Few figures seem less amenable to appropriation by the Right than Antonio Gramsci. An icon of the Left and a key inspiration for ‘critical’ sociological and political thought and IR theory, Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony and political transformation have long been taken as the enemy of conservatism in all its forms. This chapter, by contrast, argues that Gramsci provides a powerful way to understand the globalisation of the Right in part because many of his core ideas, particularly those concerning cultural hegemony, historic blocs, and counter-hegemonic movements, have been self-consciously and strategically appropriated by the Right. The near worldwide rise of the Right is in many ways the product of this ‘Gramscianism of the Right’. Just as Marx famously quipped that the goal of his historical materialism was to turn Hegelian Idealism ‘on its head’, so the Right has inverted Gramsci.

This chapter examines the evolution of this project. To be clear, we are not writing from a Gramscian position in the sense of using a self-consciously Gramscian analysis to explain the Right or the crisis of the liberal international order. That would be quite a different undertaking from the one we engage in.Footnote ¹ Nor are we blaming Gramsci or self-declared Gramscians for the rise of the Right, arguing that the Right is dominated by Gramscian ideas, or claiming that its thinkers and supporters are theoretically rigorous or authentic Gramscians. The Right’s use of Gramscian ideas is much more promiscuous and often instrumental, and it is clearly directed towards objectives that Gramsci and his followers would vociferously oppose. Nonetheless, we hold that focusing on its Gramscian dimensions reveals a coherence and an active strategic agency that is often overlooked in discussions of the Right. This in turn has profound implications for domestic and international order.

Below we sketch a series of themes or analytic principles central to Gramsci’s exploration of social power and dominant, hegemonic political orders. We then outline how a Gramscian approach provided the radical Right with intellectual and political inspiration for how counter-hegemonic movements might successfully challenge modern liberal orders. Our analysis is not designed to provide a comprehensive or authoritative account of Gramsci’s complex ideas. We seek instead to show how these themes illuminate key aspects of the thinking and cultural and political strategies of the Right – in no small part because they draw upon explicitly Gramscian inspirations.

Historic Blocs and Counter-hegemonic Movements

Written largely from his prison cell in fascist Italy in the 1930s, Gramsci’s body of work amounts to a comprehensive critique of the capitalist state and the ruling class. A central aspect of his thinking is the close interdependence between ideas, politics, and material production in historically specific structures of social power that he called ‘historic blocs’. This analysis proceeds along three dimensions. He begins with the economic, with the mode of production and relations of class power and domination operating in a given historical epoch. These forms and relations of production, he argued, are systematically connected to state structures. Politics, government, and law express and ensure the functioning of economic structures and secure the interests and position of the dominant classes. Much of this followed relatively conventional Marxian tenets, but for Gramsci, social and political orders and their power relations cannot rest on economic and coercive power alone. They depend to a significant extent on the consent or co-optation of the dominated – the operation of what he famously called ‘hegemony’ – and it is this insight that has proven his most influential contribution, including to the thinking of the radical Right.

In Gramsci’s quite nuanced account, it is a degree of consent and ideological consensus that prevents a major clash between the oppressors and the oppressed in any social order. To understand how specific orders and distributions of power and wealth endure, we therefore need to identify the components of a dominant culture that produce this consent: the values, norms, perceptions, beliefs, sentiments, and prejudices that support the existing distribution of material and symbolic goods; the institutions that decide how this distribution occurs; and the permissible range of disagreement about those processes. Culture in the widest sense as a complex of dominant ideas, aesthetics, and even modes of feeling is thus not an ephemeral superstructure mechanistically determined by the material base of economic production, as in the more classic Marxian sense. It is instead an essential, active domain that systematically underpins and supports social orders. To understand a historic bloc is to grasp the connections between the dominant forms of ideological, economic, and state power and the hegemonic culture. As he put it, if these

With this in mind, Gramsci introduced the notion of an organic ‘spontaneous philosophy’ that permeates society as a whole, and that is ‘spontaneous’ in the sense that it is not the result of any systematic educational activity on the part of an already conscious leading group but has been formed through everyday experience illuminated by common sense.Footnote ³ Consent and the maintenance of hegemony do not necessarily require active commitment by subordinates to the legitimacy of elite rule. Less powerful people may be thoroughly disaffected. At times they may openly revolt. But normally most people find it difficult, if not impossible, to translate the outlook implicit in their experience into a conception of the world that will directly challenge the hegemonic culture. Consent, for Gramsci, involves a complex psychological mixture of support and apathy, resistance and resignation. The mix varies from individual to individual; some are more socialised than others. In any case, ruling groups never engineer consent with complete success; the outlook of subordinate groups is always divided and ambivalent.

