Equality, Metapolitics, and the New Right

It will be useful to open by sketching some distinguishing features of the New Right. The landscape of conservative thought has historically seen no small range of challenges to egalitarian positions. For some, this normative ideal effaces the natural hierarchies between human beings and groups—their unequal dispensation of natural capacities, tastes, preferences, or capabilities (Hayek Reference Hayek2011; Rothbard Reference Rothbard2000). By doing so, a strong egalitarianism substitutes a normative aspiration for a nuanced anthropology of human life (Weaver Reference Weaver1948). For others, the biggest concern reflects how the politics of equalization requires an expansive state, tasked with correcting material inequalities by reaching into ever more spheres of life. It is this tendency that leads market enthusiasts such as Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman to deride commitments to material equality as a quick path to authoritarianism (Friedman Reference Friedman1962; Hayek Reference Hayek2001).

Even this quick rendering helps to situate the interests of this essay. Unlike many strains of conservatism, New Right concerns toward egalitarianism do not reduce to anxieties over social steering, an expansive state, or the metaphysics of justice. Instead, the politics of equality must be evaluated through the effects to which it has given rise. To set the stage, Alain de Benoist (the most prominent figure of the French New Right) describes egalitarianism as the “principal menace” of liberal modernity—one that yields the “demise of the world’s diversity” (de Benoist Reference de Benoist and Lindgren2017, 16). Such charges reflect a significant thread of New Right thought, where egalitarian commitments are figured as the gateway to large-scale immigration (i.e., “population swamping”) and the related erosion of cultural differences (Camus Reference Camus2018, 45; Bar-On Reference Bar-On2007, 91-94). Pierre Krebs, for instance, argues that “egalitarian reasoning, by walking on its head, has indeed turned the world upside down … the egalitarian lie has turned on their heads the last two ways in which states retained their integrity; the most essential and, therefore, the most difficult to constrain: territorial integrity and the ethnic integrity that depends on it” (Krebs Reference Krebs and Jacob2012, 18). What is ultimately most objectionable about the reign of equality discourse for this theoretical school, then, rests in how an egalitarian political culture has ostensibly come to threaten the “integrity” of nations—facilitating their demographic transformation by engineering support for widespread immigration and diversity initiatives.

As noted, this attention to the sphere of culture and ideology reflects a distinct concern of the New Right. According to much of the “anti-replacement” literature, systematic demographic change does not represent an accidental outgrowth of economic necessity or the labor flows that define globalized times. Rather, the policies that enable these shifts are facilitated by a social pedagogy that structures public opinion and sentiments. In the terms of the New Right, the current regime of “population replacement” (persistently described as a process of “ethnomasochism” or “ethnosuicide”) stems from the metapolitics of liberal societies (Faye Reference Faye and Adwan2016; Krebs Reference Krebs and Jacob2012). Minimally, this neologism can be understood in self-consciously Gramscian terms, as an account of how every community is rooted within a reservoir of beliefs, ideals, values, and sentiments (Bar-On Reference Bar-On2007, 84-90; Bar-On Reference Bar-On2013, 10-32; Ekeman Reference Ekeman2018; Woods Reference Woods2007, 25-56). This field of “common sense” guides which normative questions can be asked and which cannot within the conversations of civil society; it structures those policies that can be reasonably proposed or supported; it shapes perceptions of threats to a polity; and, likewise, it constrains the horizon of positive value commitments—what can be legitimately hoped or pursued by the community in question.

For theorists of “the Great Replacement,” this formative role for political culture helps account for what would otherwise remain inexplicable: how native citizens could reconcile themselves to the loss of their demographic majorities and the related “erosion” of their cultures. As Renaud Camus argues, “this numbness had to be created, organized … The principal ideal involved is equality. The principal interest at work is normalisation, standardization, similarity, sameness—needless to say, equality is the condition to those” (Camus Reference Camus2018, 89, emphasis in original). Equality, on this reading, is both an ideological justification for policies that might otherwise be viewed as objectionable and an anaesthetic for those who suffer the outcomes of such policies. And this broadly Gramscian approach to politics does not rest with indicting the “quasi-religious orthodoxy” of egalitarianism or its far-reaching effects in engineering perception or compliance. Rather, the New Right stakes its public work on a “positive” metapolitics—an active project to intervene within this field of beliefs, sentiments, and values, so as to provide resources for an anti-liberal public sphere. In terms offered by Daniel Friberg, this metapolitical project pursues “the process of disseminating and anchoring a particular set of cultural ideas, attitudes, and values in a society, which eventually leads to deeper political change” (Friberg Reference Friberg2015, 4).

