Supposing the grounds of human life shift beneath us even as the tectonic plates of the Earth’s surface, it is evident that from their long, slow subterranean movements a climacteric will now and then come, erupting forth in volcanoes and boiling geysers, rending gorges at our feet and rising mountain peaks before our astonished eyes. And just as with the geographical tectonic plates, the sluggish, centuries-long preparation of such catastrophes often renders us their complacent and unsuspecting victims. Yet strangely, it is often the foolish among us who are best preserved. They like the dumb beasts are somehow forewarned by some rumor; there is, as it were, a mood which descends upon their subtler sensibilities, alerting them to the chaos which is coming, to which precisely the clever and best-informed often remain numb.
The popular mood today takes precisely this character. Its instincts are stirring nervously as horses before a lightning bolt or bees before an earthquake. May be it errs; there are superficial fevers now and then which lead the masses astray. But there are valid reasons for taking this mood very seriously indeed — valid reasons for attempting to pierce the shell of this conventional politics, to see what might be moiling and muttering in the substrata. One wants only a fissure into which one may peek — and fortune would have it that a veritable chasm is opening before us today. For the conventional political right today seems everywhere to be splitting apart at the seams and drifting inexorably away from that political left to which it was only lately and seemingly indissolubly wed. One has but to consider the decline and confusion of the old right- and even center-leaning political parties throughout the West, togethoir with the rise of the so-called “populist right,” as represented by Donald Trump in America, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and numerous others yet. The evidence of the scope of these changes is everywhere to be seen. The old conventional right is slowly dispersing, disbanding, or being absorbed by its very antagonists of the left; something as of yet amorphous and anomalous is trying to arise in its place. The political right today is struggling vainly against its own fragmentation; it has entered a time of crisis, which crisis, for its gravity and extent, is probably parallel to the crisis afflicting the West as a whole. We might characterize that wider crisis thus: the modern era, of which we are all the late-born children, is about to end; “modernity” itself is coming to its close.
We enter the wider crisis through the narrower. We pose ourselves a more modest question now, which stands indeed nearer to us: what fate is come upon the political right today?
Now, “the right” does not refer to a political party. It is taken to represent one entire half of that famed “left-right political spectrum” which we contemporaries blithely presuppose in most of our political discourse. “The right” by this view can then be assumed to represent half of all possible political viewpoints to which any human being might subscribe. The right encompasses many parties, many movements, many individuals, ranging from centrist and moderate to “far-right” and extreme. Yet the familial grouping of parties as diverse as the American Republican Party, the French Front national, the UK Independence Party, and the Italian Lega Nord presupposes shared characteristics, values, “ideologies,” between them all. We are permitted then to ask, what is the common ground here? What is the political right?
The “left-right” political spectrum is not a classical schema: the ancients have no analogue for it. It originates in recent centuries, and in particular during the Enlightenment; it is a modern division through and through. It appears for the first time in our parlance and our writing in the bloody debut of Enlightenment politics, which came in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. One of its principal forefathers was an Irishman, one Edmund Burke, who, upon the overthrow of the French aristocracy in 1789, penned the argument against the revolutionary spirit which was then sweeping all of Europe. And in so doing, he inadvertently seeded a goodly portion of the political right as we know it today.
Burke himself traced the revolutionary fervor to modern origins. Defining his own position, he noted, “We are not the converts of Rousseau; we not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers.”1 It might be said then that the first act of the political right in this world was an act of defiant resistance to modernity, and to the unprecedented philosophical changes even then wracking the old European orders. This origin is reflected imperfectly in the fact that even today the right is associated with the reactionary. In some progressive circles (whose members are characterized no doubt by calm sagacity and philosophical impartiality) the right is taken to be coeval with reactionary tendencies as such: it is supposed that what defines the right as the right is its blind hostility to any and all change.
But let us, precisely in the original spirit of the right, tend a moment’s favor to caution. It were safer to say that the right is unified in all its parts by the spirit of conservatism, or the will to maintain some old or traditional order — by resistance to change, and by reverence rather than audacity. It ranges, we may say, from that doctrinaire and zealous loyalty to a specific regime — attitude which refuses to acknowledge any failing or fault in whatever is — to the simple and often wise awareness that it is safer to persist in small injustices, than to invite firebrand fanaticism into one’s house under the guise of “idealism.” The various manifestations of the right differ in what they would preserve — what state, what status quo, what epoch they regard as furnishing the standard; but they are at one in agreeing that they should preserve. Amidst all of its inner divergences and all its variants, the right maintains the conservative attitude.
And here we arrive at the first historical peculiarity of the right. The right, even in its initial act of defiant resistance, failed: for though not every nation of Europe bent its neck beneath the guillotine nor fell before the sanguine stampede of revolution, yet every nation of Europe sooner or later succumbed, by “politics” or powerplay, to the “spirit of ’89.” The French Revolution, quite against the honorable fulminations of Burke and his ilk, marks the political birthday of our age, after a long philosophical conception and gestation known as the humanistic Enlightenment. The political right was not so much an attempt to abort that birth, as it was the twin brother of the same.
For make no mistake, the right from the first adopted the liberal principles of the Enlightenment with but the most superficial qualifications. The entire force of its resistance to revolution, and more generally to the ideal of progress, relies on its constant contrast of the results of that ideal with the principles from which that ideal is supposedly derived. But those principles, and the critique which the right forges from them, are essentially modern. One has but to listen to Burke’s very denunciation of the French Revolution to hear one of the most lucid summations of our Enlightenment heritage ever spoke:2
Far am I from denying in theory; full as far is my heart from withholding in practice (if I were of power to give or to withhold) the real rights of men. [Perk up your ears, Reader: the real rights — of men!] In denying their false claims of right, I do not mean to injure those which are real, and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy. If civil society be made for the advantage of man [Be not fooled: our good Burke takes his bearings here from none other than Hobbes], all the advantages for which it is made becomes his right. It is an institution of beneficence [read: Locke]; and law itself is only beneficence acting by rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to justice. … They have a right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their industry fruitful [Locke, Smith]. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents [the ubiquitous Locke once again]; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life [enter Helvétius, Rousseau], and to consolation in death [sounds the fine laughter of Hume]. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor [Locke, Smith, Hume, Hobbes, Helvétius, Rousseau — the English, the French — all togethoir or each apart, quite as one pleases!].
Burke argued for “tradition” — but what tradition in all the world prior to modernity would ever have spoken like this? When did any pre-modern ever talk of rights at all, so far as “man” or “men” were concerned? And whenever did the exemplars of the grand old English aristocracy — not to look any farther afield — ever trouble themselves over “industry” or “acquisitions” or “a fair portion” of the “favors” of society? Burke’s “tradition” had already been tainted indelibly by the hues of Hobbes and Locke — not to speak of the mad tones of Rousseau. Burke’s “tradition” was already modern, already Enlightenment.
