Translator's note: What follows is a selection I made from Alain de Benoist’s responses to an interview on the French Right that appeared in the quarterly review Éléments at the end of 2005 (#118). Benoist talks both about “the Right,” which refers to all the individuals and movements right of center, including the mainstream Right, and the “real Right,” which in an Anglo-Saxon context would be called the “Old Right.” The failure of the mainstream Right is well-known, and often commented on. But the failure of the “Old Right” is more difficult to deal with, as the men concerned (one thinks of Enoch Powell in Britain or Robert A. Taft in America) were most of the time well-meaning, courageous men, yet they failed. I removed most of the references to French history so as to make it understandable to a Pan-Western audience. Benoist's arguments are not without flaws — far from it. His call to go beyond Left and Right is contradicted by the fact that he goes far to the Left in this interview. But I believe this aspect is secondary. This text, thanks to a remarkable psychological analysis of the “right-wing mind,” is first and foremost a way for us to question our own way of thinking, thus making us more “fit and brisk” for the battle of ideas. It is the ideal complement to William Pierce’s “Why conservatives can’t win.”
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The Right has never been fond of
intellectuals. Little wonder then that the phrase “left-wing intellectual” has
for a long time been a tautology. For many right-wing people, intellectuals are
just unbearable. They visualize them sitting on a chaise longue, of course, and view them as
“sanctimonious types” who sodomize flies, split hairs and publish books
invariably described as “indigestible” and “boring.”
This idea is to be found in very different backgrounds. For libertarians, intellectuals are inevitably “disconnected from reality.” For activists, intellectuals quibble while we face a “state of emergency” demanding action.
This idea is to be found in very different backgrounds. For libertarians, intellectuals are inevitably “disconnected from reality.” For activists, intellectuals quibble while we face a “state of emergency” demanding action.
I have heard things like this my entire life.
Granted, there’s a positive side to this attitude. Right-wingers show a real
concern for concrete facts, a genuine wariness of useless abstractions or pure
intellect, a desire to assert the precedence of the soul over the spirit, of
the organic over theoretical “dryness,” the hope (always disillusioned) to go
back to a simpler life, etc.
The Right is more sensitive to human qualities
than to intellectual capacities. It likes to admire more than to understand. It
asks for examples more than for lessons. It likes style, gesture, and panache.
And it is not wrong in doing so. A society entirely made up of intellectuals
would be unbearable.
But the problem is that when this attitude is
systematized, it leads to the avoidance of any doctrine, to the rejection of
any work of the mind.
The intellectual can be defined as the person
who tries to understand and make others understand. The Right, very often,
doesn’t try to understand anymore. It ignores what the work of the mind can
accomplish. The result is that right-wing culture has today almost entirely
vanished. It only survives in restricted circles, marginal publishing houses,
and newspapers that only rightists believe are actual newspapers. The ostracism
that it has suffered is not the only factor in this.
One can only be struck by the way the Right
lost the habit of intervening in intellectual debates. If one takes the hundred
books that have been discussed the most over the last half-century, one
realizes that the Right hasn’t published a single review of these. It doesn’t
interest the Right or concern it. The Right is uninterested in any author
outside its landmarks. It doesn’t discuss or refute any of them.
On the dialectic of modernity, the evolution
of the social dimension, the forces behind mercantile logic, and symbolic
Imaginary, the Right has nothing to say. Why wonder, then, that it has been
unable to formulate a critique of technoscience, a theory of localism or of
social connection, a philosophy of ecology, or an anthropology of its own? It
is simply unable to do that anymore. There have always been hundreds of
theoretical debates on the Left, some insignificant, others very deep. Who can
cite one single intellectual debate that has marked the history of the Right in
the last half a century? On the Right, as far as thought is concerned, it
resembles the Tartar Steppes or a flat-lining encephalogram signal.
Most right-wing people substitute convictions
for ideas. Ideas can of course engender convictions, and convictions stem from
ideas, but the two terms are different. Convictions are things in which one
believes and which, because they are the objects of a belief, cannot undergo
any critical examination. Convictions are an existential substitute for faith.
They help living without the need for one to question their logical structure,
their value relative to various contexts, or their limitations. Right-wing
people make it a point of honor to defend their convictions in the manner of
bible study.
The Right likes answers more than questions,
especially if these are pat answers that abnegate the need for a philosophical
outlook, as one cannot philosophize when the answer is preconceived. The work
of the mind requires the learning of one’s mistakes. The right-wing attitude is
rather to avoid considering its mistakes, and thus it never tries to correct
these so as to go further; hence the absence of self-criticism and debate.
