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Feb. 9, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:03:39
The Dialectic of Populism

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comNeema Parvini (“Academic Agent”) joins Richard and Mark to discuss the dialectic of Trumpism.

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You know, one thing that's interested me is this kind of satanic panic that's going on among conservatives that I've seen online, which I think is very authentic in the sense that I think they actually believe this.
So a lot of this was instigated...
With the Grammys that happened on Sunday.
And there's this artist named Sam Smith, who I remember hearing his music a while ago, let's say eight or ten years ago.
And, you know, it's fine.
I don't really have an opinion on it.
It's kind of soulful, but poppy.
And then he actually sang the theme song for Spectre, which was the James Bond movie before last.
And it was kind of, it was very similar song to Skyfall.
All of the songs seem to be like Skyfall because Skyfall has become a bit of a classic sung by Adele.
You know, it's a great number.
But it also just struck me as kind of horrible.
I really didn't like the music.
And I could go into that, but I don't think I really need to.
So I was just kind of like, yeah, you know, this guy.
Recently, he's turned into almost like a Madonna figure and a rather implausible Madonna figure.
I mean, Madonna, at least in the 80s, was attractive.
She was a good pop singer, and everything was always sexy.
And then, of course, by the late 80s and into the 90s, she took it to a level of S&M and just stuff that it just became gross.
And now she's a grotesque husk of herself.
But anyway, Sam Smith seems to be going in this direction.
And I've seen highlights of...
His latest video, music doesn't interest me in the slightest.
And I think one of our, someone who's actually a member, she was talking about it, how he's dressed up in like corsets, almost like an 18th century aristocrat.
And it's just all very kind of gay and trans.
And it's just, you know, the comment by one of our members who I like is like, isn't it amazing that everything's so sexualized, but then Totally non-erotic.
They've somehow managed to make rampant orgies something that becomes a boner killer.
Remarkable.
She definitely speaks for me in that regard.
But anyway, he was on the Grammys on Sunday, and as you've probably seen...
He was dressed up like Satan himself, or at least a kind of Hollywood version of Satan in a red suit and all this kind of stuff.
And the conservatives take this as, look, it's out in the open now.
They're Satanists.
These award shows are rituals and so on and so forth.
They're trying to get your children early and turn them all into Satanists.
I think there's something kind of interesting to this.
I obviously don't think that that's actually the case.
And I think Satan, for people in Hollywood, the music industry, it's a kind of LARP, you could say.
It's like dressing up at Halloween.
For Halloween, you can dress up like Mike Myers.
That doesn't mean you're a serial killer.
Dress up like a zombie.
It doesn't mean you're undead or something.
It's a kind of fun LARP.
And I think they are kind of, you know, you could say thumbing their nose at Middle America or something.
I mean, that's certainly fair.
I think there's almost like another level to this which is worth discussing, and that's the Caducean level.
So there's a phrase of...
I'm probably mangling it.
At this point, it's almost like an Oscar Wilde phrase of hypocrisy is a compliment to virtue.
And it articulated in some fashion like that.
Now, what he means is that if you are hypocritical, you're almost demonstrating the value of being virtuous.
So if you have a love affair and you lie about it, you're in your own way.
Reinforcing the idea that marriage is a good institution that we should support.
If you do a little cocaine one Saturday night and you cover it up, well, you're paying a compliment to being virtuous, if you understand what I'm saying.
You're a hypocrite, you're lying, but you're in that way reinforcing If you're ashamed of your sins as opposed to shameless, is what you're saying, right?
Exactly.
That's definitely a part of it.
You know, there's something almost like worse in my mind about a lack of shame.
And I remember seeing this, this was like five years ago or something, reading this article in the New York Times.
About these polyamorous relationships and the new fad of polyamory, which is probably going away at this point.
And thinking to myself, I had the same exact response as one of our female members who was making fun of Sam Smith, where it's like...
You've somehow made an 18th century aristocratic orgy unsexy.
Like, what a remarkable accomplishment.
You've somehow done it.
I felt the same way about polyamory.
I remember reading this article in the New York Times, and first off, the people involved were just kind of uniformly gross.
Yeah, it's a demographic problem in that case.
So you hear about like, oh, wow, these open marriages and multiple partners, and then you see these people and you're like, I don't, it wasn't what I imagined.
But there's also something kind of worse about it, like on a deeper level, like regardless of aesthetics, where, you know, remember the congressman from South Carolina who ended up on the Appalachian Trail with his mistress, like he went on some He just lost his mind.
I'm forgetting his name at the moment.
He's a kind of libertarian guy who was anti-Trump.
That's beside the point.
But he was this South Carolinian politician, Mark Sanford.
And he kind of like lost himself in a way.
He threw caution to the wind.
And next thing you know, he's on some weekend getaway with his mistress and so on.
You can look back on...
Another politician from Colorado who had kind of a similar situation where he was in an unhappy marriage and he genuinely fell in love with this woman and they were on a boat and then the Washington Post got a hold of it.
