Nietzsche Would've Loathed the Woke Right
Anti-Semitism is Slave Morality
A major fissure on the American right is between Christians and post-Christians. Confusingly, many post-Christians profess a form of cultural Christianity, but they wield the cross merely as a weapon in the culture war. The ostensibly Catholic livestreamer Nick Fuentes exemplifies this trend. While Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, Fuentes worships worldly power. Tellingly, he’s expressed admiration for both Hitler and Stalin, each of whom sought to eliminate Christianity. He’s also tweeted that “White people need to restore the Roman Empire like the Jews restored Israel.” Needless to say, Jesus was a Jew who himself sought to restore Israel—spiritually if not politically—and was then killed by the Romans. Presumably, white people should also bring back crucifixion, the Romans’ preferred method of execution for rebels. How very Christian indeed. As a self-professed “proud incel,” Fuentes’ call for “Catholic Taliban rule” is also quite revealing. He’s clearly more impressed by the anti-women stance of radical Islamism than the pro-family teachings of his own church. I suspect Fuentes secretly agrees with Hitler that “it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. . . . The Mohammedan religion . . . would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” Manosphere influencer Andrew Tate converted to Islam to better sanctify his misogyny. I wouldn’t be surprised if Fuentes ultimately follows suit.1
But while I agree that Fuentes is LARPing as a Christian, I disagree with the label that some critics have applied to him instead: Nietzschean. In The American Mind, Daniel J. Mahoney writes that “The new pagan Right—and that is what Fuentes represents, despite his professed Christianity—is far more Darwinian and Nietzschean than classical, Christian, or American.” Similarly, the president of conservative Hillsdale College has said that “I did not like the Tucker Carlson interview with the Nietzschean Fuentes.” An article in First Things lumps him in with Richard Hanania, arguing that “both of them see the world through pagan eyes and analyze it with pagan logic. Their political projects may be at odds, but their post-Christian vision—or, rather, nostalgically pre-Christian vision—is shared.” Hanania is indeed something of a Nietzschean liberal, but Fuentes—and the broader woke right that he embodies—is the antithesis of Nietzsche. It’s understandable that Christians would use Nietzschean as a short-hand pejorative for “anti-Christian,” since Nietzsche was arguably the most vehement critic of the faith since Julian the Apostate. But Nietzsche’s fundamental critique of Christianity was of its underlying psychology, which he characterized as priestly ressentiment. For Nietzsche, ressentiment wasn’t limited to Christians. Indeed, he explicitly criticized the Groypers of 19th-century Europe on the same grounds.
In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche distinguishes between master and slave morality. While “every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself,” slave morality is born from “the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge.” While the English word “resentment” approximates the French ressentiment, it elides Nietzsche’s essential distinction between active, spontaneous sentiment and reactive, embittered re-sentiment. For Nietzsche, the “need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself—is of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always needs a hostile external world . . . its action is fundamentally reaction.” For master morality, the good is primary, while the bad is secondary: “it seeks its opposite only so as to affirm itself more gratefully and triumphantly—its negative concept ‘low,’ ‘common,’ ‘bad,’ is only a subsequently-invented pale, contrasting image in relation to its positive basic concept—filled with life and passion through and through.” By contrast, for slave morality, evil (a concept alien to the noble) is primary, while good is secondary: “the submerged hatred, the vengefulness of the impotent” conceives “‘the Evil One,’ and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a ‘good one’—himself!”2 According to this schema, is a grievance-driven troll like Fuentes more of a master or a slave?
Nietzsche, ever the prophet, provides us with the answer. To psychologists who would “like to study ressentiment close up for once, I would say: this plant blooms best today among anarchists and anti-Semites” who seek “to sanctify revenge under the name of justice—as if justice were at bottom merely a further development of the feeling of being aggrieved.”3 He later calls Eugen Dühring, an influential proto-Nazi, “that Berlin apostle of revenge.”4 Here, it’s worth recalling that anti-Semitism wasn’t a label invented by the Jews. Rather, it was Wilhelm Marr, a 19th-century German contemporary of Nietzsche, who coined the term to describe his own anti-Jewish ideology. Marr’s 1879 screed, The Victory of Judaism over Germandom, established the self-pitying, hysterical tone adopted by epigones like Fuentes. Recall Nietzsche’s quip about the “vengefulness of the impotent” in light of Marr’s rant that “Our Germanic element has shown itself culturally and historically powerless, incapable of achievement, before alien domination. . . . I bow down in amazed admiration before this Semitic race that has set its foot upon our necks. Having gathered up the last trace of human energy, I am resigned to enter into Jewish slavery. . .” Marr quite literally thinks of ethnic Germans as slaves to their Jewish masters. And, in true slave morality fashion, he forms a parasitic identity in response: that of the anti-Semite. Marr founded the Berlin-based League of Anti-Semites in 1879, which helped prove the potency of ressentiment-based mass politics.5 The Groypers are the digital heirs of this modern-day slave revolt.