Nevertheless, the deep foundations of a strong hegemonic order mean that direct attacks on it are doomed to failure. Effective opposition must instead be built via a thoroughgoing understanding and critique of that order and the patient construction of ideas and diverse agents capable of confronting it successfully; the creation of a counter-hegemonic movement. Here, the battle of ideas is crucial. Since a hegemonic order is supported not only by common sense but also by organic intellectuals who produce, legitimate, and reproduce its ideological content, a counter-hegemonic movement similarly requires its own intellectuals to undertake a systematic critique of the existing order and provide alternatives to it.

These critical intellectuals and cultural actors must engage in another of Gramsci’s most well-known ideas: a ‘war of position’ in which diverse counter-hegemonic forces operate fluidly to weaken the existing order and build the intellectual, ideological, cultural, and institutional foundations for the new order that will eventually replace the old. In this war of position, the task of the intellectual strata is to analyse the structures of liberal power and modern domination, probe their weaknesses, and forge alternatives. But intellectual or cultural agents alone cannot produce a successful counter-hegemonic movement – they must be connected to wider social forces with the interests and, potentially, the will to challenge the existing hegemony. In Gramsci’s case, this involved the long and multifaceted strategy of bringing to cultural fruition the Marxian goal of transforming the proletariat from an analytic or sociological class in itself into a politically self-conscious and active class for itself. In short, what was needed was not only ideas but also a political economy and a symbolic and affective sociology geared towards political mobilisation.

Although Gramsci remained in many ways wedded to the idea of a central guiding role for the Party in these counter-hegemonic struggles, he also developed the innovative notion of spontaneous struggles beyond any central, directing agent. In many cases, such struggles remain purely at the level of reactions against the existing order, and they are therefore unlikely to be effective.Footnote ⁴ However, spontaneous struggles hold the potential for something more powerful if that opposition can be given a more cohesive sense of itself and its situation, as well as an understanding of its adversaries. In such situations, diverse spontaneous actions can become part of movements with real political power. What appear to be spontaneous or purely reactive revolts (as support for right-wing politics is often characterised) may in fact be connected to a wider war of position that transforms purely reactionary opposition into something more coherent and powerful.

A successful war of position thus contributes to the formation of insurrectionist movements against the dominant order without being the product of central control or direction. While these movements lack centralised leadership, they do not lack a logic. As Gramsci put it in an analysis of the revolutionary movement in Turin in 1920, the success of the rebellion

In Gramsci’s analysis, the war of position is a thus long-term struggle, and its success requires the cooperation and coming together of intellectuals, cultural leaders (or influencers in today’s parlance), as well as the masses. Merely claiming to represent the ordinary people in the conventional party-political sense is unlikely to overturn existing relations of domination but will instead simply reproduce existing common sense.

A Gramscianism of the Right

Gramsci’s strategic analysis of political transformation is generally seen as the intellectual property of the Left. It has, however, been effectively appropriated and in many ways actualised by the Right which has striven, and to a striking extent succeeded, in building a counter-hegemonic project along recognisably similar lines.

Evidence of this appropriation is not difficult to find and dates back nearly half a century.Footnote ⁶ Its historical origins can be traced to the French Nouvelle Droite, established during the late 1960s by Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, Dominique Venner, and other militant right-wing intellectuals associated with the Groupement de recherché et d’etudes pour la civilization européenne (GRECE). Their aim was nothing less than the development of a ‘Gramscianism of the Right’, as Venner put it.Footnote ⁷ The Nouvelle Droite began as a group of young activists who broke from the older far Right and reinvented themselves as intellectuals and ideological entrepreneurs. Their agenda took shape as a response to the rise of the student movements and New Left counter-cultural forces that expressed passionate commitment to civil rights, free speech, and university reforms, as well as a deep hostility to capitalism, colonialism, and all forms of authoritarianism. This was a ‘counter-cultural’ revolt insofar as its protagonists sought to completely reshape the cultural Zeitgeist in their own image, rather than simply providing an alternative within the existing cultural and political institutions.Footnote ⁸

In the eyes of the Nouvelle Droite, the leftist radicals who undertook their ‘long march through the institutions’ after the protests of 1968 led the way not towards greater authenticity and emancipation but towards chaotic political anomie and the deracination of all cultural identities. At the same time, however, Nouvelle Droite members were deeply struck by the sophistication of the Marxist cultural theories sustaining the revolutionary fervour of students and workers. They realised that the post-war Right had seriously neglected the importance of cultural and intellectual activism in the maintenance and subversion of political power. The Nouvelle Droite found its mission in addressing this important failure. Instead of planning a political revolution or an electoral victory, its leading figures proceeded to establish new research networks and journals of ideas to renew the conservative critique of liberal modernity and forge sympathies in the realms of education, media, and the arts.