There was a movie made about it with Wolverine.
Hugh Jackman.
Hugh Jackman was in a movie about it, yeah.
Gosh, COVID has, I think, affected my memory.
I'm always at a loss for names.
Anyway, there's something kind of tragic and romantic about these figures.
And I'm not endorsing what they did, but it's also very human and understandable.
You know, you're stressed.
Maybe you're very unhappy, maybe, et cetera.
And you kind of...
Throw caution to the wind and go off with this woman and, oh, it's not going to work out, but, you know, there's something kind of tragic and human and understandable about having a failing like that.
Whereas when you look at polyamorous people, there's something kind of horribly rational about it that just, and hyper moral in a way, that just makes it kind of disgusting.
I remember seeing some video of Destiny, who's this very famous streamer and debater and all this kind of stuff.
And he was talking about like, oh yeah, so my wife sleeps around, but I know that we have a great partnership together, so she's always going to come home to me.
There was just something so moral and rational about his conception of this that it's almost, at least from my mind, it would almost be better if...
His wife had an affair, and then he forgave her.
That would almost be kind of human, you could say.
You know, like, tragic, but understandable, sympathetic, etc.
But this notion of like, no, what we're doing is actually moral and rational and demonstrates our, you know, mutual compassion or whatever.
There's almost something just kind of disgusting about it.
And there's something almost like not romantic about it.
I kind of feel, I don't like Mark Sanford.
He's a libertarian, South Carolina, whatever.
I don't like him.
But like, there's something kind of romantic about, he just threw caution to the wind.
And next thing you know, he's on the Appalachian Trail with his mistress.
It's a good story.
He's a human being.
But there's something just un-erotic, un-romantic, un-sympathetic.
About these people who are like, oh, yeah, well, you know, you're an individual.
I'm an individual.
We have sex with whoever we want to.
It's just, anyway, guess what I'm getting it to with Satanism thing?
Like, it's, don't you think on some level it's a kind of, like, hypocrisy that pays a compliment to virtue in the sense that...
It's so overtly satanic that it's almost deeply Christian in the sense that this notion of being, of Satan, doesn't exist outside of a dominant Christian worldview.
So in a way, it's reinforcing a dominant Christianity in society.
It's, you know, Satan exists to some degree in the Old Testament, although...
I don't think we should overestimate that.
I mean, he appears in Job.
He's called the adversary, the usual translation, or something like that.
He's not necessarily Satan.
He might be someone else.
He's someone working with Yahweh.
Does Satan appear in the Garden of Eden, in Genesis?
You know, you could read it that way, but it's certainly not written that way.
I mean, who exactly the snake is might be something different.
It's not necessarily a...
The kind of, you know, red-clad, cloven hooves character that we imagine, you know, post-Hollywood.
But nevertheless, like, Satan himself, it's not like he can't exist outside of Christianity.
And so indulging in this satanic play at the Grammys is weirdly reinforcing its opposite.
You know, I mean, like, it strikes me as odd that Christians imagine...
That, like, Satanism is an actual thing, and not just this, like, hypocrisy that's paying a compliment to them, so to speak.
Like, it's not, it's their opposite.
And it's something that only functions within their domain.
So it's weirdly kind of reinforcing Christianity.
Yeah, I forget who said it, but just to miss it in.
Like, Christianity upside down is still Christianity in a second.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the exact, that's perfect.
That sums it up.
Yeah.
You're doing Christianity upside down, but in that way, you're reinforcing Christianity.
So it really is an excellent example, an outrageous, vivid example of the Caducean in action.
It's a synthetic opposition.
In that way, there's no possible way for Satanism to overturn Christianity.
All it's going to do is reinforce and strengthen Christianity.
And Christianity, in turn, needs a certain Satanism to justify itself.
Yeah, we associate that inverted cross with Satanism.
But actually, from the Bible, Peter was crucified upside down, right?
And Peter was, again, he's the one who denied Christ three times, right?
So he could be a symbol, and yet nevertheless was given leadership of the church, right?
So he could be a symbol of Jews who deny Christ, right?
Nevertheless, they're given a kind of cultural and positional advantage over them.
Or he could be a symbol of a crypto Jew, right?
And we know that that phenomenon exists.
Maybe it's more likely the former.
You know, but I mean, it's evidently symbol-rich, so we are, you know, we're right to kind of suspect things like that.
Peter is the rock, too, which is a kind of important symbol of Yahweh, a reoccurring symbol of Yahweh, a reference to his abidingness, right?
Right.
I feel like we're being rude to our...
Yeah, I'm glad you're here.
I wanted to kind of throw that out there because I do feel like there's a total, not surprisingly, like a total misconception of things coming from conservatives.
And they're now so enthused about this.
Like, we've got them.
Like, it's out in the open.
They're safe.
Okay, academic agents.
I have a couple of comments about this.
About this opening spiel there, Richard, which is, I mean, they're just two, like, observations, I guess.
