Authoritarian Ideas, Old and New: From Schmitt to “JD”

September 21, 2025January 25, 2026 By Juan Acevedo Archive / Podcast

On this episode of International Horizons, RBI Acting Director, Eli Karetny talks with Richard Wolin (Distinguished Professor, CUNY Graduate Center) about the intellectual roots of today’s anti-liberal right. Tracing a line from Germany’s “conservative revolutionaries” (Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, Heidegger) to France’s nouvelle droite and “great replacement” rhetoric, Wolin shows how cultural critiques of egalitarianism and “decadence” resurface in contemporary movements—from the manosphere and Bronze Age Pervert to tech-elite flirtations with political theology and the “state of exception.” The conversation connects these currents to U.S. figures like Peter Thiel and JD Vance, exploring why myths of decline, warrior brotherhoods, and friend-enemy politics have regained appeal—and what that means for liberal democracy now. A bracing tour through ideas shaping our moment, and a call to understand them clearly before they reshape our institutions.

Transcript

Eli Karetny
As we confront the rise of authoritarianism at home and abroad, we are presented with anti-liberal leaders, ideas, and movements which threaten to destroy the post–World War II international system. To guard against these threats, liberal democracies must better understand the relationship between ideology and totalizing political systems. Twentieth-century European history offers a glimpse into how reactionary political ideas and the turn toward political mythology can upend democratic societies at the very moment public intellectuals convince us we’ve reached the end of history.

Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is Eli Karetny. I teach politics at Baruch College and have for years been a deputy director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. With our director John Torpey on sabbatical this year, I have the privilege of serving as the institute’s interim director, which means I have the honor of hosting this podcast today.

On the podcast, we have distinguished professor of history and political science at the CUNY Graduate Center, Richard Wolin. Professor Wolin is an intellectual historian who writes on twentieth-century European philosophy and ideology and has authored numerous books which explore the thought and influence of, among others, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, the Frankfurt School, and Carl Schmitt—and most recently, his book Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology.

Hi Richard, thank you for joining us on International Horizons.

Richard Wolin
My pleasure, Eli. Thanks very much for the opportunity.

Eli Karetny
Let’s start with the German and French intellectual sources of the MAGA movement’s cultural conception of nationalism and its approach to politics and notions of greatness. Maybe you can give us a sketch of first German conservative revolutionary thought: who were the key thinkers, what’s their critique of liberalism, and what makes them distinct from the Nazis, who several of them would ultimately go on to support?

Richard Wolin
Sure, I think that’s a good way of formulating the problem or question as a point of departure, because, you know, circa the late 1960s are developed in Europe, and now everything is so internationalized and globalized. Little surprise that the movements—that the recalibration of the right to a new right in French nouvelle droite, Dugin as the Russian representative, and so forth—their program was predicated on reintroducing the so-called conservative revolutionaries of the interwar period: figures like Oswald Spengler (Decline of the West and other books), Carl Schmitt, of course, Ernst Jünger (glorification of war and combat and the figure of the warrior), and other figures. I mean, Heidegger figures in the mix as well, and in addition, some writers who are not as well known, perhaps in English.

But if you glance at the leading representatives of right-wing thought today, however you want to define it—even in North America—if you look at the right-wing presses that are trying to recalibrate English-language intellectual life to give it a right-wing shift or slant, the term of art is “a Gramscianism of the right,” to achieve some kind of cultural-intellectual hegemony prior to any political action or involvement. One will see they’re reprinting volumes taken from Spengler and Jünger, and a lot of attention is paid to Schmitt too. These are the main figures.

And basically, as your question indicated, Schmitt occupies a special role since, of course, there’s also a left-wing reception of Schmitt that’s been ongoing since the 1990s in the English-speaking world. But in 1923—so approximately 100 years ago—he wrote his famous book Critique of Parliamentary Democracy (which has a slightly different title in German). Be that as it may, he made a rather heretical argument, but one that also caught on at the time, given the weaknesses as the 1920s advanced of the Weimar Republic: that liberalism and democracy operate at cross purposes, and liberalism as a social, economic, and institutional form short-circuits the potential for a homogeneous relationship between a leader—of course, in German, the term Führer was loaded even then—and the people.

So he reconfigures democracy as plebiscitary democracy, or what’s called “leader democracy.” So, you know, that’s where we are today in many ways. Just open the newspaper—we’re experiencing it. If you still want to call it democracy—okay, that’s a stretch. Republicans don’t like that word. There’s a book out—Pat Buchanan already in the ’90s wrote It’s a Republic, Not a Democracy—pointing toward an elitist direction.