Nietzsche’s own view was “That the Jews, if they wanted it—or if they were forced into it, which seems to be what the anti-Semites want—could even now have the preponderance, indeed quite literally mastery over Europe, that is certain; that they are not working and planning for that is equally certain.” He advised Germany to absorb the Jews and instead “expel the anti-Semitic screamers from the country.”6 In terms of Hanania Thought, Nietzsche viewed anti-Semitism as a low-IQ rightoid reaction against Elite Human Capital: “the whole problem of the Jews exists only within national states, inasmuch as their energy and higher intelligence, their capital of spirit and will, which accumulated from generation to generation in the long school of their suffering, must predominate to a degree that awakens envy and hatred.” Although his writings have been abused by the Nazis and their modern admirers, Nietzsche’s own politics favored a sort of based European Union: “As soon as it is no longer a matter of preserving nations, but rather of producing the strongest possible mixed European race, the Jew becomes as useful and desirable an ingredient as any other national quality.”7 Nietzsche would’ve bemoaned Zionism as a loss to Europe, but he also would’ve accepted its necessity in the face of the degeneracy he opposed.8
As it stands, Theodor Herzl’s famous epigram, “If you will it, it is no dream,” is a classically Nietzschean sentiment.9 The Zionist project itself was a grand exercise in master morality. Zionists responded to the hatred of anti-Semites not by stewing in bitterness, but by reviving their ancient language, farming the land, learning to fight, and building a state. Even today, Israel is the only developed nation with an above-replacement fertility rate. The Jewish response to terror and hatred isn’t just to kvetch, but to procreate.10 The childless, terminally online Groypers should study the Zionist example.11 Fuentes has summarized his worldview as “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise. It’s that simple.” Well, no, it’s not that simple. You could execute, subordinate, and jail all your perceived enemies, but you’d still be living in hell, because you’re a slave to your resentments. Try starting a family, actually studying your religion, and building a real community. That’s how the Jews have persevered for thousands of years. Nietzsche may not have used the term “woke right,” but he diagnosed its pathology: “The anti-Semites do not forgive the Jews for possessing ‘spirit’—and money. Anti-Semites—another name for the ‘underprivileged.’”12 By all means, go ahead and question Fuentes’ Christianity. But don’t besmirch the name of a great philosopher by calling this slave a Nietzschean.
The more based move would be to convert to Judaism, as he’s alluded to doing. Fuentes, your move.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887; trans. Walter Kaufmann, 1967), First Essay, Section 10.
On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Section 11.
On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Section 14.
In France, Édouard Drumont published the similarly vitriolic Jewish France in 1886 and founded the Anti-Semitic League of France in 1889. He helped create the anti-Jewish climate that contributed to the Dreyfus Affair, which in turn influenced Theodor Herzl’s development of Zionism.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886; trans. Walter Kaufmann, 1966), Section 251.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878; trans. Marion Faber with Stephen Lehmann, 1984), Section 475.
In a passage sure to please the Nazis, Nietzsche espoused the creation of a mischling ruling caste for Germany: “the stronger and already more clearly defined types of the new Germanism can enter into relations with [Jews] with the least hesitation; for example, officers of the nobility from the March Brandenburg: it would be interesting in many ways to see whether the hereditary art of commanding and obeying . . . could not be enriched with the genius of money and patience (and above all a little spirituality, which is utterly lacking among these officers).” See Beyond Good and Evil, Section 251.
Nietzsche never commented on the then-nascent Zionist movement. Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State was published in 1896, but Nietzsche had collapsed into insanity in 1889. However, Nietzsche did prophetically write: “One of the spectacles which the next century will invite us to witness is the decision regarding the fate of the European Jews. It is quite obvious now that they have cast their die and crossed their Rubicon: the only thing that remains for them is either to become masters of Europe or to lose Europe, as they once centuries ago lost Egypt, where they were confronted with similar alternatives.“ See The Dawn of Day (1881, trans. J.M. Kennedy), Section 205.
Herzl was said by his cousin to have “absorbed [Nietzsche’s] style.” Nietzsche directly influenced Jewish writers like Martin Buber, Micha Josef Berdichevsky, and Yosef Haim Brenner.
Of Jewish ressentiment, Nietzsche writes that “our self-respect depends upon our ability to make reprisals in both good and evil things. Nevertheless, [the Jews’] revenge never urges them on too far, for they all have that liberty of mind, and even of soul, produced in men by frequent changes of place, climate, and customs of neighbours and oppressors, they possess by far the greatest experience in all human intercourse, and even in their passions they exercise the caution which this experience has developed in them.” See The Dawn of Day, Section 205.
Fuentes’ quip about restoring the Roman Empire shows that he’s superficially interested in the Zionist example. But is he actually promoting a classical education, Western unity, or the rule of law (perhaps Rome’s greatest legacy)? Of course not. He’s just posting shit on the internet. That’s attention whoring, not the will to power. If you really want to be a Roman Zionist, then start learning Latin and forming a legion.
Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1901; trans. Walter Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, 1967), Section 864.
"The Goycow moos out in ressentiment as he gores you"
Antisemitism is for losers.