Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the Alt-Right

This edited collection uses critical theory in order to understand the rise of the Alt-Right and the election of Donald Trump—and, in doing so, to assert the necessity and value of various disciplines within the humanities. While neoliberal mainstream culture has expressed shock at the seemingly expeditious rise of the Alt-Right movement and the outcome of the 2016 United States presidential election, a rich tradition of theory may not only explain the occurrence of this “phenomenon,” but may also chart an alternative understanding of the movement, revealing the persistence of right-wing populism throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Though the humanities have seen themselves undervalued and under attack in recent years, the historical and cultural contextualization of the current moment via theory is a means of reaffirming the value of the humanities in teaching the ever-important and multifaceted skill of critical literacy. This book re-affirms the humanities, particularly the study of literature, theory, and philosophy, through questions such as how the humanities can help us understand the here and now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jun 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030187538

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© The Author(s) 2019

Christine M. Battista and Melissa R. Sande (eds.)Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the Alt-Righthttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18753-8_1

1. Introduction: The State of the Humanities and the Age of the Alt-Right

Christine M. Battista¹   and Melissa R. Sande²  

(1)

College of Arts and Sciences, Johnson & Wales University, Denver, CO, USA

(2)

Division of Humanities, Union County College, Cranford, NJ, USA

Christine M. Battista (Corresponding author)

Melissa R. Sande

Email: [e-mail]

Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, we editors had a conversation about the shock and awe exhibited by the left at Donald Trump’s ascendance to the presidency. As humanities scholars, having studied the work of theorists like Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, we found the election results somewhat predictable. Actually shocking to us, however, was that more people did not. Part of the work of this collection is to use critical theory (we mean the term broadly, encompassing work in literary theory, philosophy, and political science) and the work of the humanities to explain and make sense of the current moment. What unites the following chapters is the assertion that with critical theory we can understand, contextualize, and even predict phenomena like the current moment. This is just one of many ways in which the humanities prove their value and importance.

The humanities have been under attack for decades now. In his 2015 essay, "Posthumanism in the Age of Globalization: Rethinking The End of Education, William V. Spanos revisits his 1993 book, this time from the post-9/11 perspective, to reconsider the role of humanities studies and the post-human that he defined in his concluding chapter. Spanos suggests that the United States’ globalization of the free market in the post-Cold War period and, after the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by al Qaeda on 9/11…enabled an invasion of the University by neoliberal capitalism intended not only to recuperate but to aggrandize the control over knowledge production it lost during the turbulent Vietnam decade."¹ More specifically, Spanos writes, he is referring to the obliteration of both the residual traditional function of the humanities (the production of good ‘nationalist’ citizens of the nation-state) and the function of the humanities inaugurated by the protest movement in the 1960s and 1970s that would supersede the former.² In his meditation on the post-human and the post-structural decentering of man, Spanos concludes that we must not only forcefully resist the neo-liberal capitalist version of globalization and its dehumanizing instrumentalist—and neo—imperial—imperatives but that humanities teachers and scholars in particular must establish a dialogic relation…between the departments of the humanities in order to inaugur[ate] an authentic intellectual polity of the common that would become the model of the coming community.³ In this collection, we seek to bring together various departments of the humanities to answer such a call to action.

Particularly concomitant with Trump’s rise and that of the Alt-Right globally is further decimation of the already-massacred humanities disciplines—and this is discussed at length in Chaps. 6 and 11 of this book. Justin Stover’s March 4, 2018 essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, There is No Case for the Humanities: And deep down we know our justifications for it are hollow, began with the claim that the humanities are not just dying – they are almost dead.⁴ The essay goes on to discuss how the disciplines are squeezed on both sides because defenders on the left and the right do not make adequate defenses and the call to make the case for the humanities is fraught with ambiguities.⁵ One of the more troubling assertions of the piece is the claim that left defenders of the humanities have defended their value in the face of an increasingly corporate and crudely economic world, and yet they have also worked to gut some of the core areas of humanistic inquiry – Western civ and all that – as indelibly tainted by patriarchy, racism, and colonialism.⁶ If uncovering silenced histories and working from a New Historicist framework is troubling to Stover, perhaps he ought to consider the role his own ideological agenda plays in his argument. Further, Aaron Hanlon’s December 14, 2018 essay in The Chronicle Review effectively pushes back on such a claim. In Lies About the Humanities – and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, he discusses the often-unacknowledged lack of distinction between the humanities and the social sciences, and the charge that all too often ideology, not truth or rigor, guides humanistic research.⁷ Many of the most important questions we face as a species aren’t falsifiable, he writes.⁸ Hanlon posits questions like, Can there be just warfare? Is the death penalty moral? and asks, What empirical scientific test would definitely answer these questions?⁹

