The Cultural Causes of Political Change
This is an essay from the 16th conference of GRECE «Pour un Gramscisme de droite» (For a Right-Wing Gramscianism) by Alain de Benoist. November 29th 1981. Benoist analyzes the 1981 victory of the French left, arguing that it was neither surprising nor illogical but rather the natural result of a long-term shift in cultural power. He contends that the former conservative majority failed primarily because they operated only on the political and economic level while ignoring the cultural dimension, where the left had steadily gained dominance in shaping societal values. Benoist argues that the former majority's adherence to liberal ideology made them incapable of effectively opposing leftist values, as they were ultimately trapped within the same egalitarian ideological framework. Instead of offering a distinct worldview, they merely claimed they could achieve leftist goals more efficiently. Benoist concludes that true opposition requires breaking free from this shared liberal-socialist matrix altogether and developing an entirely different civilizational project and conception of human life, operating at the level of ideas rather than conventional politics.
You can find an electronic copy of the conference essays in the original French over at Éléments. TN denotes translator note. Hyperlinks to provide additional information.
Translated by Alexander Raynor
We will, for once, begin this colloquium by evoking, if not an event, at least a political fact: the coming to power in France of a new majority claiming to represent what is usually called "the left." In doing so, we are not going to stray from our vocation and engage in politics. We will simply analyze, in order to take note, and from the perspective of our fundamental options, an evolution that precisely deserves to be studied with some distance - this distance that specialists in electoral sociology, these meteorologists of contemporary political science, are generally quite incapable of possessing.
We believe we possess this distance, insofar as the values we claim are today neither more nor less in power, nor more nor less in opposition than they were yesterday; insofar also as we have never identified ourselves with any of the families that agitate on the scene of politicking politics, as we have always situated our action on a metapolitical and transpolitical level, both cultural and theoretical, and that this is obviously a vocation that we could not change.
Let us say immediately that the victory of the left was, in our eyes, neither "surprising," "illogical," nor "paradoxical." We saw this victory as a normal fact, and even a justified fact, an assessment which, I emphasize, does not in itself entail any value judgment. Objectively speaking indeed, the former majority did not deserve to remain in power, while the left deserved to attain it. Why? This is what I will try to explain.
In our opinion, the essential cause of the failure of the former majority is twofold. On one hand, the values to which this former majority explicitly or implicitly referred had become minority views in French society (a shift inseparable from an evolution affecting all Western societies). On the other hand, prisoner of its inhibitions and the internal contradictions inherent to liberal ideology, the former majority found itself unable to express its reference values - or at least those of its electorate - in a clear and decisive manner, judging it more "clever" to rally to the objectives, even the ideals of its adversaries, claiming only to achieve them more efficiently or more calmly. From then on, the contradiction existing between its explicit discourse and its implicit discourse - the two levels occasionally emerging into each other - and the obsolescence of the value system in which it was nevertheless still required to situate itself, could only provoke its fall.
For several years, all sociological indicators have been pointing in the same direction: the values that underpin life choices have changed. For the French, personal success has undergone a shift in meaning. It is less identified with work, wealth, and the resulting social rank, and more with a convivial lifestyle that excludes values of power, conquest, and self-assertion. The taste for risk and the notion of a life densely invested in one's profession have gradually been replaced by the praise of security and happiness focused on concrete everyday spaces. The goal is to live "comfortably," "relaxed," to evacuate the stress associated with a polemical relationship with the world. At the same time, the major cultural currents stirring the social body and transcending political debate were evolving towards the rejection of responsibility and authority. In short, the French seemed ripe for a social democratic type of management.
It indeed seems certain that a lifestyle based on the idea of risk or the notion of service is today without echo in more than 60% of the population. The transformation of mores bears witness to this. To stick to just one example, I will recall that various polls have shown that in the current state of affairs, a majority of French people would refuse to fight to defend their independence and freedom. We are, in other words, in a society that thinks nothing is worse than death (which will happen anyway), and especially not slavery. The drawback is that this type of society always ends up dying - after having been enslaved.
