The Problem with ‘Theory’

Joel Davis and Lightswitch Leftism

Debate Tactics

Last week I had a discussion with Joel Davis which became somewhat testy owing to Mr Davis’s decision to come in looking to score ‘debate points’ – something for which I have never had any time.[1] We were meant to be having a friendly discussion not a debate. Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, did a similar thing a few weeks back.[2] I’m friendly with both Davis and Benjamin, but after being sucker punched twice now like this, the next time someone tries it on in this manner they will be kicked no matter who they are. I despise ‘debate tactics’, hatchling questions, the scoring of cheap points through pot shots, and so on. As fun as they can be to watch as a spectator – and they appeal to the pro-wrestling fan in me – they mainly get in the way of an exchange of ideas because, by necessity, they make rhetorical appeals.

Negative versus Positive Visions

However, beyond that, there is, I think, a deeper and more substantive disagreement between Joel and me – and it is not over negative versus positive visions which is, in truth, a superficial debate. I adopt the negative vision purely out of strategic utility – to build a coalition – but the most organised and ruthless group who eventually take power will invariably possess a positive vision. I do not believe such a vision is a necessary component of what makes them rise, but it is also not insignificant. For example, it ultimately mattered that Lenin was a communist and that Hitler was a German national socialist. These positive visions affected their decision-making once in power. Even if we may still quibble over the extent to which a positive vision is necessary for the group who takes power (I maintain it is incidental to organisation and ruthlessness), I think it is chiefly this latter point – that the positive vision is non-trivial and has serious consequences – that Davis was likely trying to emphasise. I’ll grant that because I believe that ideas matter insomuch as they affect decisions made by elites.

The Poverty of Theory

This brings me to what is the more important area of disagreement between Joel and me, which is the fact he seems to think that we can just borrow concepts and ideas from Marxists. He has repeatedly called of late for the importance of Theory (that’s with a capital T) and for a structural understanding of power. He sounds like a right-wing version of Louis Althusser, the structural Marxist who was prominent in the 1960s and 70s. Incidentally, there’s a very good book highlighting the limitations of Althusser’s anti-humanist structuralism by the socialist historian E.P. Thompson called The Poverty of Theory.[3] Thompson ultimately accuses Althusser of being an idealist, a type of theologian with an ahistorical and closed system that is completely incapable of recognising man as he really is. I fear I spot a similar tendency in Davis who seems not to recognise those elements of history that cannot be reduced to ‘structure’. The elite theorists, for example, Pareto – whom Davis has recently eschewed and declared ‘outmoded’ – recognised the role of Will to Power, Carlyle’s Great Man of history, the Man of Action. Such men trample over structure through the force of their character.[4] There is no ‘structural analysis’ that gives us Lenin, Mussolini, FDR, Hitler, or Mao, although we can account for their respective rises. There are two prerequisites: first, the falling apart of an existing power regime, and second, the supreme powers of organization and natural leadership common to each man. And if FDR looks like the odd man out here, he should not: he was just as revolutionary and dictatorial as the others.

Follow the Leader

Each of these men may have had their own ideological commitments at one time or another but they inspired personal (which is to say non-ideological) loyalty in others. If you listen to the average speech by Rudolf Hess, it is not about the ideology of German national socialism but rather about the near-Godlike characteristics of the Great Leader. That systems as disparate as liberal democracy (FDR), communism (Stalin), and the so-called third position (Hitler) should each gravitate towards the Cult of Personality around the Great Man tells us something about what humans are like regardless of ‘system’ or ‘ideology’. Gustave Le Bon knew all this, of course – I hope the book is not too old and outmoded for Davis.[5] The ‘messiness’ of human nature disrupts structuralism in this way. History is and always will be made by such exceptional men. This basic truth should be recognised intuitively and instantly by all those on the right. I fear Davis has no feel or instinct for these sorts of things whatsoever since his basic orientation is intellectual rather than felt, and that intellect tends, like structural Marxism, to strive for a Pure Theory of power. I can even imagine Davis arguing in earnest that the time for Great Men is over since the modern world, made up by managerial elites, makes them structurally impossible – tell that to Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. One can only laugh when Xie Chuntao, the director of the Central Party School’s academic department, denied that there is a cult of personality around Xi. Rather, the ‘respect and love’ that ordinary Chinese people feel for him is ‘natural’ and ‘heartfelt’.[6] The Western aversion to Strong Man leaders since 1945 is likely one reason why so many in the masses cannot identify with the elites – Donald Trump, for all his faults, did activate personal loyalty in his followers. But structure cannot account for Trump.

