On Monday, Americans and Britons woke up to media reports about the surge of the “far right” in Europe. The news, according to Anglophone media, was especially bad in France, where the “far right” walloped President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition so thoroughly that Macron felt compelled to call snap elections.
English speakers could be forgiven for panicking over fear that a Franco-fascist skunk called Pepe Le Pétain had come to stink up the Republic, and herald the odiferous return of Vichy. After all, what else could “far right” mean?
After this weekend’s vote, it should be clear that “far right” is a term that says more about the biases of the person using it than it does about the person or party to whom it is applied.
A story: Back in 2018, the U.S. liberal scholar Mark Lilla published a thoughtful piece in the New York Review of Books, unveiling for American readers “two roads for the new French Right.”
“Something new is happening on the European right, and it involves more than xenophobic populist outbursts,” Lilla wrote. He went on to talk about how parties of the non-traditional Right in France (and beyond) were developing a coherent ideological program to reach Europeans alienated from neoliberal economics, mass migration, and other features of the globalist era.
Early in the piece, Lilla faulted the media for not understanding the nuances of the European Right. The “narrowness of vision” of French journalists has made it difficult for them to understand voters of the Right who are fed up with the exhausted Republicans, but who don’t identify with the National Front either.
Writing of a constellation of young right-wing Paris intellectuals, all Catholics, who are pioneering a third way, Lilla said:
The intellectual ecumenism of these writers is apparent in their articles, which come peppered with references to George Orwell, the mystical writer-activist Simone Weil, the nineteenth-century anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, the young Marx, the ex-Marxist Catholic philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, and especially the politically leftist, culturally conservative American historian Christopher Lasch, whose bons mots—“uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots”—get repeated like mantras. They predictably reject the European Union, same-sex marriage, and mass immigration. But they also reject unregulated global financial markets, neoliberal austerity, genetic modification, consumerism, and AGFAM (Apple-Google-Facebook-Amazon-Microsoft).
That mélange may sound odd to our ears, but it is far more consistent than the positions of contemporary American conservatives. Continental conservatism going back to the nineteenth century has always rested on an organic conception of society. It sees Europe as a single Christian civilization composed of different nations with distinct languages and customs. These nations are composed of families, which are organisms, too, with differing but complementary roles and duties for mothers, fathers, and children. On this view, the fundamental task of society is to transmit knowledge, morality, and culture to future generations, perpetuating the life of the civilizational organism. It is not to serve an agglomeration of autonomous individuals bearing rights.
Reading this shocked me. Not only does it describe my own conservatism, but it turned out that on his reporting trip to Paris, Lilla had spent time with, and interviewed, friends of mine. At last! I thought. An American journalist gets European conservative politics!
In the next edition of the magazine, perhaps the most important journal for liberal American intellectuals, there appeared a letter from Paris sternly rebuking Lilla. Its author said that despite all the interesting things Lilla had uncovered about the newly emerging French Right, they are still nothing more than a pack of Muslim-hating bigots, and we must never lose sight of that.
The author? James McAuley, at the time the Paris correspondent of the Washington Post. His barely-veiled insinuation was that Lilla, in trying to understand his subject, was behaving as a useful idiot for the French neo-fascists. In fact, some of the same people Lilla had profiled had warned me earlier that year, on a visit to France, about avoiding certain factions because they really were fascist. It struck me as telling that the journalist whose writing the leadership class in the American capital depended on more than anybody else’s to understand what was happening in France was incapable of making important distinctions. To him, anyone to the Right of Nicolas Sarkozy was a knuckle-dragging Vichyite.
Six years have passed since that exchange appeared, and much has changed in Europe. The National Front, for one, is now the National Rally, and Marine Le Pen has succeeded in decontaminating the party from its unsavory elements. I moved to Hungary, and began to understand nationalist conservative European politics from the inside. Yet the fundamental insight I gained from that Lilla-McAuley exchange has served me well: never, ever trust mainstream journalists to report accurately on the non-traditional European Right.
It is common for U.S. and UK expats living in Hungary to laugh over drinks about how stupidly panicked our friends and family back home are about “fascism” here in Orbánistan. We all have stories of these people coming to visit us, and being shocked and delighted by how Hungary is not what they had been led to believe by their media.