Though these metapolitical commitments have been introduced via the European New Right, they likewise guide identitarian schools across North America. Richard Spencer, for instance, asserts that “metapolitics is more important than politics” (Minna Stern Reference Minna Stern2019, 22) for an alt-right movement that seeks to “capture the imaginations of our people (or the best of our people) and shock them out of their current assumption of what they think is possible” (Spencer Reference Spencer2016a).Footnote ² And Greg Johnson, the identitarian white nationalist, argues that a meaningful Right politics demands the dissemination of counter-liberal ideas and vocabularies so as to restructure the field of political possibility. As he proposes, “we must create our own metapolitical organizations—new media, new educational institutions, and new forms of community … We must fight bad ideas with better ideas … This is not to say that there is no room for street activism today, but it has to be understood as a metapolitical activity, a form of propaganda, not as a battle to control the streets. Actual politics comes later, once we have laid the metapolitical groundwork” (Johnson Reference Johnson2018, 89-90).

If the metapolitical project of the New Right has been rendered in broad strokes, assessing the argument requires attention to its details—more specifically, the asserted link between egalitarian commitments and demographic transformations. To set the stage for this engagement, a brief formula will prove helpful. Though the figures associated with the New Right diverge in emphasis and detail as they diagnose population change in a so-called “global age,” they typically converge on the following insistence: the presumption of equality allots normative worth to human subjects on the basis of what they abstractly share. To press a step further, if there are no normatively meaningful distinctions between human beings, then there can be no normatively compelling reasons to prevent the admixture of existing populations (Taylor Reference Taylor and Shaw2018a, 118). And these broad propositions typically end on a more pointed conclusion: equality is thus not simply an aspirational horizon for the liberal moral universe, but rather the ideological basis for policies that have a) opened nations to widespread immigration, and b) decimated the traditional claims of culture.Footnote ³

From Equality to Equivalence

As the foregoing makes clear, the New Right challenge to egalitarianism stakes a distinctive path on the contemporary political landscape. The target is not an expansive, invasive state, but rather how a certain commitment to human equality has ostensibly facilitated sweeping ethnic, racial, and cultural transformations in liberal democracies across Europe and North America. To make this argument legible, it will be useful to untangle the disparate threads from which it draws.

First, much literature of the New Right highlights a familiar antagonist as a stepping-stone for population replacement: liberal universalism and its underlying normative framework. Where a universalist moral grammar is often presented as a historic accomplishment of modernity, the New Right typically insists that the true legacy of liberalism is a stark individualism that elides the historical and social contexts through which subjects gain their intelligibility as distinctly cultural beings.Footnote ⁴ These concerns can be rendered through what theorists of the New Right present as the culmination of liberal moral principles: the commitment to human beings as rights-bearers, meriting normative protections, regardless of institutional, cultural, or social memberships. Accordingly, for Michael O’Meara, the normative ontology of liberalism is not only atomistic, but fundamentally abstractive. It “promote[s] a standardizing uniformity that seeks to eliminate national, racial, and historical differences for the sake of a borderless, color-blind order subject to one law, one market, and one humanitarian creed” (O’Meara Reference O’Meara2013b, 90). Or, Alain de Benoist argues that this homogenizing dynamic yields an incoherence within the universalist moral universe: “If all men are equal, if they are all fundamentally the same, if they are all ‘men like others’, far from the unique personality of each of them being able to be recognized, they will appear, not as irreplaceable, but on the contrary as interchangeable” (de Benoist Reference de Benoist2011a, 81).

At one level, then, the argument follows a well-worn set of communitarian suspicions toward the universalist impulses of liberal modernity—a tradition that questions whether it is meaningful to theorize “the human” as such, outside of its social and cultural memberships.Footnote ⁵ That said, the New Right characteristically presses beyond concerns for the theoretical presumptions of liberalism, to argue for substantive political consequences that follow from these premises. At the bare level of being human, there is ultimately no normative difference between the subjects of rights; by extension, each is equivalent to any other within the normative grammar of liberal universality. Accordingly, theorists of the New Right propose that liberal modernity has ultimately arrived at its logical conclusion in the globalizing present: the large-scale intermingling of populations, which erodes their cultural differences and specificity. As Daniel Friberg argues, “universalism is … a view of the world in which humanity is represented as a homogeneous whole, one extended family, in which terms such as ‘people’ and ‘identity’ lose their relevance … Universalist doctrine demands that all cultures should intermix, and thus vanish, since no relevant differences between them exist” (Friberg Reference Friberg2015, 107).

