“Completely Irrelevant Whoever Is Or Will Be POTUS” (Jungeuropa Interview)
Nothing ever happens. The only question is: where?
Earlier this year, the dissident right publisher Jungeuropa released my short introduction into “neoreaction.” After the tumultuous developments of the past few weeks with regards to US politics, they invited me to an interview for their blog, which I may share here in a translated form. Enjoy!
An assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the resignation of Joe Biden, the nomination of JD Vance as the Republican vice presidential candidate—a lot is happening in the United States of America right now. These “happenings” lead some people in Germany to rediscover their interest in US politics, not without pinning their hopes on the odd, unexpected turn of events. Jungeuropa author Nils Wegner (Neoreaktion and Dunkle Aufklärung) certainly is not a fan of hopeful slogans, but he is all the more knowledgeable about US politics in general and the American right in particular. We asked him about the latest events in North America.
It cannot be said that US politics is not entertaining. President Donald Trump was succeeded by President Joe Biden, whose mental derangement has now also led to his premature retirement. Dear Nils, who will succeed Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate, and how funny could this so-called alternative be?
“Entertaining” is actually something of a leitmotif here: In the space of just over two weeks, we've seen the full-on demise of Biden in what was, after all, a “debate” completely set up in his favor against Trump, then the panicked damage control attempts by liberal media worldwide (!), and finally the bizarre attack in Butler, Pennsylvania, which dropped the most iconic press photo of the 2020s so far and made Trump virtually unchallengeable within the Republican Party. If anyone still hasn't realized that the public part of US politics is nothing but a spectacle, then they really are beyond help.
After Biden's bizarre “renunciation” of another candidacy via tweet, which seamlessly continues the above series of “events,” the global public has now already settled on Kamala Harris as his successor. This was practically inevitable, as she offers all the seemingly essential criteria for progressives. Above all, she embodies the Rainbow Coalition of multiple minorities who want to be “represented:” She is a woman, she is the daughter of a Tamil and a Jamaican, she is a child of divorce ... She is also known for having few “convictions” and for mostly twisting her little flag in the wind, which makes her malleable matter in the hands of the Democrats' most important financiers. So ultimately it all comes down to Harris as the Democrats' presidential candidate, but we won't know for sure until after their convention in August. This is not least due to the fact that apparently no one bothered to prepare a contingency plan for a possible withdrawal of Biden in good time.
So Biden's withdrawal should be seen as a stroke of luck for the Democrats rather than a defeat?
Well, what in this is supposed to be a “defeat?” Biden is approaching his 82nd birthday; he is the oldest sitting president in the history of the USA. It was foreseeable that he would drop out sooner or later, and indeed many observers were already expecting that to happen during his first—and now probably only—term of office. VP Harris could then have taken over smoothly and steered the ship of state on the desired course or, if necessary, back onto it. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson are prime historical examples of such maneuvers.
The fact that all established media, without exception, have for so long insisted on denying Biden's obvious neurological and mental decline and presenting it as “right-wing” fake news, only to turn 180 degrees after the aforementioned debate when all was lost for good, and demand the immediate withdrawal of the incumbent president from the election campaign—this represents a new low in so-called reporting on the one hand. On the other hand, it also represents a high point of cognitive dissonance, as Biden's mental decline was already clearly recognizable before his first presidential candidacy. Anyone who claims to have only noticed this as a result of the debate with Trump is either struck with ideological blindness or is simply a liar.
However, the timing of this renunciation is rather unfavorable for the Democrats, who had certainly already prepared themselves for an unexciting national convention according to prefabricated guidelines. It is now long too late for a genuine internal campaign with different candidates for the presidential nomination; such a campaign was systematically suppressed by the Democratic party leadership last year (which is why Bobby Kennedy Jr. is now running as a non-party candidate). Either way, it would have come down to Kamala Harris, not least for the reasons mentioned above, but the transition from one “presumptive nominee” to the other could have been much less bumpy.
Donald Trump is only marginally younger—yet he seems to be firmly in the saddle (of the Republicans). What does that say about the Republicans?
