“Whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat.” –Pierre Joseph Proudhon

In his important work Beyond Human Rights: Defending Freedoms (Arktos, 2011), Alain De Benoist aptly summarizes the first article of faith of the present day secular theocracy which reigns in the Western world:

One proof of this is its dogmatic character; it cannot be debated. That is why it seems today as unsuitable, as blasphemous, as scandalous to criticize the ideology of human rights as it was earlier to doubt the existence of God. Like every religion, the discussion of human rights seeks to pass off its dogmas as so absolute that one could not discuss them without being extremely, stupid, dishonest, or wicked…(O)ne implicitly places their opponents beyond the pale of humanity, since one cannot fight someone who speaks in the name of humanity while remaining human oneself.

While reading the above passage, I was instantly reminded of a particularly venal leftist critic who once amusingly described me as “flunking out of the human race” for, among other things, promoting the work of Benoist. The zealous religiosity which the apostles of human rights attach to their cause is particularly ironic given the nebulous and imprecise nature of their cherished dogma. As Thomas Szasz has observed:

Never before in our history have political and popular discourse been so full of rights-talk, as they are today. People appeal to disability rights, civil rights, gay rights, reproduction rights (abortion), the right to choose (also abortion), the right to health care, the right to reject treatment…and so forth, each a rhetorical device to justify one or another social policy and it enforcement by means of the coercive apparatus of the state.

Indeed, contemporary “rights-talk” often resembles the scene in one of the Star Trek films where Captain Kirk and his cohorts are engaged in negotiations of some sort with the Klingons and the Chekhov character raises the issue of the Klingons’ lack of regard for “democracy and human rights.” A Klingon responds by denouncing the term “human rights” as “racist” (presumably because Klingons are excluded from the human rights pantheon).

Benoist traces the development of modern “human rights” ideology and explores how the concept of “rights” has changed throughout history. In the classical world, “rights” were conceived of as being relative to an individual’s relationship to a particular community. Someone possessed “rights” because they were a citizen of a specific political entity or some other institutional context. The notion of abstract “rights” in a quasi-metaphysical sense was non-existent. Benoist considers the ideology of human rights to be an outgrowth of Christian universalism. Christianity introduced the concept of an individual soul that is eternal, transcendent, and independent of one’s specific social identity. Out of the Christian notion of the transcendent soul emerged the Enlightenment doctrine of “natural rights.” These rights are assumed to be universal and immutable.

Yet the very concept of “rights” as conceived of in this manner has itself undergone a number of profound metamorphosis. In its early phase, rights doctrine recognized only the Lockean negative liberties of “life, liberty, and property” and so forth. With the advent of ideologies like socialism or progressive liberalism the rights doctrine began to include what are now called “positive” rights. FDR’s famous “four freedoms” are an illustration of the foundations of this perspective. With the racial and cultural revolutions of the postwar era, rights doctrine took on a whole new meaning with “rights” now including exemption from discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability and an increasingly long list of other things. This certainly would have come as a shock to the great apostle of “natural rights,” Thomas Jefferson, who, as the Left never ceases to remind us, was a white male slaveholder who thought homosexuals should be castrated.

The definition of “human rights” continues to become increasingly murky over time. Benoist provides an apt illustration of the escalating imprecision of the rights doctrine by citing this quote from Pierre Manent:

To respect the dignity of another human being is no longer to respect the respect which he conserves in himself for the moral law; it is today, more and more, to respect the choice that he has made, whatever this choice may be, in the realization of his rights.

Benoist describes the predictable outcome of the rights doctrine that is now observable in contemporary politics:

The present tendency…consists in converting all sorts of demands, desires, or interests into ‘rights.’ Individuals, in the extreme case, would have the ‘right’ to see no matter what demand satisfied, for the sole reason that they can formulate them. Today, to claim rights is only a way of seeking to maximize one’s interests.

Particularly disastrous has been the fusion of the rights doctrine with mass democracy and the parallel growth exhibited by these two. Hans Hermann Hoppe has observed that a mass democracy comprised of an infinite number of interest groups making infinite rights claims is simply a form of low-intensity civil war. Likewise, Welf Herfurth has demonstrated how the very meaning of “democracy” has changed over time whereby earlier definitions of this concept, even in their modern liberal variations, have been abandoned and “democracy” has simply become a pseudonym for the limitless right to personal hedonism.

A paradoxical effect of the infinite expansion of the rights doctrine has been the simultaneously infinite growth of the state. Fustel de Coulandges described the political order of pre-modern Europe:

At the top of the hierarchy, the king was surrounded by his great vassals. Each of these vassals was himself surrounded by his own feudatories and he could not pronounce the least judgment without them…The king could neither make a new law, nor modify the existing laws, nor raise a new tax without the consent of the country…If one looks at the institutions of this regime from close quarters, and if one observes their meaning and significance, one will see they were all directed against despotism. However great the diversity that seems to reign in this regime, there is, however, one thing that unites them: this thing is obsession with absolute power. I do not think any regime better succeeded in rendering arbitrary rule impossible.

Benoist contrasts this with subsequent political developments in European civilization:

The end of the feudal regime marked the beginning of the disintegration of this system under the influence of Roman authoritarianism and the deadly blows of the centralized state. Little by little, hereditary royalty implemented a juridicial-administrative centralization at the expense of intermediary bodies and regional assemblies. While the communal revolution sanctioned the power of the nascent bourgeoisie, the regional parliaments ceased to be equal assemblies and became meetings of royal officers. Having become absolute, the monarchy supported itself upon the bourgeoisie to liquidate the resistances of the nobility.

Indeed, it could be argued that a similar process is presently transpiring whereby the New Class (or what Sam Francis called the “knowledge class” or what Scott Locklin regards as simply a new upper middle class) is aligning itself with the central government for the purpose of destroying the traditional WASP elite and marginalizing the traditional working to middle classes just as the nascent bourgeoisie of earlier times aligned itself with absolute monarchies against the nobility.

