Change Everything No 81: Understanding the thinking of the Far Right

'Post-liberalism replaces the liberal search for consensus with confrontation and conflict'

© Natalie Bennett (Gel plate print)

Understanding the thinking of the Far Right

It is easy to dismiss the many Far Right voices we are hearing in UK politics, and around the world, as mere reciters of hate, recyclers of old racist tropes, misogynist stereotypes and religion-based repression. But there is a whole ecosystem of thought, of philosophy, of dialogue that largely circulates out of the general public gaze, which provides the foundation for the retail politics of significant political forces. In Against Post-Liberalism: Why ‘Family Faith and Flag’ is a Dead End for the Left, Paul Kelly sets out an account - not a definitive account but certainly a useful one - of the main names associated with this discourse and the origins and directions of their thinking.

That’s not his main aim. The overall intention, as the title suggests, is to take on forces that seek to remain economically progressive while embracing social conservatism and offer a revamped liberalism as an alternative. But it works as a useful exploration of what he identifies as opposition. (You can listen to the author talking about the text on the New Books Network.)

For him, post-liberalism is a negative ideology, “one that aspires not just to be an alternative to liberalism but to achieve its annihilation”. This is something he associates with JD Vance and “includes academics such as [Patrick] Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, as well as commentators such as Sohrab Ahmari, Chad Pecknold, and the political organiser Gladden Pappin, who have brought otherwise fringe debates about ‘integralism’ from the margins of Catholic Church politics and theology and US Catholic social media sites to the centre of the struggle for the soul of conservatism in the United States and to the centre of the policy agenda of the Trump presidency.” (pp. 102)

So what’s integralism? On Kelly’s account it “goes back to Late Antique and early medieval debates about the Christianisation of natural law and the Gelasian symbolism of the two swords of temporal and spiritual authority, or even to St Auginstine’s distinction between the two cities in his City of God Against the Pagans, and to the vexed question of the relationship between political and divine authority… after the Reformation and the slow emergence of political pluralism from the 17^th century onwards, that classical synthesis came under assault – most especially under the modern sovereignty articiulated by Hobbes and Bodin, both of whom rejected Pope Gelasisus I’s doctrine of the balance of two swords.” (p. 106)

“(Traditionalist) Catholicism is a clear candidate for an alternative political theology, as it denies the fundamental premise of popular sovereignty in politics and episemolgy. Its claims are clear and countercultural. The church is the deposit of an unchanging set of dogmas, which are true independent of their popular recognition and which do not fundamentally change across time, although they can undergo renewals.” (p. 111)

You can see this thinking in the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025, and the politics of Viktor Orban. Such thinkers reject the US constitution because it gave rise to liberal rights such as Roe and Obergefell… the division between the domain of the private and the public, and the dominance of liberal reason.

“What is most striking about Deneen and [Matt] Goodwin [yes, of Gorton and Denton fame] is that they emphasise the revolutionary nature of the post-liberal project… analogous to Leninism, who see the crisis of ideology as a reflection of the more fundamental crisis in the material conditions of early 21^st-century capitalism – something that has become increasingly evident in their thought. … Both Deneen and Goodwinwho deliberately channel ideas of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci into their political practices. They recognise how metropolitan liberalism has come to dominate the political, social and economic institutions of contemporary society through its function as a hegemonic discourse. The overthrow of the liberal hegemonic discourse requires a counter-hegemony to displace it, which is achieved by taking control of the dominant institutions of the political, social and economic culture of a society.” (p. 19)

“National populists tell a story about liberalism that differs from the one liberals tell about themselves: it is a critique designed to show that the dominant discourses of the present are not what they seem and have a darker side, as forms of domination and deceptionism… do not explicitly cite Foucault or Nietzsche, and many whould be shocked to be associated with the sort of project these two developed … but it is a strategy they employ… The point … is to show that all liberalism, and especially its egalitarian social democratic variant, far from being a strategy for emancipation and progess, is a form of elite domination that subjugates ordinary people – the majority of society. And it does this not by refuting liberalism’s validity but by rubbishing liberalism: this is the strategy of geanealogy.” (p. 22-23)

This is very much an ideology grounded and developed in the US, but there is a strong political strand in the UK that embraces it, the very opposite of one side of British conservatism that has been deeeply wary of, even hostile to, the US. A substantial thread of the UK Right desires, as a Guardian writer recently put it, “full ideological colonisation”.

