Bronze Age... Ennui?

Highlights of "BAP"s Red Scare interview

This post, even more-so than my review of David Samuels’ Obama essay and interview, is mostly a work of curation. Not much original commentary will be offered, but hopefully my extraction of laboriously-transcribed quotes on a theme from a wide-ranging discussion will be of reader service.

The Age of Nietzsche

This week, among other happenings which have prompted takes on my part, in a first-time podcast summit of luminaries in “the alt-right” and “so-called fascist avant garde” milieu, “Bronze Age Pervert” joined the Red Scare’s Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/87677520

Bronze, or BAP, is a long-time “poaster” in “frog” and now alt-right online circles; I won’t pretend to have anything like familiarity with his work preceding this interview. Despite his recent targeting by many intellectually “serious” regime water-carriers, it is difficult to discern in his daily work anything besides aesthetic sensibilities; and I have not read his book (“Bronze Age Mindset”). Anna and Dasha, for their part, are a bohemian duo offering insight and humor from a politically ambiguous posture which has shifted from left-adjacent (Dasha first achieved internet notoriety as “Sailor Socialism” in an Infowars clip which semi-accurately templates her roll as a foil on the pod (“Do you know Venezuela?” “Heard of it.”)) to something more like nihilism.

I haven’t read much of Nietzsche, either — since it becomes clear when one reads him, that his audience is a superior being, and his advice and sayings are deliberately not practical for societies of any type; they are apolitical. (At 2.00 hours, BAP makes the same case that his own book and the media backlash has over-exposed Nietzsche’s thought beyond an audience capable of having his work transmitted to them.)

But apparently we are nonetheless in his age, in the same way the post-Classical era was in the age of Plato (as BAP puts it, at 1.04), and it is absurd to fight against him. It is always invigorating to hear bold claims, and BAP’s elevator pitch for Nietzsche is no exception, so I will quote it.

I am honored, and I am humble, unlike other so-called writers, and people who fancy themselves philosophers and theorists, which I would never call myself. I’m happy to say, I’m just a popularizer of Nietzsche, because I’ve felt since I was sixteen — I first ran into Nietzsche I was sixteen years old, I read some of these same books you’re talking about now. It made me very angry at first. I was actually a hardcore Marxist at sixteen. Not a mainline Marxist, a Platonic Marxist — you know, there’s communism and Plato and so on. And it made me very angry at first, Nietzsche, but then seduced me slowly. He’s a very seductive writer. I have always felt he is a prophet of modern world, and includes — nobody since him has managed to exceed him. And the people who have tried, like Heidegger and Leo Strauss, and there have been quite a few others throughout 20th Century, who thought they could criticize and exceed Nietzsche. And their criticisms are always I think are pathetic. And we live in the age of Nietzsche in the way that let’s say people after Plato at some point after some centuries after Plato, because his influence creeped along, lived in the age of Plato. You know, Christianity is the age of Plato. And so it’s absurd to try to fight Nietzsche, against him. I’m happy to be his popularizer. I don’t pretend to be anything more than a popularizer of Nietzsche and a shitpoaster and a humble internet shitpoaster online, that’s all.

This hopefully suffices for an introduction. It is a charming interview as usual for Red Scare, and the commentary regarding the cultural allure of the left (“the most culturally acceptable source of radicalism after 1945”) (1.06), the leftist bowdlerization of Nietzsche in Anglosphere academia after 1945 until the internet permitted a literal interpretation of his writing (1.13), the dull vision of life of “eugenicon” and other edgy conservative commentators who lament Black antisociality (0.29, .41) followed by obviously controversial, far-flinging comments on Black political nullity (.37), and finally 19th Century avant-garde art as a philosophical and religious exercise and why Marxism can never be a basis for art (1.40), are highlights. If it is worth 3 hours of your time it is worth a $5 one month unlock at their Patreon.