The New Right literature draws from a different set of critical intuitions, however, as it identifies the other significant motor behind population “replacement”: the social and economic form of global capitalism. Just as human rights discourse is thought to abstract from cultural specificity, so too is economic reason meant to diminish the differentiation of cultures and peoples toward a state of “sameness.” Alain de Benoist offers a symptomatic rendering when he argues, “in the name of the capitalist system, the ideology of the Same reduces all meaning to market prices and transforms the world into a vast, homogeneous marketplace where men, reduced to the role of producers and consumers—soon to become commodities themselves – must all adopt the mentality of Homo Economicus” (de Benoist Reference de Benoist2009, 65). As the language of this passage conveys, the difficulty is not simply an abstract concern for capitalism as an ahistorical force of homogeneity, but rather the distinct reshaping of economic and social life characteristic of neoliberalism. A variety of theorists have demonstrated, for instance, that one of the defining features of neoliberalism was the pursuit of a “globalist” project, where local forms of sovereignty were dismantled to permit the rights of capital to operate at a transnational level, free of interference from individual nation-states (Slobodian Reference Slobodian2018). Minimally, then, much of the New Right indicts neoliberalism as an economic form of imperialism, where the interests of capital are expanded across national borders and progressively immunized from the claims of non-market actors. And these “imperialist” tendencies do not simply reflect the transnational institutions that overrun expressions of local autonomy (e.g., World Bank, WTO, IMF, etc.); rather, this charge captures what Jessica Whyte has identified as one of the central neoliberal tactics for reshaping political and economic institutions: the sanctification of “free trade” as a baseline human right, to be installed in recalcitrant nations through a wide range of incentives and penalties (Whyte Reference Whyte2019).

Here is not the place to reconstruct the full range of New Right anxieties toward capitalism or its characteristic desire to tame (rather than eliminate) market organizations toward communitarian aims.Footnote ⁶ What is most significant at present is how the New Right highlights the costs of “market imperialism” beyond the question of nation-state sovereignty. More broadly, the neoliberal project yields a deeper, “anthropological disfigurement” of human beings once market principles come to organize more spheres of life. From this perspective, efforts to universalize market forms and ideals represent a form of “soft totalitarianism,” where culture after culture sees the rich variance of competing values reduced to a) common icons or tastes, and b) the singular medium of utility calculations, organized toward individual consumption and market rewards (Krebs Reference Krebs and Jacob2012, 53-54; see also Bar-On Reference Bar-On2007, 94). And though theorists of the European Right often indict the reign of market value as a form of “Americanization,” figures from the North American alt-right likewise indict the deculturing effects of market society.Footnote ⁷ Richard Spencer, for instance, maintains that promoters of globalization “want an undifferentiated global population, raceless, genderless, identityless, meaningless population … They want a flat grey-on-grey world, one economic market for them to manipulate” (Spencer Reference Spencer2016b; see also Spencer Reference Spencer2017b). Here, the challenge departs from the considerations of democratic sovereignty or accountability that guide many critical engagements with neoliberalism (Brown Reference Brown2015; Streeck Reference Streeck2014). Rather, the concerns of the New Right channel and amplify the anxieties that define much neoconservative and paleoconservative literature: where market ideals threaten to crowd out regional traditions, local cultures, transcendent ideals, or extra-market values—leaving subjects increasingly homogenized in their values, aspirations, and vocations (Buchanan Reference Buchanan1998; Francis Reference Francis2000; Kristol Reference Kristol1978).

