In Search of Able-Men and Strong Gods
“While old false Formulas are getting trampled everywhere into destruction, new genuine Substances unexpectedly unfold themselves indestructible.”
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History (1841)
It will be entertaining, to say the least, for those of us that live long enough, to read the first retrospective histories of the Trump era. What later generations will say, how they will frame it all, is of course not yet clear. I look forward to it, as I do old age generally. One element that will surely be present is iconoclasm. Before anything else, Donald Trump is an iconoclast Like Martin Luther, a slightly more appropriate German comparison than the usual, Trump’s followers will go and have gone further. Arguably, we have entered a new stage of the iconoclasm inaugurated a decade ago.
When Luther gathered students on December 10, 1520, to mockingly burn the papal bull Exsurge Domine, the student carried on, adding a staged funeral rite, songs, and perhaps some property destruction to the festivities long after Luther had retired. It was a metaphor for the Reformation itself. The Peasant Revolt, the Anabaptists, and Huldrych Zwingli all displeased Luther, but he was aware, in most cases, that these were externalities of what he had unleashed and that, on balance, what had been unleashed was both necessary and positive for Christendom. Diverse sects always emerge in such times. Iconoclasm cannot be managed, not exactly. But would you prefer the alternative of motionless malaise?
Whatever you think of the online right fringes, Nick Fuentes and Bronze Age Pervert, for example, or whoever is the current online right boogeyman, they represent iconoclasm, the extremities of the mood not exactly commissioned by Trump but facilitated by his occurrence. Mockery, hyperbole, post-post-irony, all tools of iconoclasm. None of this is a concerted, allied effort to be sure. BAP accuses Fuentes and Candice Owens of being controlled opposition while Fuentes charges BAP and Curits Yarvin with philosemitism and Peter Thielism. We are observing here, and what we are most interested in is the young Americans who are labeled “followers” of these iconoclasts. What do they want? Of course, anyone familiar with the new right will understand that the influences are many and eclectic. Online fandom has emerged around certain figures, but this does not exhaust the constellation of ideas, impulses, or intentions. To intuit that the new right has been influenced by certain media characters does not mean that it is full of the “acolytes.” Just because the New York Times has lately discovered a new right actor does not prove their ownership (or leadership) of what is a highly decentralized, multifaceted movement. What does, I think, represent the movement, and link it to Trump, is a spirit of iconoclasm.
The new right is accused of nihilism or of Nietzscheanism, the same thing is meant. On this telling, right wingers just want to watch the world burn because they enjoy it, because they despair of reform. Maybe some do. That type, ever opportunist, will always be with us, but they are not representative or definitive. In any case, nihilism is entirely the wrong way to understand it all. The new right does not have a death wish; they are not masochistic. They want life. But more than that, they hate lies, they hate empty forms. Material and economic conditions play into the rightward shift of young men, to be sure. The open bigotry and systematic marginalization of white millennial men certainly confirm and heighten the case. Zoomers watched this happen as millennials were subjected to sanctioned reeducation programs. It either wasn’t happening or it was good that it was. And I don’ think, contra Ross Douthat, that you can appease young right-wing men at this point by “just not discriminating against them,” or that the left will actually take that advice. That ship has sailed. I tend to believe that the present dissatisfaction is deeper, more spiritual, more justified, than material conditions alone would suggest. The formlessness of modern political life is more than economic and material.
The new right is a movement of iconoclasts, but not nihilists. That’s why, as Geoffrey Kabaservice said on a podcast with Aaron Renn earlier this year, all the intellectual energy and curiosity is on the right. Right wingers, even Zoomer right wingers, are not faithless or agnostic, they see the emptiness of present forms. On the contrary, they believe perhaps too intensely, too zealously. Maybe the monasteries really do need to be dissolved and assets redistributed. A question for Protestants: Whatever his motivations, was Henry VIII wrong?
The cottage industry that has emerged around bemoaning the new right tends to think of itself as supremely historically conscious, as watchmen on the wall against repetition of twentieth century catastrophes. Rod Dreher is representative. Describing supposedly nihilist right wing Zoomers, he wrote last month,
“Trust in the system is gone. Hell, I share most of these conclusions myself! The difference is that I am not a nihilist; I don’t want to tear it all down, but rather reform it. There are no historical examples in which “tearing it all down” produced a better, more just, more functional order. The Zoomers don’t seem to have any knowledge of history, nor do they care about it.”
This is in the context of Dreher claiming that 30-40% of Zoomers on the Hill are Groypers, a subject and claim we won’t now get into, but I find it incredible. That is, unless a “Groyper” is simply any Zoomer who has watched Fuentes and resonated with some of his monologues in which case the percentages are far too low. There is a reason Fuentes is popular and it’s not just because he is a provocateur, a generator of memes, and laser focused on audience growth.