The growth of the rights doctrine has of course brought with it the explosive growth of rights-enforcement agencies and bureaucrats as any small business owner or self-employed person who has dealt with Occupational Health and Safety Administration would agree. Likewise, the autonomy of regions, localities, and the private sector has been nearly entirely eradicated in the name of creating rights for an ever expanding army of grievance groups and their advocates. Benoist discusses how the rights doctrine has also resulted in the phenomenal growth of the legal system. Today, there is virtually no aspect of life that is considered to be beyond the reach of state regulation or prohibition. Says Pierre Manent:

In the future, if one depends principally upon human rights to render justice, the ‘manner of judging’ will be irreparable. Arbitrariness, that is to say precisely what our regimes wanted to defend themselves against in instituting the authority of constitutionality, will then go on increasing, and will paradoxically become the work of judges. Now, a power which discovers that it can act arbitrarily will not delay in using and abusing this latitude. It tends towards despotism.

Far more dreadful than the use of “rights” as a pretext for enlarging civil bureaucracies and creeping statism in domestic and legal matters has been the application of the “human rights” ideology to international relations. Benoist points out the irony of how the military imperialism that the decolonialization movements were ostensibly supposed to end has been revived under the guise of “humanitarian intervention.” The doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” not only contravenes the international law established by the Peace of Westphalia but as well the Charter of the United Nations: “It suggests that every state, whatever it be, can intervene at will in the internal affairs of another state, whatever it be, under the pretext of preventing ‘attacks on human rights.’” The effect of this doctrine is the simple sanctioning of aggressive war without end.

Plato’s observation that a democratic regime on its deathbed is most typically characterized by a combination of individual licentiousness and creeping political tyranny would seem to be apt assessment of our present condition. As one Facebook commentator recently suggested:

Barbarism. Take a picture, we need to get it down for future civilizations. They need to know how the dialectic works: the negation of parental and local authority does NOT lead to freedom, or does so only briefly. That negation is in turn negated by a soft totalitarianism, now becoming harder and more crystallized in order to fill the vacuum of authority. If we record it for them, when some future Neo-Enlightenment philosopher promises liberty and equality circa 2800CE, he can be properly dressed down before he does any damage.

Hear, hear!

There is a much quoted aphorism, attributed to Karl Marx, to the effect that history repeats itself: first as tragedy, the second time as farce.

I suppose this statement could be said to summarize the history of Marxism itself, which in its 20th-century economic and political form in the East played out as unbridled state-enforced ideological repression and violence, leading to the torture and murder of millions of people, while in its current 21st-century, "cultural" incarnation in the West it takes the (slightly) less unsightly form of Chaz Bono gyrating uninhibitedly before millions of people on TV's "Dancing With the Stars."

But setting aside his ironic, unintended prescience regarding the future course of the ideology he bequeathed to our unfortunate world, Marx is generally off the mark here. Sure, tragedies do sometimes beget farces. However, it more often seems the norm for contemporary farces to spring from similarly farcical events of the recent past. When history repeats itself, it usually does so, first and ever after, as farce. Yet with each repeat step of this pitiful process, the farcicality gets magnified to an increasingly ludicrious level, until one can only conclude that the entirety of the human race-- or at least 99 percent of it-- is utterly retarded.

Take the postmodern-day institution known as "sexual harassment," and its latest manifestation in the ongoing scandal swirling around GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain. For all of the sound and fury surrounding Cain's "Grope-gate," there's really not much going on here that we haven't witnessed before.

The notion of sexual harassment was first widely broadcast to the public via our cultural commissars way back in the day, when Anita Hill publically accused Clarence Thomas of inappropriately regaling her with hearwarming stories of pubic hair on Coke cans and porn stars named Long Dong Silver. Because Thomas was a conservative Supreme Court judicial candidate, and Hill wished to derail his nomination, the latter naturally became the darling of liberals across the country, who proclaimed their righteousness and solidarity with the oppressed by plastering their cars with "I Believe Anita Hill" bumper stickers.

However, when a certain left-leaning president was accused of much more nefariously lecherous, even violent, deeds by numerous female underlings and acquaintences just a few years later, we found out (surprse, surprise!) that liberals tend to care more about politics than principle. Thus, in the waning years of the nifty nineties, we were treated to the smelly spectacle of the Democrat party and its supporters eschewing all of their Anita Hill-era concerns and avidly whoring themselves out to big-pimpin' daddy Clinton. These same jokers who wanted Thomas's balding head on a platter for allegedly making tasteless jokes to a co-worker now insisted that we give the prez a pass for allegedly feeling up Kathleen Willey, exposing his penis to Paula Jones, and raping Juanita Broaddrick, since to do otherwise would mean letting the odious Newt Gingrich and the evil Republicans have a poltical victory.

So much for the lofty ideal of "speaking truth to power."

And now in November of 2011, with the unfolding accusations against Herman Cain, this farcical triptych comes full circle. Now that a conservative Republican presidential contender is in the crosshairs, the tiresome partisan hacks on both sides have once more switched seats. Fresh from turning their backs on inconvenient victims like Willey, Jones, Broaddrick, and others, the liberals have suddenly decided that it's time to start believing the women again. And "movement" conservatives--those who equate ideological victory with GOP dominance--can only reflexively stand in solidarity with Cain, no matter how much of a sleazy lech he appears to have been on numerous occasions, since to do otherwise would mean letting the odious Nancy Pelosi and the dirty Democrats have a political victory.

And there we have it. "Sexual harassment"--which in previous ages was simply known as ungallant, un-gentlemanly, scandalous, and loathsome behavior, reviled by all decent people--has in our ideologized era become a means of cynically advancing one's own cause and hyper-selectively attacking one's adversary. Leftist feminists are passionately in favor of prosecuting alleged harassers, as long as the accused is a "bad" conservative like Thomas or Cain and not a "good" lefty like Clinton or Ted Kennedy. Movement pseudo-conservatives, for their part, find it useful to believe certain accusers, like those of Clinton, while reflexively impugning the integrity of those who dare to say that one of "their" guys might have gotten indecently fresh or hand-sy with the ladies.

