Revenge of the Aristocrats

“Where will it all end? In the destruction of all other command for the benefit of one alone - that of the state. In each man's absolute freedom from every family and social authority, a freedom the price of which is complete submission to the state. In the complete equality as between themselves of all citizens, paid for by their equal abasement before the power of their absolute master - the state. In the disappearance of every constraint which does not emanate from the state, and in the denial of every pre-eminence which is not approved by the state. In a word, it ends in the atomization of society, and in the rupture of every private tie linking man and man, whose only bond is now their common bondage to the state. The extremes of individualism and socialism meet: that was their predestined course.”

Bertrand De Jouvenel, ‘On Power’

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“A state? What is that? Well! open now your ears unto me, for now will I say unto you my word concerning the death of peoples. A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’

“It is a lie! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.

“Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.

“Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’

Allow me some free association regarding the term ‘aristocracy’…

In democratic Athens, the aristocracy never truly gave up power, even in times of ‘democracy’ (nothing like the contemporary version). Its legacy was built by noblemen of the likes of Solon, Pericles and Alcibiades; this was true also in Republican Rome. Yet both city-states became models for western statecraft. At the same time, the very existence of aristocracy was likely the wellspring of Greek philosophy.

The freedoms of Magna Carta in England were won by a revolt of the aristocrats, not of the people.

In Anglo mythology, the story of Arthurian Britain, the resistance against foreign invaders, is entirely aristocratic in spirit, as is the folkish tale of Robin Hood, an aristocrat fighting for an absent crusader-king…

Even in the strictly republican USA, there was a great strain of monarchism in many of the country’s Founding Fathers; and an aristocratic tradition of noblesse oblige and gallantry in the South.

If aristocracy has long been at the heart of high politics and culture, the converse is also true.

The great irruptions of western states occurred when aristocrats lost power. The French Revolution and its Great Terror were only possible because the aristocracy had been discarded and corrupted by the kings of France.

This was also true of the Russian Revolution, when the aristocratic class became so ‘enlightened’ that they allowed a tiny minority of thugs to take over a great empire, an empire that had produced the likes of Dostoevsky and Rachmaninoff.

I recall these moments and movements in history, because they bear some importance when one reflects on the continued ‘populism’ rising around the world, brought again to the attention of the world by the electoral victory of Javier Milei in Argentina.

This follows ‘populist’ successes last year in Sweden and, once again, Hungary, all of which, of course, followed the Trump and Bolsonaro eras in the US and Brazil. (Does this week’s Netherland shock qualify? Perhaps, considering the support of the farmers’ movement for Wilders.)

But are these movements truly ‘populist’, mass movements in the name of ‘the people’, or are they something else?

It has already been persuasively argued elsewhere that the so-called populist moment never happened.

I find it difficult to dispute the thesis of the Bronze Age author above, when he states that ‘right wing populists’ are not populists at all, but representatives of those who seek independence from the state and not its patronage (despite whatever rhetoric is often used).

Here, I will go one step further. What is commonly called the rise of populism is something almost entirely its opposite, the revenge of the aristocrats...

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The political theorist Bertrand de Jouvenel proposed that modern states can be identified as an alliance between the high and low elements of a society, in a kind of patron-client relationship set up to oppose ‘an aristocratic middle’. This ‘aristocratic middle’ is the independent class who threaten the permanent revolution of the state, that is, its inexorable bid to control all of society.

The managerial class, in this formulation, gathers a coalition of the fringes in order to squeeze the middle, to seize its ‘castles’. These fringes in our time are often minorities, gender activists, young voters with little material stake in the country, and welfare recipients.

Eventually, as each ‘castle’ is seized and sacked, no other social authority, no rival to the managerial state remains. All that is left is a mass, bureaucratic state, stifling all individuality, because it stifles all organic community.

