Jean-François Drolet and Michael C. Williams: From Critique to Reaction: The New Right, Critical Theory, and International Relations

Looking across the globe, radical conservative parties, transnational movements, and ideas are influencing and even reshaping the landscape of international politics. From the United States to the European Union and beyond, populist and nationalist forces have coalesced into "international nationalist" movements, challenging established mainstream norms, practices, and institutions. This has led some to proclaim the emergence of an unpredictable and unsettling "right-wing international." These ideas and movements have garnered increasing attention within international political theory. Some researchers have questioned why, in an age demanding vigilance against such ideas, international relations (IR) theory remains largely devoid of content regarding these reactionary thoughts. Other researchers have begun to excavate the genealogies of marginalized or forgotten radical conservative international theories, tracing their contemporary expressions, influences, and implications. In light of contemporary events, this type of research is crucial; if international political theory aims to understand and respond to the challenges posed by the New Right ^[1], it must expand and deepen these related studies.

This article seeks to contribute to such research by bringing together two seemingly unlikely partners: critical theory and the New Right. At first glance, this combination appears at best an impractical fantasy and at worst a perversion of common sense. From its inception, critical international theory has basically been defined as the inheritor of the mantle of progressive politics. Inspired by Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, early "critical" thought was clearly demarcated from conservative realist approaches, as the latter failed to recognize the possibility of progressive change. Similarly, theories inspired by Jürgen Habermas sought to conceive of political communities transcending territorial or nation-state boundaries, while critiques of neoliberal economics and global governmentality sought to reveal global power structures and inequalities, along with potential sources of power that could resist them.

However, the intellectual resources and genealogies of critical theory are by no means the exclusive domain of progressive thinkers and movements. This article proposes a completely different, even disturbing possibility: the most effective appropriation of numerous critical ideas across contemporary Western circles comes neither from the liberal universities of the Atlantic world nor from the "progressive" movements of the political Left with which critical theory is traditionally aligned. On the contrary, they stem from today’s radical conservatism. In fact, as we intend to show, many perspectives and themes that have long been the cornerstones of critical social and international theory—from Gramscian hegemony to the Frankfurt School’s analysis of capitalist society and mass consumerism, to postmodernism—have been appropriated and mobilized by the New Right. Consequently, these critical theories have been subverted for explicitly non-progressive and often reactionary ends. These forms of thought developed outside of academia, weaving ideas from critical theory into new and mobilizing conservative ideologies, and attempting to combine this ideology with social forces that are playing an increasingly effective role in global politics.

The intent of this article is not to attribute responsibility for the emergence of New Right ideas to the perspective of critical theory in a direct manner or through indirect association. Rather, we seek to show how linking the New Right with critical theory helps us better understand the nature and character of its antagonism toward the liberal order in contemporary politics and international relations. This connection also reveals an important theoretical and political challenge: while today’s "critical" IR theory often seems marked by self-doubt regarding its own theoretical foundations and practical significance, the New Right rarely displays such hesitation. The New Right actively invokes critical theory themes to achieve reactionary goals, posing a direct challenge to the view that critical theory is inherently linked to progressive political ends. If critical theory—and international political theory in a broader sense—is to effectively respond to the intellectual and political challenges posed by today's New Right, it is essential to confront this theoretical and political strategy.

I. A Gramsci for the Right?

By "New Right," this article refers to the intellectual vanguard that has provided much of the ideological momentum for the resurgence of the radical right in Europe, the United States, and other regions since the end of the Cold War. This New Right takes many forms and manifestations across different countries. In Europe, its historical origins can generally be traced back to the French "Nouvelle Droite" established in 1968 by Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Guillaume Faye, and other right-wing military-intellectuals closely associated with the "Research and Study Group for European Civilization" (Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne, GRECE). The agenda of this right-wing organization was formed against a backdrop where the intellectual and cultural movements and economic crises of the time had profoundly shaken Western society, triggering multiple ideological realignments.

A key move marking the emergence of the French New Right was a strategic marriage with the critical legacy of Gramsci, aimed at developing what Venner called "Right-wing Gramscianism" at the time. This marked a major shift in strategy within the French radical right. Previously, the French radical right had been guided by the "integral nationalism" of Charles Maurras, the philosopher of Action Française. Although Maurras insisted on the importance of decisive and confrontational political engagement, many of the young people involved in founding the New Right in the late 1960s—many of whom had been activists of this type—became convinced that broad intellectual and cultural activity was the prerequisite for successful political action. Organizing around GRECE, they abandoned the far-right's path of extra-parliamentary radical action in favor of a long-term strategy that de Benoist termed "metapolitics" ^[2] (métapolitique). This strategy was based on the premise that all great political revolutions in modern European history were achieved through evolution in the intellectual and cultural spheres.

Although culture and its relationship to political power have always played an important role in the philosophy of the Counter-Enlightenment, de Benoist and his colleagues at GRECE believed that the post-war Right had seriously neglected this relationship. In its obsession with opposing communism, the Right had embraced American free-market dogmas and a consumerist culture of cheap entertainment and technological fetishism. In contrast, the French Nouvelle Droite conducted a broad reassessment and critique of modernity, including a measured questioning of capitalism. The appropriation of Gramscian intellectual resources provided the New Right with new strategic perspectives and facilitated its blurring of traditional distinctions between Left and Right. The goal was to counteract the eloquent power generated by the Left's use of Gramscian discourse while adding a certain revolutionary appeal and post-fascist intellectual credibility to radical right-wing positions.