Some provisional conclusions can now be posed. For the New Right and its identitarian allies, large scale demographic transformation (and the cultural changes it ostensibly brings) cannot be reduced to a historical accident that follows from global flows of migration or labor, nor does it result from a patchwork of ad hoc policy decisions. Rather, this movement has been prepared by ideological currents and material practices through which the distinction of cultures is thought to be melted away. In programmatic form: within liberal modernity, the moral commitment to equality has effectively become a governing logic of equalization that promotes a decultured, deracinated equivalence between human beings. As Pierre Krebs argues, for example, these instances of “humanity as such” represent “abstract, transparent, neutral copies, models bearing no identity and consisting of pure, formless projections of a universal, archetypal man” (Krebs Reference Krebs and Jacob2012, 72). Or, in Camus’ evocative coinage, this subject offers little more than “Undifferentiated Human Matter” [UHM]—a bare unit of population, labor, or consumption that can be moved indiscriminately through geopolitical space (Camus Reference Camus2018, 191). And this push toward population mixture is only radicalized, for the New Right, by the multicultural initiatives that have shaped liberal democracies in recent decades. From the multicultural perspective, cultural or ethnic interchange is not simply an unintended byproduct of economic forces or humanitarian premises, but an ideal to be celebrated (Taylor Reference Taylor and Johnson2018b, 29-34). If the scope of New Right challenges toward equality discourse are now legible, it would be inadequate to stop without considering how they have been pressed to reconfigure the political imaginary of late modern societies.

Restaging the Liberal Vocabulary: The “Right to Difference”

At this point, many critical questions arise. One might challenge, for instance, the sociological claim, to ask whether currents of demographic change are meaningfully comparable to the “reverse colonisation” that is persistently invoked by figures of the New Right (Faye Reference Faye and Knipe2010). One might further refuse the logic under which ethnic mixture constitutes a “destruction” of a host culture, rather than a process of negotiation, enrichment, or exchange. Finally, one might resist the paranoiac element of the analysis—the insistence that these demographic changes are the result of motivated policy interventions by a shadowy set of actors behind the scenes (e.g., finance capitalists, the Davocracy, Jewish elites, the technocratic “New Class”) to serve aims at odds with national or racial integrity (Camus Reference Camus2018; Johnson Reference Johnson2018). For present purposes, however, the most fundamental normative questions arise from distinguishing the various paths opened up by this diagnosis.

To pursue this lead, it is necessary to set aside the anti-liberal polemics that have occupied this essay to this point and engage, instead, with how theorists of the New Right have recently offered a more nuanced set of engagements with liberal normative categories. For instance, Alain de Benoist argues that “the ENR [European New Right] has always denounced what I call the ideology of Sameness, i.e., the universalist ideology that, in its religious or secular forms, seeks to reduce the diversity of the world—i.e., the diversity of cultures, value systems, and rooted ways of life—to one uniform model … Insofar as it seeks to reduce diversity, which is the only true wealth of humankind, the ideology of Sameness is itself a caricature of equality. In fact. it creates inequalities of the most unbearable kind. By contrast, equality—which must be defended whenever it is necessary—is quite another matter” (de Benoist Reference de Benoist2009, 65). This line of argument sidesteps an unreserved critique in order to avow a project of restitution—an effort to salvage a version of equality that would not override human difference. Such a vision is founded within what segments of the New Right have come to term (with some degree of internal controversyFootnote ⁸) the “right to difference.” That is, a more normatively defensible form of equality would be founded in the commitment that every people (construed as a bounded cultural totality) has an equal right to secure its existence against competing cultures or the spread of global monoculture (Krebs Reference Krebs and Jacob2012, 27; O’Meara Reference O’Meara2013b, 104).

As the formula (the right to difference) already suggests, this version of equality is rooted within an adjacent political vocabulary: the diversity discourse that is regularly derided in the politics of demographic anxiety (Buchanan Reference Buchanan2011; Taylor Reference Taylor2011). For critics of this stripe, once diversity is written into the basic table of social goods, it is immunized from scrutiny and helps to undermine the integrity of a host culture (O’Meara Reference O’Meara2013b, 101). What defines much recent New Right literature, however, is a reappropriation of this normative language to furnish a metapolitical defense of ethnonationalism or ethnopopulism (characteristically rebranded as “ethnopluralism”). Alain de Benoist, for instance, depicts diversity as the axiological basis for policies of cultural protection

Such appeals to difference are now a staple of the New Right – particularly those who invoke a language of “human biodiversity” to argue for group differences in natural capacities and intelligences.Footnote ⁹ Just as ecosystems hold together through a functionally differentiated system of life, the diversity of cultures is meant to reflect an analogous system of differentiation and hierarchy (see Taguieff Reference Taguieff1993, 106-108). For current purposes, what is most significant is how the language of diversity is set to work by New Right theorists in order to claim its normative legacy, while presenting ethnonationalist movements as its true heirs. To put this argument in short form: because distinct cultures are the ground through which distinct forms of life are possible, any meaningful human diversity requires the preservation of their locality, difference, and situatedness.