The two right wings

At various points, BAP laments the need to employ the term “right-wing,” due to the particularly American confusion of moralizing conservatism for right-wing thought. He denounces or dismisses conservatives and online “trads” as people he would not get along with (and vice-versa). At 1.33, he gives his definition (on request) of “hard right, in contrast to the modern, mainstream right”:

[B] Yeah, [the association of Andrew Tate with the hard right] is pathetic, and of course before that, they looked at George Bush and thought he was Hitler. By the way, not that I support Hitlorr, but Hitlorr carried a copy of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation in World War I in his knapsack, whereas other German soldiers were just by rote assigned a copy of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in their knapsack in World War I.

It’s very different, it’s very different, which is why I don’t like the word “right wing” because it’s got nothing to do with let’s say Rush Limbaugh or the Republican Party’s platform of flag, cross, country, family platitudes.

[D] But when you say a “hard right philosopher,” what do you mean?

[B] I mean that they saw human life as fundamentally hierarchical, and, opposed to what we talked about earlier, the Marxist vision of a completely homogenized, universal, egalitarian state where people go fishing in the morning, painting at night, for no particular reason. Whereas this other vision of man saw mankind as maybe a transitional state between something lower and something higher, let me leave it at that. And they criticized especially bourgeois liberal modernity a shop-keeper’s regime, the place where nothing great happened, nothing great could ever happen again.

If you look at Nietzsche’s particular criticism of liberalism, he says it’s a system of herd animalization. That liberalism only means something as long as it’s fighting against monarchy, and that’s only because it’s actually fighting. Because it’s promoting the virtues of the warrior. Whereas when it wins, it leads to cutting down every tall mountain, herd animalization, the Englishman’s comfort-based shopkeeper’s morality.

In contrast, at 1.50, BAP characterizes American conservatism as

obviously a failure — they’ve done it for 50 years or whatever the hell it is, and it’s not produced anything. That’s nothing. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

This comment would appear to require active interpretation, which as a non-reader of BAP I am incapable to provide. Conservatism isn’t meant to produce [novel] ideas, on the face of things. Perhaps BAP means that American conservatism has failed to reply effectively to leftism, to stave off progressive assaults. Perhaps that it hasn’t found a way to keep going an intellectual flame bright enough to produce any must-read books. I can only guess.

On both possibilities, one could counter that the gradually strengthening intellectual and legal school of originalism has made inroads. In a way, the projects of originalism and repudiating the Civil Rights Act, however much they may fit comfortably within the wardrobe of Limbaugh-esque pop-conservatism, recall the “fighting liberalism” that prevailed before the death of the monarchy.

At all events, I agree that it is unfortunate that both conservatism and proto-fascism are described as “right-wing” in American understanding, but I find that both systems offer avenues of attack against the dull, Jacobin regimes of antiracism and biosecurity that proved in 2020 to be inevitable end-points of the liberal project. As mentioned in my disclaimer the other day, I think different societies should be allowed to pursue different models in dismantling liberalism, and that includes both “unproductive” conservatism and more radical, heroic systems. For this reason, I have tried to tie my criticism of secularism, science, and scientism to both “right-wing” projects.

Nonetheless, having declared conservatism useless, BAP continues:

I’m talking about possibly resurrecting the spirit of this other avant-garde that came out of Nietzsche from 1900 on, until it was crushed in 1945.

I’m not defending the Nazis, by the way, but because they took over at the leadership of various other strains that came under their brand, and then when they got crushed, it was as if European society and really all mankind, excised half of its face out, like cut off half of its face, so as not to be associated with Nazis.

And that half of its face was everything having to do with beauty, and strength, and mankind’s possibly reaching beyond this tawdry day-to-day life.

No prospect for fascism

At 1.23, BAP expresses his view that the Nietzschean revival, or whatever one wants to call what is going on in twitter and Manhattan and Miami, has no possible future as a “serious political project. That time is gone.” At 1.26, regarding the pseudo-intellectual attacks on his work that have emerged from the woodwork of late, he says:

Something about the so-called modern intellectual that actually my friend City Bureaucrat has this wonderful article your audience should look up called Ideologies of Delayed Informatization which is about precisely this kind of intellectual, who seeks a pat on the head from the establishment so-called intelligentsia, and the way they think they get that is by denouncing these “vulgar sophists” like me, like you, and so-on, who are spreading dangerous ideas in society.