The New Right has many manifestations, and different theorists have carried out the aforementioned appropriation in different ways. Overall, however, this appropriation expresses a common belief: that the intellectual and cultural movements of the 1960s had successfully politicized all spheres of human activity; thereafter, parliamentary debates and government policies would only confirm the results of the culture wars; and the egalitarian principles of the Left had already achieved hegemony in almost all civil society, state, and international institutions. In this context, the New Right concluded that the only viable strategy to challenge its opponents' "cultural power" was to turn the Left's ideological critique against the Left's own universalist categories and egalitarian common sense. The aim was to reshape public debate at a theoretical meta-level by re-articulating the ideas, concepts, and meanings people use to understand and define the world around them, and to provide an intellectual foundation for political movements capable of challenging the Left and the mainstream liberal order.

By the early 1980s, similar organizations across Europe, such as the Italian "Nuova Destra" and the German "Neue Rechte," had adopted similar methods, producing a significant transnational network of publications, publishing houses, research groups, conferences, front organizations, and online platforms, constituting what participants and observers now call the "European New Right." In the 1990s, de Benoist and his colleagues also became major contributors to Telos. This journal was an influential—albeit unorthodox—American flagship for Frankfurt School critical theory. In the view of its founding editor, Paul Piccone, this trans-Atlantic post-Cold War alliance demonstrated that traditional Left-Right categories had become obsolete in the face of an increasingly predatory neoliberal global governance regime. Piccone reflected and even successfully promoted the ideological repositioning of the New Right, claiming: "The French New Right—if it is still possible to place it anywhere on the right-wing spectrum—has redefined itself by absorbing 95% of standard New Left ideas. But, generally speaking, there is no longer anything that can be defined as 'Right-wing'."

Describing the New Right's intellectual strategy as a bridge transcending Left and Right is naive and highly misleading. This is because at the core of its Left-inspired goals is a systematic effort to disseminate right-wing ideas and visions typical of some of the most distinctively conservative figures in the history of Western political thought. It is not merely a matter of initiating new research, producing new editions, making new translations, or launching new commentaries to give a new generation of readers access to well-known, forgotten, or previously unpublished texts. It is also a conscious strategy of cultural hegemony ^[3] that seeks to shape the identity, collective self-understanding, and agenda of the European New Right by constructing its own intellectual history and genealogy. The New Right traces its lineage back to the counter-revolutionary tradition of writers such as Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and Louis de Bonald. However, most importantly, it seeks to inherit the legacy of 20th-century "Conservative Revolution" ^[4] thinkers, such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, and Julius Evola. As we shall see later, the goal is not to restore a golden age destroyed by the Industrial Revolution and the arrival of mass democracy, but to articulate new, anti-liberal ideological alternatives that seek to radicalize some of the most powerful dynamics of modernity to accommodate traditional communitarian and spiritual "values."

In the United States, these efforts to link renewed conservative ideas with specific social forces were closely tied to the historical development of the paleoconservative movement. In the mid-1980s, the intellectual historian and Schmitt scholar Paul Gottfried, together with historian Thomas Fleming, coined the term "paleoconservatism" in an attempt to revive the driving forces of the Old Right. Their aim was to counter the growing influence of neoconservatism as well as the neoliberal strains within conservatism—both of which were often confusingly identified as the "New Right" in the United States and Britain at the time. In the eyes of paleoconservatives, this mainstream conservatism was effectively a "neoliberal" version of conservatism that re-entrenched the power of the liberal order rather than providing a foundation for a genuine conservative restoration. In seeking to develop an "alternative Right," ^[5] they too turned to Gramsci.

Few thinkers explored these issues as deeply as the influential writer and columnist Sam Francis. Like the European New Right, Francis emphasized the importance of waging a cultural struggle against the prevailing liberal order. In his view, the problem for conservatives was that: "While we find much in the conservative tradition to teach us what we want to preserve and why we want to preserve it, we find almost nothing in conservative theory to provide us with the strategy and tactics to challenge the dominant authority. Instead, we must look to the Left to understand how a politically subordinate and culturally dispossessed majority of Americans can recover its rightful status as the dominant and creative core of American society." At roughly the same time that Gramscian intellectual resources were gaining prominence in international political theory, Francis suggested that if "the American cultural Right is to reclaim that culture from those who have usurped it, it will find the study of Gramsci's thought to be instructive."

Francis argued that conservatives had ceded control of cultural institutions, products, and power to liberal elites. Consequently, even when conservatives won elections, they were unable to exercise real political power. Citing Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, Francis insisted that real political power ultimately rests on the recognized compliance of the ruled, because the ruled and those who determine the distribution of existing goods—along with the institutions behind them that dictate how this distribution occurs and define the limits of permissible dissent in the process—are all grounded in shared values, perceptions, beliefs, and prejudices. Thus, within this framework, a class-based interpretation of history is not necessarily confined to the overt struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed; rather, it may reveal a process in which the ruling class successfully avoids confrontation by fostering a complex mixture of support, apathy, and compliance among the oppressed—what Gramsci termed "consent" or "contradictory consciousness." Therefore, "to challenge the dominance of any established authority, it is necessary to build a counter-cultural apparatus, a 'counter-hegemony' (or what the New Left called a 'counter-culture') that is independent of the dominant cultural machinery and capable of generating its own system of beliefs."

