Embracing Evola and Glorifying Guénon: Traditionalism, Nationalism, and Orthodoxy among the Digital Far Right

Far-right actors across the globe connect through social media use, with users, ranging from those with tens of thousands of followers to just a handful, engaged with each other in digital kinships; virtual relationships and worlds built on technology and ideology. One ideological movement circulating among the digital far right is traditionalism (Tebaldi and Del Percio 2024). Also known as Perennialism, traditionalism is an esoteric, anti-modern twentieth-century philosophical school of thought involving mystics, orientalist metaphysicians, and those more right-wing than fascists in some accounts. Traditionalism offers a world built on primordial truths, which often includes a defense of universal cosmologies, angst about racial and sexual purity, and fears over White extinction. In the 21st century, these historical ideas about the cycles of human life have taken on new political vitality in far-right communities, particularly online.

Drawing on four years of ethnographic research and digital data collection, this paper, emerging from my current book project, considers the entanglement between the esoteric philosophies of Rene Guénon, Julius Evola, and Aleksandr Dugin and far-right nationalist ideologues. Utilizing case studies of digital content produced by American converts to Russian Orthodoxy (and its political framings), I tease out how philosophically intolerant, anti-modern conceptions of the body and person—proliferated through memes, podcasts, and video streams—are intimately tied to understandings of traditionalism, racism, and the disciplinary structures of political authority in the 20th century European context.

Rene Guénon, Julius Evola, and Aleksandr Dugin are often viewed as key figures in the loosely constructed traditionalist movement (Sedgwick 2004). Evola would prove instrumental in shaping the philosophical worldview of Russian radical philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who took the themes of traditionalism and reimagined them through an Orthodox Christian (albeit Old Believer) lens. The ideas expressed by Guénon and Evola in the 20th century, and those offered by Dugin in the present are often not utilized wholesale by far-right traditionalists themselves. Rather, as is the case with most conceptual ideas, they are transformed into a social project that is easily digestible for their communities.

In my own work on far-right American Orthodox converts, they are often admirers of Guénon because his ideas were utilized by Fr. Seraphim Rose (1934-1982), a mid-twentieth century mystic convert to Russian Orthodoxy who wrote: ““It was René Guénon who taught me to seek and love the Truth above all else” (Damascene 2005, 63). Rose’s interpretation of traditionalism, combined with his antisemitic views shaped by the fabricated *Protocols of the Elders of Zion* (1903) is digitally trafficked by my interlocutors as a new form of traditionalism, one that elides with Dugin’s views. In an interview, Dugin stated that “he felt a great similarity between his return to the Church and that of the American Guénonian traditionalist and Orthodox priest, Seraphim Rose, who was baptized as a Methodist and converted from atheism” (Stawiarski 2022). As far-right converts become more well versed in traditionalist literature, they move away from Rose and begin to evoke Evola’s right-of-fascism position, mapping it on to contemporary geo-politics to make philosophical sense of current global events.

Evola, who influences Putin’s post-Soviet Russia, far-right Orthodox Christian communities online, White Nationalists, and the former Trump White House through Steve Bannon, focused on ushering in a civilizing phase that was, in his words, “hierarchical, traditional, and elitist.” I’ll make the case here broadly that Evola’s notions of what constitutes a civilization (a closed, nostalgic nation with social, racial, and sexual boarders and boundaries) is key to understanding far-right forms of religious nationalism we see in the Euro-American-Eurasian context. Religious nationalism is a traditionalist worldbuilding project of the future just as much as it is a rewriting of the past.

Traditionalism recapitulates an ontological and spiritual divide between East and West that hinges of the juxtaposition of traditional and modern. Part of preserving tradition is focusing on borders, boundaries, and bodies, to retain or contain the primal values of “glorious past,” as Evola would say. This finds appeal among White far-right converts to Russian Orthodoxy who react with fearful dismay at progressivism, becoming radicalized in the process through traditionalist thought, using it as a justification for nationalism. Ironically, new takes on traditionalism are finding traction globally because of the porous transnational borders made possible through digital connectivity. Americans can easily find Russian and European content that aligns with their political positionality.

Contemporary far-right discourses of traditionalism, including that of American interloctors, draw on and reimagine Guénon, Evola, and Dugin’s civilizing projects, using them to apocalyptically emphasize the end of worldly depravity, decadence, and democracy. Through podcasts, blogs, and social media content, American converts to Orthodoxy praise Evola and call for an end to democracy. They also conjure Cornelius Condreau’s vision for Christian fascism, revel in Orban’s autocratic, nationalistic vision for Hungary, delight in Franco’s Catholic Spanish fascism, and praise Putin’s war in Ukraine as a way to fracture the modern West, thereby giving room for traditionalism to spring forth.

Using audio-visual digital case studies, this paper will show how traditionalism is transformed through technology. Traditionalism evolves, travels, and even cycles, as Guénon and Evola might say, through time and technology, becoming entangled with antisemitism, homophobia, and racism, and conspiracies theories. For my own Orthodox convert interlocutors, these phantasmagoric projects of traditionalism find traction through media technologies in order form new American worlds that extend the work of historical European fascists and contemporary Eurasian authoritarian leaders into the United States. In doing so, I show that the project of traditionalism espoused on far-right social media is not linked to primordial truths but rather to the 20th century philosophical conceptions of what counts as ancient, what counts as modern, right, wrong, true, false, salvific, or damning. For many, traditionalism is a way to philosophically shore up loyalty to values politics, for others it is an Edenic return to a world that never was and, for the majority, much like their 20th century orientalist forebearers, I contend that traditionalism provides the vocabulary to help alleviate their anxiety about rapid social change, economic crisis, and shifting political dynamics.