The Metaphysics of MAGA

Evil in the Eyes of Stephen Miller and Larry Arnn

You, [our ‘enemies’], have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy! You are envy! You are hatred!… You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build… We have beauty, we have light, we have goodness, we have determination, we have vision, we have strength… We are on the side of God.

- Stephen Miller -

A good thing is a thing that has being. An assassin is not a thing that has being. The assassin must give up his humanity to destroy something that has being.

- Larry Arnn -

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good… Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an unuprooted small corner of evil.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -

Like many across the nation, my wife and I tuned in last Sunday to the Charlie Kirk memorial held following his brutal murder. One of the first things that struck us was its metaphysical register. I do not use this word lightly, to refer merely to apocalyptic language, weighty themes, or philosophical airs. I mean this in the technical sense: the science of what is insofar as it is; being qua being. Fundamental claims were advanced about first principles, participation, the great chain of being, and the ontological status of evil.

In what follows, I will draw attention to the metaphysical statements made at the memorial by two men in particular: Stephen Miller and Larry P. Arnn.

Together, their speeches (you can watch them here and here) present an erroneous and dangerous vision of the nature of evil, one which is foreign to both classical and Christian philosophy of evil as privation of/parasitic on the good, even while they enlist the support of Athens and Jerusalem. Theirs is a view in which evil succeeds in cutting itself off from any relation to the good, becoming a “nothing” which is nonetheless substantial, standing apart from and opposed to the good. It is, somehow, at once an existential threat and entirely powerless.

On this view, one’s political enemies are evildoers who have denied their own humanity. They have been, on a metaphysical level, dehumanized. Indeed, they no longer have any being or goodness at all. This is, to state the obvious, a dangerous view; what may one not do to someone who has been exiled (supposedly, has exiled themselves) from civilization and existence itself?

That Miller advocates this view of evil is to be expected. It authorizes the cruelties he is in fact inflicting on families across our nation. He is a propagandist; that is his job description.

Arnn, however, is an educator and vocal champion of a “Great Books” education. He knows (I hope he knows!) better—both in terms of what the Western tradition teaches about evil and human dignity, and about the dangers of instrumentalizing and distorting that past to serve political or utilitarian ends. This is, unmistakably, what thoughtful conservatives once called “ideology.”

This convergence presents a grave danger, both materially to our neighbors and more generally to the pursuit of truth. There have been those, throughout history, who have suspected that behind such fine words as truth, goodness, and beauty lie nothing but the power and advantage of the stronger. They are, and will always be, wrong, but when the nation’s most prominent advocates of liberal arts education enter into a symbiotic relationship with authoritarian movements, it is hard to blame them for their cynicism.

An Unlikely Convergence?

One would not expect Miller’s and Arnn’s remarks to have much in common, and certainly not a shared metaphysics.

True, both men have deep connections with the conservative movement, but surely this much is to be expected at an event honoring one of its most influential voices.

At least, a deeper dissimilarity would have been a reasonable presumption prior to Hillsdale College’s ongoing hard-right turn, in which Arnn has increasingly marketed the school as an educational arm of MAGA following Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party.

But even keeping this in mind, we still expect more of Arnn. Presumably, even disastrous political alliances do not induce forgetfulness of basic philosophical principles.

Stephen Miller, let us recall, is President Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor. He is the mastermind behind such policies as the so-called “Muslim Ban” and ICE’s current terror campaign of mass deportations. The country’s most shameless authoritarian, his speeches drip with the rhetoric and trappings of fascism. He is a demagogue. Should he (unaccountably) stumble into armchair philosophizing, it will not be pretty.

Larry Arnn, on the other hand, is an academic, and the president of a liberal arts school. He leads Hillsdale College (my alma mater, Class of 2016), and is a champion of “Great Books” education on the airwaves and in the halls of power. His voice, with a scholar’s softness and higher pitch, emanates homespun respectability. One might hope for sober reflection and maybe even a deeper perspective on this fraught moment of our nation’s history. Metaphysics is probably still too much to expect in this setting, but if metaphysics there will be, this is to whom one should look.

Here we have a man who has spent his life ensuring that young people have access to the tradition’s greatest minds. If there were need of a philosophical correction, Arnn could, it stands to reason, right the ship.

And a philosophical misstep there certainly was.

Miller’s Manichean Vision

Stephen Miller’s speech has drawn attention for its apocalyptic imagery of “fire,” “fury,” and “storm.” He warned his “enemies,” “the forces of wickedness and evil” that they cannot comprehend “what they have awakened… the army they have arisen in all of us.” He did not hesitate to lay claim to the banner of civilization itself, drawing on the racially loaded language of “our” “lineage” and our “ancestors” and the primal scene of “light” emerging from “caves” and “darkness.” His rhetoric invites comparison to the idiom of European fascism, and Miller is certainly not unaware of the streams on which he draws. Yet one need not prove direct inheritance; this is simply how one speaks when one wishes to demonize the opposition. It is the universal language of polarization and hatred. It appeals to ur-metaphors seated deep within the human psyche.