It is no wonder. The single valid alternative to the Enlightenment in those days — an alternative toward which the right honourable Burke sometimes tends yet without ever daring to arrive — was to castigate the entirety of the Enlightenment with the lash of true traditionalism, opposing a shamelessly illiberal past to the liberal project which even then had begun to take hold. No longer industry and the rights of man, but Crown and Cross or thyrsus and throne. Insofar as this attempt was made by Burke or others (one thinks immediately of Joseph de Maistre or the Marquis Donoso Cortés, for instance), it was overwhelmed by that epitomizing lust for the new which was spreading like brush fire throughout the West, evidently following some deep and universal affinity. Consistent, wholesale resistance cannot be taken as characteristic of the “right,” if this “right” is to be understood as a historically generalizable and politically effective phenomenon. All the moreso, as men of the rank of de Maistre or Cortés necessarily stood as much against the conservatism of men like Burke as against the zealous fervor of the revolutionaries; they belonged, not at all to the same worldview as Burke, but to a competing worldview — and very shortly we shall see why. The simple proof of this, however, is found in the fact that this radical conservatism, which ought to have been unwavering in its allegiances, today almost no longer exists as a political force. To say it again — not resistance to the Enlightenment, but hesitant acquiescence to it — qualified to be sure with caveats and a great deal of hemming and hawing — this is what generated our contemporary right, and paved the street upon which we to this day travel. Only now, for the first time since the time before the Great Wars, some of us begin to grow restless: for our feet begin to chaff against this asphalt “freeway,” and our eyes begin to glance about for other routes, higher vistas, further — destinations —
But it has been long, too long, that we go this way: the strictly “traditionalist” approach such as Maistre or Cortés might have desired is in a way no longer possible, no matter what some might hope — is not possible, at least, insofar as “tradition” is taken to indicate this or that concrete tradition. The centuries intervening between the pre-Enlightenment social orders of Old Europe and the unambiguously liberal societies of the present day have transformed the West fundamentally in countless respects; and “tradition” is a chain which once broken cannot be reforged. To name but perhaps the most incisive consequence of this: all hope of reestablishing the good old days of constitutionalism, of a decent and respectable and docile “Christian-Democratic spirit,” of republicanism broadly understood, in the countries of Europe, has effectively been rendered chimerical and vain by the natural unfolding of Enlightenment thought. In a very important sense, one cannot go back.
The conventional right has long divined the impossibility of fully turning back, not least of all because in its very soul it did not altogethoir want to return. But it has always been equally unprepared to forge ahead. And so it bargained on establishing a new tradition, the tradition of decent Enlightenment humanism. It hoped to use this “tradition,” which in those days was effectively a meeting point between past and present, to forestall all further change. This is the true meaning of that famous line from a famous latterday conservative, that the right “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” Such an attempt is of interest to us for two principal reasons: first, that we may comprehend how it failed; second, that we may better recognize how we came to this point, why the right begins now to crumble apart, and what might issue of its dissolution. It is of interest, that is to say, for our project on the one hand, and for our self-knowledge on the other.
Now, the right was given a choice from the beginning as to the manner of its protest in the times of ferment and fever after the American and French Revolutions. The specific forms of conservatism depended much on local and historical circumstances; and these divergences have since governed many of the varieties and conflicts perceptible in the right to this very day.
On the one hand, the conservative right could oppose humanism to ethos — ethos understood as the specific character of life of a people, its ways and aims, its religions and cults, its modes and mores (not unrelated to that which today is erroneously and offensively called “culture”). This form of conservatism had to identify the “conservative” humanistic values of the Enlightenment with the perfectly just and as-of-yet-unattained order of its society. Conservatism of this stamp arose particularly in lands which had little historical regard for “human rights,” such as Germany or Italy — lands which by their heritage resisted these novelties and retained aristocratic modes, and yet which were never overcome by open revolution as France had been. The problem with such an attitude on the part of conservatism is evident: conservatism in these lands acquired a distinctly “progressive,” in some cases even “revolutionary” flavor, for it was forced to establish the very order it proposed to conserve. For that reason, it failed to emerge as an independent constraining force to the flagrantly progressive mindset, and the result was a very weak political center and a very powerful political left. This is why Italy, for example, which was one of the last of the European countries to adopt a liberal society, was nonethoiless one of the first intellectual bastions of Enlightenment liberalism in all the world.3 This historical circumstance is visible to this day in the fact that the intellectual tradition of such countries remains predominately progressive. There is almost no analogy in Italy, for instance, to the American conservative intellectual tradition.
This original lack of a consolidated and moderate center-right is large part of what made the emergence of Fascism and National Socialism possible: in the absence of the right, a void was opened from which the so-called “extreme right” could easily profit. Ideas of ethnicity and ethnic instincts, which had been suppressed in the humanistic onslaught and aggravated by the artificial construct of the “nation-state,” could arise with a vengeance in the form of a new nationalism, counter the specter of communism. It would appear then that the political spectrum in such countries extremitized both to the left and to the right. Yet in truth Fascism and National Socialism cannot be adequately understood as pertaining to the conventional right, nor even having much to do with the older ultra-traditionalist forms. They were peculiarly contemporary novelties, planted on the conventional spectrum by habit, identified as “right” simply for their stringent opposition to communism, and for the fact that they occupied a place held in other countries by conservatism. But a cuckoo chick in a robin’s nest is no robin, and the genealogy of Fascism and National Socialism has little enough to do with the conventional right. Put generally, wherever the conventional right recedes, the extreme progressive left at once seizes up its abandoned territory — leaving at its flanks however long stretches of unconquered ground, ready for the claiming by new political orders which transcend, or subvert, the Enlightenment scheme.
Such was the fate of those countries in which the Enlightenment was mistrusted and held at bay from the first. In more “naturally” humanistic countries, a possibility opened to the right instead to identify humanism with ethos. In such cases, the principles, traditions, or founding orders of the countries in question were taken to be the historical expressions of the coming and inevitable Enlightenment victory. In older nations, a bit of legerdemain was required to reinterpret historical developments as tending toward the liberal state. Thus the English, to take the most noteworthy example of this kind of theorizing, adopted a peculiar historiography, favoring those documents and events — e.g., the Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution — which could be understood as foreshadowing classical liberalism. This required a retrospective reevaluation of English history, a labor which worked from the implicit or explicit presupposition that the entirety of that history was but progress toward the Enlightenment ideal. English history thus identified itself with liberal history; history itself was understood as but the gradual unfolding of an inexorable human progress. Just as religious men are wont to interpret all present and future events as being the fulfillment of past prophecies, so Whiggish historians perform the opposite acrobatics, interpreting the present liberal order as being a kind of prophecy in reverse which necessitates and justifies the past.
But if the conservative right wished to conserve anything at all in such countries, such historiography was by itself insufficient. The conservative right had also to define a given historical juncture as the culmination of Enlightenment principles, as the realization of the final or best order. Yet the Enlightenment principles, and all of history understood in their light, would appear to mandate the progressive attainment of an infinitely improvable liberal scheme. No clear moment of “final achievement” can ever be posited, for progress appears, in principle, to be undifferentiated and limitless. The conservative right in these countries could therefore little defend itself against accusations of inconsistency or obstructionism. The progressive left could easily claim that the conservative fixation with this or that historical plateau was simply an arbitrary act of resistance to all future progress — the inertia of stuffy, visionless reactionaries. While the conservatism of such countries was stabler and better established than that “conservatism” which almost failed to emerge at all in Germany and Italy before the World Wars, it was nonethoiless destined to relinquish its heart to the progressive left and to decline — as indeed we have lately seen in an unequivocal manner in countries like England, which practically have ceded their very spirits to the progressivist rot of our late modernity.
In certain special cases (classically in the United States of America) it was possible to identify the conservative ideal with the political and social origin of the country — with its constitution, taking this term not merely as a specific political document, but rather as an act of social and political cementing, as the constitution of a people, which albeit is necessarily accompanied by some physical sign of the “social compact.” This is conservatism in its purest incarnation, and it is a good deal of the reason why the American right has always been more moderate and more successful than most analogous European forms. The American conservative until very lately has always been able to cite the founding state of his nation as the object of his reverent affection; he has had the authority and example of the Founding Fathers, and their written documents, to which he might make constant reference, as to some immobile stone of Plymouth. This insulated the American right, rendering it at once sounder — and duller.