This ideological drift, despite its own dynamics, has not developed by chance. It results from the implementation in a given direction of a cultural power that alone is capable, on one hand, of replacing one value system with another value system, and on the other hand, of responding to the need for ideological consumption that persists within society. It translates into facts a slow work of tipping, of reversal of values operated by this cultural power.
The facts, in this regard, very exactly confirm the diagnosis that our school of thought has long held. Citing Gramsci, we have consistently said that in developed societies, the conquest of political power passes through that of cultural power; that no power can last, even if it is repressive (and all the more so if it is "liberal"), if it does not benefit from the implicit consent that can only be conferred by the deep agreement existing between the values it embodies and those to which the majority of society members adhere; that a parliamentary majority not accompanied by an "ideological majority" can only legislate provisionally; that an authority inclined to deny itself in favor of an overly exclusive "managerial" orientation or a "neutral ideal" is condemned in the long term; finally, that short-term action cut off from its dimension of depth, that is to say, from its historical and ideological dimension, is doomed to failure.
All these assertions receive striking confirmation today. The rise of the left in France is much more than the "rise" of a coalition of malcontents. It is much more than the consequence of social or economic unease ("the unemployed," "inflation") which is in any case far from reaching its end. It is much more than the reflection of a desire for "alternation." It is the work of cultural power. And, consequently, the argument that the conquest of cultural power by the left had not led to any political change in our country proves to be unfounded today.
The political majority has changed. However, and this is what matters most, the ideological majority remains the same. In other words, there is now concordance rather than contradiction between the political majority, the ideological majority, and the sociological majority. Such an alignment currently represents the main fact of things. However temporary it may be, it puts an end to at least thirty years of "dualism." This is worth looking at more closely.
It is clear, first of all, that cultural power not only allowed the left to create the climate in which a political shift became possible, but also had all the more ease in expressing itself as it benefited from societal traits as diverse as the growing importance (and immediacy) of information, the development of "mass culture" and leisure, the institutional recognition, characteristic of liberalism, of the legitimacy of divergent projects (including, of course, projects of subversion and corruption of consensus), and finally the blindness of most representatives of power.
The former majority committed, we could say, exactly the error that the communists, according to Gramsci, had made in the 1920s: not becoming aware of the "natural" complementarity of civil society and political society. This error was even more serious in their case. The communists indeed believed that political action would be sufficient to lead them to success, while the former majority attributed this capacity to economic action.
There is, moreover, nothing paradoxical about France choosing socialism at a time when its failure, particularly economic, appears "obvious." To imagine that the success or failure of a belief depends on its concrete validity or its empirical verifiability shows a naive anthropology, a complete misunderstanding of crowd psychology, as well as a total ignorance of the nature of messianic prophetism in politics. A doctrine is not discredited by its failures. It is discredited when these failures induce critical reflection on its own postulates. But such reflection is not necessarily produced by the failures themselves. It must have another cause, which can only appear in a radically modified climate, and on the condition that the principles in question are not self-producing of their own illusion.
However, in the case of "economist" ideology, we are far from achieving this. Any improvement in the standard of living, being quantitative, automatically raises hopes for its reevaluation. In a liberal regime, increases in the standard of living (in themselves very desirable), far from disarming socialist hope, can only make it more attractive, since, by nature, it will always be able to promise more. On one hand, the pleasure principle tends towards an ever-more. On the other hand, in terms of quantity, outbidding is always possible. And the only way to avoid being a victim of outbidding is to move from the domain of quantity to that of quality - of lifestyle, of worldview. But this implies changing universes...
The former majority wanted to ignore that in terms of promises, an established power is never competitive. It expended a lot of effort lining up figures, arguments, and reasons. This was to forget that crowds are not "reasonable" and that moreover, as Marcel Aymé said, "it is always possible to oppose reasons with reasons." Where General de Gaulle had shown character, they wanted to display intelligence. And, to borrow an expression from Gérard Miller, on May 10, 1981, "the most intelligent man ended up encountering the stupidest event."
