The Relevance of the Old Right

Giacomo Balla, Balbo and the Italian Transatlantic Flyers (Celestial Metallic Airplane), 1931

1,560 words

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What is the relevance of what I call the Old Right — German National Socialism, Italian Fascism, and related interwar national-populist movements — to White Nationalism today? The question would not even arise, of course, if there were no connection at all. Many White Nationalist ideas are either direct descendants of Old Right ideologies, or they are their cousins, meaning that they share common ancestors, that they are branches of the same ideological tree.

This is what I take from the Old Right:

1. Nationalism over globalization: the Old Right put the preservation and flourishing of historically existing peoples ahead of the imperatives of universal ideologies like liberalism and Communism and the homogenizing tendencies of globalizing institutions like the marketplace.
2. The common good over individual liberty: the Old Right put the health of the body politic ahead of individual freedom and self-expression. One can still value liberty, private life, individuality, and private enterprise, but only to the extent that they promote a healthy society.
3. Biology is central to politics: liberal individualism simply does not care about the demographic or dysgenic trends it establishes, because caring about such things is “collectivism.” The Old Right saw that the health of the body politic has everything to do with long-term demographic trends, and it took the responsibility of promoting positive rather than negative ones. Thus the Old Right promoted strong family bonds, healthy population growth, and eugenic rather than dysgenic breeding.
4. Whiteness is a necessary condition of European identity. There is more to being a Frenchman or a German than being merely white, but no non-white can be a Frenchman or a German or a member of any other European people. Thus we cannot preserve European nations without preserving their racial purity.
5. Jews are a distinct people who therefore belong in their own homeland, rather than scattered among European peoples. And if that were not reason enough to separate ourselves, Jews as a people are implacably hostile to non-Jews, especially Europeans, and their net effect on European civilization has been overwhelmingly negative.

Of course, since all of these ideas are based ultimately on reality, they are not unique to the Old Right. The first three principles, for instance, were simply political common sense before the Enlightenment. One could arrive at all five of these principles based on one’s own experience and reasoning, or through other intellectual and political traditions. Thus, there is no necessary connection between modern day White Nationalism and the Old Right. And that is the proper answer to those who wish to dismiss White Nationalism by linking it to the Nazis or fascists: not necessarily.

For instance, in my own intellectual biography, I arrived at the first three principles through the study of classical political philosophy. I arrived at biological racism and awareness of the Jewish question through observation, conversations with friends, and reading books like The Bell Curve and The Culture of Critique. And it was only on the basis of that background that I could see truth and value in the Old Right. For instance, before I read The Culture of Critique, I saw anti-Semitism as a serious flaw in National Socialism, which I regarded as otherwise highly attractive, both aesthetically and politically-philosophically.

Of course this does not imply that I learned nothing from the Old Right — that I already knew it all. First, the Old Right made sense within my worldview. Then it added to my worldview. But it never became my worldview. And that same worldview also gave me some critical distance on it as well.

I differ from the Old Right as follows:

1. I am a “universal nationalist,” meaning that I believe that ethnonationalism is good for all peoples. Thus I am opposed to imperialism, whereas Old Right regimes practiced imperialism against their fellow Europeans as well as non-whites. Defending imperialism is basically telling your neighbors that you are not above a little murder and theft when it suits you. But that is no way to build solidarity among white nations or a peaceful planet in general, to the extent that these are possible.
2. Given that White Nationalists today are concerned with the well-being of our race, both as a whole and in all its constituent ethnic parts, it makes no sense to identify White Nationalism with any particular Old Right regime, since those regimes pursued their particular national interests at the expense of other European peoples. For instance, identifying White Nationalism with German National Socialism is a self-defeating tactic when dealing with Poles or Ukrainians, regardless of the fact that a minuscule minority of these nations are broadminded enough to share such attitudes, or at least tolerate them.
3. The Old Right was born in the struggle against Bolshevism, and it adopted the Bolsheviks’ organizational model and tactics to beat them, e.g., the paramilitary party and the totalitarian state, including terrorism and mass murder as tools of policy. Imitating such policies today, however, is ineffective (to say nothing of moral considerations). The postwar hegemony of the Left was not established by Bolshevik means but through institutional and cultural subversion. Thus the New Right must combat them through institutional and cultural renewal. This is the basis for the metapolitical strategy of the New Right. New Rightists do not object to taking a gun to a gunfight, but we do object to taking a gun to what is now essentially a battle of ideas.

Thus for my form of White Nationalism, the Old Right is highly relevant in terms of its analytical framework and political goals, but I reject imperialism in favor of universal nationalism, and I reject the Bolshevik organizational model and methods for metapolitics.

So how should White Nationalists today approach the Old Right? The same way you should approach any tradition or body of thought: with an open but critical mind. First, get enough education and experience to form your own worldview, understand who you are, and exercise adult judgment. Then, standing on that foundation, examine the Old Right, incorporate what is true and useful, reject what is not, and move on. This approach requires self-awareness, authenticity, and groundedness in one’s own identity and worldview.

The least productive engagement with the Old Right is when people who lack a worldview of their own go shopping for a complete and ready-made system of ideas that they can adopt as a package deal. Common examples in our circles include Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Traditionalism, and National Socialism. Old Right ideas are adopted essentially as religious dogmas, in which one defers to the thoughts and judgments of others rather than developing one’s own.

The danger is that such people will latch on to and repeat ideas and strategies that are no longer justified — if they ever were — and they will lack the experience and critical thinking skills necessary to get beyond them. They also lack the groundedness in present-day reality necessary to apply such ideas productively. The usual result is the strident, brittle, and quarrelsome people who populate internet forums and comment threads. However, trying ideas on for size is part of intellectual growth and exploration, and exposure to experience and counter-arguments generally tends to mature such people.

Another unproductive engagement with the Old Right is not just adopting a ready-made system of ideas but imaginatively identifying oneself with the Third Reich or another bygone fascist regime. This goes well beyond learning the lessons of history to apply them to the present and instead becomes escapism, a way of fleeing from the present rather than transforming it, a way of re-fighting the battles of the past, which cannot be changed, and avoiding the battles of the present, in which our race’s future is at stake. To accuse such people of LARPing is usually an undeserved compliment, because such role playing seldom leads to “live action” of any sort.

There is also something deeply inauthentic about identifying with a past regime, especially if it is a foreign one. White Nationalism is a form of identity politics. To be real identity politics, however, it has to be based on a real identity. We are not just creatures of our own time and place, since we reject the false and meaningless identities that the current system offers us: deracinated individuals, citizens of the universe, children of nowhere, defining ourselves by the plastic products and postures we consume and discard. Instead, our identity is defined by our whole biological and cultural lineage, which leads to the present day and cannot be re-routed to some other time and place.

We reject the modern “identity” because it is false, because it does not fit us, because it makes us miserable and base. But modern individualism can only be fake if we already have a real identity, although we might be largely unconscious of who we really are. Therefore, the answer to the modern malaise is to discover who we are and live accordingly, to be authentic rather than fake. It is no answer to simply replace the predominant fake identity with something equally fake but merely more eccentric or marginal. Adopting off-the-rack systems of ideas or living in the past are symptoms of rootlessness rather than solutions for it.