Welcome back!
We hope you are enjoying DEEP SOCKS, the year long serialized book project that will take your political thought deeper than before.
In our first season, we examine SHALLOW WINTER, the seemingly terminal society we have found ourselves in. The first month, MANAGERIAL SOCIETY IN WINTER, examined the stasis of the current shallow center, the managerial society. The second month, EMBERS OF FASCISM, will examine the frozen stasis of the right—the enduring appeal of fascism and the deep right’s own political position.
Today, we will examine the conflict and differentiation of monarchism, fascism, and managerialism in the thought of the deep right.
Why monarchism, and not fascism?
For many right wingers, the question is perennial. Why not just be a Nazi? That Hitler fellow had some big ideas. Some bad ones, but it’s not as if Volkswagen isn’t the envy of many a nation’s fledgling auto sector. The autobahn is a splendid idea. And surely some of them aren’t apologetic about wanting a little (or big) spot ethnic cleansing. The answers to the questions of life, power, and your role in it are right there. Be a fascist! Go for it, jump off the cliff. And surely you can be some sort of ‘nazi’ that doesn’t have to be so gung ho about the Jews, or whomever. Presumably, an American fascist could be a fairly likable and hale fellow, not even racist in the death camp sense, just in love with a mostly-white America that could and did accept a deracinated, European-led nation. Perhaps there’s a beige fascism in the future, some averaged out Amerikaner that speaks Spanglish and hates the damn leafs. They might just look a little strange, spend a little too much time in the gym, talk about male models in a way that makes you uncomfortable.
But this is certainly not the position of the deep right. To the extent that it is a full ideology, it is a monarchical one. It wants a king, who can transcend the problem of race, the problem of class, and unite the populous under a grand will and a magnificent design, like one of the leaders in the Civilization games. This is that deepest of right wing revanchist tendencies—that since 1688, the creation of fake monarchies, mere sockpuppets for oligarchy, most architectures of power have been in a certain sense illegitimate or suboptimal. We’ve been getting fake kings, one after another, since some Dutch pretender strolled in and asked only to be used by the halfwit oligarchy of Britain.
But surely, you think, fascism and monarchy have so much in common. They hate some indeterminate, polymorphic cabal, they seek a huge, larger-than-life personality to lead us out of moral decadence and imperial decay. They like Trump, and are nostalgic for the first (and maybe not only) period of the Trumpenreich. Both keep saying things are based, but based on what?
Failure, response; failure, response
World War 1 is the failure state of monarchy. It is not a failure state of absolute monarchy, perhaps. It is a failure of a monarchical state system, that is to be sure, a falling out between cousins who all had no idea their struggle for power and recognition amongst each other, using their nations as proxies might end everything. Some stan of Austria-Hungary may argue, there’s a million and one reasons why this was not the one true monarchy that could have simply been better than other governments. And maybe they’d be right.
The failure state of monarchy brought us the interwar period, known best internationally by the ill-starred German Republic. It accomplished little, though perhaps a bit more than it was reputed to. It did not, however, survive long, nor did it prosper. It was succeeded by the fascist state, which, by creating a mythic past of national destiny and a new, kingly figure—but a distinctively modern and chancellor-like, sought to reimpose the conditions of monarchy with what seemed to be a winning combination of the king’s moral and spiritual grip on the nation with the best practices of early-managerial/late-corporatist economics. Fascism had a solid run of overthrowing liberal polities and establishing its own, starting in the 20s with Mussolini and ending, of course, in 1945, a year that needs little introduction, and finally giving its last gasp by the 80s as East Asian, Southeast Asian, South American, and African fascisms all gave up the ghost in quick succession.
For right wingers, an unparalleled tragedy. For those of you on the left, it is an easy imagination. For those of you in the center, hello, and I ask you now to imagine defeat. What if Trump had won in 2020? Or if Nixon had managed to somehow skate by that whole Bay of Pigs deal.
This failure state of fascism was the end of the unabashed right wing revolutionary dream inside of electoral politics. By this point, it had become clear that liberal governments were accommodating enough—ask the boys in Unit 731, or the boys in NASA. Hardly any of the actually guilty went down in Nuremberg or Israel’s successive show trials.
