A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #20: On the Philosophical Roots of the “Dark Enlightenment.”

But you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of this essay by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab.

*Originally published in the 3:16am blog.

** “EJ Spode” is a pseudonym of Peter Ludlow.

20. On the Philosophical Roots of the “Dark Enlightenment”

Continental philosophy has taken a rightward turn since 1968, so it is hardly a bulwark against reactionary economic policies. But what people don’t seem to appreciate is that post-68 Continental philosophy is larded throughout the so-called “Dark Enlightenment” in the United States, wherein extreme right-wing elements, often associated with the tech industry and Silicon Valley, have begun advocating authoritarian, anti-democratic policies. More concisely, we are witnessing the return of the monarchists.

Let’s start with Curtis Yarvin.

Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) and two unidentified acolytes

Curtis Yarvin (writing as “Mencius Moldbug”), is a self-described “royalist.” He has been arguing that modern liberal democracy is structurally incapable of delivering good governance because real power is actually exercised by an informal, self-reinforcing complex of elite institutions—universities, legacy media, professional bureaucracy—institutions that comprise what he calls “the Cathedral.” To some extent, it is the inverted Chomsky thesis. For Chomsky, of course, all these institutions set boundaries for permissible discourse, but they set boundaries on the left. For Yarvin, it sets the boundaries of permissible discourse on the right. If we are being honest, “the Cathedral,” if we want to call it that, sets boundaries on the left and the right. So, for example, when the CNN show Crossfire was hosted by Tom Braden and Patrick Buchanan, those two were supposed to set the extreme edge of acceptable discourse. The guests would theoretically be somewhere in the middle. So, the acceptable range of discourse, for CNN, lay between a former CIA officer and a former Nixon speechwriter.

Yarvin, of course, doesn’t see, or doesn’t care, about the left border, but it wouldn’t matter if he did. His goal is to wreck the Cathedral (a plan that is playing out in the Trump administration as I write this). Yarvin’s positive proposal is what he calls “neocameralism:” treat the state more like a tightly accountable corporation (“gov-corp”) led by a CEO/monarch with clear, concentrated authority, aiming for competence and order rather than participatory legitimacy. So, the idea is to get a competent version of Trump. You know, a good quality king like England’s George III, or France’s Charles VI, or, while Bavaria is fresh in our memory, Ludwig II of Bavaria (at least we got some good castles out of that one).

Our question now is, where do these ideas about kings come from? What are the philosophical influences behind this? Well, it sure as shit isn’t Locke and Hume, and I think even Schuringa would have to concede that (but who knows? <sigh>). And Schuringa might be advised to be careful what he wishes for, because if Liberalism collapses, you may not get a worker’s paradise. You just might get Mencius Moldbug’s CEO-run monarchy.

So, I ask again, where do these ideas come from? You may recall Schuringa talking about that brief moment of goodness in British philosophy—that period when British Idealism ruled Oxbridge, or at least Oxford. In discussing this, Schuringa gives a nod to Thomas Carlyle for helping to bring Idealism to England. And guess what? Carlyle is one of the key influences of Yarvin. Although perhaps “influence” is a bit weak. Here is how Yarvin puts it:

I have an alternative label [to “royalist’]. I am a Carlylean. I’m a Carlylean more or less the way a Marxist is a Marxist. My worship of Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian Jesus, is no adolescent passion—but the conscious choice of a mature adult. I will always be a Carlylean, just the way a Marxist will always be a Marxist. And it is not too late for you to join us yourself! It’s a big tent, this cult of Carlyle. The only problem is that since Carlyle is dead, you can’t sell your possessions and give them all to Carlyle. No—you’ll have to think of some other worthy recipient. (Yarvin, 2016)

Yarvin spells this out in his book Moldbug on Carlyle (Yarvin, 2016). It’s all there— everything you would need to be a Trump supporter or a fan of having a CEO/monarch: heroic rule, fuck democracy, “great man governance” etc.

