Ideological Foundations of the Nouvelle Droite
Part 7

3,851 words

Critique of American Society

From its origins, Americans have held three fundamental beliefs: first, that America—the new promised land—is the prefiguration of the Cosmopolis, the future Universal Republic, and that the mission of Americans is to set an example and attempt to export the universal model of democratic “good”; second, the belief that all men are equal and that all can (eventually with God’s help) reach whatever goal they set for themselves; and finally, the belief that authority is, in itself, something nefarious and abominable, and that the institutions that must be based upon it (government, army) are nothing but necessary evils whose prerogatives must be limited.

From the outset, America [1] was born of a rejection of Europe—even a hatred of Europe—of a desire for vengeance and revanche against Europe. From its creation, America has seen itself as the “Promised Land,” a refuge for all those excluded from Europe. For them, America is the place where dreams come true and where anything is possible. From the beginning, puritan America would affirm that politics is nothing more than an application of morality, and would strive to create on earth the “City of God.” America is thus born of an adventure of a religious—more exactly, biblical—character.

The American man is Homo dollaricus uniformis. He is worth what he possesses, not what he is. The essential aim of life is to make money. This mercantile mentality is likely linked to the rejection of the principle of authority: Americans deem power over things admissible, insofar as they consider power over men morally detestable. American society is spontaneously egalitarian, for it recognizes only the mass-individual, perfectly interchangeable and measurable, since any difference can only be quantitative: the universal yardstick is the material and financial order (the dollar). Thus there is no place for personality or for aristocratism, for the latter consists in giving value to what has no price. Americans confuse aristocracy with elite, and the latter with material success.

In America, the primacy of the economic finds its justification in certain currents of the Protestant Reformation that morally endorsed enrichment, considered the surest index of work devoted to the glory of God. Material success came to sanction good observance of the divine Law. The adoption of this Protestant capitalism stripped religion of its dogmas and institutional character and made belief a simple moral conduct, giving it a practical hue that justified the pursuit of profit and oriented economic activity toward philanthropy and social assistance.

American ways of life are technomorphic. The diffusion of the American way of life entails a slow substitution of the organic by the mechanical. The United States is the country of no particular people; it is not a nation, for a nation always represents a certain human homogeneity. The United States is a mere agglomeration of men from every country who share nothing in common except a will to rupture with Europe and, in daily life, participation in a certain mode of life; thus unity cannot be established upon a human factor but at a material level—at the level of things—for only these are common to all Americans: the American way of life rests upon the possession of identical goods that constitute social standing.

The State is not the form of any people, for no specific people exists. It results simply from a mechanical assemblage of individuals. “The people” is nothing more than a simple mosaic (the people), and is therefore not considered a whole with specific properties. The State is nothing but the representation of the parts. It possesses no transcendence capable of grounding its legitimacy and imposing its authority upon the parts. The aim of government is not to give the people a destiny—which would be its reason for living—but merely to secure its means of existence. Logically, the rejection of raison d’État proceeds from the rejection of the idea that a country is something more than the mere sum of its citizens, as well as from the idea that in the name of this “something more,” heads of state govern and have prerogatives the ordinary citizen does not. Moreover, raison d’État situates itself beyond good and evil, and the considerations that motivate it transcend such values. This is incomprehensible and almost repugnant to the inhabitants of a country whose two cornerstones are the Constitution and the Bible. Politics is not based on the idea that the principle of sovereignty is a principle of authority; rather, the supreme political values are grounded in biblical morality: egalitarian justice, moralism, universal aspiration. In America, politics par excellence is not foreign policy, which brings relations of power into play, but domestic policy, which is reduced to administrative management.

American hostility toward power and the State is the old biblical hostility toward the power of men—the critique of the principle of authority. For Americans, the ideal government is the one that manifests itself as little as possible, and the State is a necessary evil which, at best, is a mere distributor of goods. This is the Welfare State, the assistance state, which does not govern but manages, an annex of social security.

According to this conception, the head of state must be a man like any other, required only to be competent on the technical plane. Thus, the head of state can only be a merchant of happiness, well-being, or illusion.

Since politics is subordinated to economy and commerce, it must not guide citizens by proposing a path to follow; it must please the greatest number in the shortest time possible. Although he represents the executive power, the president enjoys only an extremely limited margin of maneuver. America’s real power, rather than being represented by statesmen, is held by the representatives of opinion, the owners of the mass media, the heads of lobbies, and fundamentally the lawyers—that is, the judiciary. The ability of American courts to declare acts of the legislative and executive powers constitutional or unconstitutional is the keystone of political life. This nomocracy, or “republic of judges,” follows the logic of American social biblicism. Whereas in the classical conception politics is the art of determining what can be done, judges legislate about what must be done. The subordination of political power to judicial power reflects the predominance of morality over the State’s real power.