“I feel like I’m in Europe again,” said one Parisian to me last year. It’s a frequent observation made by Europeans who had forgotten how good it felt to live in a city not overrun by migrants and migrant crime. You can literally go days without seeing a police officer in Budapest. They aren’t needed like they are elsewhere in Europe. Hungarians aren’t saints, but they know how to behave themselves.
It is important for the left-wing media and liberal academics to demonize Orbán, because if people actually come to Hungary and see what his government has achieved, they will wonder why they can’t have the same thing in their own countries. This is also true for right-liberal institutionalists in the Atlanticist sphere. Many conservative, anti-Trump Washington grandees genuinely believe that Hungary is a fascist hellhole. They would no more accept that Hungary has an actual far right, and that it disdains Fidesz as too soft, than they would believe in Bigfoot.
For the same reason, it is important for these same liberals to keep the Anglosphere masses—who cannot read other languages, and who are therefore dependent on their media to keep them informed—terrified of the populist European Right. If you keep calling them “far right,” many well-intentioned Americans and Britons will dismiss them out of hand as Nazi-adjacent. This, of course, serves to reinforce the tottering liberal order—which may be the point.
There was a time, of course, when “far right” was an accurate and useful term of description. In the 1980s and 1990s, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front was exactly that: a party that held fascist, or semi-fascist, views—including anti-Semitism—and existed on the extreme right-wing end of the French political spectrum. The mainstream Right consisted of the Gaullists led by Jacques Chirac, while the Left was the Socialists of François Mitterrand and his successors.
That was then. Today, both the Socialists and the Gaullists are spent forces in French politics. Former Socialist Emmanuel Macron seized most of the energy of the Left, with hardcore ideologues hiving off to Jean-Luc Mélanchon’s far-left party. The National Rally of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, which claimed one out of every three votes cast on Sunday, are not the “far right.” They are the Right, tout court.
Journalists and others who insist otherwise are living in the past. What if European journalists, reporting from the U.S. in the 1980s, insisted on referring to Reagan Republicans as “far right” because the Reaganites no longer lived by the Republican Party platforms of the Nixon era? Would that help European readers understand better what was happening in America? Or would it be more a statement of the blindness and biases of the journalists?
To be fair, it is undoubtedly the case that Jean-Marie Le Pen’s core belief—that mass migration, especially of Muslims, is a disaster for France—has moved far more into the mainstream than twenty years ago. This is because French voters can see with their own eyes how their country is changing, and they don’t like it. They also see how impotent the institutional leaders are in the face of this crisis. So they are more willing to give the so-called “far right” parties a chance. Why keep voting against the “far right” if the consequence is more of the same decline?
That said, if you actually look at the National Rally platform, it will shock Americans, at least, by how … normal it is. If this is “far right,” then your church-going grandmother in Dothan, Alabama, who has voted Republican since Nixon, is Triple Hitler.
The first two planks of the platform are what most distinguish the National Rally: stopping uncontrolled migration, and eradicating Islamist ideologies and networks. If you don’t believe those are popular views among the French in 2024, and that the French have solid reasons for believing this (as opposed to mere prejudice), then you have been living in an ivory tower. If you don’t believe most Americans—and not just Republicans—would endorse these policies, even though the problems they address are far less pressing in the US, you are dreaming.
The rest of the platform is commonsense to the point of dullness. Tough on crime. Pro-natalism. Tax incentives and other measures to boost French industry and entrepreneurship. Greater defense spending. Lower VAT taxes on energy products, and re-invigorating France’s nuclear power program. That kind of thing.
What you don’t see is the kind of social conservatism and pro-religious policies that shows up in the governing programs of Viktor Orbán and some other European populists. National Rally is firmly secular, and questions of gender ideology, for example, do not particularly concern its leadership. The French will not soon see a drone cross hovering over the Seine, as Hungarians do over the Danube on St. Stephen’s Day. Too bad for the French, but this fact does make the claim that the National Rally is “far right” even more risible. In fact, there is a real danger that once in power, Marine Le Pen would fall under the spell of Ursula von der Leyen, and become “Melonified.” But that is a risk the French have to take.