This isn’t Yarvin’s only philosophical influence, of course. To this, we can add Thomas Hobbes (sort of obvious). And, of course, Yarvin is a big fan of Austrian economics (previously discussed), and he presumes that that is what the monarch will use to run our economies. But in addition to Mises and Hayek, we now need to introduce Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Murray Rothbard, who are also are among Yarvin’s intellectual inspirations. Both are associated with Austrian economics and right-libertarian political economy as a route from libertarianism toward explicitly anti-democratic conclusions.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a German-American academic associated, as noted, with Austrian School economics, anarcho-capitalism, and right-wing libertarianism. He is perhaps most famous for his campaign against democracy, as in his 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed—a book that famously proposed excluding democrats from society (Hoppe, 2001). From 1986 until 2008, he was a professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). He is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute think tank.

The next question is: where do his ideas come from? Could this be the logical conclusion of Humean/Lockean liberalism? Logical positivism gone wild? Ordinary language philosophy when it travels to Las Vegas? None of the above. Hoppe was, in point of fact, a philosophy PhD, except that he got his PhD in Frankfurt … under … checking notes… one Jurgen Habermas. His dissertation, completed in 1974, was entitled Kritik der kausalwissenschaftlichen Sozialforschung: Untersuchung zur Grundlegung einer konstruktivistischen Sozialtheorie, which I guess we can translate as something like this: Critique of Causal-Scientific Social Research: An Inquiry into the Foundations of a Constructivist Social Theory. You can probably already guess who the targets are going to be: Yup, logical positivists.

Now, to be clear, I’m not blaming Habermas for where Hoppe ends up philosophically. The point that I am making is that this guy had zero contact with Analytic philosophy, except in the form of a target of his critique. And to be sure, there were other important influences on Hoppe, including Karl-Otto Appel (OK, that isn’t so helpful to Continental philosophy) and on Murray Rothbard, who Hoppe called his “principal teacher, mentor and master.”

OK, so who is Murray Rothbard? Murray Rothbard was the chief architect of so-called modern anarcho-capitalism, which has nothing to do with anarchism and has everything to do with ceding absolute power to corporations. There are some ideas from Locke in the mix—private property and voluntary association (which is misread as a justification for property confiscation)—but that is where the Locke part, such as it is, ends. The rest is a kind of radical libertarianism, with a call for the abolition of the state. He proposed that all government functions—law, police, courts, defense—could and should be privatized and provided through voluntary market mechanisms. In 1982, following his split with the Cato Institute, Rothbard co-founded the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama (with Lew Rockwell and Burton Blumert).

Things get wild in the 1980s, when Rothbard married the traditional anarcho-capitalist desire to dismantle the state with the racial resentment of paleoconservatives such as the afore-mentioned Crossfire host, Pat Buchanan, creating an unholy synthesis of libertarianism with racism and xenophobia. In 1989, Rothbard left the Libertarian Party (not enough hate there) and began building bridges to the post-Cold War right. He was the founding president of the conservative-libertarian John Randolph Club and supported the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan.

What does libertarianism have to do with paleoconservativism? God only knows, but the end result is the stuff of nightmares. Noam Chomsky (Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky) critiqued Rothbard’s ideal society as

a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it … First of all, it couldn’t function for a second—and if it could, all you’d want to do is get out, or commit suicide or something. (Chomsky, 2002)

Full of hate or not, it was also a precursor to Trumpism.

The question we are really interested in is where do these ideas come from, and the answer, of course, is that they come first and foremost from Austrian economics and the idea that there are no empirical handles on economic and social theory. It is all a priori.

Here’s a hint of how that reasoning proceeds, from Rothbard’s paper “In Defense of ‘Extreme A Priorism’” (Rothbard, 1957):

Now the crucial question arises: how have we obtained the truth of [Mise’s fundamental] axiom? Is our knowledge a priori or empirical, “synthetic” or “analytic ”? In a sense, such questions are a waste of time, because the all-important fact is that the axiom is self-evidently true, self-evident to a far greater and broader extent than the other postulates. For this axiom is true for all human beings, everywhere, at any time, and could not even conceivably be violated.… Positivists of all shades boggle at self-evident propositions. And yet, what is the vaunted “evidence” of the empiricists but the bringing of a hitherto obscure proposition into evident view? But some propositions need only to be stated to become at once evident to the self, and the action axiom is just such a proposition. (Rothbard, 1957)

And yes, the mind boggles. Or perhaps wobbles. Whether you buy this line of thinking or not, I think we can agree that it is not empiricism, and it is not positivism. It is Austrian economic apriorism. It is ideology, wrapped in dogma, wrapped in dogshit.