Despite his focus on cultural struggle, Francis maintained that socio-economic class remained a crucial component of political transformation. In fact, he argued that the experiences and failures of radicals within the New Left exposed the limitations of a purely cultural strategy detached from the social forces—specifically the working class—capable of successfully advancing such a strategy. In this view, a key weakness of the New Left lay in the fact that its counter-cultural politics clashed with a large portion of the working class, whom the New Left dismissed as conformist or blindly self-assured. Francis and his paleoconservative colleagues disagreed with this indictment. On the contrary, they believed that the mobilization of the working class, galvanized by economic insecurity and cultural resentment within the white industrial working class, was the potential catalyst for radical conservatives to challenge the liberal order. Their goal thus became to provide an analysis of liberal cultural power and its weaknesses, and to construct a cultural strategy—that is, a political identity and ideology—capable of mobilizing the aforementioned groups to become a counter-hegemonic force.

Over the past decade or so, this agenda has been advanced by a range of advocates of "alt-right" ideologies. They have gravitated toward various publishing houses and media platforms, such as Counter-Currents Publishing, North American New Right, American Renaissance, and other white nationalist actors who are similarly closely linked to counterparts in Europe. In the version of white nationalism advocated by Greg Johnson, the so-called "metapolitics" of the European New Right translates into two main activities in the American context: the first is education, namely "the articulation and propagation of forms of white nationalism applicable to the interests and viewpoints of all white constituencies. This includes not only theoretical work in the ivory tower but also artistic expression, topical cultural and political commentary, and all the media that disseminate them." The second activity aims to organize and develop "real-world communities that live according to our current vision and may become the seeds of a new order in the future." Currently, political organization is a systemic goal for the vast majority of the New Right, which, combined with the objective of training a new youth cadre, seeks to undertake what the Charlemagne Institute calls the "long march" through cultural, commercial, and governmental institutions. ^[6]

Section II. Conservatism and the New Class: A Critique of Neoliberalism—A Turning Point

Of course, the New Right's marriage with Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is highly selective. Although Gramsci critiqued the "economism" of the Second International, he still believed that the social bonds of class were ultimately more real than those of family, community, and religion. His interpretation of "consent" and "contradictory consciousness" was bound by a rationalist psychology and a revolutionary teleology that could only view worker discontent as the embryonic form of class consciousness—a consciousness Marx theorized as opposing an inhuman system of exploitation. The New Right values the question of class but avoids the question of class consciousness. Instead, it suggests we understand late modern capitalism as part of a new "managerial society." In such a society, the adversary is not an abstract logic of extraction driven by the market and bourgeois profit motives, but a deliberate mechanism of exploitation closely tied to the concrete driving forces of the so-called "New Class."

The roots of this New Class theory can be traced back to late 19th-century critiques of Marxism and later critiques of Soviet-style communism. In the mid-20th century, Bruno Rizzi and James Burnham launched more systematic critiques. Burnham argued that a "New Class" composed of technically skilled administrators had successfully gained power in government, industry, and media by exploiting a redistributionist ideology. He claimed this was not unique to Soviet Russia but was also a primary feature of fascist regimes and welfare-state democracies throughout Europe and North America. The new managerial state emerging from these experiments was "built neither upon a market economy nor upon socialist equality." Instead, it elevated a class of managers who had already captured the corporate economy into a class that now designed and provided state-mandated social services and dominated technological development. Progressive elites began to dominate the "technocratic state" and turned its expanded new powers toward combatting prejudice, providing social services and welfare, and penalizing violations of freedom of expression and lifestyle.

The New Right uses the term "New Class" in a similar fashion to refer to the burgeoning social stratum of experts—including corporate executives, university lecturers, lawyers, computer programmers, and bureaucrats—who occupy positions of economic and political power in the post-industrial "information" society. These elites control the mechanisms for centralizing mass organizations, and they have a vested interest in applying indeterminate but "professional" and "therapeutic" knowledge to solve social problems. The "War on Poverty" and progressive reforms implemented through bureaucratic regulation, as well as a "rights culture" where rights are increasingly determined by liberal experts and judges rather than public will, all embody this agenda and the way it empowers and rewards the new elites and their associated client groups. According to this account, the transition in the West from "New Deal"/social-democratic liberalism to neoliberalism since the mid-1970s should not be interpreted as a market-driven withdrawal of state apparatuses from society, but as an administrative move from expanding material rights toward behavioral control. Cuts in expensive welfare benefits were replaced by government commitments to cheaper, yet still generous, therapeutic and disciplinary programs. These programs maintained dominance and promoted the interests and expansion of the "managerial regime" and the "administrative state."

The Frankfurt School once addressed the oppressive contradictions of seemingly free capitalist societies in the 20th century; and as many pivotal New Right theorists admit, their critique of neoliberal managerialism overlaps with—and even draws inspiration from—those highly influential accounts of the Frankfurt School in several important respects. From the early 1940s to the late 1960s, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse wrote extensively on how capitalism narrowly avoided terminal crises of systemic legitimacy by co-opting modernist counter-cultures and transforming them into commodities. By analyzing how the emerging "culture industry" transformed the expression of individuality into a tool for the administrative creation of consumerism, they sought to explain how mass media altered the socialization processes previously conducted within the family and community, thereby producing individuals susceptible to manipulation by advertising and bureaucracies. In this one-dimensional, totally administered society, the space possessed by critical forces seemed increasingly small, and the historical mission of the proletariat to lead modernity toward liberation seemed increasingly implausible. In these accounts, while critical theory retained its faith in the power of the negative and its resistance to liberal capitalism, this resistance lacked a convincing historical process or agent of change.