Re-read Mark Lilla’s description of a new current on the Right manifesting in France. That is the kind of conservatism that appeals to me – and you find it far more often in the speeches of Viktor Orban than in those of Marine Le Pen (though pay attention to the rhetoric of Marine’s young niece, Marion Maréchal of Éric Zemmour’s Reconquest party; she embodies that kind of Catholic conservatism). But that more intellectually deep conservatism can thrive better in a political order governed by the secular Right of Le Pen and Bardella, just as its American version stands a far better chance of achieving success under Donald Trump.
Though most of the alarmists shrieking about the coming of the far right are liberals, it is also true that there are diehard right-wing establishmentarians—Tory wets, Never Trump Republicans, and so forth—who are just as panicked. There’s a reason nobody at last fall’s big ARC conference in London cheered for former U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s leaden call for a return to the glory days of Reagan and Thatcher. Aside from bitter-end nostalgists, nobody believes that Reaganism and Thatcherism, whatever their virtues in the 1980s, have much to say to the core challenges of our time.
True, neither Le Pen nor Trump has the stature of a Thatcher or a Reagan—but maybe they are better suited to the eras that produced them. After all, in the 1970s, both these iconic conservative leaders were considered to be avatars of the “far right” within their parties.
It is always easier to blame the supposed evils of those one hates than face up to your own side’s failures. The hard-left English politician George Galloway is a menace in some ways, but when he’s right, he’s right. He tweeted in the aftermath of Sunday’s vote that Europeans are choosing right-wing populism because of centrism’s failures. He went on: “Cultural disdain for family, faith and country. A uniparty from a uni place. Economic decline [and] deindustrialization dressed in green mantras. It will not be repelled by MORE liberalism, by tossing around ‘isms,’ ‘ists’ and ‘obias.’”
On this, nationalist conservatives can agree with the hard-left Englishman. Perhaps you have to be outside of the establishment center to see things clearly. France excepted, Sunday’s results were not the ballot-box revolution we conservatives hoped for. But they were probably the seismic slips before the true earthquake yet to come. The media and the ruling class in Brussels, Washington, and other Western capitals, thoroughly besotted by the woke habit of dismissing challenging ideas by labeling them as a phobia or a form of irrational prejudice, will be the last ones to see it coming.
So too will those who still believe that these institutional experts are accurate analysts of the world as it is, as opposed to the world they thought they lived in back in the 1990s, at the End of History, when all the great and the good agreed that globalist liberal democracy was the final solution for all humankind’s problems. That era has passed, its ideals hollowed out by its failures. Believe it or not, once upon a time, George Soros was the future.
What Is ‘Far Right,’ Anyway?
@MLP_officiel on X
On Monday, Americans and Britons woke up to media reports about the surge of the “far right” in Europe. The news, according to Anglophone media, was especially bad in France, where the “far right” walloped President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition so thoroughly that Macron felt compelled to call snap elections.
English speakers could be forgiven for panicking over fear that a Franco-fascist skunk called Pepe Le Pétain had come to stink up the Republic, and herald the odiferous return of Vichy. After all, what else could “far right” mean?
After this weekend’s vote, it should be clear that “far right” is a term that says more about the biases of the person using it than it does about the person or party to whom it is applied.
A story: Back in 2018, the U.S. liberal scholar Mark Lilla published a thoughtful piece in the New York Review of Books, unveiling for American readers “two roads for the new French Right.”
“Something new is happening on the European right, and it involves more than xenophobic populist outbursts,” Lilla wrote. He went on to talk about how parties of the non-traditional Right in France (and beyond) were developing a coherent ideological program to reach Europeans alienated from neoliberal economics, mass migration, and other features of the globalist era.
Early in the piece, Lilla faulted the media for not understanding the nuances of the European Right. The “narrowness of vision” of French journalists has made it difficult for them to understand voters of the Right who are fed up with the exhausted Republicans, but who don’t identify with the National Front either.
Writing of a constellation of young right-wing Paris intellectuals, all Catholics, who are pioneering a third way, Lilla said:
Reading this shocked me. Not only does it describe my own conservatism, but it turned out that on his reporting trip to Paris, Lilla had spent time with, and interviewed, friends of mine. At last! I thought. An American journalist gets European conservative politics!