Self-criticism is seen as a weakness, a useless concession, if not a betrayal.
Right-wing people flatter themselves that they “regret nothing,” including the
errors they have made. Debate, because it implies a contradiction, an exchange
of arguments, is generally seen as an aggression, as something that one does
not do.
The right-wing man proceeds with enthusiasm or
indignation, with admiration or disgust, but not with reflection. Instead he is
reactive; hence his almost always emotional reaction to events. What is
striking is his naïve, if not puerile way of reacting, of always contenting
himself with the upper layer of things, with the news anecdote, of taking a
narrow point of view on everything, without ever going deeply to the causes.
When you show them the Moon, many right-wing people look at the finger. History
then becomes incomprehensible — what on Earth is Providence
doing? — even if right-wing people constantly refer to it. Hence
simplistic conspiracy theories, which can lead to real lunacies, abound. Social
problems are always explained by shady manipulations of an “invisible
conspiracy,” a “dark alliance,” etc.
As the Right is very little interested in
ideas, it tends to bring everything back to people. Right-wing political
movements are first and foremost associated with their founders, and rarely
survive them. Right-wing quarrels are chiefly quarrels of individuals, with
basically the same gossip, and the same slanderous accusations. In the same
way, its enemies are never systems or even genuine ideas, but human categories
presented as scapegoats (Jews, “metics,” “bankers,” freemasons, foreigners,
“Trotskyites,” immigrants, etc.). The Right has a hard time apprehending a
system devoid of a subject: the systemic effects of the logic of Capital, the
constraints of structure, the genesis of individualism, the vital importance of
the environmental threats, the forces unleashed by technology, etc. The Right
doesn’t understand that men have to be fought, not for what they are, but in so
far as they embody and defend harmful systems of thought or values. By
preferring to take it out on individuals, disliked for what they are, the Right
veers towards xenophobia or something even worse.
The Right has been the great vanquished of
history. It has virtually lost every struggle it has engaged in. The history of
the last two centuries for the Right has been one of continuous defeat. Such a
succession of failures suggests that the superiority of its adversaries is
merely based on the Right’s own weaknesses.
In the beginning, what was the best that the
Right had to offer? I would briefly say: an anti-individualist and
anti-utilitarian system of thought, together with an ethic of honor, inherited
from the Ancient Regime. Thus it was opposing head-on the ideology of the
Enlightenment, whose driving forces were individualism, rationalism,
self-evident individual interests, and the belief in progress. The values that
the Right claimed were aristocratic and popular at the same time. Its historic
mission was to fulfill the natural union of the aristocracy and the people
against their common enemy: the bourgeoisie, whose class values were precisely
legitimized by Enlightenment thought. But this union was fulfilled only during
very brief periods.
For the Right, Man is naturally social.
However, it never forged its own consistent theory to explain community or
social connectedness. Nor did it seriously explore opposition to the ideal
liberal types, the autonomous individual and the “social man.” It has never
been able to formulate a genuinely alternative economic doctrine to the
mercantile system, either.
Instead of supporting the workers’ movement
and nascent socialism, which represented a healthy reaction against
individualism that the Right was also criticizing, it all too often defended
the most dreadful human exploitation and the most unjustifiable political
inequalities. It sided with the wealthy, objectively participating in the class
struggle of the bourgeoisie against the would-be “redistributors” and the
“dangerous classes.”
There were exceptions, though rare ones. The
Right’s theoreticians were more often led by their audience
than leading it. Defending the nation, the Right rarely
understood that the nation is above all else the people. She forgot the natural
complementariness of aristocratic and popular values. When the workers’ right
to an annual holiday break was passed into law, the Right railed against the
“vacation culture.” It always preferred order to justice, without understanding
that injustice is a supreme form of disorder, and that order itself is very
often nothing but an established disorder.
The Right could have developed a philosophy of
history founded on cultural diversity and the need to acknowledge its universal
value, which would have led it to support the struggles in favor of autonomy
and liberty in the Third World, whose peoples were prime victims of the
ideology of progress. Instead of that, the Right ended up defending the
colonialism that it had once condemned, while complaining about being colonized
in turn.
The Right forgot that its only true enemy is
Money. It should have considered everything opposing the system of money as its
objective ally. Instead it gradually joined the other side. The Right was
better equipped than any other force to reframe the anti-utilitarian values of
generosity and selflessness, and to defend them. But, little by little, the
Right acceded to the logic of interest and the defense of the market. At the
same time, it fell in line with militarism and nationalism, which is nothing
but collective individualism, something that the first counter-revolutionaries
had condemned as such.