The dystopian vision that emerges from Rothbard and others is nothing compared to the dystopian future envisioned by Nick Land—the guy who coined the term Dark Enlightenment.

Land’s influences are a bit more post-modern than the Carlyle-loving Mencius Moldbug.

In his early work, Nick Land views capitalism as a self-propelling techno-cultural evolution, a positive feedback loop where technology and markets feed each other in exponential growth – yielding a runaway process escaping human control. In Land’s vision, technological growth will expand to such a degree that humankind’s welfare is just a speedbump on capitalism’s destination of brutality, culminating in what he calls the “Techno-Capital Singularity”—a point where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and capitalism fully automates itself, rendering humanity obsolete in a post-human future of pure machinic becoming. That’s bad, right? Wrong!

According to Land’s neo-reactionary “Dark Enlightenment” thesis, your feeble democratic and egalitarian politics merely delay acceleration. Capitalist monarchies would better pursue long-term technological progress toward this inevitable, though anti-humanist, destiny.

OK, so where the hell does that shit come from? I promise you it is not coming from Locke or Hume, or from anywhere in Analytic philosophy, which he quite likely knows nothing about.

His key influences are Deleuze & Guattari and wider post-structuralism, which, through the filter of Land’s mind, yields a cocktail of “deterritorialization” plus accelerationism, plus an understanding of Nietzsche / Schopenhauer / Bataille as being anti-humanist, nihilist, etc. Transgressive “limit” traditions are central to Land’s thinking. I guess the rest must include cyberpunk fiction. Don’t believe me? Here is what the editor of his collected papers says.

Land seized upon Deleuze-Guattari’s transcendental materialism – years before its predictable institutional neutering – and subjected it to ruthless cybernetic streamlining, excising all vestiges of Bergsonian vitalism to reveal a deviant and explicitly thanatropic machinism. The results of this reconstructive surgery provide the most illuminating but perhaps also the most disturbing distillation of what Deleuze called ‘transcendental empiricism’. In Land’s work, this becomes the watchword for an experimental praxis oriented entirely towards contact with the unknown. (Land, 2011)

And then in the very next paragraph we get this.

At the core of Land’s thought are the works of Immanuel Kant. (Land, 2011)

What? Look, obviously this is all just incoherent babbling and has nothing to do with Kant, but isn’t this precisely the sort of thing that Analytic philosophers have warned us about since the days of Susan Stebbing? If you tolerate incoherent discourse, you are bound to secrete a political horror show. In Schuringa’s discourse, the incoherent babbling about Hume etc. yields an implausible thesis about Analytic philosophy being cut off from human concerns and political activism. In Curtis Yarvin’s discourse, the incoherent babbling yields royalism, or Carlylism, or whatever we want to call it. In Land’s discourse, the incoherent rambling yields the conclusion that we should accelerate towards our imminent destiny with the end of humanity itself, and perhaps the best way to do that is to replace our liberal democracy with technocratic monarchs—people who are better positioned to accelerate us to this doom.

And of course in the background of all this, we have the Austrian economists, rejecting any empirical justification for their claims, suggesting that it all flows from Kant’s a priori, or Aristotle’s essences, or whatever, but the thing they want you to get through your thick skull is that you can ignore the calls for evidence and science from those silly logical positivists because the claims being made are “self-evident.” End of story.

It would be one thing if Dark Enlightenment philosophy were confined to academics and essayists, but as we already noted, these ideas have metastasized within the American political discourse and have now have uptake at the highest level of American government, certainly in the Trump administration, which could hardly be expected to spurn the idea of an all-powerful unitary executive. But so too these ideas, born from nonsense, have seeped into the judicial branch of the US Government, making it seem that the US Supreme Court cannot wait to install Mencius Moldbug’s Dear CEO and bring about the dystopias envisioned by Land and Rothbard, Yarvin and Hoppe.

If only it stopped there. These same ideas, born of incoherence, post-modern word salad, and anti-empiricism, have found their way into the thought processes of the true authorities in today’s world—the Silicon Valley tech titans. Yup, they have been drinking the Kool-Aid too, and it isn’t Lockean-Humean Kool-Aid.

