Social Matter

If the first installment of Neoreaction: The Book was Bryce Laliberte’s What is Neoreaction? (Amazon link here), the second installment would undoubtedly be Michael Anissimov’s  A Critique of Democracy: A Guide for Neoreactionaries (see here). Despite their differences, our two hot-headed young intellectual mavericks remain the only two people to have formally published any sort of complete works on neoreaction, short as they both are (the books that is — not our mavericks [though they may be as well, I have no idea]). Whereas Laliberte’s work is a dense read by all accounts, Anissimov’s is a rather light one; a guide is a guide, even when it’s a guide to political philosophy. John Glanton, a fellow of mine here at this very site, gave his opinion of Critique just a couple weeks ago.

True to its name, the book is a bare-bones introduction to the arguments against democracy, rooted in a firmly reactionary frame. Detractors almost immediately complained that Anissimov was just rehashing the arguments against democracy articulated by the Austrian School economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his magnum opus Democracy: The God That Failed (see here, and I [and I imagine the opinion would be unanimous among neoreactionaries] cannot recommend the book enough). Similarities notwithstanding, Anissimov also introduces a number of more interesting additions to the case against democracy, and puts Hoppe’s economic arguments in their proper place in a [neo]reactionary perspective, and also categorizes alternatives to democracy and their relations with it and each other. It is important to remember that Hoppe was not a monarchist himself, but only considered monarchy a lesser evil compared to democracy. Hoppe’s preferred form of human political organization, in an ideal world, would have been anarcho-capitalism.

Using Hoppe’s paradigm, a neoreactionary differentiates himself from libertarians, anarcho-capitalists and faithful believers in the democracy by rejecting democracy on Hoppe’s (and Anissimov’s) grounds, and then subsequently rejecting anarcho-capitalism, for whatever reason. The reasons for rejecting anarcho-capitalism might differ, and might be the very reason neoreaction conceives of itself as a trichotomy of blood-and-soil ethnonationalists, throne-and-altar theonomists and hyper-capitalist techno-commercialists. But I digress. The important take-away is that Anissimov has appropriately reframed Hoppe’s arguments as a reactionary should, and thus put the economic arguments against democracy in their appropriate context along with a series of others based on psychology, history, genetics, etc. I am not the first to notice that Anissimov is doing more formulating than original thinking, but I am also the last person to condemn some good formulating — all new ideas are old ideas after all, but that just goes to show the power of formulation.

Anissimov touches on a lot of fertile ground ripe for intellectual cultivation, although their details are deliberately elided in the interest of brevity. In just one chapter, we consider the “problem of civilization” from the viewpoints of chimpanzee gangs, human hunter-gatherers, early Sumeria and the proto-Greek Indo-Europeans and their culture of chariot-riding warrior-chieftains. I’m sure Anissimov realizes each one of these topics could easily fill up a thick tome’s worth of neoreactionary guiding, especially the last one. If it was the particularities of the proto-Greeks and their culture that gave rise to Western civilization as we know it, I’d love to see a long-view study of Western civilization since antiquity and how well it has done with regards to conserving this Ur-culture.

Anissimov also touches on the “Putnam argument” against democracy (i.e. based on Robert Putnam’s research that found that “diversity” reduces social capital) and various other trains of thought relatively palatable to the modern liberal mind. Other examples include the “cognitive bias argument,” that voters are influenced by too many unalterable biases to make good decisions on average, as well as the “polarization argument,” that democracy encourages political polarization and increasingly intrudes into non-political spheres of life. Bringing up the American Founding Fathers’ well-documented aversion to democracy and their blunt elitism is another classic anti-democratic spiel, although it probably serves more to reassure neoreactionaries of their sanity than convince — ahem — “democracy enthusiasts” of the illegitimacy of their favored political system, seeing as most of them have probably been taught by now that the Founding Fathers were slave-owning, old white bigots who ought to be summarily dismissed and ignored insofar as they aren’t overthrowing an even-more-incorrigible old white bigot like the King of England. But hey, no one said this was easy.

Anissimov spends a fair amount of time reiterating Hoppe et al.’s libertarian economic arguments against democracy, and also goes into a fairly long tangent on democracy’s relations to GDP (gross domestic product) and income inequality. Following the latter, he also goes on an even more tangential rant on why income inequality is not inherently wrong. This part of the guide felt quite out-of-place compared to the rest, since it went on too long for what was comparatively a minor issue, and especially one so terribly based in progressive propaganda, coming as it does straight from the ramen-infested bowels of Occupy Wall Street. Anissimov definitely forgot for whom he was writing his book at times — yes, inequality is a fact of nature that will be reflected in society; neoreactionaries do not need persuasion of this fact!

All in all, Anissimov accomplished what he set out to do. Many of his assertions and much of his evidence could be turned into full-length books in and of themselves, and I would advise any intellectual entrepreneurs to take note of this fact. Anissimov critiques democracy, but as much as he critiques democracy, he critiques the average voter, the dogma of equality and modern culture itself. If this was a guide, it was a guide to unexplored territories, beckoning to the bold.

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