A Review Auron Macintyre's The Total State

A Review of The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies by Auron Macintyre

Matt McManus

August 2, 2024

Introduction

It’s been said that fascism was a 20th century movement of the lesser intelligentsia. If that is the case the 21st recuperation of the far right shows that history does indeed repeat itself, but not-as Marx thought-first as tragedy then as farce. Instead we get farce followed by farce; history as a series of near-identical rhymes. Over the past 15 years a variety of far-right authors have emerged to put a gloss on the movement’s ambitions. These include Peter Thiel’s pet philosopher Curtis Yarvin, aging troll Bronze Age Pervert, the perma-online counter-revolutionary Chris Rufo, Mr. Lomez, and a baker’s dozen of others. Around these thought leaders has clustered an ecosystem of influencers and commentators who disseminate the core ideas through an ever more dissociated series of memes, videos, self-pitying victimization screeds, and all the rest.

Auron Macintyre is one of these popularizers (to avoid confusion, since this piece covers another author with a very similar last name, I’ll adopt the unusual convention of using first names). He is well known for his conspiracy theorizing about things like the media coordinating the Trump assassination attempt and offering apologias for mass murderer and perennially fashion challenged Francisco Franco. He has recently released a book The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies which has been receiving praise on the far right for making the core intellectual claims accessible to a wider audience. Discussing the book may help us better understand the worldview being promoted.

Once More Into the Breach…

The core argument of the book is fairly straightforward. We live in the titular “total state” ruled by a managerial elite made up of soy-latte sucking liberals. Their ever expanding control is obscured in several ways. Firstly, the presence of a liberal constitution which promises to neutrally respect the liberty and rights of all equally. But in “fact” the “doctrine of individual rights, liberal democracy, and constitutional government in no way inhibited the dynamic expansion of the state” since those rights are in fact granted selectively and mass democracy has meant that “every branch” of government is now “subject to the same selective force: public opinion.” Indeed democracy makes the expansion of state power more inevitable, since its is never securely in the hands of anyone. This means the “ruling class” of liberals must continuously respond to and manipulate public opinion; as he puts it the liberal ruling class wields “control of information and manipulation of public opinion.”

Sometimes Auron suggests this is done quite overtly. But the contemporary far right never misses an opportunity to applaud itself for discovering the notion of hegemony a century after Gramsci. So we get appeals to Curtis “I’m like Hitler with more brain cells” Yarvin’s notion of a “cathedral” which serves to provide a set of “religious values” that help subversively entrench liberal and progressive rule. Anyone who goes to school or university learns to “swim” with “self-policing” progressivism since abiding by its norms is key to becoming successful. This in turn shapes the broader culture through propaganda, stigmatization, and doing mean things like calling online racists names like racist. The result is a typically paranoid combination of internalized victimization by the powers that be coupled with amusingly self-contradicting declarations that we live within apparently totally controlled “chaos” and “entropy” and the only way to restore order is radically disruptive transformations by reactionaries.

The level of rigor demonstrated in The Total State is very low. Throughout Auron will make transparently wrong statements, and the motivated spin is obvious. He’ll sometimes grudgingly acknowledge that “Covid was real” and that “hundreds of thousands [of] Americans would die from it-but COVID-19 mostly affected the elderly and many healthy young people did not want to be held hostage.” Put aside the fact that the “elderly” might not want to die prematurely. Elsewhere Auron dismisses COVID as nothing more than a “nasty flu” made to “look like the black death.” The actual number of COVID deaths in the United States is close to 1.5 million over 4 years: to put that in perspective, its about on par or slightly more than the total number of American deaths in EVERY war the country has fought since its founding. Elsewhere the spin gets more head spinning still. Describing the January 6th riots that left 9 dead and many more hospitalized, Auron mentions how there was a “protest at the Capital building on January 6, 2021 [which] ended with participants entering and taking pictures.” I suppose the reality of far right activists literally shitting on the traditional sites of patriotic authority the right claims we must revere was too self-contradicting to acknowledge.

…Because Why Not?