Let’s look at a couple of examples. We could start with Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, a corporation that advertises itself as using artificial intelligence and big data to build software platforms that enable governments, intelligence agencies, militaries, corporations, and critical-infrastructure operators to combine massive, fragmented datasets into a unified operational picture for decision-making. Its core products ingest and fuse data from thousands of sources (databases, sensors, logs, images, communications, supply chains), apply access controls, audit trails, and governance rules, and then allow users to model scenarios, detect patterns, run simulations, and coordinate real-world operations (e.g., asymmetric warfare attacks). It is, as of this writing, the 10^th largest tech company in the US, just behind Tesla and Oracle.

We can almost imagine Schuringa hopping up and down and insisting that here, finally, we must be getting the evidence of Lockean-Humean liberalism, distilled into big data. But of course, I doubt that Karp knows the first thing about any kind of liberalism. He is, however, a PhD in philosophy, earned in Frankfurt, under the direction of … checking notes again… Jurgen Habermas. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but I am not blaming Habermas for this. But can we at least stop trying to blame Analytic philosophy?

This is a clear case in which Karp is using knowledge he acquired while studying under Habermas and weaponizing it! He learned that social order is produced by communicative action, not brute force alone. He seems to internalize the idea that populations, institutions, and states are fundamentally communication networks that can be modeled, mapped, and influenced.

Palantir weaponizes this by graphing communication, relations, coordination, and contagion of ideas at scale.

He seems to have learned that contemporary discourse is corrupted by strategic actors, media manipulation, and institutional powers that override rational consensus. His takeaway from this is that if the public sphere can be distorted, it can also be stabilized and optimized through better sensing and computation. Palantir then uses this idea to justify engineering information environments and institutional dashboards for governments and large organizations, rather than empowering citizens. Habermas’s philosophy, flipped on its head, gives him a roadmap for products that are instruments of social control. And very profitable ones at that.

Palantir isn’t the largest or most influential tech company, it is more like it is building the central nervous system for the system of social control. If we are interested in which tech titans are the most influential in American Politics, you might think that Elon Musk is important, but he is more of a stooge for Trump and does not seem to have any particular intellectual grounding other than to cut regulation on his companies. The real power behind the throne is Paypal founder and start-up investor Peter Thiel.

Peter Thiel

Thiel is, of course, well-known as the principal mentor of US Vice President JD Vance, and some would say that he is still JD’s puppet master. But what is Thiel’s ideological background? You will be happy to know that it isn’t Habermas. It isn’t Hume either. It is something else altogether.

The number one intellectual influence on Thiel is René Girard (Thiel was Girard’s student at Stanford). As Thiel put it: “Girard has shaped how I see the world.” What Thiel got from Girard was, first of all, the idea of mimetic desire—the idea that people imitate what others desire. Add to this, mimetic rivalry—the idea that competition becomes self-destructive. Then, there is the idea of scapegoat dynamics—the idea that crowds punish outliers. Finally, we can point to anti-mimetic strategy—the idea that you should avoid competition by doing what others aren’t

These ideas directly informed PayPal’s early strategy, his investment thesis (“avoid competition”) and his critique of higher education, media, and mass democracy. But Thiel has also cited Nietzsche. In fact, his book Zero to One, Thiel opens with a Nietzsche quote: “Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule” (Thiel and Masters, 2014).

Nietzsche may be the source of Thiel’s suspicion of the “herd,” his valorization of exceptional individuals, his critique of equality as resentment and his skepticism toward democracy. From this, Thiel reframes will-to-power as entrepreneurial will-to-creation and his idea that tech founders are “exceptional individuals.”

Thiel, according to his own reports, is also a big fan of Leo Strauss and the Straussian idea that modern liberalism is philosophically unstable, and that societies need elites who understand deeper truths. Would it surprise you to hear that Thiel is also a big fan of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt? Thiel has cited or alluded to Schmitt’s ideas repeatedly (especially in political talks). From Schmitt he takes the idea of politics as friend vs. enemy, sovereignty as the power to decide the exception, Schmitt’s critique of parliamentary democracy, his admiration for decisive, centralized authority (not gonna name names but you know who Schmitt loved), strong executives, and emergency powers. It is basically the philosophical foundation for Trumpism, as understood by the sitting US Vice President, if not Trump himself. Of course, Thiel also loves Ayn Rand, from whom he absorbed the hero-founder narrative, the distinction between creative vs. parasitic classes, etc.