This language, or imaginary, assumes an implicit metaphysics. “We” are the light, resplendent in purity, responsible for all that is good. “We” are the rightful heirs and guardians of civilization. “We” are, in short, being, pure and substantial.

“They,” our enemies, oppose all that is good, for no reason but pure malice. They worship at the altar of evil and chaos. They are outside civilization, even outside humanity. They are evil, subtracted from being’s fullness. They are, since they have no goodness or being at all, at once an independent substantial entity (a mortal threat endangering absolutely everything) and absolute nothingness (and thus utterly powerless to withstand the righteous).

None of this is original. It is not what makes Miller’s speech worthy of note. What is remarkable is that this rhetoric is now coming from one of the president’s most powerful advisors on national TV (rather than some two-bit fascist online). And what is surprising is that the metaphysics is thematized: “You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred, you are nothing, you can build nothing.” The Left, he directly states, is below the level of bare being and incapable of productive activity as such.

The “we” for whom Miller claims to speak spans from “Athens, to Rome, to Monticello, to Philadelphia,” presumably a synecdoche for Western civilization like Vance’s “Athens and Jerusalem.”

But even the slightest familiarity with the actual Western tradition allows one to spot Miller’s mistake. The idea that evil is the good’s substantial other (or, which comes to the same thing, entirely deprived of being or goodness) is as foreign to Plato and Aristotle as it is to Augustine and Kant.

For Plato and his successors, evil is always a privation of something good. Indeed, in an important sense there is, in the end, no such thing as malice or choosing evil for evil’s sake; we are ineluctably oriented to the good and can at most fall short of it through ignorance. Evil has neither independent existence nor reified non-existence (again, these expressions are convertible). There is only the good and the privation or absence thereof.

The Christian tradition, following Augustine, is more willing to speak of perversity or evil proper, rather than mere ignorance. But even here, evil is always parasitic upon the good. It has no intelligibility or positive being of its own, but “exists” only by twisting or totalizing something which is, in itself, good. To treat evil as a substantial principle, or grant that it withdraws itself fully from being, is to attribute to it precisely what it lacks and seeks to establish: an alternate dominion to that of God’s goodness.

As long as we remain exiled from our origin, this perverse but futile ambition is an inner possibility of our spirit, not a threat from without. For this reason, all our life is in the movement of soul known as conversion, which Miller’s logic renders inconceivable.

Just how important is the difference between evil as privation (Plato) and parasite (Augustine) is a matter for scholarly debate. What is not controversial is that Christianity, just as firmly as Platonism, rejects Miller’s vision of things, which history knows by the names of Manicheanism and Zoroastrianism (ironically, these systems are consistently associated with the East rather than the West).

Augustine, in the Confessions, exposed for all time the incoherence of a dualism in which a cosmic battle rages between independent principles. This way of viewing things is fundamentally material rather than spiritual (conceiving evil’s relation to the good through spatial separation or juxtaposition) and its martial imaginary relies on the secret presumption that the good can be vanquished or corrupted. As Augustine’s friend Nebridius memorably asked, what would happen if the good principle chose not to fight back? Manicheans like Miller can only justify their apocalyptic violence by stoking the fear that evil would destroy it. But this is to admit that the Good is not the sovereign Good. But if the Good is indeed inexorable (as both the philosopher and religious believer hold it to be), then a cosmic battle between light and darkness no longer makes sense.

Miller, we might say, betrays the philosophical core of the legacy he claims to defend. But can one really betray what one has neither knowledge of nor interest in? His references to Western history dress in borrowed finery a program whose violence and hatred are utterly petty and parochial. But such is the demagogue; in his mouth, all that is noble—the Good, the True, the Beautiful, the “Great Books,” the Western Tradition—are degraded to mere words, malleable instruments of power.

It would be the responsibility of any true educator to unmask this subterfuge, and present us with the genuine article.

Arnn’s “Ladder” of Being and Its Sudden Collapse

Indeed, Arnn begins by positioning himself as someone who can offer this deeper perspective. He writes that he once asked a young Charlie Kirk “some questions he couldn’t answer.” “You have to suffer,” Arnn told him, directing him to immerse himself in the texts of the Western tradition.

Taken at face value, this is a helpful reminder; to undertake to defend “the West” in the political arena as an activist or influencer is something entirely different truly inhabiting its insights. And this is not something one can simply master intellectually. There is an experience to be undergone, which involves experience negativity and contradiction. It is a conversion of the soul.

