Petr
11-12-2005, 03:51 PM
Hmmm... apparently I cannot post pieces longer than 25,000 characters around here. I had to chop up this article to make room for the most relevant parts.
Annoying. :(
Anyways, nice to be here again. I just hope this place doesn't immediately crash!
:)
Petr
http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol4no3/sf-omeara.html
New Culture, New Right:
Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe
by Michael O’Meara
Bloomington, Ind.: 1st Books, 2004
Reviewed by Samuel Francis
...
The French New Right has centered largely around an organization founded in 1968 called the Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE, or “Group for Research and Study of European Civilization”), and its major exponent has been the journalist and author Alain de Benoist. Entirely unlike the American “New Right” (or for that matter the Old Right), the French New Right is anti-Christian, anti-American, and anti-capitalist. Why then is it a “right” at all?
It is a right (a label Benoist and most of his colleagues have always hesitated to embrace) because it mounts a searching and virtually total critique and rejection of “modernity”—modern philosophy since Descartes, modern science and technology, modern materialistic values and culture, and the modern state and its tendencies toward global hegemony and technological regimentation—and it sees in Christianity the origins and underpinnings of modernity and in America and modern capitalism its most extreme representation. It affirms what O’Meara and the New Right itself describe as “traditional societies”—that is, the hierarchical, traditionalist, particularist, familistic and patriarchalist, communitarian, and usually agrarian and pagan societies that modernity destroys. “Traditional culture” as O’Meara explains in a footnote (55), “refers not to those primitive, tribal formations studied by anthropologists, but to the pre-modern formations that characterized Europe up to the 17th century—that is, to the Greek, Roman, Celtic, Germanic, and Medieval forms of the European civilizational heritage.” As the name GRECE suggests, one of the archetypal societies of this kind that the New Right idealizes is that of the ancient Greek polis itself. “Reactionary,” a term usually employed to describe portly suburban dentists or literary monarchists who wear opera capes, does not quite fit la Nouvelle Droite.
...
At the core of the New Right’s critique of modernity is a rejection of the philosophical rationalism that drives the modern mind and of its principal source, the philosopher René Descartes. “In his quest for truth—that is, epistemological truth—,” writes O’Meara,
Descartes concentrated on the length, depth, breadth, and velocity of physical objects, for these alone enabled him to quantify “the empirical unity of the world” and render nature into extensions whose measurements leant themselves to precise and predictable calculations.… His unprecedented success in reducing complex natural phenomena to simple mathematical explanations would, of course, do much to launch the career of modern science; but his success came at a steep price. Besides reducing reality to a simple expanse of matter, “understood” in abstract mathematical terms that did little to enhance man’s knowledge of his world and, in some cases, further estranged him from it, his quantifying reductionism had the effect of relegating the qualitative features of the European life—all those things associated with culture and heritage—to a secondary order of significance. (p. 58)
...
In the New Right’s critique of modernity, individualism itself is closely linked to the other features of modern society:
For once the social world becomes a collection of monadic individuals, inherent distinctions and supraindividual designations take on a secondary order of significance. What counts for liberalism is the basic zoological unit, which—ideally—is a self-contained rational being. The qualitative attributes of station, character, and breeding (not to mention race, culture, and history), whose importance has prevailed in every previous civilization, are thereby ignored, for the individual—any individual—is looked on as an “instance of humanity,” worthy, in himself, of dignity. From this “naturalistic” notion of the individual, which denies everything in man that goes beyond his zoological nature, there emerges another of liberalism’s defining doctrines—that of egalitarianism and the contention that all individuals, irrespective of their inherited or acquired qualities, are bearers of equal rights and deserving of equal treatment. (p. 65)
...
In any case, the New Right certainly did not take its rejection of modernism from the Christian or conservative right but from the movement known as “post-modernism,” associated with Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, et al., a movement usually involved not with the right of any sort but with the extreme left. The logical implications of post-modernism are radically relativistic and skeptical, even nihilistic, and affirm little of anything. As O’Meara writes:
Against the rational, objective, and universal claims of the modern narrative , as it applies the timeless truths of mathematical reason to man’s contingent world, they [the post-modernists] argue that the narrating subject is never autonomous, never situated at an Archimedean point beyond space and time, never able to perceive the world with detachment and certainty. Rather, representations of all kinds are entwined in sociolinguistic webs of signification that know no all-embracing truth, only their own truths, which are indistinguishable from the will to power…. All forms of human action, even (or especially) the most lofty, inevitably shatter before an elusive, polymorphous reality, represented by a now self-conscious throng of incompatible discursive traditions. This leads postmodernists to a “radical pluralism” that “deconstructs” modernist notions of truth, value, and justice in the interests of a wider field of localized representations and practices. (pp. 22-23)
Post-modernists usually apply their “deconstruction” to white, Christian, patriarchal, heterosexual Western society, arguing that its claims to truth, justice, rationality, normality, and even scientific and philosophical certainty are mere myths concocted and deployed for the purposes of buttressing the power of those who benefit from them. This position is in some respects close to those of such thinkers as Pareto and Nietzsche, at least in implication, and one that the New Right has embraced—up to a point.