In short, it's little but a political shell game. An appalling, albeit intermittently amusing, farce: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

It was my discovery of the European New Right that finally convinced me that one could be both a serious intellectual and a political rightist. My initiation came when I discovered Alain De Benoist’s and Charles Champetier’s manifesto for the French New Right eleven years ago. I had never seen rightist ideas presented in such a way before and I knew I had come upon something powerful. Previously, I had been more or less a left-wing Chomskyite. I had long found the left dissatisfying, particularly its victimological ressentiment and its PC bluenoses. Yet, when I looked at the bulk of the American right and saw the jingoist flag-wavers, Bible-bangers, Israel-firsters, plutocratic apologists, conspiracists, and knee-jerk militarists, I would wonder why would anyone could possibly want to be associated with that, for God’s sake? Murray Rothbard’s championing of the legacy of the “Old Right” notwithstanding, I considered the right to be an intellectual wasteland. Fortunately, the European New Right rescued me from such a narrow perception. It was from the European New Right that I learned one could be a progressive without being an egalitarian, a conservative without succumbing to vulgar economism, and a traditionalist without being a yahoo.

A major problem with bringing ENR ideas to North American audiences has been the fact that much of the scholarship produced by ENR writers has yet to be translated into English. For instance, De Benoist is the leading intellectual of the ENR and one of its founding fathers, yet only only two of De Benoist’s dozens of books, On Being a Pagan and The Problem of Democracy, have undergone an English translation and the latter appeared in English only this year thanks to Arktos Publishing. Two original English works surveying ENR thought have also appeared. One of these is by Tomislav Sunic and the other is by Michael O’Meara. If you are a college student and you want to shock and offend your politically correct professors and peers, then the distribution of copies of these works on campuses would certainly be an easy way to do so.

Because of the efforts of Arktos, more and more works of the ENR are gradually being made available in English as well as older works originally written by long-forgotten conservative revolutionary figures of the interwar era. Arktos also makes available works by leftist thinkers offering genuine insight and other writers whose ideas fall way outside the paradigm of what passes for “the right” within the context of U.S. style “conservatism.” Suffice to say we will not be seeing any of the plutocrat-funded and neocon-managed publishing houses of America’s “conservative movement” issuing the works of Lothrop Stoddard, Antonio Gramsci, Georges Sorel, Carl Schmitt, Michael Cremo, Andrew Fraser, or Pentti Linkola. Arktos has also issued an English version of Ernst von Salomon’s It Cannot Be Stormed. Salomon was a conservative revolutionary author whose success continued well into the post-WW2 period and earned the denunciation of TIME magazine in the process. I’m still waiting for English translations of Ernst Junger’s Der Arbeiter and of the works of Ernst Niekisch (hint, hint).

Several contemporary works by leading ENR writers, such as De Benoist, Sunic, and Guillame Faye have been given extensive review on Brett Stevens’ website. (See here, here, and here.) Sunic’s Against Democracy and Equality is particularly helpful not only as an introduction to ENR ideas on a more abstract level, but as a source of critical insights that shed extensive light on the realities behind some of the more important political and cultural phenomena of our time. As Stevens observes in his review of Sunic:

Liberalism dehumanizes its adversaries. According to Carl Schmitt as channeled through Sunic, the left abhors war — so it phrases every political action as a police action. The bad guys become inhuman because they are immoral, not nice, not egalitarian, etc. and thus can be exterminated not in a war but in the right-thinking people detaining or removing the bad ones.

De Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy subjects the most sacred of all modern pieties, the ideal of liberal mass democracy, to rigorous and unrelenting criticism. The only other contemporary work that I am aware of that offers such a thoroughgoing assault on modern democracy is Hans Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed. I gave Hoppe’s work an extensive review when it first came out ten years ago. The twentieth century’s two leading critics of modern liberal democracy, with its tendencies toward mob rule, were arguably Carl Schmitt and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. Schmitt attacked liberal democracy from the perspective of a traditional conservative in the mode of Hobbes or Burke, while Kuehnelt-Leddihn offered a critique rooted in a synthesis of Catholic traditionalism and a monarchist variation of classical liberalism reminiscent of Lord Acton.

Hoppe’s work is clearly influenced by and somewhat derivative of Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and employs arguments one might expect a conservative Catholic and liberal monarchist to make. De Benoist’s observations on democracy more closely resemble and are influenced by those of Schmitt. While Hoppe and Kuehnelt-Leddihn defended classical eighteenth and nineteenth century liberalism against modern egalitarian democracy and its social democratic manifestation, De Benoist like Schmitt before him sees liberalism as the root of the problem. De Benoist offers not classical liberalism but classical democracy as conceived of by the Greeks as the answer to the “problem of democray” in its modern form. Whereas Hoppe postulates the concept of a society ordered completely on the basis of private property as the alternative to modern democratic institutions, De Benoist offers suggestions that at times resemble the notions of “participatory democracy” or “direct democracy” advanced by certain strands of the Left. These contrasts should make for interesting dialogue and debate on the alternative right.

Guillame Faye’s Why We Fight differs from much of the literature of the ENR in that while Faye incorporates the essence of the broader New Right philosophy into his analysis, he also demonstrates a greater concern for on-the-ground practical politics, strategic formulations, and particular policy prescriptions in a way that is atypical of ENR thinkers with their general focus on arcane theoretical abstractions, historical interpretations, or “metapolitics.” Faye’s geopolitical outlook in some ways resembles a melding of the “Eurasianist” idea advanced by Alexander Dugin and the anti-Islamism of Western European euronationalism. This puts Faye at odds with other strands of the ENR which leans towards at least a tactical solidarity with the Third World and regards Islam as a potential traditionalist ally against globalization and Americanization.

I am inclined to regard Faye’s view as appropriate for Europeans and the latter view as more relevant to North Americans. Islam is geographically far removed from North America, and poses no immediate demographic threat. Islamic terrorism directed towards the United States and its allies is for the most part the inevitable “blowback” generated by U.S. foreign policy or, more specifically, the exercise of Zionist influence (whether Jewish or Christian) over American foreign policy in the Middle East. An alliance with Russia against both Americanization and Islamication may serve the interests of Europeans, but America would be best served by a simple renunciation of globalism and a return to old-fashioned isolationism. Indeed, domestic U.S. Muslims may well be valuable allies against domestic Zionism.

