The dark philosophy animating Trump’s chaotic second term

Episode Summary 

It’s now one year into Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, and while it’s been just as chaotic as the first, this term’s chaos has been so much worse.

But invading Greenland, burning down NATO, partially taking over Venezuela, and slashing science budgets for no stated reason might seem random in many ways.

But in fact, it isn’t. If you’ve read a lot of right-wing political theory and religious theology, you can actually see what his top aides like Stephen Miller or Russell Vought are up to. The larger goal is to literally destroy modernity and replace it with an undefined form of Christian techno-feudalism.

Luckily, our guest on today’s program, Matt McManus, has done the reading. A longtime friend of the show, he’s the author of the book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. He’s also an assistant professor at Spelman College. In this discussion we talk about how Trump and Trumpism fit into the bigger picture of fascism, authoritarianism, and right wing epistemology.

The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

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--The social science revealing why Trump loves the poorly educated so much

--Why ancient Greek Skepticism has become surprisingly relevant

--Renee Good and the problem of other minds

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

05:45 — Non-religious anti-intellectualism in right-wing thought

09:07 — Nietzsche as the canonical far-right thinker

13:19 — Trump’s domestic policies are basically the re-institution of serfdom

15:43 — The importance of sci-fi authors in anti-democratic political thought

21:33 — Utopias as political lodestars

25:20 — Horseshoe theory and its limitations

29:44 — The historic relationships between 20th century fascism, conservatism, and left-wing ideologies

34:47 — The folly of leftists who team up with reactionaries

38:38 — Conclusion

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: One of the things about the second Trump term that I think that a lot of people are observing is just how much more insane he is—or at least this presidency is, I’m sorry, I should say. People are seeing all these policies like tearing down various scientific funding, or education, or foreign policy organizations, et cetera, et cetera. And people are like, why the hell is this? Why is he doing this? This makes absolutely no sense.

But it actually does make sense, if you have done your reading, I think you would agree, right?

MATT MCMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I’ve recurringly pointed out is there’s a long anti-intellectual bias in the history of conservative thought including intellectualized bias that’s been articulated by conservative intellectuals. Right? And you don’t have to take my word for it. you can just go back and read Joseph de Maistre, for example, who’s been a major influence on a lot of MAGA intellectualism, movers and shakers, people like, Curtis Yarvin, who everyone seems to know right now, or Oran McIntyre, who’s his disciple.

De Maistre says, flat out, that look, what people ignorantly call philosophy is fundamentally a destructive force. Why? Because it encourages people to think critically for themselves. It gets a society that’s filled with all kinds of intellectuals are coming up with new ideas about how government and society to be organized.

We don’t want that, right? That says we’re way better off having everyone instilled with their belief system from the cradle to the grave, what he calls, dogmas, right? People should approach [00:04:00] their beliefs and especially approach existing systems of authority, dogmatically and by and large he says, society will run better that way.

And if that seems a little anachronistic, you can flash forward to Roger Scruton, who I would argue is, the greatest English speaking conservative philosopher of the latter half of the 20th century. In his book, the Meaning of Conservatism Scruton used to say that there’s something deeply commendable about what he called, and I quote, “unthinking people who accept the burdens that life imposes upon them without trying to politicize them or without looking for recourse from existing systems of authority.”

And the reason that Scruton thought unthinking people were better than thinking people, is unthinking people are far likely, more likely, again, to show allegiance to their betters, and to pay deference to existing authorities, right. I would frame it as they’re more likely to be willing to accept their subordination to those that conservatives think they should subordinate themselves too, right?

So all that you see with this Trump administration is in many ways a very virulent form of this anti-intellectualism. Casting a very, wide net where for decades, American conservatives has seen as JD Vance was put it, professors as being the enemies, the media being the enemies, because professors in the media have a bad habit of saying, ‘Is that exactly true? Probably isn’t.’

And now they just have the power to act upon that, by, at the very least, stripping the resources from the media and academics that they need to do their job and actually try to ascertain the real world. And in the worst case scenario, as we’ve seen in the Trump administration, is actively trying to censor and chill the speech, those who tried to decide against it.

SHEFFIELD: They are. And, they’re also in, in particular, going after science quite a bit.

MCMANUS: Oh yeah.

SHEFFIELD: I mean there’s just so much chaos and whatnot.

