Andrew Tate and Conservatives’ Kierkegaard Trap

Kierkegaard did not go insane, which leaves him no excuse for his later writings.

Though he was one of the most brilliant and subtle thinkers in history, Kierkegaard ended life as a raving pamphleteer. He was not insane, but his attacks on the Danish church—first in the Fatherland, and later in the Moment—were. For example, he wrote that 

Christianity in the New Testament consists in loving God, in hatred to man, in hatred of oneself, and thereby of other men, hating father, mother, one’s own child, wife, etc., the strongest expression for the most agonizing isolation. 

He added that, 

In the New Testament, according to Christ’s own teaching, to be a Christian is, humanly speaking, sheer anguish, an anguish in comparison with which all other human sufferings are hardly more than child’s play. 

This hyperbole was scripturally ungrounded—and Kierkegaard knew it, just as he surely also knew that the anti-natalism he repeatedly expressed in these articles was biblically baseless.

Kierkegaard’s radicalism resulted from his wanting to be a “corrective” to what he saw as the worldliness and complacency of the established Danish church. As he put it in a journal entry:

He who must apply a “corrective” must study accurately and profoundly the weak side of the Establishment, and then vigorously and one-sidedly present the opposite. Precisely in this consists the corrective, and in this too the resignation of him who has to apply it. The corrective will in a sense be sacrificed to the established order. If this is true, a presumably clever pate can reprove the corrective for being one-sided. Ye gods! Nothing is easier for him who applies the corrective than to supply the other side, but then it ceases to be the corrective and becomes the established order.

And so Kierkegaard meant to be unbalanced, like a man straining to push a wayward cart away from a ditch. He sought to provoke a complacent Christian establishment, and so pushed against it to the point of absurdity. After years of creating memorable literary-philosophical characters, he became one; for example, he ostentatiously stopped going to church. But we can become the characters we play, and so Kierkegaard’s sudden collapse and death may have been a mercy—not just because he was running out of money, but because his “corrective” was spiritually perilous.

This brings us to Andrew Tate. Pundits on the Right and the Left were stirred up after Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan, left Romania, where they face serious criminal charges, for the United States, reportedly with the help of the Trump administration (which includes some of their apparent admirers). Other than crude appeals to his popularity, or at least notoriety, those who support Tate tend to tout his anti-Left (and specifically anti-feminist) views. And he is, in some ways, anti-Left. He is certainly anti-feminist. He is also a loathsome anti-Christian Islamist thug and self-admitted abusive pimp who hates righteousness. There is no good to be had from embracing him, as some on the Right have done, or even from adopting a sort of anti-anti-Tate approach that concedes his vileness but regards him as a useful corrective to a feminist culture that has neglected the interests and formation of young men. 

This is foolish, but it arises from a natural human tendency. We are tribal, and tend to welcome any weapon, tactic, or alliance against our foes, a temptation that may be especially acute for those who feel that they are on the outside looking in. Conservatives, who have long had little cultural and institutional power even when politically ascendant, may be especially susceptible to this error. This dynamic is often evident in conservative media sites that began from a justified disgust with the legacy corporate media, but that have become a mirror image of what they hate—reveling in many of the same vices and disregard for the truth, just on behalf of the other political team. And we need only look around the website formerly known as Twitter to see conservatives who will make any alliance against their current foes, and who will embrace, or at least give a hearing to, any view, so long as it is anti-establishment. 

This leads to a focus on destruction that offers little in the way of positive ideas and ideals. As a practical matter, it produces an opposition party mindset that is unlikely to govern well. And it makes for a movement that is easily hijacked by malevolent actors who are the enemies of conservatism. Tucker Carlson has become a leading example, as demonstrated by his praise for, and softball interviews of, figures including Andrew Tate and Darryl Cooper, the Churchill-hating, Nazi-sympathizing fringe podcast “historian.” Though many on the Right swiftly condemned these fawning interviews and the lies they promoted, others saw this disavowal as proof that Carlson and his guests were on to something. Such people are defined by what—and more importantly, whom—they oppose. If the establishment—whether it is the culturally dominant liberal establishment, or just the much smaller conservative establishment—is for it, they are against it. 