The European New Right clearly has much to offer to ordinary conservatives looking for ideas of infinitely greater substance than what is typically found on talk radio, FOX News, or the subcultures of American right-wing populsim. But the philosophy of the ENR might well prove to be the bridge that also helps many disaffected leftists to eventually find their way to the alternative right. The thinkers of the ENR have developed a critique of globalization, imperialism, and Americanization every bit as thorough and radical as that offered by neo-Marxists like Immanuel Wallerstein, indeed even more so. Likewise, the ENR possesses a critique of consumerism, recognition of ecological issues, anticlericalism and critique Christianity that avoids the shrill bigotry of the “new atheists” that at times resembles but is more substantive than that offered by the Left. The ENR emphasis on the sovereignty and self-preservation of all peoples might even appeal to non-white nationalist, separatist, or autonomist movements.

Writers of the ENR have also advanced an intelligent and sincere but measured social and cultural conservatism that lacks the “homosexual-atheist-abortionist-under-every-bed” hysteria of the American right-wing. ENR thought upholds masculine and feminine identities without sinking into crass misogyny, and De Benoist has even controversially called for solidarity with Third World nationalism against US imperialism in a way that resembles a rightist version of Chomsky, and advocated a federated European “empire” of autonomous ethnic, cultural, and national identities that is reminiscient of the Holy Roman Empire (which, as Voltaire said, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire). Meanwhile, the ENR-sympathetic Telos journal has postulated a critique of the modern liberal-managerial “new class” that greatly resembles Bakunin’s early critique of Marxism.

If we are going to build a rightist opposition in North America that is worthy of the legacy of Nietzsche, Pareto, Schmitt, Mencken, Ortega, and Junger, and is not merely a movement of useful idiots for the neoconservatives, military-industrial complex, and right-wing of the U.S. ruling class as so-called “movement conservatism” often is, then it would appear that the ideas of the European New Right are thus far the best thing going.

Matthew Lyons is a leftist writer of  the "watchdog" variety and has in the past worked as a co-author with Chip Berlet. He currently operates a blog called "Three Way Fight" which previously featured a critique of AlternativeRight.Com from a hard left perspective. More recently, Lyons published an extensive critique of the ideas and work of yours truly on the socialist New Politics website. I have since produced a three part response. See Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. Lyons has posted a very brief reply to my reply. Readers of AltRight may find the exchange interesting or at least amusing.

While watching the video of efforts by left-wing thugs to disrupt Richard Spencer’s recent talk on affirmative action at Providence College, I was reminded of a conversation I had sometime in the late 1980s with a former member of the 1960s radical group Students for a Democratic Society who had been involved with the movement to oppose the Vietnam War since its inception circa 1962. He recalled how in the early days of the antiwar movement, protest organizers were thrilled if they could get fifty people to show up for a rally. To publicly oppose the war at the time was physically dangerous, and such rallies were always at risk of being physically attacked by vigilantes shouting epithets like “communist” at the protestors. If organizers of the rallies could get police protection at all, they were happy to have it. Not only were public demonstrations in danger of such assaults, but so were quiet and peaceful meetings of those who opposed the war held in church basements or on university campuses. Of course, we all know that the anti-Vietnam War movement morphed into a mass movement just a few years later.

So it is indeed ironic that half a century later it is those who challenge the established dogmas purveyed by the Left who similarly experience the disruption of their efforts to peacefully speak and organize, who become the targets of epithets like “racist,” “sexist,” or “classist,” and who are threatened with physical violence. Incidents of this type are exceedingly common. It is now widely known that conservative speakers on university campuses, even entirely mainstream neocon-friendly “movement conservative” types, are routinely shouted down and threatened by leftists. As most readers are probably aware, right-wing organizations outside the mainstream, such as American Renaissance, have endured even worse attacks. At times, simply attending an anti-illegal immigration rally can be all that it takes for one to become the victim of a physical assault.

A number of observations could be made concerning the demeanor and behavior of the disrupters of Richard’s presentation at Providence. One is the obvious fact that they are so certain of their own moral superiority and the nobility of their crusade that they feel ordinary rules of civilized discourse or common courtesy no longer apply to them. Another is that far from their image of themselves as enlightened, free-thinking rebels, they come across more like brainwashed zombies similar to members of the LaRouche cult or the Moonies I used to encounter selling flowers on the streets of Washington, D.C. years ago. Their level of intellectual prowess seems to amount to little more than thinking that merely throwing labels at people and ideas they find disagreeable counts as a valid refutation of the opposing viewpoints.

Judging from the hysteria of their reaction, one would think that Richard was advocating genocide rather than arguing for the fairly standard right-of –center position that affirmative action is a bad idea, a position that even some minority scholars and analysts hold. It is also rather difficult to see how Richard was arguing for “white supremacy” given that the data he was presenting actually showed Asians to be the top performers with regards to SAT scores. As Richard pointed out in his talk, it was he who was the moderate and the protestors who were the extremist nutjobs.

For the diversitarians, affirmative action is not merely a policy preference, but a sacred article of faith, like the Holy Trinity or the Immaculate Conception. Affirmative action is a political tool the liberal establishment utilizes to maintain the loyalty of one of its core allies and constituent groups, the black elite and the middle class professional sectors of the black population. Affirmative action is an entitlement used as a reward for political loyalty from these sectors. It is doubtful that AA is of much benefit to genuinely impoverished or disadvantaged blacks, many of whom do not even finish high school, much less attend college or obtain professional-level occupations. And as Richard pointed out, if the goal of AA was to help the poor and disadvantaged in the first place, AA would be class-based rather than race-based.

Indeed, “black conservatives” like Thomas Sowell and Elizabeth Wright have documented a myriad of ways in which policies implemented by the welfare state and civil rights bureaucracy that has meta-morphed in recent decades have severely undermined the organic economic, cultural, and family life of urban black communities, and contributed exponentially to the social pathologies often found in those communities. Likewise, the black libertarian economist Walter Williams has produced rather extensive evidence indicating the contribution of efforts at intrusive economic micromanagement to high unemployment rates among urban blacks.