America is fundamentally isolationist because, from its origin, it has sought to keep itself apart from the sin of other nations. But at the same time it feels obliged to propagate throughout the world the principles of the American way of life. It considers itself to have a mission toward the world: to propose to other peoples a model of universal democracy based on the two biblical virtues of justice and peace. The sense of election and the messianic character of its mission lead to a subtle form of imperialism. The United States is isolationist in politics but interventionist in morals. Its interventions correspond to no precise political project; rather, it believes it must be present everywhere to propose its dream: the disappearance of local diversities, generalized enrichment that will make wars useless, the advent of a world culture born of mixture and supranationality. Hence U.S. foreign policy oscillates perpetually between isolationism and crusade, hyper-pragmatism and hyper-moralism, an obsession with force and a total renunciation of force. The only way to realize the universality that Americans claim is by absorbing other peoples into the American model. Therefore, by virtue of its universalist vocation, the United States is condemned to make all cultures it touches decline, to uproot all countries where it implants its culture and mentality durably. Americans conceive specificity only as folklore, commercially organized for tourists. By exporting its lifestyle, the United States murders the soul of peoples, because its way of life was born of precisely such a death.

Americans certainly possess inventive genius, but not creative genius. Culture in America is a mere matter of fashion. Moreover, it has no time to sediment, since the American way of life implies the devaluation of the past and a headlong rush toward tomorrow. Culture is not created but consumed. For that, it must be imported, and as a whole it is nothing but snobbery. American cultural production, [2] according to the ND, is not only criticizable for its omnipresence but intrinsically harmful to the life of peoples because of the values it transmits. There is a logical continuity between the founding myths of the American republic and the quality of the products it disseminates—a continuity between the homogenizing universalism of its essentially stereotyped productions, in which differences are reduced to exoticism, and the a-historical reality of a nation instituted as a contractual society, a new Jerusalem, the meeting point of all the earth’s wanderers, of all those born without fatherland and without home. If American products are immediately consumable everywhere, it is precisely because they belong to no particular people, to no concrete culture—and instead destroy them all.

The most surprising thing about American ideology is that it consists precisely in an absence of ideologies—or, more exactly, in a hostility toward organized worldviews. In the United States, philosophy is utilitarian, analytical, or instrumentalist. American bipartisanship itself, far from corresponding to a doctrinal vision, is morally inspired: it is deemed “not good” for a single party to hold power, and alternation is desirable. The parties’ program is always the same: the perpetuation of the American way of life; only the labels change. Moreover, this system satisfies most of the population, which lives in a Manichaean, hence dualist, universe. Neither of the two major parties has particular ideological principles. Both have slogans or interests backing them. Party platforms are reduced to extremely vague advertising formulas onto which anyone can project his aspirations. This absence of doctrine is necessary given the heterogeneous character of the population: any choice would be discriminatory and would translate into fewer votes. The two decisive factors for voting are the electorate’s opinion (supplied by polls) on the outgoing administration and the degree of identification with the parties. The latter depends on habitat, religion, social and economic position, and ethnic belonging. One belongs to a party by family tradition or professional interest, rarely out of adherence to ideas. The ease with which immigrants settled in America influenced the formation of American optimism and its belief in progress. This doctrine of progress, at the root of the American mystique, proceeds not only from Enlightenment philosophy and Rousseau’s theses but also from the pietism of the Quakers and evangelical sects, with their deistic faith in reason and in the natural goodness of humanity, and with their firm conviction—typically behaviorist—that if the environment were transformed, man would be modified in the desired direction. This environmentalist doctrine was seductive for the inhabitants of this new nation, convinced that a new man would emerge from the melting pot. In reality, faith in the perfectibility of human nature—which coincides with the Puritan belief in the omnipotence of the educational environment—has been professed, from the beginning, by all American thinkers.

America does not love the best; it loves only the winners—that is, those who triumph without ever ceasing to be like everyone else. The whole conception of success à l’américaine and of the self-made man (the myth of the hardworking boy who rises from nothing) proceeds from the biblical idea that the common man is worth more than the superior man, because God loves only the humble. In parallel, it is believed that anyone, regardless of innate qualities, with the support of divine grace and with good education and socialization, is capable of getting wherever he aims.

