The Priest on the Wall
A liberal response to Jordan S. Carroll’s survey of right-wing sci-fi.
The Los Angeles Review of Books recently ran a survey essay on contemporary right-wing American science fiction, written by scholar and non-rightist Jordan S. Carroll. Since ostensibly nobody reads, much less reads science fiction, much less reads right-wing science fiction, much less reads scholarship about right-wing science fiction in the LARB, I thought I would throw a few more eyes on his work and write a timely response. As a literary editor with a speculative inclination, I spend a lot of time encountering these ‘hopeful monsters’ Carroll examines. They exist ambiently in the online ecosystem of post-prestige independent literature.
The defining trait of the right-wing idea space is an almost confounding diversity of thought, as modeled by various researchers, although there are plenty of ingroup and outgroup signifiers that exist at the level of aesthetics. I borrow the term ‘hopeful monsters’ from biologist Richard Goldschmidt to describe this diversity, using it in the Roderick Beaton sense to mean quirky political upstarts that will die off or, rarely, become successful. They are all different from each other, often contradictory, often at odds. The opinions of one cannot stand well for another, since their only real through line is opposition to the mainstream left. Defining them in positivist, generalizable terms in baskets of ‘right’ and ‘far right’ is a difficult errand, but nonetheless it's exactly what Carroll has endeavored to accomplish.
I’ll start with what Carroll got right, which is a lot, at least at the level of generality. He has endeavored to be broad in his reading, and you can tell by how often he caveats things a lesser author would oversimplify. He notes, for example, “a portion of the reactionary futurists may be willing to admit Jews or Asians with H-1B visas into their imagined community of potential posthumans,” pointing to a tech-trad split on ‘elite human capital’ between classic racists and more cosmopolitan ‘human biodiversity’ types.
He's also right that a lot of the dream of exploration and colonization involves simply getting away from people, not seeking fortune or opportunities for conquest. In the case of white supremacist daydreams of space, it's true that a huge portion of their fantasy involves winning the culture war by simply flying away from minorities like a Civilization V science victory. Nowhere is this more clear than in “Dead White Astronauts,” the first story in Passage Press’ After the War, where the nature of living on the moon has somewhat implausibly filtered out progressive rabble-rousing. It evokes Oregon, a state so racist it banned slavery, or how the Plymouth settlers chose New England over Amsterdam because their children kept running away to be prostitutes and sailors instead of Puritan cultists.
Carroll is also correct in saying, citing Michael Feola, that one of the primary emotions of the far right is melancholy. There is a yearning for an imagined world present in a lot of their writing, a distinct moroseness grappling with their visions of gleeful vitality. I would caveat that this melancholy is universal to anyone whose identity is tied up in political utopianism that seems unreachable. For such types, there are two modes. There is chasing the dragon through hopium and violence, and there is lamenting the beautiful things that once could have been.
In citing Christoffer Kølvraa and Bernhard Forchtner, Carroll also accurately identifies the primordial world of alt-right fantasy, one in which there is no law but that of strength. This is an unbroken line of imagination that goes back a long time in American history. It's no coincidence Milius’ Conan starts with a Nietzsche quote. Carroll is also right to be skeptical of Kølvraa and Forchtner’s claim that the idiosyncrasies of any one individual, like Jason Reza Jorjani, represent the broader desires of the right. In the case of Jorjani, at least, the author is able to see the folly of ascribing the beliefs of the one to too broad a whole.
It's also true, as Carroll stresses, that “whiteness” has historically been expansionary, although one must imagine there may come a point where it's so inclusive of the global elite that “white” is no longer the right term. Nigerian-Americans, after all, are already more highly educated than Americans whites on average. What do you call a race hierarchist of 2125 when he's putting Nigerians on his S-tier?
On tech, Carroll correctly notes a tension between the more progressive, anti-imperial middle rungs of most tech companies and their increasingly libertarian-conservative leadership. He uses some loaded terms to describe military R&D, like “terror weapons,” which does not seem to mean much more than a weapon that is scary or can be used in a scary way. Still, if anything, this slant helps properly characterize the qualms and fears of the middle manager left.