Far worse is Auron’s treatment of major authors who are handled so crudely one guesses they’re just invoked to give a bit of intellectual glamor to the book. The Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt is given pride of place, with Auron brushing off the damaging association by calling it “deeply unfortunate” but reminding readers that other Nazis helped get “America to the moon.” Auron rehashes the old Schmittian critique of liberal democracy as committed to a faux rationalism about politics, when really it is nothing more than a “decentralized atheistic theocracy” with its own religious “narrative.” These comments of course sit very uncomfortably with other remarks Auron makes that suggests liberal secularism really is more rational, scientistic and “materialist” than alternatives and that is its key problem. But we’ll get back to that.

In Political Theology Schmitt claimed that liberalism was a titular political theology like any other, predicated on an existential decision about what “theological concepts” a group should be committed to. This choice inherently excluded competing political theologies held by those who become “enemies”-not necessarily evil, but embodying a permanent otherness. Schmitt’s argument was that liberals assumed they could get around these exclusionary choices through majoritarian democracy, but in fact this simply demonstrated liberal hypocrisy. If they faced a truly existential threat to their regimes when push came to shove liberals would either declare an exception to their own norms of tolerance and pluralism and eradicate the enemy, or be destroyed by them. In Auron’s telling liberalism “with its promise to eliminate existential political conflict and replace it with objectively beneficial governance, serves as the perfect narrative justification for the expansion of the total state. But the total state does not eliminate the friend/enemy distinction because that is impossible. Instead, it seeks to become the only entity with the authority to define the terms of the friend/enemy distinction for an ever-expanding ideological empire.”

So Auron doesn’t like liberalism because he agrees with Schmitt that it invariably trends towards becoming a total state-as his bud Curtis Yarvin likes to put it, the all-encompassing monster Cthulhu swims slowly but he always swims “left.” The problem is that Auron ignores the universality of Schmitt’s claims, which go some way to explaining why the latter’s Nazism wasn’t just an “unfortunate” oops. For Schmitt the liberal state isn’t unique in its aspiration to become total; its unique in trying to renege on that ambition even as it invariably fulfils it or collapses in the face of a more stalwart opposition. The difference is crucial since Schmitt would point out that any (modern) state or government that wants to survive will have a tendency to become total as it must exclude “enemies.” This includes the “regional governments” which Auron wants to assume “more and more autonomy” if the liberal state breaks down.

In his most influential period Schmitt often seemed to think there was nothing wrong with a total state, like the one built by the fascist Nazi party post-Weimar, provided it acknowledged what it was. In Constitutional Theory Schmitt even drew on Rousseau to endorse the idea that the demotic general will could be embodied in the figure of a dictator who genuinely spoke for the entire unified people. This could go very far. In the Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes Schmitt chastised the great English authoritarian for allowing even a minimal degree of private religious liberty to exist when it might grow and disrupt the body politic. Nowhere is this more serious and sweeping Schmittian point taken up by Auron, since his discussion of Schmitt never gets deeper than the partisan application of the theory to liberalism.

Now one should never take Schmitt at his word given a lifelong history of bad calls ala ineffectively resisting the Nazis out of a preference for conservative dictatorship before opportunistically joining them, getting booted out of the inner circle for being a fellow traveler posing as a true believer, refusing to apologize and living out the rest of his days in exile. But if we did take Schmitt at his word he’d say Auron’s preferred state would eventually become just as totalizing as the liberal one he wants to confront or it would fall apart. This makes a lot of Auron’s shrill, at times almost ultra right libertarian rhetoric ala Hermann Hoppe about a sacred right to insulated freedom from liberal pieties very funny. For the consistent Schmittian we’re not left with a choice between a total state and a free state, but between a total state committed to liberal theology and a gestating total state that will be committed to reactionary principles. Indeed Auron even seems to gesture towards this with his claim that “in the beginning, all states were total” which begs the question of what then would or could change if Schmitt is right.

But probably the worst offender in badly reading his source materials category is Auron’s treatment of the left-communitarian Alasdair Macintyre and his great book After Virtue (here’s the second MacIntyre, and again I’ll use first names)Auron discusses Alasdair’s critique of managerialism and his condemnation of liberal relativism in favor of emphasizing the continuity of tradition for several pages. The intended effect seems to be glamorizing the right with a degree of moral seriousness liberals lack. This highfalutin seriousness would be easier to take seriously if Auron actually engaged Alasdair’s work in real depth. He wouldn’t like what he found. Forget Auron wrestling Alasdair’s seminal thesis in Marxism and Christianity that it is the socialist tradition that carries on much of what is best in the Christian tradition, or the demands to pursue the “common good” through immensely greater workplace democratization in his recent Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity. We don’t even get an acknowledgement that in After Virtue, the very book Auron cites heavily to support his reactionary views, Alasdair sneers at the “ideological uses to which the concept of a tradition has been put by conservative political theorists. Characteristically such theorists have followed Burke in contrasting tradition with reason and the stability of tradition with conflict. Both contrasts obfuscate.” Alasdair later goes on to point out that when a tradition becomes “Burkean” and conservative in abandoning the “continuity of conflict” it is “always dying or dead.” Tradition, on this reading, means acknowledging the deep traditions of conflict and delegitimation that occur internally rather than brushing them aside.

