Ideological Foundations of the Nouvelle Droite
Part 3

Part 1, Part 2

Alain de Benoist

4,170 words

Political Conception of the Nouvelle Droite

For the Nouvelle Droite, one of the fundamental criteria defining political activity is its polarization around a relationship of hostility—the friend–enemy polarity formulated by Carl Schmitt. The political act par excellence is that which mobilizes a population by designating an enemy. To designate an enemy can also mean to respond to an adverse challenge. Therefore, politics assumes the destiny of a people by awakening their awareness of the threats that endanger them, and by using the energy created through mobilization to realize a political project.Politics serves to awaken peoples [1], to tear them away from mediocrity through the surpassing mobilization of adversity, and to insert them into the historical process.

It is necessary to distinguish the substance of politics—its function—from the institution that assumes that function. When the State no longer monopolizes the substance of politics, politics itself does not disappear; rather, it shifts toward other institutions or spheres: toward the military (terrorism), the cultural (metapolitics), and so on. There must exist an institutional territory that monopolizes politics, for otherwise it risks becoming fragmented, shared among partisan and therefore illegitimate spheres such as those just mentioned. This is the indispensable condition for a community to possess a historical destiny and to confront the challenges before it.

Political activity may thus be defined as that which seeks to ensure the external security and internal concord of a territorial unit through force, generally supported by law. Political action guarantees order amidst the struggles and disorders arising from diversity and from the divergence of opinions and interests.

Furthermore, to recognize the polemical dimension of human relations is to guarantee respect for every adversary, whose cause is no less legitimate than one’s own. Contemporary ideologies, on the contrary, claim to possess a universal truth, and they also postulate the necessary pacification of all human relations—reducing all competitiveness to a commercial form and regarding every political, ideological, or military enemy as an absolute. Refusing to acknowledge adversity transforms every confrontation into a battle of absolutes, in the spirit of the bellicose and intransigent pacifism of Christianity. The enemy is conceived as the final being to be annihilated before the definitive, final peace. Moreover, to fight in the name of humanity is to strip the adversary of his human condition—to reduce him to the “non-human”—and this justifies his elimination, aggravated by the good conscience with which one believes oneself to act. In the Machiavellian conception of conflict, one does not fight for a just cause, but for specific interests at stake. Combat is thereby relativized, yet legitimized; it becomes an indispensable game, but one at least capable of being codified.

Another central theme of the ND is its exaltation of the communitarian model, conceived as an appropriate response to the growing nihilism of today’s mercantile society.

The community is a human group whose internal, organic bonds are structured by the sentiment of a common origin, a shared historical and cultural heritage, and a desire to live together. It stands in opposition to society, in which relations are contractual, individual, and self-interested. The basic community is the national-popular community. According to this definition, the people are a living being that transcends individual persons, whereas society is composed of aggregates of individuals and mechanized sectors of activity, essentially quantitative and economic. The people, in this first conception, possess a collective memory that confers upon the community its identity and personality. This memory frees it from the immediacy of the present, enriching it by integrating the past while projecting it into the future. Corresponding to this communitarian model is a type of mentality that Tönnies called organic will (Wesenwille). This will is its desire for existence—its will-to-live—which reunites all the cultural and historical unconscious of a community. This organic will stands in opposition to the reflective will (Kürwille) of society, in Tönnies’s schema.

However, for the ND, the task consists in associating both types of will, which would make it possible to reconcile modern techno-industrial forms with the communitarian organicism of traditional societies. The aim is to re-vitalize social bonds by grounding them in a collective project and in values of national mobilization. The reflective will, through the political function, should give form to the irrational substratum of the organic will, organizing the communal will-to-live and converting into a collective project the impulse expressed in cultural memory and historical origin. Only this unifying political function confers a homogeneity of value and tension within the plurality of forms.[2]

Another of the ND’s main points of reflection is the bipolarity of right and left. Alain de Benoist calls “right-wing,” purely by convention, the attitude that consists in regarding the diversity of the world—and consequently the relative inequalities that are its product—as something positive, and the progressive homogenization of the world, advocated by egalitarianism, as something negative. For him, the doctrines of the right are those that deduce relations of force, which shape the historical becoming of the relative inequalities inherent in existence. For the ND, therefore, the enemy is not isolatedly the Left, communism, or subversion, but the egalitarian ideology of which these are merely successive products and stages. For de Benoist [3], there are not so much right-wing or left-wing ideas as there are specifically right-wing or left-wing ways of holding those ideas.