Additionally, there is some evidence that black children who are educated in culturally specific Afro-centric schools perform much better than black children who receive conventional public schooling. The reasons as to why this is so are inconclusive but what is interesting is that the efforts of either conservative and libertarian black scholars like Sowell, Wright, or Williams, or of Afro-centrists with a nationalist or separatist outlook, are routinely attacked or dismissed by white liberals and the captains of the civil rights industry alike. Indeed, such people are often reviled by the Left. The obvious reason for this is the fanatical egalitarian-universalist ideology that has come to dominate the Left, an ideology that just happens to coincide with the political and economic self-interest of those who push it. It is an ideology that seeks a society where all resources are controlled and managed by the state and administered according to a spoils system the ostensible purpose of which is the imposition of bureaucratically-managed “equality.” The ultimate outcome of totalitarian humanism taken to its logical conclusion would be a totalitarian state organized as a kind of caste system whereby individual rights are assigned on the basis of group identity and group rights are assigned on the basis of the position of the group in the pantheon of the oppressed or on the victimological family tree.

Given these considerations, it might be apt to compare our present day lefto-fascist, stormtroopers-on-granola with the Red Guards of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards were, of course, bands of youthful vigilantes who scurried about China during the 1960s smashing up cultural artifacts deemed “old” (e.g. conservative, traditional) and engaging in vigilante violence against persons deemed “reactionary” (mostly dissident intellectuals and those labeled “bourgeois” or originating from politically incorrect cultural or class backgrounds.) We see a similar though milder version of this today in the West today with attacks on expressions of traditional culture (like Christmas celebrations), historical artifacts considered to be reactionary (like Confederate Civil War monuments or streets named after Confederate generals), and vigilante actions against people given labels like “racist,” “fascist,” “sexist,” or “classist.”

I suspect that these “antifa” types, these Red Guards-on-tofu, would be every bit as murderous and destructive if the authorities would sanction it, as Chairman Mao did during the Cultural Revolution. We’ve seen hints at this already with the nonchalant attitude of the authorities towards threats of murder and arson against innocent people made by the Antifa in response to American Renaissance’s planned gathering in 2010. Plenty of other incidents have occurred where destructive or violent behavior by those claiming to act in the name of noble causes like “anti-racism” and “anti-fascism” have been overlooked or dealt with leniently by authorities convinced of the purity of their motives or restrained by political pressure.

The great irony presented by the Antifa is that despite all of their posturing as radicals and revolutionaries, they’re essentially doing the establishment’s bidding. The attitudes they subscribe to are not fundamentally different from those of the liberal elite overlords of the wider society. The Red Guards-on-tofu are simply a smellier, more ill-mannered, undisciplined, more in-a-hurry version of the liberal establishment itself. Wouldn’t it be an even greater irony if indeed the growing counterculture of the alternative right were to grow into a large influential movement as the leftist counterculture and antiwar movements did in the 1960s, with the Antifa and their ilk assuming the role of the “hardhats”?

Professor Roderick Long is a Harvard grad who currently teaches philosophy at Auburn University. He is also a devout “Austro-libertarian,” an ideology that synthesizes Austrian economics with individualist anarchism in the manner championed by Murray Rothbard. He is associated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and the left-libertarian Molinari Society. Professor Long is someone whose work I generally respect and which contains some interesting and valuable insights into matters involving political theory, class theory, political economy, legal theory, and a number of other matters. Unfortunately, Long is also a PC lunatic on social questions who once compared pro-lifers to Guantanamo torturers during an online discussion he and I were both party to. His argument? Childbirth is physically painful, therefore denying a woman an abortion at any time she wants for any reason she wants amounts to the imposition of physical torture. Pretty thin, huh? Apparently, women who undergo abortion procedures never experience any kind of discomfort, physical or otherwise. (By the way, I generally favor legal abortion, in case anyone is wondering.)

I was therefore surprised to see Professor Long offer the following insight during a discussion of how “Austro-libertarians” might engage in outreach to the Left:

There are some left-wingers whom I call the “aristocratic left,” and whom I despair of reaching. These are left-wingers who have a particular vision of an idyllic society and are prepared to hammer into place anyone whose preferences or behavior don’t align with the vision; in effect they see other people as their property. Back when I lived in North Carolina, on the city line between Chapel Hill and Carrboro, I used to watch with mixed amusement and horror as the affluent white “liberals” who ran the city councils of those two communities competed to see which city could impose the most callous and intrusively micromanaging legislation. In Carrboro, which incredibly billed itself as the “Paris of the Piedmont,” the council thought that old cars looked unsightly, and so declared that residents would be forbidden to park in their driveways any car older than a certain number of years (I forget how many). Unsurprisingly, this law had a more burdensome impact on lower-income households than on higher; so much for the idea that liberals are supposed to care about the poor. The Chapel Hill council, with similar solicitude, forbade a local copy shop to post its (low) prices or to use words such as “discount” in its advertising, because the emphasis on low cost seemed tawdry, and clashed with their vision of an upscale community. (I am not making this up.) I have to laugh when conservatives accuse liberals of practicing class warfare, because these regulations were certainly class warfare-but from the opposite direction from the one suggested by the accusation. The Carrboro council also thought that cul-de-sacs looked unfriendly and standoffish, too much like private communities, and so proposed not only to ban new ones but to ram streets through existing ones; apparently the beloved mantra of children’s safety only applies sometimes. Mercifully, I don’t think that one finally passed. The same council also wanted to require drive-in banks and restaurants to install downward-sloping exits, thus allowing cars to turn their engines off and glide soundlessly and emissionlessly back down the street. (I am still not making this up.) What gun laws were favoured by these two hyperactive city councils I leave to your imagination. I have no suggestions on how to sell Austro-libertarianism to left-wingers of this variety; they seem like enemies of the human race.

Of course, Professor Long goes on to contrast this evil “aristocratic Left” with the good Left:

There are many, many left-wingers whose primary motivation for their left-wing political stance is the very libertarian impulse to protect people who are being pushed around. These left-wingers look at contemporary society and see an economy dominated by massive, impersonal corporations with enormous and seemingly unaccountable power; they see lower- and middle-income people disempowered in the workplace and struggling to make ends meat; they see institutions and social practices rigged against blacks, women, gays, immigrants, and other oppressed groups-and they turn to government to address these inequities, viewing the democratic state as an institution in principle accountable to the public, and thus able to serve as a bulwark against private power and privilege. Call this variety of left-wingers the anti-privilege Left. And this is the Left we can reach.