This deployment of diversity discourse takes a number of shapes. At an institutionalist level, for instance, numerous New Right theorists have argued that cultures will meet their full efflorescence only where ethnically homogenous peoples engage in a practice of self-governance that approximates a direct democracy (de Benoist Reference de Benoist and Champetier2012, 38-41; de Benoist Reference de Benoist2011b, 93-99; Walker Reference Walker2006). And to place this vision on a broader stage, the ethnonationalist project to halt the admixture of cultures and populations is typically presented as the sole path toward a “true” multiculturalism. As Pierre Krebs frames this ideal, “the future of this world will never stop being many-voiced, multicoloured, multicultural, and multihistorical as long as the human species that bears it remains permanently multiracial, that is to say … as long as the homogeneity of the peoples remains a guarantee of the heterogeneity of the world” (Krebs Reference Krebs and Jacob2012, 29-30; see also Spencer Reference Spencer2015) The “right to difference” is thus presented as a normative good (rather than an unreconstructed nativism) through the role it is meant to play within a Herderian philosophy of history (de Benoist and Champetier Reference de Benoist and Champetier2012, 18-19; see also Bar-On Reference Bar-On2013,151-152, 168-169). If each culture represents the outcome of historical experiments, innovations, biological capacities, and structuring constraints, then each represents a unique contribution to human life that would be lost by a global “monoculture” or the influx of new populations into a given nation-state (what the biodiversity literature likens to the introduction of “invasive species” into the cultural ecosystem).

The more ambivalent legacy of this project of “cultural protection” stems from how it has been conceived and promoted. Where a broad language of difference orients much recent literature, the varied pursuit of this ideal reflects a schism that came to divide segments of the New Right. As noted, Alain de Benoist has come to depict this “right to difference” in a manner that resonates with some central commitments of liberal multiculturalism—where this right is extended to groups attempting to preserve their way of life, no matter where they find themselves under diasporic conditions (e.g., Muslims in France who wish to veil in secular spaces).Footnote ¹⁰ For the more radical, growing segments of the New Right, however, such a stance proves insufficiently attentive to the ostensible crisis posed by immigration in a so-called “global age.” Accordingly, a wide variety of figures rejected this development to describe themselves as, instead, “identitarians”—those who seek to preserve the identity of nations (and the unified cultures that ostensibly define them), against the varied forces of cosmopolitanism, global capitalism, and homogeneity (Spencer Reference Spencer2015; O’Meara Reference O’Meara2013b, 101-106; Willinger Reference Willinger2013; Zúquete Reference Zúquete2018). For those who identify as identitarians across Europe and North America, the right to difference is pursued in more militant terms. Guillaume Faye, for instance, argues that any such effort to conceptualize this right of defense in a “multicultural” direction betrays its core insight and fails to address the depth of the threats faced by Europe in a global age. In Faye’s terms, such a project is a “Disneyland dream” that “threatens to degenerate into a doctrine—an ethnic communitarianism—sanctioning the existence of non-European enclaves in our lands” (Faye Reference Faye and Knipe2010, 24). And this diagnosis of crisis yields a more extreme set of solutions for many European and North American identitarians: no remedy short of removing cultural newcomers will prove sufficient to defend the nation’s integrity or preserve its identity into the future. Accordingly, the perceived threat demands a different response: a “Great Return” or “slow cleanse,” where groups deemed incompatible with the host culture are expelled or repatriated to their lands of origin (Johnson Reference Johnson2014; Zúquete Reference Zúquete2018, 157-159).

Before pursuing the significance of these proposals, it is necessary to note how the New Right metapolitics of equality ultimately rests upon a strategy of inversion. This theoretical lineage does not simply indict egalitarian commitments as homogenizing and “raciophobic” (Krebs Reference Krebs and Jacob2012) in the threats they are meant to pose to cultural difference. Rather, theorists of the New Right persistently claim the true legacy of equality, in order to provide ideological resources for transforming debates on immigration, demographic change, and nationhood (see Taguieff Reference Taguieff1990, 110-112, Sheehan Reference Sheehan1980). And yet, as the foregoing already hints, this project of restitution is expressed along avenues that raise significant normative challenges. The final section will thus press these commitments in order to detail the normative legacy and costs of the New Right metapolitical project.