This self-conscious appropriation of Gramsci’s revolutionary legacy marked a major change of tactics within the French radical Right, which until then had been guided by the ‘integral nationalism’ of Action Française philosopher Charles Maurras. Whereas Maurras insisted on the importance of decisive and confrontational political engagement, members of the Nouvelle Droite were convinced that a wide range of intellectual and cultural activities were preconditions for successful political action. Organised around the GRECE networks, they abandoned the extra-parliamentary militancy of the extreme Right to pursue a long-term strategy premised on the notion that all great political revolutions in modern European history were the actualisations of developments that had already taken place in the realms of thought and culture.

The appropriation of Gramscian themes provided the Nouvelle Droite with novel strategic insights and facilitated its attempts to blur the traditional distinctions between Left and Right in ways that could neutralise the polemical force of left-wing usages of Gramscian tropes. At the same time, it adorned radical right-wing positions with a certain revolutionary appeal and a new post-fascist intellectual credibility.Footnote ⁹ As Guillaume Faye recalls in his Manifesto of the European Resistance, this post-1968 Nouvelle Droite set out to selectively appropriate Gramscian ideas, focusing on the dissemination of cultural values, ideas, and mentalities with the aim of instigating long-term political change by first shifting the boundaries of acceptable discourse within society.Footnote ¹⁰ Gramsci was by no means the only left-wing thinker who attracted the attention of Nouvelle Droite intellectuals. Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Althusser, and Marx himself also became part of a ‘counter-encyclopaedic’ pedagogy of the Right designed ‘to draw historical lessons by analysing the mechanisms that allowed egalitarian ideas to implant themselves so successfully in Europe during the twentieth century’.Footnote ¹¹ But what distinguished Gramsci from other left-wing thinkers was the non-egalitarian potential of his theory of cultural power, along with the organisational lessons that conservative forces could derive from it in their struggle against liberal modernity.

Nearly three decades later, this strategic orientation continues to inspire the Right in France. During the 2022 French Presidential elections, for example, The New York Times observed somewhat incredulously that the two right-wing candidates Eric Zemmour and Marion Maréchal frequently denounced the liberalism of cultural institutions, particularly the media and academia. ‘Paradoxically’, the newspaper noted, ‘they cite Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher, and his theory of “cultural hegemony” to explain how beliefs expressed by the ruling class trickle down to become cultural norms. They have taken up the battle of ideas within mainstream institutions with zeal’.Footnote ¹² In other European countries too, the radical Right regularly recognises Gramsci as an inspiration. The leader of the Dutch right-wing FVD party, Thierry Baudet, concluded his speech at a conference organised by the American Freedom Alliance with his own declaration of admiration for Gramsci.Footnote ¹³ ‘Antonio Gramsci’, he exhorted

In Greece in 2013, the controversial right-wing politician and sometime government minister Makis Voridis justified the decision to shut down the public broadcaster with reference to Gramsci. ‘While he was imprisoned by Mussolini’, Voridis argued, ‘Antonio Gramsci had plenty of time to think about the weaknesses of Communism. He soon realised that no political party can gain power without ensuring its ideological hegemony through ideological mechanisms … We forgot how hegemony worked during the ’80s and allowed the left’s organic intellectuals and supporters to dominate … and propagate a reversed reality.’Footnote ¹⁵

The appropriation of Gramsci is also evident outside Europe. In India, the RSS ideologue Ram Madhav has made explicit connections between cultural Marxism and Gramsci, and joined the RSS leader in blaming ‘cultural Marxists or wokes’ for capturing the media and academe, and plunging India’s educational, cultural, political, and social environment into chaos.Footnote ¹⁶ In Brazil, the maverick intellectual and confidant of former President Jair Bolsonaro, Olavo de Carvalho, has been described as ‘the Gramsci of the Brazilian Right’.Footnote ¹⁷ Carvalho, who died in 2022, provided his own idiosyncratic reading of the Italian thinker to explain both the previous dominance of the Left and the need to create a movement of right-wing intellectuals that would gradually transform the population’s thinking. In The New Era and the Cultural Revolution, originally published in 1994, he identifies the Left’s intellectual conversion to Gramsci’s strategy as ‘the most relevant fact in the national history of the last thirty years’. For the Brazilian Right, this means a patient struggle is needed: ‘The steps are as follows: in the first step, it is necessary to create a movement of intellectuals who will intensely discuss the situation and create a kind of consensual diagnosis. In the second stage, money has to be collected to form a militancy. The third stage is the formation of the militancy itself. The fourth stage is penetration into society. How long would it take to do all this? Twenty years.’Footnote ¹⁸ On Carvalho’s advice, a group of ‘olavistas’ obtained influential positions in Bolsonaro’s government, and not surprisingly, one of their main targets was the university sector and its left-wing intellectuals.

