Reactionary Futurism 2025

Jordan S. Carroll reviews recent scholarship on the alt-right.

By Jordan S. CarrollJune 16, 2025

• SF

• Politics

This essay is part of LARB’s Futures in Review series. Essays in this series offer a critical overview of recent fiction and scholarship related to key areas of future-oriented speculation.

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WE OFTEN CONSIDER the Far Right to be backward-looking. White nationalists appear as nostalgic and retrograde: they desire to drag us into the past, pulling us towards an imagined era of unquestioned hierarchy that was supposedly characterized by stability and order. Obviously, this is one of the major narratives of the Far Right—think, for example, of Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.” We see this orientation within the alt-right and white nationalism more broadly as well. Some white nationalists want to return to their distorted versions of Greek antiquity, pagan Europe, medieval Christendom, or the United States at some point prior to the 1960s. But the notion that the Right has ceded the future to progressives has always been a dubious proposition. Interwar fascism saw itself as a forward-looking, modernizing force, and in practice, the contemporary Far Right’s political program requires changes as unprecedented and revolutionary as anything proposed by the Left.

Indeed, many on the far right see themselves as ushering in a new future world while the rest of us remain stuck in the past. As I show in my 2024 book Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, reactionaries have long dreamed of building a fascist utopia in which a genetically gifted elite would be free to use their innate genius to develop advanced technologies. For many decades, neo-Nazis have argued that space colonization will be carried out by Aryan men driven by a white European spirit that yearns to explore and expand into new territories. Space is especially appealing to them because it represents a Lebensraum devoid of any Indigenous population that might mix with the white race. These fantasies may sound bizarre, but they have found expression in the second Trump administration. Donald Trump announced in his 2025 inaugural address that the United States would soon follow its “manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.”

More fundamentally, though, the Far Right believes that the future belongs to them. In much reactionary discourse, only white men have any meaningful ability to imagine the future. According to this worldview, white people possess a racially unique capacity for speculation, including rational planning, counterfactual imagination, and inspired innovation. At the same time, the Far Right claims that only white men have the discipline, intelligence, and foresight to realize this future. This ideology holds that whiteness is a potential for greatness, including the inborn ability to build a high-tech society. In other words, whiteness is speculative to the alt-right: it possesses a promissory value far in excess of any white men’s actual achievements. Some fascist thinkers have gone so far as to suggest that science fiction is an inherently white genre. For example, Theodore Beale (a.k.a. Vox Day), the leader of the Rabid Puppies fan group, claimed that increased racial diversity would ruin the genre because, in his view, people of color could not possibly understand the achievements of white science fiction authors. Despite the widespread success of speculative authors of color in recent decades, there are fascists who hold that nonwhite people are genetically incapable of imagining and inhabiting science-fictional futures.

In recent years, the emergence of techno-fascism out of Silicon Valley and into the White House has made it easier to see the future as a site of struggle. Wealthy and powerful figures such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Palmer Luckey force us to recognize that there is nothing inherently progressive about futurism, including within science fiction. Scholars are thus now coming to grips with reactionary futurism.

Looking back to 2024, it is clear that right-wing studies has become a mature field with a significant body of scholarship behind it. Some books focus on how the Far Right feels as if its future has been jeopardized. Michael Feola’s excellent The Rage of Replacement: Far Right and Demographic Fear (2024), confronts white nationalist anxieties that warn of demographic changes imminently spelling the end of a white future. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Feola convincingly argues that white nationalists place themselves in a melancholic position. The Far Right thinks that the nation they claim ownership over is slipping away from them into the hands of racialized others. Because they remain hopelessly attached to this lost object, they are unable to properly mourn and move beyond an imagined national past characterized by white pride, belonging, and mastery. According to Feola, white nationalists’ fixation on phantom grievances leaves them unable to imagine alternative futures where other forms of solidarity and community might supersede the binding ties of blood and soil.

Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024) explores similar dynamics in how transphobes approach so-called gender ideology. Butler suggests that the “phantasm of gender” serves to condense and displace a whole host of legitimate fears about future ecological and economic devastation onto lurid fantasies about trans people. Butler argues that transphobes see the trans rights movement as an existential threat to their cisgender bodies and identities. If it feels like we have skipped a logical step, that is because we are in the realm of fantasy, however deadly. Transphobes project their own violent intentions onto the people they would victimize: although the public existence of trans people does nothing to harm cisgendered people, transphobes wish to strip trans and nonbinary people of their sexed identities even if it means ending their lives. Moreover, transphobes no less than white nationalists cling to a fictional past—what Butler calls the “patriarchal dream-order”—in a paranoid defensive posture that precludes the openness to possibility required for utopian thinking. Transphobia distracts us from the looming apocalypse while robbing us of the imaginative resources that would help us avoid or overcome this future risk.