But the whole idea that you could have a meaningful democracy in the twentieth century without any kinds of liberal safeguards such as institutional checks and balances, respect for constitutional principles, bills of rights, etc.—we’ve seen how that works out historically, and it hasn’t worked out well at all. So the fact that it’s back in vogue now, not just in the US but in European and Western democracies that are teetering on the brink with far-right parties threatening the corridors of power, is quite alarming.

So Schmitt, from a political standpoint, is clearly most relevant, and the reception of his work—which I’ve tried to trace for a project I’m working on since 9/11 and the debates over emergency powers, the Patriot Act, etc.—has really skyrocketed. So it’s an important issue.

Hi Richard, thank you for joining us on International Horizons.

Richard Wolin
My pleasure, Eli. Thanks very much for the opportunity.

Would you like me to go through the entire transcript in full (it’s very long) with the same style of edits (punctuation and repetitions only), or would you prefer I return the cleaned version in sections so it’s easier to read and review?

You said:

yes

ChatGPT said:

Thought for 5s

Great—here’s the rest of the transcript cleaned only for punctuation and repeated words (nothing else changed). I’ve kept it in sections so it’s easier to review.

Eli Karetny
That’s great, Richard, thank you for that. And I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. By the end of our conversation, we’ll talk a little bit about Peter Thiel and this announcement several years ago when he wrote about his realization of the incompatibility between liberalism and democracy—it has echoes of this kind of Schmittian political critique of liberalism—so we’ll come back to that. But maybe you could say a few words about where the cultural—you talk about Gramsci and the cultural analysis—where the German cultural critique of liberalism dovetails with Schmitt’s political critique of liberalism?

Richard Wolin
Yeah, that’s an interesting point, because there’s a little-known fact here, which is that Schmitt, when he was just starting his career, participated in 1920—he was born in 1888, so he would have been 32—in one of Max Weber’s last seminars in Munich, where Schmitt had been stationed in the army and where he began teaching. And we know from materials left in his estate that Schmitt and Weber had a long discussion about Oswald Spengler and Decline of the West, which was one of the largest-selling books in postwar Germany, for obvious reasons. It had been conceived in 1912 before the war.

This whole theory—this couldn’t be more current—this whole theory of decline, and the values of… one of Schmitt’s late books from 1959 was called The Tyranny of Values. We need not get into that right now, but of course it’s Western values—instead of a very Spenglerian argument. But this cultural critique is really indispensable for the antidemocratic and illiberal right stemming from Spengler. There’s a widespread reception of Spengler’s thesis of decline and the notion of liberal democratic decadence, and that decadence really inheres in democratic egalitarianism and rights talk and notions of human equality in general that are inherited from Christianity—the idea that all persons, all souls, are equal in the eyes of God.

If you read the essays and books by the progenitor of the new right, nouvelle droite, Alain de Benoist—who is now translated into English; the formerly left-wing journal Telos published his essays and had a special double issue on his work during the 1990s—one of his books has to do with human rights (droits de l’homme), which is an honorable and much-honored aspect of French political history, beginning with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789.

So this attempt—and now the American conservatives are all in on this notion that the Declaration of Independence, the phrase “all men are created equal,” is just a meaningless piece of paper. This is the creed—they call it the creedal version of American citizenship. This is superficial, they imply. J.D. Vance said this explicitly in his Claremont Institute talk over the summer, in July: you know, what good is a piece of paper?

Before we got on the podcast together, I was thinking along the lines of this book I’m in the middle of writing on Schmitt and Nazi law; but not just Nazis—the conservative revolutionaries too who were alive. Schmitt was a Nazi. Spengler didn’t join—he died in ’36; that’s another issue—but the ideas were more or less parallel, possibly with the exception of the rather exclusive emphasis on race.

One of their targets and polemical slights to liberal law and constitutionalism was this notion—what they called in German (and it’s the same in English, virtually)—a polemic against Paragraphenwesen, law articulated in the form of paragraphs. It’s a criticism of legal discourse and legalism and legalese. And, just take my word for it, you can’t find any legal text that’s critical of Weimar democracy—after 1933, that is—that doesn’t include this kind of polemic. And we know where that ended up very quickly: already in 1933, any kinds of checks and balances or institutional opposition to dictatorship were quelled, quashed within the first few months of Hitler’s dictatorship.

