The Pathetic End of Richard Spencer's Nietzschean Alt-Right

 

This is Richard Spencer leaving the Federal Courthouse in Charlottesville, Virginia.  He is carrying his daughter's stuffed animal.  He brought it to court every day, he said, to be his "emotional support animal."  This is a good image for the pathetic death of Spencer's Nietzschean Alt-Right.

Yesterday, a jury awarded $26 million in compensatory and punitive damages to plaintiffs claiming damages from the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville in August of 2017.  $14 million of the damages were assessed against James Field, who is serving a life prison sentence for driving his car into a crowd and killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer.  Spencer was ordered to pay $1.2 million.

I have written previously about Spencer (here and here).  Spencer's ultimate aim has been to overthrow liberal democracy and establish a "white ethnostate" in North America and Europe.  For him this kind of thinking all began when he first read Nietzsche as a college student at the University of Virginia.  Then, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he began to study Leo Strauss, who he saw as sympathetic with Nietzschean fascist thinking.  (I have written a series of posts on the Strauss-Nietzsche connection.)  Later, he did some graduate work at Duke University where he took a course on "Nietzsche's Politics" from the Straussian political theorist Michael Gillespie; and his paper for that course--"Politics in the Grand Style: Nietzsche, the Judeo-Christian Legacy, and European Unification"--is perhaps the fullest statement of his Nietzschean Alt-Right thinking.  He argued that "the deeper character of the Ethno-State . . . is Nietzschean at its core."

Suddenly, at the trial in Charlottesville, Spencer announced that his Nietzschean Neo-Nazism was all wrong.  He said that this kind of thinking showed him at his "absolute worst," and that it was all a product of his "animal brain."  At one point, he testified: "That was me as a 7-year-old, and it's a 7-year-old that's probably still inside me.  I'm ashamed of it.  Those are not my sincere, thoughtful beliefs.  That is a childish, awful version of myself."

After the verdict, Spencer told reporters that the Alt-Right movement that he created is over.  "That's long dead and gone in my opinion.  And it's buried.  And I don't want to have anything to do with it."

He also said: "I'm going to develop ideas that I think are important to the future of the world.  I've evolved a lot.  I think that populist energy of a few years ago, I think it brought out the worst in a lot of people, and it brought out the worst in me.  I don't think saying I'm sorry would help anyone.  I think the main thing is to move forward with integrity and seriousness."

Is this the death of the Nietzschean Alt-Right?  Surely, some of the Nietzschean Alt-Right thinkers will say that rather than showing the death of the movement, what this really shows is the stupid mistake of people like Spencer who shout in public that the final goal of the Alt-Right is a military ethnostate, which provokes a public backlash.  The smart strategy is to keep quiet about this.  

As I have noted, "Bronze Age Pervert" has recommended to his readers that they should study the idea of the military ethnostate as a guide for their "final aims," but they should be careful not to talk about this in public, because this would only expose them to their enemies.  They should join the Trump movement as the best way to work for overthrowing liberal democracy and moving towards a Nietzschean military dictatorship.  But they should never say that this is their aim because "you must have an instinct for how much normies are able to take" (Bronze Age Mindset, 170-71, 176).

In other words, don't march in a torchlight parade chanting Neo-Nazi slogans and assume that you won't be punished by your enemies!

Can this Straussian "secret writing" strategy of Bronze Age Pervert work?

Well, a recent report on "The Global State of Democracy 2021" concludes that the United States has joined the growing list of countries that are "backsliding democracies"--democracies whose democratic institutions and norms are declining--while at the same time the illiberal authoritarian regimes are expanding.  Does this suggest that the historical conditions in the world today are growing ever more favorable to the ultimate triumph of the Nietzschean Alt-Right?