Jean-François Drolet on American conservatism, New Fusionism, Civilizationalism, and Right-wing Gramscianism

Thank you for joining us in this conversation, Jean-François. You have been working for years on the US Right, its evolutions, its interpretation of the international order, and its internationalization. In your article “The View from Mars: US Paleoconservatism and Ideological Challenges to the Liberal World Order,” you mention the broad dissatisfaction with the hegemony of liberal internationalism. Can you explain why this dissatisfaction is better effectuated in a political struggle on the American right than the left? This is not to say that there aren’t critics of liberal internationalism on the left, but what about the right’s political messaging or institutional makeup has allowed it to build an effective anti-liberal political movement?

Thanks for having me. Like other articles I published on the right in recent years, this is a piece I co-wrote with my close collaborator Michael C. Williams.  It was written in the context of a workshop on the future of liberal internationalism organized by Rita Abrahamsen at the University of Ottawa back in 2018. It feels like a long political time ago, but that stuff is even more relevant now than we anticipated at the time.

There is a long-standing tradition of conservative opposition to liberal internationalism in the United States. It goes back to at least the interwar period and has been characterized historically by hostility towards foreign interventionism, hostility towards increases in military expenditures, and hostility towards international organizations and multilateral cooperative frameworks. During the Cold War, the scope and character of this opposition was determined by a strong hostility towards communism. Conservative dissatisfaction with liberal internationalism today extends to global governance and the transformation of international law from a mechanism designed to regulate inter-state relations into a mechanism designed also to regulate the relationship between states and their citizens.  

But the modalities and extent of this hostility towards liberal internationalism can vary a great deal across different conservative factions. In “The View from Mars” and other works, we look more specifically at the paleoconservative movement as one of the most radical ideological expressions of this reaction against liberalism in American politics.  Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming coined the term paleoconservatism during the mid-1980s to designate a relatively eclectic group of traditional conservatives who felt increasingly alienated by the growing influence of neoconservatives within the Republican establishment since the late 1970s. Paleoconservatives were particularly concerned with the direction taken by the post-WWII conservative movement led by figures such as William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan.

In many ways, this increasingly well-organized movement had adopted much of the domestic agenda of the earlier anti-New Deal right, and it was extraordinarily successful in putting in place an extensive network of corporate funding, media platforms, and para-academic institutions to disseminate and promote its visions. But it broke with the positions of the Old Right by advocating free trade and an aggressive, internationalist, and interventionist foreign policy. In the eyes of paleoconservatives, key conservative institutions like Buckley’s National Review, the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Hudson Institute, and the Cato Institute had accommodated—and in some cases adopted—policies and positions that were antithetical to conservative principles and commitments to tradition, historical communities and the decentralization of political power.

Paleoconservatives hold neoconservatives largely responsible for this debasement of American conservatism and its accommodation with the globalism of the liberal left. In their eyes, neoconservatives have no problem promoting forms of international policy coordination that bind others through economic integration and liberal institutionalization, as long as the US is granted special prerogatives and exemptions from this process wherever it sees fit. The strategy is both wrong-headed and hypocritical insofar as it laments the erosion of American traditions and culture, while at the same time eliding the destructive role of economic neoliberal globalization in this process.

Why is this challenge to liberal internationalism better effectuated on the American right than the left? That’s a difficult question that cuts across several complex issues. Broadly speaking, I think it’s because the challenge is articulated on the terrain of identity politics, which suits the right much better than the left. The left has not abandoned its commitments to class politics, but since at least the 1970s these commitments have tended to intersect with—and often be eclipsed by—an identity politics that is largely individualist and tends to fragment progressive agendas into a variety of group-based struggles or issue-based social movements that do not always coalesce or find strength into supporting each other (multiculturalism, LBGT rights, feminism, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, decolonizing the university, the Occupy movement, etc.).

This is a politics that developed on the back of the cultural revolutions and political experiences of the 1960s and 1970s. It is largely transnational and globalist in its view of the world, and it is often seen to be self-righteous and contemptuous of those who resist its cosmopolitan values and ambitions. Its trajectory is generally associated with the agency of liberal-left, educated, and affluent activists whose influence in American politics since the 1970s is seen to have been achieved at the expense of labor representatives and Democratic Party diehards who used to represent the interests of the White working class and lower middle class. This creates all sorts of ideological and organizational difficulties for leftwing forces seeking to cultivate large, stable, and inclusive networks of solidarity targeting the perceived failures, shortcomings, and limitations of liberal internationalism.  

Unlike the left, which criticizes liberalism either for not delivering on its emancipatory promises or for not going far enough in its emancipatory ambitions, the right can attack liberalism at the level of its ideological foundations: individualism, cosmopolitanism, relativism, hedonistic materialism, etc.

