In November 2016, just days after Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, Buzzfeed ran a curious article about the sympathies of Trump’s then-right-hand man, former Breitbart Chairman Steve Bannon. According to the article, titled “This is how Steve Bannon sees the world,” Bannon had given a 2014 talk at the Vatican that revealed a decidedly spiritualized, highly Manichean worldview: one that foretold “new barbarity,” a civilizational clash between the “Judeo-Christian West” and Islam, and the downfall of capitalism itself. Perhaps most strikingly, Bannon had cited the work of Julius Evola — a relatively obscure far-right occultist of the early 20th century best known for his jeremiads against liberal modernity — and its seemingly positive influence on one of Vladimir Putin’s advisers. Bannon did not name the man, but it was a reference to Aleksandr Dugin, whose no less spiritualized vision of Moscow’s world-historical mission has allegedly shaped Russian policy.
It is difficult for the casual observer to keep track of all the strange and esoteric voices in contemporary post-liberal politics, of the fine lines between integralists and occultists, white supremacist neo-pagans and religious members of the alt-Right. But Benjamin Teitelbaum’s War for Eternity, a study of one particular strain of far-right thought, the 19th-century occult school of traditionalism, is a necessary primer. In this briskly written analysis-cum-reportage, Teitelbaum, a musicology professor whose work on neofolk music has made him an expert on the contemporary Scandinavian far Right, takes on the persona of the learned everyman in a conspiracy thriller: an academic who discovers that his niche area of research, reactionary occultism, is at the heart of a vast, global conspiracy.
Teitelbaum is at his best when he’s connecting the dots, explaining how “traditionalism” — which here refers to the ideas that all religions are but bastardizations of one true source of knowledge, that history occurs in clearly delineated cycles, and that people are divided into no less clearly delineated castes — has come to shape the worldviews of some of the internet’s best-known reactionaries. The traditionalist ethos is one that envisions the entire political landscape as secondary to a cosmic battleground: one in which democracy, capitalism, and globalization are all conspiring to homogenize human beings, reducing people from primal warriors to sclerotic bureaucrats. The world, for the traditionalist, is thus fundamentally upside down. As Teitelbaum recounts Bannon telling him: “Everything you think is good is bad. Every change you consider progress is actually regression. Every apparent instance of justice is actually oppression. Every extension of credentials ought to disqualify the recipient.”
At its most unsubtle, traditionalism leads to explicit white supremacy: the division of human beings into different bloodlines and castes. But the more insidious version, the one that Bannon and Dugin share, sees human differences in terms not of race but of spirit. There are certain people with spiritual gifts who can see the truth of the world — and certain people who cannot.
The book is, unfortunately, somewhat hampered by its structure. One of Teitelbaum’s selling points, his access to Bannon for several hours of interviews, turns out to be something of a drawback. While we get a few odd tidbits that seem drawn from a midcentury spy novel (apparently, to get Bannon, Teitelbaum is told to ask for Alec Guinness at the hotel reception) and some juicy quotes from Bannon on his identification with traditionalism, Teitelbaum is all too conscious of the compromises he’s had to make for access and the limits of that access. An extended section on some minor figures involved in a shady, traditionalism-tinged, alt-right deal ends in something of a whimper: Teitelbaum informs us that he thinks he’s discovered the identity of the mysterious “Londoner” we’ve been chasing for some of the book, only to tell us he’s been informed it’s not safe to reach out to the Londoner directly, let alone disclose his name to the reader.
Teitelbaum is at his best when he’s exploring the appeal of traditionalism. What is it about the promise of spiritual heroism, occult mysticism, and overturning the world order that attracted so many on the far Right’s fringe? How did so many seeming “bit players” — publishers of far-right Evola translations living in Indian ashrams (Arktos editor John Morgan), internet nationalists, and minor conspiracy theorists such as Jason Jorjani — get the ear of people like Bannon?
At the core of War for Eternity is its participants’ self-glamorizing hunger for not only meaning but secret revelation: the sense, shared by Bannon and Dugin but also by the publishers and minor reactionaries desperate to get their ear, that they understand the mysteries of an ever-more unenchanted world. Ultimately, theirs is a fetishization of the end of history at which they are the chosen witnesses. And though Teitelbaum begins and ends with Bannon and Dugin, we can see this hunger for the end of the world far beyond the bounds of his book — in the spiritualized contrarianism of Peter Thiel; in the neoreactionary movement, which calls for the end of democracy; and in the watered-down religious traditionalism of pop gurus such as Jordan Peterson, whose dragon-slaying rhetoric and imagery hearken back to a mythic, imagined time of heroes and demigods: primal figures free of the atrophy of modern urban society.
In his recent book The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat identifies the fundamental problem of our age not as libertinage but as disaffection: Ours is a world in which the political landscape has been reduced to “a kind of digital-age playacting in which young people dissatisfied with decadence pretend to be Fascist and Marxist on the Internet, reenacting the 1930s and 1960s with fewer street fights and more memes.” If this is so, then the Dugins and the Bannons of the world are the biggest play-actors of all: reenacting the twilight of the gods, just with more memes.
Tara Isabella Burton is a contributing editor at the American Interest, a columnist at Religion News Service, and the author of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World.
