Justin Lee teaches in the Department of Composition at the University of California, Irvine.

Loving one's political enemies is a perennially difficult task.

As Nietzsche observes in Genealogy of Morals , it requires a prior reverence, a kind of delight in the contest of equally matched powers. The nobility of one's enemy becomes a "mark of distinction."

In stark contrast to this is the "picture [of] 'the enemy' as the man of ressentiment conceives him - and here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived 'the evil enemy', 'the Evil One', and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a 'good one' - himself!"

I confess that I have neither the imagination necessary to reverence the tiki-torch-wielding sallow-supremacists who twice this year descended on the University of Virginia, nor do I possess the intemperance or historical illiteracy required to see them as a monolithic evil.

I recently read William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and was struck by an interesting fact: from its inception, the Nazi leadership was chock-full of losers. I don't mean losers of the "wrong side of history" variety, but losers.

Hitler was a failed painter who lived as a tramp on the streets of Vienna. Martin Bormann was a lowly farm manager and convicted murderer. Prior to helming the SS, Heinrich Himmler's chief qualification was as a failed chicken farmer. The early Nazi party was a home for all manner of social outcasts: ex-convicts, drug addicts, street thugs, jobless veterans, homosexuals and generally gormless youth. The early movement was a byword in Weimar politics. One could be forgiven for having expected it to collapse of its own entropy.

The man-children who gummed their way out of the basements of middle America to converge upon Charlottesville recapitulate the lacklustre venality of their heroes. For all their impotence - intellectual, social, vocational, sexual - they are eminently dismissible, the mobile-age incarnation of the same be-sheeted skid-marks perpetually ghosting the margins of society. Were it not that their flaccid, gelatinous bodies are capable of actual violence, we'd be justified if we paid them no attention.

But the terroristic murder of Heather Heyer and the wounding of nineteen others, and the likelihood of more violence to come, demands we pay attention. Demands we seek to understand. Why are these shitheels so angry? Hate is not an answer, but another way of posing the question. What motivates their racial hatred? And what sociological function does it serve?

Traditional answers focus on poverty, inherited viewpoints, failures of education, or the lack of meaningful, collaborative exposure to people of different races. Doubtless there is much truth in these explanations; these are factors that shape all of our predispositions towards our fellow man. But I'm not convinced that they account for the growing impulse to violence. The nascent alt-right terrorism is as much about ideas as it is material circumstances. Thinkers on the left are correct in denying the idea that the alt-right is merely a product of poverty and disempowerment. Like earlier incarnations of racial animus - the Civil Rights Era Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity, various forms of neo-Nazism - this is a phenomenon that cuts across socio-economic categories.

I contend that the alt-right - along with all post-Industrial Revolution white supremacism - should be understood as a reaction against certain universally disruptive, even traumatizing, fruits of the modern period. Hate, for the alt-rightist, operates as a coping mechanism, a therapy that attempts to reconcile the individual's inner experience with the outer world.

[A note on terminology: While there are meaningful differences between the labels "alt-right," "white nationalism" and "white supremacy," for the purposes of this article I will be using them interchangeably, as my thesis applies equally to each. I also take for granted that after Charlottesville Richard Spencer's faction has successfully monopolized the alt-right brand. Distinctions once existed between the broader "community" of internet trolls and anti-political correctness playactors of the Milo Yiannopoulos variety and the in-the-flesh racists of the "Unite the Right" rally; but the former have been effectively erased from the public imagination by the latter.]

The Politics of Disenchantment

In a recent essay, R.R. Reno argues:

"Our political struggles over nations and nationalisms are best understood as referenda on the West's meta-politics over the last three generations, which has been one of disenchantment. The rising populism we're seeing throughout the West reflects a desire for a return of the strong gods to public life."

Reno has in mind Max Weber's understanding of disenchantment as the state in which "there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation." To the disenchanted mind, reason becomes fully instrumentalized. Rather than a faculty allowing us to desire the true, the good and the beautiful, reason is merely a tool the will uses to impress itself upon raw material.

For Weber, disenchantment has been unfolding in the West for millennia but became our default most thoroughly after the Industrial Revolution, when the mechanistic worldview established itself in the material conditions of the average man.

Charles Taylor, our most exhaustive recent chronicler of disenchantment, contrasts our nominalist expressivism with the way the world was experienced by pre-moderns: "in the enchanted world, the meaning is already there in the object/agent, it is there quite independently of us; it would be there even if we didn't exist." The world is quite literally bursting with meaning, each object pointing beyond its own contingency to a grounding transcendence. To the disenchanted mind, however, meaning is not discovered, it is merely expressed, a product of the individual's will.

