Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
Page 19
out of the American “New Left.” The journal’s stance became increasingly
close to the French New Right during the 1990s. Its founder, Paul Piccone,
asserted during his presentation of the special issue dedicated to the French
New Right that it was not a threat and that it was necessary to engage with
it in a dialog. 39 Following the publication of this issue, the exchange took
place, not with Faye but with Alain de Benoist. If Faye shared some of the
reference points of the American New Left (e.g., Jürgen Habermas, Carl
Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger), he had different views not only on the
question of power, whose instrumental reason, he believed, can act as a
tool, but also on the question of racism. Paul Piccone supported the idea of
the New Right as a sort of “new New Left,” yet GRECE had nothing leftist,
since it only used the revolutionary- national strategy of the Far Left of the
Far Right.40 An author who was favorable to GRECE, Michael Torigian,41
published an article on the New Right in Telos in 1999.
Since his return to political activism, Faye has remained a key the-
orist of nativism. His dismissal of Islam and Arab Muslim migration
met a favorable public in the US, where the radical Right has been sen-
sitive to this issue since 9/ 11. Like Alain de Benoist, Faye and the French
New Right have been reading American thinkers since the creation of
GRECE in 1968, despite their anti- Americanism.42 These readings have
given birth to a reciprocal exchange of intellectual reference points and
discussions.
Notes
1. Guillaume Faye, L’Archéofuturisme (Paris: L’Æncre, 1998), 42– 43.
2. Ibid.
3. Pierre- André Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle Droite: Jalons d’une analyse critique
(Paris: Descartes & Cie, 1994), 205.
4. Guillaume Faye, “Les Titans et les Dieux: Entretien avec G. Faye,” Antaïos 16
(2001): 116.
5. Ibid., 116.
6. Guillaume Faye, “Le G.R. E. C. E. et la conquête du pouvoir des idées,”
Pour un Gramscisme de droite: Actes du XVIe colloque national du GRECE
(Paris: GRECE, 1978).
7. Nouvelle École, August- September 1968, 86, published the list of the founders
of GRECE.
8. Anne- Marie Duranton- Crabol, Visages de la Nouvelle droite: le GRECE et son
histoire (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1988); Pierre- André Taguieff, Sur la
10
100
M O D E R N T H I N K E R S
Nouvelle droite: Jalons d’une analyse critique (Paris: Descartes & Cie, 1994);
Stéphane François, Les Néo- paganismes et la Nouvelle Droite ( 1980– 2006): Pour
une autre approche (Milan: Archè, 2008).
9. Stéphane François, Les Paganismes et la Nouvelle Droite; Pierre Verdrager, L’Enfant
interdit: Comment la pédophilie est devenue scandaleuse (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013).
10. Faye, L’Archéofuturisme, 10– 11.
11. Ibid., 66.
12. Ibid., 168.
13. Guillaume Faye, Sexe et idéologie (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1983), 25.
14. Faye, L’Archéofuturisme, 103.
15. Guillaume Faye, “Pour en finir avec la civilisation occidentale,” Éléments pour la
civilisation européenne 34 (1980): 5– 11; Le Système à tuer les peuples (Paris: Copernic,
1981); La NSC, la nouvelle société de consommation (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1984);
L’Occident comme déclin (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1984); Nouveau discours à la nation
européenne (Paris: Albatros, 1985).
16. Guillaume Faye, Pourquoi nous combattons: manifeste de la résistance européenne
(Paris: L’Æncre, 2001), 73.
17. Faye, Nouveau discours à la nation européenne, 106.
18. Faye, Pourquoi nous combattons, 113.
19. Ibid., 117.
20. Ibid., 76.
21. Ibid., 118.
22. Ibid., 78.
23. Ibid., 20– 21.
24. Ibid., 55– 56.
25. Ibid., 57.
26. Guillaume Corvus (pseudonym), La convergence des catastrophes (Paris: Diffusion
International Éditions, 2004).
27. Faye, Pourquoi nous combattons, 69.
28. Corvus, La Convergence des catastrophes, 201.
29. Guillaume Faye, Le Système à tuer les peuples, translated into Italian as Il sistema per
uccidere i popoli (Milan: Edizioni dell’uomo libero, 1983) and Il sistema per uccidere
i popoli (Milan: Società editrice Barbarossa, 1997); Faye, La NSC, translated into
Italian as La Nuova Societa dei consumi (Milan: Edizioni dell’uomo libero, 1985);
Faye, Nouveau discours à la nation européenne, translated into German as Rede an
die europäische Nation (Tübingen: Hohenrain, 1990); Faye, Les Nouveaux enjeux
idéologiques (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985), translated into German as Die neuen
ideologischen Herausforderung, en Mut zur Identität: Alternativen zum Prinzip der
Gleichheit (Struckum: Verlag für ganzheitliche Forschung und Kultur, 1988);
Guillaume Faye, Pierre Freson, and Robert Steuckers, Petit lexique du partisan
10
Guillaume Faye and Archeofuturism
101
européen (Esneux: Eurograf, 1985), translated into Spanish as Pequeño léxico
del militante europeo (Valencia: Iskander, 1996), and Pequeño léxico del partisano
europeo (Barcelona: Nueva Republica, 2012).