It’s not that they are wrong about everything. This reflects what I often say myself about the loading down of a generation with student debt (albeit my answer is to cut the debt not in any way discourage the education). Take Danny Kruger, once a Tory, now Reform MP.

“Like Deneen, Kruger argues that the promise of university is access to a new elite class, but that is a false promise: echoing Goodhart, Kruger suggests that the graduate wage premium is diminishing and many who fall for the promise are rewarded only with debt, high cost of living in scarce accommodation in university towns and cities, and perhaps most importantly, separation from the ties of home, family and neighbourhood… This state of affairs further diminishes the ‘social capital’ that sustains the associations and organisations that hold together communities and enrich schools”. (p. 37)

There’s some I would agree with too in the communitarianism to be found in many of these thinkers.

“Our personality – and especially our moral personality and political citizenship – is a social and communal achievement. It always arises in the context of institutions, practices and relationship. The turn to the common good is communitarian, notwithstanding [Maurice] Glasman’s claim that his Blue Labour is not communitarian… The problem with liberalism is its individualism – in that individualism either fails because it is vacuous and cannot create complex social and political obligations or presupposes a background culture from which choices of value and principle must be made – in which case liberalism is not morally and politically fundamental. In place of the idea of the social contract, the post-liberals turn to the idea of the covenant. Pabst and Milbank use the term, as does Glasman and… so do Kruger and Hazony, two post-liberals who seek to resurrect conservatism.” (p. 54)

While associated often with traditionally conservative thinkers, there’s much too to agree on with regard to how humans are brought into being.

Drawing on Edmund Burke “as a major critic of social contract theory. He sets out to subvert and undermine its rationalism by recasting it as a way of understanding intergenerational obligations. … a conception of society as made up of a web of associations, relationships and small communities, out of which the broader political fabric of the nation is woven…. He sees family, school, workplace, village, college, profession, parish, county, town, and regiment as the ‘little platoons’ from which identity, obligation and values emerge. The ‘trustee’ model of the citizen and of political society has been a staple of conservative thought ever since”…. Taken up by then post-liberal heirs of the Big Society trend, both on the left and on the right. This is especially clear in the work of Maurice Glausman… makes much of the way in which the history of the British Labour movement grew precisely out of this conception of social order, where the Labour Party depended upon cooperatives, labour unions, various religions and church movements, both Roman Catholic (with Cardinal Manning) and Methodist, and intellectual movements like the Fabian Society.” (pp. 55-56)

Yet the views on the family are scarily traditionalist. And as to who bears the most “hardship and sacrifice”, well it is not hard to know the gender division of labour here:

Hazony’s image of the family … is not one of romantic self-expression but a community of obligation to those gone before and those yet to come, echoing Burke’s intergenerational covenant. Hazony emphasises the ‘hardship and sacrifice’ of sustaining marital relationships: marriage partners are not supposed to be happy, to find pleasure in each other or to enjoy themselves… intended to bolster opposition to liberalism by presenting a theory of the family that connects with religious and scriptural traditions but does not rely on the simple assertion of Bible or church teachings.” (p. 63)

This is a philosophy very focused on paid work. And scornful of benefits - something we hear all too often from Labour figures in the UK. (It doesn’t cope at all with the idea of universal basic income.)

Kelly, talking about the UK Labour MP John Cruddas, says “he saw the danger of an exclusive pursuit of welfare squeezing out other aspects of the moral economy of the Labour movement. His fear is that the strong utilitarian strand of Fabianism dominates the emancipatory agenda of social democracy through a narrow focus on redistribution and transfer parments – an approach strongly advocated by Gordon Brown and younger cabinet ministers with Oxford degrees in PPE who had been raised on a version of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. What is essentially a tool for social transformation became an end in itself: but, as communitarians have been quick to point out, this rapidly instrumentalises people, making them appear as benefit claims and recipients rather than independent persons with a dignity and identity shaped by work, community and place.” (p. 70 )

Donald Trump is not (only) ignoring international law because he thinks might is right. For many of these thinkers, “international law” is not a reality or a meaingful term.