I doubt that a substantial plurality of Republican staffers are practitioners of the bizarre and perverse Groyper lifestyle insofar as it exists—it’s unclear. Are 30-40% of Republican staffers to the right of Charlie Kirk? Probably. Are they sexual deviants? I doubt it. Do they like crusader memes? Almost certainly. Are they “race realists”? Maybe. Do they read Steve Sailer? Everyone does. Are they antisemites? It depends on what you mean. Have they taken the obviously ludicrous and trollish “oath” to Fuentes? Unlikely. Anyone who pretends some kind of coup is imminent with Fuentes at its head is unserious. I have not seen Dreher suggest this, to be clear. Observers should strive to understand the actual function of people like Fuentes or BAP or Owens even before the cause of the same.
In any case, our present interest is broader dynamics and trends. To his credit, Dreher acknowledges that “The inability of us older people — Boomers, Xers, and older Millennials — to comprehend the world through the eyes of Zoomers is a big, big problem.” He knows that there is no “gatekeeping our way out” of the rising iconoclasm. (We will not now interrogate the modes, degrees, and types of iconoclasms, but only register its presence.)
“You cannot simply point at the Zoomers and say, “Thou shalt not,” and expect it to work. The problems are too deep and complex, and anyway, they have learned to have no respect for authority. Why should they? The institutions of our society, as they see it, have lied and lied and lied, and still lie.”
Yet, still, Dreher accuses the Zoomers, the young, nascent, new right of nihilism. This is not quite right. Nor do young iconoclasts don’t disdain authority as such, just pretenders to authority. On the contrary. What they want is revolutionary men, what Thomas Carlyle called able-men of substance to fill the forms. Nor, from what I can tell, do they relish destruction, nor are they soulless, amoral, void.
Moreover, I see no one on the new right longing to repeat the ills of the twentieth century. Quite the opposite. Unprecedented carnage is certainly the legacy of the prior century in one respect, but for younger generations, its destruction reaches further and deeper. The Boomers lament the death of the body, but the Zoomers suffer from death of the soul. The safeguards against bodily harm, the impenetrable armor, are hollow. The soul needs the body, but the body is mere matter without the soul. Nor do I perceive hatred of America but longing for the America that truly was—dissatisfaction with the thing of partisan myth.
What I see unfolding is revolutionary, as Carlyle understood it. It is Puritanical, and not just because Margaret Atwood’s fever dreams says so, or liberals who got mugged by woke like Noah Rothman and Andrew Doyle say so. My assessment, like Carlyle’s, depends on a certain filial piety. In fact, the so-called nihilists are lovers of order, not disorder. Else they would be accelerationists, else they might not speak at all. The present disorder that Dreher sees too would fill them with glee. The difference between Dreher and his subjects is that degree or position, of moderate and revolutionary. The question is which is truly a lover of order and reform, the moderate conservative or the radical iconoclast? I have entered this inquiry before. Or perhaps, speaking of icons, and since Dreher is eastern orthodox, the clarifying question is whether images necessarily induce idolatrous worship, are likely to in the weak minded, or are harmless?
As Carlyle says, revolutionary men, if genuine—and there are surely disingenuous men among us—are “by nature” sons of order not disorder. Indeed,
“It is a tragical position for a true man to work in revolutions. He seems an anarchist; and indeed a painful element of anarchy does encumber him at every step,—him to whose whole soul anarchy is hostile, hateful. His mission is Order; every man’s is. He is here to make what was disorderly, chaotic, into a thing ruled, regular. He is the missionary of Order… Disorder is dissolution, death.”
What is “vulgarity” when the whole world is vulgar? What is “anarchy” when the world disordered?
The “war of the Puritans,” says Carlyle, by which he means the English Civil War and its prelude, was one of “Belief against Unbelief.”
“The struggle of men intent on the real essence of things, against men intent on the semblances and forms of things. The Puritans, to many, seem mere savage Iconoclasts, fierce destroyers of Forms; but it were more just to call them haters of untrue Forms.”
Archbishop Laud and the Caroline Church stood for false forms, hollow ceremonies. Laud was like “a College-Tutor, whose whole world is forms, College-rules; whose notion is that these are the life and safety of the world.” The emptiness of these things, the veneer, is what drives men mad.
Forms are good, “the formed world is the only habitable one.” Substance requires form. Puritanism was not a “naked formlessness.” What is objectionable is empty forms or forms formed around false substance. Stale, lifeless forms—rules, ceremonies, “set speeches”—these drive men mad. This is idolatry, “worshipping of hollow shows.” Forms that do not conform to or rather conceal the reality of the thing—unresponsive forms.
“You have lost your only son; are mute, struck down, without even tears: an importunate man importunately offers to celebrate Funeral Games for him in the manner of the Greeks! Such mummery is not only not to be accepted,—it is hateful, unendurable.”
This is what the Puritans detested. A formless life—a naked pulpit—was better than idolatry.
“It [Puritanism] stood preaching in its bare pulpit, with nothing but the Bible in its hand. Nay, a man preaching from his earnest soul into the earnest souls of men: is not this virtually the essence of all Churches whatsoever? The nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is preferable to any semblance, however dignified. Besides, it will clothe itself with due semblance by and by, if it be real. No fear of that; actually no fear at all. Given the living man, there will be found clothes for him; he will find himself clothes. But the suit-of-clothes pretending that it is both clothes and man—!”
