What is this “dissident right”?
In November 2013, American Renaissance magazine published an interview with French philosopher Alain de Benoist, in which he stated, "We are clearly at the end of something." There is both wishful thinking and foresight in this statement: as a leading representative of the French New Right, Benoist developed his metapolitical thought around the exhaustion of the matrix of modernity; but the turbulence of our time (and the suspicious way we now tend to view liberal solutions) make his diagnosis insightful:
"In Europe, we have the impression that the political system has exhausted all its possibilities. We have the financial crisis, which is, for me, a structural, not a contingent, crisis of capitalism. (...) At the same time, we have ecological, demographic, and immigration problems. We are clearly at the end of something. Probably the end of modernity."
We are thus in a moment of transition, in which all possibilities are open, and the forms and categories we have used in recent decades to interpret political phenomena seem to lose their usefulness. We reluctantly accept new words to refer to movements that express these changes and check whether new political solutions fit the old definitions. It is therefore not surprising that the American philosopher Peter Boghossian devoted a section of his Spectrum Street Epistemology to the question of whether the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement is a conservative movement.
Since Donald Trump's turbulent entry into the Republican Party, the right wing in the United States has been undergoing transformation. Contrary to the more conservative movements that coexisted within it, MAGA representation has gained momentum and emerged as a reaction to the post-World War II consensus that established a politically and morally progressive vision, the technocratic establishment that marked the end of the 20th century, and, more recently, the excesses of Wokism that have taken hold in American society.
Advocating for a transformation of the system and society, the MAGA movement can hardly be considered part of the conservative tradition, which is why the party today seems to be condemned to a deep split between traditional conservatives and those who invoke the need for a more or less radical change in North American society and who, assuming different forms and inclinations, have come to be referred to as the "dissident right."
2 The dissident rightFor some authors, this right-wing dissent began during Barack Obama's first term with the creation of the Tea Party movement, which was concerned about the interventionist excesses of a president its members perceived as a socialist. However, it's possible that this movement should be seen more as a position of insurgency than dissent—that is, as a clamor seeking to reclaim the initial values of the 1773 protests.
The categorization as a dissident right seems to refer to a questioning of the very liberal paradigm that marked the birth of the United States, considering that liberalism has exhausted its resources or that liberalism itself produced the current state of affairs. The dissident right thus assumes an illiberal political dimension, and it is in this sense that the Alt-Right (the alternative right) was for a long time its reference, with its nativist foundations and its ties to Richard B. Spencer and Breitbar News. Steven Bannon is said to have been the link between this right and the first Donald Trump, with associations with conspiratorial positions, such as Q-Anon, and paramilitary groups, such as the Oath Keepers, who were allegedly involved in the January 6th riots.
Throughout Joe Biden's term, however, Trump has been forging new coalitions, bringing him closer to the Silicon Valley tech world and techno-libertarian ideas, often imbued with racial overtones. The choice of J.D. Vance as vice-presidential candidate could be interpreted as a result of these influences: despite being traditionally associated with conservative thought, Vance seems to link the world of finance and new technologies to more reactionary movements, as revealed by his reference to the intellectual Curtis Yarvin .
3 The Neo-ReactionariesCurtis Yarvin is the most popular figure in the Neo-Reactionary movement, known as NRx, which is based on Yarvin's writings as Mencius Moldbug , as well as Nick Land's manifesto on Dark Enlightenment . What connects all these figures is Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, who stated in a 2009 text : "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
What are the central ideas of this neo-reactionary movement?
On the one hand, those who subscribe to this movement reject the liberal democracy model, based on free elections and limited exercise of power. Conversely, they argue that, given the current challenges, new political solutions should be considered. Yarvin's proposal, following Hans-Hermann Hoppe's example, is the establishment of a kind of CEO-monarch, capable of governing the country as if it were a corporation, not necessarily in an authoritarian and exploitative manner, but ensuring the best results for the population (a kind of enlightened despot).
On the other hand, these thinkers subscribe to market capitalist logic, drawing on the anarcho-capitalist thinking that is very popular in the United States (and which Yanis Varoufakis has come to refer to as technofeudalism )—but which takes on a particularly relevant dimension here, considering technological developments: there is an almost religious belief in the potential of technology. In this sense, they are close to accelerationist ideas, which endorse the acceleration of capitalist mechanisms as a way to overcome their problems and aim for the absolute transformation of society.
Is this the "woke right" we discussed last week? No. While that term is intended to refer to the growth of an identitarian and pamphleteering digital discourse, this dissident right has conceptual and theoretical substance. The problem is that, despite having an equally minority position in American society, it has greater political and economic power to assert its ideas, which makes it more dangerous.
And if it doesn't come close to Alain de Benoist's old Nouvelle Droite , it seems to support his claim that modernity, and with it liberalism, will be coming to an end: these thinkers assume that the world is already in transition to a post-liberal paradigm. Are they right?
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