At the time, many conservatives and Cold War liberals shared the sociological analysis underpinning this pessimistic diagnosis. Although these thinkers did not, in principle, reject the continued dominance of capitalism, they feared that consumerism and the successful commodification of the counterculture would lead to the internalization of subversive tendencies into the normative structure of the liberal capitalist system. This "hedonistic" or "decadent" culture was then eroding traditional values and solidarities, as well as the bourgeois worldview—the latter of which had historically guided liberal democratic societies to distinguish liberty from license and provided these societies with a stoic resignation ^[7] in the face of inevitable racial and economic inequalities. Few captured these misgivings better than Daniel Bell. In his neoconservative analysis of the "cultural contradictions of capitalism," Bell wrote:

(The trajectory of contemporary society has) come to be dominated by a modernist principle which subverts bourgeois life, and the middle-class lifestyle by a hedonism which undercuts the Protestant ethic that provided the moral foundation for society. The cultural contradictions of capitalism consist of the interplay between: the modernist mode developed by serious artists; the institutionalization by the "cultural mass" of those uncreative cultural forms; and the hedonistic lifestyle promoted by the commercial marketing system. Modernism has become exhausted and is no longer threatening. Hedonism satires it by mimicking its tedium. But the social order lacks either a culture for the symbolic expression of any vitality or a moral impulse with motivating or constraining power. What, then, can hold society together?

For Western neoconservatives and other mainstream conservative forces, this dilemma necessitated the mobilization of state apparatuses to introduce proactive, often punitive, public policies and welfare reforms designed to regenerate the normative consensus and individual "discipline" deemed necessary to stabilize liberal capitalist democracy. By contrast, New Right intellectuals consistently opposed such strategies, viewing them as a deceptive ruse intended to legitimize the managerial state ^[8] among those with conservative inclinations. In their view, this strategy was profoundly hypocritical: it lamented the erosion of national traditions and culture while ignoring the devastating role of economic neoliberal globalization in that very process of erosion. As Gottfried argued, neoconservatism exacerbated the "one-dimensionality" ^[9] of late capitalist society because it conceptualized values and identities as plastic, market-like commodities that could be bought and exchanged at will to satisfy the needs of the system: "This provides a mode of social control in which subjects can be manipulated in exchange for access to certain comforts and services." Francis also believed that the neoconservative appeal to the erstwhile "virtues" belonging to republicans or bourgeois liberal citizens was profoundly naive, fundamentally underestimating the power of the managerial regime to implement cultural integration, commodification, and social control. He argued: "Technology and its organizational application not only seduce us with 'luxuries'—and what we complacently call today a 'high standard of living'—but offer to those who know how to manipulate them a degree of power unknown to even the most arbitrary tyrants of the past."

Consequently, the challenge facing the New Right became finding a new path beyond both the neoconservative Right (which was nothing more than liberal managerialism in disguise) and the failures of the New Left. From the perspective of the New Right, the "critical" theory of the New Left was analytically insightful but suffered from the defects of being hopelessly abstract, elitist, and ineffective. Furthermore, it actually bolstered the power of the managerial state rather than challenging it. Having failed to secure the support of labor unions and the formal organizations of the Old Left, the counterculture movements of the 1960s were unable to generate their own discipline or survive independently outside the society they rejected. As a subsequent reaction, the new transnational social movements that emerged from the frustrated democratic waves of the 1970s largely rejected party politics and formal, organized systems of representation. Instead, they reoriented their activities toward the "global stage" and pursued a postmodern, multicultural discourse of individual liberation—driven by a deep-seated distrust of all political parties and state institutions. This new, multicultural "politics of recognition" demanded the public affirmation of individual and group differences—not as pathological deviations to be grudgingly tolerated by the majority, but as valuable ways of leading individual and collective lives.

In the eyes of its advocates, this turn toward identity politics represented a struggle for self-determination and human dignity, aimed at confronting the hypocritical universalism of the establishment and the dominant cultural hegemony of heterosexual and Anglo-Saxon whites. For the New Right, however, engaging in this was to dig one's own grave, what Gottfried called "theocratic politics in a new key." Ironically, identity politics reinforced rather than resisted liberal managerialism. Gottfried argued: "Identity as recognition is granted, which means (here the multiculturalists are politically correct) granted by those in power or those who wish to seize power... [Identity] has a relational and adversarial content, the validity of which depends on those who grant political recognition." Because identity is something granted or denied based on the needs and desires of existing political institutions, it becomes another tool used selectively by managerial elites to empower minority groups at the expense of the established majority culture: "Multiculturalists talk constantly about tolerance, but not everyone can be granted the same right of expression. Those granted victim status by virtue of group affiliation have a prior right to self-identification, while those identified as oppressors, such as Southern whites in the United States, have no right to feel pride in a shared past."