The first one is that it occurred to me that we're living through, like, kind of like the most boring version of, like, Pasolini's Salo or something like that, you know?
Because that's what it sounds like.
I mean, if you ever sat down and watched Salo, you're watching, like, orgies.
It is stripped of all...
Like, it's not sexy.
It is like kind of sterile and odd.
The other thing I thought I'd mention is that I think what you're circling around there is a concept which the left have long been obsessed with, which is dialectics, right?
And this is something I've tried to talk about before, because...
There was a Marxist theorist in the 70s, I'm sure you're familiar with, called Raymond Williams.
He was a literary theorist.
He had this idea of culture being residual, emergent, or dominant, right?
And it seems to me that a lot of the left's worldview is kind of...
It's kind of stuck in a freeze in that cultural moment where a lot of this Marxist thought was written in, like, 1975 or something.
So they have to maintain a fiction, really, that they are not the dominant culture, that they are still the emerging culture, right?
And to me, I've said for a long time that one of the things that kind of drives me up the wall about the right, broadly speaking, Is that they always play into the dialectical trap of the left, which is if you're reacting to them, they are basically controlling the turf in a strange way because the reaction is what they're looking for.
So all of the outrage about Sam Smith, which any of us with any sense at all have just ignored.
It's been kind of marginally on my field, but most of the people I follow just don't talk about this sort of stuff because we know that it actually validates the left's view of themselves as being somehow edgy or countercultural or, you know, like in their minds, they're still kind of reacting against the America of the 1950s, you know, which has been beaten up so many times now.
So I've always thought that the right was always on its strongest footing.
I mean, really, the last time this happened was during what I like to call the alt-right 1.0.
That was essentially you guys, Richard, right?
Where the left was reacting in some way to us rather than vice versa.
If they are reacting to you, your kind...
They're somehow having the conversation on your turf.
If you're reacting to them, it basically validates everything they're trying to do.
So, you know, the outrage cycle is kind of self-perpetuating.
Unfortunately, it's like the writer has an addiction.
They cannot help themselves kind of lean into that dialectical trap over and over and over again.
Yeah, this is great.
I totally agree.
I mean, I have some more to add to this as well.
I think also the right can't justify itself outside of yelling at the left, leave us alone, or you're bad, or something like that.
Like, there's no there there in some way to the right.
All it is is a kind of...
Endless outrage cycle to leftist advances.
Whether it's Sam Smith dressing up like Satan himself or transsexuals on TikTok or whatever, it's just this kind of like endless no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
You know, like, and I think that's a bigger issue with culture where, you know, there's like a negative Empty center to liberal culture.
And I actually think it is a kind of donut or bagel, so to speak, where there's this empty hole at the center of liberalism.
And I actually think maybe Hitler is in that hole or something.
Because the way you justify what you're doing is that you're not Hitler, effectively.
So it's like a negative Hitler at the center of the donut.
And so anything is possible outside of being Hitler.
I mean, that is, I mean, I have a concept that, you know, I don't know if any of your listeners will know about this, but a good three years ago now, I had a YouTube video series called The Boom of Truth Regime.
You know, like, you know, the idea of an episteme, you live in a kind of epistemic bubble.
I guess, you know, Foucault's truth regime is kind of what I had in mind, whereby the ultimate good is something like unlimited individual self-expression and the ultimate bad is the mid-century Germans, you know, and all things revolve around, like, it's almost everything in the culture has a reference back to...
The kind of founding mythologies, I guess, where there is an ultimate evil at the, you know, at the base of what launched this, what I call a truth regime, which is obviously a terrible event that happened in the mid-century, perpetuated by, you know, the ultimate evil.
Right.
So therefore, all enemies of the regime become a cipher of...
Of Hitler, effectively, whereby, I mean, do you remember the whole attempt in the 2000s to remember Islamofascism?
Do you remember that?
Yes, yes.
Or whether it's, you know, the Ayatollah Khomeini or Milosevic or Saddam Hussein.
I mean, they're all basically standing.
Even Stalin, for a period, was a stand-in Hitler.
People think of the Cold War.
As a war against kind of, quote-unquote, far-left communism.
But really, if you kind of get under what was happening there, kind of like, I mean, this is going to sound very odd, but in a strange way, Stalin had become a kind of reactionary figure by the time he died.
And in a strange way, it was the, I mean, if you look in the longue durée...
I kind of feel like the USA was the progressive force in the Cold War, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I totally agree with that.
I mean, there is this irony of the East being cordoned off from liberalism.
I mean, this gets to a motto I've repeated over and over from Jonathan Bowden of, you know, communism attacks the body, liberalism rots the soul.
You know, communism, you can...
They can starve you.
They can enslave you.
They can beat you up in the middle of the night.
But there's something almost more toxic about the liberal meme that's out there.
I think there's a lot of, definitely a lot of truth to that.
And I do think you have to get, I mean, I think what you're getting at is that, like, moral foundation of what we're doing.
