The Real Right? Part II

New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe
by Michael O’Meara
Bloomington, Ind.: 1stBooks, 2004

For Part I, click here.

. . .  The New Right itself in recent years has moved away not only from its early attraction to a biological view of human nature and society but also from its opposition to multiculturalism, if not to immigration as well.  The earlier position, as O’Meara explains, offered a firm rejection of multiculturalism:

In contrast to liberalism’s homogenized world of fractured cultures and peoples, New Rightists advocate a heterogenous world of homogenous peoples, each rooted in their own culture and soil. Every people, they claim, has a droit à la différence: that is, the right to pursue their destiny in accord with the organic dictates of their own identity. They see, moreover, no convincing reason why Europeans should feel obliged to abandon their millennial heritage for the sake of a dubious cosmopolitan fashion. (p. 77)

But the new position has changed course radically.

Recently, however, GRECE’s opposition to multiculturalism has undergone a significant shift. Until 1998, it consistently opposed multiculturalist efforts to recognize immigrant communities as separate legal entities, for it claimed these efforts threatened the integrity of French identity. Then, rather unexpectedly, it reversed course, adopting a “communitarian” position favoring the public recognition of non-French communities—so that immigrants could be able to “keep alive the structures of their collective cultural existence.” To some, this shift constitutes nothing less than an identitarian betrayal, for others a recognition that Europe’s enemy is not the immigrant per se, but the system responsible for immigration. (p. 77)

The shift was not without controversy, with New Rightists like Guillaume Faye and others rejecting it. As O’Meara comments:

When Grécistes first sloganized the droit à la différence, they sought to rebuff liberal efforts to stigmatize European identitarianism as a form of racism. At a certain point, however, its defense of cultural/ethnic difference took on a life of its own . . . This eventually led to a qualified form of multiculturalism, as the GRECE reversed much of its earlier argumentation and joined the liberal chorus demanding the institutional recognition of the immigrants’ cultural identity. The problem with its metapolitics, however, did not end here, for its defense of European identity has consistently been waged on the Left’s cosmopolitan terrain—in that it fought not for the primacy of their own people, but for the application of pluralistic standards to support Europeans in the defense of their heritage . . . . Le droit à la différence ended up, then, parroting the ideology of liberal pluralist society and its relativist values. Needless to add, this augurs badly for the future of the GRECE’s identitarianism, for it now tacitly acknowledges the right of non-Europeans to occupy and partition European lands. (pp. 77-78)

Interestingly the same trend and its implications appear on the American hard right, as advocates of territorial secessionism and proponents of “Euro-American” identity present themselves not as the rightful heirs of the European civilization in North America but merely as one more chip in the multiculturalist mosaic demanding (or in the case of the right, begging for) recognition. One would have thought that French intellectuals intimate with Gramsci and Nietzsche would have avoided this trap.

The withering of the New Right’s opposition to multiculturalism is one of the major flaws of the movement from the perspective of the American right. Two other problems that most Americans will find troublesome are the French Rightists’ anti-Christianism and their anti-Americanism. Actually, both positions have a good deal to be said for them, but both are also problematical.

The New Right’s distaste for Christianity owes little to the conventional rationalist and secularist critique associated with figures like Bertrand Russell and T. H. Huxley and far more to the ancient pagan criticisms of Christianity before its acquisition of power under Constantine. The New Right argues that Christianity, and more generally monotheism itself in the forms of Judaism and Islam, have been destructive forces that have spawned intolerance, dogmatism, and a narrow-minded dualism in the European mentality and have authorized massive persecutions, exterminations, and cultural genocide of its victims.  Christianity did not emerge from the European folk tradition and identity but was adopted as a theological construct shaped by its Semitic origins and its underclass adherents and was then imposed by the state and the church, often through repression of its rivals and critics. Only through a long process of “Germanization” (O’Meara here cites James Russell’s The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity) or “Aryanization” did early Christianity become at all compatible with European identity. New Rightists share Nietzsche’s critique that Christianity represented a slave revolt against the aristocratic paganism of ancient Europe and under the sway of its otherworldly and universalist beliefs rejected “national and cultural particularisms” and promoted the destruction and amalgamation of distinct peoples. They argue that by substituting its “logos” for the ancient pagan view of nature as suffused with many divinities and supernatural beings Christianity “desacralized” nature and prepared the way for the advent of modern rationalism and the secularized depredations of modern capitalism and mass democracy.