"The great error of French leaders," observed Alain Griotteray, "was to overestimate the importance of economic management; however, growth is only the numerical translation of the behavior of economic agents, which itself depends on their moral framework, as Joseph Schumpeter well understood" (Pourquoi la gauche? (TN: Why the Left?), in Revue des deux mondes, September 1981). As manager of the city, the former majority remained blind and mute in the face of the investment of minds. Yet, one does not kill a belief, one does not disarm hope with economics lessons or standard of living curves. Raymond Aron, moreover, made this revealing remark: "On themes, rightly or wrongly, considered fundamental in partisan discussion, the opposition seemed to hold a monopoly on projects. At the limit, one could say that the majority spoke of management and the opposition spoke of politics" (L'Express, August 14, 1981).
"The former majority, as Alain Griotteray wrote again, had allowed its cultural, moral, political, and sociological foundations to crumble" (art. cit.). Its intellectual and ideological justifications were practically nonexistent: "Above all, no doctrine! That seemed to be the watchword" (ibid.). This neutrality, like all neutrality, could only play into the hands of those who were not neutral. In education, for example, the former majority could only oppose programmed amnesia, the erosion of memories, the implementation of egalitarian practices, and the denationalization of culture with regrets and pious wishes. It accepted the teaching of a rootless history. It did not dare to want, or even imagine, that the dissemination of knowledge could be linked to its shaping within a worldview different from that of its adversaries. It wanted to enforce "neutrality" instead of combating the opposing offensive with a counter-offensive of superior power. André Henry, Secretary General of the National Education Federation, was able to say: "One cannot be a teacher... if one is not left-wing". The former majority willingly or unwillingly accepted that the essential knowledge transmitted to the elements called upon to play a decision-making and choice role in the nation was provided to them, directly or indirectly, by partisans of ideologies openly devoted to its own elimination.
Rejecting any polemological vision of socio-historical action, the former majority opposed the left on the level of the most immediate politics, but within the framework of a clear conscience of ideological non-opposition. Driven by a bourgeois conception of existence, also won over by the play of fashions to new values, it wanted neither to yield flatly to the adversary nor to truly wage war against it. It believed in the virtues of "seduction" and "openness". It considered it "unbearable" to designate an enemy - who, for its part, clearly designated it. It thus resigned itself to practicing a policy of containment, which, on the international level, we know has obtained perfectly null results.
As a result, the political discourse of the former majority automatically situated itself within the cultural discourse of the left. "In schools, at the University, in intellectual and artistic circles, and in most activities that disseminate a general way of seeing and feeling, which orient morals and permeate hearts, it was the left that dominated" (Louis Pauwels).
Certainly, it sometimes happened that one or another element of the former majority seemed to pull itself together. But in the absence of any overall plan, any deep agreement within the government itself, any global ideological reference, these reactions appeared as mere clenching. The criticism of egalitarianism, for example, was not accompanied by measures of social justice that would have made it considered as anything other than an indirect defense of unjustifiable privileges. The pleasure principle was in full play, a principle according to which, the more massively egalitarian a society is, the more the remaining inequalities, even the most minimal, appear as "monstrous"
Thus, the former majority devoted itself in advance to being only the "opposite pole" of a mental universe entirely dominated by the left. By the same token, it condemned itself to a total impoverishment from a semantic, ethical, and thematic point of view. It behaved as if it did not think, as if it were impossible for it to extract a global, coherent view of the world. To produce, in a word, an ethical point of view, an ideology ordering, beyond political tactics which have never been more than means, a long-term perspective capable of rallying people and giving birth to hope.
It was quite different on the left, in this future "republic of professors", where it was known that the ideological content of a television series is at least as important as the announcement of an economic program. Jacques Attali stated: "The societal challenge is not an economic challenge, nor even a political one, but fundamentally cultural" (Le Monde, May 21, 1981). For his part, Jack Lang declared: "I want the Ministry of Culture... to contaminate the State and the entire country" (Le Monde, September 5, 1981).