Non-religious anti-intellectualism in right-wing thought

SHEFFIELD: And there’s a particular animus that these people have, and it isn’t only just the religious either, I think. And we’ve talked a lot on this show about the religious animus towards science. But it’s not just religion that is motivating [00:06:00] this.

MCMANUS: No, absolutely not. Right. I mean, look Joseph de Maistre was an arch reactionary Catholic. And a lot of the anti-intellectual in the Trump administration right now are clearly come from a religious evangelist perspective. but you know, Roger Scruton was by and large a secular philosopher, even if he had certain things that he wanted to intimate about the sacred, again, the anti-intellectual—

SHEFFIELD: And Stephen Miller is not religious either, so we should say that too.

MCMANUS: Yeah, exactly right. And Curtis Yarvin, describes himself as a militant atheist as well. And so does Bronze Age pervert and many of the other intellectuals and movers and shakers that are kind of ideologically inspiring Trump administration. Again, what animates them about intellectuals isn’t that intellectuals are espousing this or that idea that’s contrary to what they want people to hear, that’s part of it. The big thing is that intellectuals are doing their job at all in whatever field, right? Because the problem with having too much discourse, too much discussion too many controversies is it leaves open to question who’s supposed to be in charge and who gets to call the shots in society?

And fundamentally, conservatives just don’t really want that. Right? They prefer, again, a society where people know and understand their place. Right? As a conservative author, James, Steven once put it they want people to think that to acknowledge and affirm a real superior is a great social virtue.

And sometimes this can take pretty fear form. One of the more. Under examined intellectuals of the pre-Trump era as a figure called Wilmore Kendall who I wish everyone would read. So Wilmore Kendall was a major conservative intellectual in the 20th century. Very smart guy. Don’t want to deny that, right?

Very learned, very thoughtful. But he wrote a quite a thoughtful essay called, was Athens Right? To Kill Socrates? For those who don’t know Athens put Socrates on trial for the crime of philosophizing and asking probing questions and most thinking people. Since, the BC has said Athens was wrong to execute Socrates, right?

Socrates, as he articulates, was doing something valuable by raising these kinds of probing questions, getting people to think more deeply about what is [00:08:00] justice, what we should do, et cetera. Kendall disagrees, right? Kendall says, actually the conservative elite who are running Athens were absolutely right to execute Socrates.

Because even if they weren’t always able to answer his questions, and even if Socrates was right that Athens wasn’t a perfectly just society. His form of questioning posed a serious threat to the established social order. So of course, elites were entitled to get rid of him. They did not want the social order change and it was not in their interest to see the social order change.

So Socrates should have drank the hemlock for the sake at least, of the conservative elites that were running at the country or accordion to the conservative elites that were running Athens at the time. And Kendall’s idea is not, or Kendall’s are the. The insight of Kendall’s piece is not hard to extrapolate, right?

He’s directly targeting what he calls the John Stewart Mill School of Thought that sees society as better organized if there’s open discussion, open debate, free rights to liberal expression, et cetera, et cetera where everyone can weigh in. And everyone should feel free to criticize society.

Kendall didn’t want that because he thought it was disruptive of respect for authority and conservatives today, really, again, ibi very deeply of that spirit.

Nietzsche as the canonical far-right thinker

SHEFFIELD: They do. And. It’s notable with that Kendall piece that it’s actually a direct echo of Friedrich Nietzsche’s, where he has an entire section in there called the Problem of Socrates. and, I think that is one of the, I mean, there, there’s so many leftist French misreadings of Nietzsche that are just so moronic, frankly, in my view. And they only read the early part of Nietzsche where he was a bit more libertarian, don’t read any of his middle or later output. And he says, I mean, in his essays that yes, I don’t like Christianity, but actually, the real problem with Christianity is Socrates.

And that Socrates is the one who got this whole slave morality thing started, in the Greco-Roman world, and then that [00:10:00] infected Judaism. And so he’s the real villain here. Jesus was just, kind of a a Buddhist guy out there, saying, do your own thing and leave everyone else alone.

That reading of Nietzche, which is the correct reading if you read his later books, it seemed a lot of people on the left don’t seem to have done that reading, I would say.