For nearly fifteen centuries Christianity dominated the continent. In disenchanting the world, associating faith with reason, and fostering individual subjectivity, Benoist claims it prepared the present “eclipse of the sacred.” As a result, Europeans now lack the spiritual references—the transcendent certainties—that once inspired them, for a post-Christian world, in which science or liberal ideology has been substituted for the church’s discredited teachings, is a world that knows only life’s material properties and the existential groundlessness that dooms the individual to impotence. Spiritually adrift, Europeans seem to have dissipated even their instinct for survival, as ethnomasochism becomes foremost in their hierarchy of values and effeminacy renders them defenseless before larger dangers. Faced with the nihilism born of this void, New Rightists call for “a return to ourselves”—and to the primal sources of their heritage—advocated not for the sake of some pre-Christian Golden Age, but as a means of reviving the European project—and hence Europe’s will to power. (p. 98)

It has to be said that there is a good deal of truth in much of the New Right’s attack on Christianity, especially as Christianity appears today, whether on the political left or the political right, with its support for an egalitarianism and universalism that reject race and nation in general and the historic European (especially pre-Christian) identity in particular.  Nevertheless, the New Right’s critique is also somewhat overdrawn, as O’Meara notes in his last chapter, which offers a critique of the New Right itself. Christianity, whatever its origins in the Near East and the deracinated proletariat of the late Roman Empire, was in fact “Germanized,” as Russell argues, assimilated itself to much of the heritage of Europe, and played a major role in creating the European civilization we have known since the early Middle Ages, including its art, music, philosophy, and even science. It is simply vacuous to claim that the actual Christianity of history displays the character Benoist describes. In any case, Christianity has been the religious identity of European man for some two thousand years, and to argue, as the New Right does, for the resuscitation of paganism as the “real” tradition of Europe is simply a posture, even if it is not intended literally.

In appealing to the pagan heritage, New Rightists do not actually seek a restoration of ancient pagan practices, just as they distance themselves from New Age pagans, whose eclectic mix of ancient cults and postmodern hedonism are no less anti-identitarian than the Christian/modernist practices they oppose. Instead, their paganism strives to resuscitate Europe’s ancestral concept of the cosmos, its classical ethical principles, its notion of time and history, and its affirmation of community. It thus affirms the integrity of the European project and “all the inscrutable creative powers manifested in their nature,” rejecting, in the process, a misanthropic religious conception that leaves man begging forgiveness from a god forged in the image of a Near Eastern despot. Above all, the New Right’s paganism aims at transvaluing the Judeo-Christian values that have inverted all that is strong and noble in their heritage. (p. 99)

Christianity today is virtually extinct, at least in Europe among real Europeans, and it is not that much more alive in America, which is why American churches are so zealous in their support for a mass immigration that replenishes the stock of an institution whites have abandoned. But apart from the pop paganism of the New Age cults, there is no real sign of a revival of a serious paganism of the kind the New Right talks about at either the popular or higher levels of culture. Whatever the merits of its critique of Christianity, the New Right’s neo-paganism seems to have born little fruit.

New Right paganism looks to the studies of Indo-European mythology and social structure of the late Georges Dumézil and invokes “mythos” as a pagan counterpart to the Christian “logos.”  The latter, as O’Meara acknowledges, may

be a more logically, analytically, and clearly developed form of thought, but cognitively it is not superior to mythos and often less suggestive and encompassing. More important still, logos—especially in its modern form—empties the world of those mythic truths that once constituted the essence of the European project. Against this “disenchantment,” which leaves the European powerless before the great challenges threatening him, a revival of Europe’s mythic heritage holds out the prospect that the true sources of his being might be recovered and the European project reborn. (p. 102)

Just as problematic as its hostility to Christianity, at least for many on the American right, is the French New Right’s outright hatred of America itself. While the New Right is surely correct that both contemporary “mainstream” (and even “conservative”) Christianity and the hegemonic forces of contemporary America are the enemies of European Man, it insists on pushing its critique of them far beyond contemporary manifestations.

In the case of America, its critique is not confined simply to the modern post–World War II managerial regime in which state, corporation, and mass culture coalesce to dominate and deracinate the world as well as traditional American culture, but extends to America as it originated and developed. In the New Right’s view, the current American regime is merely the logical and natural extension of America as it was founded and is the most complete expression of modernity itself.

