Daniel Friberg and Metapolitics in Action

This chapter discusses the life and work of Daniel Friberg, who takes a leading part in running a range of online media. Friberg’s main impact has been his implementation of metapolitics. Distinguished by his strategy and method rather than ideological inventions, Friberg advanced his career through a series of outreach, rebranding, and socialization initiatives. The products of this metapolitical activism include multiple newspapers and magazines, a publishing house, and online social media. By the 2010s these projects were replacing skinheadism as the social center of a fractious and sectarian Nordic radical nationalism. This unifying function has since been at the forefront of collaboration between American and European white activists.

Bat Ye’or and Eurabia

This chapter discusses the life and work of Bat Ye’or (Gisèle Littman), who is widely seen as the doyenne of “Eurabia”-literature. This comes in different varieties and formulations, but in Bat Ye’or’s rendering refers to an ongoing secretive conspiracy which involves both the European Union and Muslim-majority countries in North Africa and the Middle East, aimed at establishing Muslim control over a future Europe or “Eurabia.” Though Bat Ye’or did not coin the term “Eurabia,” she can be credited with having popularized the concept through quasi-academic titles such as Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis and Europe, Globalization and the Coming Universal Caliphate. Through its dissemination on various “counter-jihadist” websites and in the work of the Norwegian counter-jihadist blogger Fjordman, her work inspired the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. She also has long-standing relations with Serbian ultranationalists, the Israeli Far Right, and various radical Right activists in Western Europe and the US.

Patrick J. Buchanan and the Death of the West

This chapter discusses the life and work of Patrick J. Buchanan, who served in three US administrations before making quixotic bids for the US presidency. He was the principal standard-bearer for paleoconservatism, and he popularized a form of politics structured around the white working-class that anticipated the 2016 Trump campaign. Buchanan’s campaigns challenged long-established elites and stressed faith in an American nation based upon a distinct white, northern European heritage. Seen thus, the nation has primacy over the market and is based upon a shared ethnicity rather than on universal principles. This starting point led Buchanan toward the white identitarianism that underpinned The Death of the West in which he contended that the nation was threatened by mass nonwhite immigration. Nonetheless, Buchanan’s efforts to popularize paleoconservative claims were out of step with political time. It took Trump’s campaign to bring the ideas associated with paleoconservatism to the forefront of politics.

Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel

This chapter discusses the life and work of Ernst Jünger, who was part of a strain in modern German conservatism that tested the limits of modernity and Enlightenment rationality. He catapulted to fame as a young man on the basis of his World War I memoirs, In Storms of Steel, which made him part of the antidemocratic forces of the Weimar Republic, but he retreated into the inner emigration during the Third Reich. After 1950 he lived a reclusive life but published a stream of essays and books and an impressive diary that chronicled almost four decades of life with sharp observations on a wide range of topics. He was a cultural pessimist who thought that the rise of a unifying planetary technology and the loss of local culture meant that we were entering into a posthistorical world of fragmentation, and new forms of cultural and political tyranny.

Oswald Spengler and the Decline of the West

This chapter discusses the life and work of Oswald Spengler, whose fame is based on his The Decline of the West, a monumental historical study that endeavored to show that all human civilizations live through similar phases of evolution. Spengler also dabbled with politics and attempted, in a series of essays, to promote the idea of a conservative renaissance in Germany. The rise of National Socialism put Spengler in a situation of ideological opposition and, after he criticized the regime because of its racial theory and its populism, made him a persona non grata until his death in 1937. After the Second World War, Spengler’s elitism and expectation of a German-dominated Europe dominated the reception of his work. This somewhat masked the complexity of his thought, which prefigures such modern debates as the criticism of technology, ecological issues, interreligious questions, the rise of Asia, and prehistoric human evolution.

Alain de Benoist and the New Right

This chapter discusses the life and work of Alain de Benoist, a prolific French political thinker and the leading figure of the school of thought known as the New Right, launched in 1968. De Benoist and his New Right are proponents of the right to difference (often understood as ethnopluralism or ethnodifferentialism) and a pagan European identity with roots in the Indo-European peoples who migrated in the fifth millennium BC. His main focus today is the criticism of globalization and the hegemony of capital, but there is a debate on the continuity with, or breakaway from, his former association with the radical Right.

Richard B. Spencer and the Alt Right

This chapter discusses the life and work of Richard B. Spencer, the president of the National Policy Institute, a US white-nationalist think tank. A few weeks after the 2016 presidential election, at a National Policy Institute conference, Spencer famously called “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” and some of his supporters gave the Nazi salute. Spencer is self-described as an identitarian, and is the inventor of the term “Alt Right,” which he coined to differentiate his views from mainstream American conservatism. Spencer is the leading communicator of the Alt Right message rather than its leading intellectual. He has found his niche as Alt Right provocateur and media spokesman. The mass media line up to interview him, and university students are listening to his message.

Jared Taylor and White Identity

This chapter discusses the life and work of Jared Taylor, the leading American advocate of “race realism” and the claim that white people have legitimate and important racial interests that need to be both better articulated and publicly affirmed. Through his American Renaissance magazine, annual conferences, and videos, Taylor has set the intellectual standard for highbrow white racial advocacy and what is variously called “White nationalism,” “White identitarianism,” or simply the perspective of the “alternative” or “dissident” Right. Taylor’s thinking combines conventional conservative ideas regarding family and community, classical liberal and libertarian ideas regarding freedom of association and basic property and economic rights, and ideas championing ethnoracial homogeneity within nations and disdain for multiculturalism. His arguments are drawn from both historical experience and contemporary sociobiology.

Paul Gottfried and Paleoconservatism

This chapter discusses the life and work of Paul Gottfried, who is known as the founder of Paleoconservatism, a reformulation of the Right that advocated aspects of the conservatism of Edmund Burke, southern agrarian writers, and the National Review as it was before neoconservatism. His criticism of neoconservatives focused on their belief in the universal imperative of categories and ideas that led them to therefore disparage any kind of historicism. Gottfried maintained both Platonic and biblical categories in his conceptions of truth, beauty, justice, and revelation. He became the foremost critic of the Republican Party and neoconservatism. From 1999 until 2005 he expanded his criticisms of political ideology in the US and Europe. Since 2008 Gottfried has adopted the label of right-wing pluralist and allows most conservative dissidents into his organization, the H. L. Mencken Club, which became associated with the Alt Right during the 2016 presidential election.

Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Identity

This chapter discusses the life and work of Carl Schmitt, a German legal scholar and professor of law who developed a constitutional theory that declared the liberal and parliamentary state under the rule of law to be outdated, a theory he used to justify rule by presidential decree in the Weimar Republic and then National Socialism. As a legal scholar, Schmitt avoided taking strong positions in terms of theological or philosophical claims, but his friend-enemy distinction provided a counterrevolutionary, apocalyptic, and anti-Semitic language and logic. Schmitt exerted a strong influence as a legal scholar and political commentator. He had a close friendship with Ernst Jünger; he argued for an “authoritarian” transformation of the Weimar Republic; and after 1933, he gave strong support to National Socialism and was influential in forming the Nazi understanding of the law and in the Nazi coordination [Gleichschaltung] of jurisprudence.