Philip Sandifer - Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

Neoreaction a Basilisk

Essays On and Around the Alt-Right

Philip Sandifer

Copyright 2017 Philip Sandifer

No Laws for the Lion and Many Laws for the Oxen is Liberty 2017 Philip Sandifer and Jack Graham

Published by Eruditorum Press

All rights reserved.

All images are either public domain or used under the principle of fair use.

To the ghosts and the witches

First and foremost, this book would not exist were it not for David Gerard, to whom it was basically serialized in e-mail as I wrote it, and who performed the original copyedit on the manuscript (Alison Jane Campbell has done a second pass since). David was an invaluable resource in pointing me towards the sources I needed to make the argument, hone the jokes, and generally making this entire mad caper work.

Thanks also to Jack, Sam, Jane, and Alex for podcasting about the book with me and giving me a variety of insights that helped in fine-tuning it, and to Veronica for her helpful comments on some of the early sections. Also thanks to Emily Stewart for her help on My Vagina is Haunted, and to James Taylor for his usual brilliance on the cover.

The book was also improved and refined (as well as promoted) by the many people who reviewed and talked about the manuscript during the Kickstarter, some sympathetically, some not so much. Particular thanks to both Nick Land and Eliezer Yudkowsky, who fell on opposite sides of that divide.

Speaking of whom, although many of the sources that shaped the book are obvious from reading it, one important one is not. A major push in writing it was Park MacDougalds fine essay The Darkness Before the Right, which introduced me to the bewildering rabbit hole that is Nick Land. A nod also to Kieron Gillen, who linked MacDougalds piece on Twitter; this is all technically his fault.

Finally, my profound thanks to the 708 Kickstarter backers who made this book possible. My gratitude is immense, and I hope it lives up to your expectations.

When I started this book, it was fun. An opportunity to connect some philosophical ideas Id been playing with, using some very silly right-wing nutjobs who were nevertheless kind of interesting in a pathological way. The book came in a joyful burst of late-night writing sessions, holed up in a candle-lit room tapping away on my laptop, letting it all pour out of some strange and liminal space I still dont entirely understand.

Then everything went to shit, and suddenly a book about far-right nutjobs stopped being quite as much fun and became somewhat more important.

This is not the first book on the alt-right to come out, although the main essay was finished in May of 2016 and distributed to Kickstarter backers shortly thereafter. But the bulk of books (and articles) on the matter so far have focused on two questions that I admit to finding relatively uninteresting. The first is how the alt-right came to happen. Its possible to write intelligently on this topic as a matter of historyDavid Neiwerts Alt-America does an excellent job of tracing the precise evolution of the far-right from the mid-90s to the present day, for instance. But ultimately the question is fairly easy to answer: far-right movements arise when the established order starts to crack. (This is also a good time to weigh in on the terminology alt-right, which some have, not without reason, criticized as masking the fact that were talking about a neo-nazi movement. This is true, but equally, no iteration of far-right uprisings is entirely like another, and while historical comparison is essential, so is having a specific term for the enemy were fighting today. Alt-right has become the consensus term, and there are higher priorities than complaining that we should have picked a better one.) This does not mean, as far too many commentators have suggested, that the people at Trump rallies making Hitler salutes are motivated by economic anxiety. Theyre motivated by racism. Duh. But their racism is emboldened by a political order that visibly has no answers, is running just to keep still, and not even managing that. The path to the mainstream that this particular batch of racists took is worth documenting as a matter of historical record, but the question invites missing the forest for the trees.

The cautionary tale in this regard is Angela Nagles appalling Kill All Normies, which takes the jaw-droppingly foolish methodology of simply reporting all of the alt-rights self-justifications as self-evident truths so as to conclude that the real reason neo-nazis have been sweeping into power is because were too tolerant of trans people. From this spectacularly ill-advised premise Nagle makes the inevitable but even worse conclusion that the obvious thing to do is for the left to abandon all commitment to identity politics (except maybe feminism which, as a white cis woman, Nagle has at least some time for).

This brings us to our second relatively uninteresting question, which is what to do about the alt-right. In this case the answer is even easier and more obvious than the first: you smash their bases of power, with violent resistance if necessary. If you want a more general solution that also takes care of the factors that led to a bunch of idiot racists being emboldened in the first place you drag all the billionaires out of their houses and put their heads on spikes.

But the ease of answer reveals the deeper problem with whats to be done as an angle on the alt-right. We all know whats to be done. Nazis have been the go-to example for people arguing why sometimes violent resistance is necessary for decades. But in the absence of a credible resistance that consists of more than hashtags and an inexplicable propensity to take Louise Mensch seriously the knowledge of what we should do is fairly useless. Were not doing it, and I am to say the least skeptical that screaming for fucks sake, just bash the fucking nazis skulls in already for the next 350 pages would magically kickstart a mass uprising.

Instead this book asks a different question: if winning is off the table, what should we do instead? Because the grim reality is that things look really fucking bad. Ecological disaster is looming, the geopolitical order is paralyzed, and were not putting nearly enough billionaire heads on spikes to plausibly change it. What then, is left?

This is not a question with straightforward answers. Straightforwardness is for victors who get statues and ballads. The defeated operate from shadows and hidden places, and the legacies they leave are cryptic and secret. This book behaves accordingly, and there are limits to what I am willing or indeed able to explain. Nevertheless, a brief overview.

There are seven essays in this book. They do not directly build on one another or trace a single argument, and are united more by approach and philosophical concerns than by topic per se. The main essay is the title piece, and is the one I am most invested in allowing to stand on its own terms. That said, it focuses on two specific strands of thought within the alt-right: their own grappling with eschatology, and their roots in silicon valley tech culture (the latter of which is probably the thing that most distinguishes them from previous far-right movements). It takes as its starting point the work of neoreactionary thinkers Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land, along with Eliezer Yudkowsky (who is not on the alt-right but has a variety of interesting links to the topic). Its ending point is considerably more oblique.

The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate moves the focus from the philosophical and intellectual aspects of the alt-right to its blunt and practical end of vicious online harassment campaigns, looking at, as the title suggests, Gamergate, which in hindsight is increasingly clear as a watershed moment in their ascent.