For the far right, ideas matter. I would add that what might seem to progressives as really foolish ideas have consequences. They have an impact for three key reasons. One is the ideas themselves. Second, they are preserved and transmitted by networks and institutions. Third, a conjunction of circumstances produces the social atmosphere that makes people receptive to once marginal thinkers with obscure ideas.

Steve Bannon, the incendiary Trump adviser, may be the best-known activist of the international far right. Still, he has derived inspiration from otherwise little-known figures on the fringes of history, underlining the wisdom in Keynes’ well-known observation:

Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

Three influential far-right thinkers

I would like to take as examples three scribblers, one from the past, the German conservative nationalist Oswald Spengler. One who’s now in his eighties but played a very influential role in the rise of the far right two decades back is the French thinker Renaud Camus. And one very contemporary and controversial Romanian-American, Costin Vlad Alamariu, whose pen name is “Bronze Age Pervert.”

Oswald Spengler was an intellectual outside the academy who captured the imagination of a pessimistic post-World War I generation with his warning that the “heroic” culture of the West was in danger of being overwhelmed from within by lack of confidence and loss of a sense of identity and from without by the “downtrodden races of the outer ring.” These races had begun to move from the periphery to the center, armed with the technologies shared with them by the West owing to what Spengler characterized as misguided liberal values.

People of Europe had a shared, collective identity based on one central idee fixe — the “striving for the infinite,” manifested in art, adventure, and conquest. This “Faustian” collective identity, Spengler said, was threatened by the moral sensitivity and self-doubt that liberalism had engendered and by global immigration.

The “decline of the West” (also the title of his key work) was inevitable. Still, he argued it could be postponed if the peoples of Europe would recognize and embrace their common collective cultural and racial identity and decisively reject the corrosive influence of liberalism, with its leveling doctrines of democracy and equality.

A French intellectual influenced by Spengler was Renaud Camus, who is known as the person who conceived the “Great Replacement Theory,” which argues that Europe’s White majority was being replaced with Muslim people of color in collusion with a left-wing, globalist elite. According to the Washington Post, his conversion from being a figure of the bohemian, gay left to a far-right conspiracy theorist began with witnessing something he characterized as “terrifying” veiled Muslim women in a French village.

Camus, who also calls his theory “genocide by substitution,” has been embraced by white nationalists from Paris to New Zealand, including the perpetrator of an attack on a grocery store in a Black neighborhood in 2022 that left 10 people dead. Among those who have spoken favorably of his work is Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, who, like Bannon, is an influential figure on the American right.

Let’s move to the present. The leading lights of the far right are almost all men, and these people are almost uniformly of the belief that women have gained too much influence and need to be put in their place. One of their key theorists is Alamariu, who styles himself the “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP).

Laura Field, who has followed Alamariu’s writings, says that for him, the Bronze Age was a golden age of human history because it represented the hard suppression of what supposedly came before, which was the womanly, proto-socialist age of the communal “longhouse. Bronze Age man, in BAP’s telling, revolted against the feminine tyranny of the Iron Age, exerted his power, and invented political order and rule, and this was exceptional and great. Sadly, in the West today, mankind has succumbed once more to something like the older natural state of ‘gynocracy.’ So, it is time for the manly men to rise and take action.

Bronze Age Pervert, who has a PhD from Yale, is a serious nutcase. But people like him have to be taken seriously since they are influential in spreading nutty theories. One up-and-coming New Right figure claimed that every junior staffer in the Trump administration has read Bronze Age Mindset.

Transmission networks

Let me now move on to the networks that transmit the ideas of these thinkers, and for this, I would like to draw on the work of Field, who wrote Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.

MAGA’s ideological apparatus consists of networks, organizations, and movements such as the Post-Liberals, National Conservatives, Catholic Integralists, Christian Nationalists, and “Claremonters” or intellectual satellites orbiting the ultra-conservative Claremont College in Southern California. These groups and individuals are not in the public eye, but they probably prefer it that way since they have power and influence, which is more important than publicity.

They are very well educated, with PhDs and other postgraduate degrees, and quite a few are tenured professors at leading universities, like Adrian Vermeule, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. Other key figures on the intellectual far right are Michael Anton, Patrick Deneen, Costin Alamariu, and Christopher Rufo, all of whom are profiled in detail in Field’s book.

These networks and individuals are well funded, being in close contact with folks like Peter Thiel, the multibillionaire founder of PayPal, who shares their ideological radicalism.

What unites these networks and individuals is two things. The first is a hatred for liberalism, the rights-based political tradition inspired by John Locke. To them, liberalism disembedded the individual from the community. Liberalism enshrined pluralism, which promoted the coexistence of communities with different beliefs and discouraged the search for the “One Truth,” relativizing truth instead.

Liberalism also promoted equality when, in fact, people and communities are unequal, and they cite Lincoln, of all people, to advance this. Liberalism for the Catholic Integralists destroyed what should have been the unity of Church and State. Liberalism for the Christian Nationalists replaced the original Christian inspiration of the Republic with one based on the Enlightenment, and here some of the “founding fathers” like Jefferson, a champion of reason and Lockean democracy, must bear part of the blame.