Predictably enough Auron is guilty of the very conservative “ideological” thinking Alasdair relentlessly made fun of over a decades long career. In a seemingly endless discussion of the American constitution Auron contrasts the “modern obsession with progress, rationality, systems and [legal] proceduralism” with the real “metaphysical underpinnings of the nation” in a “living and vibrant tradition.” Later he juxtaposes “organic emotion, passion, feeling, or romance” to the “materialism and bloodless rationality” of progressivism. Obfuscating contrasts indeed…

Do I Contradict Myself? Very Well, I Contain Grievances…

Throughout his book Auron will make a lot of self-contradicting statements. We are not in “dialectical union of opposites” or even “unity through particularity” territory. The book doesn’t even rise to the more base level the far right usually operates on, which is to follow Mussolini in his 1922 speech to the Fascist Congress where he admitted that the Fascists had “created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality.” At least here there is an admission that what’s being argued about is not actually a real thing, but rather something made up and projected to be real because it is a “stimulus, is hope, is faith, is courage” to the very gullible. Instead in Auron’s book get simple flat contradictions, which the readers are asked to drink hard and with an acridchaser. This is of course the inevitable end result of a philosophy based neither on reason or fact, but impulses and grievances that jockey desperately for the status of reason or facts. That is where they don’t just throw up the white flag and appeal to a mysterious “organic emotion” to escape implosion.

There are so many contradictory and evasively declaratory statements that a full compendium and explanation would end up far longer than the slim The Total State. To give a few examples: Auron will often resort to appeals to “human nature” or the “human condition” to justify his arguments. All this ironically reminds one of Schmitt’s canny axioms that whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. Invariably the alleged facts about human nature Auron presents are selected to fit his world view, with all others being ignored. We need to recognize how the “poor [will] always be with us; suffering and loss [will] always be part of life. We must abandon the commitment to “progress” as a “grand narrative” of the total state and realized that “suffering and tragedy” are “inevitable features of the human condition” since people have a “fixed and tragic nature that they must learn to endure.” Of course this resignation to a reified and determining human nature which cannot be changed in the abstract doesn’t apply to more concrete individuals or groups which Auron very badly wants to judge without being judged in turn. They are to be very much hectored for their “moral failing” and “deviance” and “defects of character.” Maybe Mac wants us to adopt an Augustinean view of human nature as defined by original sin, but if that’s the case there is none of Christianity’s calls for mercy or a recognition that judgement in the end lies with God. Let alone an insistence that it is the meek, poor, and sinners whom God prioritizes; the “wretched of the earth” who will know God is on their side.

More importantly if human nature is so clearly on Auron’s side its rather unclear why the total state emerged in the first place and would be so widely supported by the “democratic element.” If the norms of liberal democracy are in fact so contrary to the human condition and human nature why have they gained such persuasive force that only a select few of Yarvin’s “Dark Elves” (you read that right) can pierce the illusion? Auron’s only recourse is to those worn-out reactionary war horses still working their way to the glue factory: decadence, corruption, and of course manipulation by liberals and leftists who somehow both don’t understand human beings at all and yet have also managed to gain absolute control over all of them.