The New Right’s critique of America is in fact a mirror image of what the left thinks about it or would like America to be—the “proposition country,” “creedal nation,” or “first universal nation” of liberal and neo-conservative folklore. Pointing to the millennialist and utopian language of the early Puritans in New England, the egalitarian and universalist slogans of the Declaration of Independence, and the anti-European fulminations of Mark Twain and other progressivists in American history and culture, the New Right claims that this and the political and economic system reflecting it are all that exists in America. As such, it regards this country as the main enemy of European Man and his tradition and identity (as well as of the Third World peoples whose cause the New Right increasingly seems to champion).

As an anti-Europe, the United States represents the preeminent exemplar of liberal modernity. Nowhere else, the Grécistes argue, were the Enlightenment principles—of equality, rationality, universalism, individuality, economism, and developmentalism—more thoroughly realized than in this new land “liberated from the dead hand of the European past.” The country’s constitutional Framers, it follows, were steeped in eighteenth-century liberalism—which “blended with the earlier ecclesiastical culture of New England” (Carl Bridenbaugh) and later with the Emersonian ideals of individualism. This led them to adopt a political system whose ideological underpinnings rested on rationalist abstractions exalting the individual rather than the history and traditions of its people. The federal state was thus conceived not as an instrument of its people’s destiny—nationality in the European sense did not exist in America—but as a cosmopolis, potentially open to all humanity.

Contrary to the contention of certain paleo-conservatives, as well as the arguments of those historians associated with the school of “civic republicanism,” this propositional notion of the American state was not the invention of latter-day Jacobins, of whom William J. Clinton and George W. Bush are the descendants, but inherent to the country’s original constitutional project. (p. 145)

The hostility of the New Right to America and its global hegemony leads it to sympathize with the Soviet Union, as O’Meara notes. “Given the nature of the existing geopolitical realities, the GRECE has long sympathized with Russia, even during the Cold War.” The sympathy was not due to any affiliation with Marxism but to the New Right’s belief that Marxism-Leninism penetrated into and deformed Russian society far less than liberal modernism permeates American and contemporary European society, that the Russians are an Indo-European people and thus share a racial and deep-cultural identity with Europe, and that their imperial identity is derived from what Rightists like to call “tellurocratic” (based on land power, like Sparta, Rome, and Germany) rather than “thalassocratic” (sea-based power, like that of Athens, Carthage, Britain, and America). Moreover, if Russia recovers economically, it would be capable of mounting political and military resistance to the global hegemony of American liberal modernism.

If European capital and know-how continue to penetrate eastward, contributing to Russia’s recovery, the ex-Soviet Union holds out the prospect of becoming a vast continental power, with an abundance of natural resources (especially oil), an immense reservoir of human talent, and a will to power. A Eurasian rapprochement (which is already occurring in numerous areas of trade, research, and development) would thus portent [sic] an empire of unparalleled immensity and a possible “staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution” . . . . It would not be at all “unnatural,” then, if European and Russian destinies should merge and an “Empire of the Sun” stretching across fourteen times zones, arise. (p. 193)

The New Right’s anti-Americanism is not confined to a political critique but extends also to American culture or what the critics claim passes for culture in this country. O’Meara cites a recent special issue of the New Right periodical Terre et peuple that ridiculed America as the “Planet of the Clowns,” taking “particular delight in emphasizing the absurdity of homo americanus.”

From that part of the population claiming to have been abducted by aliens, to creationist accounts of human origins, to a president claiming fellatio by a student aide ought not be considered a “sexual relation,” they have had a field day. (pp. 149-50)

Any number of responses to this line of criticism may be offered, and O’Meara, though he appears to be sympathetic to much of it (recapitulating the thesis of Jewish liberal historian Louis Hartz that America is a society founded on Lockean liberalism and has neither conservative institutions nor conservative ideas), offers a response himself in his final chapter, in which he quotes paleo-conservative historian Paul Gottfried’s perfectly accurate comments that the New Right view of America is in large part simply a caricature of the reality.