I’m not one who’s big on one-to-one parallels between what happened in 1933 and what’s been happening in the US since, you know, Trump’s second inauguration in January. Of course, we already had this debate on American fascism during his first term. But the systematic manner in which potential institutional sources of opposition— I mean, we’ve seen it in the past week too, with the media—have been cowed, intimidated, threatened, to the point where, you know, if you can have these institutions censor themselves, all the better—which is actually a sound bite from Trump yesterday. If they do it on their own—speaking of major media companies—that’s fine, you know. And if they don’t, we’ll have the FCC look into it. And then he qualifies all this—he takes back with the other hand to preserve deniability with, “But I don’t have anything to do with that.” He’s just spoken on it for a couple minutes and made all these threats. He’s the chief executive of the United States—“but I don’t have anything to do with that; it’s the chairperson of the FCC who would take care of it.”

But he’s already articulated his desiderata. So this is really pretty meaningless. But we play out this thought experiment often these days, and I know there have been Ralph Bunche Institute podcasts to this effect earlier in the year about the parallels between 1933 and, you know, 2045. I think one could clearly go astray. We don’t have a Sturmabteilung with millions of members—that’s just for beginners—or the heritage of World War I and all these warriors, the Freikorps, who were looking for another war. But we do have some lessons we have to heed, I think, about how democracies fail.

Eli Karetny
That’s great, thank you for that. And maybe just to stay in this space for a moment longer: can you say a few words about where the conservative revolutionaries and the fascists and the Nazis overlap in political and cultural critiques of liberalism and modernity, and where lines should be drawn? Are the differences in the solutions they propose—while the underlying critiques are essentially the same—or are the differences deeper than that?

Richard Wolin
Well, some of these matters—there’s a competition after a while. I mean, the young Hitler, before the Beer Hall Putsch in the early ’20s—Mussolini was his hero, and the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 in Munich was an imitation of Mussolini’s March on Rome a year earlier in 1922. But eventually, you know, these are different versions of nationalism and racism, and although they allied in the 1930s explicitly—and Hitler paid a famous visit to Mussolini in 1934, etc.—they have different worldviews.

For example, the Nazis didn’t want to be known as fascists. Of course, there was antifascism on the left, which was another reason to distance themselves. But fascism, historically speaking, was an Italian invention—and I think Italian scholars are somewhat proud of this in a strange way. Nazism—one can’t find too much after the fact to be proud of—but it was a very German movement.

Even the Aryanism—white supremacy aspect of Aryanism—the elite, the elect, the privileged—they weren’t going to extend it, really, to Scandinavia or other so-called Aryan nations; this was really about Germany. Even then, the definition was mixed up.

The conservative revolutionaries—Spengler, for example—was an autodidact. He was an independent writer; he wasn’t an academic, although he’d been trained. Schmitt was one of the leading jurists of the Weimar Republic, whose foundations he tried to sap through Article 48 and presidential emergency powers. But he also engaged in a lot of writings in political theory—I mentioned the famous book Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy—and also his writings on political theology from 1922, where he praises the counterrevolutionary philosophers of state, he calls them, such as Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald and Donoso Cortés (with whom he’s most close).

So, you know, the Nazis—there was also a breach between some of the lesser-known conservative revolutionaries, the intellectuals around the right-wing journal Die Tat. They never forgave Hitler for playing the parliamentary game after the defeat in 1923—for trying to craft a supposedly normal Weimar-era political party to gain power by legal means, which, as we know, was realized. They thought this was a sellout.

And there was this strange “spiritual aristocracy” that the conservative revolutionaries—and, for example, this very influential Tat-circle journal—advocated. At the end of the Weimar era, they were selling like 30,000 copies an issue. They considered the Nazis too plebeian. They believed in a new elite, a new spiritual aristocracy. There were currents in Italy who distanced themselves—like Julius Evola—from Mussolini’s version of fascism; they thought it was too much twentieth-century mass politics and not, in their sense, principled enough. This is one of Spengler’s disagreements with the Nazis in ’33–’34.

But frankly, the ideational armature of the conservative revolutionaries and the Nazis—they had much more in common than not. And Schmitt, just to finish this, played an indispensable role in early April 1933 in writing the Gleichschaltung, or elimination of political opposition legislation (especially against the individual German states), to grease the wheels for a full-fledged totalitarian dictatorship. They put his legal expertise to good use, and he made quite a career under the Nazis, accumulating offices, and he was very content for a time. Thank you.

Eli Karetny
This wasn’t an exclusively German phenomenon, as you mentioned; Italian fascism was at the heart of this. But we can’t leave out the French. And—interesting that you mentioned—there were aristocratic perceptions among some of these movements that the German expression of these ideas and tendencies was plebeian. So I wonder if you can say a few words about what you’ve called French literary fascism—how does that play into this? And maybe elaborate, in part of your answer, about twentieth-century French antisemitism and how that related to theories known as integral nationalism.