Critical Questions, Normative Costs

It is now possible to address the question that guides this essay’s engagement with the New Right and its identitarian followers: how equality discourse is not only denounced as the stepping stone for demographic fungibility, but has been restaged to inaugurate a new horizon for political thought and action. The normative questions raised by the foregoing are, however, considerable. In broad terms: if the metapolitics of the New Right takes over and transforms the orientational values of the public sphere, then what is gained, lost, or threatened by this project?

There are a number of areas to focus this question. To begin, where much New Right literature enlists diversity discourse toward a project of “cultural defense,” the object of preservation demands scrutiny. As intellectual historians have demonstrated, one of the central aims for adopting this culturalist language was to distance the New Right from the discredited tradition of fascism—particularly the fascist fixation upon race as the source of existential threats and an object of ethnocidal violence (Bar-On Reference Bar-On2007, 33-43). This effort to sanitize the image of the movement is considerably troubled, however, by those theorists who preserve a significant role for biology in their determination of peoplehood. In North American discussions, the racial dimension of these appeals to cultural defense tends to be prominently featured. White identitarians such as Richard Spencer, Greg Johnson or Jared Taylor have explicitly argued the need for a racially defined homeland (i.e., an ethnostate) in which a white population would be able to “reproduce and fulfill our destiny, free from the interference of others” (Johnson Reference Johnson2014). Where the European New Right tends to be more rhetorically cautious, a wide range of prominent European identitarians continue to negotiate arguments for cultural defense through an explicitly racial lens (Sunic Reference Sunic2011, 141-145; see also Zúquete Reference Zúquete2018, 266-319). Pierre Krebs, for instance, makes the link explicit: “peoples, unlike man, who is made up of an intangible humanity, exist: they are biologically definable, sociologically identifiable and geographically localisable … when a people, unsatisfied with the contempt that they inflict on themselves in submissively assimilating the culture, language and gods of another people further submerge their biological identity … they sign their death sentence for all eternity” (Krebs Reference Krebs and Jacob2012, 20, 22). The most significant dimension to these arguments is the abiding presence of biological factors within their avowed project of cultural preservation—where expressions of culture represent the efflorescence of genetic and racial potencies, inflected by social, historical, and geographic factors (i.e., “bioculture”). And the work of these commitments is reflected through an organicist thesis of degeneracy: to deny or stray from this “biological infrastructure” is to court the “death sentence” of a given culture. This political organicism becomes more fraught yet through those who base their commitments to difference upon a “race realism”—that is, the speculative history according to which there are meant to be indwelling differences between races that prevent their peaceful cohabitation in a multiculturalist vein (Taylor Reference Taylor2011; Taylor Reference Taylor and Shaw2018a; Taylor Reference Taylor and Johnson2018b).

For some, these troubling appeals to biology and race are mitigated by countervailing tendencies within the New Right. Alain de Benoist, for instance, contends that the “official” position of the European New Right is a defense of cultural difference, that applies to cultural totalities no matter where they may reside. Even this stance, however, has been targeted by critics as inadequate. For Pierre-Andre Taguieff, this reformed path does not depart from the terrain of racism, but rather offers a discursively deflected form of racialized communitarianism. Where a classic racism commits to a universal table of racial hierarchy (where one race is placed at the head, against which all others can be measured), Taguieff argues that the culturalist wing of the New Right pursues what is ultimately a “differentialist racism”—founded upon the presumption of stark difference between closed, cultural totalities and vigorously opposed to any admixture between these groups (Taguieff Reference Taguieff1990, 117-118; Taguieff Reference Taguieff1993; see also Schlembach Reference Schlembach2014, 97-98). Although a culturalist language figures prominently in much New Right diversity discourse, the “obsession of contact and the phobia of mixing” underpins the privilege that this vision grants to the (homogenous, bounded, fixed) ethnos over the (plural, contested, shared) demos (Taguieff Reference Taguieff1990, 118; Bar-On Reference Bar-On2013, 144-148). It is for this reason that Verena Stolcke charges the New Right with a “cultural fundamentalism” that uses a sanitized language of cultural defense to pursue the commitments historically associated with fascist politics of demographic purification, defined by calls to partition those groups deemed incompatible with a given ethnos (Stolcke Reference Stolcke1995, 4-5).