For de Benoist, the relative superiority of the Left over the Right has been due to the former’s understanding that nothing escapes the interpretation of a worldview, whereas the latter has clung to an impossible ideological neutralism.

Nevertheless, the ND seeks to transcend this duality through a third ideological position. The future, according to de Benoist, belongs to those capable of thinking simultaneously what has hitherto been conceived as contradictory. For him, we have entered decisive years in which new factions will take shape. The ideological dividing lines of the future will no longer oppose Right and Left, but rather the partisans of differentialism against the partisans of universalism.

Finally, the ideological debate surrounding the notion of democracy must be considered. For the ND, the diversity of interpretations attributed to democracy reveals a profound crisis in both its theory and practice. Thus, the most important task is to redefine the notion of democracy. [4]

In principle, democracy, as the power of the people, is subject to the principle of the diversity of peoples. Therefore, there cannot be a single model of democracy valid for all. Nor should its formulation be identical in every age and place. There is no immutable democratic system.

To restore meaning to the term democracy, one must return to its origins—that is, to its inventors: the Greek democracies. These consecrated the political rights of man insofar as he was a citizen, for democracy in principle is the organized community of citizens. Citizenship, the essential element, derives from provenance and lineage. [5] Hence, to be a citizen is to belong to a homeland. Furthermore, the Greek concept of liberty does not evoke the modern sense of liberation, but the political capacity to participate in the life of an organized community. It has nothing to do with emancipation from communal norms or authority. This freedom is fundamentally the freedom of the people as a whole and presupposes independence as its primary condition. There is no individual freedom without collective freedom. Political equality derives from citizenship as an essential condition—that is, from belonging to a people, not from belief in a natural equality. Ancient democracy is holistic and communitarian; modern democracy is primarily individualistic.

The modern conception of democracy, based on Enlightenment philosophy, is first and foremost a democratic mystique. [6] It rests on belief in the natural equality of men and the dogma of natural rights. This metaphysics of equality originates in the justicial mysticism of the prophets of Israel, preoccupied with a utopian return to a state of weak social differentiation. This prophetic tendency found philosophical continuation in the seventeenth century through the jurists of natural law in Protestant countries. Inspired by Christian rationalism, they affirmed the existence of a natural reason similar in all men. These theses were reinforced by the Cartesian belief in the equality of reason among all human beings. It was, in fact, the eighteenth-century Encyclopedists who transformed this egalitarian mystique into a democratic mystique of political nature. Animated by the desire to reconstruct the natural state, they deduced from the existence of inalienable natural rights the obligation to realize social equality. The French Revolution assimilated justice to the promise of socio-economic equality, indirectly introducing mercantile hierarchy as the only criterion of social distinction. Moreover, the mystical dogmas of human rights destroyed the representation of the social bodies of organic societies, yet they could not prevent the emergence of unions, pressure groups, and other formations that constitute the chaotic neo-feudalism of modern, hyper-individualized societies torn by rival factions. The transformation of democracies into plutocracies, dominated by the absolutist values of mercantile classes and now evolving from a liberal-capitalist stage to a techno-socialist one, has its origin in the Calvinist tradition of democratic mysticism. For Calvinists and Protestant jurists, the State was nothing more than a social contract, and religion became a commercial contract—reactualizing, in the form of mercantile capitalism, the Hebraic conception of relations with God: mercantile enrichment pleased God and was also democratic, since everyone could pursue it.

Contemporary liberal democracies are not founded on the spirit of the ancient democracies but on Christian individualism, Enlightenment rationalism, and the Anglo-Saxon Protestant spirit. For liberalism, the individual precedes society, and society is composed of individuals, each pursuing his own ends. It is an atomistic conception of social life, which renders peoples and nations transient superstructures of little significance. This individualism fosters a logic of civic disinterest, while proclaiming the inferiority of politics to economics. Furthermore, the bourgeois and mercantile tradition of this democracy stands in opposition to the aristocratic tradition [7] of European democracy, Greek or Germanic. In this conception, disinterested civism is an aristocratic virtue, and to be a citizen is a civic privilege—one that must be earned and conquered.

