An intellectual and cultural war is underway. Not a conflict between states, nor a clash of civilizations, but a struggle within them. It is an ideological battle whose strongest focus today lies across the Atlantic. It is being waged by what Emmanuel Macron has called the “reactionary international.” This struggle is reshaping alliances and drawing new borders from Washington to Moscow, from Buenos Aires to Ankara.
The movement is not structured like the socialist and communist internationals of the 20th century. They were the successors to 19th-century workers’ organizations, united in the hope of making a “radical break” with the past in order to change the world “from the ground up.” However, attempts to unite the modern right have been ongoing for a decade. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former strategic advisor, launched The Movement in Brussels in 2018, with the aim of bringing together far-right populists and nationalists across Europe.
Despite the apparent failure of that project, Trump's victory further emboldened leaders of the European far right. They reconvened in Washington in February 2025 at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual gathering of American conservatives, in an attempt to replicate the MAGA ecosystem in Europe.
Olivier Roux, a professor at the European University Institute in Florence, said that “several ideological factions are celebrating Donald Trump’s victory: a reactionary movement supported by the Christian right, identity-based populism, and a futuristic high-tech direction.” Although often at odds with each other, these three currents are united by a common disdain for “wok” culture and progressivism.
The Christian Right: Illiberal and Climate Change Skeptical
The Trumpist sphere draws support from a large segment of evangelicals - neo-Protestants who adhere to a literal interpretation of the Bible and personal conversion. Trump's election also highlighted a lesser-known but very active faction of Catholic fundamentalists, with J.D. Vance, the vice president of the United States, as their political leader and Steve Bannon as one of the first ideological promoters. This Catholic current opposes many of the theological positions of the late Pope Francis, especially on environmental protection and immigration.
Trump himself praises plastic straws and advocates a “drill, drill, drill” policy when it comes to shale oil and gas extraction. While environmental activists promote the concept of “reducing growth,” reactionaries boldly counter them with capitalist productivism. “If American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg and her sermons, you can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” Vance told European leaders at the Munich Security Conference on February 14.
The main struggle of Catholic integralists is to ban abortion and euthanasia. Inspired by the natural law of Thomas Aquinas, their vision draws more on the traditionalism of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) than on the reformism of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), and is ideologically closer to the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow than to Pope Francis. In any case, they contribute to the rise of an identitarian Christianity that is illiberal, anti-vaxxer, climate skeptical, and anti-science.
While acknowledging that Europe and the US are still “on the same page,” J.D. Vance believes that the biggest threat to Europe is “not Russia, or China, or any external actor,” but “a threat from within,” as he said in Munich in February. In his view, it is “Europe’s departure from some of its most fundamental values.” He attributes this shift to the laws and norms of European democracies that regulate freedom of expression, protect citizens from foreign political influence via social media, give in to feminist demands, and criminalize anti-abortion activism.
“The Christian right is literally reactionary,” says Olivier Roux. “It rejects the philosophy of the Enlightenment, defends the traditional family, and rejects feminism and homosexuality.” Reactionaries are not conservatives; they are, according to historian Mark Lilly, a professor at Columbia University in New York, as radical as revolutionaries. Reaction is driven by a desire to restore the old order.
Lila adds that they are “obsessed with contradictory dreams: one of a lost pastoral, religious age, and the other of a new society built and governed by strong men.”
Identity populism: nostalgic and vengeful
The second component of the neo-reactionary bloc is identity populism – a form of nationalism that draws support from the middle and working classes, but has the power to attract embittered elites who are hostile to the “cultural left”. This populism is embodied in politicians such as Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Đorđe Meloni in Italy. Dominant in Europe, this form of populism is, in the words of Olivier Rue, “less reactionary and more nostalgic”. It seeks not to restore the distant past or to build a world of the future, but to preserve what it perceives as the advantages of the world as it once was.
“Nostalgia hung over European thought like a cloud after the French Revolution and has never fully dissipated,” says Mark Lila. For Western European populists, it means a return to the idealized “30 glorious years” after World War II. In Germany, it sometimes means a romanticized memory of the former East Germany (GDR), a phenomenon known since the 1990s as Ostalgie (from the word Ost, which means “east” in German).