The point at which the New Right breaks with conventional post-modernism is in the latter’s endorsement, as a practical matter, of the “individualistic tendencies of liberal politics. In many respects they [the post-modernists] are, in fact, simply more philosophically sophisticated liberals, although ones whose principal reference is no longer the ethnically homogeneous nation-state, but rather the rainbow world of the global market.” Given the zealous antagonism of post-modernists to any and all European identities and their passion to dissolve them, as O’Meara writes,
[I]
B and D groups, racial minorities, trance freaks, lesbian bikers, squatters, immigrants, and grunge rockers all register in their count, while Basque nationalists, Swiss Communards, and Lombard regionalists, whose communities are ancient and intergenerational, are generally suspected of being “closed” or repressive variants of the Great Narrative. (p. 23)
In fact, it is never clear in O’Meara’s account why anyone who embraces post-modernism, whether on the left or the right, would retain any logical grounds for affirming any social fabric or philosophical commitment whatsoever. Despite O’Meara’s somewhat tortured account of how the New Right tries to eat the post-modernist cake while at the same time salvaging traditional identities that post-modernism rejects, the New Right’s position appears inherently arbitrary and contradictory. “Based on a recuperation of postmodernism’s anti-liberal core,” O’Meara writes,
identitarians claim the only viable narratives for Europeans—and hence the only viable communities and identities—are those posited by the cultural, historical, and racial legacies native to their heritage. Unlike the New Left, then, whose rebellion in 1968 ostensively targeted the America-centric order founded in 1945, the New Right fights this order not in the name of a postmodernism that extends and radicalizes its underlying tenets, but for the sake of freeing Europeans from its deforming effects. (p. 26)
Nevertheless, the latent nihilism of post-modernism appears to render any such “identitarian” commitments on the part of Eurocentric New Rightists logically and ethically impossible. The preference of one side for “lesbian bikers” and of the other for “Lombard regionalists” or the ancient Greek city-state seems to be merely that—an arbitrary preference, rooted in no logical or ethical soil, though perhaps grounded in material interests, psychological peculiarities, social habits, or the will to power.
...
In any case, the New Right itself in recent years has moved away not only from its early attraction to a biological view of human nature and society but also from its opposition to multiculturalism, if not to immigration as well. The earlier position, as O’Meara explains, offered a firm rejection of multiculturalism:
In contrast to liberalism’s homogenized world of fractured cultures and peoples, New Rightists advocate a heterogenous world of homogenous peoples, each rooted in their own culture and soil. Every people, they claim, has a droit à la différence: that is, the right to pursue their destiny in accord with the organic dictates of their own identity. They see, moreover, no convincing reason why Europeans should feel obliged to abandon their millennial heritage for the sake of a dubious cosmopolitan fashion. (p. 77)
But the new position has changed course radically.
[I] Recently, however, GRECE’s opposition to multiculturalism has undergone a significant shift. Until 1998, it consistently opposed multiculturalist efforts to recognize immigrant communities as separate legal entities, for it claimed these efforts threatened the integrity of French identity. Then, rather unexpectedly, it reversed course, adopting a “communitarian” position favoring the public recognition of non-French communities—so that immigrants could be able to “keep alive the structures of their collective cultural existence.” To some, this shift constitutes nothing less than an identitarian betrayal, for others a recognition that Europe’s enemy is not the immigrant per se, but the system responsible for immigration. [/I](p. 77)
The shift was not without controversy, with New Rightists like Guillaume Faye and others rejecting it. As O’Meara comments:
When Grécistes first sloganized the droit à la différence, they sought to rebuff liberal efforts to stigmatize European identitarianism as a form of racism. At a certain point, however, its defense of cultural/ethnic difference took on a life of its own…. This eventually led to a qualified form of multiculturalism, as the GRECE reversed much of its earlier argumentation and joined the liberal chorus demanding the institutional recognition of the immigrants’ cultural identity. The problem with its metapolitics, however, did not end here, for its defense of European identity has consistently been waged on the Left’s cosmopolitan terrain—in that it fought not for the primacy of their own people, but for the application of pluralistic standards to support Europeans in the defense of their heritage…. Le droit à la différence ended up, then, parroting the ideology of liberal pluralist society and its relativist values. Needless to add, this augurs badly for the future of the GRECE’s identitarianism, for it now tacitly acknowledges the right of non-Europeans to occupy and partition European lands. (pp. 77-78)
Interestingly the same trend and its implications appear on the American hard right, as advocates of territorial secessionism and proponents of “Euro-American” identity present themselves not as the rightful heirs of the European civilization in North America but merely as one more chip in the multiculturalist mosaic demanding (or in the case of the right, begging for) recognition. One would have thought that French intellectuals intimate with Gramsci and Nietzsche would have avoided this trap.