Consequently, if we understand the exercise of democracy as the process through which each people fulfills its historical role, and the organic community of citizens participates in the realization of that role, then the ideologies that, through individualism and economism, bring about the destruction of peoples make any notion of democracy impossible. This is the case with the current Western technocratic democracies, in which the notion of active and responsible citizenship is eliminated through a passive social consensus, generated by the egoism of socio-economic interest, and where the people have lost their cultural and historical homogeneity, and therefore lack an authentic general will. The end of citizenship is the corollary of the end of the political State [8], understood as the power of the people as an organic whole of citizens.

For the ND, on the contrary, the national and popular community constitutes the source of political legitimacy. But the people must be understood as an organic whole that possesses its own specificity and that must be distinguished from the mass, which is nothing more than a transient plurality of isolated individuals. For the ND, a political power is legitimate when it responds to the profound aspirations of a people and allows its citizens to participate in their historical destiny.

Liberal democracies, however, are reluctant to conceive of the people as an organic and relatively unified notion, while at the same time their practices contribute to dismantling the people into factions, parties, and individuals. Democracy is etymologically a kratos (power), which as such implies authority. Liberalism, however, is a doctrine of the limitation of power. Democracy is based on national sovereignty; liberalism, on the rights of the individual.

In the liberal conception, the nation is not a body to which the State must give a destiny, but a marketplace of interests for calculating individuals. Political activity and sovereignty disappear in favor of the technocratic management of civil society. The State is asked only to limit itself to technical, ideologically neutral interventions. The State becomes just another economic agent, extending itself only as an impersonal bureaucracy (the origin of contemporary statism), and not as a representative organization of a nation or a people. Instead of governing—setting an objective to be achieved without constant interference—it multiplies its interventions but does not lead. Once the State was omnipotent, which spared it from continuous intervention; today it is omnipresent, to compensate for the power it no longer possesses. What it has lost in intensity, it has gained in extension. The origin of this oppressive statism has been the abandonment of authority and political sovereignty. [9]

Modern liberal democracies have propagated arithmetical equality, corresponding to the simple law of numbers. Moreover, they derive equality of political rights, as already noted, from a supposed natural equality. This latter is a moral demand, since it cannot be empirically demonstrated. In contrast, Greek geometrical equality preserves the idea of proportion and rests on reality. It is not antagonistic to merit and is based on equality of opportunity. It affirms equality before the law and public office, against both the communist equality of results and the socio-economic privilege of liberalism. It induces a meritocracy in the recruitment of elites according to talent, in opposition to the mediocracy derived from the dogma of social equality. This conception does not advocate the privilege of a hereditary caste but rather the selection of the best, from all perspectives. It admits inequality of condition but mitigates the injustices that may be felt due to socio-economic stratification, reducing their impact on the social hierarchy and multiplying social orders. [10]

In the view of the ND, the most important problem is the legitimation of the elites. Egalitarian societies apply elitism even as they reject it in theory. What happens is that they reduce the elite to the dominant socio-economic classes (the bourgeoisie). On the other hand, economism and the excessive rationalization of social selection processes hinder the indispensable circulation of elites. The democratization and mass culture resulting from it impede social mobility and the promotion of potential popular elites. The Nouvelle Droite advocates a coincidence of elites with a “popular meritocracy” [11], based on the notion of duty and communal service.

Liberal representative democracy implies a delegation of sovereignty, which amounts to an abdication of the political will of the represented, transferring it entirely to the representative, who finds in election the basis of legitimacy that allows him to act according to his own will. Having delegated, through suffrage, the totality of his political will, the voter is made to believe that he is fully represented and is thus denied the right to intervene politically in the sphere of his professional or personal life. Every representative democracy runs the risk of locating the center of gravity of power in the representatives (the intermediaries) rather than in the people. To this must be added the drawbacks of partitocracy. [12] The cunning of the party regime lies in making so-called citizens vote negatively, asking them to pronounce themselves on a pre-established project (that of a party), which excludes any direct expression of the people’s will.