In the next edition of the magazine, perhaps the most important journal for liberal American intellectuals, there appeared a letter from Paris sternly rebuking Lilla. Its author said that despite all the interesting things Lilla had uncovered about the newly emerging French Right, they are still nothing more than a pack of Muslim-hating bigots, and we must never lose sight of that.
The author? James McAuley, at the time the Paris correspondent of the Washington Post. His barely-veiled insinuation was that Lilla, in trying to understand his subject, was behaving as a useful idiot for the French neo-fascists. In fact, some of the same people Lilla had profiled had warned me earlier that year, on a visit to France, about avoiding certain factions because they really were fascist. It struck me as telling that the journalist whose writing the leadership class in the American capital depended on more than anybody else’s to understand what was happening in France was incapable of making important distinctions. To him, anyone to the Right of Nicolas Sarkozy was a knuckle-dragging Vichyite.
Six years have passed since that exchange appeared, and much has changed in Europe. The National Front, for one, is now the National Rally, and Marine Le Pen has succeeded in decontaminating the party from its unsavory elements. I moved to Hungary, and began to understand nationalist conservative European politics from the inside. Yet the fundamental insight I gained from that Lilla-McAuley exchange has served me well: never, ever trust mainstream journalists to report accurately on the non-traditional European Right.
It is common for U.S. and UK expats living in Hungary to laugh over drinks about how stupidly panicked our friends and family back home are about “fascism” here in Orbánistan. We all have stories of these people coming to visit us, and being shocked and delighted by how Hungary is not what they had been led to believe by their media.
“I feel like I’m in Europe again,” said one Parisian to me last year. It’s a frequent observation made by Europeans who had forgotten how good it felt to live in a city not overrun by migrants and migrant crime. You can literally go days without seeing a police officer in Budapest. They aren’t needed like they are elsewhere in Europe. Hungarians aren’t saints, but they know how to behave themselves.
It is important for the left-wing media and liberal academics to demonize Orbán, because if people actually come to Hungary and see what his government has achieved, they will wonder why they can’t have the same thing in their own countries. This is also true for right-liberal institutionalists in the Atlanticist sphere. Many conservative, anti-Trump Washington grandees genuinely believe that Hungary is a fascist hellhole. They would no more accept that Hungary has an actual far right, and that it disdains Fidesz as too soft, than they would believe in Bigfoot.
For the same reason, it is important for these same liberals to keep the Anglosphere masses—who cannot read other languages, and who are therefore dependent on their media to keep them informed—terrified of the populist European Right. If you keep calling them “far right,” many well-intentioned Americans and Britons will dismiss them out of hand as Nazi-adjacent. This, of course, serves to reinforce the tottering liberal order—which may be the point.
There was a time, of course, when “far right” was an accurate and useful term of description. In the 1980s and 1990s, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front was exactly that: a party that held fascist, or semi-fascist, views—including anti-Semitism—and existed on the extreme right-wing end of the French political spectrum. The mainstream Right consisted of the Gaullists led by Jacques Chirac, while the Left was the Socialists of François Mitterrand and his successors.
That was then. Today, both the Socialists and the Gaullists are spent forces in French politics. Former Socialist Emmanuel Macron seized most of the energy of the Left, with hardcore ideologues hiving off to Jean-Luc Mélanchon’s far-left party. The National Rally of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, which claimed one out of every three votes cast on Sunday, are not the “far right.” They are the Right, tout court.
Journalists and others who insist otherwise are living in the past. What if European journalists, reporting from the U.S. in the 1980s, insisted on referring to Reagan Republicans as “far right” because the Reaganites no longer lived by the Republican Party platforms of the Nixon era? Would that help European readers understand better what was happening in America? Or would it be more a statement of the blindness and biases of the journalists?
To be fair, it is undoubtedly the case that Jean-Marie Le Pen’s core belief—that mass migration, especially of Muslims, is a disaster for France—has moved far more into the mainstream than twenty years ago. This is because French voters can see with their own eyes how their country is changing, and they don’t like it. They also see how impotent the institutional leaders are in the face of this crisis. So they are more willing to give the so-called “far right” parties a chance. Why keep voting against the “far right” if the consequence is more of the same decline?
