One of the most dangerous clichés about the far right is that it appeals exclusively to stupid people. But the truth is far more unsettling.
In The Anatomy of Fascism, historian Robert Paxton describes fascism as little more than a set of “mobilizing passions” that appealed to intellectuals, if at all, only in its early stages. Paxton insists that fascism was “an affair of the gut more than of the brain,” a characterization it’s easy to sympathize with when you think of how often fascists talk out of their ass. Even where the far right does try and speak articulately, many find the results underwhelming. The sociologist Michael Mann once sneered that fascist ideology was at best the playpen of the “lesser intelligentsia.”
Anyone who has suffered through the collected works of Curtis Yarvin or Auron MacIntyre will concede that stupid people are wildly overrepresented on the far-right end of the political commentariat. But it is simply untrue to describe the far right as uniformly thoughtless.
A Socratic error that has long persisted in our culture is that intelligence, education, and moral insight at least reinforce one another where they aren’t causally related. Satan was the world’s first theologian. In many depictions, most notably in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, he’s presented as a charismatic and intellectually ingenious character. The desire to create a world of pure intellect for himself is part of what drives him to make the world his own. Likewise, from the beginning, plenty of thoughtful, even profound, people have defended monstrous evils. For the Left to be effective in combatting a resurgent far right it is crucial to understand it without self-flattering illusions about our exclusive intellectual prowess. One of the finest works to dissolve these illusions is Thomas Mann’s opus Doctor Faustus.
Born in Lübeck, Germany in 1875, Mann grew up in a comfortably bourgeois family at the height of Otto von Bismarck’s German…
Auteur: Matt McManus