MCMANUS: No, absolutely. Although I’d like to point out in defense to the left that there’s been a serious effort to reevaluate our addiction to vulgar Nietzscheanism, which I think has undermined our effectiveness for a very long time right now. And you don’t have to take my word for it.

SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah. Well, Domenico Losurdo, yeah. Great book.

MCMANUS: Domenico Losurdo are more recent and Daniel Touch, right? No, I don’t agree with tu and Losurdo about everything they say about Nietzche, but they’re pretty clear, right? That he is a reactionary aristocrat, at his very core. So, whether or not there’s, some insights that you can glean from him that are important, Nietzche is a brilliant thinker. I don’t want to vulgarize him in that way. Right. And there are insights you can glean from him. But you should be very clear about what he himself was committed to.

And just to kind of connect this to Trumpism a little bit, I think that’s not only leftists who’ve made the mistake of reading Nietzsche as a kind of proto-libertarian many on the American right did for a long time also. Think about people like Ayn Rand and a lot of her disciples. They saw him as a, fundamentally an individualist at heart. Somebody who was pushing against bourgeois, petite bourgeois moralism with its evangelical tendencies and creating more space for free inquiry.

The expression of various forms of individual identity. Well, Nietzche himself actually repudiates that reading of his work pretty emphatically in an unpublished work called The Will to Power, right, which was organized by his sister and is somewhat problematic, but does consist of stuff that he himself wrote in the world of power, Niet says, I am not an individualist, right? My philosophy is not about individualism. It’s about what you call orders of rank, right? So some people are indeed entitled to expressions of their individuality to be free of the shackles of good and evil.

But those are the people that Nietzsche thinks are worthy [00:12:00] of that kind of liberty. Namely the kind of superior persons the new aristocrats of the future that he thinks society should be organized around breeding. But he is very clear and beyond good and evil, for example that for most of the rest of us what we deserve is, as he puts it, slavery, right?

Because he says the only kind of society that has ever been able to culturally produce anything of value that has been able to resist the kind of sirens call of nihilism is a aristocratic society. And no, a Socratic society can function. As he puts it without a slave class. Right. There’s a very good researcher who pointed out that Nietzche talks about slavery hundreds of times over the course of his ure.

And there’s almost not a single instance where he’s not describing it in. Positive even rap sodic terms, he thinks it’s absolutely necessary for any good society. And given that you shouldn’t be surprised again when you see people like Braun’s age pervert or God help me, raw ag nationalists, all these MAGA influencers coming out of the woodwork, espousing a kind of vulgar tism and saying horrible things about how most people in the world are bug men.

Or how women are just roasty who are only fit to, be sexually assaulted by these powerful individuals. Nietzche himself would never be so crass or so stupid. But you know, there’s an instinct there towards suggesting that there are better kinds of people or higher kinds of people and lower kinds of people.

The better kinds of people are entitled to do whatever they want to the lower kinds of people in the pursuit of their allegedly grand projects.

Trump’s domestic policies are basically the reinstitution of serfdom

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and you see it also with their, domestic policy as well, because, the, domestic policy of the Trump administration is to eliminate. All social welfare, payments or organizations. And then at the same time to bring back menial labor jobs and make those proliferate.

But you will, they will be private sector jobs and they will not be unionized. And so, this is basically. They are trying to bring back a serf class. I mean, that is essentially what they’re doing. and you see that also in particular in the, writing and, speeches of Peter thi, like he’s pretty almost [00:14:00] explicit in saying this.

MCMANUS: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, changes his orientation. Anytime, he’s on camera, right? He’s a pretty well read guy. But, one day he identifies with a kind of vulgar Nietzscheanism. The other day he has nice things to say about post liberalism. The next day, he re identifies as a libertarian.

And then all of a sudden, he’s financing Curtis Yarvin, who’s, secular atheist monarchist. Right. What I think the common thread though is, that Thiel has always been attracted to anti-democratic forms of politics. And this goes all the way back to his essay from 2009, I believe, the Education of a Libertarian where he says, look, Barack Obama has now become president.

This is disaster, right. For those of us in, let’s call it the yacht class, right? The reason it’s a disaster for those of us in the yacht class is Barack Obama, mainly supported by women, minorities and welfare recipients is promising to tax the productive creative class in order to redistribute to the unworthy.

