In order to “come to grips” with the podcaster Nick Fuentes, Daniel Mahoney in his latest article for the American Mind rightly calls for “sober evaluation from a critical distance,” but his own response is at best insufficient. A robust rejoinder to Fuentes demands more than reified appeals to Churchill.
Mahoney simply does not seem to take his opponent seriously. His familiarity with Fuentes seems limited to decontextualized soundbites. He is hoodwinked by Fuentes’s trolling and youthful antics, attributing to him a somewhat paradoxical weakness for both Hitler and Stalin (and harping on the latter’s atrocities, as if Fuentes is somehow unaware of them). He ignores how Fuentes’s and the lifestyle influencer Andrew Tate’s visions contrast and incorrectly conflates Fuentes’s brand of Catholicism and the “new pagan Right.” He seems not to realize that Burkean platitudes are unpersuasive under our antiracist constitution, or that unironic pleas to “authentic Americans” and “true conservatives” appear preposterous to young men who have seen the wholesale cheapening of American identity and reckon there is little left of America to conserve.
Mahoney approaches subjects like neoconservatism and the Russo–Ukrainian war with insight and nuance, but the refusal to take seriously the more substantive and timely issues raised by Fuentes—and, similarly, the tendency of others to discount Fuentes’s ideology as mere rebellion—will only further alienate the marginalized and disaffected young men who follow him.
Leo Strauss described in German Nihilism how the opponents of the young German nihilists, those adolescents who mounted a moral protest against liberal democracy and the prospect of a universal and homogenous state, committed a “grave mistake.” They
believed to have refuted the No by refuting the Yes, i.e. the inconsistent, if not silly, positive assertions of the young men. But one cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood. And many opponents did not even try to understand the ardent passion underlying the negation of the present world and its potentialities. As a consequence, the very refutations confirmed the nihilists in their belief; all these refutations seemed to beg the question; most of the refutations seemed to consist of pueris decantata, of repetitions of things which the young people knew already by heart. Those young men had come to doubt seriously, and not merely methodically or methodologically, the principles of modern civilisation; the great authorities of that civilisation did no longer impress them; it was evident that only such opponents would have been listened to who knew that doubt from their own experience, who through years of hard and independent thinking had overcome it.
An effective refutation of Fuentes would not simply exalt Churchill, but distinguish between his transhistorical magnanimity and his historical and all-too-human shortcomings. It would not imply that National Socialism posed a threat to “Western civilization” without explaining how it posed a threat. It would not appear to minimize Israeli ethnonationalism or to conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, no matter how “militant, obsessive, and emotionally charged” the latter might be. It would not mistake Fuentes’s moral protest for mere rebellion, and it certainly would not from its position of relative comfort dismiss his daring as only “skin deep.”
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An effective refutation would address the substantial questions raised directly and indirectly by Fuentes’s polemics. How do diversity and particularity differ? Are Roman Catholicism and particularity consonant? What about Roman Catholicism and the American way of life? Are moral actions justifiable as such, or should they be judged in light of their consequences? Is meritocracy possible under multiculturalism, or is ethnic nepotism intrinsic to human nature? Under what circumstances, if any, is it just to champion the national or ethnic identity of one political community but not another? Is it possible to be both a dual citizen and a good citizen? Is Israel, viewed in a certain light, postliberal? Does Israel feature prominently in both right- and left-wing discourse because it so brightly illuminates the contradictions within postwar liberalism? Have the deracinated youths of the West fashioned a chalice out of Israel into which they pour their struggles with identity, belonging, and meaning?
We must confront these and other questions unflinchingly if we are to reach disaffected young men. Mahoney is correct that they have “grown up in a culture afflicted by many false pieties,” but he is wrong to attribute all false pieties to the left. Many originated within conservatism and are promulgated to this day by conservatives. It is no wonder that Fuentes and his followers—the rootless progeny of an immoderate “age of the adolescence”—have come to question all received opinions. What they need are “old-fashioned teachers . . . undogmatic enough to understand the aspirations of their pupils”—teachers who can “explain to them in articulate language the positive, and not merely destructive, meaning of their aspirations.” Only then might they be receptive to an education in moderation and the other virtues.
None of this is to deny the odious stench of ressentiment that pervades Fuentes’s speech, his dubious personal motivations, or his aspirations for power. But kneejerk recitations of liberal orthodoxy and the synonymous charge of “willful and systematic distortion of empirical realities” will not accomplish much, given the depth and severity of the problem. They may in fact compound the problem. But, unlike the interwar Germans, we still count among us a few teachers of the old breed. Now is their time.