Richard Wolin
Yeah, it’s interesting that when we were talking just before the podcast kicked off, you were mentioning to me this list of books by Costin Alamariu, a.k.a. Bronze Age Pervert—his syllabus of recommended books—which I hadn’t seen. It was interesting that this book by Louis-Ferdinand Céline—who, of course, was a virulent antisemite in the ’30s—was on the list; the book that’s best known in the English-speaking world, part of which takes place in the US, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night).

So this is very important, and it speaks to the strength of French fascism and also its weakness, because there’s a surprisingly widespread and vocal—this is characteristic of French political culture to begin with. Many French politicians from the Third Republic—even Léon Blum, the leader of the Popular Front from ’36 to ’37 on the socialist side—began his career as a literary scholar, writing reviews and literary essays, etc. This speaks to French political culture and their literary predilections, which derive from the Enlightenment and the accomplishments of the great nineteenth-century novelists, etc.

So they’re very vocal and engaged—people like Robert Brasillach and Drieu La Rochelle. Brasillach was executed in 1945 for collaboration; he was the editor of Je suis partout, which was virulently antisemitic, etc. And the towering presence—who seems to be coming back—died in 1952: Charles Maurras, the leading intellectual light of Action Française.

What’s interesting in part is that the younger generation of Maurrassians, or partisans of Action Française during the 1930s, felt that Maurras—being a monarchist—was out of step. (Monarchism is coming back into fashion in France today in ways that are quite remarkable; Action Française.) And we have postliberal Catholics in the US, such as the Harvard professor of law Adrian Vermeule, who bills himself as a neo-integralist and identifies with some of Maurras’s positions on political authority and order and absolute values, which have a neo-Thomist pedigree as a rule.

But the younger generation of Maurrassians during the ’30s realized that monarchism was going to be a hard sell, so they were very attracted—after France’s loss in the Franco-Prussian War, all things German seemed poisonous, especially to Maurras personally. On the other hand, they were looking across the Rhine and seeing what they perceived as energy, unity, enthusiasm, and political vigor which France in the ’30s, at the tail end of the Third Republic, didn’t seem to have. So, with one eye at least, they regarded these experiments to the east and the south—Mussolini’s Italy—and tried to figure out how this might work in France.

There were fascist political parties with whom the literati were involved, and many were collaborators. There’s this famous dictum by Maurras in 1940 at the fall of France—he got his start in politics at the apogee of the Dreyfus Affair in 1898–99—when he called the fall of France une surprise divine, a divine surprise. He’d been arguing against the Third Republic for most of his life, and finally, as a result of the fall of France in June 1940, it came to pass. But there were some bitter pills hidden within the surprise as well. Maybe that would take us too far afield.

Eli Karetny
To stay with the French fascists for a moment longer—and to connect some dots to our current situation, the US political moment—can you speak about how these reactionary French thinkers gave fascism a makeover after World War II through ideas and mythologies like the Great Replacement theory (you’ve written about this), and maybe draw connections to anti-immigrant American figures like Tucker Carlson, who privileges “legacy Americans”?

Richard Wolin
Yeah, it’s an interesting question, because the French new right, or nouvelle droite, which really develops in the early-to-mid 1960s, comes out of right-wing political figures and intellectuals—some of whom actually fought in the Algerian War to keep Algeria French and participated in the OAS (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète), which was setting off terror bombs in metropolitan France to try to deter de Gaulle and the French government from yielding Algeria back to the Algerians.

The point is that the French new right evolved from the OAS and the “keep Algeria French” contingent. These were militants, and the whole problem of decolonization loomed large in their worldview. They very quickly—and it can be readily documented—presented this image of fear and terror that there would be inundation by people from the Third World in continental Europe.

And it’s perversely fascinating the way they discursively reversed our inherited notions of racism as it emerges in studies of colonialism. So it wasn’t the colonists—the European colons and Europeans—who were the racists; it’s those who are colonized, who are rebelling against European rule and who, on occasion, to free themselves, will commit acts of violence and take up struggle (as has happened in a number of cases—of course not always; in the case of India there was peaceful resistance orchestrated by Gandhi).

So it’s anti-white racism, anti-European. I mean, they’re the real racists—the ones from the tiers monde, or Third World. They reverse this very quickly, and it becomes a theory of white supremacy rights. These are really the origins of the Great Replacement: that there’s this threat of inundation. There’s this terrible book by a literary representative of the nouvelle droite that’s often cited today from 1971—Jean Raspail’s book (The Camp of the Saints), supposed to be Bannon’s favorite—that tells the tale of Europe’s inundation by unkempt masses from the Indian subcontinent, etc.

