Howard Phillips Lovecraft is, it seems, as popular as ever. “The indie Lovecraftian game Dredge is getting a live-action movie adaptation,” reports Screen Rant. And that’s just one recent example of the horror pioneer’s enduring influence.

In this light, it’s worth asking what Lovecraft’s writing promoted ideologically, and to judge what portions of his political thought are applicable to the modern day.

Was Lovecraft a Socialist?

According to writer Michel Houellebecq, Lovecraft considered neither democracy nor liberty desirable political ends, and historian Katherine Kelaidis characterizes Lovecraft’s ideology as “totalitarianism.” While always leery of capitalism, the Rhode Island–native hoped that big businessmen would redistribute some of their own wealth and establish a new aristocracy, one similar in its values to the nobilities of yore. Following the crisis of 1929, he abandoned this hope and switched his allegiance from Herbert Hoover to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Lovecraft explains this conversion in a 1933 essay wherein he endorses technocratic control of the economy, a system which he himself terms “fascism.” Having declared democracy “a joke,” the master of horror claims that “by 1932 the actual achievements of Russia” had refuted “[t]he old sophistry of the capitalist ‘that effective production and distribution could not exist without the profit motive.’”

Naturally, Lovecraft was wrong. By the 1950s, as philosopher Steven Hicks mentions, the data on the USSR’s agricultural production showed little to no growth. Simply put, communism doesn’t work.

Still, to gloat that Lovecraft became a “socialist” isn’t logically sound. Firstly, the man’s intellectual journey underscores the deeply elitist nature of the Woodrow Wilson–esque tradition of big government. And secondly, although socialism was already foolish when Lovecraft adopted it, it was less obviously harmful then, with less evidence of its consequences available. Even the disasters of Soviet rule were more difficult to discern. Lovecraft’s 1933 essay was, after all, written the year after Walter Duranty received his infamous Pulitzer Prize after penning articles that whitewashed conditions in the USSR.

So perhaps we can cut Lovecraft some slack for his naïve socialism. By contrast, other political ideas of his have aged remarkably well.

Lovecraft on Islam

In a 2015 speech met with predictable outrage, Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price argued that the horror writer foresaw “the ineluctable advance of the hordes of non-Western anti-rationalism.” This, he adds, is currently manifested in both “the bloodlust of jihadism” and the “affirmative action epistemology” that rejects things like logic on the grounds that they were created by white men.

Price points to Lovecraft’s short story The Horror at Red Hook as having predicted occurrences of this nature. Indeed, that narrative depicts a community of unassimilated Middle Eastern immigrants who perform demonic rites in the heart of New York City. The group in question is “eloquently repudiated by the great mass of Syrians,” a caveat which suggests that Lovecraft’s motivation included genuine concern about foreign beliefs, not merely racial xenophobia.

That said, of course, Lovecraft is famous for his detestation of foreigners, and while his ideas in this domain are not palatable to most of our modern sensibilities, it doesn’t mean that all of his ideas don’t stand the test of time. For example, Lovecraft cautions against ideological subversion by ill-intentioned immigrants in The Street, where the imported ideology is communism.

Another staple of Lovecraft’s fiction is esoteric cults that worship evil otherworldly beings. Notably, the main text in which the beliefs of Lovecraft’s cultists are set down is the Necronomicon, a book based on revelations received by its Arab author. The resemblance to the Quran is obvious.

Literary scholar Ian Almond highlights a passage from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward wherein one character picks up “a fine volume conspicuously labelled as the Qanoon-e’-Islam,” only to discover that it is really the Necronomicon. Note the symbolism: “Inside one Islam,” explains Almond, “Lovecraft’s Englishman finds another,” namely “a darker [one] lying much closer to madness and monstrosity.”

In another story, Lovecraft may not have been thinking of Islam itself, but nonetheless touched on something relevant to the subject. In The Whisperer in Darkness, extraterrestrials have colonized a remote part of Vermont, infiltrating the surrounding society by means of human collaborators. The protagonist, Albert Wilmarth, learns of the alien invasion through his correspondence with local scholar Henry Akeley, who has been fighting the intruders off. Suddenly, Akeley’s letters begin to state that the aliens are benevolent and misunderstood and that he has befriended them. Yet this turns out to be a ruse: The invaders have abducted Akeley and have been communicating with Wilmarth in Akeley’s name.

Price spells out the moral of this tale:

It’s like people today that say, ‘Oh, there’s no problem with Islamofascism—we’re the problem! These people are merely misunderstood.’ Nah, you’re wrong, and you better hope you don’t pay with your life for this stupidity.

If you believe Akeley’s change of heart is genuine, he adds, “you’re being set up.” Perhaps Lovecraft hoped that by setting his readers up in this way, he could inoculate them against similar propaganda in the real world.

Lovecraft’s hostility to Islam was likely well-informed. The dour litterateur studied various religious traditions in depth. Thus, Almond contends that Lovecraft’s tale Through the Gates of the Silver Key, co-authored with E. Hoffmann Price, incorporates many ideas—and even specific terms—taken from Sufism (Islamic mysticism).

Lovecraft as a Reactionary

Lovecraft’s sensitivity to the threat of foreign ideological subversion was part of a broader concern for national security. Even during his socialist days, the fearful fabulist imagined that under his desired political system, “an army and navy of great strength would be rigorously maintained—perhaps through universal training.” He was hardly Pollyannaish about the likelihood of lasting peace: “The sober philosopher,” he wrote, “perceives in war a phenomenon eminently natural and absolutely inevitable.”

Lovecraft’s views on the matter were, of course, shaped by World War I. And more than anything else, Lovecraft’s social thought seems to revolve around staving off threats to civilization. Even in his articles advocating for big government, one of his major arguments was that if state power were not used to provide for the poor, there could be a Soviet-style revolution. Despite his partial praise of the USSR, that was a prospect he found terrifying.

In a similar vein, Houellebecq opines that any writer who worked with Lovecraft’s subject-matter would likely be a reactionary like him, because he would be acutely aware of the existence of evil.

And reactionary Lovecraft certainly was, often in an anti-commercialist way. Lovecraft’s displeasure with capitalism arose partly from what he saw as its cheapening and corrupting effects on the national culture. “The dominantly commercial civilisation of boom times,” as he puts it, “was itself an anti-cultural influence.”

Lovecraft’s lifelong authoritarianism and uncurbed snobbery led him to erroneous economic conclusions, and his personal failure to find employment likely reinforced his disillusionment with private enterprise. Perhaps his infatuation with the 18th century played into his distaste for industrial capitalism, which had been more broadly accepted during the 19th.

Still, his thinking was thoroughly in line with the earlier predominant frame of mind, which historian Jerry Z. Muller terms the “civic republican” one—a view of politics that emphasized, above all, the polity’s stability, security, and cohesion. In this regard, Lovecraft’s insights remain valuable.

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Image credit: public domain (Lovecraft headshot)