In Argentina, the Right has long admired Gramsci and adopted a war of position in their efforts to counter the Left. According to Mark Osiel, Argentina’s ‘far Right’ started reading Gramsci in the 1980s. He recalls the ‘bizarre’ experience of interviewing Argentine military officers in the late 1980s and hearing ‘them quote chapter and verse from the same Gramsci passages one had pondered in graduate school’.Footnote ¹⁹ The newly elected libertarian anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei is also a Gramscian of the Right. As he explained in an interview with Tucker Carlson shortly before his election, the Right has to ‘wage a culture-war every single day – and we have to be careful because they [the Left] have no problem with getting inside the state and employing Gramsci’s techniques: seducing the artists, seducing the culture, seducing the media or meddling in educational content’.Footnote ²⁰ While Milei’s aggressively neoliberal approach to the economy differs from many other radical Right positions, he is a committed culture warrior dedicated to the fight against liberal values and policies on abortion, gender rights, and racial justice. To this end, he has established ties with Spain’s Vox party, right-wing leaders in Latin America, as well as the Madrid Forum that seeks to bring together right-wing parties within the Iberosphere.

In the United States, the evolution and influence of right-wing Gramscianism was articulated in the early 1990s by the prominent paleoconservative Sam Francis. Like the European New Right, Francis stressed the importance of adopting a cultural struggle against the prevailing liberal order. As he saw it, the problem was that although the conservative tradition had much to say about what it wanted to conserve and why, it provided little strategic guidance on how to achieve those ends. As a consequence, to ‘understand how a politically subordinated and culturally dispossessed majority of Americans can recover its rightful position as the dominant and creative core of American society’, conservatives needed to look to the Left:

The most important of these ideas involved cultural hegemony. Conservatives, Francis argued, have ceded control of cultural institutions, products, and power to liberal elites. As a result, even when they achieve electoral success, conservatives fail to exercise real political power. ‘What is important to understand about Gramsci’s strategy of cultural hegemony’, Francis explained, is ‘first, that it recognizes that political power is ultimately dependent on cultural power – that human beings obey because they share, perhaps unconsciously, many of the assumptions, values, and goals of those who are giving them orders – and, second, that in order to challenge the dominance of any established authority, it is necessary to construct a countervailing cultural establishment, a “counter-hegemony” (or, as the New Left called it, a “counterculture”) that is independent of the dominant cultural apparatus and is able to generate its own system of beliefs’.Footnote ²²

Francis was not alone. Andrew Breitbart, whose eponymous website Breitbart News played so important a role in the early rise of the Alt-Right and Donald Trump, similarly accorded an important place to Gramsci in his belief that ‘politics is downstream from culture’ and his attacks on the hegemony of the Left’s ‘cultural Marxism’.Footnote ²³ Breitbart’s even more famous and influential protégé and collaborator, Steve Bannon, adopts a similar position when discussing his desire to ‘deconstruct the administrative state’ – an idea whose genealogy and centrality we trace in the next chapter.Footnote ²⁴

Metapolitics

These diverse calls to cultural arms provide a useful framing for understanding wider intellectual moves on the Right, which can be read in terms of Gramsci’s tripartite focus on philosophy, politics, and economics. Their stress on philosophy is most strikingly illustrated in the intense engagement with what Alain de Benoist, the key intellectual figure in the French Nouvelle Droite, labelled ‘metapolitics’: the need for a deep critique of modernity in general, and of liberalism in particular, as part of a wider project of intellectual and cultural counter-hegemony.Footnote ²⁵ Although culture and its relationship to political power played a major role in the philosophy of the counter-Enlightenment, de Benoist and his GRECE colleagues believed that the post-war Right had seriously neglected this relationship. In its obsession with fighting communism, it had come to embrace the free-market catechism of the United States, along with its consumerist culture of cheap entertainment and technological fetishism. By contrast, the Nouvelle Droite undertook a wide-ranging re-evaluation and critique of modernity, including a modulated scepticism towards capitalism. At the heart of this critique lie several interrelated themes – most notably, the commercialisation of culture by the consumerist society and the danger of uniformity.Footnote ²⁶ Speaking in no uncertain terms about the dangers of importing free-market cultural institutions such as Disneyland, de Benoist called for Europe to move away from the United States. In his words, ‘cultural war has been declared’.Footnote ²⁷

The Nouvelle Droite theorists channelled this strategy in different ways. Collectively, however, they shared the conviction that the cultural revolutions of the 1960s had succeeded in politicising all areas of human activity; that parliamentary debates and government policies would from now on merely confirm the results of the culture wars; and that the egalitarian principles of the Left had become hegemonic in practically all civil society, state, and international institutions.Footnote ²⁸ Under these conditions, members of the Nouvelle Droite concluded that the only viable strategy to challenge the ‘cultural power’ of its adversaries was to provide a critique of ideology that turned the Left’s own methods against it. The aim was to ‘de-naturalise’ the egalitarian categories and universalist claims of the Left, and reshape public debates on a theoretical meta-level by re-articulating the ideas, concepts, and meanings which people use to make sense of and define the world around them.Footnote ²⁹