This is a go-to, oft-cited piece of literature in the European far-right political imaginary. And today, even nations with minimal immigration, such as Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, raise the specter of replacement theory despite the fact that there are very few immigrants to Hungary or attempts to immigrate there by refugees from anywhere. But, obviously, from a demagogic standpoint, it’s a very effective means of spreading fear of the other.

Eli Karetny
And this brings us back to MAGA and the current moment. Let’s talk about how these ideas are influencing right-wing culture and politics in the US. You’ve written about—and just briefly mentioned—BAP (Bronze Age Pervert, Costin Alamariu) and how German thinkers like Jünger and Schmitt can help us understand BAP’s self-proclaimed Nietzschean aristocratic spirit. Let’s spend a little time on the supposed aristocratic element in all of this.

As you mentioned—and we discussed before the podcast started—I brought to your attention that BAP, in a tweet (an X post), openly seeks to convert what he calls “sensitive and intelligent youth.” What he’s trying to convert them to is—what he calls—“fascism or something worse.” What is this “something worse”? He offered this conversion package very explicitly, and you mentioned a few of the books on this list. Let me just read the list for our audience: the conversion package includes the prologue to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra; Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night; Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and Spring Snow; Jünger’s Storm of Steel; Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Nostromo; and Lampedusa’s The Dwarf. Anything in this starter pack jump out at you other than the books you’ve already mentioned?

Richard Wolin
Well, it’s an interesting list, and there are definitely thematic resemblances and continuities between the writings. Nietzsche is such an obvious choice it almost doesn’t bear commenting on, since the title of Alamariu’s dissertation—which was published a few years ago, or self-published—was on selective breeding and the birth of political philosophy; breeding was a concern of Nietzsche’s in The Will to Power (it’s the title of one of the later sections).

But Mishima—Yukio Mishima—is a very interesting figure who, of course, committed seppuku, eviscerating himself in a coup attempt in 1971 before the Japanese military academy. He had, if you will, a Spenglerian critique of growing Japanese effeminacy under democracy—how it had lost the samurai ethos, etc. The important point here is that Mishima is really a saint and a go-to figure in the manosphere, online and among the men’s movement, for a number of reasons. He’s considered a very important progenitor. Jack Donovan, who has written No Man’s Land, has photos online of himself in front of a huge image of Mishima.

A few years ago, I was working with a student at the Graduate Center who was doing a thesis on the relationship between German political ideas and Japanese political ideas during the 1930s—even before the Axis was officially agreed upon. I came across a 1936 book published by the SS with a preface by Heinrich Himmler called Die Samurai, suggesting some kind of affinity—the SS thought of itself as an elite, a warrior elite, of course—and somehow the samurai… you’d think from a standpoint of race theory and pure Aryanism that might not exist, but there are other ways of conceiving it where it does work.

Mishima is lionized. You mentioned the French nouvelle droite that played such an important role here—like Alain de Benoist during the 1960s. His benefactor, who was an OAS fighter in Algeria, Dominique Venner, committed seppuku (harakiri) in Notre Dame Cathedral in May 2013, trying to—

Richard Wolin
—And his suicide note replicated Renaud Camus’s Great Replacement theory. He wanted to turn it into a political act. We later found out he was terminally ill, so I guess he wanted to go out with a bang. By the way, Heidegger’s name was in the note. He said it was in Heidegger’s honor because the next scheduled demonstration of the anti-gay-marriage movement—which he was trying to reach—was on the day Heidegger had died, May 26.

It’s peculiar—there were all these Heideggerian motifs about being-toward-death and a heroic death which defines life, etc. At a certain point, some of this becomes a little banal. Anyway, Dominique Venner’s autobiography is entitled Un samouraï d’Occident (A Samurai of the West). So this figure really is quite widespread, and Mishima is quite a demigod among the men’s movement.

To cut to the chase, what’s important is that there’s so much misogyny spread among the new right and the MAGA movement—these astonishing proposals last spring: Trump’s neo-pronatalist ideas to award $5,000 to women who have an extra child, or to have mandatory menstrual-cycle classes for women. Much of this is sheer provocation, but it needs to be taken seriously; at the same time, it’s not mere rhetoric when it’s coming from the chief executive of the United States.

So the antimiscegenation—anti-misogyny?—and all these conspiracy theories… take the dictum by J.D. Vance that came up so often in the 2024 electoral campaign: men have to wake up; they’re being ruled by childless “cat women.” Where does this come from? Personally, I’m allergic to cats; I don’t have much experience, but this is the tip of the iceberg.

This antipathy—the incel phenomenon and the men’s movement known as “men going their own way.” It’s very widespread and intensely ideological, conducive to false consciousness about other people and how one individuates oneself as a person or as a male. It’s very defensive in many ways.