Like, how do we justify fighting the Cold War?
And, you know, putting the world on the brink of nuclear Armageddon and engaging in espionage, killing people, engaging in all sorts of black ops.
What morality undergirds that?
Because you need that.
You can't just openly express, we're doing this for power, you know, to dominate or whatever.
You can't do that.
I don't think that's satisfying for us as humans in general, but I think you definitely can't do that.
In a liberal age.
So it's like, what is that morality that's undergirding it?
I've mentioned this anecdote before, but I remember when I was living in New York City some, you know, 12 or 15 years ago, I was actually at this CrossFit gym and there was a cool guy who was middle-aged and, you know, we had become, you know, acquaintances and so on at this gym.
And he brought his son one time and his son was this kind of young.
Angry young man type and, you know, still finding his way in the world.
And he would always wear like a red T-shirt with a hammer and sickle on it.
It's kind of like the ultimate outrage, I guess, you know, rebellion.
And, you know, these kinds of things are typical and amusing.
But, you know, there is something odd about it where it's like...
Everyone there didn't pay him any mind.
It's like you're wearing a Soviet Union t-shirt.
There's something almost nostalgic or amusing about it.
You know, it's, oh, look, you must be into punk rock or you're edgy or whatever.
If he walked in wearing a red t-shirt with the swastika, like, I mean, granted, anywhere in the Western world, but certainly New York City, people would be screaming, like calling the police.
He'd probably be punched, right, Richard?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
I know that all too well.
So there's something like, well, it also, it's a negative, like, Nazism is the empty center of liberal morality.
It's like, it's very powerful, but then, hold on, it's negative, but then it's also powerful.
Like, if you touch it, You have, in a way, more outsized power.
No one cares.
There's no debate going on about the communist menace.
I guess there's a little bit of a debate about Antifa, but it's not treated as anything of significance.
But there is a debate about rising fascism.
It's still relevant.
It's still potent.
It's a kind of...
It's this potential energy force out there.
Now, none of this is to suggest that we all walk around with Hitler mustaches and Nazi t-shirts.
I'm not suggesting that.
I think that's stupid.
But there's a way that you can kind of get power in the system by in some ways going there, by in some ways touching on that dark energy, by By going to that place that you dare not go, it's still a source of power.
And it's maybe kind of like the only source of power in a way.
Yes, but I would also say a road fraught with danger because one of the things, I wrote a book called The Populist Delusion last year that I'm grateful that a lot of people bought.
Hold on, you wrote that book?
I wrote the book Populist Illusion, yes.
Oh my god, this is a revelation.
Yes.
I mean, this is one of those strange things where I have, you know, my name on that book.
I'm Roland Rett on Twitter and I'm Academic Agent on YouTube.
And there are lots of people who follow me, watch me on YouTube, follow me on Twitter and own the book and don't know I'm the same person in all three places.
That's me, yeah.
When I was researching Carl Schmitt, there's a chapter in Carl Schmitt in there.
One of the things that really struck me was the extent to which the American Washington establishment and the liberal establishment had kind of imbibed and inverted Schmitt in the 90s and the 2000s, which is something that I really wasn't...
He was very much, obviously for a period, a taboo and a figure you couldn't touch.
But then he was really...
We're rehabilitated within the academy and within Harvard elite circles and things like that.
And by the time you get to the 2000s and now, I would say, there really is an extent to which we're living in a kind of upside down.
I mean, I know it's kind of cliche to call your enemies fascists or whatever, but we are living in like a kind of Schmittian inversion, if that makes any sense, where...
They, you know, whatever is fascist is the total enemy, right?
And because of that, you draw the eye of Sauron.
So there's a power in that, right?
But at the same time, the totalitarian state, if you want to put it that way, it kind of looks for all of those things I talk about in the populist.
It looks for organization.
It looks for...
It knows that that is the threat to it, i.e.
people openly discussing its antithesis and organizing around it.
They're kind of drawn to that as moths to a flame, as I'm sure you're aware through your own experiences.
Oh, yeah.
It is very much a road fraught with danger.
And at the moment, I kind of...
We have to play this kind of strange game where we want to deal with fire, right?
We want to deal with those very dangerous ideas, but somehow do so in a way that does not, you know, repeat some of the mistakes of the past.
And a lot of my frustrations these days, I'm afraid, is just watching the same mistakes repeated over and over again, whether it's the normie conservative right or the radical right.
Who, as far as I can see, just don't learn and keep on just leaning into the same stuff over and over again.
You're speaking with my voice here, yes.
I mean, this is why I still listen to you, Richard.
Lots of people said, why are you still listening to Richard Spencer?
And you see, the thing is, I'll just explain.
I mean, there's two reasons, really.
The first is that, whether this is true or not, I feel dispositionally, When I was a kid in the 80s, I watched He-Man kind of rooted for Skeletor.
And I feel that you may have done that as well.
So that's one reason.
The second thing is that on a lot of the big issues, I'm not talking about the little, like we would probably argue about, I don't know, were the 2020 election results legit?
