Gee’s Reviews > Against Democracy and Equality: The New European Right > Status Update

‘The Jacobin and Marxist conception of the Utopia in which history was destined to end were remarkably similar.’ Both were conceived as being perfectly in harmony with the interests of the people, although in order to enforce this harmony both had to resort to violence.

In general, argues Pareto, each government tries to preserve its political institutions and internal harmony by a posteriori justification of its political behaviour; a behaviour that stands in sharp contrast to its a priori political objectives. In practice, this means that governments have a tendency to ‘sanitise’ their improper and often criminal behaviour by simply appropriating self-serving labels

Culture is the most effective carrier of political ideas because culture mobilises the popular consciousness not only by virtue of ephemeral slogans, but also by a genuine appeal to the historical memory of the people. Reversing the Marxist theorem, the New Right argues that ideas, and not economic infrastructure, constitute the foundation of every polity.

The excessive individualism of Anglo-Saxon society and a unique political theology of ‘secularised’ Protestantism resulted over a period of time in the subordination of traditional politics to unbridled economic expansion. In his essay on democracy, de Benoist explains that real and ‘organic’ democracy can only exist in a society in which people have developed a firm sense of historical community

The political dualism that prevailed during the 1940s and 1950s, sharpened by the earlier fascist experience, prompted many intellectuals to label everything that remained on the Right as the ‘dark forces of reaction fighting against the enlightened principles of progress’.

Despite their dislike of Marxism for its appeal to Christian universalism and equality, New Rightists enthusiastically but selectively study the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. They use Gramsci to arrive at their own critique of the cultural hegemony of ‘big business’ and of the social engineering working to subvert what remains of rooted societies at the present time.

Egalitarianism aims at introducing equality where there is no place for it and where it does not match with reality, as for instance when somebody argues that all individuals have the same skills and the same gifts. But egalitarianism also aims at apprehending equality as a synonym for ‘sameness’, i.e., the opposite of diversity.