These metapolitical endeavours take many forms, ranging from philology and the esoteric to the more conventionally philosophic. They are far from unified, and many are in respects conceptually at odds with one another.Footnote ³⁰ Their diversity, and at times incoherence, should not however deflect from their more basic strategic orientation and political objectives, for these are rarely abstract scholarly endeavours alone. Instead, they aim to provide the bases for a thoroughgoing critique of liberal modernity so as to reveal the deep and powerful interconnections between thought, culture, and power that underpin liberal domination – and in so doing, provide the means of resisting and gradually overturning it.

In the major ideological realignments of the 1970s, metapolitics became a key resource in reorienting the radical Right away from its association with historical fascism and the violent anti-intellectualism of skinhead subculture. The Nouvelle Droite instead pointed to the more ambiguous constellation of interwar philosophical explorations and anti-liberal political experimentations that has come to be known as the German Conservative Revolution as its main ideological forebearers.Footnote ³¹ By the 1980s, the strategy had inspired the creation of similar movements in Italy, Belgium, Germany, and other countries across Western Europe.Footnote ³² The further expansion of those networks across Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and Russia after the end of the Cold War in turn led to the development of a significant transnational network of publications, publishing companies, study groups, conferences, front organisations, and online platforms that make up what participants and observers today simply call the European New Right. We trace a number of these initiatives further in Chapter 4.

In the United States, the emergence and consolidation of a similar metapolitical agenda is again closely linked to the historical development of the paleoconservative movement led by intellectuals like Paul Gottfried, Thomas Fleming, and Sam Francis. The term paleoconservatism emerged and gained traction during the mid-1980s, designating a diverse group of traditional conservatives dissatisfied with the growing influence within the Republican establishment of neoconservative and neoliberal strains of conservatism that were often at the time designated as the New Right.Footnote ³³ For paleoconservatives, these developments were symptomatic of the moral and political degeneration of the American conservative movement itself, which they believed had wholeheartedly embraced the hedonistic commercial culture of late-modern capitalism while accommodating the political correctness of the Left and dismissing traditional conservative positions as political liabilities.Footnote ³⁴

Long before Trump, paleoconservatives predicted and sought to foment a populist revolt that would radicalise conservative positions in the domestic and global culture wars. They saw the first glimmers of this revolt in Pat Buchanan’s ‘America First’ challenge to the incumbent President George H.W. Bush in the presidential primaries of 1992.Footnote ³⁵ The aim was not so much a return to classical conservatism as the creation of a New Fusionism that would combine traditionalism with the modernist rebellious spirit that yielded the American Revolution.Footnote ³⁶ Paleoconservatives, however, were under no illusions that winning elections would be sufficient to overthrow the incumbent regime. If the dissident Right was to lead a revolt, Francis wrote at the time, it was ‘necessary to construct a countervailing cultural establishment, a “counter-hegemony” … that is independent of the dominant cultural apparatus and is able to generate its own system of beliefs’.Footnote ³⁷ Drawing on Gramsci, Francis saw Middle American Radicalism (MARS) as an untapped and potentially game-changing source of ‘post-bourgeois resistance’ against the dominant ‘liberal’ culture, as well as economic globalisation and the follies of internationalist foreign policies.Footnote ³⁸

The Buchanan Revolution never really materialised, but in the following decades, paleoconservatives continued to provide intellectual ammunition to a wide range of agents and ideological forces challenging the prevailing liberal order nationally and internationally.Footnote ³⁹ This constellation of conservative voices sees itself as part of an ideological vanguard charged with fighting a long war of position on behalf of the large culturally conservative populations it claims to represent. As Francis saw it:

These perspectives have also provided a means of bringing issues of race back into explicit discussion. Francis often invoked race, although until later in life he generally did so with some caution, frequently formulating questions of race relations within a wider defence of the culture of the anti-bellum American South. More recently, Greg Johnson, a leading figure in the North American New Right, articulates a more explicitly ‘race-focused’ metapolitical strategy:

Race is thus an important element in much radical Right thinking, but their metapolitics is not reducible to race alone. Not all those sympathetic to the American New Right subscribe to its racist, white nationalist, or supremacist variants, something that is even more true of those who are not explicitly part of the ‘movement’ but sympathise with some of its cultural or economic positions. As we discuss in the next chapter, capturing this diversity and the strategic potential it holds for the radical Right requires a rather different understanding of its unifying ideas.

