After God, Before Socialism

A few more thoughts on Nietzsche and the Right.

My last post about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey triggered a lot of reactions. A benefit of being less nichey, I suppose.

First, a quick shout-out to Brad Delong for cross-posting the piece on his site, which brought tons of new eyeballs over here. I jumped into the Substack waters a little late so I’ll take all the help I can get. But it was this response from the always interesting Corey Robin that sent me back to the keyboard:

Throughout the piece, Sean contrasts the disingenuousness of the contemporary right’s defense of Christianity and love of the Homeric world with Nietzsche’s “honesty”: Nietzsche saw that you cannot have both, and he was willing to give up Christianity for the aristocratic radicalism of the Homeric ethic. But what this argument about Nietzsche (and his times) needs to confront is what Nietzsche saw as the major emblem/residue of Christianity in the modern world: it wasn’t the church or religion or anything like that. It was socialism.

Quite a bit to chew on there. I probably tried to do too much in the piece. My excuse, if you’re wondering, is that I was breezing through a few centuries of history so you’ll have to pardon the omissions. All I wanted to do was highlight the incoherent ideological stew on the modern right. Having pagan heroes, a Nietzschean morality, and a Christian identity just doesn’t make any sense.

Yet Nietzsche, the philosopher who said you can’t preserve Christianity and simultaneously resurrect the moral universe it spent two thousand years dismantling, remains a lodestar on the right. That, my friends, is a helluva contradiction no matter how you slice it.

Corey’s beef (if that’s the right word) was that my piece didn’t go far enough because Nietzsche was being “honest” for a very particular reason that I glossed over. The culture he admired (ancient Greece) was dying and the real threat was socialism, not the church. He was convinced (wrongly, as it turned out) that the church had already lost its metaphysical footing.

Dutiful readers of Nietzsche (and this Substack) know Nietzsche’s obsession with Christianity was about the moral revolution it unleashed. Strength, pride, and domination were turned into vices. While the poor, the meek, the suffering, the outcast, and the powerless were placed at the center of the moral universe.

As Corey reminded me, Nietzsche looked at late 19th century socialism and saw the residue of Christian ethics. All that talk of “equality of souls” was translated into concrete demands for material equality. That — more than anything else — was the big political problem. You know how much I adore Nietzsche but this is the stuff I just can’t get behind. There’s a deep, deep contempt for everyday people (“the herd”), which is why he was so committed to destroying the seeds of democracy.

Anyway, when Camus said that Nietzsche wanted to force a “final decision” about atheism, this is what he was talking about. Europe had a choice to make: restore the Christian worldview, or find some new foundation for Christian morality, or accept the death of God. What it couldn’t do, Nietzsche thought, was reject Christianity while continuing to treat Christian morality as sacred. But that’s exactly what the modern right has pulled off, and that’s what I was trying to parse in the last piece (Side note: Matthew McManus is truly excellent on this topic and you should check out his work and also my podcast episode with him from a couple years ago).

The amusing thing is that right-wing intellectuals love to borrow Nietzsche’s language about decadence and resentment and decline and they love to rant about wokeness, DEI, campus radicals, social justice activists, and whatever the Democratic Socialists of America are doing this week. But none of these things constitute anything like the socialist threat that haunted 19th century Europe. There’s no mass movement in America preparing to abolish private property. Most of what gets called “Marxism” on the right is corporate branding or progressive cultural politics operating inside capitalist institutions.

Shadowboxing with symbolic egalitarianism as though it were a revolutionary material force is completely silly. The balance of forces is clear and everyone knows it. Capital owns the institutions. Wealth is more concentrated than it has been in generations. Whatever else this is, it ain’t a society trembling before socialism.

The right-wingers I wrote about don’t have to make Nietzsche’s final decision — that was the whole point. They can claim Christianity as a cultural identity while rejecting much of Christian morality, and they can celebrate wealth and hierarchy while continuing to invoke Christendom as the foundation of Western civilization. Again, there’s no powerful egalitarian movement forcing the contradiction into the open.

I’m glad Corey pushed me to think a little harder about what I was trying to say in the last post. What I called a misunderstanding of Nietzsche, Homer, and Christianity is more likely a correct — and useful — reading of the political situation.

The right can keep playing with the language of Christianity and Nietzsche while defending late-stage capitalism, even though none of it coheres philosophically. That it works politically is all that matters. No one has to ask too many thorny questions about what Jesus actually taught.

Nietzsche hated this arrangement because he thought Christian morality was still conquering Europe through socialism. Today the right faces no comparable pressure. Its version of Christianity has already been thinned into a civilizational brand and, miraculously, the right gets the authority of Christianity without all the pesky ethical demands.

What a political bargain!