The Hero Complex

Capitalism and its discontents

In 2017, I directed a documentary adaptation of Angela Nagle’s book, “Kill All Normies,” about the genesis of the “alt-right.” For the final scene of the film, Angela wanted to interview the infamous white nationalist Richard Spencer. My film crew and I accompanied her to a winery out in the Maryland countryside, where Spencer’s group had organized a secret conference.

It was a surreal experience. My crew consisted of me and my two regular filmmaking partners, one of whom is Jewish — I would say identifiably so — and the other of whom is half Jewish and half Salvadoran, the son of a refugee. I’m also of mixed racial ancestry. Nonetheless, the racists organizing the event were unfailingly gracious and polite to us, which was sort of on-brand for the alt-right: they were the types of people who would shake your hand and offer you a glass of Pinot just before sitting down to engage in a genteel panel discussion on how you should be forcibly removed from your own country.

But the most shocking things I heard from Spencer and his colleagues that day were not about Jewish world conspiracies or the superiority of the white race — naturally, I expected all of that. What took me by surprise were the comments they made about capitalism.

At one point, Eliott Kline, at the time the leader of the white nationalist youth group Identity Evropa, floated his plan for bringing new blood into his movement. He argued that “white Bernie bros” were ripe for recruitment. They had already been vilified by the Hillary camp, he explained, for their whiteness, so they could be counted on to harbor white racial grievances against the political establishment. And additionally, they were disenchanted with the neoliberal capitalist order, so they’d fit right in with fascism.

It only got weirder from there. In the Q&A session, one attendee made an impassioned speech about the imperative of saving the environment, and wondered when white nationalists would take up the cause of nature conservation. Another talked about workers’ rights, as everyone nodded their heads, seeming to take for granted that the movement to expel non-Aryan people from the continent was a critical part of the liberation of labor from capitalist exploitation.

At one point, Mike Enoch, host of a podcast called “The Daily Shoah” and possibly the most overtly repulsive of the whole bunch, despaired over the destruction of innate human brotherhood by market forces. He congratulated those gathered for reviving a lost, ancient fraternal spirit by rejecting the fetishes of consumerist society in favor of the deep, authentic bonds of racial tribalism.

Save for the underlying philosophy of racial purification and genocide, with all the raging against capitalism and modernity, it could have been a meeting of eco-anarchists. It was weird, but the weirdest part was that, as a lefty, or a former lefty, or whatever I am, suddenly the nihilistic, adolescent appeal of fascism, intellectually vacuous and morally degenerate as it was, made some sort of visceral sense to me.

LISTEN TO AUDIO OF THE CONFERENCE

Right wing ideologues talk a lot about being “red pilled,” which is a reference to The Matrix. In The Matrix, Neo is given the choice of swallowing a red pill or a blue pill. The blue pill would plug him back into the Matrix, where he would live out his life in blissful ignorance of the horror show the world had become. The red pill would strip the veil from his eyes, and awaken him to the incomprehensible reality of destruction and pain and suffering that constituted the world as it actually was.

In the right’s political analogy, we’re all stuck in the Matrix, spellbound by the fairy tales being fed to us by the liberal elite. Once we muster the courage to face facts, we awaken to the reality that it is feminists who are exploiting men, non-whites who are oppressing whites, and immigrants who are victimizing American citizens, or something like that. The point is that we’re all brainwashed by a lie that has been taught to us by our teachers and marketed to us by our magazines, movies and televisions since we were children. At one point in Angela’s interview with him, Spencer referred to this manufactured reality as a “simulacrum,” sounding like Jean Baudrillard pontificating over an espresso with some grad student in cultural studies.

As proper racists, Spencer and his crowd see the fix to this existential fall of man in white racial solidarity. Racial allegiance is ancient, their line of thinking goes, and therefore authentic, unlike consumer capitalism, which is new, and therefore fake.

On that count, they’re just wrong on the facts: Vikings and Germanic barbarians and ancient Romans didn’t think of themselves as “white,” and didn’t feel any mystical kinship with each other based on some skin color-designated meta-tribe. Race is a thoroughly modern social construct, which emerged from the transatlantic slave trade — in other words, from capitalist relations of production. Like the modern consumerist dreamworld that the racists at that Maryland meeting decried, the entire “race realist” worldview is founded on a lie.

Still, what impressed me was not the intellectual content of the argument, of which there was none, but its mythological heft. I’d never really heard it before in the context of ideological racism. We once lived as noble savages, the ethnonationalist fable went, bound to one another by blood. We killed animals and climbed mountains and fought and fucked and did manly things. Then came capitalism, with its corruption, its cheap utilitarianism and its artifice. It enchanted us with its hedonic illusions, enslaved us to its inhuman logic, and doomed us to a pathetic, amoral existence.

But at last, we have begun to see through its lies, and can recognize once again what is truly great in nature and man. As the world remains shackled in chains it cannot even see, we, the few, have found one another, awakened to the truth, and shouldered the duty and the privilege of saving what remains of this fallen world. We have taken the red pill.

It’s the hero’s journey. It’s the historical dialectic. It’s Nietzsche. It’s literally the story structure of The Matrix.

The appeal of fascism had always been a mystery to me, because I tended to regard it as an ideology motivated principally by hate, and I’m not a particularly hateful person. But now I saw it, through the eyes of its adherents, as a story of redemption. Like the fascists of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, the American alt-right yearned for a glorious past that never was; pointed to the despised liberal elites as the puppet masters who had profited from its destruction; railed at the sheepish, brainwashed masses who fell for their ploys; and cast themselves in the roles of the enlightened vanguard and savior. The appeal of fascism, at the end of the day, was the appeal of narcissism.

