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

by Elizabeth Sandifer

“I must Create a System. or be enslav’d by another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.”

Engels eviscerated this deduction of ideological conclusions from supposedly disinterested maxims back in 1878, in his coruscating polemic against the anti-Marxist social democrat Eugen Dühring: And when such an ideologist constructs morality and law from the concept, or the so-called simplest elements of “society”, instead of from the real social relations of the people round him, what material is then available for this construction? Material clearly of two kinds: first, the meagre residue of real content which may possibly survive in the abstractions from which he starts and, secondly, the content which our ideologist once more introduces from his own consciousness. And what does he find in his consciousness? For the most part, moral and juridical notions which are a more or less accurate expression (positive or negative, corroborative or antagonistic) of the social and political relations amidst which he lives; perhaps also ideas drawn from the literature on the subject; and, as a final possibility, some personal idiosyncrasies. Our ideologist may turn and twist as he likes, but the historical reality which he cast out at the door comes in again at the

window, and while he thinks he is framing a doctrine of morals and law for all times and for all worlds, he is in fact only fashioning an image of the conservative or revolutionary tendencies of his day — an image which is distorted because it has been torn from its real basis and, like a reflection in a concave mirror, is standing on its head.

There is no center here; not even the ruined, nameless thing within the Oval Office. There’s just a void—a historical calamity emanating out from nothing save for a morbid but systemic lust for its occurrence.

(Marx in fact describes capitalists as “a band of warring brothers,”