First, as for America being a pure product of the Enlightenment and the triumph of modernity, that is certainly true of the system that has prevailed in this country since the New Deal era and increasingly since the Civil War. But it is arguable (indeed, it is the paleo-conservative argument) that this dominant system is by no means the only or real American identity, an identity steeped in racial and tribal realities far more than most Europeans today are. (Pace the French Rightists, “the preeminent exemplar of liberal modernity” is not America but the French Revolution.) Some New Rightists seem to perceive this, however dimly, but their knowledge of the realities of American history appears to be thin. O’Meara in a footnote notes that much of American modernism was simply the result of the triumph of the Northern base in the Civil War. “By contrast, the American South, closer to the legacy of the English gentry than New England Puritanism, was far more European in character,” and “In a characteristic expression of anti-liberal disdain for the North’s ‘anti-culture,’ Maurice Bardèche describes Sheridan’s terrorist assault on Atlanta and the subsequent crushing of Southern civilization as nothing less than a ‘barbarian victory.’” (p. 158)

Bardèche is correct, of course, except that someone should explain to him that it was not Philip Sheridan but William T. Sherman who burned Atlanta (Sheridan did enough damage in the Shenandoah Valley)—facts that any American schoolchild would know. That Bardèche (and perhaps O’Meara, who fails to correct his error) does not know them suggests that much of the New Right sneering and snorting about America is really not much more than an affected European snobbery and resentment of a more successful and more powerful political order.

Moreover, despite the rhetorical and ideological dominance of American political forms by Enlightenment rationalism, the reality of American national political and social life is rather different. Americans, both their leaders and average citizens, love to boast of their egalitarianism but almost all of them live in racially homogeneous neighborhoods, attend racially homogeneous churches, and place their children in racially homogeneous schools. I have no disposition to defend creationism any more than I would claims of alien abductions, but the New Right might try to grasp that the Americans who embrace creationism are rejecting the Darwinian naturalism that the New Right itself claims to oppose.

What the New Right does not appear to understand is that despite the presence and increasingly the domination of the liberal modernism it despises in this country and the American rejection of specific European traditions, American society, like any human society, re-invents itself as a naturally hierarchical, cultic, racially conscious community. The great promise of American nationhood was neither that it might replicate and perpetuate the specific obsolete and irrelevant European manifestations of such natural human formations nor that it might escape from history and nature and recreate the egalitarian Eden or construct a utopian “city on a hill,” but that, having discarded many of the particular feudal, ecclesiastical, dynastic, and nationalistic distractions, deformities, and conflicts of old Europe, European Man could find in North America a more authentic destiny than the European baggage permitted. That hope remains possible of fulfillment even today, but it cannot be realized until the present managerial regime and its calculated annihilation of European Man domestically and abroad is dismantled. Only if the fundamental European character of the American nation is identified and championed can the regime be challenged at all either politically or culturally. The French New Right’s total and cartoonishly simplistic rejection of all American culture ab ovo renders any such effort impossible.

Indeed, it is difficult to see how the French New Right could mount any kind of effective opposition to modernity, given that it rejects almost every aspect of European society. The Christian view of man and society that shaped the classical conservatism that resisted the French Revolution and defended the eighteenth century dynastic states it rejects as bitterly as it does contemporary America. It also has come to affect a skepticism of the racial and sociobiological findings of recent science and of science as a whole. There appears to be no social or political group or force in modern European society with which it expresses any kinship or sympathy. It increasingly seems to ooze sympathy for the Third World invaders of Europe and the violently anti-Western states from which they come. And it regards the Soviet Union as preferable to the contemporary United States.

Since the collapse of American conservatism under Ronald Reagan and afterwards, there has been a desperate need for the emergence of a new identity for the right, both in Europe and America, a right that is less concerned with defending the “wisdom of our ancestors,” “the free market,” the Constitution, and similar bromides and is more interested in conserving a specific human group, its biological foundations, and its cultural extensions—in the case of Euro-American conservatism, European Man as a race and the heir and creator of a civilization, whether on the European or North American continents. There is increasing evidence that such a right is slowly beginning to emerge in the United States in the reactions against immigration and the invasion of Iraq, among other issues.

Much of what the French New Right has to offer in its philosophical critique of modernity and its defenses of the enduring legacies of ancient pre-Christian values and ideals is a valuable contribution to formulating the basis of such a right. The emerging American right (if it does or will exist) should pay more attention to what it has to say and would be well advised to emulate its intellectual depth and seriousness and to learn something from its “metapolitical” cultural war. Michael O’Meara’s book is by far the best and most comprehensive account of the thought of the French New Right now available in English, and there is far more in it than this review has been able to encompass (the influence of such thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola, René Guénon, Francis Parker Yockey, and others, for example), but as a whole the specifics of much of what the New Right is offering do not really speak to either the practical issues or the underlying philosophical and cultural problems that a real new right, in either the Europe or America of today and the future, requires.