Guillaume Faye: Seven Mistakes That Explain The Failure Of The European New Right
The weakness and shallowness of the mainstream Right has been noticed a thousand times. In 1896, Robert L. Dabney described the GOP as “a party that never conserves anything,” that always growls against the Left’s innovations but ultimately rallies to them, to the point of being “a mere shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward.” This emptiness allowed for the GOP to be taken over by crypto-Trotskyite neoconservatives once they had purged the old guard.
The very repetition of the critique, though, shows that making the point — and re-discovering it again and again — is not enough. Those who made the point were right but could not change the “Mighty Left And Spineless Right” system. Dogs bark at cars, but dogs can’t drive, and the astute critiques of Conservatism Inc. have never yet achieved power in the US.
The non-mainstream Right must find an alternative beyond this simple critique. But before today, before the Internet became public, others already tried. Though barely mentioned in the mainstream today, these dissenters were able to coalesce into an intellectual big tent associated with the French magazine Le Figaro. They became intellectually fashionable, sparked debate among a wide range of political issues, and sought genuinely new grounds in order to replace the Left in its role of cultural authority able to shape the mainstream norms, narrative and core concepts. These thinkers were known under the name of Nouvelle Droite (“New Right”).
It may come as a surprise to many, but the biological roots of IQ, sex differences, the soundness of eugenics, the Indo-European-Aryan roots of Euro-American civilization — such were the topics raised by fierce, fearless “New Righters.” Indeed, Nouvelle École (New School), one of the main journals of the New Right, listed names such as Raymond B. Cattell, Hans Eysenck, Henry E. Garrett, Arthur Jensen, and R. Travis Osborne on its masthead. Many of their positions overlapped with today’s neo-masculine points. Of course, they were targeted by cultural Marxists, labelled “fascists” and “racists,” but for some time they seemed rather stimulated than weakened by the Leftists’ attacks. Read more