Also, I don't just mean they are reactionary in certain area or in their personal life (Like Aristotle was important for biology despite being an apologies for slavery)?
I mean worth looking into their thinking precisely in areas where they're reactionary.
Possible suggestions (not saying they're justified) that I expect people would put forward include:
- Carl Scmitt
- Heidegger
I enjoyed Mishima Yukio when I was younger, almost as a morbid fascination/character study. As a non-western nationalist, he wasn't happy with American hegemony/occupation, including the use of Japan as a staging ground for the Korean War ("It was supposed to be our turn to bomb Korea"). Unlike the American conservatives I was used to, he had an actual culture to write about, so he could write florid prose about some aspect of Japanese culture and talk about how it's being destroyed by neoliberalism and it's a little bit more reasonable than the things the American right whines about (though it's important to remember that his cause was abhorrent and fascist).
A lot of his writing subverted my expectations of what the right could look like - though I encountered him before the Alt-Right was a thing. In some ways, I feel like he prepared me for the Alt-right. He was all about the Chad meme and bodybuilding and strong muscular men, he was (most likely) gay, and in one of his novels the protagonist cucks the imperial prince (despite Mishima's affection for imperial rule). A lot of the Milo Yiannopoulos-type bits and subversiveness and attempts at third-positionism were kinda like :seen-this-one:
Mishima's a really fantastic example because, as you say, he's got an actually very developed, sophisticated cultural background that he's working out of (despite people on here often getting on the Japan-hate bandwagon, which is politically correct but often culturally ignorant and quite chauvinistic), and he's a genuinely fantastic writer. He's also so weird as a fascist in terms of his contradictory personal life, beliefs and aesthetic tastes that I agree that it's difficult for me not to be morbidly fascinated in him at a minimum. Unlike the alt-right edgelords and cultureless USAmerican conservatives however, Mishima has actual culture and actually explores his disturbing topics in ways that are philosophically interesting.
The sad thing is that apparently his writing's poetic nature is so tied to Japanese that it's extremely difficult to convey what it's like to read him in the original.
I reconvinced myself of this by reading another book by him a few months, ago. I can't recall the title in English but the Italian one is 'Il sapore della gloria' (The Taste of Glory'; CW for extreme animal cruelty).
Like you note, a great example of fascist reaction against neoliberal capitalism under a military dictatorship.
Also: I wouldn't say that USAmericans have no culture, although alot of yank comrades like to get masochistic about it and claim so. It's just that most of the great US culture is not white (music first comes to mind, like Blues, Gospel, Jazz, Soul, Funk, Disco, House, Techno, Hip Hop..., but literature and painting too, like the Harlem Renaissance).