Other scholars in right-wing studies have focused on the resistible rise of techno-fascism. Adrienne L. Massanari’s Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right (2024) is the book about Gamergate we have been waiting for, detailing how reactionary fans lashed out in coordinated harassment campaigns against women in the video game industry. As Massanari shows, Gamergate provided the Far Right not only with a new recruiting pool but also with a laboratory in which to develop tactics for gaming social media platforms to promote their toxic ideologies. The reactionary gamers in Massanari’s study look like the nerdy counterparts of Feola’s white nationalists and Butler’s transphobes. They are driven by a nostalgic longing for a time when straight white men dominated geek culture, from gaming to science fiction. They feel as though their childhoods have been retroactively ruined by the mere presence of previously marginalized fans in their hobby spaces. Focusing on later movements such as Comicsgate, Mel Stanfill’s Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture (2024) persuasively demonstrates that, if we want to understand right-wing culture wars, we must explore the fannish affects and attachments motivating them. Stanfill’s study zeroes in on the unjustified sense of victimization felt by right-wing fan cultures, which fight any gain by marginalized fans as a setback for white male fans.

David Golumbia’s Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology (2024) also traces an important genealogy for techno-fascism. Drawing on the work of Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Golumbia points to the prevalence of an updated form of “producerism,” an ideology that divides the world into people who make goods and parasites who take them. Previous producerist ideologies tended to heroize those who produce physical products—industrial capitalists and workers—but the new techno-fascism pits a geek elite of coders against the untechnical masses. Fascist nerds seek liberty or—better yet—sovereignty. They believe they can only achieve freedom by eliminating democratic oversight of their activities and dismantling or privatizing the state. Once the nation has been broken up into secessionist corporate fiefdoms, the techno-fascists foresee themselves innovating in eugenics and artificial intelligence to develop future generations of increasingly smart humans and posthumans. They will leave the rest of us behind, and nobody will be able to stop them.

Christoffer Kølvraa and Bernhard Forchtner’s Imagining Alternative Worlds: Far-Right Fiction and the Power of Cultural Imaginaries (2025) locates similar elitist speculations on the alt-right. The authors provide a comprehensive survey of books released by the far-right publishers Arktos and Counter-Currents through 2020 as well as a vast archive of alt-right film reviews. This incredibly thorough and insightful book will be the starting point for scholarly analyses of alt-right cultural production and reception going forward. Kølvraa and Forchtner argue that alt-right texts create imaginary worlds designed to train the readers’ desires, emotions, and expectations in order to produce reactionary subjects. These imaginaries include a primordialist world that conditions white nationalist warriors to fight to reclaim their ethnoracial birthright, a nostalgic world that cultivates paleoconservative gentlemen who despise the present while longing for the past, and a nihilistic world that encourages incels to seek revenge on society through acts of murder-suicide.

What they term the “promethean” world is the most relevant for the study of reactionary futurism. Kølvraa and Forchtner build up a picture of this imaginary domain based on the philosophical fictions of Jason Reza Jorjani. The promethean subject emerges as an avant-garde futurist figure who refuses any limitations and sees the planet, the body, and the species as infinitely malleable to their whims. The promethean world draws heavily on science fiction to depict scenarios of transhuman transcendence, including fantasies of escaping the constraints of temporality through reincarnation and time travel. This may be a libertarian vision, but it is not an egalitarian one. Prometheans look to a future where a superheroic elite pursues the technological singularity to the rest of humanity’s detriment.

Kølvraa and Forchtner present a brilliant and often convincing argument about prometheanism. Much of what they have to say on the topic resonates with my own work, which draws on some of the same archives, but where we differ is that I’m not convinced that Jorjani represents a significant right-wing tendency interested in transgressing traditional gendered and racial categories. I think we should be skeptical when a figure such as Jorjani or Nick Land claims to have moved beyond racism as conventionally understood. As Kølvraa and Forchtner point out, even Jorjani claims that the potential for promethean technoscientific mastery is prevalent in some ethnoracial populations but not others. Whiteness and white supremacy have always been more capacious than the purity politics of white nationalism would suggest; when there’s a historical need, they’re capable of inducting new members into the white race or enrolling other racial groupings as partners to the master race. Furthermore, I believe that when Jorjani does break with right-wing traditionalist dogma and write about things such as being reincarnated as a woman, he is speaking from an idiosyncratic position rather than articulating a widely shared reactionary world. Jorjani’s outlier status is evidenced by the fact that he fell out with other fascists and then made a series of desperate attempts to dissociate himself from the alt-right to court a more socially acceptable audience of New Agers instead.

