As a mentally ill and overly online person with radical politics, I'm regrettably cursed with an awareness of Internet-based demagogues and their respective movements that normal people don't possess. The digital far right in 2024 is lively and worrying. They're more visible now than they were just a couple of years ago owing to a few factors. The international order is in crisis and American hegemony is being challenged by the strains of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Russo-Ukrainian war, and China's increasing presence as a would-be mediator in such conflicts. The domestic economic situation in the United States is objectively improving by some metrics, but American consumers on average have a negative outlook of their purchasing power in the present day. Most of this stems from the delusions of the middle class, the most vocal stratum in the United States, but some staple grocery goods are still highly overpriced and the country is *also* suffering from a housing crisis. Things seem to be in a similar state in the United Kingdom, but I'm less well versed when it comes to that dismal island nation and will speak of it no further but to say they have important an election coming up and so do we Americans. To cap it off, recent organizational changes at Twitter have made the platform considerably more habitable for the far right.
Put all of these factors together (there are certainly more) and the right in the Anglophone world has a lot to capitalize on, and the vast majority of them are being as loud about that as they possibly can. This variety of rightist is the type who'll either grow out of it or die alone soon, possibly after committing an act of stochastic terrorism. They're the stupid ones who are less capable of seeing the kinds of changes they want through. That isn't to say that they can't ever be politically effective, but their "efficacy" is uncouth and comes in the form of taking a hammer to liberal institutions, ie., advocating that Donald Trump should be the president. The *really* stupid ones don't even do that, they just go out and shoot people they dislike. Donald Trump is horrible and I don't want him to be the president again, but in a way I'm grateful that he's become the figurehead of American fascism because his utterly retarded method of politics- taking a hammer to his problems- typically isn't good at effecting change in the long term. In fact, it can be massively counterproductive because of the ire it draws from everybody who has some sentimental attachment to the liberal democratic process.
While there are numerous conservative projects that seek to use Donald Trump to effect institutional changes that would entrench their power, the viability of those projects is in question mostly because Trump is a stupid, senile, and vain man who relies solely on pathos and is mostly concerned with his ego rather than any actual agenda. I'm skeptical that the right can successfully use the culture war to effect long lasting changes, and interestingly, so is far-right thinker Curtis Harvin. If you aren't sure who that is, replace that H with a Y. Curtis belongs to the other category of rightists, the more worrying kind who *do* seem to understand how politics actually work and who aren't given to committing random acts of violence that make them look really, really bad. Curtis's politics are in the realm of dystopian science fiction (which he freely admits) and it's unlikely that we'll ever see something like patchwork, his theory of the state, practiced in reality on the scale that he dreams of (if ever), but he's still somebody to worry about. He and the online movement centered around him ultimately desire a total break with the liberal state like the more crass rightists, but they're still willing to work within its confines in the pursuit of its eventual destruction. Their cloak and dagger approach to politics and culture is more effective at carrying out that mission than quiet-part-out-loud right populism, at least in theory.
In an article from June 2022 titled "You can only lose the culture war," Curtis outlines his understanding of American politics in his characteristically nerdy and smug fashion. He speaks of elves and hobbits in lieu of bluepilled liberals and redpilled conservatives. The elves are educated and cultured people, liberals, who in Curtis's mind typically make up the ruling class and enforce their socially progressive views on society at gunpoint. The hobbits on the other hand are simple people- middle class Americans who are usually cultural conservatives who don't take kindly to having the social views of elves forced onto them. It's telling that he doesn't mention the working class at all. He goes on to say that neither group enjoys being governed by the other, and that conservatives in particular tend to react poorly to liberal governance and prioritize lashing out and targeting policies in a fashion less than stellar for optics, which typically serves to strengthen liberals in the long term. This article was certainly inspired by the then recent overturn of Roe v. Wade, and the phenomenon that Curtis described here basically happened- Conservatives used this outcome to make abortions as difficult to access as possible in strongly conservative states, but it also entrenched the liberal position on abortion and was in large part responsible for the Democrats' better than expected performance in the 2022 midterms.
Since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, access to abortion has become a key political issue again- its codification in law doesn't seem to be something that Democrats had seriously considered for fear of overreach until now. Assuming things go well enough for Democrats in the near future, it's a realistic possibility. Bare minimum, they're going to do everything they can to ensure that abortion doesn't become totally illegal. Seeing that this intensive culture war campaign being championed by the dumber variety of rightists isn't necessarily good for the right as a whole, Curtis advocates for a different path to power- Trying to sway liberals and leftists to his side. In accordance with his stupid Lord of the Rings racial allegory, such individuals are "dark elves," elites who are sympathetic to the reactionary elements of the middle class and want to realign society along more fascist lines, but with a velvet glove approach. To them, politics are downstream of culture and the most effective method of effecting political change is by first influencing the producers of culture so that they can in turn produce works that convince others of their views. Essentially, Curtis sees the creation of a robust intellectual right wing as a critical prerequisite to long term power. Such a goal is actually pretty worrying- The American right as it currently exists is mostly a cultural and intellectual void, and for that reason among others it's less fashionable to be a rightist than to be a leftist or liberal in demographics who more easily swayed by aesthetic trends for instance, such as the youth or socialite bohemians.
Curtis has made an undeniable impact on online culture. Certain Web3 projects are being led by advocates of his ideology, there's a whole scene in New York made up of people and they use their podcasts to promote it, and he even scored an interview with Tucker Carlson a couple of years ago. All of this has made him and his ideology more visible, but to what end? The aforementioned Web3 projects and podcasts tend to be three-fourths grift and *maybe* a quarter genuine conviction, if any. The Web3 stuff in particular stinks of rugpulls, and the most visible of these projects is headed by a clearly delusional cult leader who has cut and run from their projects before. Like any good Silicon Valley parasite, even Curtis's former personal programming project is massively suspect- and open to investment today. In order to be relevant in a meaningful sense, the traditional internet and personal computing as we know it would have to be gone. It's a millenarian cloud-based computing system in nature, and if that doesn't set off alarm bells in your head then I'm not sure what to tell you. In any case, Curtis recently wrote an article in which he tacitly endorsed Biden over Trump, essentially for the same reasons that Richard Spencer cited in 2020- That his administration is more capable at managing the American state and that Trump being out of power allows more subtle rightists like himself to get away with their careful and more impactful infiltration of culture.
Curtis allows comments on his posts. Can you guess how a lot of his readers (many of whom I'm guessing came from that Tucker interview!) responded to this, in my mind, measured and worrying take? Not well! A lot of these comments imply that he's a wolf in sheep's clothing and bring up the fact that he's Jewish, a classic enemy in the delusional minds of rightoids, and these comments have plenty of likes as well. This indicates to me that Curtis isn't necessarily attracting the kind of people he says he wants in his camp and seeing as it's been a good few years since he attained his more mainstream presence, I wonder if he ever will in a meaningful sense. I wouldn't count on it, though.