We can’t have this and the education of a libertarian is fundamentally about how he’s realized that. If there’s a cont that there’s a fundamental contest as he understands it between democracy and liberty and, These circumstances, he chooses liberty over democracy. Now, of course, the liberty that Thiel is talking about is the right of people like him to exploit all the rest of us with the rest of us having no political agency to actually do anything meaningful about it.

Right? And I don’t see that as being meaningful liberty at all. But you know, even though he shifted the tone and the tune a little bit the fundamental messages remain the same. Right? Democracy is dangerous to people like Thiel, who want to have all the money in the world to spend on rocket ships, to send them themselves to space and those that consider worthy.

And consequently, we need to undo democracy by any means necessary.

The importance of sci-fi authors in anti-democratic political thought

SHEFFIELD: And one of the interesting things also about Thiel in this context is that he was asked one time, by somebody, a young person that was seeking advice from him. They said, well, where should I be looking at to get ideas about startups, to have a [00:16:00] new company? And, he said, you should read mid 20th century science fiction. And that’s, I thought that was extremely notable because there was a tradition, like a real tradition of reactionary intellectualism, beginning with de Maistre and Nietzsche, but Scruton was basically the last of that line. And he was a lonely fellow for most of his life. Didn’t have any peers I would say in his milieu.

And, which is, and it’s notable that this sort of post-libertarian, post-democratic framework that we did see that came out later, it began with Ayn Rand. So there’s a reason why Thiel recommended these 20th century sci-fi authors like Robert Heinlein and for instance, like his The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is, Elon Musk said that’s one of his favorite books. And for those not familiar with it, that book is a story of people who are living on the moon and they are never contacted basically by the Earth government, but they have to send them all their money and so they, have a revolt and kill all the Earth people and declare their independence and have rugged individualism in space. And that’s basically the plot line of pretty much all of these authors like they, they genuinely have no concept—there’s a famous meme that argues that libertarians are like cats, that they are sustained by a system which they have no understanding of, and also disdain.

And I think that’s notable that they really, their intellectual tradition did in fact shift to fiction. And so, that’s why instead of having long explications of arguments and responses to critics, instead of that, we just have these endless monologues of Ayn Rand characters and Robert Heinlein characters, in particular, and they’re not responding to critics.

Like one could say that [00:18:00] Robert Nozik for instance, was somebody who was right-leaning, but this guy was not a reactionary like these people. And so he was capable of reading others and responding to them. And like you see that with the second Trump administration. Like they are literally, as we’re recording this today, the FCC Chairman announced that he’s going to enforce equal time rules against late night comedians. Like they literally cannot respond to the arguments of the opposition because they don’t understand them. I would say.

MCMANUS: No, absolutely. I mean, look, you don’t have to take my word for it. Just read the take downs of the left by authors like Jordan Peterson or Gabby Sad. And, these aren’t random YouTube influencers. These are academics who should know better. Most of ‘em are of no value whatsoever, right?

I’m not even convinced that they’ve actually read Fuco, let alone Marx, let alone, have an understanding of the kind of nuanced arguments that appear in those traditions. But we’re talking about Thiel in this, at this Thiel and this attraction to science fiction. There’s a really good book by a Marxist author called Frederick Jameson who some of your listeners might be familiar with. Dense author, so take him a piece at a time. But it’s called Archeology of the Future which is his analysis of the role, a political role that science fiction has played in different social imaginaries. And one of the things that he points out that’s very sharp, and I don’t agree with Jameson about everything is that science fiction has often been a source of utopian speculation for different political actors about the futures that they want to see brought into being.

And I think this choice of the word utopian is. Done thoughtfully by Jameson. Because when it comes to things like the Libertarians who talks about quite a bit libertarian sci-fi authors he points out that they did have a utopian vision for what the future was going to look at. And this should make us extremely wary of the insistence of some conservatives or some on the right.

That fundamentally it’s the leftist who only have a monopoly on utopian ideas or speculative ideas about how the future should be organized. And that conservatives standeth, wart history, young stop are at the very least, slowed down. To these [00:20:00] utopian reformers, right? Jameson pointed out, if you read Ayn Rand or Heinlein, who you mentioned, they very clearly want a radical change to the status quo.