The most excoriating and unavoidable critique of all is the one Carroll levels against the tech elite for the abandonment of the homeless in downtown San Francisco. Yes, we can blame the situation on bad left-NIMBY housing policy and the cruel kindness of anarchist DAs enabling a paid police strike, but at the end of the day those homeless people are human beings suffering in the shadows of our richest corporations. If we can't bring out the guillotine, the elite should possess enough noblesse oblige to help clean up the streets and fund private charities, as Carroll implies.
You may notice we have strayed a long way from science fiction by now. If tech billionaires aren't funding homeless services, they certainly aren't funding esoteric right-wing sci-fi novels, either. What they do fund, through Amazon Studios and Apple TV and the like, looks a lot like the same old center-progressive stuff you get from Hollywood. It's Carroll’s chafing middle managers of the left, not the billionaires, shaping the arts in the day-to-day media executive sense. He has confused a couple dozen oddball genre authors of the right with a broader tech elite that for the most part has no interest in such quirkiness.
Where Carroll fully misses the mark, it's mostly due to his own curious strain of zero-sum utopianism. I deliberately don't use the term Marxist here, because Carroll himself seems cagey about it, calling its vocabulary “vulgar.” For all his scholarly effort, he is unfortunately not just a progressive but a hardline redistributive command economist to such a degree that the very topic of right-wing sci-fi short circuits him. “If we are ever to move beyond capitalism and its crises, however, we must reject reactionary futurism,” he writes in his closing. YouGov tells us only 18% of Americans even describe themselves as progressive, much less economically revolutionary. Carroll, if he is writing of a fringe, is certainly in a fringe of his own. His vision of overthrowing American capitalism, either by convincing hundreds of millions or doing some sort of undemocratic vanguardism, is just as much science fiction as the racist fantasies he studies.
I will say that I believe Carroll is both half-right and half-wrong when he says of conservative techno-optimism, “Prometheans look to a future where a superheroic elite pursues the technological singularity to the rest of humanity’s detriment.” I think there are indeed bitter supremacists who are in it for the cruelty, for the naked oppression of others, but there are also earnest-hearted idealists who see the unshackling of the elite as a path to uplifted post-scarcity existence for all humanity. In a way, the status of this second set boils down to a moral referendum on the Chicago School. Is it okay to pull a lever that makes the standard of living go up for everyone, if wealth inequality also goes up? Can you call that “humanity’s detriment”?
Of course, it's not all Randian economics on the right. It's a lot more complicated than that. In attempting to typify all of said complications, Carroll struggles at times. “If Musk is the rational planner, Thiel is the inspired risk-taker,” he writes at one point, to compare Elon Musk and Peter Thiel’s ideologies. Anyone who knows these two men knows these characterizations are essentially reversed, at least in action. Musk is a risk-taker to a self destructive degree, and Thiel is so measured he put his PayPal fortune in a retirement account so he could take it out tax-free at sixty-five.
Carroll also commits some small failures of theory of mind in trying to interpret the broader right-wing psyche. The right does not treat “Indigenous” people as a bloc, certainly not a capital-letter bloc. They don’t think of the Sami and the Ainu and the Tongva and the Anglos as sharing common political cause. So, despite what you may find on the left, it's never going to be useful to make broad statements about how any faction of the right feels about indigenous people as a whole.
It gets yet dicier when he tries to hit culture war specifics. Citing Adrienne L. Massanari, Carroll describes Gamergate as a reaction to “the mere presence of previously marginalized fans in their hobby spaces,” which undersells how much the 2010s were fought as a mutually-aggressive, zero-sum war over values, not ‘presence.’ Carroll also makes the mistake of taking Judith Butler literally when she says, absurdly, that transphobia is just misplaced climate and economic anxiety.
