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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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.