That said, if you actually look at the National Rally platform, it will shock Americans, at least, by how … normal it is. If this is “far right,” then your church-going grandmother in Dothan, Alabama, who has voted Republican since Nixon, is Triple Hitler.
The first two planks of the platform are what most distinguish the National Rally: stopping uncontrolled migration, and eradicating Islamist ideologies and networks. If you don’t believe those are popular views among the French in 2024, and that the French have solid reasons for believing this (as opposed to mere prejudice), then you have been living in an ivory tower. If you don’t believe most Americans—and not just Republicans—would endorse these policies, even though the problems they address are far less pressing in the US, you are dreaming.
The rest of the platform is commonsense to the point of dullness. Tough on crime. Pro-natalism. Tax incentives and other measures to boost French industry and entrepreneurship. Greater defense spending. Lower VAT taxes on energy products, and re-invigorating France’s nuclear power program. That kind of thing.
What you don’t see is the kind of social conservatism and pro-religious policies that shows up in the governing programs of Viktor Orbán and some other European populists. National Rally is firmly secular, and questions of gender ideology, for example, do not particularly concern its leadership. The French will not soon see a drone cross hovering over the Seine, as Hungarians do over the Danube on St. Stephen’s Day. Too bad for the French, but this fact does make the claim that the National Rally is “far right” even more risible. In fact, there is a real danger that once in power, Marine Le Pen would fall under the spell of Ursula von der Leyen, and become “Melonified.” But that is a risk the French have to take.
Re-read Mark Lilla’s description of a new current on the Right manifesting in France. That is the kind of conservatism that appeals to me – and you find it far more often in the speeches of Viktor Orban than in those of Marine Le Pen (though pay attention to the rhetoric of Marine’s young niece, Marion Maréchal of Éric Zemmour’s Reconquest party; she embodies that kind of Catholic conservatism). But that more intellectually deep conservatism can thrive better in a political order governed by the secular Right of Le Pen and Bardella, just as its American version stands a far better chance of achieving success under Donald Trump.
Though most of the alarmists shrieking about the coming of the far right are liberals, it is also true that there are diehard right-wing establishmentarians—Tory wets, Never Trump Republicans, and so forth—who are just as panicked. There’s a reason nobody at last fall’s big ARC conference in London cheered for former U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s leaden call for a return to the glory days of Reagan and Thatcher. Aside from bitter-end nostalgists, nobody believes that Reaganism and Thatcherism, whatever their virtues in the 1980s, have much to say to the core challenges of our time.
True, neither Le Pen nor Trump has the stature of a Thatcher or a Reagan—but maybe they are better suited to the eras that produced them. After all, in the 1970s, both these iconic conservative leaders were considered to be avatars of the “far right” within their parties.
It is always easier to blame the supposed evils of those one hates than face up to your own side’s failures. The hard-left English politician George Galloway is a menace in some ways, but when he’s right, he’s right. He tweeted in the aftermath of Sunday’s vote that Europeans are choosing right-wing populism because of centrism’s failures. He went on: “Cultural disdain for family, faith and country. A uniparty from a uni place. Economic decline [and] deindustrialization dressed in green mantras. It will not be repelled by MORE liberalism, by tossing around ‘isms,’ ‘ists’ and ‘obias.’”
On this, nationalist conservatives can agree with the hard-left Englishman. Perhaps you have to be outside of the establishment center to see things clearly. France excepted, Sunday’s results were not the ballot-box revolution we conservatives hoped for. But they were probably the seismic slips before the true earthquake yet to come. The media and the ruling class in Brussels, Washington, and other Western capitals, thoroughly besotted by the woke habit of dismissing challenging ideas by labeling them as a phobia or a form of irrational prejudice, will be the last ones to see it coming.
So too will those who still believe that these institutional experts are accurate analysts of the world as it is, as opposed to the world they thought they lived in back in the 1990s, at the End of History, when all the great and the good agreed that globalist liberal democracy was the final solution for all humankind’s problems. That era has passed, its ideals hollowed out by its failures. Believe it or not, once upon a time, George Soros was the future.
READ NEXT
Guarantee of Unhappiness
Are Net Zero’s Days Numbered?
Erdogan’s Hour of Triumph