This collection seeks to use critical theory to understand the rise of the Alt-Right and the election of Donald Trump— and, in doing so, to assert the necessity and value of the humanities. While neoliberal mainstream culture has expressed shock at the seemingly expeditious rise of the Alt-Right movement and the outcome of the 2016 election, a rich tradition of theory may not only explain this phenomenon but also chart an alternative understanding of the movement, revealing the persistence of right-wing populism through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Though the humanities have seen themselves undervalued and under attack in recent years, the historical and cultural contextualization of the current moment via theory is a means of reaffirming the value of the humanities and the ever-important and multifaceted skill of critical literacy. The underlying focus of this work is reestablishing and reaffirming the humanities, particularly the study of literature, theory, and philosophy through questions like how the humanities can help us understand the here and now. The overarching argument is that critical theory provides a richer understanding and analysis of the present moment and an opportunity to make connections to various disciplines within the humanities. In the wake of the current historical moment, anti-intellectualism has become the modus operandi for our predominant governing bodies. This book seeks to examine, challenge, and develop thoughtful alternatives to these dangerously limiting ideologies, arguing for the necessity of deliberate and concentrated theoretical analysis as a form of individual and collective agency.

Chapter 2, ‘For Every Two Steps Forward, It Often Feels Like We Take One Step Back’: Foucauldian Historiography and the Current Political Moment, uses several of Michel Foucault’s texts to rethink linear conceptions of historical progress. In November 2017, former president Obama wrote a letter to supporters, encouraging them not to lose hope: Our country’s progress has never followed a straight line – for every two steps forward, it often feels like we take one step back, he wrote.¹⁰ But does such a statement put forth a problematic, linear, and somewhat oversimplified conception of history? In The Order of Things, Foucault presents an overarching question that may be of use here: "But what if empirical knowledge, at a given time and in a given culture, did possess a well-defined regularity? If the very possibility of recording facts, of allowing oneself to be convinced by them, of distorting them in traditions of making purely speculative use of them, if even this was not at the mercy of chance?"¹¹

This chapter begins by tracing Foucault’s historiography from The Order of Things (1966), to The Archeology of Knowledge (1969), to finally Discipline and Punish (1975). The Order of Things initiates Foucault’s archeological method, the notion that knowledge and systems of thought are governed by rules that people subconsciously adhere to and that such rules define conceptual possibilities that create the limits of thought in a given period and place. Foucault extends such a method in his next work, The Archeology of Knowledge, in which the value of this method becomes clearer: it allows Foucault to compare various discursive formations in different periods while displacing the primacy of the individual subject crucial to traditional historiography. In the last text addressed here, Discipline and Punish, Foucault employs genealogy to account for the transition from one way of thinking or one system of thought to another—something that the archeological method could not do, he says. Foucault’s genealogy—an extension of Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals—negates a grand scheme of linear, progressive history. Foucault argues instead in Discipline and Punish that genealogical analysis reveals that systems of thought are actually the result of unforeseen, unpredictable historical turns, and not the consequence of destined or fixed trends.

This chapter uses Foucauldian historiography, as defined and refined through these three primary texts, to destabilize popular conceptions of cohesive historical narratives of linear progression and liberal advancement. From Obama’s letter to myriad celebrity commentaries to political talk shows and editorials, narrative has acted as a salve over the last year, and popular rhetoric has conceptualized of the 2016 election as derailment from a progressive path, which presupposes the existence of an inaccurate historical trajectory refuted by Foucault in his work. Put simply, this chapter proposes a critical framework for rethinking the connections between the current political moment and those that came before it, as well as a means for reconceptualizing and unpacking the notion of History.

In Chap. 3, Andrew Woods begins with the premise that an analysis of the Alt-Right from the perspective of critical theory necessitates an understanding of what the Alt-Right says about critical theory. He argues that a conspiracy theory that identifies the Frankfurt School as the origin of cultural Marxism and political correctness in the United States supplies the Alt-Right movement with a foundational myth. Allegedly, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and others arrived in the United States in the 1930s with the intention of converting millions of Americans to Marxism by introducing cultural ideas, such as multiculturalism, feminism, and sexual liberation. Reputedly, contemporary cultural Marxism uses political correctness to demean and belittle masculinist and nationalist narratives and identities by policing the speech of white people. Rather than merely dismiss this conspiracy as fictitious, Woods confronts it to examine what it exposes about the nature of the Alt-Right movement.