Nationalism led the Right to the metaphysics
of subjectivity, this illness of the spirit, systematized by the Moderns. This
estranged the Right from the notion of truth. It should have been the party of
generosity, of “common decency” [1], of organic communities; but it all too often became the party of exclusion, of
collective selfishness, and resentment. In short, the Right betrayed itself
when it began accepting individualism, bourgeois lifestyles, the logic of
money, and the model of the market.
Christian Socialism occasionally played a
useful role, but it chiefly fell under paternalism. The social achievements of
the “fascisms” were discredited by their authoritarianism, their militarism,
and their aggressive nationalism. Corporatism led to nothing. Revolutionary
syndicalism was killed by the “Fordist compromise,” which resulted in the
integration of larger and larger parts of the working class into the bourgeois
middle class. Most importantly, this kind of concern was never associated with
a deep analysis of Capital. The condemnation of “Big Money” is insignificant
when it refrains from analyzing the very nature of money and the
anthropological impact of a generalized market system, with its reification of
social relations and its effects of alienation.
As for the “Real Right,” it hasn’t ceased
marginalizing itself and wasting away. More and more oblivious of its own past,
all of its implicit system of thought can be summed up in a single phrase: “It
was better before” — whether this “before” refers to the thirties, the
Ancient Regime, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages or Ancient History.
This conviction, even when it is occasionally
correct, nurtures an attitude that is either restorationist, which condemns it
to failure, or purely nostalgic. In each case, the “Real Right” contents itself
with opposing the real world with an idealized and fantasized past: the fantasy
of the origin, the fantasy of a bygone age, and the irrepressible nostalgia of
an original matrix revealing the incapacity to reach adulthood.
The aim is to try to conserve, preserve, slow,
or hold back the course of events, with no clear consciousness of the
inevitable historical sequence of events. The great hope is to reproduce the
past, to go backward to the time when everything was so much better. But, as it
is quite obviously impossible, the “Real Right” settles for an ethical attitude
in order to make a statement. Politically, this “Real Right” has no more telos of
its own to fulfill, as all its models belong to the past. It has reached a
point where it doesn’t even know clearly the type of political regime that it
would like to establish.
History becomes a shelter: idealized,
reconstructed in a selective way, and more or less fantastical. History
provides the reassuring feeling of having a stable “heritage,” of bearing
significant examples that the Right can oppose to the horrors of present times.
History is supposed to give “lessons,” although one never really knows what
they are. The Right has not understood that History, which it reveres so much,
can also be crippling. When Nietzsche says that “The future belongs to those
with the longest memory,” what he means is that Modernity will be so
overburdened by memory that it will become impotent. That’s why he calls for
the “innocence” of a new beginning, which partly entails oblivion. People never
have a greater hunger for history than when they are incapable of making it,
and when history is happening without them or against them.
Hostile to innovation, the “Real Right” is
unable to analyze the unseen situations of the future with its obsolete
conceptual tools. It judges everything according to the world it once knew,
which was familiar and thus reassuring, and confuses the end of this world with
the end of the actual world. It faces the future with its eye in the rear-view
mirror. The Right is unable to analyze historic events, to step back from the
consequences and examine distant causes. It cannot establish the genealogy of
the phenomena it deplores, nor detect the fault lines of post-modernity. It
cannot understand anything in the current world any longer, the evolution of
which it dismisses as an endless “decadence.”
The fact that it has constantly been
vanquished often elicits a peculiar mix of meticulous irony, emphatic derision,
bitterness, and conniving snicker, so typical of the long reactionary lament.
It also presents the mediocre apocalyptic motto “We are doomed!” With such a
vision, we are always in “a state of emergency,” it’s always “one minute to
midnight.” Before the “catastrophes” which face us, we are waiting for a
“surge,” an “awakening.” The “silent majority”, the “real country” is being
summoned. But all of this had already been said in 1895. During all this time,
history has nevertheless kept going.
The most distinctive feature of the “Real
Right” is a political and moral narcissism, founded on an immutable worldview,
with two sides (us the good, them the evil), which is a simple projection of a
fault line inside any of us. This dichotomy of “Us vs. the Others,” given as the
explaining factor for everything, comes actually under this metaphysics of
subjectivity that I have already mentioned, which legitimizes all forms of
selfishness and exclusion. The Right talks a great deal about defending its
“identity,” but it generally has a hard time defining this. Most of the time,
its identity is about not being what it condemns. It is the
existence of its enemies that defines the Right’s own existence, a negative
existence, a contrario. The Right’s marginalization nurtures an
obsidional mentality, which in turn sharpens its rejection of the Other.