Yet even American conservatism has lost its moorings, thanks to the constant sophisticated efforts of the left to slander American origins as racist, classist, and jingoist. The left, with its keen social instinct, knows that the best way to undermine the right is to demonize its great men and events; and so it set about “deconstructing” American history, American government, and the Founding Fathers, condemning them by the bar of progressive ideals — work which it is still about to this day. This was the crusade initiated by men like Charles A. Beard, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn. Such luminaries inaugurated a heyday of censure laid on the past: thenceforth, everywhere the delighted progressive eye looked it found scandals and scoundrels, where prior generations had seen but heroes and models. The great success of this jackal’s feast is evidenced by the fact that nowadays one can almost not cite even the political authority of the Founding Fathers, without being forced sooner or later to blushingly defend them against an array of utterly anachronistic charges. More concretely, this attempt can be seen in the campaign presently underway to literally erase the traces of the most illiberal segments in the American past, as incarnated in statues, monuments, names. The left undermines American conservatism at every point, employing the very standards upheld by the conservatives to do so. But American conservatism, to the precise extent that it once furnished the most viable and monolithic conservative view anywhere in the West, makes the greatest tremors as it falls.
Almost paradoxically, the other countries to enjoy the prerogative of American conservatism were precisely the nations of the erstwhile Axis powers, after the fall of the latter in World War II — the very same nations which originally had emerged from the weakness of the political right. The collapse of the Fascist order and the obliteration of the Third Reich following the end of the war led directly to the rise of certain influences, most obviously embodied in the Christian Democrats, which endorsed liberal principles more or less parallel to the American model, and endowed their countries with similar liberal constitutions to which future generations might make authoritative reference.
We may see more clearly now why the conventional right, wherever it has existed and particularly wherever it has enjoyed any influence, has defended the original Enlightenment values: the right has in countless essential cases represented precisely a more or less conscious attempt to recast these values as the fundamental values of human society — as the natural human values, the natural human right. This is a great labor, one of the greatest in the modern era and even in all of history. Prior to the Enlightenment, these values were foreign to every society save but accidentally. At present, in the Occident, there is no society which is not explicitly founded on them. And let there be no doubt, this is thanks as much to the efforts of the conservative right as to those of the progressive left. The conservative right was a purveyor of the Enlightenment scheme from the first, even in some cases its foremost representative and champion. To be sure, it contradicted itself in innumerable cases in its own instinct to preserve values of its society which ran counter to the Enlightenment; but these were incidental to it, as is demonstrated by the fact that these values change from society to society and from time to time. What was essential to the conventional right was its initial subscription to certain key portions of the Enlightenment vision of society.
Enlightenment values are not unique to the conventional right: they are shared, in whole or in part, by the entirety of the political spectrum. It is even this universal acceptance of a single set of values by both right and left which permits us to plot them on a single scale. Yet there is a fundamental difference in the historical genesis of the right as compared that of the left: for while the right was born out of the failure of an older and more traditionalist generation to resist these values, the left was born at the moment of their first and clearest triumph in this world. The right is the unhappy mutation of a failed counter-movement. It commenced from the very first on a note of resignation, which has never since ceased to cast all its music in the minor key.
As tempting as it might be to seek the root causes of the right’s present decline precisely here, in this original mood of resignation, this temptation must be resisted. The right could as easily have taken will and heart from its initial defeat, learning from its failure and vowing never to permit such ignominy again. The right has not been without intelligent and self-aware men capable of turning such a misfortune to better account. No, the causes for the decline of the right must be sought elsewhere.
Now conservatism does not enjoy the same advantages which attended the older traditionalism it replaced. Prior to the Enlightenment (name which was given in a spirit of propaganda, and which would be more honestly called “revolutionary egalitarianism”), tradition was ubiquitous and authoritative. One did not challenge tradition, neither in word nor deed, without risking one’s liberty or one’s life; one certainly did not hope for any radical emendation of the Old Order — to say nothing of its mere revolution. True, regimes were changed: but such change was generally forced by external powers, by wars between nations, or else by the ambitions of demagogues or great men. When the populace took up arms against its own leaders, it was generally desperation that drove it, not “ideology”: one spoke in those days not of revolt but of uprising, generally due to conditions of extreme hunger or penury. In the pre-modern era, put otherwise, the regime was much stabler than it subsequently became. It owed its stability in large part to this: in those days religion and politics were inseparable. The great political innovation of modernity, which destabilized all social orders everywhere, was the rise of the secular state.
The religious force in politics is never to be underestimated. Religion is to society what mortar is to the cathedral. We of today distinguish more or less rigorously between secular and theocratic states, but before modernity, the majority of human societies were neither the one thing nor the other. States were ethnoi, meaning among other things that they derived from specific ethoi, in which the manners and aims of society were bound up essentially with the way of life of a people. That way of life in turn never could be divorced from a specific belief in specific gods. Religion so understood was ballast to law, and thanks to it, innovations on the social fabric were difficult and rare.
The great fact which altered this, the tremendous change, whose causes and consequences we cannot ponder here, though we feel them tremor daily beneath us, and though they regulate all our work, was the emergence of hostility to Christendom on the part of the Enlightenment philosophers. The great revolution in modern understanding, which brought all subsequent revolutions, was an invisible one; it took place, not on the stage of politics, but in the very attitude which best characterizes the modern philosophers as opposed to the ancient. One hears its herald already in Machiavelli; it arrives in a visible form in Hobbes, in a subtler form in Locke; it peeks out slyly from the devious Descartes and is what cost the lens-grinding Jew Spinoza his place in every major religious community of his time. Kant attempted to sublimate it in his “noumena,” and Hegel concealed it in his “historical dialectic.” Then, with Marx on the left and with Nietzsche on the right, it makes itself known. This attitude has been christened, and with good reason, “anti-theological ire,” and it is the brand which is burned onto the back of every individual deed to issue from the “deist” Enlightenment, almost every philosopher to carry the Enlightenment on or even to oppose it.
The conservative has resisted this attitude in particular with half his heart, and his success has been correspondingly feeble. He generally sensed with sure instinct that without the anchor of the divine, his cause was lost from the first. Yet there is much in the divine that is inconvenient and even unacceptable to modern thought. The conservative, in seeking to uphold the law of God and the law of the secular state at once, had to make concessions either to the one or to the other — for if there is single thing that the secular state demands of all its citizens, it is that they shall take no commandment before that of Enlightenment humanism. Although there has been a variety of different approaches to this dilemma on the part of different groups within the conventional right, one of the most popular approaches, which issued especially from the United States, has been of essentially Protestant thrust: the right has generally admitted the principle of the secular state, under pretext of thereby preserving religion: it has tried to claim that the church is rendered safe by its separation from the state. But no matter the rhetorical or theoretical flourishes with which the conservative might adorn his effort, it is clear that in submitting to the principle of the secular state, he submitted as well to the essential irreligiosity of modern times, and revealed himself an atheist in his heart. For if the law of God is not permitted to rule and overrule the law of man, it is no law at all.