...
The New Right’s distaste for Christianity owes little to the conventional rationalist and secularist critique associated with figures like Bertrand Russell and T.H. Huxley and far more to the ancient pagan criticisms of Christianity before its acquisition of power under Constantine. The New Right argues that Christianity, and more generally monotheism itself in the forms of Judaism and Islam, have been destructive forces that have spawned intolerance, dogmatism, and a narrow-minded dualism in the European mentality and have authorized massive persecutions, exterminations, and cultural genocide of its victims. Christianity did not emerge from the European folk tradition and identity but was adopted as a theological construct shaped by its Semitic origins and its underclass adherents and was then imposed by the state and the church, often through repression of its rivals and critics. Only through a long process of “Germanization” (O’Meara here cites James Russell’s The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity) or “Aryanization” did early Christianity become at all compatible with European identity. New Rightists share Nietzsche’s critique that Christianity represented a slave revolt against the aristocratic paganism of ancient Europe and under the sway of its otherworldly and universalist beliefs rejected “national and cultural particularisms” and promoted the destruction and amalgamization of distinct peoples. They argue that by substituting its “logos” for the ancient pagan view of nature as suffused with many divinities and supernatural beings Christianity “desacralized” nature and prepared the way for the advent of modern rationalism and the secularized depredations of modern capitalism and mass democracy.
...
New Right paganism looks to the studies of Indo-European mythology and social structure of the late Georges Dumézil and invokes “mythos” as a pagan counterpart to the Christian “logos.” The latter, as O’Meara acknowledges, may
be a more logically, analytically, and clearly developed form of thought, but cognitively it is not superior to mythos and often less suggestive and encompassing. More important still, logos—especially in its modern form—empties the world of those mythic truths that once constituted the essence of the European project. Against this “disenchantment,” which leaves the European powerless before the great challenges threatening him, a revival of Europe’s mythic heritage holds out the prospect that the true sources of his being might be recovered and the European project reborn. (p. 102)
Just as problematic as its hostility to Christianity, at least for many on the American right, is the French New Right’s outright hatred of America itself. While the New Right is surely correct that both contemporary “mainstream” (and even “conservative”) Christianity and the hegemonic forces of contemporary America are the enemies of European Man, it insists on pushing its critique of them far beyond contemporary manifestations.
In the case of America, its critique is not confined simply to the modern post–World War II managerial regime in which state, corporation, and mass culture coalesce to dominate and deracinate the world as well as traditional American culture, but extends to America as it originated and developed. In the New Right’s view, the current American regime is merely the logical and natural extension of America as it was founded and is the most complete expression of modernity itself.
The New Right’s critique of America is in fact a mirror image of what the left thinks about it or would like America to be—the “proposition country,” “creedal nation,” or “first universal nation” of liberal and neo-conservative folklore. Pointing to the millennialist and utopian language of the early Puritans in New England, the egalitarian and universalist slogans of the Declaration of Independence, and the anti-European fulminations of Mark Twain and other progressivists in American history and culture, the New Right claims that this and the political and economic system reflecting it are all that exists in America. As such, it regards this country as the main enemy of European Man and his tradition and identity (as well as of the Third World peoples whose cause the New Right increasingly seems to champion).
As an anti-Europe, the United States represents the preeminent exemplar of liberal modernity. Nowhere else, the Grécistes argue, were the Enlightenment principles—of equality, rationality, universalism, individuality, economism, and developmentalism—more thoroughly realized than in this new land “liberated from the dead hand of the European past.” The country’s constitutional Framers, it follows, were steeped in 18th-century liberalism—which “blended with the earlier ecclesiastical culture of New England” (Carl Bridenbaugh) and later with the Emersonian ideals of individualism. This led them to adopt a political system whose ideological underpinnings rested on rationalist abstractions exalting the individual rather than the history and traditions of its people. The federal state was thus conceived not as an instrument of its people’s destiny—nationality in the European sense did not exist in America—but as a cosmopolis, potentially open to all humanity.