Even if they frame this in nostalgic terms, right? We need to go back to these older kind of warrior or individualistic ethics. The idea is that fundamentally the future needs to look very different from the president. And that’s going to mean undoing a lot of what liberals and progressives have achieved, right?

And Thiel is very imbibed an awful lot of that, right? He really does seem to think that he is a John Gault type figure that the present is so decayed because of woke leftism, democracy, et cetera. That the only thing to be done is for the truly productive class to take over and rebuild society the way that it should be organized or should have been organized from the very beginning.

And in these kinds of circumstances, the kind of irony is that a lot of the old, truly conservative critiques of the left actually pertain to the speculations that they’re making. And particularly, the kind of policies that figures like the maga movement are trying to put forward.

They’re really trying to break systems that they don’t fully understand in order to bring about a new world that exists only in their head. And that is going to be an absolute disaster, if they try to realize it in practice.

The difference I think between left wing utopias and right wing utopias is that I think that sometimes left wing utopias are actually attractive at the level of theory, even if they break down in practice.

For the utopias speculated upon by people like Thiel or Heinlein, or Rand, I think are just unattractive right from the get go. And they look even worse when you try to put them into practice.

Utopias as political lodestars

SHEFFIELD: They do. And one of the sad ironies of our current politics though, is that this utopianism that absolutely does drive this reactionary-- and, I do distinguish it from conservative that this reactionary activism they, work tirelessly for it. And they see it as, and we are going to destroy modernity and replace it with our utopian vision.

And [00:22:00] by contrast, when you look at the institutional leaders that are in the center left, or we’ll say conservative to the left they seem to, have no utopian impulse whatsoever, generally speaking. And, they think that this is the best of all possible worlds. And the, and it’s why I would say that, the, that you do see, I mean, you did see for instance, in the 2024 election, the, a massive shift in support among young people toward Donald Trump.

A guy who is, you couldn’t depict, you couldn’t imagine a, more stereotypical boomer person, bloated. Rich, selfish lazy, stupid. I mean, he’s literally every caricature of a boomer. And yet he has had the highest support (among Republicans) of young people in the United States in, since 1984, Ronald Reagan.

So like there, there’s a serious, serious problem among people who are against reactionary ideas that they have no interest in inspiring people or realizing that there are a lot of things wrong with the current system.

MCMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just to your point about Trump being like the Ultimate Boomer I went to one rallies in 2022 with a buddy of mine who’s a documentary. And I don’t think I heard a single song that was, anywhere newer than from 1986. You know what I mean? I remember, yeah, there was something from born in the USA.

It was the most modern song at the Trump rally. So that’ll really give you an indication of his. So we say somewhat dated taste right. But you know, on the kind of point about utopianism and the left I, think that Juda Slar has a really very sharp point to make. Right. Juda Slar, for those who don’t know is the author of a seminal essay called The Liberalism of Fear.

And it’s famous for being a liberal critic of utopianism. Well, even sclera said, look. It’s very, there’s a longstanding tendency for center right liberals to say utopianism has only led to bad effects over the course of the 20th century. We’re better off without it. And she said, look, any movement that is entirely [00:24:00] devoid of any utopian aspirations isn’t long for this world.

Because then you don’t really have any energy, you don’t have any creativity, you don’t have any drive. All you’re there to do is to sit there and offer intellectual apology for the status quo. And inevitably when somebody, people become dissatisfied with the status quo, they’re going to turn to your enemies who do have ideas about how things should change.

Right? So this is where I think that. Liberals need to recognize that this defensive attitude that we sometimes take, even if understandable is not enough in the contemporary era, right? People are clearly dissatisfied, they’re turning to alternatives. And I think that what we need to do is have ‘em turn to liberal alternatives to a neoliberal status quo that is clearly run as course and is no longer sustainable.

Now, I put forward. Liberal socialism as, one possible alternative that we could move towards inspired by people like Thomas Payne and Rawls and John Stewart Mill, et cetera. But there are others out there as well. But you know, you don’t need to kind of side with me on this. What I just encourage my fellow liberals to do is to be open-minded.

About the fact that a little utopian energy and a little creativity about how the future can be better from the past is not only intellectually a sustainable project to engage in. I think it’s very much politically needed right now. because you’ve seen across the world, right? Politicians with a couple of exceptions that just come forward and say, I stand for what we’ve been doing for the last 20, 20, 30 years.