Let me just say something about, and it’s not merely self-protective, about so-called fascism. Fascism is a non-starter today, it’s not, it doesn’t, there’s no prospect for it. There’s no prospect for any Nazi party; there’s no prospect for any fascist party. If you take the whole online far right, whatever you want to call it, it’s at most 70, I would say that’s a high estimate, 70,000 people worldwide. […] It’s not enough to run a party, even in a European country with proportional parliamentary representation.

It’s enough, however, to change culture, to change ideas, and so-forth, and that’s where its strength could maybe lie.

On top of that, my own focus, a friend of mine said, I took it as a great compliment — you improve on Nietzsche because Nietzsche had hopes that his ideas could be done through a state system. That they could be acheived through a statist system. And the whole fascist, so-called, Nazi you want to say, project in the 20th Century, was very statist, was state-based. I don’t have, again, I’m not saying this to protect myself, I don’t have any political or state-based ambitions at all ‘cause I’m not stupid, it can’t be done, anything that way.

All I’ve done is taken the core, as I see it, of the idea of Nietzsche and mixed it with my reading of antiquity, of certain ancient Greek philosophers, and I am trying, I guess, to bring to people’s mind some truths forgotten and suppressed by modern propaganda.

That said, that said, these people that you’re talking about, the midgets attacking us in these pieces, they make a mistake. They think wrongly that the avant-garde so-called is a fundamentally left-wing phenomenon. The truth if you look before 1950 especially is very much the opposite. Most of the great artistic, literary names, before 1950, were men of the right or of the hard right.

(More comments to the same effect appear at 2.03.)

I would imagine BAP has a good sense of what is politically possible in Europe. And, for myself, I agree nothing in the neighborhood of a fascist revolution is remotely possible in the US or anywhere else in the Anglosphere.

And yet, the use of “merely” in “not merely self-protective,” if read rigorously, means we should understand these disclaimers as nonetheless being self-protective. But BAP may simply have chosen this construction to avoid a “doth protest too much” response. The listener, no matter how insistent his language, must make up their own mind whether his declaration that fascism has no future is sincere or a preemptive legal defense against future state attack; so he has chosen not to be insistent. But in fact (we could imagine) he means his comments on the political futility of the alt right project entirely sincerely.

In that regard, if fascism has no future, if the hard right cannot reanimate in European politics anywhere, just what is the political future of the now spiritless West? If BAP believes in a revival of a hierarchical philosophy in art, how can that not result in a displacement of the egalitarian political systems that have infested the democratic West? And so in this light we have his equally dismal predictions for leftism.

No prospect for leftism

Timestamped somewhere near 2.05:

[B] Maybe we are over the target, so-called.

[D] What do you mean?

[B] I just mean that the glut of these articles coming out speaks to a desperation on the part of the people who imagine themselves as gatekeepers to thought, and see perhaps that maybe hegemonic leftists’ chokehold on thought in the United States is about to break sometime soon, soonish, but that could be in the next decade or two, I don’t know.

[D] I think it’s kind of already broken.

[B] The left has castrated itself, you know. I know through other sources that, for example, the big fashion houses in Europe and so on are completely exasperated with the so-called woke thing, with the politicization, the moralism. And the fact is the left has castrated itself because it’s rejected beauty, it’s rejected anything higher than mere life. Which is always an inherent possibility in the left — but they took their own bait, in a way. And so now there’s this hole, I don’t think they can stop it. I don’t think they can stop anything from filling this hole.

[D] Yeah, that’s true, but what happens next?

Here, Anna* interrupts for a snack break.

*All above accreditations to Anna or Dasha are subject to the No One Can Tell the Ladies’ Voices Apart Easily rule.

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