“Hazony’s conception of the nation sits comfortably with libertarian views of the rights of private property and the restriction of political action in the economic realm, and would fit comfortably with Nozick’s model of the night-watchman state. A further implication of Hazony’s account of the political community … is the claim that there is a plurality of states in the providential order and there is no political authority beyond the state that can command obedience or be a source of universal or cosmopolitan law.” (p. 89

Which leads of course to Brexit.

“Pabst and Milbank are certainly Blue Labour critics of New Labour’s flirtation with globalisation and neoliberal political economy, and as such are hostile to much of the EU project. Yet, as ‘Catholic’ common-good communitarians, they are also suspicious of the treatment of the nation state as the sole manifestation of the political order: this would be a simplistic and modernist concession to Hobbesian secularism.” (p. 81)

The blessedly short book also covers the rise – and fall — of Carl Schmitt, whose reactionary thinking is linked to Nazism, with many of his key works written during the Weimar Republic.

“The fundamental problem with liberalism is that it subordinates the claims of the political order to economic interest and advantage, because it has no conception of order other than the constantly changing aggregate of economic interests of the individual…. The problem of nihilism, the idea of a world without meaning or values… where Heidigger seeks to confront the challenge of nihilism with an existential philosophy, Schmitt sees it as a political problem of order. The challenge, for both, is that the liberation of individual consciousness in Enlightenment philosophy dispenses with all the constraints or obligations that cannot be justified to this isolated intellect… The priority of the individual unleashes a world in which anarchy becomes the norm.” (p. 96)

A claim for authoritarianism being essential is the response.

“Schmitt, like many of the reactionaries – de Maistre, Donoso Cortez, de Bonald – whom he celebrates in Political Theology , takes a dim view of individual rationality and motivation, and therefore has a strong commitment to authority and coerced order. As in his fellow reactionaries, in him, too, this set of prejudices can be derived from idea of original sin; but we don’t need that theological filiation, as we can find accounts of the same attitude also in Marx’s theory of ideology, in Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents, and in the racial theories of the Nazis and others. What is clear in all these approaches is the idea that authority cannot be ascending, as it is presented in liberal social contract theory and arguments. Authority claims, whether epistim or political, are necessarily descending.” (p. 100-1)

Very handy for these thinkers is Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations”, and therefore resistance to migration, which on this account “dissolves the bonds of society and weakens the common civilisations culture that supports our values… reject the claims of distant others, be they distant geographically or in terms of identity and culture, to be rightfuly included among the beneficiaries of liberal society… Post-liberalism replaces the liberal search for consensus with confrontation and conflict.” (p. 123)

Some thinkers see - rightly of course - current liberalism as a particular product of its time and place in the 20th century, an understandable émigré reaction to Nazism and Soviet totalitarianism.

“In Liberalism against Itself, [Samuel] Moyn traces the problem of contemporary liberalism to the rise to dominance of what he characterises as ‘Cold War liberalism’, which he associates with the thought of Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt and others. What unites the members of this group is a hostility of political utopianism and the abandonment of any conception of liberalism as a vision of the good… feared that the liberal conception of the good would collapse into socialism and follow the slippery slope to totalitariansm and the overmighty state…. Left liberalism without the resources of the ambitions to defend itself as a fount of political value, and therefore as anything more than an empty conceptual holding position, which could be filled by anti-liberal forces such as neoliberalism and its aggressive foreign policy companion, neoconservatism.” (p. 129)

So what do they want?

“The post-liberal agenda of ‘faith, family and flag’ assumes we can revalue a communitarian and relatively static social order by cultural means and the rationing of opportunity.. It offers no distinct approach to the problem of social mobility and opportunity… offers no account of how we should overthrow capitalist modernity, so we are left with that social form – capitalism without social mobility. All it offers is nostalgia for a world gone by, and one that we left for a good reason.” (p. 167)

Kelly wants to find the solution within liberalism. I look elsewhere.

Almost the end

Sorry, but to continue with the exploration of the toxic political forces (in this case centrist as well as rightwing) - we really do have to understand them better - a podcast titled In Bed With The Far Right examines its attitudes to sex and gender. This episode considers particularly how Jeffrey Epstein was a focus for anti-#MeToo activism, at the centre of a network for abusive (sometimes we have to add allegedly) men and their female enablers. (Many in the American Democratic Party.)

Have to put a warning in here: predictably disturbing listening, with one of the presenters having been a serious target of these forces!

What did you think?

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