I maintain that the majority of alt-right thinkers who look forward to a high-tech science fiction future see it as an expression of what Kølvraa and Forchtner term a primordialist “destiny” rooted in white blood or spirit. This may be a difference of emphasis rather than viewpoint: the authors seem to place Jorjani’s world on equal footing with other reactionary imaginaries, but perhaps his prominence in this study has more to do with his prolific output at Arktos than with the authors’ estimation of his importance on the far right. With these minor caveats aside, though, this book is a monumental achievement that no right-wing studies scholar should overlook. The authors have done us a great service analyzing and synthesizing so many alt-right texts in such a perceptive way.

The promethean worldview of reactionary mutants and cyborgs has become increasingly influential over the past year. Kølvraa and Forchtner show how flexible far-right promethean ideology can be, and we are seeing the emergence of a futuristic fascism on the national stage that sometimes cleaves to white nationalism but at other moments seems to welcome high-IQ elites from a range of racial or ethnic backgrounds. Even though a portion of the reactionary futurists may be willing to admit Jews or Asians with H-1B visas into their imagined community of potential posthumans, they nevertheless do not consider racism disqualifying, oppose all substantive efforts toward anti-racism, and almost never extend elite membership to Black or Indigenous people. Speculative whiteness has proven adaptable but not infinitely so.

We can see in the new Silicon Valley Right the idea that the future is the province of a select few. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has adopted the mantle of rational planner, looking out into a future that we lesser mortals are unable to predict in order to see a universe populated by untold trillions of smart, productive citizens. Musk is a superficial reader of science fiction, but he nevertheless borrows from SF texts such as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy (1951–53) and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) to flesh out this vision. Asimov writes of a brilliant scientific mind guiding the course of future history away from prolonged catastrophe through his projections, while Heinlein follows a band of smart individuals assisted by a supercomputer whose probabilistic calculations allow them to stage-manage a libertarian revolution. The lesson Musk seems to take from these works is that history is made by the smart few rather than the blundering masses. He marries this elitist vision to a eugenic ideology that stresses the need to maximize the reproduction rates of intelligent individuals to stave off what he sees as the coming “idiocracy.” Space exploration is therefore important to him not only because it provides insurance for existential risks but also because it allows him to imagine the exponential growth of genetically gifted populations unbounded by earthly constraints. But, of course, this vision of the future is only possible if people like Musk are not constrained by the masses, who appear in this scenario as zombified dupes infected by the “woke mind virus.”

Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel presents a darker prophecy than Musk, but one that complements rather than contradicts Musk’s prescription for a eugenic meritocracy. If Musk is the rational planner, Thiel is the inspired risk-taker. Thiel draws as much from eschatology as from speculative fiction. He argues that history veers between two inevitable poles: Armageddon and the Antichrist. Armageddon represents the risk of technological self-destruction, while the Antichrist represents a global state that stifles freedom and innovation in its quest to protect humanity from Armageddon. According to Thiel, progress outside of the computing fields has slowed in recent decades due to a failure of nerve in the face of dangerous new inventions such as the atomic bomb. Thiel claims that progress has stalled out because people have become too risk-averse, too worried about unleashing the immense technological forces that are within our capabilities.

Thiel wants us to man up and wield these immense powers. We have developed the Star Trek computer, he sneers, but none of the show’s other gadgets. According to Thiel, our cowardice has left us emasculated (“low testosterone”) as well as earthbound. Here he sounds a lot like Richard Spencer, who dreams of a future where white men reclaim their masculinity and racial pride by becoming daring astronauts willing to die exploring other planets. It is significant that Thiel’s stand-in for the Antichrist is Greta Thunberg, the young woman who has made it her mission to warn us about anthropogenic climate change. We men are being bested by a girl, he seems to say. Thiel’s alternative is the “katechon,” which he defines as a leader or nation with the strength to hold back the end of days a little longer by charting a course between Armageddon and the Antichrist. What that seems to mean is a dominant figure willing to give up the Antichrist’s feminizing security and come a little closer to Armageddon by deregulating and promoting risky technological ventures of the kind he and his friends are developing. Others may worry about dangerous inventions such as defense tech, but Thiel protégé Palmer Luckey enthuses, “It’s already coming together exactly the way that the sci-fi authors thought that it would.”