This reflexive contrarianism is the root of much of the resurgence of anti-Semitism on the Right, as well as of many other bizarre reactionary opinions that now seem to be gaining traction in some circles. It is presumed that whatever most offends the powers that be is probably true, or at least a useful corrective to a one-sided establishment. Those who fall into this pattern tend to take contradiction and condemnation as confirmation that they are on to something—and as justification to further radicalize. The descent of Candace Owens from a popular Daily Wire host into a Jew-hating conspiracy theorist is a case in point. 

Owens in particular illustrates how the boundaries between performative and genuine contrarianism are often blurry. What begins as an effort to be provocative or to try to provide a “corrective” to a one-sided establishment can easily slide into madness, evil, or both. This is because neither provocation nor a “corrective” is grounded in truth; instead, they are defined by whatever they oppose. Thus, even if they are set against an error, they may be just as wrong—and perhaps even more so. 

This trap should be obvious, and yet not only podcasters today, but even Kierkegaard and his world-historical intellect fell into this error. The folly of the corrective should have been apparent to Kierkegaard from the start, for it always had more than a whiff of Hegel about it. The tragic irony at the end of Kierkegaard’s work is that, finally publishing without the masks of his “authorship,” he tried to correct one perceived fault with its opposite. The devastating critiques of Hegelianism he had presented in Concluding Unscientific Postscript seem to have given way to a desperate effort to manufacture an antithesis to the established church, in the apparent hope that dueling falsehoods would synthesize into a renewal of truth and faith. His campaign against the established church then became increasingly unhinged as he failed to make headway against the religious and cultural establishment.

This outcome was predictable because the very idea of a “corrective” is either manipulative or nihilistic. It is the former insofar as it seeks to reach what is good and true by inculcating lies—or at least an indifference to the truth—in one’s audience. It is nihilistic insofar as it often lapses into a negation that masks a despairing will to power—a determination to tear down, with the only goal of rebuilding being that one should be directing things oneself. Either way the approach of the “corrective” eschews the more difficult, but genuine, solution, which is to proclaim the truth in season and out: to build, to restore, to teach as best one can, and to trust in God for the rest.

Thus, Kierkegaard’s final assaults on the established church betrayed a lapse of faith on his part. He relied on his own (considerable) gifts to manipulate, or entice, or induce reform in the Danish church—yet did not trust that simply proclaiming the truth as best he could would be sufficient. And so he used theatrics and hyperbole rather than being a faithful witness. It was one thing for him to create literary-philosophical characters, but it was quite another to try to make himself into one. And he justly failed in the latter; he is not known for his embarrassing, at best, attempts to incite a populist reform of the Danish church. Rather, it is his previous work, which in his lifetime seemed doomed to fade into obscurity, that has borne fruit across the centuries.

Through Kierkegaard’s poor example we may see why it is a mistake to define ourselves by error, or to proclaim falsehood and ally with evil as a “corrective.” We are not called to manipulate a dialectical process, but to overcome evil with good. This is why the Christian response to, say, liberal feminism is not a noxious antithesis such as Andrew Tate and his ilk. Rather, it is to proclaim—and more importantly, model—righteous family life and relations between men and women.

This principle applies across culture and politics. Our calling is to faithful truth-telling and living—not mindless reaction, tribalism, and contrarian manipulations. The world will often have the edge in glitz, glamour, and appeals to immediate gratification—but we have the truth, and a way of life that is in accord with God’s design for human nature and the created order. We are called not to dialectical maneuvering, but to faithfulness to God and neighbor.

“Soren Kierkegaard in the coffee-house.” Image sourced via Wikimedia Commons.