Not so fast. Taken together, the two statements quoted above represent a dizzying combination of genuine perspicacity and utter obliviousness. On one hand, Professor Long is one of the very few from what might be called the “cultural hard left” to recognize that there is, indeed, such a thing as an “aristocratic Left.” (Obviously, “aristocratic” is being used here as an adjective or metaphor for the more general category of educated, affluent or wealthy elites.)

One of the more important insights advanced by the “radical right” is the recognition that liberalism is in fact an ideology of the elite. Most hard leftists regard nearly everyone to the right of Leon Trotsky to be an “extreme right-winger” and it is not uncommon to see such people denounce moderate conservatives as “fascists” or “crypto-Nazis.” The publications of the hard left persistently lament the supposed ongoing drift of domestic American politics to the “far right” even though American society continues to become ever more liberal, and the ideas of yesterday’s loony leftists become ever more mainstream and respectable. For example, expressing support for gay marriage, which would have been regarded as insanity during the supposed Golden Age of Decadence of the 1960s and 1970s, is now just another somewhat controversial but still respectable middle-of-the-road, perhaps slightly left-of-center opinion.

Likewise, the election of the first Black president is somehow dismissed by the Left as just a cosmetic feature that hides what a horrid, racist, White supremacist society America really is, even though nothing destroys the reputation and career of a public figure any quicker than accusations racism, no matter how mild or dubious.

Further, Professor Long recognizes that the upper classes and affluent upper-middle classes are hardly consistent or even frequent proponents of ostensibly conservative economic values such as “free markets” or “limited government.” Rather the wealthy and affluent are like every other socioeconomic interest group in that they want state intervention into the economy on their own behalf, not “free enterprise” or “market discipline.” This is a sharp departure from the usual leftist habit of dismissing conservative and libertarian critics of state-managed economies as mere apologists for the plutocratic status quo. But what Professor Long is missing is the insight that perhaps many of those who present themselves as champions of the workers, the poor, minorities, women, gays, immigrants, and on down the list of the officially oppressed might also have less than honest or honorable motivations, and might in fact frequently be charlatans, crooks, scam artists, or aspiring tyrants. Nor does it occur to him that perhaps those “aristocratic leftists” whom he labels as “enemies of the human race,” and who are persistently agitating for repressive gun laws and intrusive economic regulations, might in fact be the same class of folks who are similarly pushing the vast array of attitudes, institutional policies, and bits of legislation that have collectively been given the popular label of “political correctness.”

For it is among this class of upper-middle income and wealthy liberals that Long describes that we typically find the most zealous proponents of affirmative action, amnesty for illegal immigrants, legislated “rights” for the organized gay lobby that in fact abridge the associational, religious, and economic liberties of others, radical feminists who are not downtrodden seamstresses in garment factories but tenured academics or activist attorneys or other professionals, university professors and administrators, public sector bureaucrats who oversee the managerial state, corporate executives who pride themselves on their extensive commitment to “diversity” and “sensitivity,” and so on. Might it not just be that this socioeconomic demographic, those “aristocratic leftists” who are “enemies of the human race,” are in fact the exact same people who are the most zealous proponents of PC fundamentalism? And might they indeed have sinister ulterior motives for assuming such a stance?

This is not to say that many liberals and leftists do not hold the political beliefs that they do out of sincere regard for those whom they consider to be oppressed or downtrodden. But when we see the affluent and influential classes championing things like mass immigration or the suppression of public debate concerning taboo subjects along with all sorts of other pernicious legislation, economic policies, or social practices, perhaps we should ask ourselves why this is the case?

Whenever I have presented my “totalitarian humanism” theory to seemingly sincere liberals, the main difficulty they seem to encounter in comprehending my analysis is their inability to absorb the idea that those who claim to be waging a righteous crusade against racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, et. al. ad nauseam could possibly be motivated by anything any other than a desire to do good and make the world a better place. At worst, I am often told in response, the PC zealots are guilty of mere overreaction to past injustices or excessive exuberance in pursuit of a noble ideal. Indeed, I believe that it is this same mindset that accounts for the otherwise inexplicable phenomena of why Nazism has come to symbolize the ultimate in evil, while Communism has rarely received such a treatment in the history books, and is certainly not regarded in the same manner by intellectual and cultural elites, even though its murderous and genocidal propensities certainly rival that of any of its ideological competitors. Therefore, exposing the destructive proclivities of PC for the tyrannical anti-human ideology that it is becomes one of our most important tasks.

Challenging orthodoxy has always been a dangerous affair. The alternative Right often complains about the character assassinations, censorship, and name-calling we experience writing about race and culture, but if we take a step back for a moment and consider the persecution suffered by those who challenged the religious orthodoxy, our struggle seems far less severe. Burnings at the stake, beatings in the street, and public executions were but a few of the tactics employed by the Church to silence those who questioned the unquestionable. Perhaps then, it would behoove us to take a closer look at the strategy of those who successfully challenged—and eventually defeated—religious orthodoxy under these life-threatening conditions. We may dislike much about the world that arose in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, but we can still admire and learn from the strategy employed by its early partisans.

A good place to begin would be Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), who is considered by many political theorists to be the father of modern liberal democracy. Surrounded by controversy throughout much of his life, Spinoza was one of the most radical philosophers of the modern period. He possessed a remarkable talent for provoking people to question the unquestionable, but his willingness to challenge all forms of religious particularism would eventually result in his excommunication from the Jewish community in 1656. Such a punishment seemed entirely justified in the eyes of 19^th-century Jewish philosophers like Hermann Cohen. The 20th-century political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973) came to Spinoza’s defense, however, in his Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, in which he wrote that much of the hostile condemnation directed towards Spinoza was caused by a misunderstanding of his thought and strategy. Strauss believed that in a world dominated by the Church, attacking Judaism was a shrewd way for Spinoza to lay siege to Christianity.

This article will briefly outline Spinoza’s philosophy and evaluate Cohen’s moral critique of Spinoza from the Straussian perspective. What will ultimately emerge from this investigation is a broader view of philosophy at the highest level, where the means of delivery are as important as the message being delivered. Such a lesson should be invaluable to the Alternative Right, which desires to challenge the dominant orthodoxy of egalitarianism, anti-racism, and political correctness.