The New Right views the deliberative democracy theory of the second-generation Critical Theorists as a key expression of the aforementioned form of liberal power. These theorists reformulated Critical Theory, moving it away from what was seen as the dead end of negated agency toward universal communicative rationality. For example, Habermas typically argued: "[At the level of global governance] democratic procedures no longer derive their legitimizing force merely from—or even primarily from—political participation and the expression of collective political will, but from the universal accessibility of deliberative processes, the structure of which is based on the expectation of rationally motivated results." For New Right critics, there is no question as to what kind of people—which class—and what kind of values will dominate what constitutes a "rationally motivated result," nor how this will be determined. They see in this formulation more than just a philosophical argument; they see a process in which critical intellectuals from the post-1968 generation are co-opted into the liberal capitalist system, becoming accomplices (or favored critics) of the very system they once proposed to overthrow. Ultimately, these theorists end up providing nothing more than ineffective critiques. These ineffective critiques offer only the appearance of resistance without the slightest chance of fundamentally challenging the liberal system at a philosophical or practical level—what Piccone called "artificial negativity." Critique becomes ineffective; it legitimizes the power structure by providing a semblance of catastrophe, or it degenerates into an individualistic, moralistic, and ephemeral politics of outrage. As Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier noted in The French New Right in the Year 2000:

Critical thought is unable to renew itself; it lacks strength, is disillusioned by the failure of its goals, and has slowly transformed itself into a form of thought-police whose purpose is to expel all those who deviate in any way from the current mainstream ideological dogmas. Erstwhile revolutionaries have rallied around the status quo, while inheriting from their past lives a penchant for purges and anathemas. This new form of betrayal relies on the tyranny of media-shaped public opinion and manifests as a hysterical zeal for purification, a debilitating sentimentality, or selective righteous indignation... The reduction of politics to the rational management of increasingly problematic growth precludes the possibility of radically changing society, or even discussing the ultimate goals of collective action. Democratic debate finally finds itself rendered meaningless. People no longer discuss, they merely condemn...

In this picture, critique has not "run out of steam," as Bruno Latour put it. From the New Right's perspective, the dissipation of critical energy is accompanied by the co-option of critical theorists, who gain a modicum of power and a high degree of comfort (both psychological and material) in the process. As impractical theorists, so-called adversarial artists, or irrelevant "radical" academic philosophers, these self-proclaimed "critics" embrace pure negative values or the benefits of "failure," while actually becoming integral components of New Class hegemony, yet increasingly removed from actual political power and alienated from the majority of the non-elite population (despite their manifestos to the contrary). As Faye declared: "The critical Left is neither reformist, nor revolutionary, nor conservative: it is a means of strengthening the system... It presents itself as anti-system, yet it is the system. It presents itself as the oppressed, yet it is currently carrying out the oppression."

In short, the New Right shares many features with the Frankfurt School’s critique of late modern liberalism, but the New Right views the Frankfurt School as an insidious form of power politics that cultivates compliance and dependency through constant abstraction and socio-cultural integration. However, within the conceptual framework constructed by Adorno, Marcuse, and others to understand these developments, the New Right also sees the ambivalent yet typical inability of Leftist intellectuals to appreciate the diversity of working-class culture and to provide resources for common dignity, solidarity, and resistance. The New Right charges that over the past 50 years, Critical Theory has slowly transformed from an ally of the largely proletarian and social non-elite strata into a condescending critic. Although Critical Theory retains its radical self-image, it has essentially evolved into a small but valuable tool for liberal managerialism and the globalizing demands and aspirations of its supporters. The New Right fully exploits both aspects of this diagnosis to strengthen its ideological and strategic position in the broader counter-hegemonic struggle against contemporary liberal dominance.

III. Postmodern Possibilities / Postmodern Populism

Like Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, the appropriation of postmodernism by conservatism seems, on the surface, to meet with great resistance—and it is certainly not difficult to find a range of mainstream conservatives who have been denouncing the alleged evils of postmodernism. However, the New Right has not always maintained a hostile stance toward the postmodern. On the contrary, it combines critique with appropriation, seeking a seemingly contradictory reassessment and reorientation of postmodern perspectives, turning them toward the reactionary.

On one hand, the New Right agrees with left-wing critics such as Fredric Jameson that certain strands of postmodernism are best understood as part of the "cultural logic of late capitalism." The New Right claims that far from providing a critique of capitalist society, postmodernism merely celebrates and supports the requirements of global capital, the culture industry, and its associated political elites. However, the New Right also finds much of value in postmodern perspectives. As one of its leading theorists notes, the dominant postmodern position held by figures such as Jean-François Lyotard is characterized by an ironic, fatalistic, and pluralistic distrust of meta-narratives, as well as skepticism toward liberal morality and "Enlightenment reason"—a stance shared by the New Right. In their view, what makes our era "post"-modern is precisely the fact that, despite having lost all metaphysical credibility, the Enlightenment narrative remains central to the reproduction of the contemporary liberal order: "It exists by dint of force and propaganda. But in the realms of thought, poetry, music, art, or literature, this meta-narrative produces no meaning and inspires nothing. For 100 or 150 years, it has not moved a single great soul."