You can find all of these ideas folded into a single online essay by Thiel, titled “The Straussian Moment” (Thiel, 2007). In it, you will also find out who Thiel thinks the bad guys are: The enlightenment thinkers—the guys who got us into this big mess! And the guy that Thiel really hates is Locke.

If it sounds like Yarvin and Thiel are converging on a fusion of Carlyle/Schmitt/ Nietzsche/Ayn Randian antidemocratic adoration for a singular great heroic and creative leader, well, that is because their views have converged. And that point of convergence is the direction that American civil and political life is pointed. Trump is just a freakish failed prototype – a place-holder for the Dear Leader we deserve and will someday be blessed to have.

Again, Humean liberalism is not the engine driving American capitalism. It is not driving Analytic philosophy. It is not driving anything except for the aimless spinning gears in Schuringa’s mind.

Of course, this isn’t the whole story about American ideology, because underlying it all is the ideology of Trump’s anti-elite base, and that is its protestant evangelical ideology.

Evangelical Ideology

Evangelical Christian ideology runs through American culture and has wound its way into every nook and cranny of American government and American civil society. But what is that ideology? I can tell you it has absolutely nothing to do with Locke or Hume or Empiricism or Liberalism or the enlightenment, or Catholic theology any intellectual development of the past 2000 years. And the key thing you have to understand is that the central thesis is this: Western culture took a wrong turn with St. Thomas Aquinas, because he established a natural realm independent of a religious realm. And what you must understand is that every attempt to engage in any activity outside the context of (evangelical) Christian religion yields nonsense. Let’s dig a little deeper. In what follows, I borrow from my widely unread essay “The Calvinist Roots of American Anti-Intellectualism” (Spode, 2024).

Many years ago, Senator Ted Cruz and his father caught some criticism for attending a conference hosted by the author and pastor Kevin Swanson. What caught the media’s attention was Swanson’s anti-gay rhetoric and his calls for the death penalty for gays. What did not receive the attention of the media, nor so far as I know, any academics, was the philosophical writing of Swanson. In his book Apostate: The Men Who Killed the Christian West, Swanson lays out the problems in the West, and he sees those problems emanating from a time when we attempted to unhook human reason from Biblical religious teachings (Swanson, 2013).

Chapter by chapter, Swanson walks through the history of thinkers and writers that have supposedly led to the death of the Christian West: Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Bentham, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Dewey, and Sartre, each receives a chapter cataloging their contribution to this failure. But the first such chapter is about Aquinas, who supposedly started the whole mess by introducing the possibility of natural revelation, and more generally the possibility that humans might know anything at all independently of church teaching. Why is Aquinas problematic? Swanson’s answer is this: “the natural man’s reason has been clouded by layers upon layers of demonic deception (2 Cor. 4:4), and he is incapable of providing a solid basis for truth and ethics by his own reasoning capabilities”; then he concludes that, “in a fundamental sense [the unbeliever] will think wrongly about everything” (Swanson, 2013).

You might think that this line of thinking would have to subsume the entirety of the history of university education and the quest for knowledge. But in case you needed a reminder that one person’s modus ponens is another person’s modus tollens, Swanson is there with the reminder.

As we consider the causes and processes that brought about the slow and steady 800-year erosion of the Christian faith in Italy, German, France, England, Scotland, and America, we must start with the first universities—where the great humanist incursion began. The University of Bologna commenced its work in 1088. By the 1270s, there were universities at Paris, Orleans, Toulouse, Montpellier, Cambridge, Oxford, Padua, Bologna, Nables, Salerno, Salamanca, Comra, and Lisbon. These academic institutions were established on humanist ideas that served as the foundation for the humanist renaissance.

This was the point at which Aquinas became the great culprit and earned his place as the first philosopher discussed by Swanson:

Thomas Aquinas really believed that natural man in his fallen state could build a reliable system of philosophical knowledge on “human reason.” He did not believe that man’s reason was seriously tainted by the fall into sin. …Contrary to what Aquinas taught, the bible does not represent two different kinds of thinking or knowledge (Provers 2:1–6, Col. 2:1–3). There is only one source and one fountain of learning, and this is the Lord Jesus Christ. (Swanson, 2013)

I suspect that the preceding will sound absurd to many readers, but I can assure you that this is not an outlying position in the Evangelical movement – even within Evangelical colleges and Universities. If you have attended a Christian college in the past fifty years (as I have), chances are you are assigned a book called Escape from Reason, and it made precisely the same point that Swanson is making, beginning with a critique of Aquinas. The book was written by a figure who was, without question, the most important intellectual figure in evangelical Christian thinking. His name was Francis Schaeffer.

