Getting the Alt Right Wrong

Matthew Rose offers another genealogy of the alt right that is limited to the European nouvelle droite.

I'm pretty sure Dreher knows of Theodore Beale's existence. And he is probably not completely ignorant of paleoconservatism and its influence on the alt right. And yet he offers no modification of Roses's article.

Jerry Salyer on the New Right and the Alt Right

The Pagan Foundation of the American Alt-Right

Alain de Benoist on the Old Right

The Intellectual Vacuity of the Old Right

In the beginning, what was the best that the Right had to offer? I would briefly say: an anti-individualist and anti-utilitarian system of thought, together with an ethic of honor, inherited from the Ancient Regime. Thus it was opposing head-on the ideology of the Enlightenment, whose driving forces were individualism, rationalism, self-evident individual interests, and the belief in progress. The values that the Right claimed were aristocratic and popular at the same time. Its historic mission was to fulfill the natural union of the aristocracy and the people against their common enemy: the bourgeoisie, whose class values were precisely legitimized by Enlightenment thought. But this union was fulfilled only during very brief periods.

For the Right, Man is naturally social. However, it never forged its own consistent theory to explain community or social connectedness. Nor did it seriously explore opposition to the ideal liberal types, the autonomous individual and the “social man.” It has never been able to formulate a genuinely alternative economic doctrine to the mercantile system, either.

Instead of supporting the workers’ movement and nascent socialism, which represented a healthy reaction against individualism that the Right was also criticizing, it all too often defended the most dreadful human exploitation and the most unjustifiable political inequalities. It sided with the wealthy, objectively participating in the class struggle of the bourgeoisie against the would-be “redistributors” and the “dangerous classes.”

There were exceptions, though rare ones. The Right’s theoreticians were more often led by their audience than leading it. Defending the nation, the Right rarely understood that the nation is above all else the people. She forgot the natural complementariness of aristocratic and popular values. When the workers’ right to an annual holiday break was passed into law, the Right railed against the “vacation culture.” It always preferred order to justice, without understanding that injustice is a supreme form of disorder, and that order itself is very often nothing but an established disorder.

The Right could have developed a philosophy of history founded on cultural diversity and the need to acknowledge its universal value, which would have led it to support the struggles in favor of autonomy and liberty in the Third World, whose peoples were prime victims of the ideology of progress. Instead of that, the Right ended up defending the colonialism that it had once condemned, while complaining about being colonized in turn.

The Right forgot that its only true enemy is Money. It should have considered everything opposing the system of money as its objective ally. Instead it gradually joined the other side. The Right was better equipped than any other force to reframe the anti-utilitarian values of generosity and selflessness, and to defend them. But, little by little, the Right acceded to the logic of interest and the defense of the market. At the same time, it fell in line with militarism and nationalism, which is nothing but collective individualism, something that the first counter-revolutionaries had condemned as such.

Nationalism led the Right to the metaphysics of subjectivity, this illness of the spirit, systematized by the Moderns. This estranged the Right from the notion of truth. It should have been the party of generosity, of “common decency[1],” of organic communities; but it all too often became the party of exclusion, of collective selfishness, and resentment. In short, the Right betrayed itself when it began accepting individualism, bourgeois lifestyles, the logic of money, and the model of the market.

Related:
Political Economy for Embodied Souls
The Conservative Mind - An Act of Recovery?
How to Lose a Republic

A reaction to de Benoist's essay

I read Alain de Benoist's "Monotheism vs. Polytheism: The Dilemma at the Heart of the West,"
and I was disappointed. (I believe he had been praised by certain paleoconservatives.) De Benoist encourages Westerners to rediscover a pre-Christian identity, but he can only do it but writing an anti-Christian polemic, blaming Christianity for all of our modern political ills. (Is writing a genealogy an European thing? Or did he pick this up from Nietzsche?) Some seek to separate Jerusalem from Athens; de Benoist (and the translator Tomislav Sunic) seek to separate Athens from Jerusalem. But this is impossible. Up to this point I had not read much of de Benoist's writings, content to look at him as a possible source of good European "rightist" thought. Now, I have my doubts. Does he take the modern nation-state for granted?

Once the polytheism of values "disappears, we face totalitarianism." Pagan thought, on the other hand, which fundamentally remains attached to rootedness and to the place, and which is a preferential center of the crystallization of human identity, rejects all religious and philosophical forms of universalism.

This would seem to take the "particularity" endorsed by paleoconservatives and traditional conservatives to an extreme? Does de Benoist argue for moral relativism? Or should one instead distinguish between moral norms that are universally binding, and their different instantiations in human law? Traditional conservatives recognize the order of charity and the distinctions between people upon which our duties are based, while rejecting the obliteration by liberalism of these differences. If there is a God, are not all people bound to love Him?

Is the anti-Christian direction of this essay the reason why Alt Right published it?

Items of Interest, 22 June 2010

Peter Hitchens, Treading on dreams - my struggle with 'Stan'
Rod Dreher, The big mouth of Stanley McChrystal
Richard Spencer, The McChrystal Crackup
Alain de Benoist, Monotheism vs. Polytheism
Fabius Maximus, We are following Japan’s path of decline. The real test comes later this year.

Supreme Court Rules In Favor Of Expansive Reading of Material Support Law

Zenit:
Papal Address on 400th Anniversary of Matteo Ricci's Death
"An Example of Balance Between Doctrinal Clarity and Prudent Pastoral Action" [2010-06-21]

Papal Homily for Rome Diocesan Ordinations
"This Is the Sure Road to Find True Joy" [2010-06-20]

On the Power of the Cross
"Taking up the Cross Means Committing Oneself to Defeating Sin" [2010-06-20]

Asia Times:
Compulsory retirement irks 'old guard'
An ex-senior Chinese Communist Party member's call that retired officials should not meddle in state affairs is either an admonishment of aging former leaders who cling to influence rather than accept the end of the dynastic system of lifetime tenure, or an early warning for present leaders to abide with new retirement ages. - Wu Zhong

Asia News:
US military pressure increasing in the Persian Gulf by Maurizio d'Orlando
Govt less and less sincere with the people, Card Zen says by Annie Lam
Chinese state-owned banks buy a lot of dollars, yuan loses values
Number of Catholics in Korea continues to grow by Theresa Kim Hwa-young

Progressivism without progress by Damien Perrotin (original)

He discusses Alain de Benoist with respect to progressivism:

A number of thinkers on the fringes of the radical right have remained, or become again quite sceptical of progress. Americans will think of the Southern Agrarians or of modern paleoconservatives. Being an European, I will rather speak of the so-called New Right and of its leader : Alain de Benoist. While the New Right was born from an attempt of the far right to break with the string of defeats it experienced since the fall of the Petain regimen de Benois himself can hardly be called a fascist or even a traditionalist. He claims not to be a racist, and I have no reason not to believe him – a politician can lie about his opinions for electoral gain, not an intellectual whose only aim is to found a philosophical school. What de Benoist advocates is a world of local communities based upon non-mercantile values and with a renewed relationship with nature. Each one of those would have an inalienable right to its own culture and local, concrete, liberties inside the general framework of a loose European federation. He has recently written a book to support the idea of degrowth, which shows he understands, somewhat, the predicament of industrial society, even if his support for large-scale geopolitical constructs proves that he does not yet understands all its consequences.

The question is, of course, why do I fee so ill at ease reading him ?

I am hardly the only one in this situation. Supporters of degrowth were horrified by de Benoist's endorsement of their ideas, but for bad reasons. One can hardly blame de Benoist when he refuses to follow the degrowthers when they claim that by implementing their pet political project, they will get the perfect, classless, society two centuries of leftist revolutions consistently refused to give them. The fact is that degrowth is very bit as infused with progress mythology as the growth ideology of the old, traditional, left. They just differ on what is should be measured by.

The problem is elsewhere.

The ideology of de Benoist and his ilk may not be racist – at least in its pure form, most of its supporters definitely are – it is definitely anti-egalitarian. We tend to assume that anti-egalitarianism is necessarily racist, because it is how it manifested itself during the last century. It is a mistake, however. You can base your anti- egalitarianism on virtually anything and de Benoist bases his own upon the idea of an intellectual elite, whose supposedly innate superiority would have its root in genetics. This means, of course, that he refuses democracy, since democracy is based upon the idea that every man is, at least in theory, able to formulate an informed opinion about the way public affairs are run.

It is also a celebration of closed society. Every society, must have some kind of closure, lest it dissolves away and it is likely that post-peak societies will be more closed than our own. There won't be any large state apparatus to hold them together, so they will have to rely upon organically enforced shared values for cohesion. There is however a difference between accepting this as a lesser evil and turning every culture into a kind of ethnic island where any departure from tradition would be ruthlessly punished.

De Benoist's utopia, is in fact Sparta reborn, with its insular economy and culture, its heroic, freedom-loving, armed citizenry... and its helots.

Most peak-oil activists, even those who consider themselves conservative, would find De Benoist's project abhorrent, and that is where lies the possibility of progressivism without progress. In a world of scarce resources, it is no longer possible to dream of the shining futures of the last century. It would even probably dangerous to do so. This does not means, however, that must renounce the ideal of a common human dignity beyond and above cultural, religious and political boundaries. By this, I do not mean the false universalism and real ethnocentrism the West imposed upon the world, and which is still popular down here, just this very simple idea : every man should be respected as such, no matter his condition.

This is this idea which lies under the failed utopias of the left and no matter how bad the coming decline turns to be, they are still worth defending

Does an authentic republican require egalitarianism? Does it always involve the political participation of all? The classical and medieval conceptions of republicanism would seem to answer no to these questions. Aristotle holds that a republic is a government by the many, not by all. Apparently Machiavelli would agree with him. (Is this true of the other civic humanists? That is likely.)

Though I have been reading Mr. Perrotin's blog for only a short time, nothing that he writes here is unexpected.

Nouvelle Droite - New Right - English articles
French Philosopher Alain de Benoist Believes that the EU is more Atheist than the Former USSR

Alain de Benoist

A website dedicated to him and his writings, Les Amis d'Alain de Benoist.
wiki
(Nouvelle Droite)

I haven't read anything written by him, but he has been referenced by several writers on "the Right." Is it accurate to say he is opposed to the liberal (dis-)order and some sort of communitarian? I know he's received some criticism from those on 'the Right' for changing his mind about certain things. (Or was it being too accomodating to certain demographic trends?)

Video Alain de Benoist,Propos volés - Alain, de, Benoist ...
Alain de Benoist sur Radio Bandiera Nera 1/5

The De Benoist Archive
Nouvelle Droite - New Right - English articles--
Manifesto of the French New Right in Year 2000
The Philosophical Foundations of the French New Right

Jihad vs. McWorld. An interview with Alain de Benoist | Alberto ...
The Faye-Benoist debate on Multiculturalism
Three Interviews with Alain de Benoist
Alain de Benoist - Stirpes
Alain de Benoist move the left? - OD Board
Alain de Benoist's 'Multiculturalism': A Problem In Defining A New ...