In the past few years, some people and institutions on the right have either fallen for or taken far too seriously the musings of a figure who goes by the online pseudonym “Bronze Age Pervert.” His real name is Costin Alamariu, a Yale University political-science Ph.D. originally from Romania. In 2018, Alamariu compiled his musings into a lurid, deliberately ungrammatical, book-length “exhortation” called Bronze Age Mindset, which became an underground hit on the right. In 2019, Politico reported that it had some fans among young male staffers in the Trump administration. (Alamariu’s true popularity may be hard to discern, as he counsels fans to deny having read him, and to moderate their public views strategically.) He seems to be really into lifting (nothing wrong with that, even if I prefer running myself), and resents modern society for suppressing the authentic expression of masculine virtue (which, indeed, it does).
But there is far more to Alamariu’s worldview than just being pro-lifting and pro-masculinity. In a piece for the Daily Beast over the weekend, I outlined some of its unsavory details, as evidenced in Bronze Age Mindset and elsewhere. He has contempt for the American Founding, which he dismisses as “so much nonsense” that has “nothing to do” with America’s success. He is similarly disdainful of Christianity, which he thinks may have begun as the same faith that originated Buddhism, or perhaps Zoroastrianism, and whose central figures, such as Saint Augustine, were probably made up. As I elaborate in the piece:
He speculates that the New Testament was “written by a Jewish woman, as a parody of Greek tragedy,” and criticizes Christians (and Jews) for “suppressing the natural spirit of man.” The nicest thing he has to say about Christianity is that offending its believers is “stupid” when they have the same enemy.
To Alamariu, moreover, women are a malign force who “drain” men of their “vital essence” and are responsible for all the world’s ills over the past century; immigrants are “zombi hordes” and “sh**” from the “Turd World” ruining our cities and national parks; and rebreeding “the original Aryan race, or as close an approximation as possible, through some kind of a Platonic Lebensborn program” is a desirable fantasy.
At the root of Alamariu’s worldview is a dark vision of the future in which his followers, whom he describes as “superior specimens” in need of “space,” “wipe away” our “corrupt civilization,” and unleash their vengeance upon the “lower types of mankind,” or “humancockroach” who have repressed them. (The Bronze Age Mindset is defined as the desire “to be worshiped as a god!”) Alamariu describes his vision of “true justice” in this way:
the zoos opened, predators unleashed by the dozens, hundreds….four thousand hungry wolves rampaging on streets of these hive cities, elephants and bison stampeding, the buildings smashed to pieces, the cries of the human bug shearing through the streets as the lord of beasts returns.
This godless, neopagan, will-to-power fantasia is not conservative. Which makes it unfortunate that people and institutions affiliated with the Claremont Institute, which has done much great work, have engaged with and elevated Alamariu’s worldview. It was a misguided attempt to channel this worldview into something more responsible that served instead to strengthen and popularize it. This misbegotten attempt at dialogue failed to realize that Alamariu’s right-wing nihilism — anti-religious, anti-Founding — exists in a kind of perverse symbiosis with the left-wing nihilism so regnant today that it ostensibly criticizes. We need something better than both.
To provide a superior alternative, however, one must admit that conservatism, as a whole, has seriously failed at doing so. The trouble that confronts us today is partially the result of conservatism’s failure since the Cold War’s end. The challenges we now face, in large part due to conservatism’s failures, include an emboldened Chinese Communist Party, the crisis of American masculinity, the weaponization of capital and technology against the Right, and an administrative state that brazenly violates the U.S. Constitution even while failing to perform core responsibilities.
So no, simply perpetuating conservatism as usual will not suffice. Conservatives need to do better, lest only voices such as Alamariu’s are seen as providing answers to our current ills, or lest conservatives be seen as defenders of a status quo we all know is seriously defective. As I write:
Alamariu should not be permitted—by default—to claim the moral high ground in his denunciations of modern nihilism and egalitarianism. The American Right must present a positive and distinctly American vision of a free and virtuous society that mollifies young right-wing discontent.
Even granting the highest possible charity to Alamariu’s nihilism, however, it could only ever critique. It cannot build. Apart from his worldview’s aforementioned defects, Alamariu advises his followers to reject the “Phariseeism” of virtue and to consider descending into “a floating world of complete vice.” He also downplays the importance of starting a family, doubting that such an act would “ever be enough” to meaningfully address our contemporary moral decay. To dismiss not just Christianity and the American Founding but also morality and family life is not to save our country, but to renounce our best chances for rehabilitating it, thereby ensuring its doom.
And to use very-real attacks on masculinity as an excuse to unbridle it completely instead of defending and channeling it properly is not to address the crisis of men, but to exacerbate it. That crisis will not be solved if more men reject family responsibilities and embrace vice. Strength and courage are necessary tools, but they must be directed by principles higher than mere violence, or base self-aggrandizement. Men should worship God, not themselves. Alamariu’s program is for debaucherous teenagers and those who still act like them. Not men.
This century’s challenges may exceed even those that last century’s conservatives confronted. To meet them, conservatives must not join Alamariu in rejecting the cross, the flag, and the family. But a halfhearted embrace of these causes won’t suffice either. Only a full-throated promulgation of these essential elements can ward off the Bronze Age temptation while also defending American liberty and prosperity from ever-more-clever aggressors, at home and abroad. To the extent conservatism has failed at this, it deserves condemnation; to the extent it continues to fail at this, it will face defeat, from one band of nihilists or the other. If we believe what we believe, and hold dear what we hold dear, we must only accept victory. This is the challenge conservatives and our allies face today. Let us face it with bravery — and without fear.