Born of a rupture with the (European) past, America cannot imagine the future except as a line extended indefinitely in a utopian process. Confronted with historical becoming, America lives in an eternal present—a non-reversible succession of present moments. The American unconscious rests on a mystique of space, implying the belief that beyond the frontier there is always a space to exploit. Hence the importance of the conquest of space as a substitute for the conquest of time, which represents innovation rooted in a traditional culture.

Furthermore, Americans have grown accustomed to considering expansion a constant factor. Given their belief in the non-contradictory nature of things, Americans adhere to the theory of indefinite progress, and their taste for waste and immediate consumption proceeds from this instinctive optimism. Now, at the very moment when American optimism collapses, it gives rise to a totally exaggerated pessimism. They pass from one excess to the other, and disappointed optimism does not become realism but catastrophism. In this alternation of contrary excesses—never mediated by any position of equilibrium or synthesis—there is a paradoxical logic that characterizes Americans. They are at once hyper-idealist and hyper-materialist, isolationist and universalist; hence America perpetually tilts between puritanism and exhibitionism.

Optimism and belief in progress drive the idea of consuming the present instant. Since he lives only in the present instant, the American seeks less to possess money than to be able to spend it, and he aims to consume everything he earns. This consumerist fever engenders the ephemeral character of production as well as its low quality. In the United States, production is based on quantity and speed, and on the “planned obsolescence” of products: they are consumed and discarded. More than anywhere else, America aims to live fast; hence the superficiality of American thought and the origin of that neurosis—so characteristic of technomorphic societies—that simultaneously engenders stress and exhaustion.

Americans, over the course of their history, have had too easy a life. That is why they have never become true adults. The childishness of the American spirit is manifest, for example, in the electoral domain with electoral “competitions,” as well as in a puerile interpretation of politics, based on universal plots, etc. This childishness implies the absence of critical spirit, and this absence engenders credulity, which further accentuates the power of the mass media and of public opinion fabricated by them. The American does not resist slogans or advertising because he lacks around him the elements of judgment that would allow him to reject a piece of information. This myth of public opinion rests upon American conformism, which implies that all opinions—being fundamentally the same—are equally valid, and thus can be summed or averaged. Moreover, it exerts a real psychological pressure upon the population: on the one hand, it dictates to the masses the stereotypes of their behavior; on the other, it informs those who truly decide in society of the reactions of the masses. These decisions are determined according to opinion, even as they seek to influence it by creating false needs. The whole principle of marketing rests on the idea that initiative must come from the bottom up—that the market dictates its will, that the one on top must satisfy the one below, and that the decision should come from the buyer, not the seller; from the electors, not the elected. This omnipotence of opinion goes hand in hand with the development of intermediary industries between the masses and opinion: the mass media, whose role is important in technomorphic and mechanized societies, for they artificially secure the bonds and connections that arise naturally in organic societies.

In the United States, education is conceived primarily as training in quantitative disciplines (science, technology, business), which implies a rejection of general culture, considered time wasted. This hyper-specialization further impoverishes the cultural level and accentuates the analytical side of thought, preventing any synthetic knowledge. In the field of compilation and accumulation of knowledge, Americans are unbeatable, but from all this knowledge no new idea emerges: knowledge is added to knowledge without creating a system of thought of its own. American universities have produced less new ideas than a new caste, the intelligentsia, which claims to exercise its critique over things not so much on the basis of lived experience as of a theoretical and abstract intelligence.

(To this new class of intellectuals America owes, to cite only one example, the justification of parasitic and marginal elements of society.)

We are faced with a hypertrophic civilization to which no current, lived culture corresponds. Immigrants brought with them material goods—the acquisitions of civilization—while leaving behind the culture that made that civilization possible. Hence, in the United States, civilization—deprived of its context and substance—could only renew itself through constant external input. Moreover, America is profoundly sterile and, as said above, has never created; it has merely developed—through inventions—what others innovated and created. To make up for its lag, it has found the solution of brain-drain. To these generations of researchers the United States owes its progress. The intellectual relay does not occur within the United States itself but by resorting to fresh imports. It is as if creative instinct demanded a cultural atmosphere, while the American milieu sterilized the spirit—perhaps due to the reigning comfort, ease, and false optimism, for the true creator is never entirely satisfied with himself.