Furthermore, in a representative democracy [13], the people delegate to their representatives, and these, in turn, delegate to collaborators and experts who have not been elected. Within society, power is also exercised by financial powers and the media, whose leaders, possessing great influence, have likewise not been elected. Candidates are often chosen not for their personal qualities but for the prestige of the party that presents them. It is less the people who elect than the candidate who manages to get himself elected. The existence of a large electoral body increases the feeling of the uselessness of the vote. The probability that an individual vote is decisive is infinitesimal. This is alienation by mass effect, a factor of demoralization. The question of the “useful vote” leads one to vote not for the candidate one prefers, but against the one most detested. Likewise, the majority vote does not take into account the intensity of the preferences expressed. The undecided voter has the same weight as the resolved one.

Everyone knows that in liberal democracies, money is an essential part of every candidate’s political arsenal. Without financial means, a candidate has little chance of being elected. Since electoral campaigns are increasingly expensive, financial support has become ever greater—and these contributions are obviously not disinterested, but granted in anticipation of a return, one that the electorate is entirely unaware of. This falsifies the democratic process.

To say that elections are free is meaningless if the formation of public opinion is not. The very notion of “public opinion” is itself questionable. Only a small number of people hold genuine convictions; most have no defined opinions but rather impressions, vague and contradictory ideas rooted in moods and emotional seductions that shift with events, propaganda, and all forms of conditioning.

In a democracy, one can only become known through the media. A candidate who is ignored by the media has almost no chance of being elected. Popular will is increasingly manufactured through techniques of opinion conditioning. Lacking the means to form their own judgment, voters choose impulsively and irrationally, their passions channeled toward the inessential. Candidates exploit and abuse emotional factors and the insignificance of spectacle. The personalization of political life reduces the importance of programs and ideas to a minimum. In a televised debate, the victor is not the one who defends the most just ideas but the one with the sharpest replies or the most telegenic presence. Voters cast their ballots for an image fabricated to satisfy a previously manufactured demand—a notoriety that rewards not genuine quality but the impact one seeks to create around it.

The technique of opinion polling plays with stereotypes, which it tends to transform into irrefutable data through publication. This technique of simulacrum, based on supposedly representative “samples,” presents itself falsely as analogous to reality—or even as more real than it. In truth, it measures even less than an election does the intensity of preferences, for it translates the opinion that an individual would express if they intended to, without ever measuring that intention itself.

The evolution of political life in liberal democracies has culminated in an unprecedented wave of indifference and apathy. This results from the degeneration of political practice and from the growing feeling of impotence before the real centers of power and the true key issues. The predominance of economic and social concerns depoliticizes politics. Debates now oppose only managerial politicians, who clash with statistics as their weapons. Out of demagogy and a desire to please, nearly all candidates say the same things. The elected candidate must govern with extreme prudence, lest they lose part of their electorate, while at the same time attempting to seduce a fraction of the opposing camp—thus violating their own platform. Political programs are increasingly determined by polling data, which yield the same results for everyone. Parties are compelled to propose solutions that are ever less distinct from one another. The freedom of choice is thus perceived as illusory: the voter realizes that one may choose within the alternatives but not among the alternatives.

The discourse on the “complexity” of problems or on “circumstantial necessities” encourages the belief that politics is not a matter of choice, and that the best the voter can do is entrust power to technicians and experts. This conception, which equates competence with technical knowledge, is dangerous. The politician’s role is not to possess knowledge but to decide in the service of what end knowledge must be applied. To entrust government to experts is to forget that political decisionism necessarily involves conflicts of interest and a plurality of possible options. From the operational role of experts emerges the legitimation of technocracy.

For the ND, one must not confuse generic competence with specific competence. The former may perfectly well belong to the people, who may not know how to govern but can still recognize themselves—or not—in the will of their leaders, as long as it expresses their collective existence. Moreover, competence must not be confined to the sphere of political decision. There are immediate spheres of citizen life in which a more direct competence can be exercised. Another factor contributing to political apathy is the lack of imagination and ambition among politicians and the disappearance of great projects. These have been invalidated by economism, by the short duration of electoral mandates, and by the legalistic fetishism characteristic of the liberal rule-of-law state. Static by definition, legal institutions can only imperfectly serve the realization of a truly historical action.

The politics of politicians, having become a matter of management, results in politics as substance reappearing in other circles rarely subject to election. Furthermore, this apathy leaves the hands free to the real holders of power: the technostructure.