The average age of top American politicians has long been a cornucopia of malicious but justified jokes. Consider, for example, Senator Dianne Feinstein, who died in office (!) almost a year ago at 90, having been completely out of it mentally for at least her last two years, but nonetheless “performed” important committee functions and was aggressively defended against any suspicion of dementia by her senior party colleague Nancy Pelosi—while at the same time saying to television cameras on the Capitol floor that she had no idea where she was or why. The existence of the career politician inevitably leads to gerontocracy, and the US is only the most glaring example of a general Western liberal problem in this disturbing trend.
As for Donald Trump's age, he began to take an interest in national and international politics 40 years ago, at least in the public eye, and has shown remarkable flexibility in almost all of his views, as well as in his party affiliations and donation behavior. The fact that he ultimately leaned primarily towards the Republicans and is associated with them is probably primarily due to their economic course during the time of Ronald Reagan (and his legacy). He could have attained—not to say acquired—a significant political position much earlier and younger, but no one really took him seriously until mid-2015, especially not the establishment of the Republican Party, the majority of whom originally backed fellow candidate Ted Cruz. And you can't even blame the political professionals of the time for that: Don't forget that, according to numerous reports, even Trump and his staff themselves were caught cold by the presidential election they won.
So no “plan,” no 4-D chess from Trump's side, not even this time?
I very much doubt that. If Trump's first term as president has shown anything, it is, firstly, that he was unprepared for it (see, for example, his constant personnel changes, which showed no sign of a well thought-out strategy, but rather seemed to depend on mood swings and the “advice” of his daughter Ivanka and her husband) and, secondly, that he could be massively obstructed and sometimes downright sabotaged at the level of officials and civil servants (which calls into question the value of a “plan” as a whole).
I have already mentioned it in several Lagebesprechung podcasts and elsewhere and can only repeat myself: In the US, politics in the sense of real, tangible decisions and measures is made primarily at the level of political “managers;” staff members, lobbyists, committee members, etc. This apparatus, which has grown to monstrous proportions over the last 90 years since the New Deal under Roosevelt, is the very blob or—in Trump's diction—swamp that so many have tried in vain to force back. The former Trotskyist and later mastermind of the Conservative Movement James Burnham warned of this very early on (The Managerial Revolution, 1941); his epigone Samuel Francis has translated this lesson perfectly into the 21st century (Leviathan and Its Enemies, 2016). And now it is the political theory exotic Curtis Yarvin, alias “Mencius Moldbug,” who has issued the minarchic slogan “R.A.G.E.” for “Retire all government employees.” If you want to achieve a real change of course, you can't just replace the top staff, you have to get to grips with the middle management—and so far there has been no impression that Donald Trump is willing or able to do this.
One person who has recently been warned against is JD Vance. Does he bring change to the dynamic you described? What does the man whom Der Spiegel recently described as the personification of the “next MAGA generation” stand for?
At the very least, he is now known to move top German politicians “to tears” since Chancellor Olaf Scholz admitted last week that he had read Hillbilly Elegy with enthusiasm and still considers it worth reading. And what is Ullstein, the previous publisher of the German-language translation of the book, doing now? They have declined renewing the license agreement and are thus withholding the out-of-print book from German readers who have only just begun to take an interest in Vance! Their justification is literally that the author was okay as long as he actively positioned himself against Trump in 2016/17; now that he is on Trump's side, he is no longer okay, although the content of the bestseller has of course not changed one iota in the meantime. Exactly the ridiculous toddler behavior that we are unfortunately already used to from such publishers with their problem glasses-wearing cultural sensitivity officers.
But before there are any suggestions that Jungeuropa could take over the book: Hillbilly Elegy really isn't a revelation. Personally, I found the somewhat intrusive self-deprecating tone rather unpleasant. If you want to talk about the country and people of your youth, you can and should do so without constantly reminding the reader that you—the narrator—know full well that the reader will probably laugh at you for being a hillbilly. Without the legions of attitude journalists and other eggheads who recognized in the book a psycho- and sociogram of the Rust Belt and wanted to read the deeper reason for Donald Trump's populist success out of it, Hillbilly Elegy would by no means have become such a phenomenon. If it had been published in 2014 instead of 2016, no one would be crowing about it today. As far as I know, a replacement publisher for the German-language edition has already been found anyway.