For the New Right, this skepticism toward the Enlightenment does not open up vast new prospects for political tolerance or the inclusion of and engagement with difference. On the contrary, the "provincializing" of the European Enlightenment's false universalism provides an opportunity to justifiably restore the fundamental and unique historical identity of the West. This identity is not liberal rationality, but rather the "return of the unsettling Dionysian spirit, irrationality, sensuality, and chaos in the human soul revealed by Georges Bataille or Roger Caillois ^[10]; it opens up the possibility for reviving myths and a tragic, agonistic worldview that is the origin of Western civilization and its most outstanding cultural achievements—what Spengler called the 'Faustian spirit' ^[11]." As Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier emphasize, the affirmation of the mystical and transcendental-emotional aspects of Western culture is not a matter of overcoming the crisis of modernity by returning to the past, but of restoring "certain pre-modern values" within a "decisively postmodern dimension." In their view, "only at the cost of such a radical reconstruction can anomie and contemporary nihilism be exorcised."

In this context, the end of the Enlightenment project heralded by postmodernism is transformed by New Right intellectuals into an opportunity to reconstruct organic populism. This reconstruction seeks to re-articulate a racial politics—discredited by its associations with eugenics and historical fascism—through the less objectionable language of cultural relativism. This move is conceptually achieved through a theory of "identitarianism" regarding individual and collective self-determination, which frames identity as a process of continuous becoming constrained by historical experience and material conditions. Within this framework, identity is "not fixed forever; on the contrary, it allows one to change constantly without abandoning the self"—that is, without losing the sense of ontological security that comes from being a member of a unique community of destiny.

Consequently, identitarianism affirms the value and importance of recognizing differences between cultures, races, ethnicities, and civilizations—and the political processes and ideological mechanisms that maintain a healthy degree of segregation and distance between them. As de Benoist argues, "Groups and individuals alike need to face a 'significant other'." This is what the New Right calls "differentialism" or the "right to difference." While differentialism claims there are no objective criteria to determine a hierarchy of cultures, races, or ethnic groups, it positions itself as a racial-political response to the threats posed by liberal multiculturalism and ethnic or racial miscegenation. As L. Tudor emphasized in a survey: "When total openness and mixing occur, people do not just change in the usual sense; they lose themselves or merge completely with another people, leading to the erasure of their identity."

To be sure, this conflation of Carl Schmitt and Joseph Gobineau with post-structuralist clichés about the dispossession of alternative subjectivities would not satisfy many sociologists in professional academic circles. However, the identitarians have their own quasi-academic channels and alternative epistemic communities through which they can challenge the "regimes of truth" of the New Class ^[12] and disseminate their own views. In this sense, as Michael O'Meara is happy to admit, the New Right's revolutionary conservatism indeed unfolds within the cultural horizon of postmodernism:

Accepting the inherent inconsistency of the world and the relativity of its different value orders does not require the belittling or denigration of European heritage. From an identitarian perspective, the postmodern onslaught constitutes a powerful defense of the particularity of tradition and the fact that we are who we are only because we have made certain decisions to identify with and defend our specific system of truth. The constructive (i.e., artificial or cultural) character of historical narratives, their diversity, and their lack of closure are reasons for commitment, not despair, because the cultural "truth" arising from one's self-identity is necessarily more meaningful than those that do not. The art of survival in history... thus requires a people to guard—and if necessary, even intolerantly defend—its own myths, beliefs, ways of life, languages, institutions, and, most importantly, its genetic heritage, for only these can make it what it is and what it can become.

According to New Right thinkers, the spatiotemporal dislocations brought by globalization and the catastrophic consequences for populations and the environment make the renewal of tradition and the revival of local communities imperative. As de Benoist and Champetier point out: "Tradition facilitates a sense of ritual in social interaction and celebration, instills an awareness of life cycles, and provides temporal markers. By emphasizing the rhythmic passage of years and seasons, the great moments of life, and the various stages of the year, tradition nourishes the symbolic imagination and creates a social bond. These traditions must never be frozen in time, but must always remain in a state of renewal." Borrowing the environmentalist language of "indigenous sovereignty" from the Left, the New Right insists on the close link between historical heritage, collective memory, and spiritual roots in ancestral lands, opposing the utopian vision of cosmopolitan elites who have no concrete connection to the earth. In their view, protecting ecosystems is inseparable from territorial sovereignty and the protection of "indigenous" whites. For theorists of the Nouvelle Droite (French New Right), just as for Aleksandr Dugin in Russia or Johnson and his followers in the "American Renaissance," the challenges of the 21st century call for a new synthesis of tradition and technology to achieve a decisive break with modern egalitarianism and thus reconstruct the relationship between the local and the global. Guillaume Faye calls his own interpretation of this synthesis "archeofuturism":

Imagine a future society that combines technological progress with a return to traditional answers—answers that can be traced back to the mists of time. This may be the true face of postmodernity... Can we imagine and foresee a scenario where the majority of people return to living in traditional societies with low energy consumption and greater social stability and happiness, while (in the context of globalization) a minority continues to live according to the techno-industrial model? Will there be two parallel worlds in the future, one a neo-medieval world and the other a world of super-science? Who would live in these two worlds respectively, and in what numbers? All bold and creative thought must think the unthinkable. I believe that archeofuturism—the explosive intersection of opposites—is the key to the future, simply because the paradigm of modernity is no longer viable on a global scale.