Fat Pig Churchill

We all know that Britain did not enter World War 2, the most significant event of the past hundred years – because of ‘structural’ considerations. We entered World War 2 because Winston Churchill had personel debts to a certain tightly organised group. He used his force of character, Machiavellian manoeuvres within the British Tory Party and parliament, the leveraging of personal ambitions of men like Anthony Eden, and press support, to force the issue and oust Neville Chamberlain. If you want to read about this, I recommend Maurice Cowling’s The Impact of Hitler (1975).[7] There is no structural analysis that can account for the insane, illogical and self-destructive decisions taken by the British government in the 1940s. An analysis that looks at the players involved as human, wedded to the fact that there was a tightly organised minority interest group with a vested interest for Britain to wage war on Germany, has no such trouble making sense of what happened. Structure won’t get you there though, because structure can’t give you a flawed, fat, disgusting vermin like Churchill – as a side point, I recently learned he’d dip the end of his cigars in brandy and then chew rendering the ends ‘gummy and gnarled’, and it just made me hate the man more (the dipping I can just about accept but chewing!).

Lightswitch Leftism

Let us look at a couple of recent posts by Davis:

One of the biggest problems with the dissident right is what many are increasingly describing as lightswitch brain, the tendency to just oppose anything that seems ‘leftist’ without any reasoned entertainment of the concept. I see this a lot online in DR circles with the discussion of Marxism, everything bad is Marxist and trying to understand what Marxism actually is or isn’t is itself evidence that you are yourself in fact a Marxist and therefore bad.

Another example of this from AA: https://t.me/BertieBassett4Life/2586

Let’s not affirm things or identify as anything because that's what the commies do, I guess? Lol.

Of course, all this irrational lightswitch brain bullshit does is surrender intellectual ground to the left by cutting the dissident right off from making any claims upon concepts the left supposedly owns.

The endgame of this line of thinking is making our position totally vapid, relativizing ourselves to our enemy completely and thus granting the enemy the power to set the terms as to who we are and what we believe.

Ironically, this lightswitch brain shit puts us into a position of pure resentment against the established order. A state of pure nihilism where you just hate the power structure and will its destruction for the sake of it. Is there anything more leftist than that?

So, if you reject Marxist thought you are a ‘lightswitch brain’ who cedes intellectual ground to the left? What if Marxism is just fundamentally wrong in all its assumptions? I responded to this post with two of my own, which I will quote in full here.

I would like to return now to the problem of adopting leftist concepts and the charge of ‘lightswitch brain’. This latter phrase is glib and misses the heart of the problem. The left has a progressive telos based on a deep-rooted belief in the perfectibility of man. The right — in all its forms — rejects this belief and asserts a constant human nature. Thus, those concepts on the left which depend on their core assumptions are simply unusable for us — not because we are unreflexive, unthoughtful, and kneejerk but because we disagree about what man is. Where the left get things correct typically coincides with what they borrow from Machiavelli and his legacy and in the area of propaganda. But we don’t really need Foucault or Gramsci when our own thinkers arrive at similar conclusions through people like Le Bon. Likewise, Capital T Theory is important for the left because of their core belief in the perfectibility of man. All else flows from this. Thus, for structural Marxists the issue with Stalin wasn’t that he killed millions of people or that he was totalitarian, it was that he made mistakes in his Theory. If only they could find the right formula, they’d fix what went wrong with the USSR. Theory in this sense has no utility for the right because we do not believe that mankind can be fixed. Our task is to describe what is essential and fixed in human nature and to discern what accounts for change and variation. When people intuitively say that Joel feels like a leftist it’s because he’s running roughshod over these first principles.