National populism even attempts to appropriate the legacy of the sexual revolution of the 1970s, turning it against contemporary progressive goals. “You can’t say anything anymore, you can’t do anything anymore,” this complaint unites both the bourgeois right, worried about the loss of old privileges, and the aging libertarian left, frustrated by the “neo-feminist” blaming of men.
Although they transform republican, humanist and feminist values into “identity markers” in the fight against a Muslim world that is perceived as medieval, the appeals of identity populists to Christianity are, according to Rou, “purely rhetorical.” “It is a metaphor for defending the ‘white’ West and opposing the so-called ‘great exchange,’” says this researcher who studies value conflicts. “Most populists are not against abortion rights, or even against same-sex marriage.”
Techno-libertarians: digital autocrats
Libertarian transhumanism is the third branch of this international far-right formation. A handful of wealthy Silicon Valley engineers believe that a caste of brilliant, high-IQ startup founders is destined to rule the planet.
As American historian David Bell, a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, points out, these “techno-Caesarists” shaped their theoretical instruments for the fight against “political correctness” back in American universities in the 1990s. Entrepreneurs David Sachs and Peter Thiel, both former Stanford students, were then editing a student magazine aimed at combating the “myth of diversity.” Elon Musk later joined them, and these ideologues from Palo Alto, according to Bell, “radicalized” the so-called “PayPal mafia,” a term coined by Fortune magazine in 2007 for a group of young technology enthusiasts who gathered at the financial services company PayPal in the late 1990s.
They are fans of the epic sagas of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the more educated among them are influenced by the political philosophy of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), while some were even students of the French philosopher René Girard (1923-2015), who spent his entire career at Stanford. These techno-futurists dream of creating a new aristocracy. As Peter Thiel has put it bluntly, these autocrats of the digital age no longer believe that personal freedom and democracy are “compatible.”
According to Olivier Rue, these transhumanist tycoons are “not populists, but elitists.” They often even openly embrace their eugenic leanings. “Libertarians are not liberals, but neo-Darwinists who think they are the embodiment of a race of giants,” says the liberal essayist Guy Sorman. Their goal? “To organize the separatism of a white, genius elite, locked in gated communities and other ‘free zones,’ while they wait to go to Mars. They don’t care about the people—they can just pedal and deliver pizzas,” Rue says.
According to Mark Lilla, the global reactionary galaxy “swallows up the works of the same authors”: Nazi legal theorist Karl Schmitt, German historian Oswald Spengler, esoteric thinker Rene Guénon, royalist Charles Moras, Italian fascist occultist Julius Evola, Russian imperialist Alexander Dugin, and even writer and philosopher Ayn Rand, whose work, according to Guy Sorman, is “something like holy scripture” for them.
However, the reference authors for techno-reactionary gamers and bloggers are also very contemporary, as confirmed by the success of the person under the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert - a young Romanian-American blogger Costin Alamariu, close to the “neo-reactionary” movement (Dark Enlightenment, or NRx) led by the American anti-egalitarian computer scientist Curtis Jarvin and the British anti-democratic philosopher Nick Land. “At the moment, the books of these intellectuals are being translated and published in all European languages,” warns Lila.
The intellectual roots of the reactionary international are diverse, chaotic, and even contradictory. As Lila explains, the populist political movements she inspires “do not have the structured ideology” that communists had in Marxism-Leninism. This is precisely why this period is all the more disturbing.
Common enemy: “wolf totalitarianism”
Who are today’s opponents? It is certainly the “vouk” movement. Hatred of “voukism” is undoubtedly the strongest unifying force of these ideological currents. This catch-all term aims to discredit and caricature forms of “critical knowledge” such as gender studies, decolonial approaches, and ecological humanities – fields that are rooted in universities and resonate in educational systems. That is why, in the words of J.D. Vance, “professors are the enemy, universities are the enemy.”
A handful of wealthy Silicon Valley engineers believe that a caste of brilliant, high-IQ startup founders is destined to rule the planet.