The New Right finds the possibility of realizing its vision of an alternative world order within the postmodern globalization logic of liberal managerialism itself. The hedonistic ethics, relativistic values, and therapeutic social practices of managerial liberalism tend to fragment society into diverse groups, each with its own agenda, identity, and interests, suppressing collective action and weakening the ability of the progressive state to fulfill its promises by appealing to collective solidarity, national identity, and unity. Meanwhile, and perhaps more importantly, liberal managerialism ruthlessly undermines and attacks the economic and social standing of those unable or unwilling to adopt or adapt to the rules of globalization. These are the "left behinds" who cling to the local and view immigration or cultural cosmopolitanism as a threat. They hold fast to tradition and their inherited communities and prejudices, even as these are eroded by globalization; they are disparaged as backward, bigoted, or dependent, requiring "reskilling" (if they are lucky) by liberal elites—the patronizing agents of their increasing economic distress who ignore and devalue their sense of social and cultural dislocation or alienation.

Having learned the historical lesson from the Frankfurt School's vain search for a new subject of history after abandoning the working class, the New Right believes (and hopes) that the combination of economic disorder, cultural resentment, and mythical mobilization provides an opportunity to turn the tide. For its advocates, the current moment is particularly suited for such mobilization. Today, the economic sectors affected by globalization and population movement are not just declining industries, but also once-protected "New Class" professional groups threatened by offshoring and automation, while intergenerational inequality provides an opportunity to attract a youth cadre. At the same time, the decline of US geopolitics weakens managerial globalism while strengthening the forces of "multipolarity" and particularist identities.

In this context, New Right thought seeks to create a class, racial, or group self-consciousness among its objects of analysis, thereby helping to mobilize "marginalized" groups as a self-aware driving force. By linking the material and cultural contradictions of capitalism in this way to the historical and concrete agency of the New Class managerial elite, New Right discourse provides a focal point for confrontation (a recognizable Schmittian enemy), striving to create an agency capable of overthrowing the system. Here, the admonition to reclaim pre-modern insights into the power of myth plays an important role, and New Right theorists see themselves as the vanguard of these national and transnational movements. For those following in the footsteps of Sam Francis, the primary ideological goal is to destroy the old American "myth" of abstract universalist propositions ("human rights") and replace it with a "new myth of the nation as a unique order of history and culture, demanding loyalty, solidarity, and discipline, and excluding those who do not or cannot integrate into its norms and interests."

This strategy aims to break the reliance of the American middle class on the cultural power of the ruling elite, thereby enabling it to formulate goals and adopt tactics rather than simply imitating and assisting in reproducing the goals and tactics of the managerial regime. As [Samuel] Francis explained in 1991, within this ideological framework, "America First" is not merely a battle cry against the de-racialized follies of liberal internationalism; it represents a counter-hegemonic myth through which resistance against the system can be incited and transformed into a new cultural hegemony: "It should inform the cultural life of the entire nation and become the basis of our cultural and social identity as much as our political and national policy. . . Otherwise, America will be no more secure, no more prosperous, and no more 'first' than it is today under the tutelage of its self-serving and self-appointed globalist masters."

IV. Conclusion

The New Right is often portrayed as an anti-intellectual movement—a populist, nativist regression back to a darker, more unrefined age of "ignorance." While this view contains elements of truth, it clearly underestimates the intellectual resources of the New Right and the challenges they pose. As we have sought to demonstrate, significant portions of these movements are not merely intermittent reactions to momentary economic or social chaos, nor are they the products of fleeting, charismatic leaders. The New Right possesses a long and complex theoretical pedigree that demands critical scrutiny. Perhaps ironically, one area where this scrutiny can begin is by examining how certain segments of conservative ideology have been restructured using key themes typically associated with critical international political theory. Drawing strategic ideas from Gramsci, lessons from the successes and failures of the Frankfurt School, and selecting themes from postmodernism, the New Right attempts to conduct a radical critique of the contemporary global order and provide an intellectual and ideological foundation for counter-hegemonic movements aimed at resisting and opposing that order.

The New Right promises to transcend conservative nostalgia or neoliberal globalism through a postmodern synthesis of "aesthetic myth-making," "supra-scientific futurism," and "reconstructed ethno-politics"—an ambition that is in many ways whimsical. However, the view that treats the New Right rhetoric examined in this article merely as an extension of historical fascism is a temptation we should resist. The first wave of fascist movements that swept Europe in the 1920s and 1930s was overtly committed to militarism, imperial conquest, and violent extra-parliamentary and anti-parliamentary activity; its mode of operation is fundamentally different from the contemporary New Right. The metapolitics of New Right theorists also distinguishes their vision and activities from the delusional conspiracy theories of QAnon and other kindred groups—the types of groups that attacked the U.S. Capitol in January 2021. Yet, by linking the cultural and material contradictions of late modern capitalism to the specific driving forces of the New Class and the groups it represents, the New Right’s critique of globalization does indeed place them in close alignment with this brand of violent conspiratorial politics. Although managerialism is not itself a conspiracy theory, it can easily provide refuge for one.

Also clearly related to the fascist "playbook" is the use of revolutionary rhetoric in specific contexts. Through such rhetoric, the New Right can articulate its critiques to mobilize supporters. While Marxist revolutionary thought identifies the driver of collective action as rational class consciousness (which is clearly linked to universalist claims about the direction of historical development), the New Right advocates for a departure from universalist norms, which easily evokes (and strategically cultivates) violent sentiments and tactics that lead to social division. The goal is to render centrist parties and reformist positions irrelevant by radicalizing the terms of public debate and polarizing the electorate around various binary oppositions: the proponents of globalization versus those seeking to sabotage it; "ordinary" voters wishing to leave the EU versus arrogant metropolitan elites wishing to remain; and those wishing to preserve traditional communities and their primordial sources versus those wishing to abolish these established arrangements. This strategy is simple, but it has proven so effective over the past decade that some mainstream academic research on contemporary right-wing populism has internalized and reproduced these binary oppositions within its own analytical frameworks.

