Kieran Pender
Fear & Loathing on the Internet
War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right
By Benjamin R Teitelbaum
Allen Lane 336pp £20 order from our bookshop
Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
By Julia Ebner
Bloomsbury 348pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
To better understand how the far right and alt-right have gained political salience in recent years, a curious observer might seek to examine the ideologues and thinkers at the core of these movements. Alternatively, they might look in the opposite direction, eschewing the bigger philosophical picture to focus on the everyday, exploring interactions among the rank and file. These are the divergent but complementary approaches taken by Benjamin Teitelbaum and Julia Ebner in their new books. Together, they provide timely, insightful and often troubling accounts of the new political reality.
Teitelbaum, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, begins War for Eternity with an admission. ‘I am by trade an ethnographer, not a journalist,’ he writes. His book sits ‘in the blurred space between that method and investigate journalism’. He draws on over twenty hours of on-the-record interviews with Steve Bannon, plus what he gleaned during extensive travels across Europe and the United States. War for Eternity is predominantly an attempt to understand the ideology of Bannon and other important alt-right figures. It also explores how philosophical affinities have drawn them together.
Teitelbaum focuses on three primary figures: Bannon, campaign chief and later chief strategist to Donald Trump; Aleksandr Dugin, an influential confidant of Vladimir Putin; and Olavo de Carvalho, a close adviser to Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro. What links these three men, according to Teitelbaum, is a shared adherence to Traditionalism,
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Sign up to our newsletter! Get free articles, selections from the archive, subscription offers and competitions delivered straight to your inbox.
http://ow.ly/zZcW50JfgN5
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete