After last week’s newsletter made the case for the wickedness of Stalinism and the virtues of early Cold War anti-Communism, I thought I might get dragged into a weekend social media debate about Marxism-Leninism. Not so. Instead, I managed to entangle myself in an argument about a different totalitarianism-related question: whether the destruction of Hitler’s Germany was a true and righteous judgment of Almighty God.
That question came out of two discussions of far-right politics — one occasioned by Graeme Wood’s Atlantic profile of Bronze Age Pervert, the pseudonymous author and online personality who is a leading voice of “vitalist,” or Nietzschean, or, if you prefer, simply fascist thought online; the other by revelations about the writer Richard Hanania, who has admitted to (and apologized for) a youthful career as a pseudonymous scribbler for racist publications.
The style of far-right thought involved in both stories takes Western decadence as a given, while arguing that Christianity is a weak vessel for any kind of cultural revival. Its big idea is that a conservatism that looks to classical and pagan sources, and embraces some kind of racial identitarianism could be more, well, vital in its engagement with the times.
A version of exactly this argument floated around the platform X, formerly known as Twitter, and when someone demanded a rebuttal, I dashed off a pair of posts:
I suppose one response is to note that the last attempt to refound European civilization on the basis of classical-Teutonic heritage and eugenics led to unspeakable atrocities and the total destruction of the European heartland.
The decay and decadence of Western Christianity makes the return of right-wing Nietzscheanism inevitable. But Christians can say with some warrant that God’s judgment on that project is evident already.
These posts are minor entries in the widening debate over what conservative Christians should make of an emergent pagan or post-Christian right — in all its various forms, materialist and mystical, populist and intellectual, from extreme characters like Bronze Age Pervert to more mainstream figures, like Jordan Peterson, who seem to wobble on the edge of Christian faith. I’ve offered my own comments on our possible pagan futures, including in an argument earlier this year about euthanasia with Hanania himself (who I think remains an exemplar of a pagan libertarianism, whatever you make of his claim to have evolved into a neoliberal), but there’s much more that could be said.