Jeffrey Tucker's List of Bad Ideas

gotta read 'em

In a piece written back in 2017 Jeffrey A. Tucker wrote a piece on bad ideas, “The Pre-history of the Alt-right” that have inspired the alt-right. He means non-lefty ideas that some people on the right have adopted. Many of the books are not familiar to me, so I was interested. I say you gotta read the bad along with the good. So I’ve put them all on my list.

Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Tucker says that Hegel “posit[s] warring life forces operating beyond anyone’s control to shape history.” Hegel says “the state is the march of God through the world.” Maybe this is a book in which Hegel is actually understandable.

Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History, which popularized the “great man” theory of history. OK, I gotta read it.

Friedrich List’s The National System of Political Economy, celebrating protectionism, infrastructure spending, and government control and support of industry. I’ve heard about List, but never read him.

Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man. It treats “human society as a zoological rather than sociological and economic enterprise.” I’ve only read an abbreviation of The Descent of Man.

Frederick Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. It “described blacks as intractable criminals who are both lazy and promiscuous”. Published by the American Economic Association. Well…

Charles Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. Very popular with our Progressive Era friends back in the day.

Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race. It was never a bestseller but it exercised enormous influence among the ruling elites.

Oswald Spenglerś’s The Decline of the West. I have a copy, but have I ever read it?

Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political. Tucker calls it “a brutal attack on liberalism as the negation of the political.” Really? I read it a devastating analysis of politics and a warning to us all.

Thing is, I don’t think these books have inspired today’s alt-right. I think these books are mostly books that inspired the Great and the Good for a season, until the fashion changed.

I’m going to put them on my list, mainly so I have a better idea of the ideas that have irradiated our educated betters down the years. Tucker quotes Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1830:

It is not by the intermeddling of an omniscient and omnipotent State, but by the prudence and energy of the people, that England has hitherto been carried forward in civilization; and it is to the same prudence and the same energy that we now look with comfort and good hope. Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every department of the state. Let the Government do this: the People will assuredly do the rest.

But I don’t think it’s alt-right people that are the problem. The problem is educated elitists that are always tempted by some new Narrative that gives them an excuse to ramp up state power to save the world — and fluff their feathers.