Contrary to the contention of certain paleo-conservatives, as well as the arguments of those historians associated with the school of “civic republicanism,” this propositional notion of the American state was not the invention of latter-day Jacobins, of whom William J. Clinton and George W. Bush are the descendants, but inherent to the country’s original constitutional project. (p. 145)
The hostility of the New Right to America and its global hegemony leads it to sympathize with the Soviet Union, as O’Meara notes. “Given the nature of the existing geopolitical realities, the GRECE has long sympathized with Russia, even during the Cold War.” The sympathy was not due to any affiliation with Marxism but to the New Right’s belief that Marxism-Leninism penetrated into and deformed Russian society far less than liberal modernism permeates American and contemporary European society, that the Russians are an Indo-European people and thus share a racial and deep-cultural identity with Europe, and that their imperial identity is derived from what Rightists like to call “tellurocratic” (based on land power, like Sparta, Rome, and Germany) rather than “thalassocratic” (sea-based power, like that of Athens, Carthage, Britain, and America). Moreover, if Russia recovers economically, it would be capable of mounting political and military resistance to the global hegemony of American liberal modernism.
If European capital and know-how continue to penetrate eastward, contributing to Russia’s recovery, the ex-Soviet Union holds out the prospect of becoming a vast continental power, with an abundance of natural resources (especially oil), an immense reservoir of human talent, and a will to power. A Eurasian rapprochement (which is already occurring in numerous areas of trade, research, and development) would thus portent [sic] an empire of unparalleled immensity and a possible “staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution”…. It would not be at all “unnatural,” then, if European and Russian destinies should merge and an “Empire of the Sun” stretching across fourteen times zones, arise. (p. 193)
The New Right’s anti-Americanism is not confined to a political critique but extends also to American culture or what the critics claim passes for culture in this country. O’Meara cites a recent special issue of the New Right periodical[I] Terre et peuple[/I] that ridiculed America as the “Planet of the Clowns,” taking “particular delight in emphasizing the absurdity of homo americanus.”
From that part of the population claiming to have been abducted by aliens, to creationist accounts of human origins, to a president claiming fellatio by a student aide ought not be considered a “sexual relation,” they have had a field day. (pp. 149-50)
Any number of responses to this line of criticism may be offered, and O’Meara, though he appears to be sympathetic to much of it (recapitulating the thesis of Jewish liberal historian Louis Hartz that America is a society founded on Lockean liberalism and has neither conservative institutions nor conservative ideas), offers a response himself in his final chapter, in which he quotes paleo-conservative historian Paul Gottfried’s perfectly accurate comments that the New Right view of America is in large part simply a caricature of the reality.
First, as for America being a pure product of the Enlightenment and the triumph of modernity, that is certainly true of the system that has prevailed in this country since the New Deal era and increasingly since the Civil War. But it is arguable (indeed, it is the paleo-conservative argument) that this dominant system is by no means the only or real American identity, an identity steeped in racial and tribal realities far more than most Europeans today are. (Pace the French Rightists, “the preeminent exemplar of liberal modernity” is not America but the French Revolution.) Some New Rightists seem to perceive this, however dimly, but their knowledge of the realities of American history appears to be thin. O’Meara in a footnote notes that much of American modernism was simply the result of the triumph of the Northern base in the Civil War. “By contrast, the American South, closer to the legacy of the English gentry than New England Puritanism, was far more European in character,” and “In a characteristic expression of anti-liberal disdain for the North’s ‘anti-culture,’ Maurice Bardèche describes Sheridan’s terrorist assault on Atlanta and the subsequent crushing of Southern civilization as nothing less than a ‘barbarian victory.’” (p. 158)
Bardèche is correct, of course, except that someone should explain to him that it was not Philip Sheridan but William T. Sherman who burned Atlanta (Sheridan did enough damage in the Shenandoah Valley)—facts that any American schoolchild would know. That Bardèche (and perhaps O’Meara, who fails to correct his error) does not know them suggests that much of the New Right sneering and snorting about America is really not much more than an affected European snobbery and resentment of a more successful and more powerful political order.
Moreover, despite the rhetorical and ideological dominance of American political forms by Enlightenment rationalism, the reality of American national political and social life is rather different. Americans, both their leaders and average citizens, love to boast of their egalitarianism but almost all of them live in racially homogeneous neighborhoods, attend racially homogeneous churches, and place their children in racially homogeneous schools. I have no disposition to defend creationism any more than I would claims of alien abductions, but the New Right might try to grasp that the Americans who embrace creationism are rejecting the Darwinian naturalism that the New Right itself claims to oppose.
...
Indeed, it is difficult to see how the French New Right could mount any kind of effective opposition to modernity, given that it rejects almost every aspect of European society. The Christian view of man and society that shaped the classical conservatism that resisted the French Revolution and defended the eighteenth century dynastic states it rejects as bitterly as it does contemporary America. It also has come to affect a skepticism of the racial and sociobiological findings of recent science and of science as a whole. There appears to be no social or political group or force in modern European society with which it expresses any kinship or sympathy. It increasingly seems to ooze sympathy for the Third World invaders of Europe and the violently anti-Western states from which they come. And it regards the Soviet Union as preferable to the contemporary United States.