And so, the right wing, its dreams of monarchy dashed on the rocks of the early 20th century, and the dreams of fascism on the middle, now embarked on the neoliberal project, a fantastically complex and baroque scheme to ensure financial, military, and resource dominance by the American Empire, making common cause with the shitlibs of yore to put the boot to the real bad guy in this situation: the Communist bloc.
Things went well, and now, less so. Clearly this compromise is producing many results that are, to most observers, not all that much unlike the Weimar Republic, but now combined with a deep and broad despair across all strata of society that they can either somehow save the ship, bring back sanity, guarantee security and liberty, much less reject modernity, embrace tradition, or return to monke.
The failures of neoliberalism need little elaboration. But what is the right response to it? For the right, there must be a path back to monarchy, which worked, until it didn’t—and surely with some imagination, might yet be a solvable problem.
Intuitive recognition
Fascism is a response to the failures of monarchy competing against early managerial and late corporatist society. Experience has shown though, it is a loser. It cannot check its violence at the door, it is a monstrously aggressive state system that fights within its own borders as much as it fights without. Its nature, as a paramilitary political movement in a democratic system, or a revolutionary movement, endows it with paranoia and a viciousness that leaves it struggling to preserve peace or endow a society with prosperity for long.
What citizens under a fascist society learn is that they are either within the favored group, the movement, or they are to join promptly, upon some extraordinary pain. The path back to monarchy must be one that transcends the need for revolutionary political struggle, as surely as it transcends the need to build a specific power base, grounded in a mythological history.
Fascism, the heroic way to die
Long live death! They cried it quite a lot during the Spanish Civil War. Fascism is, for better or worse, a way of political activation of the tremendous energy and struggle of death. Mark Neocleous’ 2011 article, ‘Long live death! Fascism, resurrection, immortality’ offers a fantastic perspective on this use of death as a philosophical and political grounding.
Fascism sought to replicate the power conditions of monarchy, but to streamline and make it more efficient. To this end, it sought to create a political religion, to supplant the now-obviously-false religions that had served Europe until the Great War. The nation, led by the state, led by the movement, led by the leader, is the god, church, clergy, pope, respectively. But to create a political religion, first there must be martyrs! Witnesses of the glory of the nation, whose final deed is a voluminous, mute speech. One that can never be argued with.
Part of this special significance was to turn the dead into heroes. Even before the Nazi seizure of power those on the far Right were proclaiming the political and historical significance of those who died at Langemarck. Josef Magnus Wehner gave a speech of dedication at one memorial in 1932: ‘The dying sang! The stormers sang. The young students sang as they were being annihilated: “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles, uber alles in der Welt” . ... The dead heroes became an omen for the German people.’ Fascism turned such ideas into a philosophy of life, with the coming new age to be founded on the heroism of the dead. The myth of Langemarck, for example, quickly became a basic component in the repertoire of National Socialist propaganda, with annual ceremonies and eminent figures such as Martin Heidegger addressing rallies on the historic event (in November 1933).
-Mark Neocleous, ‘Long live death! Fascism, resurrection, immortality’
Fascism, the moronic way to die
Perhaps the only death left to us that is heroic is death in a romantic political cause. And what greater romance is there than to die defending your country? Even jaded liberals now see the heroism of Ukrainians, a nation of great fascist sympathy, defending their country in a hopeless and doomed struggle.
Aside from inspiring redditors and soldiers of fortune, the brigades of Volunteers for Ukraine have mostly not materialized. What has materialized was vaporized by missiles. But who will die for their country today, much less the nation of the Current Thing? And who isn’t a complete chump for dying for their country in this day and age? Russia would have hardly any army today, were it to rely on volunteers instead of conscription. And certainly the American war dead of the 21st century did not die heroically, nor for their country, merely on orders from their country. America recruits its soldiers from its lower castes for a good reason—dying for your country is a shitty way to get rich and live well.
The woman who died or the many were sent to the American gulags as a result of the events of January 6th aren’t seen by rightwingers as martyrs, though they are pitied. There aren’t any songs about them to be sung by wignats and anime profile pictures and the shitheels who put flashing sonnenrads in webms for Twitter and 4chan to pass around. You can’t mythologize the Q Shaman, he just looks like a moron for caring about am ineffectual and cowardly idiot like Trump, or a bullshit country like America.