30. The “symposia of Athens” organized by Jason Hadjinas between 1982
and 1985.
31. On European- Arab links organized by the University of Mons in 1985.
32. Stéphane François, Au- delà des vents du Nord: L’extrême droite française, le
pôle nord et les Indo- Européens (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2014),
233– 245.
33. Faye, Pourquoi nous combattons, 119.
34. Ibid., 128.
35. Greg Johnson (2010), “Project Septentrion: The Last Line of Defense,” Counter-
Currents 2010, accessed July 11, 2017, http:// www.counter- currents.com/ 2010/
08/ project- septentrion.
36. “En français,” Racial Nationalist Library, accessed August 8, 2017, http:// library.
flawlesslogic.com/ french.htm.
37. Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism (London: Arktos Media, 2010); Why We
Fight: Manifesto of European Resistance (London: Arktos Media, 2011);
Convergences of Catastrophes (London: Arktos Media, 2012); Sex and Deviance
(London: Arktos Media, 2014); The Colonisation of Europe (London: Arktos
Media, 2016); Archeofuturism 2.0 (London: Arktos Media, 2016); Understanding
Islam (London: Arktos Media, 2017).
38. Archéofuturisme was translated into Spanish as El Arqueofuturismo
(Barcelona: Titania, 2008) and into Italian as L’Archeofuturismo (Milan: Società
editrice Barbarossa, 2000); Pourquoi nous combattons was translated into
German as Wofür wir kämpfen: Manifest des europäischen Widerstandes: das
metapolitische Hand- und Wörterbuch der kulturellen Revolution zur Neugeburt
Europas (Kassel: Ahnenrad der Moderne, 2006) and into Czech as
Pročbojujeme: manifest evropského odporu: metapolitický slovník (Prague: Delsky
potapěč, 2016).
39. Paul Piccone, “The French New Right: New Right– New Left– New Paradigm?”
Telos 98– 99 (Winter 1993).
40. Stéphane François, 2014, Au- delà des vents du Nord: L’extrême droite français
e, le
Pôle nord et les Indo- Européens (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2014).
41. Torigian was close to the European- American radical Right and wrote in the
white- supremacist press under the pseudonym of Michael O’Meara.
42. For example, Paul Gottfried, Raymond Cattell, Arthur Jensen, Donald Swan,
Wesley George, Roger Pearson, Kevin MacDonald, Roger Griffin, Samuel
Francis, and Jared Taylor.
102
7
Paul Gottfried and
Paleoconservatism
Seth Bartee
PA U L G O T T F R I E D I S the founder of the “paleoconservative” wing of
the American conservative movement, and the author of twelve books
dealing with subjects as broad as conservatism in the US, European in-
tellectual history, fascism, the German jurist Carl Schmidt, and the
German- Jewish émigré political philosopher Leo Strauss. Gottfried is a
late second- generation postwar conservative intellectual who began pub-
lishing monographs in the 1980s. He did not belong to the early forma-
tive years that saw the publication of books such as Russell Kirk’s The
Conservative Mind, Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, and Leo
Strauss’s Natural Right and History.1 By the late 1970s and 1980s, neo-
conservative intellectuals and Protestant activists challenged the tradi-
tionalist ideas that animated the works of Russell Kirk and the Southern
Agrarian wing of the Right.2 The traditionalism of Kirk and the Agrarian
wing often gathered around ideas such as regionalism, the enduring value
of Western civilization, and the role of Christianity as it was animated
in the structure of the Roman Catholic Church. Neoconservatives and
Protestant evangelicals were committed to broadening the appeal of the
Republican Party and the ideology of conservatism beyond its tradition-
alist roots, which Gottfried disliked. The traditionalists were often associ-
ated with Watergate, and opposition to the New Deal and the Civil Rights
Act of 1964. Although the conservative movement in America could date
its beginnings only to the immediate post– Second World War years, the
neoconservatives, according to Gottfried, were destroying vital intellectual
103
Paul Gottfried and Paleoconservatism
103
elements of the traditionalist wing of the Right. These necessary elements
included the Right’s capacity to argue from history, or within a tradition,
without having to rely on the progressivism of the American Left. This
might include an American southerner’s right to defend the primacy
of antebellum southern culture without being labeled a bigot or racist.