Unlike the left, which criticizes liberalism either for not delivering on its emancipatory promises or for not going far enough in its emancipatory ambitions, the right can attack liberalism at the level of its ideological foundations: individualism, cosmopolitanism, relativism, hedonistic materialism, etc. Its identity politics is collectivist and articulated through resentment against liberalism that can be mobilized across a variety of dissatisfied social forces. As in leftwing critiques of liberalism, class plays a significant role. But the right typically transmutes materialist analyses of class politics into a question of collective will, expressed through symbolic and discriminatory markers of identity and difference such as ethnicity, race, nationality, gender, and sexuality.

Whereas Marxist theory typically locates the motives for collective action in reasoned class consciousness connected positively to claims about the direction of historical developments, the right focuses more explicitly on the emotions and feelings that generate and sustain this political consciousness in the face of powerful social dynamics. The enemy in this politics is not an abstract extractive logic driven by the profit motive of markets and bourgeois economics, but a mechanism of wilful exploitation associated with the concrete agency of liberal elites and their allies in increasingly “woke” corporations. This is the so-called “New Class” that allegedly pulls the levers of globalization, builds post-national structures of power and authority, and mobilizes huge national resources to conduct international policing operations and wage disastrous wars of interventions in places where the US has no vital security or economic interests.  

The appeal of the right in this context is that it provides clear narratives and identifies clear agents responsible for the relative decline of the United States in world politics, and for the erosion of historic communities and traditional networks of support in American society. The liberal left has been surprised by this challenge simply because of its conviction that liberalism (after the end of the Cold War) had achieved a decisive historical victory over its twentieth-century ideological competitors, if not through the strength of its own values and principles, then at least through the obvious shortcomings and failures of its rivals. This reflects its long-standing tendency to ignore, misunderstand, and underestimate the ideological and strategic resources of the radical right, not least its ability to adapt, re-articulate, and fuse old concepts and ideological narratives into new adversarial syntheses and forms of political action.

You also evoke New Fusionism. Can you tell our readers what you mean by that? How does it break from the original fusionism of Frank S. Meyer? If the precepts of market liberalism are now challenged, what is there to fuse to a traditional sense of morality? This is a timely question given the contradictory perceptions of market and state relations in the new Trump administration.

Meyer’s fusionism was a philosophical synthesis of market libertarianism and cultural-moral traditionalism embedded ideologically in the anti-communism of the Cold War. He developed it during the 1960s and it came to be associated with the political coalition between the Christian right, neoliberal free-marketeers, and neoconservatives that came to define the mainstream conservative movement between the 1970s and the late 1990s-early 2000s. This alliance was highly successful, generating a vast complex of conservative media platforms, think tanks, and other para-academic institutions promoting what its protagonists cast as a fusion of traditional moral “values” and neoliberal economics. This fusion informed the confrontational and expansionist conservative internationalism associated with the Reagan administration and the Bush administration’s war on terror. 

The New Fusionism is the term that paleoconservative historian Thomas Flemming and other critics used to challenge the conservative establishment during the 1990s. According to these critics, fusionism was a perversion of American conservatism that led to the underrepresentation of a large, culturally conservative, segment of American society. In this account, conservatism during the first half of the twentieth century emphasized notions of an entrepreneurial economy of privately owned and operated firms, of constitutionally limited central government matched by largely independent local and state government, and a moral and social code of individualism in politics, economy, art, religion, and ethics.  

Fusionism was a departure from this insofar as it sought an accommodation with large-scale corporate capitalism and the ever-expanding and centralizing bureaucratic establishment associated with the legacy of the New Deal, the growth of the military-industrial complex, and the Cold War agenda of the foreign policy establishment. Critics argue that despite its claims to represent the nation, the interests and objectives of this fusionist mainstream have always been broadly congenial to those of liberal internationalism and the Atlanticist elites of the Northeastern parts of the US: Wall Street, the Ivy League, and the large network of financial, media, and political institutions clustered around New York, Washington, and New England. And because the interests and worldview of this “pseudo” conservatism are so deeply embedded in the socio-political order pursued by these Atlanticist-globalist institutions, it has over the years alienated itself from the set of norms and cultural practices by which the large majority of Americans experience the everyday.

