On the Recurrence of Neoreactionaries

In 2017, almost eight years ago, I wrote an article for e-flux journal titled “On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries,” in which I attempted to analyze the rise of neoreactionaries in relation to the process of globalization.1 2017 may feel to some like the good old days, but it is not too long ago. Now, the world-historical US presidential election in November 2024 has officially recognized the neoreactionaries and their ideology, granting them entry to the White House through vice president J. D. Vance, who is closely tied to two of neoreaction’s central figures, Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel.

Back in 2017, neoreactionary ideology was still largely underground, though gaining in popularity on 4Chan, Reddit, and in small groups of intellectuals interested in the work of Nick Land, who was crucial for providing a philosophical depth that the others couldn’t. The discourse was very similar to internet subcultures not only because of the way it circulated, but also because it integrated technology and transhumanism into a political vision of a post-singularity future. According to this vision, we are quickly approaching the moment when machines will acquire consciousness and their intelligence will consequently surpass that of humans. This moment will call for the traditionally human concept of politics to be subordinated to planning by a greater superintelligence.

The US election also begins the cruel process of reconfiguring the post-globalization epoch, a new global order that reverses a number of trends that had advanced since the Cold War. The infrastructures that sustained the neoliberal order will be reconstructed, for better or worse. At the same time, the US election marks a true liberation of political thought from the stagnation of ideological claims such as Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis and the grand discourses of empire’s thermodynamic ideology of globalization—as well as their other pole (or twin), the elite left lost in political correctness. (Neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin termed this elite left the “cathedral.”)

What I call “thermodynamic ideology” is the belief that societies must be open to economic activities, that economic rights determine political rights such as freedom of speech and human rights. It is also a political epistemology in the sense that it is transposed from science to the political domain. “Free markets” and “open systems” are the buzzwords of this ideology, whose triumph was marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, as Jean-François Lyotard witnessed:

Marxism, the last shoot stemming from both the Enlightenment and Christianity, seems to have lost all of its critical power. When the Berlin Wall fell, it failed definitively. By invading the shops in West Berlin, the East German crowds gave evidence that the ideal of freedom, at least of the free market, had already invaded Eastern European minds.2

This ideology culminated in the entry of China into the WTO in the early 2000s. China’s opening to global capitalism and the nonantagonistic attitude of the Chinese Communist Party vaguely admitted to the triumph of the liberal ideology of globalization, even giving the illusion that China would eventually follow in the footsteps of the Soviet Union. Though this apparent unification between East and West through global capitalism marked the end of the Cold War, it was not the end of antagonism or conflict. As I suggested in “On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries,” the optimism of globalization has ended. The thermodynamic ideology behind neoliberalism simply doesn’t work when the process of globalization advances to such an extent that American imperial power ceases to be the sole monopoly power. China and Russia’s quest for a multipolar world clearly signals this obsolescence.

Donald Trump, or rather his team, sensed this. Trump’s unusual and often grotesque behavior during his first term shocked American voters, but also the global public. His attempts to reverse immigration—a cornerstone of globalization, as well as of the free market—outraged liberals, but also overwhelmed those who grew up with thermodynamic ideology. Joe Biden, while he did not abandon Trump’s foreign policy, struggled to prolong the post–Cold War ideology, even when the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine seemed like a return to the Cold War itself.

While thermodynamic ideology resonated with liberals throughout the world, from Japan to Germany, it is now doomed, leaving no role for Biden and the Democrats in the current stage of planetarization—a term I use to distinguish the present era from the first phase of globalization.3 The end of this first phase is indicated by the US desire to economically decouple from China, and by China’s consequent defense of free-market globalization—a rhetoric unimaginable in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the US was the main promoter of globalization. The good old days of cheap labor abroad led to the loss of working-class jobs in the US. The “invisible hand” may be theoretically correct but it doesn’t seem to account for the “jealousy of trade” that marks the worsening situation described by J. D. Vance:

Trump’s candidacy is music to [the white working class’s] ears. He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas. His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground. He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.4

This is the paradox of globalization, which consolidated American imperial power by expanding the world market. In the end, one returns to the state hoping for it to stop or at least alter this process—hence a return to nationalism, to statism, to national religion. This contradiction leads to what Hegel called “unhappy consciousness,” an awareness of a contradiction without knowing how to overcome it. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, we are told that the spirit progresses according to its degree of maturity and independence (i.e., self-consciousness). Compared to the confinement to thinking itself that is characteristic of stoicism and skepticism’s renouncement of externality, unhappy consciousness arrives at a moment where it affirms the other without recognizing it as the other of the self, or without recognizing the self as the unity of both. This is also the passage to what Hegel called Jewish consciousness, in which a duality of extremes places essence so far beyond existence, God (the immutable) so far outside humanity, that humanity is left stranded in the inessential. In Christianity, a unity between the immutable and the particular is incarnated in the figure of Christ as also the immutable God; however, such a unity is yet another unhappy consciousness, because both the immutable and the particular still remain “other.”

