The movement founded by De Benoist envisaged populism, return of identity and financial crisis
Of Stenio Solinas
Half a century of a movement of ideas is a significant period of time and going back over the years to May 1968 is not to tell the other side of it, as much as the new and different that was revealed in it, the “New Right” by Alain de Benoist e del suo Greece (Research and Study Group for European Civilization), it can take on the provocative flavor of a nemesis, as well as that of an undue appropriation.
Having no penchant for either one or the other, nor for any celebratory logic, reminiscent and/or nostalgic, what is of interest here is a reflection on the concept of "metapolitics" which has been closely connected to the French New Right and the temptations, the misunderstandings, contaminations, the refusals and failures linked to the attempt to combine it in political-party terms.
Over the course of these fifty years, on the other hand, the amount of critical studies on the phenomenon of transalpine ND has become increasingly voluminous and reproducing a journalistic summary would make little sense. On the latest issue (n° 61) of the magazine Trasgressioni, two dense essays, by Massimiliano Capra Casadio (The metapolitical project of the New Right) and Antoine Baudino (New Right and Front National: between intellectual work and politics) However, they refer precisely to the topic that interests us most and can therefore be used as a good starting point and a confirmation of its relevance.
The latter consists in the fact that in the fifty-year period that separates us from his birth certificate, the metapolitical option has revealed itself, in the field of ideas, the only one capable of understanding, influencing and often anticipating the spirit of the times that had begun to blow in the meantime. A phenomenon that is even more significant if we consider that the ND was born within an ideological-political horizon that of the politique d'abord, politics first and foremost, theorized by Charles Maurras and his Action Française in the early twentieth century, he had made a sort of thaumaturgical mantra, that is, the illusion of the seizure of political power, of the levers of political action, as an ultimate end as an end in itself. Hence a sort of tarantolism among the various political formations, over time forced every two by three to reposition themselves on the electoral market in a sort of fishing for opportunities that would guarantee their appeal: now liberal technocratic, reactionary time, now statist, now privatist-liberal, now nationalist, now localist, now pro-American, now pro-European, sometimes even everything together and its opposite…
If you look today, with a disenchanted eye, to the profound motives behind the advance of so-called populism, we will realize that the rejection of political correctness, a fruit of the mass individualism of the 1968 era, as well as the ideology of individual rights detached from any duty towards the community, of the dictatorship of minority claims in the name of their own "right to happiness" compared to the will of the so-called majority made up of "ordinary people" belong more to a metapolitical work than to a political-politician practice. Likewise, the calling into question of the left-right dichotomy, the criticism of a purely economistic development model, the refusal to consider the worker as a commodity and the commodity as a new identity matrix, the rediscussion of geopolitical structures given as eternal regardless of the changes that concern them, they have to do precisely with critical reflection, metapolitics, through which to understand social complexity and identify ideal foundations, values, scientific or religious that move beneath the surface of politics.
Born on the right, but already with the implicit and then openly declared intention of placing oneself "elsewhere" compared to the traditional right and left, in a field where new syntheses were possible that would better allow us to explore and guide changes, one of the misunderstandings of the ND as a metapolitical subject and project will be due to another of its theorizations, right-wing Gramscism, right-wing Gramscism, that is, the conquest of civil society as the first and necessary condition for the conquest of political society. It was a happily ambiguous formula and therefore a harbinger of misunderstandings. Precisely because it referred to the name of Antonio Gramsci it brought with it the notions of intellectuals as the transmission belt of the Party, the latter as the Prince of political action and referent of the theoretical one, and in fact a subordination and/or exploitation of thought with respect to practice. The one who for de Benoist was "the great modern theorist of cultural power", whose teaching was that «a political action has little chance of success when the spirit of the time is hostile to it», for a certain number of Greek exponents and leaders it will turn into a decision-making temptation, motivated by the belief-need to embody ideas in a political subject. That this was it, over time, first liberal Giscardism, subsequently Jean Marie Le Pen's anti-communist National Front refers to that aforementioned politique d'abord which confuses the end with the means and effectively condemns sterility in the field of thought and the eternal and unsatisfying compromise in that of action.
The most significant lesson that can and must be drawn from it is that metapolitics is not a strategy, but a dimension that lies beyond politics and presupposes a functional attitude to understand the globality of the political as a category of human action. In the case of de Benoist, who was and remains its main theoretician, and for which "man has no other nature than the culture according to which he is built", is equivalent to putting "shape into the world just as it gives its own shape" and where, Nieztschianly speaking, for man and his destiny "everything is a question of will". And "big politics" in short…