Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
Page 41
36. Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post- Catastrophic Age
(Arktos Media, 2010).
37. “Richard Bertrand Spencer,” SPLC.
38. Ibid.
39. Martin Lee, The Beast Reawakens (Toronto: Little, Brown, 1997), 168– 183.
40. Guillaume Faye, Le Système à tuer les peoples (Paris: Copernic, 1981).
241
Richard B. Spencer and the Alt Right
241
41. Alain de Benoist, Vu de droite, 19, 25.
42. Sam Kestenbaum, “Richard Spencer Touts Himself as ‘White Zionist’ in Israeli
Interview,” Fast Forward, August 17, 2017, accessed October 15, 2017, http:// for-
ward.com/ fast- forward/ 380235/ richard- spencer- touts- himself- as- white- zionist-
in- israeli- interview/ .
43. Ibid.
44. Alain de Benoist, “Confronting Globalization,” Telos 108 (Summer 1996):
117– 137.
45. George Grant, Technology and Empire (Concord, Ontario: Anansi, 1969).
46. Spencer, “What Is the American Right?”
47. GRECE, Le Mai 68 de la nouvelle droite (Paris: Labyrinthe, 1998).
48. Alain de Benoist, Les Idées à l’endroit (Paris: Broché, 1979).
49. Joel A. Brown, “Dylann Roof, the Radicalization of the Alt-
Right, and
Ritualized Racial Violence,” Sightings, January 12, 2017, accessed October
13, 2017, https:// divinity.uchicago.edu/ sightings/ dylann- roof- radicalization-
alt- right- and- ritualized- racial- violence.
50. Johnson, New Right versus Old Right, 5.
24
15
Jack Donovan and Male Tribalism
Matthew N. Lyons
O N O C T O B E R 3 1 , 2015, a powerfully built man addressed the annual
conference of a little-
known white nationalist organization, Richard
B. Spencer’s National Policy Institute. Wearing a close- fitting T- shirt in-
stead of the jacket and tie worn by most attendees, Jack Donovan urged his
audience to reject “universal morality,” which, he told them, “makes men
weak, leaves them lost, confused, dependent, helpless.” White European
men, he said, had simply been putting their own people first when they
conquered, killed, or enslaved people all around the world. “They basically
did the same things other people have done in every other human society
all throughout history. They were just fucking good at it,” Donovan shouted
to applause. “If white men, if any men, want to be free, want to be strong,
want to say yes to life again, they’re going to have to abandon universalist
morality and liberate their tribal minds.”1
Donovan’s “Tribal Mind” speech embodied several of the themes and
tensions that have helped to make him one of the American Right’s most
innovative and distinctive thinkers. He is a skilled writer and speaker
who has a knack for expressing deeply controversial ideas in simple and
compelling terms. He believes that human equality is a lie, violence is
necessary, and exclusionary groups are the only real basis for a workable
system of ethics. He has a history of seeking common ground with white
nationalists, but he is actually not one of them: in Donovan’s ideology race
is ultimately secondary to gender, and he is concerned with how not only
white men, but “any men,” can be free and strong.
The “Tribal Mind” speech also highlighted Donovan’s political use of
his own body. Here, as in many online photographs, Donovan’s physique
243
Jack Donovan and Male Tribalism
243
advertised the masculine strength and power he idealizes, in a way that
carried both class and sexual tensions. In a gathering that sought to present
white nationalists as clean- cut professionals (not boots- and- suspenders
skinheads or camouflage- wearing survivalists), Donovan looked like a
lumberjack or stevedore, and while he is very much an intellectual (and
an artist), he has in fact supported himself largely through physical labor.
At the same time, showing off his body was also an implicit reminder that
Donovan was an openly homosexual man speaking to a movement that
has traditionally reviled homosexuality, and that his vision of masculinity
encompasses sexual relationships between “manly men” even as it rejects
and vilifies gay culture.
Implicitly, Donovan’s “Tribal Mind” speech offered many core elements
of his chief contribution to right- wing thought: the doctrine of male trib-
alism, a form of male supremacist ideology that centers on the comrade-
ship of fighters and departs from established patriarchal doctrines, notably
that of the Christian Right. Male tribalism is distinct from, but comple-
mentary to, white nationalism, and Donovan’s years of collaborating with
white nationalists have helped them to forge a multifaceted supremacist
ideology.2
Writings and Activities
Jack Donovan was born in 1974 and grew up in rural Pennsylvania. He
has also lived in New York City and California, and for the past several
years has lived in or near Portland, Oregon.3 He has worked at a variety
of jobs, from go- go dancer to truck driver to tattoo artist. His first book,
Androphilia: A Manifesto, was published in 2006 under the pen name
Jack Malebranche. Three years later, he coauthored Blood Brotherhood
and Other Rites of Male Alliance with Nathan F. Miller. Since then, he has
self- published three books under the Dissonant Hum imprint: The Way of
Men (2012), A Sky Without Eagles (2014), and Becoming a Barbarian (2016).
