Class ContradictionsWhether one supports or opposes the various ideas on offer from the new right, it would be foolish to dismiss them out of hand.
By Matthew Schmitz
February 2, 2022
A guerilla war has broken out on the right. One side has institutional support; the other, intellectual energy. At stake is the future of the Republican Party, and perhaps the country.
The institutional right controls the largest think tanks, grant-making organizations, and magazines. It gives sinecures to some and denies them to others, thus punishing dissent and rewarding loyalty. Its network is extensive, its ideas are polished, its internal divisions regulated. It has every apparent advantage—and may be losing.
The insurgent new right has magazines and think tanks, but they tend to be smaller and of more recent vintage. They certainly have a more subversive spirit. The institutionalists praise free markets, individual liberty, and civil society with sober, lofty, and comforting words. The insurgents issue stinging polemics and cutting remarks as they champion postliberalism, integralism, national conservatism, and other strange new terms.
The movements these words represent diverge from each other and frequently clash, but the various elements of the new right share more than a common enemy. They all stress consolidation over dispersion, force over persuasion, communal belonging—national or religious—over individual autonomy.
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In every political formation, there is bound to be distance, sometimes very great, between the masses and the elites. But Greer and Adler-Bell overstate the new right’s contradictions and understate its potential appeal. It has a deep and abiding base of popular support in what Sam Francis called the “post-bourgeois proletariat,” people who live in, but are not fully part of, our managerial regime. Their outlook—described by Francis as “working-class anti-liberalism”—chimes with new right themes.
Post-bourgeois proletarians hate political correctness, not because they are principled defenders of free speech but because they resent the managerial class that creates and enforces the current speech codes. They resent the HR manager’s faith. They do not reject all pieties.
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This is why the health of the right depends on the insurgents winning. Bourgeois conceits do not correspond to the realities of life under a managerial regime. Opponents of managerialism must give voice to working-class anti-liberalism, mobilizing their base of support, or they will be no more effective than Don Quixote.
Whether one supports or opposes the various ideas on offer the new right—and it is impossible to support them all, for their internal divisions are real and deep—it would be foolish to dismiss them out of hand. Theories like integralism and post-liberalism may at times take on fantastical form, but they track the movements of real bodies. Like shadows in a film noir, they are distillations and exaggerations, expressing in stark terms truths that otherwise go unseen.
Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/class-contradictions/