Of course, we could continue overturning rocks and finding reactionary futurists such as Mencius Moldbug. But the problem with so much reporting on techno-fascist belief is that it fails to recognize such beliefs’ ideological nature. These are not simply free-floating ideas; they are the imaginary ways that this ruling class fraction grapples with its real material conditions. To some extent, this can be understood in vulgar Marxist terms. For obvious reasons, many CEOs warm to Trump’s program of cutting taxes, rolling back regulations, and dismantling the National Labor Relations Board. At the same time, Silicon Valley’s brightest see a world where the tech bubbles are about to burst and they need the Trumpist state to invest in their products and services, whether those are privatized spaceflight, cryptocurrency, defense tech, surveillance, or generative AI. Reactionary futurism can therefore be understood as a form of hype, a self-fulfilling prophecy that pulls in money for speculative projects by promising a bold future of innovation and superprofits.

The reactionary futurists face a labor problem, though. As Ben Tarnoff recently pointed out, much of the tech workforce leans farther to the left than their employers, a fact demonstrated in 2018 when Google employees successfully protested their company’s Pentagon contract for an artificial intelligence program that could be used to target drone strikes. He suggests that a chain saw–wielding Musk provides an aspirational model for tech employers who would like nothing more than for their workers to think they could be fired en masse at any moment. Techno-fascism serves as a novel way of disciplining workers, but I also think that we may be seeing the birth of a new spirit of capitalism. Tech companies have long extracted more labor out of their employees by offering creatively fulfilling work that they promised would help bring about a utopian vision to change the world. Tech workers were shaggy-haired artists and craftspeople in black turtlenecks—monomaniacal in devotion but also independent-minded and rebellious. This spirit simply will not work for building terror weapons, and so techno-fascism has begun to develop another ethos of self-sacrifice. The new tech employee will work punishing hours out of martial virtue in the service of maintaining national supremacy over and against China, a rival that, we are told, threatens the “future of the west.”

At the same time, this does not account for the atmosphere of gleeful transgression that surrounds techno-fascism. We cannot blame this antisocial exuberance solely on the midlife crises of tech founders or the brain rot of social media. There’s been a long-standing gap between theory and practice in the tech world. Techno-utopianism promised flying cars and endless abundance, but when the digital elect looks out of the windows of expensive homes onto the streets of San Francisco, they see only the open-air suffering of the unhoused. On some level, they must know that their endlessly accumulating wealth is predicated on maintaining this horrible inequality. But before the rightward turn, they largely maintained a nominal commitment to social justice, not only for public relations purposes but also for the benefit of the progressive middle strata of tech employees and their centrist liberal allies in the Democratic Party. Free speech absolutists found themselves self-censoring because they could not make explicit their obvious lack of empathy for the immiserated surplus populations surrounding them. Now they can be relieved of cognitive dissonance with all of its tensions and admit they want to be rid of their social inferiors, but only a belief system as flamboyantly science-fictional as reactionary futurism can project a potential world extravagant enough to justify the techno-fascists’ disregard for actual human life. They tell themselves that they are sacrificing the masses in the short run so that in the long term they can build heaven on Mars with their godlike supercomputers.

At this point, we may wonder with some consternation why anyone outside of the ruling class would want to bring about a world where they’re to be replaced by machines. I would argue that the techno-fascist vision of reclaiming a lost future resonates with people from a variety of socioeconomic positions who complain that the 21st century falls short of how it was advertised. The right is a cross-class coalition of the entitled and the disappointed. It is not composed of the wretched of the earth, but it is made up of people who perceive a gap between the social position they inhabit and the more elevated position they believe they were promised in the hierarchy. This includes downwardly mobile people who are genuinely impoverished or indebted but also local elites who think they’re entitled to a bigger presence on the national stage. And now it increasingly includes billionaires who think that the economy should be growing at a faster rate.

What unites these people is their belief that radical subversives and racialized outsiders have robbed them of a better future. They may be relatively comfortable compared to the rest of the world, but they look at the trend line projected by their parents’ upward mobility or the booming fortunes of the midcentury economy, and then they see that actual performance in recent decades has fallen quite short. The Right has varying solutions to the case of the missing future. Trumpists seem to think a strong nation ruled by a tough leader with hardened borders will take us back to the future. The Far Right, however, goes even further to suggest that the future promised in the 1950s is only possible with an all-white racial stock. In actuality, all of these revanchist fantasies misrecognize what is really going on, namely the crisis of capitalism.

If we are ever to move beyond capitalism and its crises, however, we must reject reactionary futurism. As Ruha Benjamin has argued, we must instead “redistribute the future,” a project that begins by reckoning “with who and what currently monopolize the space to envision the future, hoard the ability to dream, and privatize the resources it takes to materialize our imagination.” A more utopian world will be realized through a process of inclusive, democratic, and egalitarian imagination—or it will not be realized at all.

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Featured image: Cover of Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (Mass Market Paperback). Berkley Medallion, 1966. Art by Paul Lehr. Image has been cropped.