05.10.25 19:30h
Neofascist Männerphantasien:
Toxic Masculinity and the Search for a “Red Caesar”
- Prof. Richard Wolin
To judge by current trends in the white nationalist “manosphere,” toxic masculinity – as apotheosized by Ernst Jünger’s War as Inner Experience and Ernst von Salomon’s The Outlaws – is back in fashion. Its leading champion is Costin Vlad Alamariu, a Romanian-American trained in Straussian political philosophy at Yale University. Among incels and “neo-reactionaries” – Curtis Yarvin, a self-described “techno-fascist” and leading champion of “dark enlightenment” was one of Alamariu’s early champions – Alamariu skyrocketed to notoriety, in 2019, with Bronze Age Mindset: a self-published, grammatically challenged paean to the bloodlust and inhumanity of pre-Socratic Heldentum, as filtered through the lens of Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht. It would be tempting to dismiss Alamariu’s Männerphantasien as merely a “hiccup,” an epiphenomenal blip on the cyber-screen. Yet, J. D. Vance has professed to being one of Alamariu’s followers on “X” (formerly known as Twitter). And Silicon Valley Mogul-turned-Republican Party “Kingmaker,” Peter Thiel, has admitted to finding his on-line musings “tempting.” A more plausible and chilling hypothesis suggests that Alamariu’s hyper-masculinist histrionics have something important to tell us about the political present. They help to explain the American Right’s recent authoritarian, anti-constitutional turn; its search for a “Red Caesar”: intrat (enter) Donald Trump!