There are cult-like aspects of the new vogue of masculinism on the right. And Alamariu, of course—with this text promoted by the Claremont Institute in one of their organs, The American Mind, by Michael Anton (now Director of Policy Planning in the State Department)—Alamariu’s books have been extremely influential and popular. One wishes one could ignore it, but it’s omnipresent among certain quarters of the young American male right.

Eli Karetny
You mentioned Michael Anton. I listened to a podcast he did about two years ago, before he returned to power, as you say, in this prominent State Department position, where he was discussing BAP and he was notably ambivalent. My sense was this was a kind of Straussianism—there was a withholding from the public of the full extent to which he supports BAP’s commitments. He tried to present it in a cautious way—“we need to steer people away from explicit and vulgar fascistic violence”—and yet you can detect just below the surface a kind of admiration or puzzlement as to how it’s taken root. Does that surprise you at all?

Richard Wolin
No, not at all—especially if you’re hoping for a position eventually in the next Trump administration. He did occupy a role in the first Trump administration until a new Secretary of State or Director of National Intelligence had been named.

In fact, in the original article he wrote on the then-anonymous treatise Bronze Age Mindset, he claimed with false humility that he really didn’t know what the alt-right was or hadn’t read any of their texts—an interesting fact. So he had the same hesitancies to preserve deniability or distance.

Interestingly, it was Curtis Yarvin—the point person for so-called neoreaction, also a representative of “techno-fascism”—who knew Alamariu and clued his friend Michael Anton in about the existence of the book. That’s how Anton found out about it. But even in the articles he wrote in The American Mind, Anton professes the same ambivalence, because obviously there’s a juvenile quality and a transgressive, violent aspect to the treatise that he didn’t want to associate with absolutely—yet he did this.

As a result of this series of articles, Bronze Age Mindset became well known on the right. After the fact, I think Anton was somewhat explicit that he and Yarvin agreed this would be a mechanism to stimulate interest among young American males—potential Trump voters—to light a fire under them.

The Claremont Institute—Strauss did the same thing. The political philosopher Strauss—Claremont are known as West Coast Straussians—knew the way to perpetuate his legacy was to cultivate a younger generation of scholars and populate universities and colleges to spread his ideas.

Claremont fetishizes the classics and certain texts of Plato, etc. There is the ethos of the natural-rights republic; they try to reconcile Strauss’s doctrines with the American founders (Harry Jaffa, his book). They’re very astute in realizing that one of the keys to making Trump successful, already during the first presidential run, was to reach younger college-age men who felt challenged by sexual equality and feminism—especially in red states—to bring them into the political fight and get them to vote.

One can’t place too much accountability on a think tank, but Claremont certainly contributed in many ways to the success of MAGA.

Eli Karetny
I’m thinking about the samurai spirit—the supposed aristocratic spirit—and how that ties into the warrior ethos exemplified in BAP’s writings and posts about “brotherhoods of men.” You’ve written about how this idea is a vulgarized, sophomoric expression of ideas from the German conservative revolutionaries—specifically Jünger’s Forest Passage and Schmitt’s Partisan. Say a little more—where is he derivative of these German ideas?

Richard Wolin
What makes sense of Alamariu and Bronze Age Mindset for me—given my background in German right-wing thought of the 1920s—is that he’s an educated person who knows Leo Strauss and his German sources and certainly knows his Jünger quite well. This is a model for him.

One thing I’d like to point out, though, is this figure of the male grouping—in English we usually use the word Männerbund, society of men. This term comes from the pre–World War I German youth movement, which had separate groups for men and women—male bonding. The point of reference became the community of the trenches—the male bonding of the trenches. And then after the war, the Freikorps—veterans who couldn’t live without fighting—sought battles against communists in Eastern Europe, etc.

There was an allure that developed among them, and the aspirations of their generation kindled by Jünger’s glorification of combat—well, that was the Third Reich.

Quick footnote: the leading philosopher under National Socialism, who wrote a study of Nietzsche in 1931 (Nietzsche and the Will to Power), Alfred Baeumler—also an editor of Nietzsche’s papers and, up to a point, a good scholar (he did a Baudouin anthology that was highly regarded), a colleague of Heidegger’s—was, along with Rosenberg, in charge of National Socialist education. He wrote a lot about these male societies—the Männerbund—as the basis of German education. It’s a figure that’s ambivalent only in the sense that the education is also geared for war—marching, retreats with military and physical exercises are inherent in the notion of the Männerbund.

There’s a big literature on this in Germany. Jünger perpetuates it after the war in Der Waldgang (The Forest Passage). The protagonist is often translated as the “forest rebel”—“rebel” doesn’t belong there. Written in 1951, Jünger styles the forest man as a resistance fighter (Widerstandskämpfer). It conjures the July 20, 1944 anti-Hitler plot—but who are they resisting? They’re resisting the Federal Republic of Germany—German democracy. That’s the antagonist.

So it’s a seductive conjecture about going out beyond the corrupt metropolis—infused with industry and, according to German conservative thought, dominated by Jews—into German nature; but more than nature: the German forest, the Wald, with terrific lore going back to Arminius against the Roman legions in 9 AD (as told by Tacitus). That text was important for German nationalists starting in the seventeenth century—Tacitus’s praise of the rugged indomitability of the German forest dwellers and barbarians, their individualism, as opposed to the corrupt nature of Rome under Augustus—its moral slackness. This was an important ideological point of reference in the development of German nationalism.

Jünger plays on this concept—the German forest is very important; it still has mystical connotations (the Black Forest). At one point in the book, Jünger speculates that one forest man might encounter another and then another, and pretty soon you’ll have a movement—an oppositional movement of forest men to contest.

Of course, Germany is not only a federal republic at this point (as of 1949) but also occupied by—horror of horrors—American liberal technocrats. A fate worse than death, really. Everyone knows—so the trope goes—that Americans are kulturlos; they have no culture or civilization, practically. So this is a recipe for a long, slow death from a certain European standpoint—or a fake European standpoint.

Eli Karetny
So this brings us to Peter Thiel. I know I promised we’d be about an hour, and we’re running a little over, but it’s a fantastic conversation and I can’t let you go without addressing how this all leads to Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and the future of the MAGA movement. As you’ve written—and as has been noted—Peter Thiel has openly admitted that he finds some Bronze Age Pervert “solutions” tempting.

We had Damon Linker on the podcast last week, and he talked about Claremont—the Claremont Institute’s influence on Trump—BAP’s Thrasymachus-style misreading of Strauss (or Strauss’s Plato), and the links between Strauss and Schmitt. You see these connections differently than Linker does. Can you say a few words about these links and what they tell us about Thiel and Vance and what’s coming?

Richard Wolin
Sure. I know that Damon Linker, whose work I respect considerably, is working on a book on Strauss’s influence on the American right, and I think there’s an important and extensive story to be told there. I’ve seen articles he’s written on it. I did listen to the podcast, as I was instructed to do over the course of the week, and I am fascinated.

I went back and reread a 2007 essay by Peter Thiel—German-born—on the “Straussian moment,” which is actually written in the aftermath of 9/11. The point of commonality—you mentioned in the podcast, quite correctly, that Strauss wrote a very insightful critique of Schmitt in 1934, calling Schmitt a liberal. So there are differences between them. Schmitt allegedly said after the fact that Strauss had him dead to rights on some metaphysical questions.

But ultimately, to make a political decision or maneuver—this might not be as important, because we know from reading Plato that politics is a realm of compromise; we’re in the realm of the sensible, and we’re permitted to tell noble lies—like the myth of the metals—because the cave dwellers, the hoi polloi, won’t understand what the Forms or real truth are about. So we have to disguise the way we communicate these ultimate truths that can never be fully realized.

In the Seventh Letter, Plato eloquently says that Socrates owes it to the polis not to just enjoy the Forms and dwell in the ether of pure Forms because the polis nurtured him. He still owes the polis something—though it cost him his life.

I think Strauss and Schmitt agree on the state of exception and share a skepticism about liberalism. Schmitt coined the phrase das Politische, “the political,” that they share, and a skepticism about liberal democracy. Strauss was a witness to the undoing of liberal democracy at the hands of a far-right party, and we saw where that led.

Hans Morgenthau, fellow émigré, founded American realism in political science from similar experiences: you can’t trust international organizations, and liberalism is weak. Hence wehrhafte Demokratie—militant democracy—emerged in the ’30s: you have to treat antidemocratic parties differently than those who accept the constitutional value system (inscribed in the German constitution today).

Thiel’s reading of Schmitt and Strauss in this essay is suggestive. To cut to the chase: it’s a justification of the state of exception and secret services who operate beneath the radar to do their duty. He’s enamored of Schmitt’s notion of the state of exception and very critical—this is Thiel—of Western democracies’ response to 9/11: the lack of agreement. Even the Bush administration feels too timorous. He doesn’t think liberal democracy can stand up. He views it, I think, as a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West, although at certain points he hedges.

I did my homework—I reread the Thiel essay after a few years—and, shockingly, at one point he quotes the sensational conclusion of Spengler’s Decline of the West, which is an appeal for Caesarism—for a new Caesar or dictator to take over. That’s what we need. He leaves it in the original German—both fascinating and disturbing; a Straussian move. What if you can’t read German? An entire paragraph—no translation. He wants to be seen and not seen—to be understood by some and not others.