The Dark Enlightenment thinkers, such as Nick Land and RAMZPAUL, argue that major universities, mainstream media outlets, and governmental institutions perpetuate this discursive regime of political correctness and, therefore, constitute a religious entity called the Cathedral. This chapter argues that the Alt-Right’s appeal is derived from their seemingly countercultural mission to dismantle and destroy the Cathedral. It builds on Angela Nagle’s work about the anti-authoritarian spirit of the Alt-Right to assert that their anti-intellectualism is a response to the belief that Cathedral intellectuals are themselves anti-intellectual. Additionally, the chapter draws on the research of philosopher Quassim Cassam to show that Alt-Right speakers advertise themselves as champions of critical thinking and debate, and thus appropriate the tools that scholars in the humanities might have used to curb their influence. Finally, the chapter returns to Robert J. Antonio’s writings on immanent critique to search for a method that will undermine and overcome the so-called critical thinking of the Alt-Right.

In Chap. 4, The Right to Anger: Combative Publics, Antonette Talaue Arogo states that anger is commonly the characterology attributed to populism. According to Jan-Werner Müller, the term is…primarily associated with particular moods and emotions: populists are ‘angry’; their voters are ‘frustrated’ and suffer from ‘resentment.’ This negative affect permeates the public sphere, claimed by both supporters and critics of present administrations to fall under the heading of populism. It is also once again being foregrounded in feminist thought and action in light of sexual harassment cases in the political and cultural domains. Furthermore, anger arguably informs the rejoinder that colonialism, to borrow from Aimé Césaire, is indefensible.

This chapter explores the role of anger in identity politics through readings of Sianne Ngai and Martha Nussbaum. Through an engagement with affect theory and philosophy, this chapter seeks to propose an understanding of anger as an ethical and political resource at present. Is anger indispensable in combatting injustices or is anger destructive of human relationships and social interactions? How has anger been conceptualized in literary, philosophical, and theoretical discourses? In what ways does anger relate to the question of agency and specify its possibilities?

If identity politics is a challenge to humanism as a theory of subjectivity, distinguishing what is human by prescribing capacities, values, and rights to one group identity while denying them from its paired opposite, the humanities, particularly literature, theory, and criticism as fields of representation, remain a necessary site of the democratization of the public sphere and state. The humanities, through their exploration of emotion as a critical faculty signaled by the affective turn, also enable new ways of thinking through historical inequalities and divisiveness that persists to the present.

Tonnia L. Anderson’s Chap. 5, " Herrenvolk Democracy: The Rise of the Alt-Right in Trump’s America," takes the position that Trump’s successful presidential bid and the 2016 GOP Platform stem from an ideology of white racial normalcy and a race-based nationalism that emerges out of Southern Civil Religion, thereby reinventing nineteenth-century Herrenvolk democracy for the twenty-first century. It examines how the rise of the Alt-Right was legitimized through neoconservative appeals to white victimology, the erosion of traditional values, and the crisis of fragmentation allegedly posed by cultural pluralism and liberal democracy, and how its agenda was codified through the 2016 GOP Platform. Anderson uses Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of capital as a conceptual framework to analyze how the ideological apparatuses of whiteness and evangelical religion were invoked to deal with the perceived problems of postmodernity and globalization through retrenchment into the past before Brown v. Board of Education (1954), thereby reasserting whiteness as a social asset.

In Chap. 6, From NeoReactionary Theory to the Alt-Right, Andrew Jones argues that the key to understanding the Alt-Right is understanding those theories that make it up, none of which are more significant than the NeoReactionary movement. The use of affect theory, postmodern critiques of modernity, and a fixation on critiquing regimes of truth are fundamental to Neoreaction (NRx) and what separates it from other Far-Right theory. While other Far-Right political theories further a politics of the capitalist or evangelical right, they maintain the liberal enlightenment values that have populated the humanities for centuries; the project of NRx is to usher in a dark enlightenment with a dogmatic anti-humanities and anti-liberal ideology. Further, unlike other Far-Right theories, an investigation of NRx requires a cross-disciplinary understanding of politics that draws less upon social scientific empirical facts and more on a historical, aesthetic, and philosophical approach. NRx first appeared in 2007 when computer programmer Curtis Yarvin started a blog devoted to rereading and expanding upon older reactionary texts since the French Revolution under the pen name Mencius Moldbug.¹² The philosopher and political theorist Nick Land, known for his work on accelerationism, followed Yarvin’s lead and began commenting and contributing to the movement, producing one of its key texts The Dark Enlightenment.¹³ Neither of these figures presents themselves as political theorists but rather as philosophers and computer scientists.