But these sorts of issues don't, at the end of the day, don't matter.
The big picture issues, I think we basically agree on a lot of them, including basic hatred of social conservatives, on things like whether empire or nationhood is the default state of the world, and some of the Nietzschean stuff.
I feel like we do, in many ways, speak the same language.
Yeah.
Anyway, here I am.
Yeah, that's great.
Wow.
I'm overjoyed that we're together.
Yeah, that's really good to hear.
It's incredible I didn't put two and two together because I read The Populist Delusion.
I really enjoyed it.
And then I'm meeting the author.
Wow.
That's great stuff.
I'm glad.
I'm definitely glad you're here.
There's another level.
To the analysis of, like, the liberals are reverse Schmittians.
Let me say two things.
First off, addressing what you just said.
One of the reasons why I've taken certain turns, and it's not the only reason, but it is one, is that I do feel like the reactionary right or the populist right, they're going...
They don't have a capacity to learn, and they're going to keep doing the same thing.
And they might even have a secret kind of martyrdom complex where they want to lose, in effect.
And losing justifies them.
And that's something that I definitely want to avoid.
But I also, you know, like, we can only fight so many battles.
If you go and fight all of these kind of conservative battles, they're going to bulldoze you on some level.
And, you know, like the J6 people, there's a lot of delusion there.
There's a lot of silliness.
There's probably some, there's definitely some authenticity there as well.
There's some like real...
General outrage at what is happening at the world and a feeling of powerlessness and things are out of control.
Things are just getting worse.
We've got to do something right now.
I think there's something admirable about that feeling.
And they took that feeling and they stood in front of a bulldozer that ran them over.
And you can't do that.
It's not...
Cowardice to say that we might need to fight other battles or we might need to fight things in other ways.
And in that sense, you have to kind of make a certain Hobbesian bargain.
Like, I'm not going to fuck with the regime overtly in broad daylight on Inauguration Day.
Like, I'm not going to do that.
That's your domain.
I can't win that battle.
I'm not going to go and say I'm going to...
You know, I'm going to put on a uniform and go play the New York Yankees at baseball.
You know, I couldn't possibly compete in that arena.
And so instead, we're going to kind of compete in other arenas and we need to kind of, what do you want to call it, masking or just, you know, kind of choosing, picking our battles and giving them what's theirs.
And I think there's a certain virtue to that.
So that's why a lot of the reactionary right, it's like, oh, Spencer, he's now a liberal or he's Rachel Maddow or whatever.
I'm not, but I'm going to kind of like grant Rachel Maddow what's first.
You know what I mean?
Like, I'm not going to challenge, I'm not going to push in that place because I can't win.
I just...
And so we're going to try to push in other domains where they aren't playing as hard.
They're going to allow us to do very radical things on a cultural level.
We can initiate people and gain influence and develop ideas on a cultural level to which they're not going to push back on.
But if we start...
You know, if we start trying to actualize ourselves on inauguration day of Joe Biden, they're just going to kick our ass.
And I don't want to be a martyr.
I just, you know, I think there's better things.
I also think, Richard, that, I mean, I've said many times that, ironically, like...
Arguably the MAGA movement or what the MAGA movement has become.
Arguably like the most pro-black, pro-gay, pro-democracy movement in the history of the world.
I feel like, I mean, when you're talking about the boomer truth regime, I feel like in a way like the left have already deconstructed that in their own way.
And they already don't believe in democracy.
They understand power.
You know, they did all that stuff in the 70s and the 80s, right?
And, you know, the so-called new right, Alain de Benoit and so on, were kind of playing catch-up in the 80s, right?
Yeah.
So the left have kind of instinctively understood all this stuff already.
And now they're in power.
They're just going to be ruthless, right?
So we are like, I mean...
One of my first encounters with your stuff was your podcast series with Jonathan Bowden.
He has a fantastic lecture on vanguardism.
Ever since I heard that lecture, I knew that vanguardism is the way.
You also have to understand where we are in the scheme of things.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the 19th century or something.
We're a long way away.
Post 1905, actually.
We're kind of hanging out in Switzerland or something.
Yeah, something like that.
We failed and then we're kind of brewing right now.
You have to be authentic to where you are in the time.
You can't just...
Go keep trying the 1905 over and over again.
You know, they're on to you.
So, yeah, there's another element to this, because I've always found a certain elective affinities, so to speak, between Carl Schmitt and Karl Popper.
And in the sense that, you know, ostensibly, you couldn't find two thinkers who are...
more disaligned or opposed to one another.
This is Karl Popper of the Open Society and so on.
And it's Carl Schmitt who played along with the National Socialist regime and is a conservative Catholic and so on.
But they actually come to kind of similar conclusions about the contradictions within power.
So before, You know, Hitler took charge.
Carl Schmitt was in favor of expelling non-democratic parties from the Weimar parliament.
And he was like, what they're doing, they're taking advantage of you.