The former majority sometimes went even further than the search for an impossible "neutrality". It occasionally admitted a certain sympathy for the ideology of its adversaries (without always being able to know what, in these declarations, was a matter of conviction, tactics, or bad conscience). Raymond Barre, at the podium of the National Assembly, praised Blum and Jaurès. (The good socialists, for him, were apparently the dead socialists). Glucksmann and Lévy dined at the Élysée. More generally, the former majority congratulated the left for its profound objectives, limiting itself to asserting that it would achieve them better. Its representatives claimed that socialist ideals were excellent, but that their "generosity" needed to be corrected with more "realism". (This "realism" was then immediately interpreted on the left as synonymous with hypocrisy). By the same token, in legitimizing the notions that the left directly claimed, the former majority implicitly admitted that it held them as decisive and considered their success inevitable.
From "new society" to "advanced liberalism", passing through "French-style labourism", the social-democratic drift of the former majority has thus continued to accentuate. The dominant conception was that of the vaccine: a little socialism would prevent a lot of socialism. But in politics, there are no vaccines. There are only drugs. And once you've started tasting them, you can't do without them. By playing moderate left against extreme left, the former majority simply made the left credible and acceptable at the very moment it thought it was fighting it. By sympathizing with the fundamental values of egalitarianism and universalism, or by sticking to an imaginary "neutrality", it consecrated these values as the only possible values, and at the same time opened the way for those who, being more authentic representatives of these values, were also, by definition, the most capable of realizing them.
This attitude of weakness is not new. It is the hallmark of all powers that have entered into decline and been struck by impotence. The Roman Empire, undermined by Christianity, opened the door to the Barbarians. The decadent nobility of the 18th century abolished its own privileges. The Mensheviks in Russia believed they constituted an excellent bulwark against Bolshevism. We know what became of that.
Claiming, at least in its dominant factions, to be liberal, the former majority, it is true, could not propose a specific worldview without contradicting its own principles. Constitutionally, indeed, liberalism forbids power to play any role other than that of "regulation." It prohibits the implementation of any historical project of civilization to the very extent that it is based on egalitarian individualism, commercial universalism, the utilitarianism of "best interest," the negation of the essence and autonomy of politics, the myths of "state neutrality," "individual happiness," economic objectivity, and the rationality of choices.
Such a power is, therefore, very easy to incapacitate; it is simply enough to refer it back to its own postulates. The cultural power, placed since 1945 in a position of moral superiority, as Gramsci had foreseen, has known very well how to use this process, for example when it demanded platforms for itself in the name of freedom of expression, but became indignant when they were given to its adversaries in the name of "anti-fascism." In both cases, its action was exercised through liberal bad conscience, that is to say, by referring liberal power back to its founding principles.
Another important observation: the former majority, already in a position of inferiority on social issues, had also gradually appeared to be in retreat on the plane of national aspirations. While socialism was coloring itself "in the colors of France," liberalism, growing in the shadow of American soil, appeared as the ideology of choice for foreign influence. Already denounced as "social exploiters," the representatives of the former majority were becoming, in the eyes of a part of public opinion, "bad patriots." We can consider from then on that they were lost. For it is indeed true that the national question and the social question are one and the same question, viewed under different aspects. And it is also true that the "social exploiter" reveals himself sooner or later to be a bad patriot. Confusing the defense of the nation with that of his profits, he ends up betting on the foreigner who guarantees his dividends. Lenin said: "Make the cause of the people the cause of the nation, and the cause of the nation will be the cause of the people." Only the left, apparently, has drawn the lesson from this maxim.
Simultaneously - and we will not regret this - the extremes were discredited. We can say, to be brief, that the extreme left was integrated, while the extreme right was disintegrated. Killed by the embourgeoisement of its leaders, the "recuperation" of its main themes, and the wear and tear of its militant organizations, the extreme left has seriously suffered, moreover, from the collapse of its political and social models (China, USSR, Cuba, etc.). The extreme right, for its part, has excluded itself from the political game due to its infantile nostalgias and an ineptitude for analysis that condemned it to perpetually oscillate between integrism (TN: integrism is used to describe religious/ideological fundamentalism) and activism, from a Christian fetishism (now cut off from its sociological bases) to various forms and manifestations of petty-bourgeois authoritarianism.
