Cold War Daily

This podcast by Ross Douthat caught my ear in part because he’s arguing that there’s a right-wing counterculture—something I’ve considered myself. He interviewed a man named Jonathan Keeperman, who’s a right-wing publisher. Keeperman’s favorite author is German militarist and author Ernst Jünger.

It’s a curious thing to listen to this conversation between Douthat and Keeperman, in which they lament the “civilizational exhaustion, decay, decadence” of the U.S.

Douthat: “Jünger, if I’m remembering his trajectory correctly, was part of the German right. He’s not a Nazi, but he serves in the Third Reich, and he’s not someone who listeners should think of as like [philosopher Martin] Heiddeger, who goes Nazi in that way, but Jünger remains very much on the anti-liberal right throughout that period.”

I’m listening to this and thinking: how is this in any way normal for Americans? What Americans are looking at the likes of Ernst Jünger or Martin Heidegger and thinking, ‘This is what we need!…This will fill the missing part of America.’?

You can’t have a counterculture when your side of political society – the right side – is running all three branches of government and using nonstop propaganda to shape events on the ground. That’s not counterculture—that’s tyranny.

It’s hard to be credibly against The Establishment when you are The Establishment, in the White House, in Congress and the Supreme Court as unhinged as the Trumpist GOP is.

The utter tragedy of right-wing America today is that they cannot see themselves as anything but victims. The reality is, most people in the US – like people everywhere – just want to get along with their neighbors, they want a basic piece of the pie, they want sanity and order.

They don’t want a grandiose, Europeanised ideology (“vitalism”, the quixotic pursuit of “right wing” art– ? What?) to explain their existence. Americans don’t need that. And yet, these right-wing pundits are so far down their own rabbit hole that they don’t even realize it.

Listen to my interview with Pat Thomas, as he discusses how three figures from the 1960s embraced their conflict with the broader culture as part of a quest for greater freedom. This is much more the American tradition.