Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News anchor and now a freelance political commentator, last month invited Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi provocateur known for denying the Holocaust, to be his guest for a very cordial interview. Giving Fuentes space drew sharp criticism from the American right. Responding to the attacks, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential American conservative organizations, came to Carlson’s defense and dismissed the criticism as “malicious.”
The conflict quickly escalated, with several members of the foundation's anti-Semitism task force resigning, followed by several members of the academic community. Roberts was forced to apologize.
These events have highlighted a real small civil war being waged within the American MAGA movement, between members who see themselves as mainstream conservatives, following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan, and those who are labeled as the "woke right", hostile to liberalism and globalism, and advocate white identity politics.
Critics accuse the new right of being too much like the left. “Like its antithesis on the left,” liberal author Thomas Chatterton Williams observed this year, “the new right places grievances about identity, ethnic consciousness, and tribal aspirations at the center of its actions and thinking.” James Lindsay, one of the most influential critics of the “awakened” movement in America, argues that it would be more accurate to “describe them as revolutionary progressives cloaked in conservatism.” Many are now worried about the expected spillover of the conflict across the Atlantic. “What starts with them ends with us,” Danny Finkelstein, a columnist for the Times, warned recently.
The phenomenon that Chatterton Williams, Lindsay, and Finkelstein are concerned about is undoubtedly real. On both sides of the Atlantic, we are witnessing the rise of open racism, white identity politics, hostility toward migrants, and the spread of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bigotry. But interpreting these changes as an “awakening of the right,” a reflection in the mirror of an “awakened left,” is wrong in that it allows mainstream conservatism to evade responsibility for its own contribution to these changes. These are not ideas imported from America. They are homegrown and have been around for a long time.
The ongoing conflict between the old and the “awakened right” is the latest manifestation of old tensions within conservatism. Conservatives, Roger Scruton, perhaps the most important conservative philosopher of recent decades, has observed, believe in the importance of free markets, private property, and individual choice, as much as in the overriding importance of community, tradition, and place, all of which impose limits on our freedom. Drawing on Edmund Burke, the founder of modern conservatism, Scruton argues that the ideal society is not built on liberty or equality, but on submission, which is “the primary virtue of political beings.” For Scruton, as for Burke, “the price we pay for community is intolerance, exclusion, and a sense that the meaning of life is in submission.” Anti-liberalism was built into conservatism from the beginning.
The same can be said of identity politics. Most people think of it as a recent phenomenon associated with the left. But the real source of these policies is to be found on the side of the reactionary right. Its primary expression, long before it was given this name, was the concept of race: the belief that your being - your identity - determines your values and place in the world.
Conservative critics of the universalist ideas of the Enlightenment began to emphasize particular group identities during the 19th century. “There is no such thing as man alone,” wrote the French reactionary thinker Joseph de Maistre in a polemic against the concept of human rights. “I have met Frenchmen, Italians, and Russians… As for man as such, I have not yet met him.”
Particularism brought a romantic view of each culture as distinct and unique, and of each people as a community defined by a unique cultural heritage resistant to the vagaries of history. It also contributed to the development of the biological concept of race, which would soon become dominant in interpreting differences between people.
Then came Nazism and the Holocaust. In their shadow, biological ideas about race were marginalized. Instead, culture became the primary language for understanding the differences between different groups of people. Paradoxically, in the postwar world, the romantic vision of culture was embraced equally by liberals and the far right.
“The true wealth of the world is the diversity of its cultures and peoples.” This may sound like the statement of a liberal who advocates multiculturalism. In fact, these are the words of Alain de Benoist, founder of the French New Right, one of the most important figures in the process of reshaping the ideas of the far right for the post-Holocaust world.
Liberals and leftists saw cultural pluralism as an argument for a more inclusive world. For the far right, pluralism was a means of exclusion, intolerance, and the rebranding of racism as white identity. Immigrants, de Benoist argued, must forever remain outsiders, because they are carriers of different, incompatible cultures and histories. They must be excluded from citizenship, because being a citizen means “belonging… to the homeland and to the past.”
The “awakened right” is the result of the transfer of such ideas from the far fringes to debates within the mainstream right. The move towards the centre has been successful because in the last few years politicians and commentators have already plundered and appropriated the ideological arsenal of the far right. Many now routinely describe immigrants as “invaders”, wonder whether black and Asian people can really be British, lament that white people are losing their “homeland” and the British are “giving up territory” – language that would have been unthinkable in mainstream debates two decades ago.
The New Right is not just a mirror image of the Left. It is a reflection of old forms of reactionary conservatism that are reasserting themselves as more liberal currents retreat. To successfully challenge such reactionary ideas, we must first understand what they are.
(Translated by Đorđe Tomic)
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