, but it ultimately collapses into a crude and deterministic elitism which sees the only possible ideological challenge to the suffocating web of ‘totally administered’ modern capitalism being high modernist art. And even there, Marxists cannot shape such challenges, they can only elucidate them through criticism. Far from doing this secretly or covertly, i...

The Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory now espoused across the alt-right is a reiteration of what the (actual) Nazis called kulturbolschewismus, an idea central to Nazi dogma, about degenerate art and culture being manufactured by Jewish communists to undermine the unity of the German people.

The only main substantive ideological difference between libertarians and the alt-right is one that Vox accidentally highlights: the alt-right tend to oppose absolute free trade because that means open borders. So, the alt-right essentially is libertarianism, but modulated to fascist principles. This is not to say that the actual dogma of the Austrian School, or even of the MPS, is directly determining the content of alt-right websites and chatrooms today. The point is the movement, both in the sense of a nebulous chain of actors motivated by the same resentments and justified by the same dogmas, and of the movement of the political centre of gravity.

Far-right groups actively targeted online communities dominated by young white men in order to spread their ideology. The most famous of these is Stormfront’s infiltration of 4chan, where they recognized that the community’s embrace of “ironic” racism provided them an opportunity for ideological recruitment. Volumes have been written on the interconnection between forums devoted to pick-up artists, which claim that the secrets to successfully losing your virginity can be yours for whatever the price of their self-published ebook is (the secrets generally being “rape people”), and so-called men’s rights activists. And, most famously, there’s the blatant pile of lies that was Gamergate, a flagrant effort to recruit gamers into fascism. In all of these cases, the strategy is to play on insecurities of young men in an age where there are mounting ideological challenges out there—especially on the Internet—to their untroubled social privilege. Coupled with the twin legacies of decades of neoliberalism—increasing ideological and political disorientation, and a future far less secure than that which faced their parents and grandparents at their age—such challenges can terrify the semi-privileged layer of young, white, middle class men, who enjoy all those privileges without also enjoying actual material security.

Being, fundamentally, a degraded version of the media, the alt-right’s presentation of this ideological narrative is unsurprisingly theatrical. This extends not only to the “meme magic” approaches that resurrected an ancient Egyptian god of primordial darkness as a cartoon frog that causes people to get punched on national television (which can be understood as a sort of cargo cult re-enactment of the neo-Situationist techniques behind leftist groups like the Occupy movement), but to their stylized and ritualized “debate” with online liberals and feminists. These responses are a quasi-coherent miasma of assumptions, factoids, lazy misapprehensions of their chosen victim’s views, recited talking points and, in most cases, outright lying and distortion. (The dead giveaway is a near complete lack of substantial quotations and close-reading of their supposed opponents.) But it’s arranged in a superficial parody of an actual scholarly, intellectual tradition based on an unslakable thirst for intellectual credentials giving rise to a whole ecosystem of Right-wing ‘atheists’ and ‘rationalists’, who lump feminism in with creationism as an absurd delusion, and claim to debunk feminism and other such ideas they hate using ‘logic’ and ‘reason’ and ‘facts’, etc. It’s a vast system run by imposters without a syndrome, fuelled by Dunning-Kruger.

This is a common reactionary fetish, actually. Many Thatcherites were attracted to the idea of themselves as rebels, as fanatics. The neocons (hated by libertarians, as it happens) liked and encouraged the (ridiculous) notion that they had some similarity to Trotsky. Steve Bannon declared himself a Leninist. Ron Paul declared himself the leader of a revolution. The right always apes the left. The attraction works upon those young fogeys who, while not wanting to challenge any of the fundamental problems with the world, nevertheless fancy themselves rebels and iconoclasts.

The Austrians are not, of course, alone in being unable to conceptualise the stateless and democratic version of socialism. But they have done as much, if not more, than anyone else to propagate this very conceptual impossibility—despite being right up close to Marxism, almost since day one. Again, here they resemble Stalinists. They have been hugging Marxism on the brink of the Reichenbach Falls for a century and a half, staring into its eyes, but have never really seen it. They have spent a long time grappling frantically and hatefully with that which they do not, and will not, look at. The essence of neurosis is denial. But, of course, in order to choose to be incapable of conceptualising something, you have to already have some idea of it. The Austrians are marginalism’s version of the Weird.