...
Annoying. :(
Anyways, nice to be here again. I just hope this place doesn't immediately crash!
:)
Petr
http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol4no3/sf-omeara.html
New Culture, New Right:
Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe
by Michael O’Meara
Bloomington, Ind.: 1st Books, 2004
Reviewed by Samuel Francis
...
The French New Right has centered largely around an organization founded in 1968 called the Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE, or “Group for Research and Study of European Civilization”), and its major exponent has been the journalist and author Alain de Benoist. Entirely unlike the American “New Right” (or for that matter the Old Right), the French New Right is anti-Christian, anti-American, and anti-capitalist. Why then is it a “right” at all?
It is a right (a label Benoist and most of his colleagues have always hesitated to embrace) because it mounts a searching and virtually total critique and rejection of “modernity”—modern philosophy since Descartes, modern science and technology, modern materialistic values and culture, and the modern state and its tendencies toward global hegemony and technological regimentation—and it sees in Christianity the origins and underpinnings of modernity and in America and modern capitalism its most extreme representation. It affirms what O’Meara and the New Right itself describe as “traditional societies”—that is, the hierarchical, traditionalist, particularist, familistic and patriarchalist, communitarian, and usually agrarian and pagan societies that modernity destroys. “Traditional culture” as O’Meara explains in a footnote (55), “refers not to those primitive, tribal formations studied by anthropologists, but to the pre-modern formations that characterized Europe up to the 17th century—that is, to the Greek, Roman, Celtic, Germanic, and Medieval forms of the European civilizational heritage.” As the name GRECE suggests, one of the archetypal societies of this kind that the New Right idealizes is that of the ancient Greek polis itself. “Reactionary,” a term usually employed to describe portly suburban dentists or literary monarchists who wear opera capes, does not quite fit la Nouvelle Droite.
...
At the core of the New Right’s critique of modernity is a rejection of the philosophical rationalism that drives the modern mind and of its principal source, the philosopher René Descartes. “In his quest for truth—that is, epistemological truth—,” writes O’Meara,
Descartes concentrated on the length, depth, breadth, and velocity of physical objects, for these alone enabled him to quantify “the empirical unity of the world” and render nature into extensions whose measurements leant themselves to precise and predictable calculations.… His unprecedented success in reducing complex natural phenomena to simple mathematical explanations would, of course, do much to launch the career of modern science; but his success came at a steep price. Besides reducing reality to a simple expanse of matter, “understood” in abstract mathematical terms that did little to enhance man’s knowledge of his world and, in some cases, further estranged him from it, his quantifying reductionism had the effect of relegating the qualitative features of the European life—all those things associated with culture and heritage—to a secondary order of significance. (p. 58)
...
In the New Right’s critique of modernity, individualism itself is closely linked to the other features of modern society:
For once the social world becomes a collection of monadic individuals, inherent distinctions and supraindividual designations take on a secondary order of significance. What counts for liberalism is the basic zoological unit, which—ideally—is a self-contained rational being. The qualitative attributes of station, character, and breeding (not to mention race, culture, and history), whose importance has prevailed in every previous civilization, are thereby ignored, for the individual—any individual—is looked on as an “instance of humanity,” worthy, in himself, of dignity. From this “naturalistic” notion of the individual, which denies everything in man that goes beyond his zoological nature, there emerges another of liberalism’s defining doctrines—that of egalitarianism and the contention that all individuals, irrespective of their inherited or acquired qualities, are bearers of equal rights and deserving of equal treatment. (p. 65)
...
In any case, the New Right certainly did not take its rejection of modernism from the Christian or conservative right but from the movement known as “post-modernism,” associated with Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, et al., a movement usually involved not with the right of any sort but with the extreme left. The logical implications of post-modernism are radically relativistic and skeptical, even nihilistic, and affirm little of anything. As O’Meara writes:
Against the rational, objective, and universal claims of the modern narrative , as it applies the timeless truths of mathematical reason to man’s contingent world, they [the post-modernists] argue that the narrating subject is never autonomous, never situated at an Archimedean point beyond space and time, never able to perceive the world with detachment and certainty. Rather, representations of all kinds are entwined in sociolinguistic webs of signification that know no all-embracing truth, only their own truths, which are indistinguishable from the will to power…. All forms of human action, even (or especially) the most lofty, inevitably shatter before an elusive, polymorphous reality, represented by a now self-conscious throng of incompatible discursive traditions. This leads postmodernists to a “radical pluralism” that “deconstructs” modernist notions of truth, value, and justice in the interests of a wider field of localized representations and practices. (pp. 22-23)
Post-modernists usually apply their “deconstruction” to white, Christian, patriarchal, heterosexual Western society, arguing that its claims to truth, justice, rationality, normality, and even scientific and philosophical certainty are mere myths concocted and deployed for the purposes of buttressing the power of those who benefit from them. This position is in some respects close to those of such thinkers as Pareto and Nietzsche, at least in implication, and one that the New Right has embraced—up to a point.