The End of Enlightenment (and Liberalism)

Conservatism has long been identified with hostility towards Enlightenment Reason.Footnote ⁴² Against the abstract, speculative tendencies of modern thought, conservatism emphasises the comforting immediacy of shared cultural conventions and self-evident truths. It affirms the importance of historical heritage, collective memory, and the concrete, situated experience of one’s particular environment as the main determinant of political thought and action. Yet this has also long left conservatives in a dilemma, inhabiting a world that they can only respond to with what seems like an increasingly nostalgic (or worse, authoritarian) yearning for long-lost verities. What marks the radical Right is both a foundational critique of liberal modernity and an attempt to build a non-liberal alternative by radicalising rather than rejecting some of modernity’s most powerful dynamics.Footnote ⁴³

This is most strikingly seen in the attitude of wide parts of the radical Right towards postmodernism. In many of the culture wars that wracked Western societies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, postmodernism played the role of a cultural bogeyman in conservative circles – a decadent destroyer of values that threatened to undermine traditional values, social structures, and reason. Indeed, hostility towards postmodernism was a rare issue on which many mainstream liberals and conservatives found common ground. However, this is not the case for important parts of the radical Right, which instead find much to use and value in postmodern views.Footnote ⁴⁴ As one of their leading theorists explains, influential postmodern positions like that of Jean-François Lyotard are characterised by an ironic, fatalistic, and pluralist incredulity regarding metanarratives and a scepticism towards liberal morality and Enlightenment Reason shared by many radical conservatives.Footnote ⁴⁵ In this account, what makes our era ‘post’ modern is precisely the fact that the Enlightenment narrative remains central to the reproduction of contemporary liberal orders, despite having lost all metaphysical credibility: ‘It persists’, according to Robert Steuckers, ‘by dint of force and propaganda. But in the sphere of thought, poetry, music, art or letters, this metanarrative says and inspires nothing. It has not moved a great mind for 100 or 150 years’.Footnote ⁴⁶

For the radical Right, this incredulity towards the Enlightenment does not open up a vast new vista of political tolerance and the proliferation and play of difference. Instead, ‘provincializing’Footnote ⁴⁷ Europe’s false Enlightenment universalism provides an opportunity to unapologetically revive the West’s essential and unique historical identity, which lies not in liberal Reason but in ‘a return of the Dionysian, the irrational, the carnal, the turbid, and disconcerting areas of the human soul revealed by Bataille or Caillois, opening up the possibility for a revival of myth and the tragic, agonistic worldview laying at the origins of Western civilisation and its best cultural achievements – what Spengler called the “Faustian spirit”’.Footnote ⁴⁸ As de Benoist and Champetier emphasise, this affirmation of mysticism and the transgressive, emotional aspects of Western culture is not a question of overcoming the crisis of modernity by returning to the past, but of recovering ‘certain premodern values in a decisively postmodern dimension’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In their view, ‘it is only at the price of such a radical restructuring that anomie and contemporary nihilism will be exorcised’. In this context, the end of the Enlightenment project heralded by postmodernism is transformed by radical Right intellectuals into an opportunity for the reconstitution of an organic populism. This reconstitution seeks to rehabilitate an ethno-politics disgraced by its association with eugenics and historical fascism by re-articulating this position in the somewhat less offensive language of cultural relativism, fashioned conceptually through an ‘identitarian’ theory of individual and collective self-determination that frames identity as a process of constant becoming within the limitations of historical experiences and material conditions. In this framework, identity ‘is not what never changes, but on the contrary, it is what allows one to constantly change without giving up who one is’ – that is, without losing the sense of ontological security afforded by our existence as member of a distinct community of fate.Footnote ⁵⁰

Identitarianism thus affirms the value and importance of recognising differences between cultures, ethnic groups, races, and civilisations, along with the political processes and ideological mechanisms that maintain a healthy degree of segregation and estrangement between them: ‘The group and the individual’, de Benoist argues, ‘both need to be confronted by “significant others”’.Footnote ⁵¹ This is what radical Rightists call ‘differentialism’, or the ‘right to difference’. While asserting the absence of objective criteria for determining a hierarchy of cultures, races, or ethnic groups, differentialism casts itself as an ethico-political response to the perceived threat posed by liberal multiculturalism and ethnic and racial miscegenation. As Lucian Tudor emphasises in a sympathetic survey: ‘When total openness and mixing occur, peoples do not merely change in the normal sense, but lose who they are or merge with another people entirely, thus resulting in the elimination of their identity.’Footnote ⁵² These views are reflected in frequent racism and hostility towards mass migration, as well as the popularity of the idea of the ‘great replacement’ whereby ‘native’ populations are being divested of their ‘indigenous’ cultural traits. Importantly, as we argue in the next chapter, these views are not simply a critique of population movements: the great replacement is seen as the outcome of the policies and interests of specific agents and is linked to a wider assault on liberal power.