This is most apparent in South Africa, where the government, consisting of wealthy rent-seekers, and overwhelmingly supported by social grant recipients, is passing legislation to seize the assets of private healthcare, commercial farmers, and the autonomy of the still-functioning schools of the country. This is where modern progress eventually takes you…

Thus, when I describe the populists and their supporters as aristocratic, I do not imply they are members of ‘the high’, the elites. Rather they represent an independent class, groups of citizens and families who seek further independence from the high-low alliance that forms the state. This casts them in ‘the middle’.

This is why, despite not being populist in the sense of representing the masses, such aristocrats are in conflict with the elites in their countries, those who run the bureacracies and the courts, who have captured corporate values and policies, and who implement the rent-seeking priorities of globalism. Instinctively, they feel the coming ‘sack’ of their castles, they see the forces ranging against them. They look for champions or bodyguards to lead a rearguard action.

Does this make them ‘populist’? No.

Of course, when it suits them, populist rhetoric is adapted for their own ends, but the great challenge of these aristocrats to our current system does not itself emerge from ‘the people’, a term conceptualised by the Left for those who would steer the largesse of the state to ‘the working class’, whatever that is.

No, this great challenge comes rather from those who seek to reduce the state.

It comes from those who bemoan the loss of competence in state administration, its bloatedness and ugliness, its anarcho-tyranny that favours the lawless and the state’s mandarins, its open borders, rising crime rates, and the deficit spending that drives inflation whilst building nothing of substance.

Common to all of these tides in various countries is a prioritization of one’s own national culture, and a scepticism toward immigration, encouragement of which is always the hallmark of real populism.

When true populism, encouraged from high and driven by low, opposes the aristocrats, more ‘people’ are always allowed in, as a bulwark in the great struggle of the masses for a ‘social democracy’, exemplified in recent years by the likes of Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa.

The aristocratic middle who oppose the mass democracies ruled by the ‘high-low alliance’ do not bemoan, not sincerely, that a country has elites, but rather that the elites, the ‘high’, hate their own people and are entirely incompetent.

Nor do they look at the plight of ‘the low’ and wish for more suffering of their apparent political enemies. Intinctively, they understand that a reduced state, governed by competent elites, would help the masses, freed from the dominance of political bosses, even as it would maintain their own independence and self-interest. This accounts, indeed, for some of the populist rhetoric.

(This aristocratic sense of solidarity was why the last Russian Tsar’s most pre-eminent prime minister, the aristocrat Pyotr Stolypin, before he was killed by revolutionaries in Kiev, sought to give Russian peasants their own land separate from the communes, to great opposition from the socialists and intellectuals like Leo Tolstoy.)

The conflict between ‘the middle’ and the ‘high-low’ alliance is one reason why a figure like Trump was able to rise in the current political moment. He intuitively tapped into the discontent of the middle, those who prize their culture, but want their own distance from state bureaucracy.

Trump, detested by ‘high’ and ‘low’ alike, has, therefore, as his base the business-owner or blue-collar worker, the married woman, and not the labour organisations, welfare recipients or young intellectuals historically at the heart of populist movements.

Whilst it is often discussed how Trump’s base consists of an outsized proportion of non-college educated whites, by income status, he performed far better among the wealthy than the poor in 2020 - a trend that intriguingly faded amongst the super-wealthy:

(Intriguingly, Biden’s victory was entirely dependent upon his absolute dominance among unmarried women, a demographic larger than unmarried men in the American electorate in 2020.)

Trump’s most notable legislative and executive priorities reflected the concerns of his base: reducing and simplifying the tax code, cutting regulations, and drastically reducing illegal immigration. There was not any kind of populist redistribution.

Even the much-touted trade tariffs were intended primarily to stimulate the activities of American industrialists and skilled workers, not field-hands or manual labourers. ‘MAGA” is not egalitarian in the slightest. Trump named his son ‘Baron’, after all.

These features of ‘Trumpism’ are common to other, similar leaders.