This was put best by Thomas Sowell – likely never read and reflexively rejected by Davis, who cringes at conservatives as he venerates leftists – in A Conflict of Visions:

The issue is not as to whether changes have occurred in human history, but whether these are, in effect, changes of costumes and scenery or changes of the play itself. In the constrained vision, it is mostly the costumes and scenery that have changed; in the unconstrained vision, the play itself has changed, the characters are fundamentally different, and equally sweeping changes are both likely and necessary in the future.[8]

People on the right tend to the former, tragic vision, and people on the left to the latter, utopian vision. The right is built and must be built on essential, perennial truths which are not only fixed but non-negotiable. In such a worldview there is no such thing as ‘progress’. Read Davis for long enough or listen to him on streams and podcasts and count up the number of times his language betrays him as he declares things to be ‘outmoded’ or ‘outdated’, or else ushers in the telos of ‘progress’ through the back door. Is it ‘lightswitch brain’ to ward against this careless and creeping leftism? I would suggest that Davis himself is subject to a type of reflexive ‘lightswitch’ himself which comes from that strange breed of rightwingers who spend all day and everyday counter-signaling other right-wingers until they somehow end up big-braining themselves into basically left-wing positions. We can call this ‘Lightswitch Leftism’ and its final product is Richard Spencer, who now agrees with Rachel Maddow of MSNBC in almost every respect excepting his residual pro-white orientation – as Bronze Age Pervert put it recently, he’s striving to become a white Jesse Jackson.[9] Now Davis is nowhere close to being Spencer, but he seems to be directionally trending that way.

Marxism is not Postmodern Theory

Now let me reproduce my second post:

Just to come back briefly to the problem of ‘dipping into’ leftist political philosophy and adopting words and concepts from Marxists, etc.: can you imagine this happening the other way around? What would it mean for a Marxist to use the concept of Kali Yuga? Nothing less than the destruction of his entire system and telos since buried deep in the concept are many assumptions about history, tradition and human nature which are entirely antithetical to Marxism. It’s not like these things are ‘optional’ and can be taken lightly. If you assert a concept that is derived from dialectical materialism, you negate concepts coming from the traditionalist lens and vice versa. This isn’t ‘light switch brain’ either it is to take concepts seriously. I should also mention that I have borrowed nominally leftist concepts from postmodern theory in my own thought. For example, when I talk about ‘the Boomer truth regime’ it is obvious that Foucault is an influence. But since he was neither a Hegelian nor a Marxist, and since there is a strong streak of Nietzscheanism in his thinking, there are fewer obvious ‘costs’ to us to develop aspects of his radical critique of modernity than in borrowing from mainline Marxism. Same is true of Deleuze and a few others.

This one speaks for itself and, as far as I have seen, Davis did not respond to it or the earlier one. I will mention in passing that certain postmodernist theorists can be used for reactionary ends primarily because they reject enlightenment thinking and therefore have no theory of progress. The same is not true and can never be true of Marxist ideas since they have the Marxist theory of history built into them.

Davis Defends Democracy and the Chinese Communist Party

And now let us look at another, unrelated, post from Davis in which, after defending Marxism, he now appears to be defending democracy and taking inspiration from the Chinese Communist Party:

The distinction between ‘Democracy’ and ‘Elitism’ is a false distinction that needs to be binned if we are going to escape the ideological hegemony of liberalism. Democracy in my view is a good thing in the essential meaning of the term – that a people should rule itself. The question though is how is this actually possible? The answer given by liberalism of dividing the people up into individual voters within some constitutional procedure is demonstrably failing to achieve the promise of a state and its laws representing the will of the people.

The typical conclusion people draw from this is that democracy is impossible because an elite minority will always rule over society. But this assumes an elite minority will necessarily have its own interest in which it rules, and that this interest is necessarily in conflict with the interests of the people at large.

The embodied refutation of this view however is China, a nation which claims to be a ‘People’s Republic’ and yet proudly and for principled reasons rejects liberalism:  https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/

The survey team found that compared to public opinion patterns in the U.S., in China there was very high satisfaction with the central government. In 2016, the last year the survey was conducted, 95.5 percent of respondents were either ‘relatively satisfied’ or ‘highly satisfied’ with Beijing. In contrast to these findings, Gallup reported in January of this year that their latest polling on U.S. citizen satisfaction with the American federal government revealed only 38 percent of respondents were satisfied with the federal government. 