The Puritan mantra, we could say, was live not by lies! Semblance, form, “college-rules” have divorced themselves from reality. The battle between Laud and Puritan—form and substance—marks our own day. Ironically, Carlyle is a bit too hard on the Puritans. But I, like him, do not praise “naked formlessness.” What I praise, with Carlyle, is the “the spirit which had rendered that inevitable,” the willingness to subvert the empty forms. I do not think today’s iconoclasts want nakedness. They desperately want to be clothed. But they would rather be naked than swaddled in lies. Their whole world appears as self-validating but empty forms, procedures, rules, platitudes, dogma. And the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image: he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me; for thou art my god.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s recent New York Times essay represents the formlessness of the present order. Ramaswamy dutifully pays homage to all the icons. For him, America is a great nation because it is not a nation, only individuals from nowhere; nationhood is predicated on allegiance to slogans and ideals–forms. Rule of law, freedom, meritocracy. So long as you swear to these forms, you are an American. Soulless stuff. Men are born for society, for community, for political life, for national existence. America is exceptional in its achievements, but it is not exempted from the laws of history or criteria of nationhood as understood for millennia. America has not bent metaphysics to its will, though it may try. That the borders of human nature, family, and nationality are simultaneously assaulted in our day is no coincidence. None of Vivek’s idols, his mute gods, tell us what these things are because they cannot. Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.
Of course, every nation holds up ideals that represent the aspirational citizen. Every nation does have a creed. Nations elevate their own character. Every self-confident nation in some sense universalizes these qualities. But these ideals, aspirations, and qualities are not themselves sufficient for nationhood or national inclusion. The forms must be predicated on substance. It is ridiculous, to borrow from a right-wing anonymous influencer, to suggest that an American is anyone who ascents to the ideal of a well-run postal service. Just as Athens and Rome are no more though their history is remembered, America does not endure on the basis of creedal recitation. Nations do not exist between the ears of men but before their eyes.
The substance of nations is their shared things: religion, rites, myths, memory, ancestry, history, language. We often house these under “culture.” Any shared creed is produced by these shared predicates. Membership in a nation corresponds to the extent of mutual sharing in these things. As in families, adoption is possible, though not normative. But it must be true adoption, true integration, true assimilation. There must be a nation to be grafted into.
As Huntington knew, “A multicultural America will, in time, become a multicreedal America.” The point of Vivek’s shallow creed is that it facilitates inevitability which is the erasure of nationality both in culture and creed. This is what the iconoclasts rail against in increasingly angry terms. Why shouldn’t they be angry? And Vivek’s, or Ben Shapiro’s, dogged insistence on worship of their idols will satisfy exactly none of the aggrieved youngsters. If they want to actually reach that audience and address their complaints they could not be doing a worse job of it. Do they really want to solve the “problem”? Perhaps that’s not their aim at all. To quote Huntington once more, “People are not likely to find in political principles the deep emotional content and meaning provided by kith and kin, blood and belonging, culture and nationality.” The iconoclasts want, above all, deep emotional content and meaning and few are giving it to them, so they search it out on their own.
Vivek is wrong to attribute the iconoclasm to economic insecurity, to the symptoms rather than the cause. If nations are more than blood and soil, men are certainly more than flesh and blood. They need home, inheritance, religion, a way of life. These are spiritual needs, not material ones, but they are also not slogans. Sure, Millennials and Zoomers would like higher wages and cheaper housing, but that’s not the source of true grievance. At bottom, it is the hollowing out of national identity, the reduction of nationhood to forms lacking all substance. A new Apollo mission and better math scores is not going to pacify iconoclasts.
What frees iconoclasts from false, hollow forms? What or who are the iconoclasts looking for? Great, able-men. Kings. Ultimately, iconoclasts want—need—is literally men of substance. They want strong men to lead them back to strong gods, gods that speak. And what they especially need is the God that speaks. (Trump does not quite offer this, but he, perhaps, has cleared the way.) The American creed on offer, to paraphrase Huntington, is a bastardized Protestant ethic, detached from the experience that created it, and emptied of the God of the people who practiced it. The form went a long way for a long time—was worshiped by many—so long as it retained a semblance its substance. What the iconoclasts have realized is that every drop of substance has been drained and they reject the absurdity of sipping from an empty vessel. Filled with new wine, the old wine skin might once again provide refreshment. Vivek, et al., stubbornly offer up vinegar.
The question is who will provide substance again? Cromwell or Napoleon. Carlyle, like me, preferred the former. By this date, sufficient critique has been lodged against the lies of the post-war order. Enough too with handwringing. The real, live question is, who will lead the Puritan cause to full, true, substantive forms? Where are the “strong daring,” able-men? They will not emerge from the cadre of “thought leaders” who despise and condemn those dissatisfied with prevailing outward forms, that much is clear. As Carlyle says, it is while false forms are trampled that new, genuine, enduring substance will emerge.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