What exactly changed on May 10, 1981 (TN: May 10, 1981 was the date of the French election where François Mitterrand and his Socialist Party came to power)? The government? The political class? The regime, the society? It's still too early to say. One thing is certain, we haven't changed universes. And besides, the question of change itself is subject to questioning. Indeed, we cannot avoid posing the hypothesis of a non-change, which would result, not from a desire for continuity with respect to the internal situation, but more simply (if one can say so) from an increasingly generalized implosion of meaning, in France as in other Western countries. This hypothesis amounts to considering that France, threatened yesterday with exiting history through the right-wing door, might exit tomorrow through the left-wing door. In which case the simulacrum would only change its referential: "morality" and "culture" would succeed the economy as the reference prosthesis and alibi of government, while the social would continue to evolve towards the non-social, power towards non-power, and politics towards non-politics.
In the newspaper Libération (September 29 and 30, 1981), sociologist Jean Baudrillard, who shares this opinion, did not hesitate to assert that "ecstatic socialism" (antithetical to passionate socialism) has already established itself as a simulacrum. The "state of grace" would then mark "the exorbitant assumption of a model that has lost its truth along the way"; May 10, the entry into the era of ready-to-believe (just as fashion entered that of ready-to-wear). Far from signaling a return to politics, François Mitterrand's socialism would be another form of acceleration of the transpolitical process of the vanishing of time and history. "Posthumous materialization of an outdated ideology," it would also be hyperreal; it would be "the ecstasy of reality frozen in its own resemblance, purged of the imaginary and frozen in its model (even if this model is that of change)". We would thus have moved from the simulacrum of stability to the simulacrum of change, without ever leaving the realm of simulation. The change of government would be the result of a spectacular reflex, analogous to that which draws a spectator who fears catastrophe above all to the "disaster movie", the spectacle here consisting of seeing one political class disappear in favor of another, without anything important actually happening in reality.
This is how we should then reinterpret the strategy of the left aimed at simultaneously satisfying the desire for change and the desire for stability. The rise to power of a socialism obsessed with moral-cultural transparency, but also a victim of the implosive structure of social substance, would be a non-event hyper-realized into an event, and all that would remain is to wait, either for the model to cancel itself out in its specular transparency, or for it to eventually give birth to another hyper-realized double. In other words, to speak like Jankélévitch, the election of May 10 would have seen the victory of the almost nothing over the virtually empty.
But let's return to cultural power. It is very remarkable that what we have constantly been saying about the ideas of power and the power of ideas seems to find a new resonance today. Here and there, people seem to be realizing "obvious truths" that we have long been the first and only ones to detect. In L'Express (June 26, 1981), Raymond Aron writes: "The time of societies of thought has come." And indeed, we will see during this colloquium the important role that societies of thought have played in historical periods that are not unlike our own.
In the face of the proliferation of "political clubs" and the now widely reaffirmed necessity for "in-depth reflection," we remain somewhat skeptical. It is indeed good to become aware of the reality of cultural power and to want to respond to it. However, the response must be appropriate - and we must not be content with limply rehashing, on a more or less "theoretical" level, principles and attitudes whose erroneous nature has just been demonstrated.
It must first be emphasized that a cultural reversal is necessarily slow. However, this slowness is generally incompatible with the immediate demands of politicians. Accustomed to a parliamentary system that only entrusts them with mandates for a few years, also victims no doubt of the current tendency towards presentism that opposes putting things into perspective, most of them devoid of any historical consciousness, they are used to working in the short term - which is the best way to fail in the long term.
Moreover, and above all, implementing a genuine cultural counter-power effort would require them to realize that on May 10, 1981, it was not so much the former majority as such that lost, but rather, through it, the entire apparatus of references and the value system it claimed to represent. Such an awareness, equivalent to a spiritual conversion to the reality of things, is necessarily confronted at the outset with its own resistance, with the repressed that it mobilizes and confronts. It is first and foremost a struggle against oneself, like any approach involving self-criticism. This is a long-term undertaking, which cannot be improvised, and which very few are capable of resolving to do.