For Weber, Reno and Taylor, as for many others, fascism is best understood as a reaction to disenchantment. It is a species of romanticism, a rebellion against Enlightenment desacralization. "Fascism," argues Taylor, "gives us the paradigm of a counter-ideal of the modern order, one which extolled command, leadership, dedication, obedience, over individualism, rights and democracy, but which did so out of a cult for greatness, will, action, life." True to its Nietzschean roots, fascism left no place "for the morality of Christianity, and certainly not of liberalism; the ultimate goal was to make something great out of one's life."

This greatness was exemplified in the exploits of national heroes, especially those martyred in a great cause. Veneration of the glorious dead was so central to Nazi ritual that Harry Kessler even called it "propaganda of the corpse."

It takes little imagination to recognize something similar at work in the recent furore for preserving the sanctity of Confederate monuments, the ostensible reason for the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally.

The horrors of the Second World War provoked a global retrenchment of disenchantment. "Ideological commitment and passion lead to brutality and moral blindness," explains Reno. "Here again many [post-war] political and cultural leaders assumed that restoration of a more humane way of life in the West would require softening and weakening." Thus the disenchanting and desacralizing project of the European Coal and Steel Community and, subsequently, the European Union.

The politics of disenchantment cannot satisfy the deep yearning for transcendent purpose. This is by design. The assumption behind this "weakening of being" is that, as Reno puts it, "If nothing is worth fighting for, nobody will fight." But this is manifestly naive. The weakening of being provokes a desire for its strengthening. "Populism rebels against the fluidity and weightlessness of life. This impulse, however disruptive it becomes for our political institutions, reflects a sane desire for metaphysical density."

Ideally, such desire would be channelled into a collective striving for the human good. But this presumes a coherent metaphysical ground. There can be no action on behalf of the good without a vision of what the good is. In former times this was provided by Christian universalism, which sees every person as made in the image of God and thus bearing intrinsic, divine dignity. Without this doctrine such originally Christian institutions as hospitals, orphanages and alms houses might never have developed. Denuded of its particularity, Christian universalism was transformed by the Enlightenment into the notion of universal human rights. A transcendent ethic became purely immanent. This too, according to Taylor, is the fruit of nominalist disenchantment.

In the hands of Martin Heidegger and others, such immanentism provided an intellectual justification for the Nazi idolization of das Volk, for the worship of "blood and soil." Heidegger went as far as to link the self-determination of das Volk with "the goal of total annihilation" of the internal enemy - epotimized by the "rootless," "nomadic Jew." When meaning, Being itself, is disclosed to us purely in that which is "present-at-hand," the refusal to recognize oneself in the Other becomes all the more justifiable.

The great irony is that the liberal proponents of expressivist disenchantment are, to quote Charles Taylor, "oblivious of how the terrible twentieth-century aberrations of Fascism and extreme nationalism have also drunk at the expressivist source."

The Disintegration of Community

Alt-right neo-Nazism is a reaction against the sublimation, atomization and techno-gnosticism of the present age. In an interview with Vice News Tonight , Robert "Azzmador" Ray, a feature writer for The Daily Stormer, opined that the Charlottesville rally signifies an important transition in the alt-right as movement. By leaving the anonymity of the internet and meeting in person, in mass, "People realized that they're not atomized individuals, they're part of a larger whole." This longing for connection to "blood and soil" is a longing for a "re-enchantment" of material reality. It is a longing for a solid ground upon which the self might stand. A longing for community and a sense that one's identity is sacred - an experience of transcendence within the purely immanent.

Max Weber observed this dynamic among German youth in 1917 and was struck by how earnest, how religious, this longing was. Though he could not have known he was witnessing proto-Nazism, his reflections are worth quoting at length:

"Never as yet has a new prophecy [that is, a revelation, in light of which one might organize one's life and interpret it as meaningful] emerged ... by way of the need of some modern intellectuals to furnish their souls with, so to speak, guaranteed genuine antiques [as a means of coping with disenchantment]. In doing so, they happen to remember that religion has belonged among such antiques, and of all things religion is what they do not possess. By way of substitute, however, they play at decorating a sort of domestic chapel with small sacred images from all over the world, or they produce surrogates through all sorts of psychic experiences to which they ascribe the dignity of mystic holiness, which they peddle in the book market. This is plain humbug or self-deception. It is, however, no humbug but rather something very sincere and genuine if some of the youth groups who during recent years have quietly grown together give their human community the interpretation of a religious, cosmic, or mystical relation, although occasionally perhaps such interpretation rests on misunderstanding of self." [Emphasis mine]

The pageantry of National Socialism - veneration of the dead, appropriated sacred symbols (swastika, eagle, cross, doppelte Siegrune and other proto-Norse runes), ceremonial marches, blasphemous iron monstrances, the political speech as sermon - comes immediately to mind. Garish though it was, it was an undeniably effective reification of metaphysical longing. Had he the misfortune of living long enough to see Hitler's rise, rather than doubting "whether the dignity of purely human and communal relations is enhanced by ... religious interpretations," Weber surely would have marvelled at the horrible power of religious sentiment instrumentalized as a technology.