The ideas that need to be defeated are clearly marked in Trump’s outbursts against “critical race theory” or in Javier Millay’s curses, in which he compares “vouk hegemony” to “cancer” or a “mental virus.” The Argentine president’s tirades unite the anger of reactionaries, populists, and techno-Caesarists: at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 23, he called for “this disgusting ideology to be removed from our culture, our institutions,” referring to voukism.
Reflecting on the “identity left” on American university campuses, Mark Lila admits that “it is hard not to feel a certain sympathy for this intellectual counterrevolution, which is exposing the academic bureaucracies charged with enforcing the new vouk gospel.”
But at the same time, he warns that "those American scoundrels, or Republicans, are also bloodthirsty and ready to set fire to the university village."
And they've already started: The Trump administration suddenly froze $400 million in previously approved funding for Columbia University, where Lila teaches, including funding for medical research.
"The Trumpists want to bring all universities to their knees and force them to toe the Republican Party line."
“Anti-voukism has become the battle cry of those who attack the independence of scientific institutions,” said historian Antoine Litty, a professor at the College de France and an expert on Enlightenment thought.
Reactionaries defend tradition and religion. Populists invoke republican principles to accuse Islam of being fundamentally incapable of reform. Libertarians distort the legacy of the Enlightenment, presenting it as a new version of the old order (Ancien Régime).
“In their apocalyptic, egalitarian view of humanity, progress and democracy were seen as dogmas to be overthrown. In contrast,” says Liti, “the Enlightenment has always defended the ideal of individual emancipation based on the widest possible dissemination of knowledge.”
"Continental Imperialism"
Will these far-right currents succeed? Rua doubts it, because, as he says, they represent “three opposing value systems”: traditionalist Catholics are disgusted by the “science fiction messianism” of techno-libertarians, who in turn are in conflict with identity-type populists, committed to the idea of a powerful, sovereign state.
David Bell believes that these currents are cutting off the branch they are sitting on.
“Trump’s policies are the politics of resentment — they have allowed oppressed workers to support a billionaire from Queens who is despised by New York’s elite,” he said. However, “the American president is actually bankrupting them.”
Guy Sorman, on the other hand, believes that insecure and vulnerable social groups that voted for Trump or Milley will eventually turn their backs on their leaders, even if, as he says, “white male revenge is a powerful unifying factor.”
Philosopher Michel Feher is not so optimistic. According to him, the reactionary international will not push the world into a conflict of nationalisms, but regional powers will try to divide up spheres of influence. "They will appropriate desirable territories, preferably through sanctions, and if necessary by invasion."
According to Feher, Russia could continue to expand its influence in Ukraine and the Baltic states, the US in Canada and Greenland, and China in Taiwan. Another example: “Erdogan no longer wants to restore the Ottoman Empire, but is pursuing an expansionist policy based on the belief that wherever there are Turks, there is Turkey,” Feher concludes.
How can we resist this wave? First, by recognizing that “the prism of anti-totalitarian thinking, which pits democracy against tyranny, no longer works in an era when the US can vote alongside North Korea at the United Nations,” says Michel Feher. The same goes for “the old anti-imperialism, which is incapable of recognizing Russia’s imperial will,” he adds.
Resistance, according to Feher, would mean the formation of an "alternative international" - a community of citizens oppressed by authoritarian regimes, who find forms of self-government within the cracks of societies.
On the other hand, Guy Sorman prefers to imagine a “liberal international,” because, as he says, liberalism, “that cosmopolitanism that has been patiently built since the beginning of the 19th century to guarantee freedom of thought and entrepreneurship,” is seriously threatened by techno-Caesarism.
One is close to the radical left, the other to the neoliberal right. Despite their differences, both agree that Europe today has a historic opportunity. It can become, as Feher puts it, “a stronghold of resistance to the alliance of global powers,” or be content to be “a fortified retirement home for domestic savers.” Sorman, on the other hand, expresses the hope that Europe will become “the best example of applied liberalism.”
Prepared by: NB
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