Unknown to the media, and confused in most of its followers, is the fundamental idea of the Alt Right: it is a cultural movement designed to end Enlightenment thought and return the West to realism.

This realism has multiple heads, starting with the idea that political ideas reflect cultural ones — “meta-politics” — and extending into the notion that demographics is destiny, and that genetics is the driver of culture and through it, politics. From there we see the importance of the biological nation, centered in the family, with human ritual and customs taking the place of ideology, economics, politics — itself a creation of democracy and the central idea of the Left, egalitarianism — and social popularity.

This is 21st century traditionalism. It favors fields of wheat and spaceships above a society straight out of Tolkien. It desires a restoration of Western civilization and a rejection of mob rule, er, democracy. And it arose from a mishmash of influences including black metal, the French New Right, extreme libertarians like Hans-Hermann Hoppe, white nationalism influenced historical conservatives like Mencius Moldbug, my own work on extreme realism, and of course, the celebrated and infamous French author Michel Houellebecq.

Reading through one his relatively recent interviews, we can see the origins:

The thing that may rub people the wrong way is that I show how feminism is demographically doomed. So the underlying idea, which may really upset people in the end, is that ideology doesn’t matter much compared to demographics.

Houellebecq recognizes the fundamental aspect of politics is not what we say we intend to do, but what we do on a biological level. From this perspective, ideology is mere verbiage, pretexts and excuses, where the real action is in the unarticulated values upon which people act.

Islam is an image of the future. Why has the idea of the Nation stalled out? Because it’s been abused too long.

Part of traditionalism is nationalism, or the idea that a nation like France is composed of a single ethnic group like the French. Starting with the French Revolution, however, what came our way was the nation-state founded on ideological principles, and this has exhausted Europeans with its pointless wars for democracy.

I am a Comtean. We are in what he calls the metaphysical stage, which began in the Middle Ages and whose whole point was to destroy the phase that preceded it. In itself, it can produce nothing, just emptiness and unhappiness. So yes, I am hostile to Enlightenment philosophy, I need to make that perfectly clear.

The point of the Enlightenment was to destroy the idea of an order higher than the human individual. It was the rise of the rabble, and since then, nothing has made sense, which is fitting for an ideology whose only real statement is “me first,” a kind of casual and callow individualism that in theory lets us off the hook for fighting to do what is right in a broader sense, but in reality replaces that with wars for ideology and endless, exhausting infighting over it.

I deny all responsibility, I claim utter irresponsibility — except when I discuss literature in my novels, then I am engaged as a literary critic. But essays are what change the world… It’s simple, if you want to change the world, you have to say, Here’s how the world is and here’s what must be done. You can’t lose yourself in novelistic considerations. That’s ineffectual.

This strikes me as an indirect rejection of the novel focused around personal issues that has made Western literature so navel-gazing and detached from real world issues over the past few decades.

Europe is committing suicide and, in the middle of Europe, France is struggling desperately to survive. It is almost the only country that is fighting to survive, the only country whose demographics allow it to survive. Suicide is a matter of demographics, it’s the best and most effective way to commit suicide.

And a cheerful note. As long as our people exist, we survive. But conversely, we cannot live on through institutions, politics and an economic system.

The whole interview — and his others and books — is worth reading.