There’s something Cathar-like
in this obsidionalism: the world is bad, let’s close the ranks of the “last
square.” The titles of the Right’s bedside books are also telling: by the
accursed, the heretics, the reprobates, the nostalgics, The Camp of the
Saints; in short, the Last of the Mohicans. In a world of tribes,
for which it has no sympathy, the “Real Right” is nothing more than a tribe of
survivors, which lives in connivance and isolation. It has rites and passwords
of its own, slogans and resentment, and every day sees itself being more and
more isolated from an “outside” world that it rejects and demonizes, with no
possibility of changing the course of events. What is left for it is to
commemorate its own defeats, which it does with such perseverance that one is
forced to wonder whether it secretly cherishes these defeats, as defeats are
always more “heroic” than victories.
The Right has never prioritized the struggle
against the system of money, which was its main enemy. First it fought against
the Republic at a time when it had become obvious that a monarchy of divine
right would never come back. After 1871, the Right devoted itself to the
condemnation of the “Boches” (and even the “Judeo-Boches”), which led it, in
the name of the “Sacred Union,” to legitimize the atrocious carnage of 1914-18,
which engendered all the horrors of the 20th century. In the aftermath of the
First World War, it committed itself to the fight against Communism and its
“pagan savagery” (as Marshall Pétain expressed it). At the time of the Cold
War, for fear of this same Communism, which it should have considered as a
rival rather than as an enemy, the Right sided with the “free world,” thus
giving its blessing to the American hegemony, the power of the bourgeoisie and
the worldwide supremacy of predatory liberalism — as if the horrors of the
Gulag justified the abominations of the mercantile system. This led the Right
to support “Atlanticism,” to approve of the slaughter of the Vietnamese people,
to show solidarity with the most pathetic dictatorships, from the Greek
colonels and the Argentinean generals to Pinochet and his “Chicago Boys”[2],
not to mention the torturers of Operation Condor, specializing in the
assassinations of “subversivos” who were mostly only asking for more
social justice. When the Soviet system collapsed, making globalization
possible, immigrants providentially took over the statutory role of the
“threat.” Conflating immigrants with Islam, then Islam with Islamism,
eventually Islamism with terrorism, she now does that again with Islamophobia,
a truly suicidal approach, and, what is more, absolutely inconsistent from a
geopolitical perspective.
The “Real Right,” at the end of the day, is
fundamentally unpolitical. The very essence of politics is foreign
to it. In fact it confuses politics with ethics, the same way the Left
conflates politics with morals. The Right believes that politics is a matter of
honor, of courage, of sacrificial virtues, of heroism, that is to say, in the
best case, of military qualities. It sees politics as the continuation
of war by other means, which totally reverses Clausewitz’s aphorism. It
doesn’t understand that politics is only an occupation, an art, something that
aims to carefully define the best but not the ideal way
of serving the common good — a good, by the way, that can’t simply be
shared out. It doesn’t understand that politics is a way to arbitrate between
contradictory aspirations stemming from human nature, to arbitrate between the
needs of civic coexistence and the necessities of self-interest.
As for me, it has been more than a quarter of
a century since I stopped considering myself belonging to any family of the
Right, and since I stopped showing solidarity with it. There’s no mystery here:
I have said it and written it many times. But for all that, I don’t consider
that the Right is an uninteresting subject. Nor do I think that it is a
despicable subject. When I criticize it — and I always hesitate before
criticizing it, both because it is not fitting to shoot at such an easy target
and because I don’t want to get involved with the mob — I am forced
to generalize, and when one generalizes, one always risks being unfair. But I
don’t ignore its merits. In the same way that its qualities have shortcomings,
its shortcomings also have qualities. On many occasions, the Right was (and
remains) admirable for its courage, its persistence, and its spirit of
sacrifice. All these qualities, yet they have achieved such meager results!
I’ll add that I don’t recognize myself as
belonging to any family of the current Left, which spares me the desire of
wanting to be “admitted.” One can undoubtedly define me as a “left-wing
right-winger,” or a man who has left-wing ideas and right-wing values. It
allows me to agree equally well with left-wing men and with right-wing men
every time they assert ideas that I consider fair. But, actually, I haven’t
cared about labels for a long time.
I care all the less, since the Left-Right duo
gets more and more ineffective as an analytic tool. What is the “right-wing
position” on the American occupation of Iraq, and what is the “left-wing
position?” There is simply none: on the Right as on the Left, this occupation
has opponents and supporters. It is the same for all the problems of our times:
European integration, geopolitics, ecology, the coming oil crisis, etc. The
only thing that matters is what people think of a precise question, no matter
how they position themselves (or refuse to) on the traditional political
spectrum.