In Brazil, the ‘populist’ Bolsonaro did not represent the masses, as his opponent, current President Lula, does, who draws his support from the poor, corrupt states of Brazil. Bolsonaro was a military officer, beloved by the middle and upper classes because of his support for pro-market and tough-on-crime policies.

Lula, of the Workers’ Party, has always been the populist, not Bolsonaro. In fact, Lula loves the people so much, he is now mandating annual covid vaccines for children. (This is how ‘democracy’ is saved, after all.)

The rise of the libertarian Javier Milei in Argentina is equally not populism at work. It is a reaction against the inflationary destruction of a once wealthy and proud nation. His victory represents the desire of well-to-do Argentinians to forsake the ‘liberation politics’ of the global south, previously harnessed by Juan Peron, and represented today by an Argentinian pope.

(This is the meaning of his, and Bolsonaro’s pro-Israel stance - a signal to pivot away from the ‘post-colonial’ narrative. More on this below.)

El Salvador is also supposedly governed by a ‘populist’: a president who mines Bitcoin with energy derived from volcanoes, who describes himself as a ‘philosopher-king’ on X, and who has taken on extraordinary powers and destroyed his nation’s gang culture while building public libraries.

Hardly a man of ‘the people’.

Similar impulses are at work in Sweden, Hungary, and the Netherlands right now. Putin’s taming of the Yeltsin oligarchy twenty years ago has energy somewhat analogous. One could say the same about Paul Kagame in Rwanda or Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, who both circumvented ‘the people’ to bring about prosperity and security for… the people.

Importantly, when I call such leaders and their movements aristocratic, I am by no means suggesting they are all admirable or excellent. I refer to their position in relation to the high-low alliance.

As some have noted before me, there is the sense that Milei and Trump embody to some extent the Jungian archetype of ‘the fool’, the character who represents ‘the unconscious’, who appears at the end of social epochs, calling into question soon-to-be-discredited ‘norms’ and ‘polite’ behaviour.

This does not make them any less compelling. The sense of humour is a source of their appeal, and would seem appropriate in an epoch commonly called ‘clown world’.

This is why the ideology of such leaders is not really that important. The energy is anti-ideology.

For at the core of the project is a great critique of the state and all that has gone into making it over the past few decades.

Whilst such a critique shares commonality with ‘libertarianism’ or ‘classical liberalism’, it does not itself represent the rise of any kind of positive political ideology, and certainly not a return to the notions of blank-slate individualism and human rights.

Rather than Locke, there is instead a Nietzschean undertone. Nietzsche, contrary to popular belief, was not a nationalist, not as we understand it. In his classic work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, he bemoaned the modern state as being contrary, a great obstacle, to the rise of a new aristocratic class, who, like the great founders of our Hellenic past, are to found peoples, and not ideological ‘states’.

The bureaucrats of the modern state govern by laying snares, entrapping people with pointless cravings, by imposing artifical rules, and by breathing lies. Great peoples are instead governed by creators, who propose faith and love, self-confidence, sincere laws and customs, rather than regulations and pseudo-egalitarianism. The constitution is the organic body, akin to one’s own ‘constitution’, and not a piece of paper.

The likes of modern ‘populists’, better termed the tribunes of the aristocratic middle, of course only hint at this kind of historical significance. They are possible precursors, not creators; jesters, not kings.

In the wake of their humorous destruction, it can only be hoped that a new set of aristocrats emerges, after the era of ‘the fool’.

What would such aristocrats look like?

• They would draw from the old tradition of Christian aristocrats, Christian knights, whose faith was not a grovelling to power and social mores, a flattening of society, but a call to adventure and great and often terrible deeds. This implies a restoration of Christianity as ‘aristocratic’. The apostles, after all, were promised a kingdom where they would sit on thrones judging the tribes of Israel and even the angels.

• They would be true to the word ‘aristocrat’: the rule of the excellent. Bukele’s destruction of gangs has drawn howls from the media class. We are meant to live with decay as the price of ‘vibrant urban living’. Bukele, however, shows us this tolerance of ruin by ‘progressive’ mayors and governors is a policy choice, not an inevitability, that rule of the competent is possible.