Most groaningly, Auron follows Yarvin et al in having a deep resentment of the “chaos” brought about by libertine materialism. Indeed this chaos has, to quote Jordan Peterson, a “more than metaphysical” significance for Auron as reflecting both the natural and spiritual decadence of the world. For Auron “chaos, not order, is the natural state of the world, and chaos will always wear away at the structures of civilization. This is why it feels like history is moving to the left, why organizations that are not actively maintained drift left over time. Cthulhu is the process of civilizational entropy from which we can never escape.” Forget that Auron’s entire book is predicated on the belief that many reactionaries think escape is possible and inevitable, otherwise why resist? Also enormously funny is his insistence that we live in a totalizing state characterized by a “breathtaking expansion of state power” which is successfully controlling everything while also living in libertine “chaos” of which even the modern practice of codifying a constitution is a symptom. Following De Maistre, Auron thinks that the “true meaning of laws and constitutions cannot be captured on paper because they true meaning exists in the context of the people and the society that created them.” Of course if laws aren’t codified but merely exist in the instincts and “organic feelings” of people that would inevitably be a recipe for disorder where their feelings disagree, unless everyone homogenously and uncritically feels the same way in the (dare I say?) rather totalizing and herdlike fashion Auron’s book is supposed to push against. Where he does seem to notice these kinds of problems Auron will try to square the unsquareable circle by insisting that it is “individual liberation” that leads to the “total state’ as individuals demand emancipation from “opposing social spheres like family and church”-disregarding of course that often it was the state itself that entrenched domineering authority structures within those “social spheres” and progressives who had to militate over centuries to change things. This is true of the women’s movement which spent generations agitating for legal equality, the LGBTQ movement which pushed for an end to the criminalization of their sexual orientation, of course the Civil Rights movements, and many more.

But by far the most baffling fact of this anxiety around “chaos” is that Auron’s right-wing radicalism would be immensely chaotic-indeed it already has been. Since 2015 the far right have been the main source of the social disorder it claims is a fatal disease that needs to be cured; though the far right never seems to realize the most effective cure to disorder could only be its own self-dissolution. The snake of chaos should start eating its own tail and rid us of it.

Auron is convinced that the liberal progressive state will inevitably “collapse under its own weight” leading to the various “provinces of decaying empire” obtaining a higher degree of independence. At times he tries to dissociate from owning such a radical position by suggesting he is just making a prediction about the future rather than suggesting a course of action. But it clearly is something of a fantasy scenario. For Auron the breakdown of the American state opens an “endless number of possibilities, both thrilling and horrifying” even if he concedes that transitions “from one epoch to another are always fraught with hardship and danger, but they also offer great opportunity.” He admits that for many there will be “political instability and a reduced standard of living” but this may be a price worth paying since it would be a “positive step” for conservative “relocalization” to take place. His model here is his home state of Florida under Governor DeSanctimonious. He endorses “consolidating local power that is capable of resisting the authority of the total state” before assuming “more autonomy as the total state decays.” The result will be a “future where true community thrives, (right wing) churches are once more “central community institutions” which will take over form the welfare state by assuming responsibility for its “charitable functions” and so on. What role democracy will play in these communities is not discussed, but given Auron’s Yarvin-like wariness of the “democratic element” and his insistence that a “ruling class is always present” in any society we can…take a guess.

Conclusion

So what we have is an argument for ending political chaos and entropy by restoring tradition. This process of restoring order will apparently require immense “instability’ resulting from abandoning centuries old constitutional and liberal traditions and completely breaking the country apart. These kinds of transparently contradictory impulses have long been a staple of the far right ala calling for a “conservative revolution” that will conserve little or a “revolution of order” that brings about global disorder. All that Auron adds to these old reactionary tropes is a Calhounean dimension that’s been a perennial temptation for the American right: calling for liberty against the total state, but only for those who deserve it; emphasizing regionalism over centralism to the point of insurrection in the name of respect for cultural particularism, but for the purposes of establishing homogenous “organic” unity within by insulating from “democratic” pressures imposed by the “numerical majority” (Calhoun’s term) hostile to reactionary domination.

These contradictory elements belie the fact that the hard right’s core commitment is not to particularity, affect, anti-rationalism or even order. As I explain in The Political Right and Equality it is to hierarchy and inequality. Reading Auron’s book there is a continuous feeling of disgust directed towards the perceived libertine decadence and permissiveness that characterizes liberal states. This is coupled a deep resentment that liberal norms prevent him and the anime anons from taking the steps needed to put an end to these behaviors, while creating new spaces of personal and political agency for those Auron regards as worthy. I’ve often said one of the biggest knocks against the far right is how its moral failings are coupled with what one can only assume are intentionally bad aesthetic tastes. The vision of society he offers is an ugly one and the world will be a better place if we never have to see or hear of it again.