These charges have spawned important debates, particularly in light of how arguments for cultural “defense” have been adopted across Europe and North America by a wide variety of ethnopopulist movements seeking to secure racially or ethnically homogeneous homelands. That said, the present analysis will close on a different set of difficulties—the displacement that these values (equality, difference) undergo when enlisted in the metapolitics examined to this point. To ask this question, it is useful to recall the Foucauldian premise detailed at the outset: that a genealogical inquiry does not track a unitary meaning at the heart of a given value, but rather uncovers the “substitutions, displacements, disguised conquests, and systematic reversals” that values undergo when contested, operationalized, and taken up by various parties in the civic arena (Foucault 1977,151). This methodological insight is borne out by the discursive politics of the New Right, where political and moral values are reinvested with alternative meanings, designed to re-orient the normative landscape of civil society. In this connection, a more pointed conclusion suggests itself: if such tactics are enlisted to forge an alternative political imaginary, they nevertheless threaten to destabilize the moorings for a democratic public sphere.

One way to pursue this insight rests in the programmatic phrase by which the New Right announces an equality that would not prepare the way for population fungibility: the right to difference. Within this formulation, each of the core normative terms undergoes a fundamental alteration in meaning. What is to be preserved is not the autonomy or integrity of persons; rather, it is the historical and social conditions under which persons come to an intelligible social existence. To shift terms, it is not individuals who can claim the “right” of difference, but cultural and racial totalities that merit this status and the normative protections that follow. Pierre Krebs argues, for instance, that “it is urgent to draw up a new Declaration of the Rights of Peoples in concert with all the movements that fight on this Earth for the respect of their ethno-cultural identities” (Krebs Reference Krebs and Jacob2012, 89). Or, in more patently racialist terms, Jared Taylor proposes that white identity movements claim “the right to pursue their destinies free from the unwanted embrace of others, to seek a future that is uniquely theirs within neighborhoods, institutions, regions, and ultimately nations in which they are the permanent and undisputed majority” (Taylor Reference Taylor and Johnson2018b, 32). In such formulations, the rhetoric of rights is refashioned and absorbed into a narrative of history in which bounded “biocultural” groups are prime movers and sites of protection. To flesh out the significance of this shift, it is useful to recall the framework of biodiversity enlisted by much of the “ethnopluralist” literature where the “right to difference” evokes a moral framework, with moral grounds, the appeal to biodiversity draws from a naturalist framework that is neither the source nor the bearer of moral predicates. Instead, the discursive guideposts for the imperative of diversity are the organic terms of life or vitality; and the implications for failure are functionalist implications such as system collapse or species extinction (reflected in the New Right’s persistent recourse to metaphors of cultural death, degeneration, and senescence).

These significant shifts in meaning make it possible to highlight the broader pathology at the heart of the New Right’s discursive politics. To recall, the official project of the New Right is not simply to challenge established narratives in the seminar rooms or professional journals of political science, but rather to inaugurate institutional change by transforming the thoughts, sentiments, values, and images that bind the public sphere. And a primary strategy toward this aim is to reengineer the normative languages that shape public debate and thought. This interventionist stance does not limit itself to diagnosing the effects of liberal normative frameworks; instead, it reactualizes these vocabularies, so as to enable a public sphere more hospitable to projects of “cultural defense”—a process that Roger Griffin describes as a rhetorical “sleight of hand” (Griffin Reference Griffin2000, 48). To illustrate this concern through the central threads of the essay, the New Right overhaul of equality has been used to pursue aims that are difficult to reconcile with even the most aggressive reconstitutions of the value within the liberal-democratic tradition. This elasticity is particularly manifest in those identitarians who deploy this equal right to cultural difference in order to justify commitments to a) a “hierarchical multiculturalism” (Spektorowski Reference Spektorowski2003) that ranks human cultures and races in terms of their putative value (Taylor Reference Taylor2017; Barnes Reference Barnes1980; Shields Reference Shields2007, 149-152); and b) homogeneous ethnic groupings that demand the removal of non-conforming types (see Taguieff Reference Taguieff1993). Perhaps most notoriously, this “right to difference” was prominently featured in the nativist politics of Jean-Marie Le Pen, as he pursued a “France for the French.” Or, to return to the theoretical literature, Guillaume Faye invokes this right to endorse the remigration of immigrants who (in his terms) have “invaded” the host nations of Europe.Footnote ¹¹ And (as noted earlier) similar proposals have been raised by identitarians in both Europe and North America who advocate for a “Great Return” or “racial divorce”—a large-scale process of repatriation that would remove “inharmonious” groups and ostensibly restore the “demographic stock” of nations as cultural totalities (Johnson Reference Johnson2015; see also Zúquete Reference Zúquete2018, 157-159).