The point at which the New Right breaks with conventional post-modernism is in the latter’s endorsement, as a practical matter, of the “individualistic tendencies of liberal politics. In many respects they [the post-modernists] are, in fact, simply more philosophically sophisticated liberals, although ones whose principal reference is no longer the ethnically homogeneous nation-state, but rather the rainbow world of the global market.” Given the zealous antagonism of post-modernists to any and all European identities and their passion to dissolve them, as O’Meara writes,
[I]
B and D groups, racial minorities, trance freaks, lesbian bikers, squatters, immigrants, and grunge rockers all register in their count, while Basque nationalists, Swiss Communards, and Lombard regionalists, whose communities are ancient and intergenerational, are generally suspected of being “closed” or repressive variants of the Great Narrative. (p. 23)
In fact, it is never clear in O’Meara’s account why anyone who embraces post-modernism, whether on the left or the right, would retain any logical grounds for affirming any social fabric or philosophical commitment whatsoever. Despite O’Meara’s somewhat tortured account of how the New Right tries to eat the post-modernist cake while at the same time salvaging traditional identities that post-modernism rejects, the New Right’s position appears inherently arbitrary and contradictory. “Based on a recuperation of postmodernism’s anti-liberal core,” O’Meara writes,
identitarians claim the only viable narratives for Europeans—and hence the only viable communities and identities—are those posited by the cultural, historical, and racial legacies native to their heritage. Unlike the New Left, then, whose rebellion in 1968 ostensively targeted the America-centric order founded in 1945, the New Right fights this order not in the name of a postmodernism that extends and radicalizes its underlying tenets, but for the sake of freeing Europeans from its deforming effects. (p. 26)
Nevertheless, the latent nihilism of post-modernism appears to render any such “identitarian” commitments on the part of Eurocentric New Rightists logically and ethically impossible. The preference of one side for “lesbian bikers” and of the other for “Lombard regionalists” or the ancient Greek city-state seems to be merely that—an arbitrary preference, rooted in no logical or ethical soil, though perhaps grounded in material interests, psychological peculiarities, social habits, or the will to power.
...
In any case, the New Right itself in recent years has moved away not only from its early attraction to a biological view of human nature and society but also from its opposition to multiculturalism, if not to immigration as well. The earlier position, as O’Meara explains, offered a firm rejection of multiculturalism:
In contrast to liberalism’s homogenized world of fractured cultures and peoples, New Rightists advocate a heterogenous world of homogenous peoples, each rooted in their own culture and soil. Every people, they claim, has a droit à la différence: that is, the right to pursue their destiny in accord with the organic dictates of their own identity. They see, moreover, no convincing reason why Europeans should feel obliged to abandon their millennial heritage for the sake of a dubious cosmopolitan fashion. (p. 77)
But the new position has changed course radically.
[I] Recently, however, GRECE’s opposition to multiculturalism has undergone a significant shift. Until 1998, it consistently opposed multiculturalist efforts to recognize immigrant communities as separate legal entities, for it claimed these efforts threatened the integrity of French identity. Then, rather unexpectedly, it reversed course, adopting a “communitarian” position favoring the public recognition of non-French communities—so that immigrants could be able to “keep alive the structures of their collective cultural existence.” To some, this shift constitutes nothing less than an identitarian betrayal, for others a recognition that Europe’s enemy is not the immigrant per se, but the system responsible for immigration. [/I](p. 77)
The shift was not without controversy, with New Rightists like Guillaume Faye and others rejecting it. As O’Meara comments:
When Grécistes first sloganized the droit à la différence, they sought to rebuff liberal efforts to stigmatize European identitarianism as a form of racism. At a certain point, however, its defense of cultural/ethnic difference took on a life of its own…. This eventually led to a qualified form of multiculturalism, as the GRECE reversed much of its earlier argumentation and joined the liberal chorus demanding the institutional recognition of the immigrants’ cultural identity. The problem with its metapolitics, however, did not end here, for its defense of European identity has consistently been waged on the Left’s cosmopolitan terrain—in that it fought not for the primacy of their own people, but for the application of pluralistic standards to support Europeans in the defense of their heritage…. Le droit à la différence ended up, then, parroting the ideology of liberal pluralist society and its relativist values. Needless to add, this augurs badly for the future of the GRECE’s identitarianism, for it now tacitly acknowledges the right of non-Europeans to occupy and partition European lands. (pp. 77-78)
Interestingly the same trend and its implications appear on the American hard right, as advocates of territorial secessionism and proponents of “Euro-American” identity present themselves not as the rightful heirs of the European civilization in North America but merely as one more chip in the multiculturalist mosaic demanding (or in the case of the right, begging for) recognition. One would have thought that French intellectuals intimate with Gramsci and Nietzsche would have avoided this trap.