And Vance himself? Apart from his origins in the white lower class and the apparent authenticity associated with this and his military service as a war correspondent/press sergeant in the Marines, the biggest asset he has is his age of just 40, which is quite young for US politics. For some time now, he has been consciously cultivating this image as a “young savage” who is stepping up to shake up an ossified political establishment, for example by sporting a full beard. His voters seem to thank him for it. They probably don't even know that, as a student, Vance worked for the website of arch-neocon David Frum—inventor of the “Axis of Evil” slogan—and therefore earned his first political spurs in the most rotten faction of the US right of all places.
However, the undeniably most important background that one must always bear in mind with Vance is his connection to Peter Thiel. For at least 15 years now, Thiel has sometimes openly, sometimes covertly financed countless politicians, media professionals and activists who seem promising and/or interesting to him—this has already become a meme in itself, with the rhetorical question often being asked in podcasts and on Xitter as to when the “Thiel bucks” would start coming in. However, JD Vance is not just another protégé of Thiel—he was managing director of a Thiel Group investment company for almost a year and should therefore, in the words of Carl Schmitt, have direct “access to the ruler”. Just like Blake Masters, the co-author of Thiel's book Zero to One, who began pushing his way into the Republican Party establishment at exactly the same time as Vance at the end of 2016. However, Masters has gone a little overboard with his image as a “young savage,” for example by publicly recommending Ted Kaczynski as a subversive thinker who is still worth reading—although this is objectively correct, it does not go down so well with the average American, which is why Masters was denied the support of important Republican circles in the 2022 midterm elections.
You've already mentioned it: Among German right-wingers, the question arises as to what exactly is supposed to be so “bad” about JD Vance. Where is the problem? Or is the question meaningless because the VP hardly plays a role under normal circumstances?
This question can be answered very briefly and succinctly: The latter is the case! Apart from the fact that he can tip the scales in the event of a tie in the Senate, the US VP has a purely representative function—as long as the incumbent president does not drop dead or resign.
Nevertheless, there is still a lot to be said about the important issue of the Thiel clique, also and especially because so many German and European right-wingers are pinning their hopes not only on ostensible national populists such as Steve Bannon but also on protagonists of the self-appointed “PayPal Mafia,” currently in particular Elon Musk, who is persistently celebrated in “our” circles—whatever that may mean—as a kind of hero of freedom.
I have explained much of this in my book on NRx. So I'll just summarize it here: Peter Thiel is considered by many to be what we in this country would call a cultural conservative—because he is a homosexual. This is only half a joke: Thiel caused a sensation at the 2016 Republican Party Convention when he stepped up to the lectern and shouted: “I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.” With that, he outlined his understanding of “MAGA” and “America first,” and as a fan of Thiel or of his minions, you have to position yourself regarding that. (Although it should be noted that Thiel only found his “conservatism” during Obama's second term, when disputes about the relationship between “freedom” and “democracy” arose among US libertarians, to which he belonged for the longest time.)
Peter Thiel does not have too many principles—essential for a successful venture capitalist, I assume—but all the more interests. And if, after almost ten years of marching through the Republican institutions, his confidants can now advance to high offices of state, even if only representative ones for the time being, then he will certainly know how to use this in one way or another, even if only for a few backroom deals. It is particularly interesting in this context that he did not openly support any of the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination this time, although one of them was Vivek Ramaswamy, a man from his extended circle. The IT investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who in turn have a shared history with the aforementioned Curtis Yarvin and were vehement Trump opponents as recently as 2016—just like JD Vance—appear to be gradually taking his place as a gray eminence within Republican donor circles.
Why did Thiel distance himself? The key lies in his speech at the 2016 RNC I just quoted, because “our” people usually overlook or omit what he said in the very next sentence: “I don't pretend to agree with every plank in our party's platform, but fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline, and nobody in this race is being honest about it except Donald Trump.”
It's all there, quite openly, one just has to be willing to see it. Thiel—and, I'll make that bold assumption, his liaisons in the GOP apparatus as well—is ultimately concerned with the freedom of balance sheets, deregulation, and trade routes. Freedom of opinion, speech, and association (although at least the latter has been a hollow phrase in the US since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 anyway) are nice accessories, but must not be allowed to become a distraction. In the last two years, the Republicans have mainly made a name for themselves as the anti-“woke” party, especially their younger politicians, and this ultimately goes against Peter Thiel's grain. Reforms can be nice, but there will be no “cultural revolution from the right” with him. He is closely linked to the military-industrial complex through a number of his companies, in particular Palantir (a big, eerie topic in its own right), and he will certainly not bite the hand that lines his pockets. The same goes for Elon Musk, by the way.