Part of what irks me about Carroll’s piece, although this may be personal preference, is his light disdain for both his subjects and his readers. “These fantasies may sound bizarre,” he says at one point, in case his summary of right-wing science fiction confused or alarmed you. “Of course, we could continue overturning rocks and finding reactionary futurists,” he says at another, humorously and perhaps unintentionally cutting against the recent leftist defense of Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers with his very own my-opponents-are-bugs analogy.
In this rhetorical mode, Carroll positions himself as a progressive priest-warrior, nobly watchful on the wall between his audience of ignorant-but-reformable liberals and the various species of creature out in the wastes of non-orthodox thought. It's his job as a member of the post-graduate humanities caste to gaze upon the intellectual scene beyond the gates and relay its horrors to the home team.
In terminology, things get even messier. Carroll makes ample use of the ‘reactionary’ ratchet, hinging on the idea that ever undoing a progressive change makes you an enemy of the grand design. Like a ratchet, the ideal society goes one way, but never the other. Obviously, if progress were unfailing, this would be a good smear. Progress does fail, though, and occasionally it needs to be rolled back like a faulty software patch. In the case of the French Revolution, where reactionism first came into being, we got The Terror and rampaging tricolor imperialism and all manner of suffering. Surely it's not a sin to say these all could have been tempered down.
In his typology of reactionaries, Carroll talks of people on the right who want to return to “Greek antiquity, pagan Europe, medieval Christendom, or the United States at some point prior to the 1960s.” But what about people who want to return, in part, to 2012 or 2019 or 2023? To undo small mistakes before they turn into large ones? Funny enough, his own ideology is only possible through neoclassical thought that worked so hard in the 18th and 19th centuries to wind back the clock on almost two millennia of church dogma. What makes that progressive, and not reaction? It’s a return to tradition, after all.
The idea of ‘reactionary’ as a label spanning anything outside the unrepentant progressive bleeding edge, the way Carroll uses it, is fatuous. Like uncontrolled cell growth, it annihilates moderation. It covers the vast majority of Americans with a broadness so extreme as to render it useless.
You can see further broad muddling in Carroll’s use of ‘fascism’ and ‘techno-fascism’ to describe all manner of beliefs ranging from genocidal white nationalism to utterly vanilla Barack Obama politics. At first, Carroll leaves the definition of techno-fascism somewhat opaque, putting all manner of libertarian and anti-state thought under this seemingly incongruous label. Then he defines it thus:
“Fascist nerds seek liberty or—better yet—sovereignty. They believe they can only achieve freedom by eliminating democratic oversight of their activities and dismantling or privatizing the state. Once the nation has been broken up into secessionist corporate fiefdoms, the techno-fascists foresee themselves innovating in eugenics and artificial intelligence to develop future generations of increasingly smart humans and posthumans.”
If anything, this is techno-feudalism, not techno-fascism. He literally says the word fiefdom in his description. More specifically, this is such an absurdly extreme post-America vision of city-state feudalism that I’m not sure what prominent tech figure it's supposed to represent, besides perhaps Cyberpunk franchise creator Mike Pondsmith, who wrote of it as warning. It’s certainly not defense industrialist Palmer Luckey, a person Carroll calls out by name, whose whole deal right now is trying to strengthen America against adversary powers, not dismantle or privatize it. Even Dryden Brown and Charlie Callinan, the relatively obscure upstarts who want to found their hypothetical tech city state of Praxis, are smart enough to know that it's easier to grab some island in the middle of nowhere than carve up a superpower.
To steelman Carroll’s use of the word, I suppose you could say techno-feudal city states are “fascist” in the very niche Fiume sense, but I think that particular strain of hopeful monster lost its claim to being representative of fascism when Nazism snuffed it out in the popular imagination. Regardless, such ventures do not constitute a common or widely shared fantasy, either in the tech right’s mind or in the sci-fi Carroll studies. If you find mention of an ‘Amazon City’ or the like in a Passage story, it’s usually something to be disdained, an object of ridicule for a gruff hero who would rather be out on the asteroid frontier with his laser gun.