To the extent that we can talk of these ideological trends as a new fusionism, it brings together a loose coalition of forces that want to construct a robust economic nationalism based on protectionism and a much more conditional support for free markets. This economic nationalism seeks to enact industrial policies that reward domestic job creation (especially in manufacturing) and punish corporations seen to have betrayed Americans by outsourcing jobs, lobbying for trade liberalization, and supporting immigration. Isolationism in this context does not mean that the US should abandon its global strategic advantages and shut itself out from the rest of the world. It means that the US should remain militarily dominant, but that its international commitments should be decided based on the strategic importance of any potential engagement, with a particular focus on countering the perceived security threats posed by Iran, radical Islam, and China. This is supported culturally by an all-out war on left-leaning political correctness and “wokeism,” and the enacting of regulatory measures to protect family, religious, and traditional values.

I am skeptical that this agenda can provide the basis for a broad, stable, and long-lasting coalition extending across the US Right. I think tensions between conservative commitments to a traditional sense of morality and the right’s historical commitments to free markets are always going to be a source of instability given the deep structures of interests and powerful sectors of transnational business and elite opinion shaping American politics. The conflict between MAGA economic nationalist ideologues like Steve Bannon and the tech oligarchs is an obvious case in point.  

In another of your articles, “Radical Conservativism and Global Order: International Theory and the New Right,” you discuss the theoretical basis for the emergent right that is taking power across the world. Western radical-right parties have a tendency to hold Western values up as being superior, and yet they use liberalism’s inherent contradictions to undermine its institutions. How should we make sense of this contradiction?

Many right-wing forces in Western liberal democracies typically argue that liberalism has undermined the substantive values that have underpinned the meaningful lives of its societies for centuries. These are values and principles that allegedly sustained social solidarity and provided a basis for decisions on accepted legal and moral principles. They include norms of collective self-determination, sovereignty, nationalism, Christian moral codes, and the sort of risk-taking entrepreneurialism that many associate with the technological, economic, and geopolitical superiority of the European/Western civilization. In this view, decades of liberal multiculturalism, affirmative action, feminism, open borders, and mindless consumerism have created a situation in which older, decentralized identities of particular social classes, communities, and religious and ethnic groups can no longer effectively mobilize populations for collective political action.

Some see this process of decline in the changing nature of liberalism itself. If classical liberalism emphasized self-government, the separation of powers, and the importance of protecting civil society and markets from state intervention, contemporary liberalism is primarily concerned with policing political correctness, “decolonizing” school curricula, integrating migrants, providing social services and welfare benefits, enforcing the rights of minorities, and promoting globalist cosmopolitan structures of governance that can limit the power of national governments and the right of national publics to effectively and democratically support particularist values.

These historical dynamics open possibilities for conservative attacks on liberalism and its managerial networks of global governance and interests. By emphasizing the perceived disconnect between power and purpose associated with the economic and cultural dislocations caused by liberal globalization, the right sees an opportunity to mobilize traditional culture to reactionary ends, while at the same time seeking to reintroduce social meaning through cultural politics.

The thinkers of the original New Right such as James Burnham viewed liberalism as more dangerous than communism due to the “managerial revolution” and the “New Class.” Can you describe what these terms meant to conservative thinkers of the 1960s? How do the ideological implications of those original conclusions influence radical right intellectuals today? Are they complimentary or in opposition to the operating assumptions that exist within older thinkers like Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Spengler?

Burnham was a Trotskyist who broke with Trotsky and Marxism during the late 1930s and went on to become one of the leading public intellectuals of the postwar American Right. In The Managerial Revolution (1942), Burnham sought to identify the main characteristics of the new mass societies which he saw emerging around the world and perceived important similarities between the political-economic formations of Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, and the United States under Roosevelt and New Deal liberalism. He argued that the bourgeoisie that dominated the society and politics of the nineteenth century had been displaced from power not by Marx’s proletariat, but by a “New Class” elite of managers and technicians who possessed the skills and expertise required to direct the large-scale organizations typical of the economy and the mass bureaucratic state that the bourgeoisie had created.

According to Burnham, one of the main socio-economic phenomena driving these global transformations was the rise of large publicly traded corporations owned by widely dispersed stockholders who may have no interest or input in how the company operates so long as their investment remains profitable. Conversely, the decision-makers and technical experts hired by owners to run and oversee the daily operation of such companies need not own a single share of stock in the business. Through this separation of ownership from control of the economy, the new managerial elite was able to make its goals predominate over those of shareholders. These goals consisted primarily in maintaining and extending the institutions that it controlled, and in ensuring that the needs for and rewards of the technical skills managers possess were steadily increased.

Burnham perceived that not only industrial establishments but also state agencies and all other significant organizations were being taken over by this New Class of managerial professionals, who pursued their own interests at the expense of the wider public good. He saw that, unlike the authoritarian strands that prevailed in communist and fascist regimes, elites in liberal-democratic societies tended to rely on the manipulation of cultural symbols, desires, and material incentives (rather than force) to acquire and exercise managerial power. Just as the old liberalism rationalized bourgeois interests, the new managerial liberalism provided the emerging New Class with the ideological combination of utopianism, meliorism, scientism, secularism, hedonism, and cosmopolitanism that reflected and justified the functional imperatives of the managerial revolution: the merger of state and economy, the centralization of government at the expense of local authority and mediating institutions, the diffusion of mass education, consumerism, and the mass media.