Before I started on Kill All Normies, I did some reporting on the alt-right for The Intercept. Aside from an interview with the founder of Identity Evropa, however, I mostly covered them from a distance.

I had seen their enemies, members of Antifa, at closer range. For a short film I produced, I interviewed several Antifa activists (including two who do not appear in the video), and, later, I had the unpleasant experience of seeing an Antifa “black bloc” formation in action at a protest in downtown Berkeley.

The protest in question was supposed to be a big show of force by “Patriot Prayer,” the right-wing group that has been skirmishing with Antifa in Portland, Oregon since Donald Trump was elected. There had been several of these protests already in Berkeley, which were not so much demonstrations as organized street brawls. At this particular event, however, almost nobody from the right wing side showed up. The park where the event took place (across the street from my old high school, incidentally) was populated by a bunch of ordinary Bay Area liberal protesters with picket signs, a big contingent of Antifa types, and, throughout the entire day, maybe a half dozen right wingers.

It was a hideous spectacle nonetheless. Dressed in black, head-to-toe, with their faces masked, Antifa occupied the park as a sort of loosely coordinated mob. Through their sheer numbers and their obvious willingness to use violence, they became the de facto police in that space, while the actual cops stood a few hundred feet away, avoiding provocation. Antifa shouted orders at people. They commanded my partners and I not to film them, and started manhandling us when we questioned their authority.

Then, they started beating people up. They began with the few actual MAGA protesters who dared show up, in wildly lopsided numbers: usually one or two or three Antifa members showering blows down on a single guy, with a group of 10 or 12 more standing behind them in case the victim was brave enough to fight back. Pretty soon, it wasn’t really clear who they were beating up and why. I watched one man getting punched and kicked by a group of three or four Antifa people with a phalanx of dozens more around them, making sure nobody intervened on the victim’s behalf. They kept yelling to the crowd that he was a “Nazi.” It turned out he was a freelance photojournalist for Reuters who had made the mistake of being more intransigent than my partners and I had been when Antifa had ordered him to stop doing his job. They smashed his camera, which was his livelihood, on the street. He went to the hospital, and was apparently uninsured.

From having interviewed several Antifa members for my reporting, and from having spent a few years in radical leftist Bay Area circles myself during the 2000s when I fancied myself an “anarchist,” I had a sense of their worldview — the convictions and fantasies that drove them to see administering mob violence as a righteous act of social justice. It wasn’t all that different from what drove the alt-right to embrace their ideology of murder, ethnic cleansing and forced mass displacement as the pinnacle of heroism.

In Antifa’s version, America was already a quasi-fascist state, and the alt-right were the shock troops who would finally push the country over the edge into a full blown Fourth Reich. The thin black line standing between safety and calamity for all of us, but in particular for “marginalized people,” were themselves.

As with the alt-right, in Antifa’s pre-apocalyptic fantasy, a small vanguard had inherited a world historical mission: to save humanity from destruction. As with the alt-right, this vanguard looked upon the rest of us as a flock of sheep in need of their protection from the wolves circling amongst us. Like sheep, we were vulnerable, easily misled, and quite stupid. When we stepped out of line, we needed to be reminded, for our own good, who was in charge.

In one area, however, there was a surprising difference. The alt-right saw Antifa as a nuisance, but the power elite as their main adversary, which meant politicians, corporations, and capitalism itself. If you asked Antifa about capitalism, I imagine they would unload a lecture on you about its atrocities and the imperative of overthrowing it through armed revolution. But in practice, they didn’t seem too concerned about Google, Palantir, Genentech, Bechtel, and the many other corporate Goliaths based here in the Bay Area. At least over the course of the Trump administration, their attention seemed to be occupied almost exclusively by middle class, middle-aged, American flag-waving white people from the exurbs with decals on their SUVs of a cartoon Calvin pissing on something or other. If you asked me who was more anti-capitalist, some black clad Antifa goon or Richard Spencer and his tryhard ubermenches, I’d have to think about it for a while.

In one sense, the alt-right people were correct, but not in the way they thought they were. Consumer capitalism has impoverished our culture, alienated us from one another, and sapped meaning from our lives. They may be wrong about literally everything else, but the fascists aren’t wrong to sneer in contempt at a commercial culture that elevates the pursuit of viral fame and influence on TikTok as one of the most compelling life aspirations for its youth. We’re all trapped in that simulacrum, some more than others. But neither the alt-right nor Antifa have evaded it. Rather, they are its apotheosis.

Another of the alt-right’s favorite movies is Fight Club, which is about a man whose life is rendered so empty by the vacuousness of consumerism that he engages in pointless violence just to fill the void. When I first learned that the alt-right had embraced it as their own, I was surprised: I remember watching it when I was young, and taking the subversive underground movement it depicted to be not fascists, but anti-capitalist anarchists, like Antifa. In hindsight, it could have been either; the allegory describes both equally. Both are acting out heroic fantasies they dreamed up to bring some romance and drama into lives left dull and meaningless by the hollow values of capitalism. Both have assigned themselves the roles of prophet and messiah, and indulge in the sadistic pleasure of administering the violence to which they presume those roles entitle them. Both need to put down their childish things, grow up, and get a life.