If subterfuge is the name of the game, then Spinoza was truly one its masters.

I have a confession to make. Despite contributing fairly regularly to this much demonized “extreme right-wing” publication, I’m really a rather bland moderate, possessed of unexceptional ideas. In fact, you could best describe me as a bit of a fuddy-duddy; strictly a pipe, slippers, and cocoa sort of guy as far as politics is concerned. If I have a true comfort zone, it is the white line running down the middle of the road that we all happen to be travelling on.

This probably sounds like I’m denying the old tried-and-tested but somewhat time-worn political categories, and I know there are many who wouldn’t blame me if I ditched this terminology derived from 18th-century French parliamentary seating arrangements, but, no, not this week. For me there still is a Right, a Left, and a Centre; and my favourite locale is the latter, which means I’m very far from the “extreme Right”!

The real problem I have with the system is how it is applied to the existing political landscape. For me the “extreme right” simply can’t be AR as there is nothing extreme about promoting legitimate interests and good, old-fashioned common sense. In the same way, my image of the Centre is not the right wing of the Democratic Party or the left wing of the Republicans—nor for that matter Britain’s Lib-Dems, the Blairite wing of New Labour, or the Cameronians. For me all these groups, along with virtually every mainstream party in the West, are just part of a very, very crowded extreme left-wing.

It might now appear that all I’m saying is that there is no such thing as a right wing and that we’re all either moderates or leftists of one degree or another. But, no, I’m not saying that either. Just because everybody stands on one side of a room doesn’t mean the other side of the room ceases to exist. It’s still there, and, indeed, there are even a few odd creatures inhabiting it!

Political modernity is based on rejection of the premodern belief that man participates in some sort of higher nature. As such, it can take several forms. Liberalism is the form that has won, but not the only one that has existed.

If we get rid of the transcendent, we might view man as fundamentally biological or historical, or as self-created in some way. Moderns have therefore tried to base social order on biology, history, or the triumph of the will.

Biology

Modern natural science favors physical explanations, so the most obvious and direct response to modernity is the attempt to base social order on the physical aspects of man's being. The usual physicalist view is that natural selection--in Darwin's terms, "the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life"--explains human nature and behavior. For that reason, physicalists have often viewed racial struggle as fundamental. The physical flourishing of the Aryan race becomes the highest good, at least for Aryans, and similarly for other groups.

A basic problem with the view is that what men find worthwhile in life cannot be reduced to the survival and multiplication of an extended kinship group. For that reason, the latter cannot serve as the guiding principle of social order. That is why people who put nation and race first have ended up emphasizing arbitrary will more than biology, and relying on theatrics, irrationalism, and violence to overcome the intellectual weakness of their position.

History

Secular conservatives, who are moderate modernists, have tried to mitigate the effect of their basic antitranscendental commitments by basing social order on habit and history. They hold the modern view of man, but accept that we do not have an effective technology of social life. For that reason they accept experience as their guide, and with it the necessity of the inherited, informal, and prerational aspects of social order.

The approach has failed. Secular conservatives are proponents of traditional ways and attachments, so they favor particularity and the practices, conditions, and institutions that allow it to maintain itself and function. In present-day America, those include federalism, local autonomy, traditional marriage, restrictions on immigration, limitations on the welfare state, and respect for the right of families and religious and community institutions to run their own affairs.

Conservatives have continually given ground on all those issues. Their weakness has been especially apparent in connection with issues related to "inclusiveness." Apart from illegal immigration and affirmative action, which are sore points for voters, conservative politicians have been willing to swear devotion to an antidiscrimination regime that is at odds with attachment to any tradition except that of liberal progress. Even opposition to affirmative action and illegal immigration has been sporadic and lukewarm, more a matter of opportunistic gestures than a genuine effort to change law and policy.

The failure was preordained. Belief in history doesn't tell you anything helpful when trends are against you. As moderns, secular conservatives accept satisfaction of preferences as the rational guide to action, but as conservatives they need people to act on other principles. Why should people do so when it becomes inconvenient? Continuity and respect for traditional ways may be a good thing in general, but there are exceptions, and why should my case not be an exception?

Political reality is shaped by how the world is understood. Secular conservatives do not seriously dispute fundamental current understandings, and those understandings make any serious opposition to liberalism seem irrational and wrong, the sort of thing that leads to Nazism and whatnot. They've already surrendered in principle, so why expect their resistance to amount to much?

The Triumph of the Will

Abolishing transcendence abolishes the distinction between preference satisfaction and the good, so that satisfaction of preferences becomes the rational purpose of all action. From that perspective, the most rational political response to modernity is the attempt to derive moral and social order from maximum preference satisfaction.

Preferences conflict, however, and they are equally preferences, so whose should prevail? The obvious answer is to prefer one's own, but "looking out for number one" is not, at least without severe limitation, a principle of social order. Since man is social, it does not even work in private life.

Fascism and bolshevism

It is not easy to make arbitrary will a principle of public order. Antiliberal moderns dramatize the paradox and then resolve it by emphasizing the conflicts and then appealing to collective power as their solution: the will of the people, party, or state, embodied in that of the supreme leader, overcomes all others and establishes order. The motive for participation in the effort, and thus the basis for loyalty to the regime, becomes the joy of smashing the opposition, together with comradeship in the struggle to make the willed order prevail.

A problem with the solution is that antiliberal moderns are moderns. As such, it is natural for them to view collectivities as arbitrary constructions. What is special about the proletariat or the German people? Who do they include and why? Why are Stalin and Hitler their perfect representatives? And why should my will and their will be the same? Such questions are unanswerable, so fascists and communists embraced irrationalism and relied quite directly on lies and violence as the basis for their rule.

The result was catastrophe. Antiliberal modernists took as their principle of social order worship of the power of the order itself. In the absence of substantive goods that principle could express itself only through self-assertion against opposition, the more extreme the better. In the end infinite victory in infinite war became the ruling ideal of social life.

A society that places itself on such a basis is not going to last. It will crash and burn like the Nazis, or sink into posturing, hypocrisy, and corruption that eventually becomes terminal, like the Soviets after Stalin.