Prior to the moment that Machiavelli scribed his famous denunciation of “principati immaginati” (which included, was perhaps directed foremost at, the “Civitas Dei”), the very idea of conservatism could never have had a great deal of sense, save circumstantially, in the description of certain human attitudes in very specific historical contexts. Conservatism owes its existence as a distinct political stance to the birth of its only meaningful antagonist — progressivism, which, as Dostoevsky saw very clearly, has been from the first an atheistic or crypto-atheistic endeavor.4
Is conservatism then not precisely what its enemies like to claim — inherently reactionary? What is the nature of this conservatism? Or, to ask it again — what is the political right? For we are now in a position to answer this question: the political right is the unceasing effort to revitalize a constantly receding humanistic moment. It is not, and has never been, the attempt to preserve a pre-Enlightenment tradition; the men who dedicated themselves to that task were properly speaking traditionalists, and had no truck with the “right” à la Burke. It is also not, and cannot ever be, the mere complacent and passive acceptance of some given status quo, because in modern times every “status quo” is change, constant and restless change. Modern society is ever metamorphosing — and if one seeks the motives for this metamorphosis, one will find them in nothing other than a certain kind of mass discontent — a great hydra of myriad, restlessly self-propagating dissatisfactions. Progressivism is fueled by this discordant discontent and would be impossible without it. But then, precisely contrary to the conventional wisdom, the political right is the active political position, against which progressivism is forever reacting. Progressivism, which perceives in any given actual situation injustices, rages against these, and so is goaded incessantly toward its utopian ideal.
Indeed, the political right requires continual and continuously renewed energy endowed with a high degree of awareness. This energy, the conscious effort of the right, is not merely the effort of a single individual over the course of a single life, nor a single generation against the changes that occur in the arc of its years — all of which is difficult enough. It is also and much more essentially a positive effort cast over many lifetimes, many generations; it is the awareness of one generation passed on to the next. This requires the deliberate transmission of doctrine, transmission of a clarion vision of that origin which the right seeks to preserve. The progressive has no such need. For, being reactionary, the individual progressive has but to listen to the complaints about himself at any given moment to perceive what “must be done.” Both the “ideal” and the pretext for agitation are furnished wholly anew each new year, month, week, and day. The progressive’s excuses are, as it were, eternally “in the air,” and the past is a matter of indifference to him: for if the law and pattern of human change is ever toward improvement, what then is the past but that aggregate of human follies which have been rightly superseded and discarded? This haughty detachment from the past grants the progressive a kind of freedom. The conservative, on the other hand, is bound to a past, constrained to a specific and concrete way things were, and can maintain that link only insofar as the knowledge of it has been renewed and reinforced in the latest generation. The word “tradition” itself comes to us from the Latin tradere, meaning “to bequeath,” “to transmit,” “to hand over” or “hand down.” This renewal, this transmission, can come only through two interconnected channels: education on the one hand, and a specific and rite-rich tradition on the other.
Now it is evident — indeed, it is palpable — that the progressives have seized control of the vast majority of institutions of learning, colleges, universities, and even those institutions which precede them, down to the very initial forms of elementary public schooling. The central domain of the progressive is the whole of the humanities in academia. The reasons for their triumph here are varied and complex, and this is not the place to explore them.5 It suffices to note that the ubiquity of progressive dogma in education has effectively interrupted, if not altogethoir ruptured, one of the key ligatures by which a healthy right might preserve and perpetuate itself. This has thrust the entire weight of the necessity of transmission onto tradition alone.
Tradition, however, is far from immune to this same interference. Modern society works constantly to undermine it. In the most contemporary form of liberal society — which we may call dynamic and globalized mass capitalism — everything militates against the rise of a strong and centralized human ethos of any kind whatsoever. The omnipresence of inherently globalist markets; the abolishment of clear social hierarchies; the ceaseless movement of individuals and families and the resultant fragility of human communities and traditional trades; the near universal attendance of “institutions of higher learning,” which, togethoir with the absurd dogma of “social mobility,” has destroyed at once the familial basis for traditional craftsmanship and the elitist basis of the university; the secular wearing away of religious authority combined with an even more erosive pluralism; the allopathic dogma of diversity and the consequent intermingling of races, castes, classes customs, faiths, ethnoi and ethoi — in a word, egalitarianism — all this has combined as even the mixing of a thousand colors will combine to muddy the clear tones of tradition and to reduce all rites and rituals to but a diaphanous gray conformity. Tradition, the foremost link between origin and present, has been rendered tenuous and drab by this modern world, and can no longer be counted on to do its necessary work for the right.
The result has been a violent requalification of the relation between the political right and memory. The right is, we may very generally say, the political manifestation of memory. It feeds on memory: it necessitates and is necessitated by memory. This memory is crystallized in custom and rite, in law and legal precedent, in faith, in holiday and festival, but also, as importantly, in our histories and myths. I suspect that a clear-eyed and deep-delving investigation into the “history of history,” the history of our practice of record-making and record-keeping, beginning with story-telling and song, indeed of myth itself, will reveal that the origin of this practice is deeply “conservative,” deeply “of the right.” The right cannot live without history, and it is dubious whethoir history can live without some analogue of the right. When the social aspect of memory is worn away, memory will be radicalized from the collective to the individual. And indeed, today the individual alone has become the principal vessel of memory, and the great duty once borne by Traditional society as a whole — to recall its origins through oral traditions and to revere, celebrate, and perpetually rejuvenate its past — falls entirely upon the already narrowed shoulders of specific human beings.
But the memory of most men is weak; it extends at best to a vague awareness of the lives of their parents. The long social hierarchy of memory as embedded in tradition is thus supplanted by the mere memory of a part of a single life; and in consequence, awareness of the distant vital origins is substituted by awareness of society as it is or has been in one’s own day alone. It is no longer the “pristine original state of society” which the conservative seeks to conserve, but rather that late form of society in which one came of age, as one knows it in childhood and in school. No longer the sense of origins, but the sense of nostalgia, becomes the guiding principle of the political right. And nostalgia for yesterday, that pastel ghost, is easily exorcised by inebriated infatuation with the prospects of some more vivid tomorrow.
This is a momentous shift, not least of all for the force and energy it must transfer to the political left, and it explains many of our present ills. But the most effectively important consequence, also the most pervasive consequence it brings, is this: cumulative progressive changes over the course of many generations are no longer perceived by the political right as such, but are instead taken utterly for granted, because they seem to pertain to the status quo of each new generation. There comes a long, steady, but gradually hastening movement in our society toward increasingly “progressive” states; there comes a long leftward shift, which the right is powerless to guide, resist, or obstruct, because in general it lacks the memory necessary even to recognize this change as change.
These are some of the base reasons the right has proved incapable of living up to its own high principles. Yet not all of its failure must be sought within it: the difficulties and contradictions which beset the right are but salt to the wound. The triumphs of the left are due mainly to advantages which the left possesses and must possess; they are due to the practical and theoretical superiority of the left, when compared to the somewhat awkward and theoretically hesitant attitude of the right.
As has been noted, both the left and the right agree on a basic set of principles which derive directly from Enlightenment thought. Their disagreement is over means, not ends. That which the Enlightenment has sought and must ever crave is the alleviation of human suffering, the equalization of conditions, and replacement of honor, nobility, or virtue with security, comfort, and wealth. Not even the great communist dictatorships, which surely in practice offended these goals in countless ways, ever dared challenge them; the propaganda, the lies and manipulations, the oppression that everywhere follow the rise of communism, are largely determined by the need to form a common chorus amongst the “people,” to sing the successes of communism in the attainment of these Enlightenment goals. It is all but flattery and mendacity, no doubt — but when an all-powerful dictatorship must pay lip-service to principles, that is most suggestive as to where the power truly lies.
The right acquiesces to the same Enlightenment “values” which the left introduced into the West: and because it accepts these “values,” it accepts the point of departure of the entire modern venture. It accepts that the original establishment of liberal institutions in the place of the old aristocratic orders represented advancement over the past. It therefore accepts the validity of revolution in illiberal societies, even when these are otherwise stable, peaceful, and prosperous. It accepts, that is to say, the reality of progress, the desirability of at least a certain kind of progress. It opens itself therefore to the fundamental objection: How can the right accept the principle of progress but halfway? How can it acknowledge the justice of progress here, but deny it there? What entitles it to fence off a portion of this nebulous realm and then call one part of it good, truly progressive, and the other bad, false progress? And does the right not, in the very act of accepting any progress whatsoever, give the lie to all its pretensions — toward conservation?