In a 1967 lecture to students in Vienna, [Theodor] Adorno reflected on the electoral victory that the National Democratic Party of Germany had just achieved, warning against allowing right-wing radicalism to return only twenty years after the end of the Second World War. Adorno attributed this danger to the growing disappointment among the youth regarding unfulfilled liberation ideals and the democratic deficit under an increasingly technocratic mechanism of government operations. Addressing those who hoped the European Economic Community and other forms of transnational integration would once and for all expose the obsolescence of nationalism, Adorno reiterated Nietzsche’s warning that nationalist politics become particularly aggressive when the nation-state faces its own impotence: "Usually, it is precisely when the objective situation has stripped beliefs and ideologies of their substantive content that they take on demonic and truly destructive characteristics." Adorno harbored no illusions that the leaders of a resurgent far-right could have a place in managing Europe’s changing political order. Holding onto the hope that the public would distance itself from these right-wing groups and movements, the only thing one could do was ruthlessly expose the deceptive character and destructive consequences of right-wing radicalism.

In retrospect, Adorno’s strategy was very effective at the time—and as we hope to show in this article, it remains very important today. However, today's radical right has completely changed. It has fortified its arsenal of "critical" theory and rhetoric and adapted its methods to take full advantage of unprecedentedly broad new communication technologies to spread its message; it has also fostered an alternative reality that allows the radical right's message to appeal to large populations in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. By reading the New Right through its appropriation of key themes in critical theory, we can discover that—contrary to what is often mentioned in the media and mainstream foreign policy literature—the ambition of this anti-globalization politics is not merely to return to an idealized picture of 19th-century nationalism. What the radical right wants most is to seize control of globalization and establish an alternative order. In this order, capitalism flourishes but is rooted in ideas of a shared civilizational heritage and myths regarding the primordial sources of inherited communities and their traditions; in this order, the West is redefined to counter the cultural and demographic "threats" of Global Islam and the Global South.

This situation urgently calls for "critical" research in every sense of the term. However, at the very moment when reactionary theorists are having a major impact through their mobilization of its core themes, critical international theory seems increasingly paralyzed by self-doubt and an apparent lack of ability to relate itself to the broader political urgencies of the 21st century. As one international relations scholar recently pointed out, there is a lamentable and growing disconnect within this literature between the "explanatory-diagnostic" aspect of critical theory and its "predictive-utopian" aspect. Today, one increasingly wonders if the dialectic of enlightenment—the great legacy of the Frankfurt School—has already revealed its own negation; whether its still-visible Marxist roots have led to a Gramscian politics that is out of step with an increasingly postmodern world; or whether postmodernism itself is merely an exhausted, diffuse, and increasingly hollow perspective that survives not so much on its own merits as due to the lack of any clearly more persuasive "critical" alternative.

Theoretically, each of these views possesses a certain degree of plausibility, and they are matched by a sociological insight: that as a historical vision always in search of an agent of action, critical international theory has found it increasingly impossible to find such an agent. The intellectual vanguard, the working class, social movements—not to mention the more speculative hopes placed in a rising, progressive global "multitude"—all seem to have failed to undertake their transformative mission, despite the decades of effort by their self-appointed theoretical magicians. At most, we can say that various critical theories may have played a role in specific political struggles—issues of gender, race, and the environment being perhaps the most active among them, which often draw on theoretical inspirations outside the scope of this article. However, within various contemporary critical international theories, there also seems to be a form of self-doubt, a worry about whether it can truly produce "worlding" effects. To return again to [Bruno] Latour's frequently cited phrase: it is difficult to avoid the impression that critique has "run out of steam."

By contrast, the New Right's appropriation of critical theory themes has not yet led to doubt, paralysis, or exhaustion. On the contrary: theories assumed to be "critical" have been appropriated and turned toward radical conservative, or even reactionary, ends. This situation presents serious problems and challenges for critical international theory. As Nicholas Michelsen recently pointed out, this indicates that, contrary to common assumptions, "critical" theoretical tools are not necessarily linked to "emancipatory" or more normative positions and goals. Furthermore, if critique has indeed "run out of steam," how should it establish a connection with those theoretical perspectives and movements that not only reject the skepticism of critical theory but view it as a sign of weakness and decadence—a target to be attacked rather than a welcome form of skepticism? We cannot provide substantive answers to these complex questions within the limited space of this article. However, these are questions that scholars of critical international theory and others can no longer avoid, and we hope the reconstructive interpretation presented in this study helps to better understand the nature of the challenges ahead.

(About the Authors: Authors: Jean-François Drolet, School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London; Michael C. Williams, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa, Canada; Translator: Xie Laihui, School of International Politics and Economics, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; National Institute of International Strategy, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASS) ) Web Editor: Tong Xin Source: Foreign Theoretical Trends, 2023, Issue 4. Originally published in the Journal of International Political Theory, 2022, Vol. 18, No. 1.