“The most incisive criticism of this antiquarian Right has come from the social theorist Samuel T. Francis in his anthology “Beautiful Losers”. Never has a more devastating attack been launched from the independent Right against the failure of American conservatism. According to Francis’s work, “archaic conservatives” have been marginalised by late modernity, and the fault lies at least partly in the refusal of the withered Right to undertake radical adaptation in a post-conservative age. A Right that hopes to survive, according to Francis, must become populist as well as reactionary and seize on divisive issues that it can use to isolate the Left. These censures that emanate from a form of the revolutionary Right recall Nietzsche’s warning in “Thoughts Out of Season” about the antiquarian mindset: “As far as history serves life, we should wish to serve it. But there is a form of history that some feel driven to pursue that causes life to atrophy and deteriorate.
“Nietzsche’s broadsides against a life-atrophying passéisme1 are recycled in Martin Heidegger’s Time and Being “as a false sense of history that no longer has a connection to a life project pointing toward the future. Someone who surrenders to this defective time dimension loses his determination to carry forth his project or to pursue any fate issuing out of the past.” No less than Nietzsche, Heidegger is underscoring the stupefying obsession with a particular past that leads to the cessation of vital energy.”
Paul Gottfried, “Defining Right and Left,” “Revisions and Dissents” (2017)
“I once listened to an Ashanti cab driver in Washington boasting about how his tribe had sold the black slaves who would be used to construct the U.S. capital. Whether it was true or not, I found this boast to be refreshing. The African cab driver did not suffer from the choking sense of guilt I encounter in American WASPs. Enemies of their own putative prejudices, they have come to remind me of the elderly Irish spinster, who would drive the village priest batty by confessing to trivial and often imaginary sins. There is something unseemly and even profoundly pathological about such a perpetually overburdened conscience. The question that occurs to me as I observe such politics of guilt is “What would Nietzsche say?”
Paul Gottfried, “The Politics of Guilt” (2009)2
Overview:
Hierarchy and History
“Gottfried doesn’t resolve the alt-right’s contradictions so much as he embodies them. He’s a sniffy traditionalist, a self-described “Robert Taft Republican,” with a classical liberal bent, and a Nietzschean American nationalist who goes out of his way to exaggerate his European affect. He opposes both the Civil Rights Act and white nationalism. He’s a bone-deep elitist and the oracle of what’s billed as a populist revolt. “If someone were to ask me what distinguishes the right from the left,” Gottfried wrote in 2008, “the difference that comes to mind most readily centres on equality. The left favours that principle, while the right regards it as an unhealthy obsession.
“Inequality is the alt-right’s foundational belief. In this view, there are inherent, irreducible differences not only between individuals but between groups of people—races, genders, religions, nations; all of the above. These groups each have their own distinctive characteristics and competitive advantages; accordingly, inequality is natural and good, while equality is unnatural and therefore bad and can only be imposed by force.”
Jacob Siegel, “The Alt-Right’s Jewish Godfather”, Tablet Magazine, (2016)
In my view, it was a shared Nietzscheanism, in this case contempt for the egalitarian preening of the American conservative movement, that led Paul Gottfried to the most politically controversial association of his life: a brief alliance with the now iconic white nationalist Richard Spencer.
“Like the French New Right, Spencer is a fan of the German thinkers Nietzsche and Schmitt. Like {Alain} de Benoist3, he sees Nietzsche as the prophet of the decline of Western civilization, the supporter of elitist anti-egalitarianism, and the critic of the “weak” and egalitarian Judeo-Christian values which produced the egalitarian “sicknesses” associated with liberalism, socialism, feminism, and multiculturalism.”4
But before Spencer’s brand was “heiling” Trump, getting decked by Antifa and cursing “kikes” or “little fucking octoroons”5, the “young gentleman”6 praised in the pages of Paul’s memoir Encounters could be found in groups like Gottfried’s “H.L. Mencken Club”7,trying to construct a post-paleoconservative challenge to the Bush-era establishment right.
I want this piece to focus on Gottfried’s Nietzschean defence of inequality - a foundational component of his works and worldview. Nietzsche’s modernist, yet still recognisably right-wing attack on the egalitarian impulse remains an unsung influence on the philosophy of the paleoconservative right - traditionally and erroneously seen as nothing more than the Christian nationalism of their perennial candidate Pat Buchanan.
Only once Gottfried’s anti-egalitarianism and quasi-pagan critique of the Christian roots of Multiculturalism and Movement Conservatism are sufficiently covered, can we move on to his dialogue with other German Rightists.
Beyond mere policy differences, the philosophical impulse that separates paleoconservatism and the thought of the old German Right from Straussianism and neoconservatism is an appreciation of hierarchy and history, in contrast to Harry Jaffa’s conception of “equality as a conservative principle” or Strauss’s withering attacks on historicism in the pages of Natural Right and History.
