Robert Stark and co-host Alex von Goldstein interview Keith Preston about his book Thinkers Against Modernity
Topics include:
- How the book is an examination of thinkers critical of modernity from a value neutral perspective
- How Keith is influenced by the intellectual tradition of the enlightenment, yet finds value in traditionalist critiques of modernity
- Julius Evola as the purest critique of modernity
- How the Right tends to have a pessimistic view of the present and idealizes a particular era of the past(ex. Julius Evola the 8th Century BC, Nietzsche the Sophist era in Ancient Greece, Traditional Catholics the Middle Ages, and mainstream conservatives the 1950’s or Reagan Era)
- Defining characteristic of the Right include rejection of social change, egalitarianism, and universalism, and a fixed view of human nature
- Nietzsche’s point that ideologies become new religions, and how the modern politically correct left is a new moralistic religion rather than genuine liberalism or Marxism
- Aleister Crowley’s aristocratic individualism, and his view that capitalism and mass democracy degraded a genuine cultural elitism
- The Distributist G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, their views on the distribution of capital, and their critique of capitalism as degrading traditional values
- Carl Schmidt’s view that democracy was incompatible with liberal individualism
- How Carl Schmidt subscribed to the realist school of thought and viewed the United States as having an ideologically-driven foreign policy
- The United States as a nation founded on Classical Liberalism and the Enlightenment
- The European New Right, how it was founded in the late 1960’s as a counter to the New Left, fusing aspects of the New Left with the conservative revolution of the interwar period
- How the New Right tried to appeal to the left on issues such as anti-globalization, anti-consumerism, anti-imperialism, and environmentalism
- The New Right’s critique of political correctness, feminism, and mass immigration as being products of capitalism
- Noam Chomsky on capitalism and anti-racism
- The American Alternative Right, how it is influenced by the European New Right, and how it is different
- Guillaume Faye’s Archeo-Futurism and futurist thought on the right