Fascism, the failure to launch
Jason Stanley’s “How Fascism Works, The Politics of Us and Them” is a facile how-to manual that treats fascism as an unfair participant in politics, that must be censored and repressed in the name of freedom. Certainly Stanley does understand that fascism is a revolutionary movement that seeks to displace the liberal state. And he does intuit quite readily that his antagonists have no love for liberals. His shallow and propagandistic thought description of fascism is cutting and highly propagandistic—it is fundamentally about the fact that right wing political movements have access to the same instruments of control and politicking, and no incentive to accept their political rivals. But the fascism he hates so ardently as a committed Democrat and lover of liberal institutions is a weak imitation.
As a response to the failures of neoliberalism, the modern managerial society, there is a currently existing far right which has the embers of fascism glowing brightly within. Nations, men, women, are starved for glory, for a way of life that is less hateful and unnatural. They yearn for some greater thing that situates them in the world, that gives them a purpose, or at least prosperity and security.
These are extremely easily exploitable sentiments, and so they are exploited. The countries with some sort of right populist leader, or pretensions and inclinations in that way are afflicted with continual institutional corruption, ineffectual leaders, and disappointing horizons. Trump was never going to lead a revolution. What liberals fear is what is behind this, the sense that there is no longer a commonly addressable target for propaganda, and instead, there are 2, or 3, and it is inefficient and costly to force these competing narratives toward convergence.
The monarch, transcendent
Fascism is first and foremost a political movement within a nation with a competitive political system. As a revolutionary movement, they seek to harness structural weakness of the presiding center or left government—it seeks competition, and therefore could be outcompeted. It seeks a menace, Marxism and its affiliated isms most often. It pits the two against each other—dissatisfaction with the regime, fear of the interloper and thieving commie. It casts the war dead and the dispossessed as heroes, the dead who may never die. Its ranks swell, as it effectively creates a spiritual legion and a real cleavage—you hate your government, you hate our enemies, be our friend.
Once it has this grip, created an in-group, it does not let go. Nor is it particularly able to expand this grip to include outgroups. This was the fundamental cause of fascism’s failure to reproduce itself in the late 20th century. It relies on a circular economy of death, the dead must live again to keep the ranks full, and their memory compels us the same way it compelled Hamlet, to greater and more risky attempts to seize power and avenge oneself.
Hamlet would have made a bad king. He listened to ghosts and wanted to bang his mom.
The monarch seeks no division, and is instead created through the investiture of the public and some existing oligarchical power. The monarch is meant to unite the public symbolically. The monarch is a superior alternative to the fascist father, because the monarch is a sovereign, a transcendent political entity and not an abstracted father for a nation of war orphans. Monarchism is about transcending the petty tyrannies of daily life and the bastard offspring of fascism and liberal-managerial society. The king is an eternally living figure, an object of universal cathartic recognition. Presidents may be kingly. But they do not practice often if ever kingly rule. Nor would we be so lucky to have a king emerge out of the presidency.
The most natural place to look for a monarch then may be where we see figures with the combination of kingly qualities: celebrity, wealth, and power. Naturally, this must be in the world of business.
The monarch rises out of the C-suite
There are two kinds of CEOs.
The first, the CEO of a company you’ve never heard of. The CEO of the company you’ve never heard of is the product of a fascistic technique of management. This is most CEOs. This is a guy who can’t shut up about his vision, when there is none. This is the man who seeks to embody the cult of the founder. Who wishes for work to be a meaning-making activity, where there are steady streams of internal propaganda, high loyalty affected by staff—and he’ll be the first to say he is the servant of the board should you press him, but the company is a servant of his will. He is a dictator, not a king, though he rules like a king, he does not embody a transcendence. He’s merely in charge. Many kings fall short of kingship as well.
The second, the CEO of a company you wish ran more and did more. Their potential seems vast and limitless. This CEO (or the one who lead the company to such great heights) appears to be actively seeking transcendence and power. He inspires a cult of personality. People admire their accomplishments. People see them as wise, and as a true and natural leader. They are generally more rebellious, more public, more at-risk, and far more dangerous to the existing system of power than any other living people.