It’s strange for someone born in Germany—he came over at a young age, but obviously the family continued to speak German. The Thiel essay appears in an anthology called Politics and the Apocalypse. So this summons for a Caesar—it seems incredibly clairvoyant in light of the direction American politics has gone and Thiel’s current status, as you can read in newspaper articles, as a Republican Party kingmaker.

At Thiel’s behest—he funded J.D. Vance’s Senate campaign in Ohio three years ago, contributing $15 million. Apparently, he was an important voice in spring 2024 persuading Trump to advance Vance to the ticket that year, since Vance is a Thiel protégé. There are eerie precedents and correspondences. I’m sure Damon Linker will sort many of them out when he finishes his book. There’s a lot there.

Eli Karetny
Let’s finish with one final Thiel question. It’s interesting you bring up this Straussian dichotomy between being seen and not seen—presenting some piece of the story and withholding deeper truth. It’s been reported—The New Republic has a piece out—that he’s giving closed-door lectures about the Antichrist in prominent places (Harvard Club, elsewhere). He’s let it be known the talks are being given, but what’s being said is concealed or only revealed to the elect.

There’s something eerie here, but also important, about the theme of the Antichrist in tension with what he calls Armageddon—on opposite sides of some invisible line in his imagination. Can you speculate on the significance and connections to thinkers we’ve discussed? Are there elements of demonization of out-groups, like in replacement theory? Is this political maneuvering—aligning tech elites and Christian nationalists? A kind of politics as holy war? Is he “tempted,” like BAP, to declare war on the “bug man,” Nietzsche’s last man? Is this about existential crisis justifying suspension of the Constitution and acceleration toward regime change? What’s going on here?

Richard Wolin
Well, to my dismay, I haven’t been invited to any of these private seminars given by Peter Thiel, so it’s hard to know. But some of the themes—the Antichrist—are clearly related to a highly Schmittian figure: political theology. Schmitt addresses these themes in his later work, Nomos of the Earth, and in his diaries and notebooks (Glossarium), where he talks about the katechon from the New Testament and the Epistles of Paul.

The katechon is described as a presumably secular, this-worldly force that stays the hand or triumph of the Antichrist—he’s a delayer or prolonger—with the expectation that the parousia, the second coming of Christ, will emerge after this delay. Schmitt puts a lot of weight on this figure. He really didn’t dabble much in “political theology” after the 1922 work—the political situation changed—and he was excommunicated from the church in 1925 when he was divorced and couldn’t receive an annulment. But he returned to it, as did many on the German right, drawing from Christianity to oppose secularism and the modern world. Part of it was highly strategic.

It wouldn’t surprise me—given Peter Thiel’s background, especially his study with the French literary scholar at Stanford, René Girard (he organized a 2004 conference on Girard’s work on apocalypse and politics)—that there’s political theology involved. Girard’s theory is pessimistic; it dwells on the inevitability of mimesis, competition, conflict, and suggests that whereas Christianity and previous societies emphasized sacrifice—a sacrificial victim to expiate sins and resolve tensions—modern secular society lacks this capacity. That could be an argument for finding some other form of katechon.

I’m speculating, but there’s a very common—whether explicit or not—Spenglerian aspect in the American right: the alt-right and “hard right” (Alamariu, Curtis Yarvin) believe contemporary American liberal society is entirely decadent. You need strong medicine, strong measures, authority to confront decadence. This theme is also in Christian nationalism, which is coming back—especially with National Conservatism conferences Thiel has funded; J.D. Vance has been a speaker, as have postliberals such as Patrick Deneen (Regime Change, Why Liberalism Failed).

So this discourse of Untergang, decline—common among the conservative revolutionaries—reappears, with their bête noire, liberalism and democracy. And also the Schmittian motif of friend–enemy: “Tell me who your enemy is and I’ll tell you who you are.” You need enemies. Vance has referred to Schmitt and the friend–enemy distinction. Unsurprising, since Thiel has written on Schmitt.

So some present-day expressions or citations of this literature might be watered down and tailored to circumstance, but it’s disturbing given the political allegiances and orientation of the conservative revolutionaries we discussed earlier—that they be considered valuable touchstones of political life and “virtue,” to use a Straussian word. There’s potentially a lot there—and it is disturbing. Wow.

Eli Karetny
Thank you very much, Professor Wolin. This has been a fascinating discussion. Thank you for joining us on International Horizons, and we look forward to seeing you in and around the CUNY Graduate Center.

Richard Wolin
Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it, Eli. Thanks for your questions.