The NeoReactionaries argue for a reversal of the liberal enlightenment project, stressing that the most significant political freedom is the freedom to opt out of a system and exit it. The movement opposes the Cathedral, the superstructure of cultural capital within universities, the media, and bureaucracy, which it views as not only hegemonic and inefficient but also the primary reason for the decline of Western civilization, as it has embraced liberal humanism. The movement stresses the failures of democracy, the value of monarchies, eugenics, and intellectual elitism.¹⁴ NRx texts are known for sarcastic prose, composed with a dubious sense of irony that prevents critiques from literal readings of the text, a habit which would be taken up by the Alt-Right.¹⁵ The chapter demonstrates that the movement has been subsumed by the Alt-Right since 2015 when the intellectual elitist atmosphere was replaced with populist content fixated more on memes than commentaries on traditionalist and reactionary thinkers.¹⁶

Chapter 7 is entitled Skepticism, Relativism, and Identity: The Origins of (Pseudo)- Conservatism. Kevin Dodson begins with Lionel Trilling’s 1950 declaration: there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean of course that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated ecclesiastical exceptions express themselves in ideas, but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.¹⁷ Ironically, Dodson argues, Trilling’s comment came on the cusp of the emergence of what was an impressive conservative intellectual movement, which vitiated Trilling’s own recommendation that liberals needed to generate their own opponents, primarily through engagement with literature. However, conservatism as a public political discourse, as represented by Fox News, talk radio, the Tea Party, and right-wing publishers, has since degenerated to the point where it fits precisely Trilling’s description.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Conservatives themselves sought to distinguish an authentic conservatism from what Peter Viereck called Reactionary Nationalism and George Nash termed The Radical Right. In The National Review, William F. Buckley sought to expel the John Birch Society and Ayn Rand from the emerging Conservative movement. Perhaps most famously, the renowned historian Richard Hofstadter distinguished between Conservatism on the one hand and Pseudo-Conservatism on the other, which exhibited an opposition to the broad consensus of American society and culture and what he famously identified as the paranoid style that was characterized by a Manichean outlook, an uncompromising political stance, a sense of betrayal, and a conspiratorial mindset. The project of this chapter is to outline the philosophical origins of this development, locating the roots of this debasement deep in the project of modernity itself, in which conservatism developed in opposition to the universalism of rationality, science, and liberalism.

Chapter 8, The Materialist Conception of Fiction, by Michael Parra, invites readers into a discussion of why literary scholars interest themselves seriously in the once-upon-a-time worlds of fiction—these unreal stories about unreal individuals—as the second decade of the twenty-first century draws to an end. Situating the author as a social being and recognizing the evolution of a craft, the chapter addresses the implications of such acknowledgment while answering the question: what is being organized in the structure of the narrative form (the novel)? With specific attention on the novelist and the novel, and a response to Benjamin’s The Storyteller, this chapter immerses itself in the post-Emancipation United States with a reading of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Completed the same year the US Supreme Court ruled Civil Rights as unconstitutional (1883), the narrative actively criticizes the failures of Reconstruction by posing the question: how do you free a free-slave?

While many readers fixate on Jim as the runaway slave of Huckleberry Finn, they often ignore the significance of Huck Finn’s enslavement to the antebellum ideologies of the South. By uncovering the social satire and exposing the effects of social conventions on personal identity, the narrative encapsulates the African American experience in the Reconstruction era. Huck Finn’s response to the sociopolitical climate of the American South, where he emerges as representation of the African American experience during the rise and fall of Reconstruction, provokes the question: was Huckleberry Finn ever white?

Gilles Deleuze frequently suggests that the means of one’s oppression are also the means of one’s liberation, and at no time is this more pertinent than in the present moment, with the rise of nationalism and the Alt-Right, forms of oppression, in various centers of Western power, the supposed global bastions of liberal democracy. Chapter 9, "Liberation through Oppression: Deleuze’s Minor Literature and Deterritorialized Nationalisms in James Joyce’s Ulysses," contextualizes Deleuze in the present moment through an analysis of James Joyce. In this chapter, Marshall Lewis Johnson argues that various shifts in narrative style between episodes throughout Joyce’s Ulysses reflect the author’s borrowings from imperial powers and the narrow Irish nationalism on the rise in his homeland in the early twentieth century.