These problems are of course surmountable, but one must be able to dance a little on the top of them; and conservatives in general are such a stiff-legged lot. It is at least true that while the conservative right must struggle with its own underpinnings — which is precarious work in the best of times — the progressive left has absolutely no such conflict with its own basis. The progressive left to say it again possesses a degree of freedom in belief and in act which the conservative right can only dream.
For one way or another, and no matter what else one might have to say about it, we must admit that modernity from root to fruit has been actuated by a sense of forward motion, bound up essentially with a peculiar notion of history. From Machiavelli’s original attempt to extract final political lessons from the successes and blunders of his time and old Rome and Greece, to Darwin’s principle of natural selection as the mechanism of organic development over time; from that sense of the historical failure of past philosophy which actuated Descartes, Hobbes, and Bacon, to Spinoza’s critique of divine revelation as being but a series of historical acts of mere men; from the “state of nature” of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, to the end of history of Hegel — and beyond: History, that most slippery, most sly, most meretricious and brutal substitute for λόγος, peeks out, abyss-like, from all the cracks in modern thought. It cannot be gotten around, and until it is addressed it will rule us all like marionettes. For it is only by History that novelty and progress, these twin obsessions of the modern heart, acquire any necessity whatsoever.
Progressivism — indeed, the entire political left — simply submits to the mastery of History and its enigmatic decrees, where the right remains somehow mistrustful and standoffish. The right has thus been the bad conscience of all modern politics — has been indeed its own bad conscience. The left has proceeded in all blithe faith: and it is certain that faith, or the appearance thereof, has a power that the skeptic cannot so much as feign. Given all of this, how could it startle us that the progressives have been gaining ground? Lately it would appear that their gains and their expectations have even upped the tempo. This is due in part to the terrifying growth of science (which like all modern things is connected stringently to ideas of history and progress), and in part to reasons already alluded to. It leads directly to the disjunction between right and left — the great and unbridgeable divide emerging between them in our own day, which transforms them from troubled kin into estranged acquaintances, and finally into outright enemies. And the conventional right in this coming war must certainly fail.
To perceive the necessity in this, let us consider for a moment the hypothetical original state of any liberal society, its first days of existence as a liberal order. That original state represents at once the highest point of progress attained to date, so far as the progressive ideal is concerned, as well as the most complete manifestation of the conservative standard. There is thus in these first days of any new liberal society a degree of unison between the left and the right — though the hairline fractures can be read even then by those of keen sight. The “left-right” political spectrum is complete in such times, one might say, with the conservative right representing reverence for what is and has been, and the far progressive left representing desire for what one day might be. But Western civilization is as a dog on the heels of its dreamers, and follows them wherever they may go, if sometimes shyly and sheepishly. By and by the progressives will and must begin to drift from the origin, and the entire order will slowly blunder after them. These progressives are guided, tacitly or explicitly, by the polestar of the extreme left, which establishes the ideal toward which all progressives are ever progressing. In the original days the political right by contrast cannot be said to have an “extreme”; for being content with what is, it has no wish to go anywhere else. Only as society shifts leftward does the idea of an “extreme right” begin to emerge. And indeed, it is a sure measure of the “progress” that the left has attained, the precise degree to which society conceives of an “extreme right” at all. Today, when the least inclination toward an older conservative mindset is precipitously hounded as being “fascist” or “far right,” we see that progressivism has reached indeed a remarkable state of advancement.
At a certain point in the inevitable “progress” of the liberal society — at the point whereupon we stand even in this moment — progressivism begins to conceive of itself as the goal-maker of society. And who could blame it? It has been commanding the movements of the social order for so long, how could it even begin to think of itself as anything but ruler and architect of all? In our day the political left is just coming into this awareness of its own power. It is just beginning to feel strong enough to upbraid and repudiate the conservative right as such — to uproot that right, to openly shame it into submission by means of those very values it shares with the right, but which it represents so much more completely and purely. And the right, which at the origin of the liberal society stands as the noble guardian of what is, now represents merely — what has been. At this fateful juncture, the conservative becomes regressive — and therefore despicable, perverse, malign, ignorant, misguided, in need of education, in need of direction, in need atimes even of chastisement and containment.
Oh, to be sure, the poor conservatives shall protest this transformation as it comes. But shall their protests not sound out as feebly as a cracked bell? Did they not forfeit everything from the very start? Did they not prepare their own extinction by dreaming that the uneasy marriage of freedom and equality, which forms the kernel of Enlightenment liberalism, could ever be maintained in this world, without radical revision of the one idea or the other? What figment or folly ever made them hope that, in a society “by, for, and of the people,” it should be freedom to win out? And when they point, with such touchingly sober emphasis, to the “greatness” that was — the “greatness” of their liberal heritage, the “greatness” their society has forgotten and forgone — do they not give everything away, and reveal their own penury? For — Athena preserve us! — this really is greatness to them! They stand convicted by their “greatness,” by what that same “greatness” has today become. And their objection that it did not have to be this way, that we made mistakes along the road which led us astray — all of this apologia grows laughable, in light of the fact that everywhere and without exception, liberal societies have ended in precisely the same fashion, in our present “progressive” conundrum, and in the consequent decline and enfeeblement of the conventional right.
And so these conservatives will fall back more and more on doctrines extraneous to liberalism, as they must. They will call upon their god, whom they have long since abandoned — be this god the father of Moses and Abraham or that of the Christ, or else that whose invisible hand is said to bless the destinies of capitalists everywhere. And truly, had they just a little more imagination and esprit…
But the better part of them do not even see clearly what has transpired or what is at stake. They maunder on plaintively about “principles.” These “principles,” they never tire of claiming, discipline progress. These dear conservatives really believe this argument will persuade. They do not perceive that the ideal of progress annihilates the very concept of principle. According to the essence of progressivism, all “principles” are but transitory waypoints from here to there, to be taken up in the moment and abandoned when they are no longer serviceable.
Indeed, let us finally lay bare the real nature of the “principles” of the conventional right. Those “principles,” alas, are but temporary ideals as they once were posited by the left; they are anything but conservative. There is nothing conservative in the idea of equality before the law, nor the “human rights” upon which it is supposedly founded; two hundred years ago such “equality” was even considered the progressive idea par excellence throughout all the nations of Europe, sufficiently revolutionary to make the old aristocracies quake in their lace. There is nothing conservative in the idea of democracy; democracy is precisely as static, precisely as stable, precisely as traditional, as the liquid masses that move it. There is nothing conservative in the idea of freedom, understood, as it is, as a form of license; for what good is human license, if it must be reined in by crusty pontificating? And as for secularism — as for the famous “separation of church and state” — whatever could this bring, if not progress in its keenest and most insidious form? For the heart of any true tradition, any time and any where one looks, is inevitably a god.
Yet whenever does conservatism dare play so much as the gadfly to these sacred cows of our contemporary politics? Were the right in any way prepared for such an undertaking, the present moment would reveal itself as an opportunity, such as seldom arises in the course of ages, to open the question of the meaning of the ground beneath us: of progress, of conservatism, of democracy, of liberalism, of humanism, of the whole gamut and range of these Modern notions. Aye, for a historically and intellectually attuned right, this would be moment to ask — what is Western culture (if it is anything at all anymore!) and what do “immigration” or “diversity,” “economic freedoms” or “mobility” or “rights” really have to do with it? Moreover, what could such a culture one day become? This would be the moment to inquire what becomes of the melting pot when the primary metal within it is superseded by its complement. This would be the moment to define, at long last, Occidental Man, a new ideal for a new age. This would be the moment indeed to ask, with all due urgency, just what we want the Occident of tomorrow to embody, how it must relate to our past, and how we may best arrive there.