Donovan has also put out numerous articles about masculinity and re-
lated topics, either on his own Jack Donovan website, or on other right-
wing sites. The Way of Men, arguably his most important and systematic
work, has been translated into French, Portuguese, and German.4
Since 2006, Donovan has been involved in various organizations and
movements. As of 2007 he was a priest of the Church of Satan, which he
described as “very much a do- it- yourself religion when it comes to per-
sonal ethics,” but resigned from the church in 2009.5 He has had a limited
24
244
E M E R G E N T T H I N K E R S
connection with the “manosphere,” an antifeminist online subculture,
which has fostered ideas about masculinity that are related to his own.
From 2010 to 2017, Donovan was an active participant in the Alt Right.
Since 2015, he has been a member of the wolf of Vinland, a Virginia- based
neopagan group that embodies many of his male tribalist principles, and
he founded a Pacific Northwest branch of the organization.6
Core Ideas of Male Tribalism
Donovan began to develop a philosophy of male bonding in his first book,
Androphilia. Here he defines and celebrates a specific form of male ho-
mosexuality. “I do not simply prefer to have sex with male bodies. I am
attracted socially, sexually and conceptually to adult men and adult mas-
culinity. . . . I am attracted to the expression of MAN as an archetype.”7
In Androphilia, Donovan rejects the label “gay,” criticizes gay culture
for promoting effeminacy among homosexual men and for allying with
feminism, and argues that homosexual men should be held to the same
gender expectations as heterosexual men. Donovan also rejected same- sex
marriage on the grounds that society has an interest in promoting tradi-
tional nuclear families. He regards the union between two men as some-
thing fundamentally different from marriage. This led him to coauthor
the book Blood Brotherhood, which draws on blood- bonding rituals from
different cultures as a basis for formalizing homosexual relationships
between men.
From these beginnings, Donovan expanded his scope to address male
bonding as a fundamental basis for male identity and society as a whole.
“The Way of Men,” Donovan argues in the book of that title, “is the way
of the gang.” “For most of their time on this planet, men have organized
in small survival bands, set against a hostile environment, competing for
women and resources with other bands of men.”8 These gangs, he claims,
have provided the security that makes all human culture and civilization
possible. They are also the social framework that men need to realize their
true selves. Donovan’s gangs foster and depend on the “tactical virtues” of
strength, courage, mastery, and honor, which together form his definition
of masculinity.9 Gang life centers on fighting, hierarchy, and drawing the
perimeter against outsiders (“separating us from them”). Homosexuality
creates problems within gangs mainly if it correlates with submissive-
ness or effeminacy, which weaken the gang’s collective survival capacity.
Patriarchy, he argues, is the natural and rightful state of human affairs
245
Jack Donovan and Male Tribalism
245
because it is rooted in this primeval survival scenario where women are a
prize that male gangs fight over.
Donovan sees a basic tension between the wildness and violence of
gang life and the restraint and orderliness that civilization requires: civi-
lization benefits men through technological and cultural advances, but it
also saps their primal masculinity— their strength, courage, mastery, and
honor. For most of human history, he says, men have fashioned work-
able compromises between the two, but with societal changes over the
past century that has become less and less possible. Today, “globalist civ-
ilization requires the abandonment of the gang narrative, of us against
them. It requires the abandonment of human scale identity groups for
‘one world tribe.’ ”10 This attack on masculinity is being led by “feminists,
elite bureaucrats, and wealthy men,” who “all have something to gain for
themselves by pitching widespread male passivity. The way of the gang
disrupts stable systems, threatens the business interests (and social status)
of the wealthy, and creates danger and uncertainty for women.”11 With the
help of globalist elites, feminists have supposedly dismantled patriarchy
and put women in a dominant role. “For the first time in history, at least
on this scale, women wield the ax of the state over men.” Women have
“control over virtually all aspects of reproduction,” and “a mere whisper
from a woman can place a man in shackles and force him to either con-
fess or prove that he is innocent of even the pettiest charges.” Faced with
the bumper- sticker slogan, “Feminism is the radical notion that women
are human beings,” Donovan retorts that this should be rewritten as
“Feminism is the radical notion that men should do whatever women say,
so that women can do whatever the hell they want.”12
To counteract the decline of masculinity, Donovan advocates a latter- day
tribal order that he calls “The Brotherhood.” Like his imagined primeval
gang experience, The Brotherhood consists of small, closely knit bands
of men, all of whom affirm a sacred oath of loyalty to each other against