Among the thinkers fetishized by Richard Spencer and the alt-right the Italian fascist Julius Evola is perhaps the most prominent. An intellectual and moral reptile, Evola had a deep influence on Mussolini and became a personal friend of Himmler, for whom he worked during the war as a Special Agent in the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence agency of the SS. Evola typifies the "modern intellectual" derided by Weber. A consummate esotericist, occultist, neo-pagan, and practitioner of "sex magic," Evola's "domestic chapel" was filled with a mystical potpourri poached from every corner of the globe. His was a life consumed by the need to fill the void of disenchantment.

At the conclusion of his magnum opus, Revolt Against the Modern World , Evola writes:

"Man, like never before, has lost every possibility of contact with metaphysical reality and with everything that is before and behind him ... As I said at the beginning, in modern man there is a materialism that, through a legacy of centuries, has become almost a structure and a basic trait of his being. This materialism, without modern man being aware of it, kills every possibility, deflects every intent, paralyzes every attempt, and damns every effort ..."

As with much reactionary writing, the diagnosis of societal ills is often spot-on, but the remedy is morally insane. "What is really needed," Evola argues, "is a total catharsis and a radical 'housecleaning' capable of liberating man from his false 'self' ..." In the hands of Richard Spencer, this is a call to purge the country of non-whites, leaving those of European descent the Lebensraum ("living space") to freely develop their racial genius.

For Evola and his disciples such "housecleaning," while perhaps terrible, is necessary in order "for a transcendent reference point to be acknowledged again and for an absolute, traditional fides to appear again, bestow on everything (man included) a new meaning, and reabsorb and redeem in a new purity everything that has been profaned and degraded."

This "transcendent reference point" is not God. Evola was less an atheist than an anti-theist. His is a world filled with gods, but lacking a sovereign God. Like Heidegger, his transcendent principle was Being, denuded of particularity, conceived of as negative ground, a blank screen onto which he could project his own divinized ego.

The impulse to discover the divine in oneself, on one's own terms, is a kind of cheap Gnosticism. It's not limited to the identity politics of the alt-right, but theirs is a particularly vulgar manifestation. The debt to Evola's thought is on full display in Spencer's "Who Are We?" promotional video for his National Policy Institute. It's a crass, amateurish production, replete with video of happy-looking white people doing things outdoors and stock photos of prominent art and figures from Europe's history, set to the sort of electronic music one finds pre-recorded on cheap synthesizers. Interspersed through it all is Richard Spencer's boyish, weak-chinned face spouting blue-eyed profundities. Here is a partial transcription:

"Who are you? I'm not talking about your name or your occupation. I'm talking about something bigger, something deeper. I'm talking about your connection to a culture, a history, a destiny. An identity that stretches back and flows forward for centuries. An identity you can glimpse in the face of a grandparent, or your child. An identity you know through experience. Through people, through places, through music. Our ancestors had a very strong sense of their identity. They could say, 'I'm a Roman. I'm a Saxon. I'm a Dane'. Some could say, 'I'm a European'. To be exiled from their communities and identities would've been a fate worse than death. Today we seem to have no idea who we are. We're rootless. We've become wanderers. Perhaps we'll also become seekers. We're often told that being an American, or a Briton or a German or any European nationality, is about being dedicated to a collection of abstractions and buzzwords: democracy, freedom, tolerance, multi-culturalism. But a nation based on freedom is just another place to go shopping. It's a country for everyone, and thus a country for no one. It's a country in which we ourselves have become strangers. Man doesn't live, and man doesn't die, for abstractions like freedom. Man lives and dies for a homeland. For a people and its future. For beauty. For the power of being a part of something bigger than oneself."

It's nauseating fare, but it illustrates my point. The ideologues of the alt-right are well aware that their movement exists as an answer to modernity's pathologies, and they've framed their rhetoric accordingly. The cure to disenchantment and existential drift, for the white European, is found within.

The efficacy of such "re-enchantment" as performed by Nazis or alt-rightists, however, is necessarily short-lived. This is because of its nature as a failed "therapy of commitment."

In his seminal work, The Triumph of the Therapeutic , Philip Rieff tells the story of the West's disenchantment using Freud as a focal point. Integrative and organic, "therapy" prior to the modern period was accomplished only under the sign of community:

"The function of the classical therapist is to commit the patient to the symbol system of the community, as best he can and by whatever techniques are sanctioned. All such efforts to reintegrate the subject into the communal symbol system may be categorized as 'commitment therapies'."