But who hopes for such depth or courage any longer from the right? Oh, these conservatives! When they do not want to go back to that dear nostalgic moment when the left was first planting its most fertile seeds, they want to get ahead, they want to — progress. They go about trying to “spread democracy” and “export liberalism,” treating of human beings and the ethoi of human beings as commodities in a global market, demonstrating once more with lucid clarity their fundamental, irredeemable poverty.
Today we are witness to this drama — and it is not at all melodramatic to call it the death of the political right. We feel the effects of it everywhere; it is one of the great factors in this political upheaval which we sense surging beneath us. The demise of the conservative was prepared decisively, if invisibly, by the very fact of the gargantuan liberal revolutions in the social order — the American and French Revolutions, naturally, but also the European revolutions of 1848 and 1849, and also the American Civil War and both the Great Wars and the Cold War that followed. Conservatism in modernity has always been the orphan of modern political thought; it was always but a hope against hope. Today, its moribundity can be smelled. It is perishing of a congenital disease: to it no first and last things are known; its very own constitutional flaws are slowly consuming it, even as we watch on.
The imminent demise of the political right most fatally leaves a void. This void is not merely ideological: for “ideologies” can be substituted well enough. It is rather, and much more importunously, a sudden aching absence of the reverent part of the human soul and society. For the dogmatic ideal of “progress” is the opposite, not indeed of conservatism, but rather of reverence. In our day, there is nothing left to revere: and the response to this enormity has been to extirpate the very need for reverence from the human heart, substituting for it “democratic rights,” or scientism, or gross materialism and the crass contentment with money and status. Just as in our industrial agriculture we sow seeds that sprout in barren plants, incapable themselves of producing valid offspring, so that we must repurchase our seeds each year anew from artificial banks, so in society we plant infertile dreams and sterile pleasures in need of constant, futile repetition, renewel through the evasion of our “popular culture” and our various contemporary baubles and gadgetry and sophisticated distraction. Where once the heart of human life was a kernel of self-renewing virtue, it has now become but emptiness and incipient death, which we deceive each new moment into seeming life. That is the specific form of our nihilism.
The progressives today, notwithstanding the dying shudders of the old conservative right, feel their victory come over the entire field of the West. But theirs is not an unambiguous and definitive victory. For in the very act of donning their laurels and urging their demands in newfound arrogant tones, they have inadvertently opened up the political arena to new challengers, to new political ideals. For the first time in half a millennium, a new politics is now possible — supposing there is only the vision, the strength left, to constitute it. Our sense of apprehension, at times of vertigo, at times even of holy terror, is due to this: that the isle upon which we have so far lived is foundering fast into the sea, and we do not know if our barks, thrust out now upon unknown tides, shall one day strike upon some solid ground —
But this much is clear: in a decisive respect, we cannot go back — if by back we mean merely, back to the old conventional right or to the ancien régime of yester-eve. The way is open now, the way is cleared; there is need now: all is prepared for the rise of a New Right.
The object of the present work is not to lay out the details and specifics of what the New Right has been or is now becoming, nor to anticipate the peculiar forms it might take one day in the world, its particular political goals or the real policies that it might seek to implement, or (dare we utter as much?) the regimes it might inspire. Some of that work has been done, or is being done, by better men than the writer of this modest book. And
indeed, these particular goals may potentially take a great many forms; the New Right, as the conventional right before it, encompasses many movements and many individuals and many particularist visions. It is the object of the present work then to add to the clarity regarding the principles of this new worldview, the principles which will inform all those who subscribe to the New Right. It is the object of the present work, at its core, to attempt some contribution to the broad comprehension of the New Right in its widest outline — in its culture, if we are permitted to use this word in a spirit of exactitude and hope.
The New Right, because it exists independently of that political tradition which has governed the West now for longer than any individual memory can recall, will often define itself in negative terms. It is antagonistic to most of what is, and in consequence tends to characterize itself by contrast to what is. The moth in the heart of the worm cannot describe itself into existence — for what do worms know of moths? It must begin by showing that gross and amorphous body its failings, and have the good instinct to let nature do the rest. This has already earned certain members of the New Right a reputation for naysaying and mockery. They are already reputed to be scoffers, scorners, haters, destroyers, and worse yet. Amongst them, some are known even as “trolls,” as the going epithet has it, which is at once the pejorative brought against them, and the term of scornful honor with which they like to dress themselves. There is exuberance in all this, as some have averred — even if of an often vulgar and disagreeable kind. But if the New Right remains merely exuberantly against, it will never achieve anything but vulgarity and pranksterism, an impishness which falls short even of the diabolic.
The list of what the New Right opposes is well enough known to anyone who looks into the matter. Does it stand for anything? Indeed, it could not be called right if it did not. The New Right proposes precisely a new right — right understood in a juridical and moral sense, perhaps even a metaphysical and spiritual sense: a new right which must seek to transcend the present state of the West, which is built on the back of the unsustainable and unaccountable belief in so-called “universal human rights.” This new right has overcome progressivism, that lecherous ideal even now fostering the decay and degeneration of the West. The New Right is therefore the position most conscious of this decay and degeneration, and most disgusted by it. Yet disgust at the scent of decay cannot suffice for a positive vision, and awareness of degeneracy on the part of a decent few does not culminate in the overcoming of that degeneracy. Precisely as we are aware of the illness in our age, we are aware of the possibility, nay the likelihood, of its final and irrevocable morbidity. The urgency of the New Right issues from this awareness — that everything it loves and hopes (hope is but love thrown futureward) stands teetering now on the brink of an abyss. The New Right approaches its day as one approaches a man standing at the edge of a cliff and threatening suicide: with outer calm to belie an inner urgency.
The New Right perceives the decay and degeneracy of the time — but decay is only decay as contrasted with sound good health; degeneracy is only degeneracy with respect to virtue. The New Right conceives then an ideal of a healthy, virtuous, right society, by which vision the present society stands condemned. The New Right strives to extract health and virtue from out of a fallen state, but this means that what the New Right best knows is not health and virtue, but vice and decay. The New Right establishes an ideal for the Occident and the Occidental ethnicities which might produce the Occident, based on awareness of the past achievements of the West and the future potential of the same. But in this it cannot avoid awareness of the vast discrepancy between the glory of the past and the wretchedness of the present, the failure of the West to attain its virtue, and the reasons for this failing. The New Right is realistic because it knows that the way to the ideal heights must be paved through the rough and parlous terrain of the true nature of Occidental Man; it is idealistic insofar as it refuses to rest content with the decadence of Occidental Man, but would goad him, by all means possible, toward those heights which ought to have been his birthright. The New Right thus demonstrates the utter inanity of this oppsition between “realism” and “idealism.” Every “real” suggests a compatible “ideal,” and every right “ideal” is fit measure for a given “reality.” In coming to this awareness, the New Right necessarily transcends as well the old left-right political spectrum: it puts itself in precarious opposition to modernity itself.
What is the guiding ideal of the New Right? What is this city on a hill by which it measures the city on the plain? (Supposing we are permitted to borrow a Biblical political metaphor whose beauty has not yet been effaced by all the appalling uses to which it has been subjected.) The full description of this ideal awaits the critique of Occidental Man, which is even now being prepared by the growing ethnic consciousness of the New Right. Nonethoiless, we may risk a few very general observations and hypotheses on this score. And, in accord with the principle already mentioned, we shall largely describe the New Right in contrast to modernity; for one’s eyes perceive more clearly that which is, than that which could be.