John Trumbull, Declaration of Independence, 1819. United States Capitol Collection. License: Public domain. 

For the neoreactionary Peter Thiel, this contradiction emerged when the West no longer profited from the globalization it started. Instead, the West became vulnerable in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Thiel identified the root of this problem in the Enlightenment, whose values such as liberty and democracy were once the cornerstone of republican state-building, but which had lost their efficacy to cope with international politics. This clearly resonates with Carl Schmitt’s fierce attack against liberal democracy for prioritizing endless discussion but no decision, rendering the state vulnerable, especially in a time of crisis. Analogically, all of the elements central to the neoreactionaries’ discourse can be found in Schmitt’s state theory: criticism of liberal democracy, the legacy of political theology, and the exigency of political vitalism. The key task for Thiel is not exactly to negate the Enlightenment but rather to ask how the West can “preserve” itself:

The modern West has lost faith in itself. In the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period, this loss of faith liberated enormous commercial and creative forces. At the same time, this loss has rendered the West vulnerable. Is there a way to fortify the modern West without destroying it altogether, a way of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater?5

In other words, how can the West—now largely the US—maintain its imperial power without suffering the drawbacks of globalization? The crisis of self-preservation is also the moment of the state of exception. Trump’s candidacy was not a choice between fascism and non-fascism, as Kamala Harris’s campaign might have wished, for one has to understand that by trying to avoid danger one ends up in catastrophe. The defeat of Harris, who had no exceptional political proposals beyond sustaining existing norms, was only a moment of self-consciousness for the American spirit, if we follow Hegel’s vocabulary here.

I am increasingly convinced that we need to go back to Hegel’s concept of world history and world spirit to explain the historical psychology of the modern epoch. Only by understanding Hegel and the economy of the spirit might we avoid becoming mere elements of the dialectical algorithm and instead reset the rules or invent a new game. Alexander Kojève, an important reader of Hegel who popularized him among French intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century, understood Hegel as essential to grasping the world process, yet he also resisted Hegel. A few months before May 1968, Kojève admitted that he thought Hegel was wrong in saying that Napoleon marked the end of history. In fact it was Stalin, claimed Kojève:

The end of history wasn’t Napoleon, it was Stalin, and I’d be in charge of announcing it, with the difference that I wouldn’t be lucky enough to see Stalin ride past my window on horseback, but anyhow … After the war, I understood. No, Hegel wasn’t mistaken; he gave the exact date of the end of history, 1806. What has happened since then? Nothing at all, just the alignment of provinces [of empire]. The Chinese revolution is merely the introduction of the Napoleonic Code into China. The famous acceleration of history that everyone talks about—have you noticed that as it speeds up, historical movement advances less and less?6

1968 was the year of a worldwide student movement, a world-historical event that coincided with Kojève’s death as well as the beginnings of a liberal economy in Europe. Kojève, an experienced French diplomat—and a Soviet KGB agent—clearly saw historical movement stagnating with a universal homogeneous state, or with the triumph of thermodynamic ideology. Either way, his resistance against Hegel falls back into the logic of Hegel. But the world spirit was never Napoleon or Stalin so much as a logical necessity of the historical process itself, of the exigency to overcome a contradiction that leads to unhappy consciousness. From the standpoint of this economy of the spirit, Trump’s victory could only be expected, not because Trump is a great leader—on the contrary, he seems more like a con man—but because he understood the political climate in time to ride its wave. And now we can foresee the reversal of the order of globalization as part of the world process.

Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters, 1799. License: Public domain. 

We can also foresee the realization of neoreactionary thought. Looking back at 2017, some of those key figures of neoreaction have grown even more influential since then. Curtis Yarvin has almost become a household name among Americans; Nick Land is still observing the world process from Shanghai, while his “Dark Enlightenment” has gained popularity among young readers in China. J. D. Vance and Elon Musk have joined forces under the guise of democracy—a political magic word in the West and East that signals the impossibility of being politically incorrect.

It is too early to tell how the Trump regime will use American economic and military power to change geopolitics. Any expectation that Trump will bring peace to the world is a leftover from an earlier era of American imperial power, with its self-flattering superhero stories. This expectation furthermore appears as an illusion when one realizes that the world process, which demands radical intellectual interrogation, is far beyond any single persona or country. The world has stagnated since the 2008 financial crisis, which suggested the failure of neoliberal globalization. The escalation of wars in recent years is the consequence of a persistent post–Cold War worldview no longer at home in the world, or of a Cold War that never in fact ended but rather continued in the guise of globalization.