It is safe to say that this fusion of poststructuralist tropes on the disenfranchisement of alternative subjectivities will not satisfy many sociologists within professional academic circles. But as we will see in Chapter 4, identitarians have their own para-academic outlets and alternative epistemic communities through which they can challenge liberal ‘regimes of truth’ and disseminate their own. As Michael O’Meara cheerfully acknowledges, the revolutionary conservatism of today’s radical Right, in this sense, does indeed unfold within the cultural horizon of postmodernism:

According to radical Right thinkers, the disorientating temporalities and disastrous demographic and environmental consequences of globalisation have made the renewal of traditions and revitalisation of local communities imperative. The vision of universal progress and development that is at the heart of liberal globalisation is fundamentally flawed since it detaches ‘man [sic] from the soil, reduces his beliefs to superstitions, denounces political sovereignty as despotism, atomises society, reducing it to individual and interchangeable economic actors’.Footnote ⁵⁴

By contrast, as de Benoist and Champetier argue: ‘Fostering social interaction and a sense of celebration, traditions inculcate a sense of life’s cycles and provide temporal landmarks. Emphasising rhythmic passing of the ages and of the seasons, great moments in life, and the stages of the passing year, they nourish symbolic imagination and create social bonds. These traditions must never be frozen in time but must always be in a state of renewal.’Footnote ⁵⁵ Appropriating the language of Indigenous Sovereignty and environmentalism, some radical Rightists insist on the close link between historical heritage, collective memory, and spiritual rootedness in ancestral lands against the utopian vision of a cosmopolitan elite that has no concrete ties to the earth. In their eyes, the protection of the ecosystem is inseparable from territorial sovereignty and the defence of ‘indigenous’ white populations.

Progress is the guiding ideology of modernity. The idea of a future open to social and technological innovation and reformation is among its most powerful philosophical underpinnings. The power of progress as a metaphysic and a political ideology has always presented conservatives with a dilemma. Many found their only response in forms of reaction that rejected modernity in favour of a nostalgic return to the past. Today’s radical Right has no such illusions. It recognises that the ideology of progress and the power of technology cannot be denied; the challenge is to rework their directions, transforming them into bases for neo-reactionary alternatives. Whereas the counter-revolutionary conservative rejects the demagoguery of modern democratic politics unconditionally, the revolutionary conservative accepts democracy as a fait accompli and seeks to redirect mechanisms of popular mobilisation against liberal-democratic institutions. For the theorists of the French Nouvelle Droite, as for Alexander Dugin in Russia and Greg Johnson and his acolytes in American Renaissance, the challenges of the twenty-first century demand a new synthesis of tradition and technology that will break decisively with modern egalitarianism and restructure the relationship between the local and the global.Footnote ⁵⁶ As Ruuben Kaalep and August Meister argue in their ‘ethnofuturist’ manifesto for the Baltic New Right: ‘Maybe the defeat of fascism and the transformation of Marxism into its post-modernist absurdities was necessary for the next leap in our history. The new ideology to make this leap possible would include elements of other organic ideologies merged with a futuristic vision of the world and political methods of the postmodernists (“fight fire with fire”), but with a metaphysical and traditionalist core.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Faye calls his own influential version of this synthesis Archeofuturism:

Conclusion

Over the past half-century, the radical Right has generated a range of critiques of liberal power and its weaknesses as part of constructing a cultural strategy – a vision of political identity and ideology – capable of overcoming it. Yet they are well aware that a purely cultural strategy is not enough. For Francis, a close student of Marx as well as Gramsci, and a follower of the ex-Trotskyist turned arch-conservative James Burnham, a project of cultural hegemony would only succeed if linked to concrete social forces. Here, he argued, conservatism actually had a decisive advantage over both liberalism and the Left. The proletarian agency expected by Marxian theory has failed to materialise. Yet, as we detail in the next chapter, the radical Right sees the dynamics of global capitalism with its attendant economic, normative, and cultural dislocation of key social classes, combined with resentment towards the power of the dominant New Class of liberal elites, as creating the economic, social, and cultural-ideological conditions for a genuine conservative revolution.

This provides the radical Right with a global sociological, ideological, and political framing, a political economy with capitalism and class at its centre, and a strategic direction. It seeks to mobilise social forces produced and marginalised by liberalism and globalisation by bringing them to self-consciousness, turning them from analytically identifiable but political inchoate classes in themselves to politically aware and active classes for themselves. Ideas and the activities of ‘organic intellectuals’ are central to this process, as is the mobilisation of wider forces of cultural resistance into diverse counter-hegemonic movements. As de Benoist argues, the aim of this strategy is not simply to displace the democratic consensus from Left to Right, but to use that displacement to position the radical Right as a plausible partner to the working class and other social positions and allow it eventually to replace the liberal elite with its own leadership cadres.Footnote ⁵⁹

In intriguing ways, this process resembles (albeit in politically very different ways) what a number of Gramscian-inspired thinkers have theorised as the project of a ‘postmodern Prince … a political subject that could form a collective will out of diversity and difference, in a social, cultural, and political context defined by postmodern subjectivities and a post-Fordist mode of production’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Instead of relying on a single source (the proletariat or the Party) as the agent of historical transformation, these views call for diffuse, yet not disconnected, forms of political struggle, complex processes of political resistance and transformation that unite diverse social actors against shared structures of oppression. These ideas are most prominent in attempts to develop a ‘Left populism’,Footnote ⁶¹ but the idea of a postmodern Prince also sheds revealing light on the activities of the Right.