Why are you so critical of Thiel? After all, he is investing in Rumble, a video platform that advertises freedom from censorship and wants to take on YouTube.
I am not critical of Thiel himself. I recognize that he has his interests and is pursuing them. What I am very critical of is the tendency on the right to be desperately searching for strong (and that means above all: well-funded and media-effective) “friends.”
Peter Thiel's fortune, which he invests or at least has invested for a long time in “subversive” characters and media projects, comes to a large extent from companies that are leaders in the field of, for example, facial recognition technology and the qualitative analysis of huge amounts of data. To make it even clearer: He benefits from the current actions of the military and law enforcement agencies, especially in the area of online surveillance, which right-wingers are usually fighting tooth and nail against, because at the moment they or “we” are the ones suffering from these technological “achievements.” As CEO of Palantir, he has appointed Alex Karp, an avowed anti-fascist!
There is a current on the US right that takes a fatalistic view of all this and says: “Artificial intelligence, total surveillance, transparent users, etc. are coming anyway—we should at least support those who profit from it and are the least hostile to us.” Some Thiel and Musk fans in this country will no doubt agree with this and gloss over it as “Machiavellian,” “neoreactionary” or the like. But that is a slave mentality, and I refuse to join the chorus.
Peter Thiel's interests are not my interests. Elon Musk's interests are not my interests either. And once the average right-winger puts aside all the smoke and mirrors ranging from “techno-optimism” to “social Darwinism” and goes beyond the pithy slogans from primary school poetry albums such as “When I grow up, I want to be a CEO,” he will realize that his interests have nothing in common with the machinations of those billionaires—nebulous and completely arbitrary ideas of “freedom” or not.
In your book on “Neoreaction” and “the Dark Enlightenment,” you write about the ideology of this Silicon Valley clique, i.e. the world of Musk and Thiel. How does that fit together? On the one hand libertarian, on the other they benefit from the state's online regulation. On the one hand “reactionary,” on the other hand close to transhumanism with their projects.
Irving Kristol, the doyen of US neoconservatism, is the originator of the popular quip that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. In this sense, one could say that a “neoreactionary” is a libertarian who has recognized that people are useless without incentives from outside or from above.
These people often come from the IT sector, so they know the value of order (at least in their work; their personal appearance is sometimes a different matter). They want deregulation—but on the other hand they need state institutions to protect them from criminals, etc. They want to be far removed from the state—but on the other hand they are dependent on the state for their very existence. The best example of this is Elon Musk, whose network of companies is highly deficient and would be practically bankrupt without state subsidies and contracts with the Pentagon.
If I had to summarize the alleged “neoreaction” in one sentence, it would be this: Right-wing libertarians are, of necessity, engaging in robust political thinking in order to hold the crumbling liberal West together until they have succeeded in initiating the next paradigm shift (in Kuhn's original sense of the word). So the bottom line is that this is not a genuine reaction, but rather a kind of progressivism with authoritarian potential—only from within the economic world, which people unfortunately still instinctively perceive as rather conservative.
In other words, what Oswald Spengler called “Caesarism.” Perhaps this is also the only option for the so-called West?
Talk of “last options,” “last chances,” and “last generations” is repugnant to me. Not least because it usually comes from people who are either selling something or trying to save their own skin (or both). If you want to make up for the devastating effects of individualism and the market mentality, you can't do it by adding more of it—but that's exactly what libertarian and “neoreactionary” projects ultimately amount to. The desire to overcome the nation in favour of loose “micro-states” organized like private companies is one of their more tame ideas.
Good. That leaves just one final question. From a German right-wing perspective: Which next US president should we hope for?
In a nutshell (and to really turn all readers against me): For the German right, it is completely irrelevant in terms of realpolitik—note: this is not some ominous “reach”—who is or will be POTUS at any given time. Just as irrelevant, by the way, as tweets by Elon Musk about the way German system parties and media deal with the AfD or the magazine COMPACT.
To return to the initial question, it would undoubtedly be more “entertaining” if Donald Trump won the election. But entertainment is not a criterion for politics.
Dear Nils, thank you for the interview!