Put in its most condensed form, we are permitted to say that to democracy, the New Right opposes aristocracy; to wealth, virtue; to secularism, religion or spiritualism; to an ideal of generalized humanity, an ideal of our particular ethnos; and to progress, tradition.
The New Right rejects the lie of egalitarianism which is the essence of modernity. It perceives in universal egalitarianism of any form the spores of that mold which rots the modern world. It proposes — better say, it hazards, for to state this aloud today is to risk much indeed, and in more ways than one — it hazards excellence, human superiority, human rank, equality between equals alone. The New Right knows that the conventional right gave up the ghost so soon as it tried to marry freedom to equality, attempt which led inevitably to the sacrifice of freedom to equality in the form of “equal opportunity” and “cultural relativism” and “multiculturalism” and like wretchedness. It has discovered the “pot of gold” at the end of this rainbow — the point at which “freedom” is utterly swallowed by “equality,” wherein liberalism destroys itself by giving birth to progressivism. The New Right, in rejecting egalitarianism, rejects the poisoned root of the modern project.
The abandonment of the egalitarian ideal in an egalitarian age is an ideal rife with peril. Democracies tend, as the ancients teach us, to resolve into tyranny, which is a possibility to be decried and denigrated in any day, not to speak of our own, in which a tyrant might seize upon unimaginable power through our utterly irresponsible modern technology. It has become absolutely necessary in our day to attack democracy, which leads us straight upon the death of the West. But in striking at the roots of democracy, we risk precipitating a political meltdown, leading directly to a form of totalitarianism so horrid, potent, vile and vast that it will make us long for the old decayed libertinage of the first decades of the twenty-first century, as for a lost paradise. We, who seek to establish an ideal counter to all of modernity, cannot for a moment forget that in doing so we adopt a responsibility of titanic proportions. We who are but men must act as more than men, and only our duty itself may edify us to this great task.
But even laying aside that ever-present danger, there are other troubles to assail us. We hold to a standard of excellence, and seek to bring it like fire into the world. Then we must have a clear vision of excellence. Yet men in all times and all places can be deceived by the mere appearance of excellence, either in themselves or in others. He who loves excellence in a day of mediocrity risks espousing or cultivating mere vainglory — and alas, countless tendencies in this direction are to be seen on the part of the Right. Many, too many are they who, to further the cause of the Right, commit acts which launch them to notoriety while damaging it. Every extremist rakehell who craves the limelight and seeks scandal or empty boasting to brighten it, every vigilante who takes up arms for the Right and sheds blood to nourish it, reinforces that caricature of the Right that the keepers of power in our day wish to promote — the Right as the expression of a vulgar, irrational, ignorant, and resentful bigotry. He does nothing for his cause, and everything for his vanity.
There is only a single cure for this, our principal vice, bitter medicine though it sometimes be, and that is self-knowledge. The present work at its core is an effort toward deepening the self-knowledge of the Right, toward reconfirming the New Right from the Deep Right.
In its movement toward self-knowledge, the New Right has an advantage over any other contemporary political position, for it recognizes that to understand the value of any community, movement, society or regime, one must first understand the quality of the individuals who compose and rule it. A regime is not defined by its institutions, nor even by its “ideology” and its laws: it is defined by its goals and its purpose, which are posited, never by institutions, but by men of a specific nature. The Westerners of present society can be said to crave above all other things wealth and notoriety or money and status. The members of the New Right wish instead virtue and excellence. But virtue and excellence are understood differently in different times and places. The nature of virtue must be sought beyond the limits of those to whom it applies: the New Right understands by virtue, the virtue of Occidental Man, the virtue of that ethnic and cultural bloc that derives from Europe or from the societies colonized and seeded by predominately European or proto-European stock. This virtue thus takes its bearings by the history of the West, by the tradition of the West — tradition which is second to none in the world, all the more so as it kept faith with the work of the empyrean upon the earth, while others lost themselves roving in diaphanous clouds, or knelt slavishly before vaporous thrones. But the New Right’s preoccupation with the Occidental tradition is shrouded in difficulty. The tradition of the West seems to have led inexorably to the modern crisis. It would appear that the post-liberal progressive society which is even now sprouting out fungus-like around us is nothing but the culmination of the Western tradition to which we make such imperative reference. We, who oppose the despicable present of the West with the glory of its past, risk being caught in a vicious “eternal return” which leads us impetuously back to the very crisis we would escape.
This appears to indicate an incorrigible failure on the part of the West, and it has led some to seek resolution to our crisis in non-Western traditions. A non-Western tradition imported into the West, however, is bound to be understood in Western terms, and thus is doomed to replicate the basic Western problem in different guise. These seekers must then look, not indeed to the traditions of the non-Western world, but deeper yet, to foreign religions or philosophies, for succor to our difficulty. But the specific differences between these religions or philosophies with those of the West can only be grasped insofar as we have fathomed the West and its unique philosophy itself. We must therefore attempt to penetrate the West as deeply as we can, before we might concern ourselves with foreign substitutes or compensations. The very act of delving toward the heart of the West might however demonstrate a Western road out of our Western crisis — a road which does not necessitate recourse abroad. As we are lovers of the Occident, as we are philoccidentals, it behooves us to keep faith with the West, with the dream and hope of the Occident, rather than fleeing into alien landscapes, which might seem to be rife with exotic beauties, when in fact they are but riddled with pit-traps and deadends.
It is commonplace in the New Right to avoid the problem of the historical connection between the tradition of the West and the crisis of the West altogethoir, by positing a historical break in the greater Tradition — an idea which has its greatest exponents in René Guénon and Julius Evola.6 But even if we are to accept it — and as men of the Right we are right tempted by it — this interpretation of Modernity versus Tradition only halfway addresses our problem. For we are left with the necessity of reestablishing our bonds with a Tradition which has, in one of the most remarkably successful and broadest political coups of all of human history, been practically expunged from the memories and consciences of the scion of the West. The Tradition can only be reclaimed by struggling against this modern project, struggling against modernity as a whole, following the warrior’s example laid down by Evola in particular — but to be successful against so successful a project, we must surely, if selectively, employ the tactics and strategies which led that project to its triumph. These tactics, these strategies, issued from a radical reworking of the underpinnings of classical philosophy. Classical philosophy is not a power philosophy, while modern philosophy is eminently a power philosophy. Classical philosophy, then, cannot be brought against modern philosophy with any hope of practical political results. We need a new power philosophy, one which however is made immune to the seeds of the modern disease, so that it does not devolve into scientism and Realpolitik. It must oppose the principles of modernity, while adopting its means. The New Right must therefore propose an ideal which is to that extent fundamentally different from any specific tradition it would resuscitate and revitalize. This requires modifying the Western tradition: it requires in some sense inventing a new tradition for the Occident, a new concept of the West as Occident.
This in turn cannot be done without first constituting a community. One wants therefore a cementing quality, a single element which is capable of acting as mortar, producing a sense of solidarity and unity amongst our many Occidental peoples. In natural communities, this element is precisely the tradition — the cult and the mores which give a people its bedrock sense of identity and unity. But because tradition is our goal it cannot be our foundation. We must seek our foundation elsewhere.