In every society, power is diffuse. Decision-making occurs simultaneously in many different spheres. Moreover, a society is composed of a multitude of associations and communities of all kinds. At this local level—of non-national and small-scale issues—direct democracy becomes possible. This form of democracy can exist wherever there is a homogeneous people, conscious of a shared identity, where, thanks to this cohesion of values, decisions can be made in favor of the common good without mediation.

The development of the “plebiscitary referéndum” could constitute another mode of “direct democracy.” The referendum could appear as the modern form of popular acclamation, allowing the correspondence between the general will and the decisions of rulers to be verified.

Ultimately, the goal is to explore every possibility of citizen participation in national life. The key notion of a “new democracy” must be active participation, which presupposes interest in the national destiny and an active role in community life. The central notion of the democratic regime is neither number, nor suffrage, nor election, nor representation, but the participation of the people in their destiny and in national institutions. Universal suffrage should not exhaust the possibilities of political participation.

For the ND, the people are profound in the essential and versatile in the inessential. Often, the people exercise their true sovereignty only when it truly matters—frequently outside the procedures of juridical and rational regimes, in the unforeseen and in cases of urgency. [14] In such moments, the people may not coincide with the majority expression of the vote and, as a nation, may be embodied in a minority—an aristocracy that, through heroism and disinterestedness, replaces the faltering mass. If this minority is authentically aristocratic, it will also be authentically democratic, for it will emerge as the essence of the people and will establish itself as the “guardian” of the popular essence, in Heidegger’s sense, manifesting the highest virtues of its people and the will to serve their historical interests.

The problem of representing the national will must be cultural rather than institutional. Good constitutions may prove insufficient and may be neutralized by sociological evolution that allows the mediocre to win elections or implants in the body of the nation uncontrolled powers in the hands of factions and private interest groups posing as public. Therefore, to complete institutions, national representatives must be recruited selectively from human environments in which character prevails over managerial mentality, clarity over cynicism, and patriotism over class spirit.

In the end, it is a matter of opposing a formal democracy of the liberal-parliamentary type with a national democracy of an organic and meritocratic nature, situated in the direct tradition of the Greco-Germanic aristodemocracies. A “new democracy” based on the people as the privileged actor of all historical destiny. An ethnic democracy that aspires neither to universalism nor to egalitarian-totalitarian messianism. A democracy that continues the European tradition of organicist thought [15], in which notions such as the complementarity and harmony of opposites, the geometry of proportions, the dialectic of authority and consent, the participation and reciprocal identification of rulers and ruled all converge—one in which the pluralism of values, which disintegrates societies, is not confused with the pluralism of opinions, which is a logical consequence of human diversity. The limit of this pluralism is the general interest—that is, the ability of the national community to continue having a destiny in accordance with its founding values.

Translated into English by Francisco Albanese.

Notes

[1] Faye, Guillaume: “Le politique como polarisation con-flictuelle,” in: Vouloir no. 14 (march 1985), pp. 3-4.

[2] Faye, Guillaume: “Le modele communitaire”, in: Vouloir no. 11/12 (december-january 1984-85), pp. 3-4.

[3] Benoist, Alain de: Les idées à l’endroit, op. cit., pp. 58-76.

[4] Benoist, Alain de: “Réinventer la démocratie”, in: Eléments no. 52 (winter 1985), p. 2.

[5] Benoist, Alain de: Démocratie-Le Problème, Le Labyrinthe, París, 1985, pp. 7-86.

[6] Faye, Guillaume: “Contre la mystique démocratique”, in: Eléments no. 48-49 (winter 1983-84), pp. 63-65:

[7] Faye, Guillaume: “Peut-on encore être démocrate?, in: Eléments no. 52 1962, pp. 29-32.

[8] Ibid, pp. 29-32.

[9] Benoist, Alain de: “L’Etat-dinosaure”, in: Eléments núm. 44 (enero-febrero 1983), p. 2.

[10] Faye, Guillaume: Eléments núm. 48-49, loc.cit. pp. 63-65.

[11] Vouloir núm. 5 (abril 1984), p. 3.

[12] Faye, Guillaume: Eléments núm. 52, loc. cit., pp. 29-32.

[13] Benoist, Alain de: Démocratie-Le Probleme, op. cit., pp. 57-75.

[14] Faye, Guillaume: Eléments núm. 52, loc. cit., pp. 29-32.

[15] Benoist, Alain de: Démocratie-Le Probleme, op. cit., pp. 77-86.