It is tempting to conclude that these expulsionist visions represent what happens when the imperative for cultural preservation is taken up and radicalized in the unruly, polarized spaces of civil society. Such a position, for instance, has been forwarded by Alain de Benoist as he disavows those who promote nativist themes in their visions of cultural preservation. As the foregoing has detailed, however, these exclusionary proposals are ultimately symptomatic of the metapolitical project that has defined the New Right from its first seminars and publications: to disrupt a perceived “liberal hegemony” on public discourse and thus seed civil society toward a different political imaginary. One essential avenue for this metapolitics is a polemical reconstitution of the liberal normative vocabulary—though such a project is likewise reflected in the spread of conservative media ecospheres, or the “meme warfare” that characterizes far-right internet culture. From this vantage point, the exclusionary repackaging of core liberal values does not represent a departure from the New Right project, but rather an outgrowth of its governing strategy of discursive destabilization. As Richard Wolin argues, such jarring normative proposals reveal a deeper tendency within the politics of the New Right—one that “cynically appropriated the universalistic values of tolerance and the ‘right to difference’ for its own xenophobic agenda” (Wolin Reference Wolin2004, 268). And Pierre-Andre Taguieff describes this metapolitical strategy as a “demagogic operation” that forges discursive “zones of ambiguity”, where liberal policies are passed off as “authoritarian” and “neo-racism is passed as the ‘right to be different’” (Taguieff Reference Taguieff1990, 116).

Minimally, then, the New Right has provided intellectual grist for the resurgence of xenophobic, ethnopopulist, and white nationalist movements throughout Europe and North America. And these outcomes have been facilitated by the animating impulse of New Right metapolitics, where the moral categories of liberal democracies are divested of their meanings, reinvested with new contents, and then recirculated so as to gain public currency for antiliberal commitments. This strategy, moreover, is hardly limited to a localized movement within the European context; instead, it has come to define much of what is now known as the ‘alt-right’ within the North American context (a movement that also seeks political gain by transforming the tropes, vocabulary, and image repertoire of the public sphere). And, more broadly, these metapolitical initiatives have entered mainstream political discourse through mass media figures who circulate these narratives of decline, invasion, and defense throughout civil society—thus engineering a perception of demographic threat that has fueled the rise of nativist and ethnopopulist movements on the recent electoral stage (e.g., Trump, Orbán, Zemmour).

Before closing, a quick clarification will be useful. A central feature of democratic life is that values are not “shared” in any easy sense; they are instead in a persistent state of contestation and negotiation, where differing parties challenge the extension, interpretation, or core terms of their shared normative universe. Values, in this sense, are always in process, contested, and incomplete in their social realization. And yet, it is a staple of political hermeneutics that these negotiations are conducted against shared background understandings that underpin and lend mooring to these challenges and rejoinders. To invoke the broad tradition of democratic thought, the presumption of citizen rule hinges upon common things—not simply common goods from which all civic participants might draw and enjoy, but a common stock of meanings that render possible civic conversations over a world that can meaningfully be recognized as common (Arendt Reference Arendt1998; Honig Reference Honig2017; Muirhead and Rosenblum Reference Muirhead and Rosenblum2019). From this vantage point, the metapolitical efforts of the radical right offer a broader threat to the health of the democratic public sphere, by stretching its orienting categories to such a degree that they may no longer provide a meaningfully common normative vocabulary. Such an attenuation of these resources is particularly urgent under contemporary conditions of heightened polarization, in which citizens increasingly cannot agree on common authorities, common founding myths, common truths, or common futures. As reflected by the metapolitical initiatives of the New Right, however, it is inadequate to describe these dynamics of polarization in the passive voice. It is not simply that citizens increasingly find less purchase on a common stock of values, and rather that the normative language of the public sphere is being aggressively reconstituted as part of an ongoing, committed strategy to serve exclusionary and nativist aims. The broader threat of this metapolitics, then, is that the frayed common will become increasingly so, such that citizens occupy not only disparate epistemic worlds, but come to lose purchase on the common stock of value-commitments that enable thinking, acting, and arguing as a democratic public.