Fanciful constructions aside, you can tell Carroll gets a little muddled even just trying to define the basics of right and far right. ‘Right’ seems to be Trump et al, and ‘far right’ seems to be anyone posting edgy stuff online. At one point, he calls the far right’s plans “as unprecedented and revolutionary as anything proposed by the Left,” which is certainly accurate, if not exactly a flattering comparison for leftists. Funny enough, this fact itself makes Carroll play something of the counterrevolutionary, although he does not point out the irony.
To further his argument that the right is revolutionary, Carroll cites Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind, which Princeton professor Kwame Anthony Appiah describes as a book about how “conservatism is, at its heart, a reaction against democratic challenges.” This framing positions the liberal-democratic center of the American public in a camp with the left against antidemocratic right-revolution.
I will say this. This revolutionary, anti-democratic characterization is absolutely true of the people who call themselves dissident right. They're dissidents for a reason, though. They’re not mainstream. The issue of defining ‘conservative’ as dissident right, at the end of the day, is that it makes the majority of status-quo Republicans not even ‘conservative’ by the stated revolutionary standards.
What is the utility of a definition of ‘conservative’ or ‘right-wing’ that in effect excludes most Republicans? What's more, what is the point of intertwining it with ‘reactionary,’ while simultaneously using the latter to describe anyone deviating at all from progressive orthodoxy? It mostly seems useful for making the right-wing extremist look more influential than he is. The sleight of hand occurring here is to take the goals of the fringe, describe them accurately, and then use them to paint the whole big tent as if Republican Joe the Plumber is a monarchist Yarvinite. It's not so different from reading Shulamith Firestone and then saying liberals want to eliminate the nuclear family.
At some points in his essay, Carroll’s described far right sounds much more radical than even the rank-and-file dissident right you see online, who are already far to the right of mainstream MAGA. He states at one point “the Far Right claims that only white men have the discipline, intelligence, and foresight to realize this [utopian] future.” If believing this is a prerequisite for admission to the far right, then ‘far right’ means a distinctly Hitlerian position more extreme on race than even Steve Sailer. It's fine to define it this way, but one must realize it probably describes a vanishingly small percentage of the American electorate, and certainly not the belief system of the Trump base or tech libertarians.
Here is the simplest explanation of where Carroll stumbles. He has created a huge-tent definition of 'reactionary’ and a highly extreme definition of ‘far-right,’ then put them in a blender and poured out the concoction as a soup of strange creatures he collectively references as ‘the right.’ Funny enough, this is exactly how most progressive journal editors and media executives see the situation, too. They are also priests on the wall. To them, there's a huge landscape of misshapen ideological monsters, a small progressive fortress of naïve liberals, and a stalwart guard of artsy anticapitalists manning the perimeter defenses.
You don't have to be conservative-aligned to be ejected from the castle into the wasteland. A figure who is essentially a progressive in all ways but one can still be tossed for that single axis of transgression. Kind of like the one-drop rule, Carroll and his type have built themselves a minoritarian purity test where defection puts you out among the rabble. I suspect, in a way, this mental frame is an ingroup policing tool gone awry. It works wonders for enforcing consensus if you respect the priests and you really don't want to get kicked out of the castle into monsterland. It doesn't work so well if people aren't scared to walk out the gate.
Perhaps people should be scared. Monsters, even hopeful ones, can eat you alive on a bad day. The zone outside polite consensus is full of dangerous idea-fauna, and I've seen at least two of my bright young friends get got. Maybe one day a new priest-guard will take watch on the liberal wall and allow a little room inside the gates for once-ejected idealists, keeping the vicious types at bay. For now, though, that doesn't seem likely. Carroll and his ilk are set in their ways, holding strong in the ivory tower, if not the White House. We’ll see how long people like him can keep ownership of the machine of arts and letters.
