Who's Afraid of the New Right?

From The Dispossessed to the Dark Enlightenment

As a teenager, I devoured sci-fi author Ursula Le Guin’s Chronicles of Earthsea, her answer to Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia. I deeply identified with Ged, the reluctant magus, her protagonist. I also loved The Lathe of Heaven, about a boy whose dreams change reality. 

I don’t read as much fiction as I once did, but I just finished The Dispossessed, from the early ‘70s. In this novel, Le Guin envisioned how an anarchist society functions on another planet. She was inspired by the famous ‘60s anarchist Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd), among other influences. The book fit the countercultural context of that time, when people were actively questioning and seeking alternatives. 

I am always surprised by the lack of models for working alternative societies or functional utopias one finds in modern literature or film (if you know of any good ones, please tell me). We have a deluge of dystopian hell-scapes to choose from, but few models of a pro-active next civilizational stage from where we are now. 

Instead, current trends lead radically backward. Vanity Fair explores the rise of the “New Right,” funded by Libertarian tech billionaires such as Peter Thiel. Thiel has publicly declared, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In the US, some of the populace grows increasingly impatient and frustrated, rejecting democracy as a path forward. Barring a reversal, this portends a shift to some form of “soft” or “hard” authoritarianism, white Christian nationalist ethno-state, or straight-up dictatorship. 

I feel I have been remiss in not exploring, until now, the formative ideas and personalities making up the Neo-fascist or authoritarian New Right. I am starting to dive into this wasp’s nest. While reading The Dispossessed, I also made my way through Alt-Right philosopher Nick Land’s Dark Enlightenment. Dark Enlightenment is largely based on the ideas of “Mencius Meldbug,” a.k.a Curtis Yarvin, the focus of the Vanity Fair article and an intellectual lynchpin of this movement.