Throughout the 1970s, Schaeffer published a number of books and, by 1980, he had become a tour de force in Christendom. His 1977 film—Whatever Happened to the Human Race—energized the conservative movement in the United States, and several people in American conservative politics have spoken of its influence on them. Four years later, he published a book called A Christian Manifesto, which called the evangelical movement to reject abortion (Schaeffer, 1981). It sold 250,000 copies and ignited the evangelical anti-abortion movement.

Schaefer (like Swanson and many other evangelical intellectuals) believed that the great intellectual failure of the West could all be traced to St. Thomas Aquinas. This is how he laid the blame on Aquinas in Escape from Reason:

In Aquinas’s view the will of man was fallen, but the intellect was not. From this incomplete view of the biblical Fall flowed all the subsequent difficulties. Man’s intellect became autonomous…. From the basis of this autonomous principle, philosophy began to take wings, as it were, and fly off wherever it wished, without relationship to the Scriptures. (Schaefer, 1968)

Aquinas’s error was thinking that human reason could function independently of God. In Chapter 2 of Escape from Reason, Schaeffer contextualized the key issue—the independence of human reason—in the context of the Reformation and the Renaissance.

We come therefore to an overlapping of the Renaissance with the Reformation. To this problem of unity the Reformation gave an entirely opposite answer from that of the Renaissance. It repudiated both the Aristotelian and the Neo-platonic presentation. What was the Reformation answer? It said that the root of the trouble sprang from the old and growing Humanism in the Roman Catholic Church, and the incomplete Fall in Aquinas’s theology which set loose an autonomous man. The Reformation accepted the biblical picture of a total Fall. The whole man had been made by God, but now the whole man is fallen, including his intellect and will. In contrast to Aquinas, only God was autonomous. (Schaefer, 1968)

The core philosophical position underlying evangelical Christianity is not about the US Constitution or guns or abortion or states rights or taxation or the teaching of evolution or any of the other dog whistles of the religious right in the United States. No, at its core, evangelical Christianity is a rejection of 600 years of Renaissance and Enlightenment thinking. It is a call to reject all thinking that is not grounded in Biblical thought. Persons that don’t ground all of their thought in Biblical teaching are “irrational,” and “in error.” Evolution and climate change? Well, they are not merely in error because they get some facts wrong; they are in error because they are not grounded in the scriptures, and there is no other source of truth.

Naturally, quite a lot follows from this philosophical perspective, including the idea that democracy is a bad idea. This is articulated in a number of places, but typically not openly. One person who has made the point in the open is Rousas John Rushdoony in his very influential book The Institutes of Biblical Law (Rushdoony, 1973)—the title riffing on Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin, 1559/2008). In this 890-page tome, Rushdoony argued that not only should we reinstate Mosaic Law, but we should also reinstate its penal sanctions. Homosexuality, adultery, incest, lying about your virginity, striking your parents, witchcraft, idolatry, apostacy, and public blasphemy all required the death penalty. As for democracy, in The Institutes he wrote that

the heresy of democracy has since then worked havoc in church and state … Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies. (Rushdoony, 1973)

This is what underpins the philosophy of Trump’s base (although obviously not Trump himself). It would also certainly be the driving philosophy behind US-based business owners. And also has nothing to do with Hume. Or Lock. Or liberalism. Or Empiricism. Or Analytic philosophy.

So this is where we are.

All Hands on Deck!

It is my thesis that whatever history there is regarding the conflict between Analytic and Continental schools of thought, enough is enough. It is time to stop with the nonsense. There is too much at stake and greater sins to confront than the excessive or insufficient clarity of a philosophical opponent. It is time for Analytic and Continental philosophers to unite in a fight against dangerous philosophies of all stripes—whether it be the Carlyle-inspired royalism of Curtis Yarvin, the apocalyptic acceleration to doom of Nick Land, or the deep Evangelical roots of Trumpism.

Of course, philosophy has faced these critical moments before—moments in which a unified approach was called for against the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s. There were even attempts at collaboration between the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School, but those efforts failed, unfortunately. But perhaps we can learn something from those failures.

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