...
The New Right’s distaste for Christianity owes little to the conventional rationalist and secularist critique associated with figures like Bertrand Russell and T.H. Huxley and far more to the ancient pagan criticisms of Christianity before its acquisition of power under Constantine. The New Right argues that Christianity, and more generally monotheism itself in the forms of Judaism and Islam, have been destructive forces that have spawned intolerance, dogmatism, and a narrow-minded dualism in the European mentality and have authorized massive persecutions, exterminations, and cultural genocide of its victims. Christianity did not emerge from the European folk tradition and identity but was adopted as a theological construct shaped by its Semitic origins and its underclass adherents and was then imposed by the state and the church, often through repression of its rivals and critics. Only through a long process of “Germanization” (O’Meara here cites James Russell’s The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity) or “Aryanization” did early Christianity become at all compatible with European identity. New Rightists share Nietzsche’s critique that Christianity represented a slave revolt against the aristocratic paganism of ancient Europe and under the sway of its otherworldly and universalist beliefs rejected “national and cultural particularisms” and promoted the destruction and amalgamization of distinct peoples. They argue that by substituting its “logos” for the ancient pagan view of nature as suffused with many divinities and supernatural beings Christianity “desacralized” nature and prepared the way for the advent of modern rationalism and the secularized depredations of modern capitalism and mass democracy.
...
New Right paganism looks to the studies of Indo-European mythology and social structure of the late Georges Dumézil and invokes “mythos” as a pagan counterpart to the Christian “logos.” The latter, as O’Meara acknowledges, may
be a more logically, analytically, and clearly developed form of thought, but cognitively it is not superior to mythos and often less suggestive and encompassing. More important still, logos—especially in its modern form—empties the world of those mythic truths that once constituted the essence of the European project. Against this “disenchantment,” which leaves the European powerless before the great challenges threatening him, a revival of Europe’s mythic heritage holds out the prospect that the true sources of his being might be recovered and the European project reborn. (p. 102)
Just as problematic as its hostility to Christianity, at least for many on the American right, is the French New Right’s outright hatred of America itself. While the New Right is surely correct that both contemporary “mainstream” (and even “conservative”) Christianity and the hegemonic forces of contemporary America are the enemies of European Man, it insists on pushing its critique of them far beyond contemporary manifestations.
In the case of America, its critique is not confined simply to the modern post–World War II managerial regime in which state, corporation, and mass culture coalesce to dominate and deracinate the world as well as traditional American culture, but extends to America as it originated and developed. In the New Right’s view, the current American regime is merely the logical and natural extension of America as it was founded and is the most complete expression of modernity itself.
The New Right’s critique of America is in fact a mirror image of what the left thinks about it or would like America to be—the “proposition country,” “creedal nation,” or “first universal nation” of liberal and neo-conservative folklore. Pointing to the millennialist and utopian language of the early Puritans in New England, the egalitarian and universalist slogans of the Declaration of Independence, and the anti-European fulminations of Mark Twain and other progressivists in American history and culture, the New Right claims that this and the political and economic system reflecting it are all that exists in America. As such, it regards this country as the main enemy of European Man and his tradition and identity (as well as of the Third World peoples whose cause the New Right increasingly seems to champion).
As an anti-Europe, the United States represents the preeminent exemplar of liberal modernity. Nowhere else, the Grécistes argue, were the Enlightenment principles—of equality, rationality, universalism, individuality, economism, and developmentalism—more thoroughly realized than in this new land “liberated from the dead hand of the European past.” The country’s constitutional Framers, it follows, were steeped in 18th-century liberalism—which “blended with the earlier ecclesiastical culture of New England” (Carl Bridenbaugh) and later with the Emersonian ideals of individualism. This led them to adopt a political system whose ideological underpinnings rested on rationalist abstractions exalting the individual rather than the history and traditions of its people. The federal state was thus conceived not as an instrument of its people’s destiny—nationality in the European sense did not exist in America—but as a cosmopolis, potentially open to all humanity.