In my eyes, a Nietzschean belief in inequality as a moral good forms half of Gottfried’s approach. It is complemented by Hegel’s quintessentially German historicism, to be covered in the next article in this series. To complete the opening triad, an essay comparing his historical works and method to the output of Reinhart Koselleck will follow. Gottfried shares many traits with the student of Schmitt, both acting as conceptual historians of the right, while exploring the development of liberalism and the course of the long 19th century.
Then, we can proceed to Gottfried’s more explicit reliance on Schmitt, Kondylis, Nolte and Schrenck-Notzing.
In exploring Gottfried’s personal relation to Nietzchean thought, it is my hope that this essay can place paleoconservative philosophy as articulated by Gottfried between the extremes of the Alt-Right and the utterly servile post-christian ethic of the mainstream conservative movement.
Nietzsche is a broad and complex thinker, who has been appropriated for all sorts of political purposes. To narrow the focus, this essay will primarily explore his radically elitist, heterodox right-wing influence on the paleoconservative critique of movement conservatism and, in general, contemporary western states and societies.
More specific to Gottfried’s career as an ideological historian, citations of Nietzsche justify his portrayal of Fascism as a fundamentally right wing movement - a truth most American conservatives are not willing to accept. His alternative history of the modern post-Marxist left, shows it to be a movement more inspired by the Frankfurt School and American values than thinkers in the orbit of the Third Reich like Nietzsche or Heidegger. This exploration of the post-Marxist left also functions as an indirect defence of the European historicist right. Gottfried’s alternative hypothesis lays the blame for modern leftism at the feet of the contemporary United States and, more broadly, American society.
Against Equality and Christ:
“Paleoconservatives was the name Gottfried gave to the small group of anti-neocons who formed the internal opposition after the conservatives’ “fusion” coalition broke apart in the late 1980s. In The Conservative Movement, Gottfried voices the paleos’ heroic self-conception: “[They] raise issues that the neoconservatives and the left would both seek to keep closed … about the desirability of political and social equality, the functionality of human-rights thinking, and the genetic basis of intelligence … like Nietzsche, they go after democratic idols, driven by disdain for what they believe dehumanises.”
Jacob Siegel, “The Alt-Right’s Jewish Godfather”, Tablet Magazine, (2016)
“When Cornwallis's army marched out of Yorktown, the fife and drums played "The World Turned Upside Down." Now our world has been turned upside down. What was right and true yesterday is wrong and false today. What was immoral and shameful—promiscuity, abortion, euthanasia, suicide—has become progressive and praiseworthy. Nietzsche called it the transvaluation of all values; the old virtues become sins, and the old sins become virtues.
Every few years, a storm erupts when some public figure blurts out, "America is a Christian nation!" She was once, and a majority yet call themselves Christians. But our dominant culture should more accurately be called post-Christian, or anti-Christian, for the values it celebrates are the antithesis of what it used to mean to be a Christian.”
Patrick J. Buchanan, “The Death of the West” (2001)
“Nietzsche was one of the few after Hegel who recognised the dialectic of enlightenment. And it was Nietzsche who expressed its antipathy to domination: ‘The Enlightenment’ should be “taken into the people, so that the priests all become priests with a bad conscience - and the same must be done with regard to the State. That is the task of the Enlightenment: to make princes and statesmen unmistakably aware that everything they do is sheer falsehood.” On the other hand, Enlightenment had always been a tool for the ‘great manipulators of government (Confucius in China, the Imperium Romanum, Napoleon, the Papacy when it had turned to power and not only to the world)… The way in which the masses are fooled in this respect, for instance in all democracies, is very useful: the reduction and malleability of men are worked for as ‘progress’!”
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, (1944)
“The Rumanian anthropologist and traditionalist Mircea Eliade has paid tribute to“one of the great eschatological myths of the Asiatic-Mediterranean world,” the redemptive role of the Just (the elected, the anointed, the innocent, the messenger, in our day the proletariat) whose sufferings are invoked to change the ontological status of the world. Eliade recognizes the power of Marxism both as a secularized adaptation of the Christian myth of the end of days and as a social scientific”restatement of the cosmic hope for a victory of the “suffering Just.” He insists that Marxism is not just one of a number of historical hypotheses, but the overshadowing transformational myth of a post-Christian culture, such as ours, that is still affected by Christian eschatology. Today’s social-science faculties in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere in Western Europe are filled not with just any historicists, but almost exclusively self- labeled Marxists. American conservative intellectuals, however they may rail against historicism in general, seem to be insensitive to this condition. They trivialize Marxism by reducing it to a subform of Hegelianism or, far more indefensibly, to an outgrowth of classical German historiography. Such genealogical explorations have no more value than those attempts (still unfortunately made by some commentators on German culture) to hunt for proto-Nazi tendencies in Martin Luther’s table talks or in Frederick the Great’s statecraft.”
Paul Gottfried, “The Search for Historical Meaning,” (1986)
The paleoconservative right has always flirted with Nietzsche, especially in their more radical and völkisch moments. Unlike Nietzsche’s left-wing fans, Right-Nietzscheans draw from his inegalitarianism, rather than his iconoclasm.