Have, by and large not done particularly well.

Horseshoe theory and its limitations

SHEFFIELD: No they haven’t. And one of the more unfortunate things I would say though with people who maybe want to have an alternative to. Neoliberalism is something that you you have written about recently, which is this idea that that some people have that well, maybe we can make co common cause with these far right people.

And there’s something, a, there’s something that, there, there dissatisfaction with the status quo is something that perhaps we could leverage. And that’s has been a very common and dangerous mistake of further left movements. And you talked about some of that history, so if you could maybe just briefly recite about that.

Obviously we’ll have a link to your, [00:26:00] piece as well.

MCMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. Right. So, during the Cold War, there was a very common theory, that sometimes called horseshoe theory, that became popular, particularly amongst, center right, liberal commentators. Right. And, the idea is that. Fundamentally, fascism and communism, are just two sides of the same coin, right?

they’re cosmetically different, but fundamentally they’re both species of a closed society or a collectivist society, whereas liberal stand for an open individualistic society, right? and I think that by and large horseshoe theory, is a very lazy way of looking at the world because it kind of divests you from any responsibility to understand.

The opposition in any kind of brand, any other way. And to recognize that even on the far right there are very substantial differences in terms of regimes, ideologies, et cetera. and Lord knows there are bajillion different flavors of Marxism out there, right? Everything from statism to anarchism to, a narco cynicism, right?

And they all look at and aspire to very different things, right? Now saying that I do think there is a kind of intellectual out there, that fundamentally understand themselves or, has become politically agitated or animated, by opposition to liberalism and liberal centrism. And in these kinds of circumstances, if your fundamental opposition is to liberalism, sometimes you do see figures switch from the far left to the far right or vice versa, right?

a very good example of this, in MAGA world right now would be somebody like, say Nick Land, for example, right? Nick Land began his career as a, critical theorist, very influenced by deli beard, all those postmodern types that you mentioned before. And gradually he moved away from the left end of the spectrum towards, a dark enlightenment perspective.

That’s very proven, very amenable. Two people like the Elon Musk and Peter Thiels of the world, right? since long story short, he essentially says that the world will be better off if we have these kind of tech bros in charge of everything. and if we militate against democracy. but these figures are by and large, fairly rare, right?

And again they only really emerge if the primary [00:28:00] motivating force behind the projects is anti-liberal. in which case they kind of shift from one end of the spectrum to the other, depending on what they think is the other geology that. Most equipped, are more likely to get rid of the liberal order.

Right. Overall though, I’d say look liberalism, socialism, and progressivism have a lot more in common with each other, than either do with, political, right, right. Liberalism, socialism, progressivism all of us believe fundamentally that all people are at least morally equal. Even if we different our capacities, interests, et cetera, and that we’re entitled on the basis of our moral quality.

Quite a lot of leeway in terms of how we want to live our life because we should be allowed to make choices about how we’re going to live our life without interference from the states, other people, et cetera. Even if those choices might end up taking us to some pretty bad places, right. as they so often do.

Right. the political right has a very different kind of philosophy about how. Society should be organized. I think actually no one captured this better than Fa Hayek where he said the unifying feature behind conservatism, and I’d say this is true of the right generally, is this conviction that there are recognizably superior people in society.

And these recognizably superior people are entitled to more respect for their agency, their wealth, their political power, you name it, right? They’re the superiors in society. They get to call the shots and all people on the right. Whether, the more moderates or the more extreme, are committed to this idea in some way, shape or form.

And I think once you recognize that ideolog ideologically, you can realize that if there’s going to be a dialogue and if there’s going to be conciliation, it’s far more likely if you’re liberal to happen with your left wing peers. And if you’re on the left, is far more likely to happen with your liberal peers, than with those on the right who just hold a fundamentally different worldview to either of us.

The historic relationships between 20th century fascism, conservatism, and left-wing ideologies

SHEFFIELD: yeah. And then also the actual history as you were talking about in your Current Affairs piece, shows that the very first people that Adolf Hitler and Mussolini went after were the leftists, like the people who thought that they were doing something [00:30:00] tricky and conniving to collaborate with them.

MCMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. So, this is, there’s a famous poem by Martin Nie Moler, that actually had the first section of bridge very often when it was translated into the United States. And it goes, first they came for the communist and then I did nothing because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the socialist and I did nothing because I wasn’t a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionist and I did nothing because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did nothing because I’m not a Jew and You get the picture right. And there’s a reason for this, right? so, the fa fascism in Italy without a doubt, was influenced in its very early stages by some species of, socialism.

Particularly things like, so surrealism, right? this idea that there was going to be a general strike and that we were going to go break the shackles, of the status quo. But, that was very, quickly abandoned after the fascist came to power. Often with the support of center right liberals.

Big business, the church eventually, of course, the monarchy, all the kind of conservative factions within Italy. And the reason why all these conservative factions liked fascism, is because they thought the fascists were extremely effective, at breaking communist skulls and attracting large segments of world population through populist rhetoric away from the appeals, of working class agitation, a Mussolini in power.

Often awe implanted various austerity programs that were intended to discipline, the workforce in addition to smashing trade unions independent, workers, movements, you name it. Right? and this one, an awful lot of applause from people like, Winston Churchill, for example, in the 1920s.

or the famous right wing economist, Ludwig von Misa, right? in his book, liberalism describe fascism as fundamentally having saved Western civilization for at least the moment, right? In Germany, the circumstances are actually even more brutal, right? in Mont Comp. Hitler makes no doubt or no, hey, about the fact that he considers Marxism to be, as he put it, a Jewish doctrine, that rejects what he calls the aristocratic principle of nature.

because he says fundamentally, socialist and Marxist and communist [00:32:00] believe in a world where all men and women will be brothers and sisters and will cooperate for the social. Even if they think that you need a class revolution in order to achieve this. and Hitler says, the Ariss Socratic principle of nature holds that there will always be conflict between races, and one race.

Of course, the Aryan race is destined to rule overall after it’s defeated. Its, Jewish and other enemies, right? Ly racist kind of philosophy and beyond just, the kind of ideological anti Marxism, anti socialism, anti-communism hither, much like Mussolini. Found that on his route to power, it was very easy, and necessary indeed to cooperate with conservatives, big business, the military, especially, who had the same interest in Germany, as conservative forces did in Italy, namely quashing the communists and socialists, who were very popular in Germany at the time.

So Robert Paxton, the author of The Anatomy of Fascism, points out that. It’s quite like that, that Hitler would’ve been a footnote in history if it wasn’t for the cooperation of so many conservative forces in Germany, to bring him to power, expecting that once he was there, he was going to crush the communists and the socialists, and bring about, kind of restoration, of the vi ha mine conservative empire, which of course, Hitler had no intention of doing.

and Richard Evans, the author of, The third, the rise of the third, or sorry, the third Reich in power. Right. Makes exactly the same point. Evans is a professor of history at Cambridge, probably the world’s leading expert in Nazism. and he is emphatic about saying it was actually conservatives that brought Hitler to power, right?

Without the conservative forces in the country, Hitler would never have taken power. and that’s because they thought. By and large, he shares a lot of our say our aspirations, right? He wants a restoration of the traditional family. He wants to re-arm Germany. He wants to make Germany great again, right?

and undo, the tragedy of Versailles. And, putting him into power and financing him is going to help us achieve a lot of our shared goals, right? even if, many German conservative had a certain contempt, for Hitler’s populism and his youth and [00:34:00] strange ideas, right? and once in power, Hitler.

Absolutely erected many conservative figures not to mention big business to positions of enormous suspicion in the new European order that he was going to create. Right? and the result was, of course, sending tens of thousands of members of the KPD, the Communist Party and, the SPD, the social Democratic Party of Germany into concentration camps, in many circumstances.

They were the first victims of Nazi aggression. So this kind of claim, that I see people like Dinesh DEA make sometimes, that the Nazis were socialists or the Nazis were liberals, right? he tries to make that suggestion also. it’s just absolutely bogus. And, the people who are trying to make the claim are either willfully, distorting history, for ideological reasons, or they’re just stupid to be quite blunt.

The folly of leftists who team up with reactionaries

SHEFFIELD: yeah, they are. And well, and, but it’s also stupid on the part of people who are leftists, kind of ilian mentality as you reference, like to think that teaming up with fascists to destroy liberalism. Is not going to create communism. Like they don’t understand that like this will never happen.