Contrary to the contention of certain paleo-conservatives, as well as the arguments of those historians associated with the school of “civic republicanism,” this propositional notion of the American state was not the invention of latter-day Jacobins, of whom William J. Clinton and George W. Bush are the descendants, but inherent to the country’s original constitutional project. (p. 145)
The hostility of the New Right to America and its global hegemony leads it to sympathize with the Soviet Union, as O’Meara notes. “Given the nature of the existing geopolitical realities, the GRECE has long sympathized with Russia, even during the Cold War.” The sympathy was not due to any affiliation with Marxism but to the New Right’s belief that Marxism-Leninism penetrated into and deformed Russian society far less than liberal modernism permeates American and contemporary European society, that the Russians are an Indo-European people and thus share a racial and deep-cultural identity with Europe, and that their imperial identity is derived from what Rightists like to call “tellurocratic” (based on land power, like Sparta, Rome, and Germany) rather than “thalassocratic” (sea-based power, like that of Athens, Carthage, Britain, and America). Moreover, if Russia recovers economically, it would be capable of mounting political and military resistance to the global hegemony of American liberal modernism.
If European capital and know-how continue to penetrate eastward, contributing to Russia’s recovery, the ex-Soviet Union holds out the prospect of becoming a vast continental power, with an abundance of natural resources (especially oil), an immense reservoir of human talent, and a will to power. A Eurasian rapprochement (which is already occurring in numerous areas of trade, research, and development) would thus portent [sic] an empire of unparalleled immensity and a possible “staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution”…. It would not be at all “unnatural,” then, if European and Russian destinies should merge and an “Empire of the Sun” stretching across fourteen times zones, arise. (p. 193)
The New Right’s anti-Americanism is not confined to a political critique but extends also to American culture or what the critics claim passes for culture in this country. O’Meara cites a recent special issue of the New Right periodical[I] Terre et peuple[/I] that ridiculed America as the “Planet of the Clowns,” taking “particular delight in emphasizing the absurdity of homo americanus.”
From that part of the population claiming to have been abducted by aliens, to creationist accounts of human origins, to a president claiming fellatio by a student aide ought not be considered a “sexual relation,” they have had a field day. (pp. 149-50)
Any number of responses to this line of criticism may be offered, and O’Meara, though he appears to be sympathetic to much of it (recapitulating the thesis of Jewish liberal historian Louis Hartz that America is a society founded on Lockean liberalism and has neither conservative institutions nor conservative ideas), offers a response himself in his final chapter, in which he quotes paleo-conservative historian Paul Gottfried’s perfectly accurate comments that the New Right view of America is in large part simply a caricature of the reality.
First, as for America being a pure product of the Enlightenment and the triumph of modernity, that is certainly true of the system that has prevailed in this country since the New Deal era and increasingly since the Civil War. But it is arguable (indeed, it is the paleo-conservative argument) that this dominant system is by no means the only or real American identity, an identity steeped in racial and tribal realities far more than most Europeans today are. (Pace the French Rightists, “the preeminent exemplar of liberal modernity” is not America but the French Revolution.) Some New Rightists seem to perceive this, however dimly, but their knowledge of the realities of American history appears to be thin. O’Meara in a footnote notes that much of American modernism was simply the result of the triumph of the Northern base in the Civil War. “By contrast, the American South, closer to the legacy of the English gentry than New England Puritanism, was far more European in character,” and “In a characteristic expression of anti-liberal disdain for the North’s ‘anti-culture,’ Maurice Bardèche describes Sheridan’s terrorist assault on Atlanta and the subsequent crushing of Southern civilization as nothing less than a ‘barbarian victory.’” (p. 158)
Bardèche is correct, of course, except that someone should explain to him that it was not Philip Sheridan but William T. Sherman who burned Atlanta (Sheridan did enough damage in the Shenandoah Valley)—facts that any American schoolchild would know. That Bardèche (and perhaps O’Meara, who fails to correct his error) does not know them suggests that much of the New Right sneering and snorting about America is really not much more than an affected European snobbery and resentment of a more successful and more powerful political order.
Moreover, despite the rhetorical and ideological dominance of American political forms by Enlightenment rationalism, the reality of American national political and social life is rather different. Americans, both their leaders and average citizens, love to boast of their egalitarianism but almost all of them live in racially homogeneous neighborhoods, attend racially homogeneous churches, and place their children in racially homogeneous schools. I have no disposition to defend creationism any more than I would claims of alien abductions, but the New Right might try to grasp that the Americans who embrace creationism are rejecting the Darwinian naturalism that the New Right itself claims to oppose.
...
Indeed, it is difficult to see how the French New Right could mount any kind of effective opposition to modernity, given that it rejects almost every aspect of European society. The Christian view of man and society that shaped the classical conservatism that resisted the French Revolution and defended the eighteenth century dynastic states it rejects as bitterly as it does contemporary America. It also has come to affect a skepticism of the racial and sociobiological findings of recent science and of science as a whole. There appears to be no social or political group or force in modern European society with which it expresses any kinship or sympathy. It increasingly seems to ooze sympathy for the Third World invaders of Europe and the violently anti-Western states from which they come. And it regards the Soviet Union as preferable to the contemporary United States.
...