the outside world. A man’s position is based on “hierarchy through mer-
itocracy,” not inherited wealth or status. The Brotherhood would not be
limited to any one economic or political model. It might be run as a de-
mocracy or it might have a king, “as long as he had to start at the bottom
and demonstrate his worth— and the next king did too.” All men would
be expected to train and serve as warriors, and only warriors would have
a political voice. Women would not be “permitted to rule or take part in
the political life of The Brotherhood, though women have always and will
always influence their husbands.”13
2
4
6
246
E M E R G E N T T H I N K E R S
In keeping with his rejection of “universalist morality,” Donovan does
not advocate The Brotherhood as a dream for everybody. “I don’t believe
that people with different interests who live far away from each other
should have to agree on a way of living, and I believe that forcing them to
accept a foreign or unwanted way of life is tyranny . . . the world is better
and far more interesting if there are many cultures with different values
and ideals.”14 At the same time, he does regard the reassertion of tradi-
tional masculinity and male power as an ideal that cuts across ethnicities
and cultures:
For instance, I am not a Native American, but I have been in con-
tact with a Native American activist who read The Way of Men and
contacted me to tell me about his brotherhood. I could never belong
to that tribe, but I wish him great success in his efforts to promote
virility among his tribesmen.15
Male Tribalism in ideological context
Donovan’s male tribalism builds on several basic premises that are
standard across most right- wing movements: that gender roles are nat-
ural and immutable; that men as a group should hold power over women;
and that women’s main roles should be to bear and raise children, and
to provide men with support, care, and sexual satisfaction. Yet Donovan’s
gender politics differ sharply from those of the Christian Right, which
has been at the forefront of patriarchal initiatives in the US for several
decades. Donovan’s reliance on evolutionary psychology contrasts with
the Christian Right, which justifies male dominance as obedience to
God’s law, and the “androphilia” he celebrates would be anathema to
Christian Rightists, who have made open homosexuality a major political
target.
Christian Right ideology emphasizes an idealized model of the “tra-
ditional” family, where women obey their fathers and husbands, who in
turn provide them with security, economic support, and love. Although
women are firmly subordinated to male authority, they are offered a sense
of meaning as housewives and mothers. By contrast, Donovan’s vision of
The Brotherhood makes the family itself peripheral, thereby devaluing
women’s roles even more. As the white nationalist Jef Costello has noted,
Donovan reverses the conventional idea that men hunt and fight to protect
and provide for their families, arguing instead that women exist to bring
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Jack Donovan and Male Tribalism
men into the world, and the family exists because it makes idealized male
gang life possible.16
In addition, sections of the Christian Right have appropriated elements
of feminist politics in the service of the movement’s patriarchal agenda,
claiming, for example, that abortion “exploits women” or that federal sup-
port for childcare is wrong because it limits women’s choices, as well as
encouraging women to become politically active, speak publicly, and even
take on leadership roles. Donovan, on the other hand, is completely un-
interested in speaking to women’s concerns or recruiting women to be
politically active.
Tracing Donovan’s intellectual influences can be difficult. He uses few
footnotes yet refers to a wide range of other writers, ranging from clas-
sical authors such as Aristotle and Livy to modern leftists such as Noam
Chomsky and bell hooks [Gloria Jean Watkins]. Androphilia cites some
other right- wing homosexual male writers such as Andrew Sullivan and
Yukio Mishima. The Way of Men draws on the work of various authors
who have called for reasserting traditional masculinity, such as Harvey
C. Mansfield and James Bowman. Here and in his essay “No Man’s Land,”
Donovan also draws on advocates of evolutionary psychology such as Lionel
Tiger and Derek Freeman. Parts of Becoming a Barbarian, Donovan’s most
recent book, draw heavily on Norse mythology, presumably reflecting his
new membership in the Wolves of Vinland, which practices a form of
Odinism. Yet Donovan reworks and synthesizes these eclectic elements in
new and original ways.
Some of Donovan’s ideas, such as his emphasis on male bonding and
his belief that violence offers a kind of spiritual fulfillment, echo Conserv-
ative Revolutionaries such as Ernst Jünger, whose work he has reviewed
sympathetically.17 Some of Donovan’s ideas, such as his rejection of uni-
versalist morality in favor of tribalist loyalties, may be influenced by
European New Right authors such as Alain de Benoist. Yet their critiques
of universalism differ, at least in emphasis: while de Benoist argues
that universalism is wrong because different cultures answer “essential
questions” differently, Donovan’s main critique is that it is smarter and