And that while perhaps you can rhetorically, work with some of the voters or people who are in the grassroots that are sympathetic to some of these ideas, the elites themselves. So like people like Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz, or. JD Vance, who, they do in fact hate capitalism. But they hate it for a very different reason than you do.

And what they want to create in its place is monstrous.

MCMANUS: Oh, absolutely. And look, I don’t want to deny that there are leftists again who gravitate towards the right, and the far right. a very good book on this written by a friend of mine is called, against Fascist Creep by Alex Reed Ross. and he talks about how, Starting in, the mid 2010s, many on the far right, especially in digital spaces, have actually tried to, brand far right politics and leftist sounding language consciously.

[00:36:00] Right. to try to entice progressives to kind of side with them. a good example of this would be, eco fascist movements, right. Who are yeah, we should get back to nature, right? Getting back to nature will mean getting back to the law of the jungle where the strong prey upon the weak.

So actually there’s an ecological dimension to fascism that, they. Play up in order to try to solicit, sympathy from various environmentalist movements. Right? or another good example that I’ve personally seen, to my enormous dismay, has been, the efforts of, various Dugan Knights, followers of Alexander Dugan, right?

Alexander Dugan, up until quite recently when he started chumming around with people like Tucker Carlson, was militantly anti-American, right? for pretty obvious reasons, right? You saw America as a Russia’s fundamental geopolitical ally. And, consequently, Dugan has been very willing to espouse, militant anti-Western rhetoric characterizing the West as an imperialist force that is, traversing the globe invading countries like Iraq and Afghanistan to kind of expand American power.

And Ross, I think quite convincingly suggests that Dugan does this knowing, that even if ma, his main audience is always going to be the far right, you might be able to entice a couple of anti-Western. Leftists into his coalition. if their fundamental convictions are, the West is just responsible for all the problems of the world.

America is all the great Satan, and we’re willing to align ourself with anyone in order to kind of undermine it. So it is a real process. Right? but I’d also like to point out, that if we are going to talk about the proportion of figures who kind of. Made their peace with MAGA or moved over to maga.

leftists I would not say are the major members of that coalition, right? Even if they don’t, there are a couple of Bernie Trump voters, I mean, think about, the sheer volume of right wing libertarians. People like Rand Paul, for example. who started out being tri critics of Trump, critics of the MAGA movement, and just completely conceded to a lot of his calls for.

tariffs stronger borders, et cetera, et cetera. because they thought it was to their political advantage. there’s even a term, that’s been developed in libertarian circles. [00:38:00] genuinely libertarian circles describe it, border Arian, which I quite like, people in the von Misa, s.

Factions are often characterized as boards, right because they’re committed to freedom for all, but not for, migrants. Right? So I think that, we should recognize that there are a lot of different reasons why people will gravitate towards far right politics. And there are a lot of different ways that the far right will try to reach out to different constituencies.

While the left definitely needs to inoculate itself against any of those kind of temptations, insist that there are plenty of classical liberals and libertarians that should take a good, hard look in the mirror. If they made to think that. While Trump was passing some tax cuts, so really he’s a classical liberal at heart.

Conclusion

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. All right, well, we’re coming up on the end here, so, if people want to keep up with your stuff besides buying liberal socialism. What else? Do you have advice for that?

MCMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. so we have a, myself and Dr. Ben Burgess have a new essay collection coming out soon on Gia Cohen, which people can check out for Paul Gray McMinn. GIA Cohen was a Democratic socialist author who taught at Oxford for a long time. And has some very interesting ideas that I’m quite critical of, but nonetheless are worth looking at.

And I also have a new essay collection coming out in July actually which includes contributions from liberal currents editor Paul Kreider and Florian Maywell, and another academic. it’s called what is Liberal Socialism. and it’s only 11 bucks. I organize it because people used to point out how the academic book that I released, the Political Theory of Liberal socialism is a little pricey and a little scholarly.

this is a much cheaper, much more kind of accessible kind of guide to some of the main themes of liberal socialism for people are interested.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. Sounds good. All right, well, good to have you back again.

MCMANUS: Yeah. Thanks Matt. Great to talk to you.

SHEFFIELD: Alright, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation and you can always get more if you go to flux.community where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes.

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Thanks a lot. I’ll see you next time.

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