Fortunately, the rise of contemporary “identity politics” has forced our awareness of one of the most promising of those human bonds which might aid us in our project: that which today goes by the name of ethnicity. The ethnic element of the Occident, of Occidental Man, which is sometimes not altogethoir helpfully reduced to his whiteness,7 gives us at least a starting point for our acts and attempts. It produces a generally visible and super-geographical criterion upon which we can begin to reforge a tattered and menaced community. By it we may combat the “alienation” brought by modernity and the fragmentation produced by the radical political and technological changes of these latest centuries. By it, above all, we might reawaken our people to the greater blood that, empyrean willing, yet runs through our veins. The new tradition of the New Right, whatever else it may be founded on, will thus necessarily include an element of ethnic awareness.
This ethnic awareness regarding the Occidental in particular, however, must be constructed, and cannot be simply presupposed. This is demonstrated by two simple facts. In the first place, the integrally related idea of race seems largely or in part the invention of recent history, and is fraught with the equivocations of modernist thinking in general. Most recently, egalitarianism togethoir with the more general agenda of the progressive left has laced the concept of race with poisoned veins of deceit, shame, and contradiction. “Race” can be approached publicly and safely, if at all, through modern science. But science belittles everything human, and in understanding race through the lens of modern science we risk hollowing it of its most valuable substance. Race must thus be bolstered and built both against the disintegrating proclivities of egalitarianism on the one hand, and also against the debasing tendencies inherent to modern science on the other. In the second place, there has never before existed awareness of the Occidental race as such. Racial awareness in the West, before it was eroded by multiculturalism, was awareness precisely of the divergences between different European groups — between the French and the English, the English and the Italians, the Italians and the Germans, etc. And because in those days there was little danger of the kind of corrosive, precipitous immigration and consequent ethnic dilution afflicting our societies today, one generally thought, not in terms of race at all, but in terms of “culture” or ethnos, the combination of race with custom. One spoke of Irishmen and Italians and Germans, one understood them as being human beings of basically different character and essence, and one took as the markers of their differences their specific ethoi — their respective languages and traditions.
Ethnos and ethnic awareness, which are meant to bind and elevate, could then potentially fragment and subvert us further. We cannot take them as we find them: they require careful and conscious emendation.
It is essential then that the difficulties with the concept of race be clearly understood. Too often, race is taken as the starting point or the sine qua non of the New Right, as if by establishing broad “racial awareness” throughout the West we will have done all that is necessary to reclaim the old tradition. The “white race” is taken as being a sort of Silk Road back to the West. But the West is not unitary, and any attempt to presuppose its unity will do violence to the one thing it attempts to refound. When speaking of the “West,” one must always ask — which one? Modern? Christian? Classical? Pagan? And that of the Germans? The Gauls? The Celts? The Anglo-Saxons? And what of the Latins? And those of the Near East? The Russians? The Persians? The notion of race, if it is to solidify a new sense of Occidental identity rather than fracturing it yet more deeply or stretching it beyond all recognition, must somehow seek to include as many of the European and philo-European traditions as it may, while clearly excluding those which lie beyond the geopolitical and ethnic borders of the historical West. But in many cases, even the purely European traditions are mutually exclusive: no one who truly believes in Christ and the Resurrection can countenance the political ascendence of one who truly worships Odin, or the pantheon of pagan deities, or no god at all.8 An idea of a unitary Occidental race, if ever attained, will have to come to grips with the multifarious and contradictory ideals that that single Occidental race has produced or adopted. One might seek to accommodate these differences by insisting on “freedom of thought” — but by that path one comes dangerously close once more to “diversity” and “tolerance,” the very issuances of a teetering liberalism which the New Right opposes with haler virtues. So we are left with this dilemma: so far as it is fragmenting to the Occidental people, the idea of race is damaging to us; but insofar as it is uniting, it is unstable.
The response to this in certain quarters has been to lay the complex question of tradition aside almost altogethoir, and to posit race as the unity underlying all these various traditions, a unity which is of vastly greater importance than the tradtions. Race, or, as one prefers to say today, “genetics,” rather than tradition, becomes the central point of reference, the binding glue of true community, and even in large part the aim toward which we are supposed to be striving (as in, for instance, all ideas of “genetic purity”). And indeed, a certain preoccupation with genetics is the most salient feature of the so-called “Alt Right.” Those who look at the New Right from without can sometimes be forgiven for believing that genetics, and not tradition, forms its vital core. But while ethnos might lead us back to the idea of nature, the particular construction of genetics, as being the most essential and important human element, is exceedingly artificial. It is not for genes that an honorable man lives or dies, but for his people; and while a certain “genetic composition” is a fundamental aspect any unified people, it is by no means sufficient in and of itself, as is proved by the simple observation that two peoples of one and the same genetic category might war against each other unto mutual annihilation.
Moreover, if genetics and not culture is the primary identifying factor of the Occident, then genetics and not culture should be the aim of our attempt to revive the Occident. The same idea is sometimes expressed in the equivalency between race and culture: “race is culture, and culture is race,” as Jonathan Bowden once formulated it. Thus one encounters in the New Right those who almost believe that one is even entitled to throw over any number of particular Western traditions in order to preserve the race. In race, and not in tradition is the really precious part of the West — its “sacred gene-pool,” its inner character as given by birth alone. The right racial basis is supposed to lead naturally to the cultural forms in question. For the good of this white race, it is implied, everything is permitted; and the consequence of this cannot help but be the very “cultural relativism” which the New Right sets out to counter and correct.
For not race but ethnos, the people or folk or Volk itself, is the primary and most natural concern of human societies. The simple disproof of the idea that “a given race leads necessarily to a given culture” is to be found in the fact that majority white societies today do not attain anything near the heights that they once did. The attempt to reduce ethnos to race alone is doomed to result in an unnatural and consequently despotic society. Racial awareness must be brought to the Occident, so that we may build on it a superior awareness of the high problem of culture; it cannot be confounded for the same.
These are deep troubles within the present tendencies of the New Right and its project, and they must be addressed.
It is the great task of the New Right in this present moment to profit of its circumstances, to forge a new sense of identity and solidarity amongst the waning peoples of the Occident, and to rekindle the hope in their future — even if this needs must be a distant future. The Old West is dying; everywhere the ethoi which once constituted and regulated the life of the West are fading, wilting, withering away. What results from their disappearance now is the only question of any interest to the lovers of the Occident, to the lovers of its past and its future — to we philoccidentals. For the death of Old Europe and of the nations that Old Europe seeded in the world, is today fertilizing the terrible birth of mass man, that homeless, virtueless, hedonistic humanoid with neither past nor future, neither people nor fatherland, neither love nor hate in his heart and neither god nor devil in his soul, but who seems everywhere to prepare the coming age of the Last Man. Only those who do not succumb to this fate, only those who by their natures cannot succumb, are any longer of interest. It is to the living, and not the dying, that we must turn our steadfast gaze. We must unify these living, the last best hope of our people, to build with them what can be recognized as a single, if not undifferentiated, Occidental tradition, capable of overcoming and outlasting these dire times for the sake of tomorrow.
This requires a deal of creation — and shall be accomplished only insofar as there is need to accomplish it. Need to invention is as fire to the steel, and so it is to our advantage that this day in which we live is not short on need. The New Right is aided beyond hope by the growing global and even Western hostility against the Occident. We cannot underestimate the value of this startlingly broad opposition. We find emerging around us not just a single enemy, but a myriad, who by their diversity and their simultaneous unified aggressiveness toward the original European peoples, accentuate the similarities of all Occidentals over their differences, and permit us to clarify our project, that we will no longer be strangled by all this confusion. For nothing simplifies like the question of life and death, and few things unify like a common foe. The New Right, supposing only that its time really has come, must anneal itself in the very flames its enemies now bear to burn it away.