Liberalism

Liberalism defers and defuses the problem posed by the sovereign will with its claim to maximize the satisfaction of all preferences equally. The will is to be tamed by the equal sovereignty of other wills and the demands of a technically rational system. Arbitrary power and social conflict vanish.

The peacefulness of its ideal has enabled liberalism to outlast communism, fascism, and Nazism. Nonetheless, those other forms of modernity responded to a real problem. By abolishing the idea of participation in higher goods and unities, the modern outlook separates individual goals from social needs. To re-integrate them some ideological myth is needed.

Fascists and communists proceed in a straightforward way by making the People or the State the only reality that matters, so the individual becomes insignificant. If that move is accepted--and those who reject it soon drop out of the conversation--the conflict between individual and collectivity disappears as an issue.

The liberal myth is more subtle. Instead of absorbing the individual into the collectivity, it absorbs the collectivity into the individual. It presents the liberal state as government by and for the people, here to serve them and acting only to promote their freedom and equality. What that state imposes reduces without remainder to individual desire and content-free public rationality. Obedience to its authority is not subservience but only intelligent promotion of what we already want.

Such is the official story. In fact, of course, liberal government is like other government. It is run not by the many but by the few. Those who rule try to make their life easier by accommodating popular concerns, but their guiding principle is less the will of the people than staying in power and running things in accordance with their own interests and understandings.

In fact, the liberal myth is no more true than the collectivist one. No government can favor equal freedom among men and their preferences, since some must lose in the event of conflict. Also, we often choose things other than satisfaction of desire: God, country, and family; adventure, struggle, and comradeship; the good, beautiful, and true. To the extent we prefer such things to getting our own way simply as such, hedonism makes no sense. It "gives us what we want," but we reject the goal as unworthy.

To avoid such problems liberal government has to tell us what to want. We can have what we want, but what we are allowed to want--safe and moderate devotion to career, consumption, and various private indulgences--must suit the regime. That is supposed to be the perfection of freedom, but who believes it? The desires we are allowed to pursue leave out everything we care about most. And the authorities from which we are freed--family, prejudice, religion, particular people and culture--are what enable us to live and act independently of the formal institutions that constitute the liberal regime.

The freedom liberalism grants is the freedom to be dependent on liberalism and do, think, and feel what it wants us to do, think, and feel. Who wants that? And why trust a system in which we all place ourselves under guardianship, supposedly for our own good, to turn out well?

The Moral of the Story

It's clear from what's happened that the attempt to build social order simply on this-worldly empirical man doesn't work. That's true for a variety of reasons. One is that it's part of the general modern effort to understand the world in a way that eliminates mystery and facilitates control, and if you deal with people that way you're going to see them as less than they are and tyrannize over them.

The conclusion is that to get out of the political, social, and intellectual hole we've fallen into we have to go back to first things. For starters, we're going to have to bring back something like the Christian soul, or at least a human essence that by nature is oriented toward the good. Otherwise we're not going to be able to deal with man as he is or the problems politics actually presents.

That is not an impossible dream. Revolutions begin in thought, and the scheme of thought that makes people most functional and enables them to deal most intelligently with the world has a good shot at winning eventually. Advanced liberalism means mindlessness and incompetence on the part of rulers and ruled. It seems to me someone can do better.

Professor Gottfried’s discussion of the reading lists suggested thus far by several AltRight contributers, including myself, provides a wonderfully comprehensive yet concise summation of what ought to be the first principles of any sort of Right worthy of the name. I share most of the political and philosophical presumptions Paul enunciates: natural inequality of persons at both the individual and collective levels, the inevitability and legitimacy of otherness, the superiority of organic forms of human organization over social engineering, rejection of vulgar economism, and a tragic view of life. However, what I am most concerned with is how these first principles might be applied within the context of the cultural and institutional environments we actually find ourselves in at present.

Perhaps this explains Paul’s puzzlement at the supposed scattered and ideologically fractured nature of my suggested reading list (I’ve already responded to this question briefly in the comments section). As I suggested at the onset of my previous post, I am not primarily concerned with providing an enunciation of first principles of my own. For one thing, there are others beside myself who are far more qualified to do so (such as Professor Gottfried himself, for instance). Instead, I am more oriented towards institutional analysis and its relevance to the core individual issues that we should be addressing. This is why I organized my list into sections dealing either with institutional matters such as elite theory, the New Class, and mass democracy, or with issues of vital importance such as foreign policy or the role of corporations and the related culture industry in fostering and propagandizing for PC. This is why C. Wright Mills, Max Horkheimer, and James Petras can be on my reading list alongside James Burnham, Ernst Junger, and Charles Maurras.

Paul’s concern about the supposed lack of a unifying principle in my own list also raises the question of what specific unifying principles can be found among the alternative Right in general. As Jim Kalb has stated: “In America today, Catholic trads, constitutionalists, libertarians, and HBD fans all count as conservative, I suppose because they all object to the omnicompetent PC managerial state and take a more laissez faire and less radically egalitarian approach to a lot of issues. But how many books would they agree on? A somewhat coherent canon implies a somewhat coherent movement, and that's not where we are.” Indeed, at times there seems to be as many philosophies represented on the alternative Right as there are individuals who participate in the alternative Right.

It would appear that the common thread among alternative Rightists is opposition to the first principles of the Left. As my colleague Troy Southgate explains, the Left’s first principles are “universalism, egalitarianism, totalitarianism and a belief in the linear interpretation of history” and that “our main bugbears are democracy, egalitarianism and globalisation, which must ultimately be countered by elitism, natural hierarchy and an affirmation of our European heritage and identity.” This common opposition to leftism, particularly in its present day “cultural Marxist” manifestations, would explain why the alternative Right includes, on religious matters, Catholic traditionalists, proponents of Orthodoxy, Protestants, atheists, pagans, Nietzscheans, and Evolans. It would explain why our ranks include both proponents (e.g. Austrians) and critics (e.g. Catholic distributists or the European New Right) of capitalism, and proponents of political systems ranging from authoritarianism to anarchism to monarchy to theocracy to constitutionalism to ethno-states. I regard this genuine diversity to be a sign of strength rather than weakness. An authentic competition of ideas is indicative of an intellectually healthy movement.