The Elusive Right...
Alain de Benoist argues that the right suffers from a lack of ideological coherence, long-term vision, and engagement with cultural and intellectual battles, unlike the left, which effectively uses theory to shape and sustain its influence. Benoist emphasizes the necessity of a precise ideological framework for effective action, lamenting the right's failure to grasp the significance of thinkers like Gramsci or the power of cultural influence in shaping political longevity. He criticizes the right's tendency to dismiss intellectual discourse and retreat into short-term pragmatism, which weakens its position over time. To regain its footing, Benoist suggests the right must assert its identity, recognize egalitarianism as its principal ideological opponent, and acknowledge that no domain of human life is ideologically neutral, requiring it to develop a comprehensive worldview.
This essay was originally published in Éléments no. 20 (February-April 1977).
Translated by Alexander Raynor
Right-wing? Perhaps. A French head of state once said that our fellow citizens wish to be governed "from the center." But the center of what? The center of the left? And how could there be a left without a right? For those on the left, the refusal to identify as right-wing is a characteristic trait of right-wing individuals. The title of this book seems to break that rule. In reality, it does so only partially. Personally, I am entirely indifferent to the question of whether or not I am right-wing. For the moment, the ideas defended in this work are on the right; they are not necessarily right-wing. I can even imagine circumstances in which they could align with the left. The ideas themselves would not have changed, but the political landscape would have evolved. Time will tell what comes of it. On the other hand, one cannot perpetually sit on the fence; words, after all, are not things. And let us say that in France, at the end of the 1970s, in an era where nearly everyone identifies as left-wing, being "right-wing" is still the best way to stand apart…
In a country where it is commonly acknowledged that, with few exceptions—such as the Popular Front or the Mendès France experiment—the left has rarely held political power, it is uncommon to find individuals openly declaring themselves right-wing. "Despite having been equipped for over a century with parties, influential newspapers, and eminent theorists," observes Gilbert Comte, "the right no longer offers any official, candid, or widely accepted representation of itself." He adds, not without reason: "The current right's reluctance to bear its own colors certainly deceives no one. Beyond opportunism and individual fickleness, it reveals the persistence of a deep unease, a sort of moral fracture within contemporary France" (Le Monde diplomatique, January 1977).
The reluctance of the right to define itself as such has various causes. The noblest, one might say, is an implicit refusal to appear as the representative of only a part of reality. The right perceives the division of the national community into parts (and parties) as the beginning of what it opposes—as the onset of civil war. Consciously or not, it rejects the tendency to offer a singular explanation of reality. It resists all the grand reductive unilateral ideologies based on economics, sexuality, race, class struggle, and so forth. It dislikes reducing the world to equations. It does not believe in the coherence of a worldview that is diminished compared to the full range of perceptions we are capable of. Nor does it believe that divided nations have a destined future. In the assignment of labels, it detects a vaguely castrating maneuver—a hint of hemiplegia.
It has been said that the key terms of right-wing vocabulary were discredited by fascisms. Let us rather say that this discredit was deliberately created and sustained by factions skilled in spreading disabling and guilt-inducing myths. Let’s be clear on this point: we are not dealing with an analysis here, but with propaganda. This propaganda seeks to equate "fascism" with any right-wing doctrine that asserts itself with a certain vigor and, conversely, to define as "democratic" only those regimes that view freedom as a sort of statutory free pass for the revolutionary enterprises of the ultra-left. By extension, this assimilation also applies retroactively. For instance, we see Mr. Ernest Kahane, of the Rationalist Union, declare that Gobineau’s work is "on the side of crime," which is about as intelligent as accusing Jean-Jacques Rousseau of bearing responsibility for the Gulag.
Our society thus offers the astonishing spectacle of a right that cannot assert itself as such without being branded "fascist," and a left and far-left that can at any moment identify as socialist, communist, or Marxist while affirming, of course, that their doctrines have nothing to do with Stalinism or, for that matter, with any historically realized form of socialism. Now, if the proponents of the various forms of socialism do not feel bound by any of the concrete experiences that have preceded them—particularly the most criminal ones—I fail to see why the modern right, which formally rejects all totalitarian temptations, should feel compelled to engage in self-flagellation or justification.
Faced with the extraordinary audacity of the proponents of a doctrine in whose name more than fifty million people have already been massacred, and who nevertheless present themselves, hand on heart and rose in hand, as the defenders of liberty, the right should respond with liberating laughter—and continue on its way.
Unfortunately, the right is most often silent. I have watched numerous televised debates. In almost every instance—or nearly every instance—I have witnessed the same scenario. Stage right: the "right-wing man," typically a gentleman of a certain age, well-dressed, polite, always smiling, full of good intentions, and entirely oblivious to the stakes of the discussion. Stage left: young far-left wolves, armed with a coherent worldview, refusing the slightest concession, well-versed in the art of dialectics and the interplay of paradigms and syntagms, tearing their interlocutor apart with glee. I think contemporary society is a reflection of these debates.
Everything happens as though the right has lost even the will to defend itself. Criticized, harassed, and heckled in every possible way, it remains purely passive—and virtually indifferent. Accused, it retreats into itself. Not only does it no longer respond to its adversaries, not only does it no longer attempt to define itself, but it pays almost no attention to the movement of ideas, ongoing debates, or new disciplines. Worse still, it shows no interest in the movement of ideas that might reinforce what it represents. It ignores recent developments in ethology, genetics, historiography, sociology, microphysics...