Will twentieth-century imperial power continue to triumph in the twenty-first century? Today the war over technology has been pushed to the forefront, with states now grouping more or less around different affinities for technological advancement. We see this in the alliance between countries that produce nanoscale microchips, while in the Cold War it was nuclear arms. The recent launch of DeepSeek and the shock it caused in the West only further confirms this observation. We also see it in the blocs that share technological infrastructure like communication systems and railways. Russia, China, and other countries might contest imperial power, but in doing so, are they also becoming imperial powers? This is a critical question if we dare to imagine a new and different phase of globalization, or to develop thought adequate to the current phase of planetarization.

The US has already entered into conflict with developing imperial powers; in response, Europe has been attempting to assert its sovereignty, but its course is not yet certain: from Habermas and Derrida’s cosigned petition for Europe to distance itself from the US unilateralism of the Iraq War, to Macron’s reiteration of it after his visit to China in 2023, it seems like nothing has happened. Already in the 1930s, Carl Schmitt identified the danger of American imperialism; he pointed to America’s manipulation of the Monroe Doctrine at the turn of the century to mobilize Japan to open up China’s market and access its capital. Schmitt argued that the nation-state would decline in the face of American imperialism.7 Of course, Schmitt was a Nazi legal theorist, which might render his ideas taboo for progressives—suggesting that Yarvin’s idea of a hypocritical “cathedral” is not completely wrong. Nonetheless, Cold War alliances are insufficient for responding to the current planetary condition and its interlinked crises of climate, AI, and geopolitics.

Political theorist Moritz Rudolph has satirized the world spirit as a salmon that was born in the East and then travelled to the West. It grew up in Greece, writes Rudolph, and reached adulthood in the Prussian state of Hegel’s time, before returning to the stream of its birth to spawn and die.8 This journey is the becoming of self-consciousness as well as liberation (Befreiung). Like a salmon, the world spirit now returns to where it began and where it will probably end. This rhetoric is redolent of proclamations in China today of a rising East and declining West (东升西降), which might sound like good dialectics—perhaps too good to be true. The West is trapped in unhappy consciousness, resenting that ways that globalization benefited non-Western countries while causing the West itself to lose its competence and identity. In a similar fashion, Oswald Spengler lamented that the West exported technology to Japan at the turn of the twentieth century only for Japan to rise from the rank of student to teacher with its defeat of Russia in the 1905 war.9

The East is trapped in an unhappy consciousness of a different kind. It is based on the East’s need to assimilate to the Western modernization project, which leads to the dissolution of its own traditions, values, and family-based social structure. A symbol for this might be the gigantic infrastructure projects in the East, ranging from highspeed trains to database centers—a sublime of technological development that replaces the sublime of confronting nature, the “wow” factor and likes on social media that replace religious respect (Achtung). In East Asia, fast-paced modernization extends the consumer ethos from high-end luxury shops to universities.

This overproduction and overdevelopment produces problems that the West already encountered in the twentieth century panic over spiritual misery. Overproduction and overdevelopment don’t mean only an excess of products, but also an excess of prosthetic organs that the soul cannot hold—like how Henri Bergson identified the looming First World War as an organological rupture. For Bergson, the source of war was not merely economic but also technological, following the unprecedented nineteenth-century expansion of artificial prostheses; with societies unable to incorporate the new extensions, war became the means of pacifying the unrest of the soul. Paradoxically, in order to surpass the West, the East will have to accelerate faster in all domains, which will only deepen its melancholia. To cope with this unhappy consciousness, the East will have to reinvent the concept of modernization by giving it a nationality, to create an illusion of moving in the direction of history. Can we really say that the East and the West are developing two different projects or agendas? There is no clearer mind than Carl Schmitt on this point: “The East, in particular, took hold of Hegel’s philosophy of history in the same way it took hold of the atomic bomb and other products of the Western intelligentsia in order to realize the unity of the world in accordance with its plans.”10

William Blake, Behemoth and Leviathan, 1825–26. Gift of Edward Bement, 1917, Metropolitan Museum of Art. License: Public domain.

