Of all the epithets applied to the New Right by those who fear, misprize, or despise it, “extremist” is certainly among the commonest. The reasons for this are not hard to divine: since the close of the Cold War, the entire West has clung almost zealously to what it proudly calls, with but scraps of reason, its “moderation,” virtue which is thought to be indicated by an almost century-long inner peace throughout Europe. To be christened “extremist” today is therefore almost equivalent to a death sentence on one’s public persona — and indeed the term is generally applied with just such homicidal intent. Our enemies name us extremists as though with this single word they had refuted us. For they know that by this little term alone they banish us to the political fringe, where we are condemned to wallow in speechless company with all manner of inarticulate and bloodlusting revolutionaries.
We ask in the first place, what is meant by “extremism”? We hear the term most commonly these days in reference to Islamic jihadists: “Islamic extremism” is used almost as a synonym for radical Islamic fundamentalism. The term is meant to distinguish the radical fundamentalist from the non-radical moderate. Were all Muslims radical fundamentalists, then the term would no longer be applicable to them: one does not speak of “extreme cannibals,” though it is doubtless that cannibalism is every bit as incompatible with civilized European life as Muhammadian fundamentalism. There can be no extremist cannibal for the simple reason that it is impossible to conceive of a moderate one. All uses of the word “extremism” therefore imply a moderate center, with which this extremism is tacitly compared.
The New Right is understood to be an instance of the extreme right, as related to the center of the left-right spectrum. According to this reasoning, the New Right is to the right what communism is to the left: namely, its most immoderate manifestation or else its most uncompromising or its purest conclusion. The New Right thus supposedly inherits the place formerly occupied by “Fascism” or “Nazism.”
Yet this conventional understanding is assailed by grave difficulties, as anyone knows who has considered these matters to any depth. In the first place, by the purely conventional view the Fascists and the National Socialists seem to have certain unmistakable affinities with the communists, and particularly with the Soviets — so much so that a new concept was invented in the last century, totalitarianism, to attempt to comprehend these similarities. It need not be mentioned that this grouping is in certain essential ways untenable, and elides fundamental differences between these three orders which cannot by any responsible analysis be elided. But to say it again, we are concerned now with the conventional understanding, and this understanding cannot help but lump all its enemies into a single category in order to preserve itself. Yet this grouping is surely very odd, if these forms do indeed represent the opposing extremes of a single spectrum. How could they have anything in common, save the most incidental and non-essential features? They should be antipodal and absolutely irreconcilable — and yet in certain ways they most clearly are not.
This has lead to a range of attempts to rework the spectrum in the interests of salvaging it. Perhaps the most popular and well-known of these at present is so-called “horseshoe theory,” which is associated with the inappropriately named “sceptic” community, but which originated rather with a postmodern French thinker, one Jean-Pierre Faye. According to this view, the political spectrum, rather than lying on a straight line, in fact takes the form of a horseshoe, with the two extremes lying nearer to one another than they do to the center. But to say nothing else of this clever patching up of an outdated theory, no attempt is made to explain how it could possibly happen that pressing a given political vision to its extreme (which presumably means attempting to realize its principles as purely and rigorously as possible in the world) would result in a system which stands relatively near to the same attempt from opposite principles. That alone should be sufficient to disqualify this reworking of the political spectrum, be it a line, a circle, a spiral, a horseshoe, or a Möbius strip, until such a time as someone is capable of explaining so evidently inexplicable a riddle.
Similar observations have lead some to the outrageous claim that Fascism and National Socialism are even in fact progeny, not of the political right at all, but of the political left. Yet if this is so, one must really ask by what marvelous lack of perspicacity they were ever located on the right? And how is it that, while there were clear ideological links between, say, Soviet Russia and communist China, even at the height of their discord, no such deep rapport ever existed, nor was ever thought to exist, between the Soviets and the Fascists or the National Socialists? How explain the fact that, according to their own leaders and their own members, the Fascists and the National Socialists were thought to form the surest and most thorough opposition to the communist threat? Or how explain the undying hatred that exists to this day between neo-communists and neo-fascists? Are we to believe that the men who governed these states or generated those doctrines were universally so unaware of their own political orders and aims that they failed to comprehend their natural affinity with one another — despite even the rise of the United States of America, which should have provided very much a mutual enemy to these supposedly akin regimes, one of sufficient power and menace to force them to unite against what was surely a much more dangerous, because much more complete, foe? And finally, if we really do place the Fascists and the National Socialists on the extreme political left — what remains any longer of the extreme right?
Our political schema exist to clarify our comprehension of the facts; so soon as it becomes necessary to force the facts, Procrustes-like, to fit our political schema, the time has come to refurbish our understanding.
Put in brief, the left-right political spectrum is an artificial construct which is of some limited use in comprehending a very specific range of contemporary political positions. To have any validity, this spectrum must treat of political positions which share a common philosophical genesis — as indeed classic liberalism and communism do: the basis, that is to say, of the European-originating Enlightenment thought of the past five hundred years. Karl Marx is unthinkable without Hobbes, Locke, Smith and Ricardo, Rousseau and Hegel, even Kant; his vision is the radicalization, the extremification, of the political ideals first promulgated during the Enlightenment. But Fascism and National Socialism, as opposed to communism, were deliberate, if imperfect, revolts against modernity, against the entirety of the Enlightenment, and so it would be not only erroneous but even confounding to try to understand these movements in the terms of Enlightenment liberalism. They cannot belong to the “extreme right,” because in truth they do not issue from the “right” at all, a fortiori less from the left.