You have unilaterally disarmed vis-a-vis.
The National Socialists and the Communists.
They are only in Parliament in order to overturn Parliament.
So they're going to use Parliament as a weapon against the state.
And you can't allow people to do that.
It's a basic notion of like, are you acting in good faith, you know, or are you not?
If you have a hotel and someone goes into your hotel with the sole purpose of squatting.
In your hotel and never leaving for six months.
You just can't let him in.
He's not acting in good faith.
He's not playing by your rules.
You're playing by his rules.
And so the paradox of tolerance of Karl Popper, of course, is that you can't tolerate the intolerant.
You kind of have to expel them.
They're not playing the game.
And this is a very similar conception of Carl Schmitt, which is that a liberal order You know, like the post, the bread and woods, like the era of globalization, which has been going on since 1944, it's all based on bombing the hell out of Europe and defeating enemies.
The deaths of millions of people.
It's all like a...
It's a liberalism.
It's like a castle built on a pile of bones, in a way.
And America itself is built on, you know, dispossessing and engaging in what can only be thought of as genocide of the American Indians and enslaving people.
I mean, it's...
So there is this kind of contradiction to liberalism where it kind of, like...
From both Popper and Schmitt's standpoint, you have to embrace the negativity in order to assert something positive.
You have to engage in radical intolerance in order to have a functioning, tolerant regime.
Yes.
I agree with everything you said there.
I mean, the election I always think of in this country was the 2010 UK general election, where the choice given by the system was it was Gordon Brown, David Cameron, who was basically Tony Blair again, and Nick Clegg.
Do you remember that?
And there was a famous moment in that debate where...
Nick Clegg kind of made a spiel, and Gordon Brown's response was, I agree with Nick.
And basically, the elites of the regime made a few critical errors in this country, in fact, in all countries, which was basically allowing actual democracy to break out.
I mean, it happened in the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn managed to, I mean...
There's a guy called Ed Miliband who allowed Labour voters to vote for their own leader.
And they ended up with Jeremy Corbyn.
And then, of course, Brexit, David Cameron called the Brexit referendum.
And, of course, you know what happened there.
And they ended up with figures like Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss, of course.
So the regime has taken pretty much, what is it now, 2015?
To now is what, five, eight, it's taken eight years to get back to 2010, when now the choice is Keir Starmer, who is literally taking lessons from Tony Blair.
I mean, paid lessons on how to be, you know, a globalist elite by Blair and Rishi Sunak.
Who is, I mean, almost openly and nakedly was installed.
And has been compared yet again to Tony Blair, who gave an interview with Jeremy Hunt just months before Hunt was brought in as the Chancellor.
So, I mean, to your point, what I'm saying is, in a liberal democratic regime, it is delusional to imagine...
That they're ever going to allow any candidate who is not a Liberal Democrat, right?
Right.
Doesn't embody the values of the entire system.
And I think we saw with Trump, basically the system cannot really handle, you know, Trump was in office, but he wasn't in power.
And he wasn't in power because the kind of arms, the machinery of the regime wouldn't work for him.
Right?
When he gave an order, like when Tony Blair was in office or when Bill Clinton was in office, they were almost Schmittian dictators, right?
They could do whatever they wanted.
They embodied almost like, I mean, they hesitate to call them great men, but they did wield genuine executive power.
Even Barack Obama, to an extent, you know, could rule by decree.
When Trump did that, none of the None of the parts of the state would actually comply with him because they knew that these were not legitimate orders because they weren't coming from, you know, someone who didn't agree with them.
Oh, look, at the end of Trump's administration, he had a national security advisor, one of these guys who's actually a kind of pro-Russia or Russia-sympathetic pundit.
Did a national security advisor actually send out a memo that was going to end America's overseas footprint and military bases?
It was like Ron Paul fully actualized.
And it was just ignored.
It was like me...
You know, me going to McDonald's and demanding that they serve me caviar or something.
They're just going to look at me with a blank stare, basically.
And you're absolutely correct.
Just to be serious for a moment, though, I do think that populism is well and truly, as they say, over.
But if the sight of millions upon millions of Brazilians on the streets, Of Rio and so on, while Bolsonaro literally sits in Florida with a KFC, you know, basically refusing to grasp the mantle and become a great man of history.
I mean, to me, that's the most boomer image of all time is Bolsonaro eating a KFC as his supporters risk their lives for him, you know, as he mumbles something about the Constitution.
You know, I've just written a sequel to the populist delusion called The Prophets of Doom, which is all about cyclical history and about kind of denying the kind of progressive view of history.
I mean, it starts with a speech by Tony Blair, who sees history as this inexorable march forward, right?
You know, it's basically doing the same thing as populist delusion, but for, you know, Spengler and people like Toynbee and Vico and people like that.
In fact, Mark may be interested.
He probably knows this already, but I actually, one of the things that the research for that book threw up was that the linear conception of history is inextricably bound up with Christianity.
