Philosophy and the Far Right—2

Why are some political philosophy Ph.D.s eager to enact far-right political programs?

Far-right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin at the Civilizations of the Eurasian Area meeting on February 26, 2018 at the University of Tehran. (Fars Media Corporation; Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, Wikimedia)

In Part 1 of this post, published a week ago, I recounted how my graduate education in political philosophy, undertaken with students of Leo Strauss, trained me to think about the relation between the two elements in the name of that field: politics and philosophy. Emphasizing a lesson from Plato’s Republic, my teachers argued that a would-be philosopher needs to seek self-knowledge about his or her political convictions the better to ascend beyond them, through dialectical questioning, toward the truth about “the whole” within which politics takes place.

But my peers and I didn’t just read Plato in graduate school. We also read Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and other radical modern thinkers who understood the relation between philosophy and politics very differently. Instead of examining their own political hopes in order to transcend them, these modern writers longed for a total transformation of politics and society following from their own philosophic ideas.

That placed their work in considerable tension with the Platonic emphasis on working one’s way up and out of politics. Yet we didn’t dismiss Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other modern thinkers as dangerous fools. Instead, we read and thought about them deeply—while dismissing their more extreme political positions as almost certainly misguided and indisputably imprudent.

In Part 1, I also speculated that some of this rather blasé response to the political views of these thinkers was a function of my graduate education taking place during the 1990s, when liberalism seemed triumphant at home and abroad. In that context, outrageous political stances held little allure and so didn’t seem especially dangerous.

That is no longer the case today.

I have no reason to think these modern thinkers are now taught (usually by the same Straussian professors) in a different way than they were when I was school. Yet the lessons at least some students are taking from these texts have shifted quite a lot since then. In a handful of noteworthy cases, people have ended up not just familiar with the writings of these modern radicals but fully devoted to enacting a far-right political program inspired by them.

What follows in this and one additional forthcoming post are brief portraits of four of these figures. Their stories leave open the possibility that my hypothesis about the changed historical context since the mid-1990s is in fact correct—that it is the primary variable that explains why the embrace of political-philosophical radicalism is more common today than it was when I was a student. But in Part 3, I will also suggest the possibility of another, more troubling source of the change.

Michael Millerman

Millerman earned his Ph.D. in 2018 from the University of Toronto, where he attended classes with Straussian Clifford Orwin, who also served on Millerman’s dissertation committee. Once it became clear to members of the committee that Millerman’s dissertation would be used, in part, to elevate and promote the political ideas of the far-right Russian thinker Aleksandr Dugin, Orwin and other members of the committee resigned.

In the end, Millerman successfully defended the dissertation and received his Ph.D. after other members of the Toronto faculty, including Ruth Marshall of the religious studies department, rose to his defense on grounds of liberal toleration for dissenting views. (Marshall has since publicly denounced Millerman over his continued defense and whitewashing of Dugin’s ideas, which include full-throated encouragement of Vladimir Putin’s brutal, imperialistic war against Ukraine.)

Of the four figures highlighted in this and the following post, I have the most conflicted feelings about Millerman. I know him entirely from his presence on Twitter, where he devotes considerable time to promoting an online school of political philosophy that he founded as an alternative to seeking a traditional academic position. From what I’ve seen of his recorded classes on Plato, Strauss, Heidegger, and Dugin, he’s a gifted teacher with a genuine love of ideas.

Yet he also regularly expresses disgust at liberalism and seems most passionately attracted to the far-right political ideas of Heidegger and Dugin—and especially to the most eschatological aspects of their thought.

Both thinkers are prone to describe the present-day world of liberal modernity as standing on a precipice, and both fashion themselves prophets heralding its imminent fall. From out of the ruins of our world’s collapse will come, according to Heidegger, “another beginning,” by which he means a wholly new epoch of Being, the first one since the time of the pre-Socratics, with new gods, a new constellation of fundamental concepts and categories of thought, a new construal of human existence and meaning, and a new morality and politics.

Dugin accepts and expands on this political apocalypticism, going so far as to suggest the outlines of a “fourth political theory” of the future. (Millerman is co-translator of Dugin’s book by this name, published by Arktos Media, which has been called the world’s largest distributor of far-right literature.) Millerman strongly denies there is anything fascistic about Dugin’s thought. The “fourth political theory” is supposed to succeed the three alternatives of liberalism, communism, and fascism, after all.

Yet those familiar with Heidegger’s highly selective reckoning with his own Nazi commitments will recognize that Dugin’s political prophesy of a political fourth way sounds remarkably similar to the highly idealized form of National Socialism Heidegger thought he was embracing in 1933—the “inner truth and greatness” of which he never seems to have repudiated.

Darren Beattie

Beattie earned his Ph.D. at Duke University in 2016, writing a dissertation on Heidegger under Straussians Michael Gillespie and Ruth Grant. (As I explained at length in Part 1, there is no reason at all to assume they, or any other Straussian professor, actively encouraged their students to follow Heidegger’s, or any other far-right thinker’s, political lead.) Soon after finishing up at Duke, Beattie came to work as a speechwriter in the Trump White House, perhaps by way of Stephen K. Bannon. (On the back cover of Benjamin R. Teitelbaum’s War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers, Beattie is pictured at a 2018 dinner hosted by Bannon and attended by close confidantes of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.)

Before long, Beattie was fired from the administration (after refusing to resign) for attending and delivering a paper at an H.L. Mencken Club conference at which several prominent white nationalists were present. Beattie subsequently founded Revolver.News, a muckraking and conspiracy-mongering website that Trump has praised for supporting his baseless accusations of election fraud. At the tail end of his administration, Trump disregarded the earlier firing and rewarded Beattie for his loyalty by appointing him to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. (President Joe Biden subsequently demanded Beattie’s resignation from the commission, along with five others.)

In addition to promoting election-fraud conspiracies on his website and in frequent appearances on Tucker Carlson’s prime time program on Fox News during the weeks and months following the January 6 insurrection, Beattie also contributed to the events that fateful afternoon with a series of tweets in which he repeatedly demanded that Black Lives Matter and several prominent black figures (including Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina) “learn their place” and “take a knee to MAGA.”

More recently, Beattie has taken to directing derisive scorn at anyone who dares to disagree with him online. My own (minimal) interactions with him on Twitter have included a cordial enough airing of differences over an important book about Strauss and Heidegger, and, more recently, a testy back and forth over whether my “low status” makes any interaction between us automatically insulting to him (when it would instead be more fitting for me to “fetch” him a Coke, which is what someone with my last name is “born to do”).

All told, Beattie appears to be following Bannon’s example of practicing bullshit politics as a way of advancing the political fortunes of the far right. Whether he was inspired to pursue this path by his study of Heidegger and other figures in the history of political philosophy, or if he came to it despite or apart from that study, remains uncertain. What is clear is that nothing in Beattie’s education has disabused him from political extremism—and that he’s well positioned for a top White House job in any future restoration of the Trump presidency.

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In Part 3 of this essay, which should appear on Friday, I will point to two additional examples of philosophically inspired political radicalism and then close by reflecting on what conclusions we should draw from this shift in how advanced graduate students are responding to the far-right ideas they encounter in their studies.