The insider-type of CEO, who can lead but not inspire, is the product of the society we live in now. The same way fascism failed ultimately, by being occupied eternally with petty tyranny, having to awkwardly weld the modern liberal state to the whims of an abstracted father-king, this insider-type of CEO can never realize the actual potential of the monarchy that could live within a firm. The return of the owner to the management structure of the firm, this right wing moment of triumph, had a backstop. The old ways of making money, the networks of reputation and power, they were not to be disturbed.
The monarch, wielder of technology
The deep right’s political affinity to monarchy as opposed to fascism comes from this recognition, that there is an extreme liability to revolution—it is never complete. Revolution most often strips the flesh off the bones of power, and grafts itself on in its place. This creates a fundamental limitation on the revolution, and requires a deep compromise to get to this flaying-and-grafting stage in the revolution. Not to mention, it’s often horrifically violent.
The deep right’s fascism is neither fish nor fowl, it is a distortion and a historical reaction to monarchy’s failure. But this failure is not a repudiation, the long interregnum between true monarchs is an invitation to consider new possibilities for our current information technology, which has so helped build the managerial state into the centerless borgmass it is today, to solve older questions of politics.
Curtis Yarvin’s proposed solution, while obviously not final nor the best he could do, offered up a moment to examine something new, his fantasy of monarchy. Fascism today exists mostly as a fantasy, but it is a specific and real one. Hitler comes back from his moon base, thousand year Reich, all that. But monarchy is an odd duck, it does not exist in a realistic fantasy space very readily. If you have ever seen a portrait of a modern royal family, it is often distressing how normal and bourgeois they seem. Did the robes of a king seem so commonplace back in the 16th century?
Guns of the Patriots
So, as a final aside, let us look at Yarvin’s technofantasy of a monarch that is given, through the political activation of irony and the sincere desire to end the failing empire of America, the actual key to the kingdom. We will compare it to a popular video game with an alarmingly similar story. Yarvin’s CEO-sovereign is overseen by an Illuminati type organization, whose identities are kept secret. The key to the kingdom given to this monarch is an NFT, a cryptographically signed key that only he has. This cryptographic key is a permissive action link, granting him total authority over the armed forces. Guns don’t fire without his authorization. Autonomous fighting drones are the backbone of his power. He is accountable only to the Illuminati.
Perhaps you haven’t played it, but this is hilariously similar to the plot of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. A quick summary. In the year 2014, private military corporations are now the primary military forces worldwide, and use highly autonomous weapons controlled by a secret Illuminati-type organization, and this organization is now actually AI. Their original leaders are dead or incapacitated without issue or a successor chosen. The throne is vacant, and the Illuminati are superhuman AI. The previous leader of the Illuminati was a warlord named Big Boss. He created a private military and nation state, which was brought down by an Illuminati conspiracy, and he has been in hiding since. The plot of the game, which is, even from this point, enormously convoluted, is entirely about the aging sons of this kingly warlord, fighting over the digital ID that will give them control over the AI and thus the armies of the world.
Please watch this introductory cutscene to get a feeling for Metal Gear Solid 4.
The game is a campy and melodramatic political thriller, with some very interesting ideas undergirding this market-appealing story structure. The fundamental organization of the game is as a psychodrama, where you must accept old age and death in order to overcome this malicious and nightmarish techno-monarchical power struggle.
While Big Boss’ dynasty certainly was not going to last, and obviously the state reached by the Patriots’ AI is a failure state for Yarvin’s monarchy—where the oligarchy, (here a society-controlling AI) has seized power that should have belonged to the monarch and not left his grip—there is still the question of why wouldn’t this be a foreseeable end-state for a futuristic monarchy?
Monarchy always ends in a familial struggle, usually some problem regarding succession or claims to rule. World War 1 was the conflagration that consumed monarchy in the Old World, and necessitated a new recommitment to what had been lost by the political right. If monarchy transcends the political dynamic created by fascism, and can offer a world free from (certain kinds of) internal conflict through investiture of the monarch, can it also overcome its own tendencies towards catastrophe and collapse?