This is the sense, for example, in which the radical Right represents an ‘internationalist nationalism’. It mobilises what Kyle Murray and Owen Worth have called Gramsci’s notion of the ‘conception of the world’ through which ‘certain social groups and individuals within them understand the world and their place in it’, and seeks to construct discursive and organisational structures through which ‘different narratives can be harmonised across different levels of international society’.Footnote ⁶² In the era of a global Right, these conceptions of the world can be actively and strategically produced and promoted to generate transnational equivalences and effects. Just as the conditions and structures of liberal power and domination are in important ways global, so too must be the resistance. The global Right thus seeks to create what Robert Cox called ‘transnational social forces’ by mobilising national social forces within a transnational framing set against a global (and globalising) enemy. This is not a unified movement in the sense of traditional Marxian conceptions of the international working class. It draws instead on the idea that similar or similarly positioned groups within states are being marginalised by the powers of liberalism and by national and international processes of globalisation, and that they can be brought to awareness of the common causes of their plight and their common cause in resisting it.

As we discussed in Chapter 1, some of the most powerful insights into such strategies come from attempts to use Gramscian ideas to build counter-hegemonic movements on the Left. In her call For a Left Populism, for example, Chantal Mouffe argues that a successful populist movement must construct a ‘people’ through a series of discursive oppositions, a strategy that ‘consists in disarticulating the sedimented structure of an existing formation and, through the transformation of these practices and the instauration of new ones, establishing the nodal points of a new hegemonic formation’.Footnote ⁶³ Crucial to a counter-hegemonic movement is its ability to generate discursive ‘chains of equivalence’ between different groups and struggles in relation to a unifying negativity or opposition. As Mark Purcell summarises the idea:

Perhaps ironically, these ideas are more effective in helping understand the successes of the radical global Right than they have been in building a Left internationalism. As we will show, they help capture what the Right has attempted, and often succeeded, in doing. The global, cast as managerial liberalism, is a key element in this oppositional conservative discourse that can operate globally, capable of being mobilised in different forms and contexts. In contrast to some historical forms of fascism (or for the matter, the Marxian tradition in which Gramsci is rather awkwardly located), the global Right does not consist of an overarching, universal theory, ideology, or zobjective that all adherents must subscribe to. Instead, it involves the construction of myriad chains of equivalence between the positions, concerns, and objectives of diverse agents. Its objective, as Mouffe outlines from her Left populist position, is ‘the creation of a popular majority to come to power’ However

Such a strategy may seem suspiciously vague, and within projects that ultimately seek a unified, universal goal it may well be. However, it is particularly well suited for a radical Right that does not seek universality but works instead to generate a range of mutually supportive yet distinct conservative visions of global plurality – as expressed, for example, in the combination of various essentialisms (Tradition, People, Nation, Civilisation) adopted by diverse radical Right movements across the world. That these diverse ideological positions lack ideological conformity and centralised, tightly structured hierarchical organisations should not blind us to the continual efforts and capacity to establish between them mutually reinforcing affinities or ‘articulations’. To quote Mouffe once more, ‘To deny the existence of a priori, necessary link between subject positions does not mean that there is no constant effort to establish between them historical, contingent, and variable links … Even though there is no necessary link between different subject positions, in the field of politics there are always discourses that try to provide an articulation from different standpoints.’Footnote ⁶⁶

Seen in this way, counter-hegemonic ideologies enable a range of actors and agendas to find common cause despite their different contexts and concerns. Radical conservative actors and ideas seek to construct transnational chains of equivalence between different movements – and at the most basic level, the global Right consists of precisely such articulations. In the North, this is strikingly evident in articulations linking working-class material interests and discontent, the predations of economic globalisation, cultural and symbolic opposition to liberal elites and ‘wokeism’, and the privileged positions of experts and expert institutions. In the South, as Marlene Laruelle points out and as we show in the final chapter, they are often connected to critiques of liberal imperialism and domination.Footnote ⁶⁷ These diverse articulations are deeply relational and globally connected, and even if the equivalences and political alliances are disparate and their ends on closer inspection perhaps incompatible, they can become socially and politically powerful in their shared opposition to liberal globalisation as a socio-economic and political agenda.