Even better, Arnn immediately introduces a genuine theme of the metaphysical tradition, the great chain of being. “There’s a ladder that reaches up toward God,” he intones. “And at the bottom of it are the ordinary good things that are around us everywhere. If we can call them by their names — they have being, and the beings of the good things are figments of God.” This “ladder” is a Neoplatonic commonplace, and thus it seems that at last we make contact with an actual philosophical tradition, even if one could quibble with Arnn’s sweeping invocation of “Aristotle,” “the Bible,” and “Madison and Jefferson.” In any case, the insight that things are good, and reflect God to the degree that they have being is the beginning of a response to Miller; a cosmic “ladder” mediating the divine is a far cry from our demagogue’s apocalyptic “storm.” If everything is, on some level, a ray of divine light, what room is there for forces of pure darkness?

Yet Arnn’s remarks soon take a somewhat shocking turn. “Do you know,” Arnn informs us, “a good thing is a thing that has being. An assassin is not a thing that has being. The assassin must give up his humanity to destroy something that has being.” Just a moment after being introduced, our ladder of being is discarded, and we have returned to the Manichean imaginary. There is a distinction, apparently, between “the good things” which are figments of God, and other things which in no way are. Apparently, our ladder of being is only one part of the metaphysical landscape. In addition, there “are” (note the “to be” verb) things do not have being, among them “assassins,” by which he means the human being, Tyler Robinson, who took Kirk’s life. He has somehow dropped off the bottom of the ladder of being and goodness entirely. He, like anyone who destroys a good thing, has exiled himself utterly from being, and successfully deleted his humanity. We are, therefore, in the end confronted with a dualism between things (and persons) which have being and things (and persons) which do not.

Lost in this sudden philosophical reversal is any initial distance Arnn seemed to place between genuine entrance into the tradition and the world of conservative politics and activism, any hint of a need for ongoing conversion through suffering, of persons who recognize that the line between good and evil passes through their own hearts.

Thus Arnn’s seeming suggestion that Kirk might not have mastered the tradition becomes a transient episode in the latter’s hagiography, overcome through Kirk’s growing ties to… Hillsdale College.

What to make of this sudden twist?

Has Arnn failed to grasp the notion of evil as privation/parasite, as taught by Plato, Augustine, and countless others? Can he not tell the difference between dualism and the great chain of being? Is he genuinely capable of making this basic of a philosophical error? After all, the idea that evil lies “below” the chain of being is the type of mistake we use as a teachable moment in intro classes!

Is Arnn aware of this metaphysics, and distorting it knowingly for some reason? Or has he simply gotten carried away by his own rhetoric, and the passions of the moment?

In at least one very real sense, it does not matter.

What matters is how such rhetoric, given what Arnn represents, functions. If Stephen Miller is to succeed in conflating his political ideology and its Manichean metaphysics with Western civilization, “Great Books” education, and the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, he cannot do it alone.

Demagogues like Stephen Miller and those they serve require someone to intellectually launder this project of identification, and its agenda of selective dehumanization. Whether through ignorance, cunning, or rhetorical irresponsibility, Arnn did this at the Kirk memorial. He lent the authority of Hillsdale College and “Great Books” education more broadly to a false and dangerous idea about evil and human dignity (or the lack thereof).

This has been happening for some time. For as long as I’ve known it, there has been a distinction between Hillsdale College and “Hillsdale College.”

Hillsdale College is a place that employs some wonderful teachers who change the lives of young students. “Hillsdale College” is a commercial on Glenn Beck and a pretext for getting rid of the Department of Education. It exists to authorize Stephen Miller and staff the Trump administration.

Hillsdale College would not exist, at least in the form it does and did, without “Hillsdale College.” Or so the advocates of “prudence” tell us. But it is clear that the relationship between the two, its inner boundary between good and evil, has shifted over the years. The brand is swallowing—has swallowed—the school. Our souls are constituted by the images they project.

More broadly, I worry that something similar—a political instrumentalization which hollows out the soul—threatens “Great Books” or classical education in this nation.

What happens if people like Miller succeed in convincing people that their ideological projects are convertible with the legacy of “the West”? Some will lend their support to authoritarian policies, with very real consequences for our neighbors. But others, balking at the politics, will turn on classical education, if not ideas like Truth, Goodness, and Beauty themselves, viewing them as nothing but masks for power.

And should this happen, who can blame them? Making a Faustian bargain always costs you your soul. But it also makes it a little easier for others to become Thrasymachus, convinced that behind every noble phrase lies nothing but the advantage of the stronger.

Metaphysics, it turns out, matters. But even in these dark days, there is no place for despair, or for a parallel dehumanization of those who instrumentalize all that is noble. Tyler Robinson, Stephen Miller—these are inner possibilities of our own souls, which are constantly in movement, constantly converting to something. And we can trust that the Good shines through, in its illimitable power, despite our distortions and political machinations. Thus while resistance is a duty, one can appeal to that “bridgehead of good” which remains in every person, that human dignity which is, in the words of the Declaration, “inalienable.” As Dionysius the Areopagite put it:

If one must make bold to speak the truth, even the things fighting against It, both are, and are able to fight, by Its power.

This is the exceeding greatness of the power of the Good, that It empowers, both things deprived, and the deprivation of Itself, with a view to the entire participation of itself.