The fact is that the former majority, as we have just seen, never understood that political action is only one aspect, chronologically secondary, of a true ideological and cultural war. And if it did not understand this, it's because it could not understand it, prisoner as it was of its ideological proximity to its adversaries, prisoner of its original belonging to a common ideological matrix. To effectively fight against the left, it would first need to undertake to fight against that which, within itself, relates it to the left. In other words, it would need to question its own principles. And it is this task that is likely to remain impossible for it.
Let's say it clearly: as long as we have not become aware of the historical and sociological reality of cultural power; as long as we have not reflected on the role of societies of thought over the past two centuries; as long as we persist in considering as "minor" or "secondary," even "useless," the ideological and cultural considerations which, alone, can mobilize people over the long term and give them a historical destiny; as long as we have not realized that a university course can be more important than a press conference or a party program, that Jacquou le Croquant has done more for the left's rise to power than Pierre Mauroy's declarations, and that on television, the most important thing is not the 8 o'clock news, but what comes after; as long as we want to perpetually go for the "most urgent" (generally: the next elections), economize on doctrine, practice outbidding in liberalism, believe that good government is the one that "makes you pay the least taxes," defend the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, reduce the "grip of the State" under any conditions, rely on others (on God the Father, on Reagan or on the American "new right") to take care of ensuring one's destiny - as long as we remain there, we will very regularly, very normally, very rightly, meet with failure.
So, what should be done? Well, we must change our principles. We must break out of the dominant framework, precisely the one in which liberalism and socialism constitute, within the same egalitarian matrix, the opposing poles. We must continue to develop a coherent theory, propose another worldview, another civilizational project, another conception of man and life.
People here and there talk to us about the "opposition." They would like us to let them know if we are "in the opposition." But this term itself is ambiguous. There are many ways to be in the opposition, and many reasons too. (Look, for example, at the diversity of "Soviet dissidents" - who have little in common other than being wrongly considered by public opinion as "experts" in Kremlinology).
Certainly, between the stupidity so often found on the right and the dishonesty so often found on the left, there is room in this country for broad opposition. But what matters even more than the attitude one adopts is the place and level at which one chooses to adopt it. Let's repeat, it is not at the level of political politics, at the level of headquarters and parties, that we position ourselves. It is at the level of ideas, at the level of the slow work of transforming the ideas of the time that we have chosen to position ourselves. And from this point of view, it is not very difficult for us to place ourselves "in opposition." Since we have been there since well before May 10, we simply need to stay there.
This is why, in view of the probably serious events that are coming, in view of the new decisive years that the earth is called to experience in the current decade, we intend above all to maintain our distance, our intellectual independence, and our critical freedom. We are certainly not among those who would like to substitute the Baader gang for the Badinter gang. But don't count on us either - to cite just a few examples - to condemn the Minister of Culture when he rightly protests against the colonization of French cinema by the by-products of the sub-culture from across the Atlantic. Don't count on us to join the camp of the emigrants, no longer from Koblenz, but from Washington or San Francisco. Don't count on us to imagine that the surest way to never encounter the Red Army is to go eat hamburgers for life in the vicinity of Brooklyn.
We are not opposed to any particular party. But we are opposed, within all parties, to that which stems from this egalitarian ideology, of which Western liberalism and European social democracy constitute today the privileged points of support. What we feel alien to is not a particular political formation, it's the world in which political formations struggle - this world of economy-as-destiny, this world of the forgetting of being, this world of calculative thinking that weighs all values at the fairest price, this world of the inessential and the dictatorship of the "they".
Where are we today? We are at midnight; we are at the "null meridian" of active nihilism. Our task is to overcome it, to surpass it, to bring it to its conclusion so that new values can be recreated in accordance with what we want to be and where we come from. Participating in our endeavor is not about choosing one clan over another. It's about definitively getting off the trolley bus that keeps going back and forth between the opposing poles of the same ideology - with or without stops on the side of totalitarian abjection. Participating in our endeavor is truly making a "close encounter of the third kind." It's changing universes. It's giving the world back its colors; memory, its dimensions; peoples, a historical and destined possibility of existence. It's listening to history to feel the call of the fled gods and that of the gods to come. It's dwelling, doing, and building in anticipation of those poets in whom Heidegger saw the supreme founders.