Against the New Reaganism - Part 1 of 2

Vitalism and the triune imperial godhead of Neo-Reaganism

In a recent critical appraisal of Bronze Age Pervert’s Nietzschean philosophy, John Ehrett sets up a dichotomy between the “vitalism” of the “dissident right” and the triune structure of Reagan ideology: “free-market economics, military interventionism, and religious conservatism.” Ehrett’s article includes a criticism of another review of BAP’s philosophy by a National Review author named Jack Butler, which criticism Butler rapidly responded to in the National Review.

I intend to review Ehrett’s review of BAP’s vitalism in this part 1 before turning in part 2 to Butler’s review of Ehrett’s review of his own review of BAP’s vitalism. This places my review in the most prestigious section of the human centipede of literary conservative midwittery.

Overview

In this article I wrote about the sociological forces compelling representatives of institutionalized versions of certain dogmas like Marxism and Christianity to lash out against anonymous internet culture. I observed in that article that although these representatives harbored widely divergent views, they nonetheless settled into criticizing the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche to express their hostility toward internet culture. In general, the criticisms blamed Nietzsche as the genealogical source of everything popular and distasteful online, reflecting these authors’ tendency to believe that heretical texts are the primary or sole causes behind naughty internet culture.

In a later article on Damon Linker and Straussianism, I discovered another sociological force at work in these clashes between respectability and internet lunacy. I observed that respectable Straussians indirectly benefited from their clique spinning off uncouth and immoral sophists and Machiavellians, because it brought notoriety to Straussianism while affording them an opportunity to affect Socratic moral superiority and detachment.

The latest slate of BAP articles from conservative writers reflects both of these analyses, in my opinion. The popularity of BAP’s sophist persona and the anti-Christian ideas that can be attributed to Nietzsche threaten comfortable religious apparatchiks, but they also present a favorable opportunity for apparatchiks to legitimize their station and hide the history of failures and betrayals that mark the institutions they represent. In the context of Reaganism, this means it allows them to use the “religious conservatism” leg to minimize the other legs of the Reaganist ideological stool.

Although couched in the rhetoric of religious condemnation arising from a conflict between Christianity and Nietzschean vitalism or paganism, these articles essentially are defenses of the political regime of Reaganism, which to be sure includes a form of religiosity, albeit a generalized one subordinate to political interests (sometimes known as the civil religion).

Reaganism was of course blindsided and bulldozed in 2016 by internet culture and Trump’s coalition of downscale and forgotten Americans. Thus it is appropriate to classify authors like Butler and Ehrett as “Neo-Reagans.”

I should add that I don’t have a problem with Reagan himself. By all accounts the late President’s miraculous total victory had the same energy as the 2016 election and even promised similar reforms like protectionism and immigration control. What I oppose in Reaganism and neo-Reaganism is the vague set of platitudes that institutional conservatives developed to exploit Reagan’s popularity without implementing his views, and which can be summarized in terms of the triune structure Ehrett described in his article.

Each of Ehrett and Butler’s criticisms presents a parade of horribles flowing from the adoption (or in Ehrett’s case, attempted adoption) of Nietzschean views to prove the necessity of sometimes-Christian, sometimes-Judeo-Christian beliefs and values. The parade of horribles is an essential tool of the assaulted intellectual because it allows him to position himself and his institution as morally superior to his opponent while neglecting the obligation to refute the propositions that supposedly entail the parade of horribles in the first place. The author can then keep the discourse at the level of tribal or team-based conflict between the good and the bad, the Christian and pagan, and so forth, which is where the cynical partisan thrives.

The phenomenology of tradition

Ehrett’s article includes a brief critical review of Butler’s approach to BAPism, correctly noting that Butler doesn’t criticize BAPism on its own terms but merely barks incommensurable platitudes back at the BAP-o-sphere. Ehrett suggests instead that we take BAPism on its own terms and concludes that BAPism isn’t just empty nihilism but rather a tragically impossible attempt to capture a dead form of religious experience.

Ehrett goes on to present a phenomenological analysis of human religious existence purporting to prove the impossibility of a Bronze Age Mindset and the inexorability of a Judeo-Christian mindset. While his analysis is admirably charitable and methodologically interesting, I think Butler’s criticism that Ehrett’s analysis is circular and self-defeating is basically correct.

Ehrett sets up what seems to me like an inaccurate or perhaps incomplete picture of what BAPism represents, framing it as a quasi-theological tradition of “Vitalism” based on a call for a return to the texts of pagan Greece. Basically, BAPism is about finding in books a way to become a barbarian pagan who revels in bloody conquest and sincerely believes whatever pagans believed about the world (that the universe and time are cyclical, that nymphs live in trees, that violence is okay etc.)

This halcyon pagan past is juxtaposed to the traditional pasts pined for by conservative proponents of our favorite three living civil-religious traditions: Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism. To show why those three traditions are possible and living while BAP’s is not, Ehrett offers two literary examples and supplements them with analyses from the phenomenologist Hans-Georg Gadamer.