The other thing that unites them is Donald Trump, whom some of them see as the anti-democratic Caesar that would set the United States on the right path: towards “virtue” and towards the original American project that united religion and the state. Some of them are classicists and champion Plato’s rule by an enlightened elite, with some seeing Sparta, with its authoritarian ways, as superior to democratic Athens.

So, how does this square with their enthusiasm for Trump? They may hold their noses when considering some aspects of Trump, like his vulgarity, narcissism, and behavior toward women. Still, they see him as a necessary instrument for bringing about their goals and a personality that, beneath his superficial coarseness, is philosophically one with them.

Some of them are disciples of Carl Schmitt, the German Nazi philosopher, who saw politics as a battle to the death between enemies, with no quarter given, which is why most of them endorsed—in contrast to traditional conservatives like Dick Cheney—the “Stolen Election” myth and became supporters of the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

These intellectual cadres of the right have been, in Field’s view, imbued with a “Long March” vision, aiming to capture one institution after another, beginning with the Republican Party, then moving to the Supreme Court, Congress, and the different agencies that are key to furthering their ideological and political agenda. And, of course, the ultimate prize: the presidency. They have been extraordinarily successful in this mission.

Although some see “no enemies to the right,” others prefer to keep some distance from the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, and white nationalists like Richard Spencer or Nick Fuentes, not for ideological reasons but because some of them fear the image of the latter might derail their message and tactics. Their preferred approach was on display in their assault on critical race theory, which mobilized white parents to demand the revision of curricula on American history in local schools by shrouding racism with calls for “patriotic education.”

This approach was also successful in dealing with the “threat” of the LGBTQI+ movement: they successfully stirred up the homophobia in the grassroots by painting alarming images of transgender people using school toilets for prurient purposes and portraying parents who had a liberal view on gender socialization as fostering gender confusion.

If there is a term that captures what these people are all about, it’s what some have called “Right-wing Gramscianism,” after the left-wing thinker Antonio Gramsci, for they believe that between interests and ideas, ideas come first. Capturing the commanding heights of culture, achieving cultural hegemony, thus becomes the key to the transformation of society.

Gross underestimation of the influence and power of nutcases like Bronze Age Pervert and the many borderline nutcases like Anton and Deneen has resulted in the surprise and dismay of liberals at the successive blitzkrieg moves of the second Trump administration in its first year. They just did not anticipate how radical these people are.

Neoliberalism, insecurity, and anxiety

The last thing I’d like to touch on is what makes ideas that were once obscure and marginal suddenly influential at certain times, like today. Here, I would like to draw from the work of Lorenza Antonucci, who recently came out with the book Insecurity Politics: How Unstable Lives Lead to Populist Support. Antonucci confirms that neoliberal economic policies were key in driving working people away from the Social Democratic parties in Europe to the arms of far-right formations.

But she makes a qualification, and it is an important one, and this is that their appeal goes beyond those working people displaced from their jobs by globalization to embrace a much broader segment of the population, many of whom are in the middle class. What is important, according to Antonucci, is not just the job losses triggered by neoliberal policies; it is the generalized insecurity created by neoliberal policies.

Some lost jobs, but many of those who have not have been frustrated with the low quality of the jobs they had or were assailed by a sense of financial insecurity owing to their having to go into debt or simply by the sense that they could not rely on anyone else but themselves if things went badly.

By embracing the neoliberal dictum that it is the individual who must bear the responsibility of surviving in a competitive world, the center left. Center-right parties created a political and ideological vacuum that was opportunistically filled by the far right, who championed the benefits of the welfare state but only for those of the same skin color and same culture, what Antonucci calls “welfare chauvinism.

“Financial insecurity and disillusionment with poor-quality jobs are at the heart of Europe’s populist boom,” writes Antonucci. “Hostility towards migrants resonates because money worries and status anxiety are widespread, and anti-migration feelings are an easy way to channel frustrations that people have about their lives.”

Generalized insecurity translates into generalized anxiety, and it is this social psychological state that provides far-right ideas, even foolish ones, fertile grounds in which to flourish. One suffering from financial insecurity may not agree with many of these ideas, but psychologically entertaining even a few of them is already a step in the “right direction.” Over the last few years, far-right parties have become experts in transforming sympathizers into active supporters and active supporters into fanatical believers. The dynamics of this process, however, are another story.

To conclude, I would take Matthew Rose’s warning seriously:

The alt right is not stupid; it is deep. Its ideas are not ridiculous; they are serious. To appreciate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its presence on social media, where its obnoxious use of insult, obscenity, and racism has earned it a reputation for moral idiocy. The reputation is deserved, but do not be deceived. Behind its online tantrums and personal attacks are arguments of seductive power.

I fully agree. Nothing is more dangerous than a bad idea whose time has come.