• They would once again live the truth that life under any condition is not always superior to death. We all die. Why stave off the inevitable to live in ruin, behind masks, injected like cattle, hiding behind locked doors? This, after all, is how one traditionally entered the line of aristocrats, through great deeds that risked one’s life. A preparation for death used to be the great goal of philosophy, which was the great justification for aristocracy. The true aristocratic spirit knew in its depths that lockdowns and masks and mass vaccination was pathetic and ugly, a crushing of youth.

• They would be patrons of beauty. The great justification for aristocracy is philosophy that draws attention to nature, the natural rationale for rule of the excellent. But so is beauty. The formula for rule, the mandate, would be no more sewage on the streets, no more trash, no more spirit-crushing architecture, instead great public buildings, clean rivers: a re-enchantment of the world. Public life would point beyond itself, the grey functionality of all ‘social democracies’ would be dismantled.

• They would challenge state power, just as the barons and churchmen under King John did to win Magna Carta. There is nothing aristocratic about modern state power, in all its stultification and therapeuticism.

Critics will no doubt accuse me of some kind of love for tyranny and authoritarianism.

But what makes you free? Political parties who pretend to care about the masses? Or the economic freedom to forge ahead, the living environment where your wife and children can walk the streets freely at night, the rescission of rule by public health rats?

Let me re-iterate what I have often written before. Democracy as understood by idealists, is entirely impossible in our world. We are always ruled by some kind of minority. (Today, in many or most countries, this minority is a sordid mix of professional party bosses and journalists.) An aristocratic middle toppling our current elites thus does not create any additional political risk.

Even so, by no means would a kind of return to spiritual aristocracy preclude maintaining what is left of democratic traditions. Quite the reverse. It has always been select leaders who have created the structures and order necessary for any kind of democracy to survive and be of any worth, from Athens to the US.

Restricting the vote to free citizens, restraining the fears, envies and passions of the masses, rooting out the buying of votes by nefarious NGOs, in short, the aristocratic call to lead and guide, is the only way to return to normal, healthy, localized democracy, which in its modern guise has become synonymous with overly-regulated economic and health policy, alongside chaos on the streets and de-policing.

But let the ruling class be visible, in the open where it is subject to criticism, rather than hidden by self-righteous platitudes about ‘sacred democracy’.

Finally, a word of warning.

I noted above the pro-Israel stance of Milei, previously shared by Bolsonaro. This stems from the desire to withdraw their states from the great global post-colonial project, built on the notion that the limits on government associated with western states, and abhorred by the ‘developmental’ model of the ‘global south’ and its bid for ‘social justice’, are ‘fascist’ or ‘reactionary’. Thus they turn to the west, and look to the US.

But this is, at best, a short-term solution.

Ultimately, one of the most important ‘red pills’ is to realise that the US itself is the great sponsor of ‘liberation politics’, of global communism. Historically, Communist China and Russia were only allowed to maintain their existence at the whim of the US. And today, the US position in Ukraine and Israel is, quite literally, insane, immoral, and of a ‘revolutionary’ spirit.

For fellow South Africans, currently finding themselves supporting the US position in Israel and in the Ukraine, because these positions exist in opposition to the ruling ANC, it is important to understand that the US is not truly opposed to the ANC project of National Democratic Revolution:

European and South American ‘aristocrats’ must quickly learn this lesson. The ‘West’ is the US now, and the US is not your friend.

Perhaps this makes the quest futile or suicidal. How can one oppose the most powerful state ever known?

But what could be more ‘aristocratic’ than taking on the quest anyway?

I suspect too that the shrieking incompetents who run the US and its satellite states, are vulnerable, ripe for a great fall, as they scream about sex changes and mild respiratory viruses.

In the wake of this, many opportunities will arise for those ‘happy few’ who would become ‘creators’ again.