It seems that there is a better procedure than what liberalism offers for representing the will of the people in the state – whatever they do in China. Of course there is no doubt that an elite minority rules China, the leadership of the Communist Party. The elite minority in China clearly sees its interests and the interests of the Chinese people as one and the same, and the Chinese people agree.

The key question for us to answer then is why that elite minority acts in the interests of the majority of its people, when the elite minority currently ruling us in West does not. I believe this question is equivalent to asking why China has democracy, and we have liberalism.

The question of democracy then is not how to overcome the will of the elites on behalf of the people, but how an elite comes to identify itself with the will of the people.

While Davis is correct that ideally there should be a moral unity between the rulers and the ruled and that the rulers should govern in the general interests of their people, I am baffled here by his need to reframe this as ‘democracy’. Incidentally, Lenin did the same thing, and the USSR maintained the fiction that it was a ‘democracy’ for its entire existence. In any case, a set of wise leaders governing in the interests of their people is not ‘the people ruling itself’ and never will be. What half-baked nonsense is this? But besides, I must ask: why is Davis trying to reclaim democracy at all? The fundamental orientation of the true right is summed up by the title of Tomislav Sunic’s book: Against Democracy and Equality.[10] It does not matter how one came to the dissident right – for example you might have arrived through the Throne and Altar monarchism of Joseph de Maistre or Robert Filmer, or the anti-democratic thunder of Thomas Carlyle, or the anti-democratic aristocratic perennialism of Julius Evola, or through the old libertarian-to-alt right pipeline via Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God that Failed[11] – the basic orientation is to recognise that democracy is socialism, democracy is entropy. Even a certain moustachioed mid-century German once wrote, ‘Sooner will the camel pass through a needle’s eye than a great man be “discovered” by an election.’[12] But to Davis all this – which amounts to the intellectual heritage of the reactionary right – is just bunk, it’s just ‘lightswitch brain’ and what we really need to do is accept left-wing ideas because we don’t want to be stupid right-wing grugs, or something. How gauche! How uncouth! How unsophisticated! Imagine right-wingers embodying right-wing beliefs! Davis’s call is not even in the vein of those people who are recognisably on the right to answer Uncle Ted’s problem of the fact that modern life fails to answer the human need to be part of the power process.[13] This is not some egalitarian left-wing drive, the modern voter in democracy likely has less direct political agency than the feudal peasant who could go to the local tavern and talk to his baronial lord. This was the thrust, for example, of Alain de Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy (2011): ‘exploring all possibilities of creating new ways for citizens to participate in public life. After all, the key notion for democracy is not numbers, suffrage, elections or representation, but participation.’[14] Along different lines, Bronze Age Pervert has argued, drawing on ancient Rome, for a limited franchise for military men as the people who have true ‘skin in the game’ in any polity. But what is Davis’s call here in essence? ‘Let’s just throw out the right-wing canon and think more like leftists.’ ‘Don’t just reflexively reject left-wing ideas because they are from the left or you’ll fall behind intellectually’. What claptrap is this? And what an insult to the canon of right-wing thought! All of which makes one wonder what Davis is even doing here. Why not just become a Marxist at that point?

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[1] See:

.

[2] See:

.

[3] E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory: Or, an Orrery of Errors (1978; London: Merlin Press, 1995).

[4] Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society, ed. Arthur Livingstone, trans. Andrew Bongiorno and Arthur Livingstone, 4 vols (1916; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935).

[5] Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1897; Greenville, SC: Traders Press, 1994).

[6] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-politics-xi-idUSKBN1D61DD.

[7] Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy 1933-1940 (1975; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

[8] Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, rev. ed. (1987; New York: Basic Books, 2007), p. 78.

[9] Bronze Age Pervert, ‘Episode 103: Identity and the Right’, Caribbean Rhythms: https://app.gumroad.com/d/957639e489c2d3ac3be4264d04f1b405.

[10] Tomislav Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality (London: Arktos, 2011).

[11] Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God that Failed (New York and London: Routledge, 2001).

[12] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1943), p. 81.

[13] Theodore J. Kaczynski, Theological Slavery (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2008), p. 47.

[14] Alain de Benoist, The Problem of Democracy (London: Arktos, 2011), p. 95.