Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Extreme Right: from Interpretation to Politics

Despite their profound differences, it’s clear that a political turn to either Nietzsche or Heidegger amounts to a radical break with what has been called the Atlantic Republican tradition, and so a radical break with American politics itself. Years ago the right and left in America both agreed that we should have a democratic republic. The right were mostly conservatives, who favored leaning toward the republican side of the equation, the left were liberals who leaned toward the democratic side. Their debates were about how best to maintain our system, not about whether to radically transform it. Now there are Americans who are against democracy and who wish to revert to a more authoritarian or tribal political life. The philosophical ground of the radical right’s position here can be found in the anti-Enlightenment thinking of figures like Nietzsche and Heidegger, because Atlantic Republicanism is just the political face of Enlightenment philosophy. The Founding Fathers of the United States were themselves key participants in that movement, so much so that classical American political philosophy is, quite simply, a child of the Enlightenment.

We see the gravity of such a fundamental turn, such a fundamental break with what counts as the American tradition in political thought. The American culture wars have shifted as the polarization of political positions has become more extreme, and are waged no longer on the restricted territory defined by liberals and conservatives, nor within the irrelevant confines of the academy, but in the wide open space that separates Nazis and Anarchists, and on the streets of the nation. The Alt-Right’s political readings of Nietzsche and Heidegger are, among other things, a symptom of how extremely polarized our discourse has become. For example, Nietzsche was against the principle of “equality” that figures so strongly in Enlightenment political theory, and against the role played by Christianity in propagating and supporting that principle. It’s one thing for Americans to argue what’s meant by “equality;” it’s another thing if Americans simply reject equality as a value altogether.

 

So the question for our interpretation of Nietzsche’s politics is to understand how both the left and the right could appropriate his work so sincerely (a question that also applies to Hegel, though for a completely different reason). But the question for an interpretation of Heidegger’s politics is how the left could ever have taken him up at all, let alone absorbed his philosophy so completely. Think of Sartre, Derrida, Foucault etc., and of today’s Heideggerian Ecofeminists, for example. What the Heidegger affair of the 1990’s meant was that philosophy, especially French philosophy, would never be the same. The depth and truth of Heidegger’s Naziism was undeniable, and there was a mixture of confusion and horror, accompanied by a kind of scrambling back to a more Kantian approach to ethics. The heyday of Poststructuralism was over. The question for us is not to worry about the French philosophers here. The question is, if the Heidegger affair had revealed this horrifying truth of his politics, why has it been taken up by Americans? Why did it happen, and how is it done? The answer here lies not just in Hermeneutics, but in ideology critique. Neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger can be integrated into native American political thought. Neither supports ANYTHING LIKE a democratic republic. So what is the Alt-Right doing, exactly, with these imperfect icons of the leftist philosophical tradition?

We should be honest and admit that there always was a strain of American culture that was too racist to be compatible with true democracy or republicanism, too racist for the liberty, equality, fraternity of the French Revolution. There were always a few Americans who were attracted to Fascism. The interaction between American and European racism now, with the Alt-Right taking up Nietzsche and Heidegger, is just the latest phase of an established pattern. Why would any American find the anti-Enlightenment convictions of Heidegger, or the pre-Enlightenment politics of Nietzsche, appealing? The case forces us to learn from history: to learn that ideas matter, that Americans can and do depart radically (both ideologically and in practice) from the Atlantic republican tradition, and that extremism like this must be spotted early and dealt with before it builds momentum. “In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had ‘gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand’. When he spoke of Lebensraum, the German drive for ‘living space’ in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind.”