We can continue by making a long list of these “other products.” Imperial powers will continue competing over resources to maintain the uneven development of the world. Many intellectuals unfortunately share the illusion that these powers will come to the table, listen to each other, work out their differences, and collaborate. But neither culture nor understanding are at stake in this larger power struggle, and those who have not woken up to this will only repeat the “clash of civilizations” cliché by insisting on respect for cultural differences. The East and the West are in fact developing the same plan, the same technology, and the same philosophy of history for domination, and are thus no longer distinguishable in this world process. As Jean-Luc Nancy put it, the Far East (extrême orient) becomes the Far West (extrême occident).11

How does one move out of unhappy consciousness? René Girard, the méta penseur of Thiel, Vance, and the neoreactionaries, developed a theory of scapegoating that calls for the sacrifice of something to resolve a conflict within a community and restore “purity,” as with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The “impurity” that needs to be sacrificed could be immigrants who threaten rural whites, or the aberration of Trump voters themselves, or China’s fierce economic and technological competition with the US. The Greek word for scapegoat is pharmākos, closely related to pharmakon, which means both “poison” and “remedy.” The scapegoat is the remedy to the community that also poisons the community. Girard recognized this paradox: “The victim is sacred, it is criminal to kill him—but the victim is sacred only because he is to be killed.”12 Whether remedy or poison, a decision regarding the scapegoat becomes necessary; a poison can be transformed into a remedy, and a remedy can be discredited as poison. Vance expressed skepticism about scapegoating, identifying “efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim” as “a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else”—but still couldn’t resist sacrificing Haitian immigrants.13 Indeed, it is hard to resist the convenience of scapegoating, such as when Trump blames DEI for the recent Washington, DC plane crash, or when so-called progressive intellectuals blame Latin American immigrants for voting for Trump. Yet the question remains: Can scapegoating relieve the unhappy consciousness, or does it only maintain a contradiction that can never be resolved?

All polarizations risk being stuck in unhappy consciousness; all efforts to resolve polarization through further polarization will only deepen the unhappiness. As mentioned earlier, the obstacle is not in any misunderstanding or unwillingness to listen. In ancient times, legitimacy came from mythology, but today the legitimacy of scapegoating comes from the economy and technology. The Ancient Greeks used another mechanism to restore social and collective order, namely tragedy. Girard tried to equate his theory of sacrifice with tragedy by aligning Aristotle’s katharsis (purification) with tragedy’s necessity for violence and fear, but we should be careful here.14 It is in tragedy that Nietzsche saw an interplay between the Apollonian and the Dionysian drives, again an irreconcilable polarization that was later abandoned in the pursuit of rationality, which nonetheless remains accompanied by modern decadence.

Much more than what Aristotle called katharsis, Greek tragedy implies a logical form, later identified by Schelling and notably acknowledged by Péter Szondi: “Since Aristotle, there has been a poetics of tragedy. Only since Schelling has there been a philosophy of the tragic.”15 The opposition was resolved by an affirmation that transcended the opposition between freedom and fate. To follow Hegelian vocabulary, we have to ask what a true reconciliation consists of. One can’t transcend unhappy consciousness without turning toward reason, because reason is the only resolution, and world history is the history of reason. Reason is the most powerful discourse of the West, since what contradicts it is inevitably unreason, which is analogical to a just enemy. By the same token, the East cannot turn to unreason in order to combat the West; but does turning to reason to operate within the framework of the West end up in the atomic bomb, as Schmitt claimed?

It is necessary to affirm and expand reason beyond the West. Such an expansion is not only geographical and universalizing; it also, in terms of logic, allows diversity to flourish. Kant uses the term Erweiterung to describe an expansion of theoretical reason in light of entities it cannot demonstrate and prove, but which are necessary for practical reason. I concluded my 2017 essay with the following:

Maybe we should grant to thinking a task opposite the one given to it by Enlightenment philosophy: to fragment the world according to difference instead of universalizing through the same; to induce the same through difference, instead of deducing difference from the same. A new world-historical thinking has to emerge in the face of the meltdown of the world.

I have elaborated on this point in all my major writings since The Question Concerning Technology in China (2016), especially in the recent books Post-Europe (2024) and Machine and Sovereignty (2024).16 I can’t think of a better conclusion to this essay. I can only add that such a fragmentation calls for a search for a genuine pluralism—in other words, a philosophy adequate to the current planetary condition—especially when the term “pluralism” is routinely appropriated by both the left and the right. In his theory of the Großraum, Schmitt developed an idea of political pluralism against universalism—namely American imperialism—that was later taken up by Alexander Dugin when he was developing his idea of the Eurasian Großraum. Contemporary anthropologists studying Indigenous concepts of nature have also suggested that ontological pluralism could help overcome the strictures of Western knowledge since the rise of modernity. But how can we be sure that such a pluralism isn’t just a disguised monism, that resistance doesn’t only contribute to the hegemony against which it fights? In recent decades we have seen how the promise of pluralism under neoliberalism collapses into monism; and we have seen how pluralism in nature was conquered by monotechnological culture. Any future pluralism will have to confront the test of technology as anticipated by Schmitt. Without relinquishing the term “pluralism,” I would appeal to a pluralism that is epistemological at the same time as it is technological—a practice grounded in a matrix consisting of biodiversity, noodiversity, and technodiversity, which I suggest as a starting point for conceiving a planetary thinking.17