The right could draw arguments from the writings of Jules Monnerot, Raymond Aron, Debray-Ritzen, Louis Rougier, and others. Yet, curiously, it seems that their works are read primarily on the left, by adversaries who are more attentive than the presumed supporters. Meanwhile, the left, constantly reassessing itself, reaches conclusions that a right-wing intellectual reflection should have reached. It is now the left, not the right, that critiques the myth of an absolute "progress" tied to the absurd notion of a deterministic course of history. It is the left that, after having claimed that festivals are essentially revolutionary (Jean Duvignaud’s thesis in Fêtes et civilisations, Weber, 1973), now realizes that they are, above all, conservative (as shown in Mona Ozouf’s works). It is the left that, after championing the hope of equal opportunities through education, now considers it a "mystification" (Christopher Jencks, Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling, Basic Books, New York, 1972). It is the left that underscores the limits of reductive and pseudo-humanist rationalism, observes that the masses are more transient in spirit than revolutionary, and so on.
In this way, the right is gradually being dispossessed of its themes and mental frameworks. Even more paradoxically, it sometimes criticizes these ideas—without exploiting the contradictions they reveal—when it encounters them in its adversaries, failing to recognize that these ideas were borrowed from its own traditions. Consequently, the right leaves the field wide open to all sorts of appropriations. Dead or stagnant, its thought is refurbished, reshaped, and ultimately annexed by the left, which thereby becomes all the more credible. To its traditional heritage, the left successfully adds right-wing themes—"neutralized" themes that it reshapes and reinterprets to suit its own purposes.
In a very interesting article on "The Right Delivered to Plunder" (Le Monde diplomatique, January 1977), Paul Thibaud, director of the journal Esprit, observes:
"Certain themes traditionally associated with the right are reappearing with intensity in contemporary thought. The hatred of falsely universalist abstraction that inspired Burke is emerging from all sides; the realistic sense of limits, and first of all of death, has become a collective obsession driven by the ecological threat; the value of rooting oneself in a cultural or geographic particularism has become a commonplace. But this reversal of trends seems to have occurred without the intellectual right gaining anything from it. All of this has taken place within the left. The left plays every role: it states theses and objects to them, it launches trends and fights battles. Intellectual content can only gain acceptance by associating itself with the left. Any nationalism must be revolutionary, and any regionalism must consider itself socialist (…). Nothing is more characteristic than the change in the status of certain authors who are now being reexamined. By confronting its most virulent critics or marginal thinkers, the left reinvents itself. We now see leftist or far-left readings of Chateaubriand, Balzac, and Péguy. Sorel returns to the left in the baggage of Gramsci. Tocqueville becomes a reference for advocates of self-management. The failures of the left seem to be the source of a new intellectual vitality, an antidogmatism that opens up fields previously considered off-limits."
Sociological conservatism has always displayed a certain reluctance toward doctrines. Here again, at best, this can be seen as a fairly healthy reaction against a form of intellectualism that views life solely through the lens of a problem—what's your problem? as American social workers so aptly (or poorly) put it. But today, the fight is uneven. Against an opponent advancing into battle armed with an ideological corpus in full bloom, the right-wing individual is utterly disarmed.
Without a precise theory, there can be no effective action. You cannot bypass the need for an Idea. And above all, you cannot put the cart before the horse. All the great revolutions in history have merely transposed into reality an evolution that had already occurred, implicitly, in the minds of people. There could not have been a Lenin without first having a Marx. This is the revenge of theorists—who, contrary to appearances, are not the great losers of history.
One of the tragedies of the right—from the "putschist" right to the moderate right—is its inability to understand the necessity of long-term thinking. The French right is "Leninist" without having read Lenin. It has failed to grasp the importance of Gramsci. It has not realized the extent to which cultural power threatens the apparatus of the state. How this "cultural power" acts on the implicit values around which the consensus necessary for political power's longevity crystallizes. It has not understood how direct political confrontation reaps the fruits of the ideological war of position.
A certain segment of the right exhausts itself in factions. Another, strong in parliamentary terms, always prioritizes the most immediate concerns—that is, election by election. But each time, it loses a little more ground. By continually playing the short game, the right ends up losing the long game...
In Le complexe de droite and Le complexe de gauche (Flammarion, 1967 and 1969), Jean Plumyène and Raymond Lasierra went beyond mere wit by asserting that the right-wing man has a completely different gastronomy than the left-wing man. This is because, indeed, no domain escapes ideology—or rather, the worldview that one has inherited or chosen. Everything is neutral outside of humanity. But within human societies, nothing is neutral. Man is the animal that gives meaning to the things that surround him. There are different ways of seeing the world and being-in-the-world (ways that are "right-wing" and "left-wing," if we insist), and these encompass not only pure knowledge but also intuitive beliefs, emotions, implicit values, daily choices, artistic sentiments, and more.
Let us be clear. I do not believe that there are truly right-wing and left-wing ideas. I think there are right-wing and left-wing ways of supporting these ideas. (The defense of "nature" is neither inherently right-wing nor left-wing, but there are right-wing and left-wing ways of understanding the concept of nature.) Arts, literature, fashion, symbols, and signs—nothing escapes the interpretation that a specific worldview is capable of providing. Generally, the left-wing man has understood this, which gives him a methodological advantage. He knows what he must think, from his perspective, about feudal production relations, abstract painting, cinéma vérité, quantum theory, or the architecture of public housing. Or at least, he knows that his chosen theory has something to say on these subjects.
The right-wing man, for his part, too often contents himself with shrugging his shoulders. He does not want to see in order not to have to act. I believe the right will have made significant progress when it has:
Understood the necessity of declaring itself for what it is;
Identified its "main enemy," which is egalitarianism—denier and reducer of the world's diversity;
Admitted that nothing in existence is "neutral," and that it must produce a discourse on every subject...
Yes, absolutely. We need a coherent and confident identity with theoretical consistency, and we must be able to defend it overtly instead of retreating from the name calling.
Very good, thank you.