Gottfried is troubled by the fact that conservatives have adopted and mod-
ified identity politics for their purposes, which also means that they now
are no different from the leftist politics of the Democratic Party.3
Postwar conservatism
American conservatism prior to Ronald Reagan included many different
strands. Additionally, early conservative intellectuals in the late 1940s
and 1950s were often disconnected from American politics. Russell Kirk
was not seriously involved in American politics until the campaign of
Barry Goldwater in 1964. The émigré wing of conservatism included
the likes of the historian Eric Voegelin and the Catholic thinker Thomas
Molnar, and also the Southernist Richard Weaver, who were never ter-
ribly public about their politics in the US. This changed in the 1960s
after the defeat of Goldwater in 1964 and following the conclusion of
the Vietnam War. The neoconservatives, who were often ex- Marxist
and Jewish, popularized their brand of conservatism in publications
such as the Wall Street Journal and Commentary, using their influence
to move conservatism from an isolationist stance on foreign policy to
one that was determined to bring an end to communism abroad. For
decades, it was thought by most historians and observers that conserv-
atism was a monolithic entity. But during the presidency of George
W. Bush, conservatives began to reveal the fracture that had existed for
decades because of disagreement about both the Second War in Iraq
and Bush’s embrace of “compassionate conservatism” as espoused by
neoconservatives and Protestant evangelicals.4
Gottfried’s life
There is a small irony in Paul Gottfried not becoming a neoconservative
intellectual, although he claims there is nothing ironic about his choice.
The stereotypical neoconservative is a well-
educated Jewish former
Marxist who rejected the Marxism associated with Stalin in favor of
an anticommunism which did not include the regionalisms of the old
104
104
M O D E R N T H I N K E R S
Right. More broadly, “neoconservative” came to mean those conserva-
tive intellectuals affiliated with the rise of Ronald Reagan and both Bush
presidencies. During the 1960s, neoconservatives broke ranks with the
Democratic Party once it began to identify with the New Left, the coun-
terculture, and a foreign policy considered to be anti- Israeli.5 In a 1980
article in Commentary, Midge Decter argued that many of the liberation
movements, especially gay liberation, had found a way to upend bour-
geois morality for heterosexual men by freely flaunting their liberated
lifestyles in front of families.6 While the neoconservatives were opposed
to these new radical movements, they belonged to an urban culture that
many of the first American New Right thinkers such as Russell Kirk and
Mel Bradford had abandoned long before. Kirk was most open in his
opposition to urban living in his books where he celebrated himself as
a “northern agrarian” living in the “stump country” near the Canadian
Lakes region of Michigan.7
Gottfried does not easily fit into either category of neoconservative or
traditionalist. He was not raised in the countryside or in a thriving metrop-
olis but in the manufacturing city of Bridgeport, Connecticut.8 This fact
alone might not seem like an important detail except that the founding ne-
oconservative intellectuals, such as Irving Kristol, often considered the fa-
ther of neoconservatism, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Norman Podhoretz
all grew up in Brooklyn and remained within the New York intellectual
scene. It is also worth mentioning that the neoconservatives were also in-
timate with the New York literati as a result of their work in the Partisan
Review and through teaching affiliations in New York City.9 Gottfried’s up-
bringing in a working- class, white ethnic neighborhood produced more
difference than likeness with neoconservatives.10 Yet, Gottfried’s family
was not without means; he reports that his father was a respected busi-
nessman and a fire commissioner in Bridgeport. Gottfried’s father was
from Budapest, part of his family having come from Austria. This meant
that the young Gottfried grew up familiar with the German language, and
he has published widely in German and English.11
Gottfried earned a bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva University in
New York City. At Yeshi
va, he studied rabbinic law, as well as New York
Jewish culture.12 Following graduation from Yeshiva, he found him-
self a graduate student at Yale, where he reported never feeling quite at
home. In his autobiography, Encounters, he writes, “I . . . have remained
a Hebrew rather than Rabbinic Jew or a passionate Zionist. . . . The Jews,
mostly from New York, raged with anger against the ‘fascist’ war of
105
Paul Gottfried and Paleoconservatism
105
president Lyndon Johnson, but when the Six-Days War between Israel and
its neighbors erupted, they became a vocal war party.”13 For Gottfried, the
neoconservatives represented the many ironies of both conservatism and
being an American Jew on the Right. On the one hand, a Jewish conserv-
ative had everything an individual of a traditionalist persuasion needed,
with a history that went all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia and
its pastoral patriarchs, but a progressive impulse seemed to keep them
from embracing the traditionalism of the New Right. The celebration of
customary practices that often defined the work of traditionalists was ab-
sent from the ex- Marxist wing of conservatism. Mostly, Gottfried’s grad-
uate school days at Yale were “uneventful,” and the only life- changing
associations at the institution were his connection with the Yale Party of
the Right and time studying with Herbert Marcuse of Frankfurt School
fame.14
Early career and the Bradford affair
Gottfried’s path from a self- described Republican Party activist to a pale-
oconservative is a twofold journey. Gottfried struggled to find academic
work because of his traditionalism, as described in Encounters.15 Later,
his opinions on social issues and foreign policy made him suspect to ne-
oconservative academics because of his criticisms of the politics of the
Republican Party, and his eventual affiliation with Telos in the 1980s and
1990s. The Telos group formed in 1968 as a New Left publication and
group, only to turn toward conservatism by the 1980s and 1990s. Telos, led
by Paul Piccone, for many years hosted a flurry of well- known intellectuals
including both Christopher Lasch and Gottfried, who were not members