And for this very reason, it senseless to think of the New Right as dwelling at some extremity of contemporary politics. The New Right is nourished by a combination of pre-modern, pre-Enlightenment principles, as well as by those philosophies which are modern only by an accident of birth. The New Right therefore can have nothing but purely incidental qualities in common with the conventional right, and cannot be compassed by it. The New Right lies beyond extremism.
The New Right, put somewhat differently, circumscribes a political sphere all its own. It contains its own movements, its own variants. It has its own center, its own extremes. It may have something very roughly analogous to its own “left” and “right,” with its own extremes and its own extremists , most of whom share the common characteristics of all popular political extremists: vulgarity and the appeal to vulgarity, and the substitution of passion and self-indulgent sentimentalism for higher reason and stern self-mastery.
Now, it might be objected that we have exonerated the New Right from the charge of extremism by deferring to an insufficient idea of extremism — extremism as relative to a fixed center. Yet there is another and much more incisive idea of extremism: namely, extremism as any ideology leading to extreme beliefs or acts, in any time or any place. Thus we refer to religious extremists, not because they hold far-flung views with respect to the average believer (any really spiritual individual could be characterized in this way, any Tibetan or Orthodox monk, any holy man), but rather because their views press them to behave and believe in objectionable or abhorrent ways, by the standards presently reigning.
But how does one define such beliefs or acts? There can be only two criteria: either these beliefs or acts are violent, illegal, anti-social — in which case the New Rightists cannot finally be convicted of extremism, save in isolated cases which prove the rule by breaking it — or else these beliefs or acts simply represent an extreme departure from mainstream views. The New Right can only be understand as extremist, then, because its vision of the world is too divergent from that commonly accepted by our society. Precisely because it lies beyond the traditional spectrum of the left-right, because it is so blatantly and profoundly heterodox, it is extreme.
Now, the New Right is not only guilty of this kind of “extremism,” but proudly so; it should indeed be ashamed to be otherwise, and much of its allure can be traced back to no other source. But one is still quite justified in asking: What is the nature of this “extremism”? Is it so horrid a thing as is suggested by the tone which its accusers employ to hurl it at us?
The question ultimately reduces to a question of perspective: from the point of view of contemporary mainstream politics in the West, we surely are extreme. Yet such perspective is a blade which cuts both ways. If we are extreme to the mainstream, then the mainstream must perforce be extreme to us. If contemporary society rejects us for our extremism, we may reject contemporary society by the same standard and with the same right. And it is not hard to find in the New Right critiques of modern society which take precisely this tone. The charge of extremism is thus essentially misplaced; it is effectively an evasion of any more rigorous and serious confrontation of the ideas of the mainstream with those of the New Right. It is a manner of obscuring, not clarifying, our fundamental dispute.
The only defense any longer remaining to those who would brand us extremists, is that we are minority, and the mainstream majority. Our worldview stands condemned because it is both too alien to that held by most people, and yet not widely enough accepted to represent a legitimate alternative to those conventional views. This argument, however, is inherently weak. It is weak first because there is nothing to stop us in principle from one day becoming a sizable portion of our society, or even from living in a society in which our view is the prevailing one. All untimely political worldviews begin in minority — but it would be absurd to say that for this reason they are all of them extremist.
But this democratic argument is weak more essentially because it relies on a conveniently restricted census of the human race. It limits itself to comparing our position with the position of the majority in Western societies in the present day. In truth, if one compares the root principles of the New Right with those of contemporary liberal society, taking into consideration all times and all places, it must be acknowledged that the vast majority of human beings throughout history have stood much nearer our ideals than those of contemporary liberalism. Indeed, even today there are surely more human societies, and probably also many more individuals globally, who would prefer our vision to that of the contemporary liberal West and its democratico-capitalistic delirium. By the numbers — which appear to be the final evidence any serious critic can bring against us to condemn us of extremism, save as he characteristically takes recourse to that enigmatic ally of progressivists everywhere, the pseudo-god known commonly by the name of “History” — we are far less “extreme,” than the very individual who accuses us of extremism.
What then does one really mean when one calls us “extremists”? Only this: that we adopt views which are not comfortable for the better part of conventional thinkers, to put the case mildly — views which put them, these
“moderates,” into the unhappy position of having to look their own opinions clearly in the face, for our ideas could shake this crumbling society down to its quivering foundations. We are extremists, because we refuse to genuflect before the idols of the day, and more particularly because we challenge those idols in a historical moment in which they have suddenly become vulnerable and uncertain of themselves. The charge of extremism is brought against us precisely as a javelin is hurled against an advancing and terrifying enemy: and precisely as it is hoped that this javelin will strike that enemy in the heart before he may ever come near enough to land a blow, so our enemies seek to fell us at a distance, when we still appear small and weak, before our proximity might show our just proportions.
For of course, this term “extremist” appears much weightier than it in fact is. When we are called extremists we are by necessary implication forced to inhabit the political space of the so-called “extreme right,” a space which must be claustrophobic to our wide vision, cramping to our lust for the heights — a space, the straitness of which forces us to all kinds of grotesque excesses. It is needless to say that we cannot be rightly understood when we are pressed into a dwelling which was built for dwarfs. On the contrary: the word “extremism” perverts our principles and assigns views to us, with which in truth we have no truck. The charge of extremism is an act of intellectual vandalism against us, a willful attempt to slander us, to misunderstand what it would be inconvenient and frightening to look in the face.
That will not stop anyone, of course, from employing such language — on the contrary! But it will already be much — very much indeed — if we begin to view ourselves as separate from this whole charade and rabble of contemporary politics — if we at least recognize our intellectual, our genealogical distinction from the contemporary left left and right — and if we begin to treat ourselves much less as misfit extremists of this present day, than as the potential cultivators of a new, more fertile, more bracing, and more wholesome political landscape, far away from this arid and purportedly “moderate” flatland.