Ultimately, Joyce’s narrative styles in episodes such as Sirens and Cyclops demonstrate a clear link between nationalism and imperialism while also showing how literature itself is a way out of these traps. By showing the similarities between imperialism, nationalism, and the short-sightedness of imagining one’s insular worldview as a global future, Joyce creates a literary vision for an island that became a nation shortly before Ulysses was published as a novel and shortly after these episodes appeared serially in the Little Review. The literary styles are treated as failed experiments that still offer Leopold Bloom a way out at the end of each episode. Given the rise of nationalism around the globe, Ulysses shows not only that nationalism fails to envision what a nation actually looks like, but also that a futuristic vision of any nation is decidedly not monologic.

In Chap. 10, Death by a Thousand Hyperlinks: The Commodification of Communication and Mediatized Ideologies, Joseph Turner begins with the development of the current political conjuncture, which he argues has been in motion since the 1930s. A timeline depicting shifts of Far-Right media strategies explains the rise of authoritarian personalities and the influx of conservative fringe theories into public consciousness. This process is continued today by conservative pundits and the Alt-Right. From the days of Charles Coughlin’s anti-Semitic radio rhetoric to current demagogues like Richard Spencer, all media has been used to generate simulations of political reality, resulting in the domination of the hyperreal as it destroys all other political possibilities. Late capitalism’s endless creation of crisis furthers the growing threat of fascism as old conservative ideas fail to keep reactionaries content.

This chapter’s analysis of conservative media, through the lens of theoretical frameworks such as Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreal, helps readers understand how political reality is shaped and how mass media as an apparatus creates the seemingly inescapable truisms that dominate mainstream discourse. We can trace the genealogy of conservative media using critical theory as a guide to help us comprehend the current political moment and the important role critical media studies plays in understanding the shaping of hyperreal constructions of power. This analysis comes with pessimism, but also calls for optimism—if political polarization grows from the unveiling of the hyperreal (in this example, the concept of fake news), this means that mass networks of news fail to maintain their legitimacy. This moment allows for a new class consciousness in the digital age, if a timely cohesive media strategy is utilized. Using the ideas offered by scholars such as Baudrillard, Fisher, Adorno, Marcuse, and others provides an opportunity to devise strategies that will empower a new media project. As spectacle has consumed the political, a media strategy rooted in theory will help craft media content that could generate what was once considered impossible, Turner writes.

In Chap. 11, Critical Race Theory, Transborder Theory, and Code Switching in the Trump Years, Charli Valdez argues that the decline of the humanities has been a commonly recognized, albeit unchecked, problem for several decades. The intractability of the problem suggests not only a systemic shift, but also a cultural shift that can be addressed locally, in the classroom. As the xenophobic immigration policies being driven by the White House continue to multiply, and as the DACA debate continues, the theoretical applications of Critical Race Theory, transborder theory, and code switching can not only offer students a mechanism by which they can parse current events, but in doing so reaffirm the critical capabilities that the humanities have to offer.

While Critical Race Theory is more frequently drawn from its legal roots and applied in the field of education, it has much to offer in the study of Latinx Literature. Transborder theory, meanwhile, in its off-centering of national borders, its critique of reductive transnational approaches, and emphasis on more nuanced articulations of identity, can help students break down the nationalist ideology that informs immigration discourse. Finally, the study of code switching as an intentional and challenging poetic strategy in Latinx texts can reorient how students understand bilingualism in everyday life. With increasing STEM pressure, this theoretical approach to reading literature is readily understood as having real-world relevance, disrupting a prevailing discourse that the humanities are irrelevant or out of touch with reality.

In the concluding chapter, Mining the Past for Usable Futures: The Global Rise of the Alt-Right and the Frankfurt School, we examine the global rise of the Alt-Right in the twentieth century, focusing primarily on the relationship between Europe and the United States. The chapter employs the Frankfurt School and their work within the humanities, particularly on liberation, through enlightened cultural forms and attitudes, to envision potential futures. Their anticipation of monopolies and new forms of fascism is applied to the current moment in order to highlight the reduction of critical thinking via monopolization of media. The chapter concludes with