What is called “American imperialism” is an imperialism without imperium, without a superior spiritual principle, without a formative or organizing principle—the opposite of a true imperial power. America is not a new Rome but a new Carthage. Its strength, like its weakness, results not so much from a political project as from its weight. The place it occupies in the world is explained by its size, by the fact that in the most mercantilist era it is the most mercantile country. Americans have intervened in the world only when forced, obliged—not to become a power animated by a project but to contribute to the establishment of peace, to give the world a moral lesson, and to preserve their economic and commercial interests. This absence of a historical politics in the United States explains why America, in peacetime, always defends and never attacks. Considering the essence of politics to be morality and not force, America sees in the politics of spheres of influence nothing but a means to re-establish a just equilibrium, and not a game in which relations of force express wills and aspirations to power. Hence the psychological errors of American diplomacy, as well as its desire to achieve status quo situations that can evolve only in favor of the stronger will.

The symbol of American foreign policy is oscillation between quietism and activism, both born of the same quasi-messianic preoccupation with preserving the purity of the American message. The slightest political disappointment (Vietnam) engenders a wave of self-guilt and a resurgence of isolationism.

Contrary to received ideas, the United States has gone to war only reluctantly. Whenever it has entered a war, that war was already won in advance, and it entered only when the enemy was exhausted (World War II). In a country that has never known invasion of its territory and that moreover claims to be pacifist, the army can exercise only the function of simple police. Military values may be useful at a given moment, but will never be considered exemplary. In America, one fights while one is winning; if not, one abandons the ally and withdraws for good, with the good conscience typical of Puritan hypocrisy: have not Americans always hated war and desired peace?

Americans have never been truly in solidarity with Europeans, and whenever they have intervened at their side it was because their own interests were threatened. In peacetime, their taste for the status quo leads them to consider Europe either a market or a military outpost. It is possible to foresee, in the event of a major crisis, a U.S. retreat into itself, as well as a sharpening of contradictions between the American and European blocs, particularly on the economic plane, to the point of a possible rupture. [3] Since August 1971, when the fixed convertibility of gold and the dollar was suspended, the United States has wielded discretionary power over currency issuance, and over global inflation and recession. The income the United States receives from its foreign credits increasingly exceeds the interest on capital it pays abroad. Internationally, the preponderance of the dollar as a reserve currency in international payments has provided a practical means of financing its balance-of-payments deficits. Americans have been able to reimburse this interest by going into debt and increasing the volume of dollars in global circulation. Recently, the rise of the dollar has allowed them to siphon off enormous sums from Europe to relaunch their economy, and by raising dollar interest rates they have deprived Europeans of a significant portion of the means necessary for their economic growth. With the dollar’s move to a floating currency, the United States acquired real assets in exchange for its incontrovertible paper money. The inundation of Europe by an almost unlimited quantity of dollars caused European monetary inflation, which led to incessant price rises—the origin of the many strikes in Europe. Moreover, American investments are concentrated mostly in strategic sectors of expansion and are direct; that is, they flow to subsidiaries whose parent companies are in the United States, which depresses the host country’s economy while creating decision centers that escape governmental control. It should also be noted that the capital used to finance American companies established in Europe comes from European savings. The profits thus obtained allow the United States to gather the capital necessary to finance research programs in cutting-edge industries and brain-drain policy—which is to say that the European market indirectly helps to accentuate its own lag in certain sectors.

America’s past is a melting pot; its future, chaos. In reality, America has neither past nor future. It is nothing but an eternal present—the crystallization of a moment in Europe’s history. America is a corpse in good health. Perhaps, by its immense material power, its geographic vastness, and its taste for gigantism, it has at times been able to cast a spell. But prisoners of their desire to live fast, and by accentuating material factors, they will disappear as brutally as they were born. This false American empire will endure only in its own present. It may exist, but it will not be able to transmit anything, for having consumed everything before allowing it to ripen, it will have nothing to bequeath.

The threat the United States poses to the world is that of a pernicious form of universalism and egalitarianism. The Anglo-Saxons can afford the luxury of being mondialist because mondialism can only lead to the Americanization of the planet. But for Europe and the Third World, this path means death—the end of every distinct civilization. In the order of colonialisms, it is by not being American today that we shall not be Russian tomorrow, because any people that has lost its soul is incapable of ensuring its physical integrity.

Translated into English by Francisco Albanese.

Notes

[1] Benoist, Alain de & Locchi, Giorgio: “Il etait une fois l’amérique,” in: Nouvelle Ecole no. 27-28 (fall-winter 1975), pp. 10-96.

[2] Benoist, Alain de: “La voix de l’Amérique,” in: Eléments no. 43 (October-November 1982), pp. 43-47.

[3] Benoist, Alain de: “L’empire du dollar,” in: Eléments no. 50 (spring-summer 1984), p. 2.