Freud's great achievement was his recognition that commitment therapies were no longer efficacious within cultures that had lost a sense of identity. For Rieff (and Freud), "culture is the system of significances attached to behaviour by which a society explains itself to itself." Culture is quintessentially moral - a symbol system of interdicts balanced by remissions. A community whose symbol system is broken, unable to reintegrate its subjects, ceases to possess a culture. For Freud, the West (especially the United States) had become so characterized by symbolic disintegration that there were no true communities to which an individual might be therapeutically restored.

This necessitated the development of a new form of therapy: the analytic. As Rieff explains:

"The analytic developed precisely in response to the need of the Western individual, in the Tocquevillean definition, for a therapy that would not depend for its effect on a symbolic return to a positive community; at best, analytic therapy creates negative communities. The distinction between positive and negative communities, as intended here, is as follows: positive communities are characterized by their guarantee of some kind of salvation of self; and by salvation is meant an experience which transforms all personal relations by subordinating them to agreed communal purposes; negative communities are those which, enabled to survive almost automatically by a self-sustaining technology, do not offer a type of collective salvation, and in which the therapeutic experience is not transformative but rather informative."

Analytic therapy is intended "to manage the strains of living as a communally detached individual" and is "patently anti-transformative." There is no cure to estrangement, only better or worse forms of management, the goal of which is measured detachment.

"In sociological terms," writes Rieff, "commitment therapies are authoritarian, whereas analytic therapies are anti-authoritarian. Moreover, commitment therapies tend to take on a sacramental symbolism; analytic therapies have an anti-sacramental bias." Sacramentalism - taken here to mean belief in the salvific efficacy of holy rites and objects - is key to understanding racialist reconstructions of commitment therapies.

Kathleen Blee, in her ethnographies of women neo-Nazis and Klan members, observes that most of her respondents present their life-stories as narratives of self-transformation. A period of "racial naivete" terminates in an "awakening," triggered usually by a traumatic event, after which the women are unable to see the world without a racial lens. The structure is of spiritual conversion.

Blee relates one woman's stunning self-description, "It is not so much that I am in the Klan, it is the fact that the Klan is in me. By the Klan being in me I have no choice other than to remain. I can't walk away from myself." This is transparently sacramental language. Racial conversion is not merely a matter of intellectual assent; it is an embodied identity:

"It is bodily experience that forms a core to conversion. Negatively, it is assaults on one's body - in the form of invasion, attack, or trauma - that are presented as the causes of ideological conversion. Positively, it is the absorption of racial commitment into one's bodily self ... that marks successful conversion."

Propaganda of the Corpse

The rallying cry of "blood and soil" is nothing if not a re-sacralizing of place and patrimony. It is a desperate attempt to conjure the transcendent within the immanent. But disenchantment robs sacramental action of its efficacy. "The sacralist," explains Rieff, "speaks for some corporate identity within which the individual can feel secure in his personal identity." But without a genuine sacramentalism, personal identity cannot be secured.

This is because enchantment only goes one direction. One does not give meaning to things - one must recognize the meaning already inherent in them. There can be only one "Enchanter." The pageantry of the white supremacist, in masking this reality, only bathes him in ridiculous irony. There is no magic here, no matter how many "Grand Wizards" swell the ranks. And even if whiteness were intrinsically special in its particularity, even if it did offer a gateway to a genuine transcendence - so would everything else. For Being, rather than the paltry thing championed by the post-war order, would be a gift.

The love of "blood and soil" can never achieve an efficacious "re-enchantment." The loss experienced in disenchantment is of a distinctly Christian, and thus universal, metaphysical vision. Absent genuine revelation, such a meagre, parochial concern as "blood and soil" can never fill such a void. Any politic of identity - exclusionary by definition - can only denude our world of transcendent meaning. Worship of the tribal deity ends only in bitterness for those who hammer its metal.

Racial hatred - along with any hatred of the Other - is a doomed attempt to recover a "therapy of commitment." The alt-right is a "negative community" parading in drag as a "positive community."

If given the Lebensraum to develop, white nationalists will splinter along similar lines as Left identitarians, into micro-identities. I envision a sort of comic inversion of intersectional victim cultural: GATTACA plus lame aesthetics - alt-right doughboys bickering over which proto-Germanic tribal DNA yields arches best suited for jackboots.

Nationalism was born amidst the death throes of the last robust therapies of commitment. A "nation" is inherently a negative community. The interdicts and remissions that compose its culture are always already revealed as arbitrary. No matter how much religious or romantic zeal one invests, a nation cannot heal or save. As long as we possess a living memory of Christian universalism, nationalism, by comparison - whether in the United States, Europe, or elsewhere in the once-Christian world - will always seem a dead thing.

The white nationalist's pursuit of metaphysical romance amounts to little more than sleeping with a corpse.

Justin Lee teaches in the Department of Composition at the University of California, Irvine.