And in fact, the progressive view of history actually comes out of a kind of Radical Protestants who overturned Augustine's much more pessimistic view of history, but that was still linear, right?
Because Christianity posits a definitive beginning, a definitive end.
And, you know, most traditions have had this kind of cyclical conception, but it's Christianity that insists on the linear one.
Anyway, one of the, just to get back to the point, one of the...
I do actually have a contrary reading to that, but I'll let you finish your point.
I was about to mention that Mark's conception of this is fairly complex.
I would love to hear his views on that, but just to finish the thought a moment, one of the things in that, you know, Spengler has this conception of the spring.
The summer, the autumn, and we're living through the winter.
And it's become one of the things that he insists really is this kind of, it's very difficult for the children of the winter to embody the spirit of another time, right?
As the children of winter, it's very difficult to be the summer or be the spring, right?
And in a strange way, It's almost impossible for someone like Bolsonaro or Trump to become the Caesar in this moment, if that makes any sense.
I mean, the Caesars are also children of winter, but they have to come almost from a kind of...
I hate to say this, but I feel like the age of the Caesars may...
It may have come, been and gone.
Maybe Franco was the last one or something.
But that's something that we have to consider, really.
Is it possible now, in this day and age, for people like a Franco or a Hitler or Mussolini to emerge?
Because obviously all of those guys were war veterans.
They lived through grim hardship.
They were masters of organisation.
You know, I spend my day shitposting on Twitter and taking pictures of my coffee.
I grew up watching bloody The A-Team and WWF Wrestling.
You understand the point though, right?
How are any of us who are children of this age meant to get back to those kind of martial values?
Because it's difficult.
And I think that you, Richard, may have come up against some of the limits of that in what happened in 2016-2017.
It's like, well, you were trying to channel those things, but you came up against the limits of what does that look like now, right?
Right.
What it looks like now are, you know...
Rallies with flags and in a way, kind of like idiots getting in fights with Antifa.
And that's a parody almost of the 1920s or something.
It is kind of out of time.
I mean, I remember having at our last...
We had a small conference this past weekend or the weekend before last.
Someone was there was talking to me.
She lives in Portland.
She was just talking to me about this Antifa versus Proud Boy battles that are going on.
And they are a kind of like Seinfeld version of the 1920s.
It's like a street battle over nothing, you know, effectively.
And just this, you know, Antifa punching Proud Boys, Proud Boys kicking the ass of Antifa.
There's nothing to this.
You're not actually winning anything.
And it becomes almost kind of masturbatorial on some level, although very damaging on some way.
The question that I would ask is, you know, because you mentioned like emerging cultures and then residual cultures.
Is the other word you use, hegemonic cultures?
Is that the three?
Dominant, yeah.
So it's roughly synonymous with hegemony.
So Trump in 2016, it was a kind of emerging force, right?
But what was it in your mind?
What was it actually?
Because we can project our own fantasies onto it, but what was it?
Well, I mean, I've got a head full of cyclical history at the moment, so I've kind of got the most negative view of it possible now, which is that, in a strange way, the kind of current regime order,
if you want, is a, you know, if you use the, you know, Spangler talks about the four states, the first state, and a lot of people like Evelyn and so on, they talk about The warrior caste, the priests, the merchants, and the peasants, right?
And, I mean, it's very compatible with elite theory because it's literally just a question of which faction is on top, right?
So when the warrior caste are in charge, broadly speaking, you've got something that looks like kind of authentic feudalism, something like that.
When the priests are in charge, You know, you get something like a theocratic state or something like that.
When the merchants are in charge, of course, you get something that looks like the 19th century, right?
Obviously now we live in a kind of managerial order, but that managerial order is dominated by a coalition of merchants and intellectuals who are, broadly speaking, the...
The fox glasses, right?
Between the lions and the foxes.
They're both fox types, masters of persuasion.
And Trump really probably does represent the true quote-unquote democratic will, right?
Which is coming from below.
So in a strange, you know, they talk about like the Kali Yuga and so on.
In a strange way, I've come to the view that actually when the populists do well and truly take over and the regime crumbles, it will actually represent a devolution to an even worse time where we're ruled by a kind of plebeian...
Like a kind of, you know, you know, the...
There's a strange thing in the populist right that does bristle at distinction and quality, if that makes any sense.
They really are the masked man in the truest sense.
I've come to have probably the dimmest possible view of what happened.
When something like that eventually wins.
Well, yeah, I totally agree.
And I'm glad you're saying this because they're, you know, remember, you know, Peter Thiel in 2016, at least explicitly or kind of ostensibly was saying this.
He was like, you know, we were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters or whatever.
And Trump...
Represents, like, an ability for the system to work.
You know, and there was a kind of, you know, businessman-interest-politics notion of Trump, where he's gonna splash through the red tape and build, you know, infrastructure and public transportation.
We're gonna have a sound foreign policy that's pro-America and, you know, so on.
And you can see this in, like, Trump's interviews.
In the 80s and 90s with Larry King, where he is putting forth a kind of reasonable nationalism about, you know, why are we losing to Japan?
Why are we paying for the security of NATO countries?
Why are we doing this?
Why are we doing that?
We need to think about ourselves first.
There's a kind of Buchanan or Ross Perot, I think, is maybe the even more salient figure type of nationalism.
But I think kind of...
That's almost a projection on our part.
I respect such a worldview.
That seems good to a large degree, even if a bit impossible and fantastical, but it's a good idea.
But maybe lying behind Trump's rise is a kind of...
Plebeian resentment and something that would be genuinely worse for us.
Let's remember, we're having a civilized conversation over Zoom right now involving people in multiple countries and time zones and so on.
We're benefiting from globalization.
There's undoubtedly something good about the fact that we're connected via the internet, that we can Travel to other countries in a reasonable fashion with a passport, that we can purchase something constructed in other countries.
We're benefiting from that.
There's something good about it.
But there's a kind of understandable, I guess, but maybe really...
Grotesque kind of plebeian revolt against that that's brewing and that's real.
Real quick, this anecdote, I've told it about three or four times in this call, so I'm sure many people who are long-time listeners are sick of it.
But I went to the Kalispell about nine months ago or so during Good Friday, and they were having this Trump rally in Kalispell, and they do it every single Friday.
And they rev their engines, the wheels start, you know, they're doing donuts in the road.
And I remember this, as I was leaving this restaurant where I was, this guy drove up to me and got out of the car.
And I think he reacted to me because I was dressed in a fairly fashionable way.
I'm almost positive that's what it was, because I was wearing like a black leather jacket.
Jeans or whatever.
I think he saw me as a liberal.
I don't think he at all recognized me as Richard Spencer, Mr. Hale Trump in Charlottesville or whatever.
And he got out of his car and he said, fuck Joe Biden, fuck the liberals.
And then he got back in his car and drove off.
It was kind of hilarious.
Like, you know, it's like, I've, you know, we've come full circle.
I'm being attacked by Trumpism.
But what I mean is that there was no...
You know, there's absolutely no political agenda to these Trump rallies that are weekly.
There is no politics.
It was class, and it was pure resentment and hatred.
Yeah, I mean, there's a pretty good example of this.
I did a stream...
I did a stream yesterday with Mike from Imperium Press and Alexander Adams, who's an art critic.
He writes for The Telegraph and things like that, so he's fairly well known.
It was called Is Modern Art Left Wing?
The whole idea of it was every once in a while, Paul Joseph Watson will do a rant in front of that world map where he has a go at modern art as being degenerate and attacking beauty and so on.
And so we just did a kind of history of what was modernism, like a kind of left-wing phenomena.
We talked about people like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound.
We talked about the visual arts and Italian featurism and vorticism.
We talked about Bowden for a bit.
But the chat and the comments were just like, no.
You guys are trying to, like, trick us in some way.
Like, this is subversion.
This is, like, you know, anything that's ugly, anything that has any ugliness in it.
I mean, this is like a kind of child's eye.
It's like a view of art that comes from something like Dead Poets Society or something.
Do you know what I mean?
And this is the sort of plebeian attitude that I see everywhere.
Yes, I kind of agree with you, Richard.
It could be worse, right?
Maybe under the populist regime, I won't be able to take pictures of my flat whites every day.
I do think that populism, as defined in the way that we're defining it now, I kind of do think that it will ultimately triumph.
But I don't think that that will be good.
And I do think that that will kind of cap off the American era.
That will be the cherry on the Sunday.
We've had this American era of globalism.
And look, whatever we want to say about America, I mean, I'm sure most people on here are critics of Americanism, like no doubt.
Wild success on some level.
You know, like regular people can have a four-bedroom home and three children and, you know, a good job and two cars.
And, you know, there's been a kind of wild success story that can be told about America.
And it's certainly since post-1944.
And particularly as we get later in the 20th century, it's been an era of globalization.
And I do feel like populism of some kind, and I do think it probably will be right-wing populism, will kind of cap it off.
You know, maybe a hundred years, maybe it's going to be 2044 or something.
It's going to cap it off with, like, that guy.
Who screamed at me at Kalispell will be like sitting on a throne of liberal skulls and forcing, you know, forcing people to use proper pronouns at gunpoint or something.
And like, you know, it's going to be just this almost grotesque, you know, right-wing phenomenon.
But I think it kind of is inevitable in some way.
The liberals are going to win over and over.
They're going to keep winning battles over and over for some time.
But I do think the backlash will ultimately win.
But I've gotten to a point where I don't think that's a good thing.
And I really was genuinely enthused by Trumpism.
If I go back to myself four or five years ago, the past is another country.
Your previous self is another person on some level.
But I was genuinely enthused and optimistic for the future.
I thought things are going to work.
And we would probably get past a lot of the kind of negativity trolling of the alt-right gas chamber memes and calling people out.
We're going to kind of move past that.
There is going to be something really positive about this.
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