One of the core claims sustaining this analysis is that managerialism as a form of socio-political power is intrinsically globalist. This is mainly because of the opportunities that technological innovation offers to address a wide variety of political and developmental challenges in a global arena unregulated by a central enforcing authority. In this account, NATO, the World Bank, the WTO, the OSCE, the UN, USAID, and all of these agencies involved in the merger of security and development after the end of the Cold War and in the context of the global war on terror are all part of this self-serving managerial complex of liberal expertise and interests.

Many aspects of this global managerial diagnostic were already anticipated in Burnham. In The Managerial Revolution, Burnham argued that the new managerial societies emerging out of the conflicts and mass politics of the twentieth century would not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped around large industrial centers (this provided much of the inspiration for the world order vision in George Orwell’s novel 1984). Spengler, Schmitt, and Jünger also made congenial arguments in their interwar and postwar writings on the reign of technology, technocracy, and the future of the sovereign nation-state. For all these thinkers, the sovereign nation-state was increasingly maladjusted to the changing techno-economic, political, and cultural realities of the late-modern age. For better or for worse, the future belonged to much larger scale forms of spatial orderings, complexes, and arrangements.

You recently co-authored World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order. In it, you and your colleagues discuss the issue of rhetorical unity in different domestic political contexts. How does populism’s “thinness,” alongside the necessity to think globally, influence the tenor of international right-wing conferences like CPAC and NatCon?

Conferences like CPAC and NatCon, and other gatherings like the Madrid Forum and the Tranzit Festival in Hungary bring together right-wing movements, delegates, politicians, ideologues, and cultural enablers that are often far from united in their ideas and politics.  But these are political agents who have understood that to pursue their own respective agenda at the national level they need to cooperate more systematically in the global arena to undermine the liberal institutions, norms, and networks of interests that stand in the way of a right-wing transformation of contemporary politics and international relations. The political strategies of these right-wing forces target diverse audiences at many different venues and through a wide variety of media and techniques of communication. Most of them are nationalist (although this can take many forms) and populist in the sense that they seek to unify disparate groups by articulating equivalences and common understandings of their marginalization under conditions of globalization and global liberal governance.

These highly mediatized gatherings also have an important performative dimension insofar as their international character can bestow an appearance of importance to right-wing groups that may otherwise be relatively marginal in their home countries. They are demonstrating unity in ways that solidify the image of the radical right as a movement with power, purpose, and momentum.

In the second chapter, which discusses right-wing Gramscianism, you describe Gramsci’s war of position as lacking in leadership but not in logic. How then does the international right operate under a central logic across myriad cultural contexts? And if the right were to reflect on this, what would they say their unifying logic is? Can you also describe how the right seemingly engages with the notion of hegemony while also, in some respects, rejecting it?

Gramsci’s war of position refers to a political situation in which diverse counter-hegemonic forces operate fluidly to weaken the existing order and build the intellectual, cultural, and institutional foundations for the alternative order that these counter-hegemonic forces wish to put in place. Gramsci in this context developed the idea of spontaneous struggles operating beyond the guiding control of the Communist Party or any central directing agent. In many cases, such struggles express themselves as somewhat random and strictly reactive revolts against the existing order and are therefore unlikely to be effective. But they can become part of movements with real political power if that opposition is given a more cohesive sense of itself and its situation, as well as an understanding of its adversaries. Ideologues and what Gramsci called “organic intellectuals” can play a key role in this respect.

We show in the book that the right, in many parts of the world, has selectively appropriated aspects of the Gramscian conceptual and strategic framework. The unifying logic here is simply the struggle against global liberal managerialism. By narrating the global history of liberal elitism and identifying the tensions and contradictions of the existing political orders with the concrete agency of the liberal enemy, right-wing ideologues provide a broad focus of opposition that can give political rationality to the sense of alienation and ressentiment amongst those who are presented as the predominant victims of liberal positions and exercises of power. Just as Gramscian theory sought to transform the proletariat from an analytic or sociological class in-itself into a politically self-conscious and active class for-itself, the right seeks to foster ethnic, class, race, or group self-consciousness to create agents capable of challenging liberal orders.

Just as Gramscian theory sought to transform the proletariat from an analytic or sociological class in-itself into a politically self-conscious and active class for-itself, the right seeks to foster ethnic, class, race, or group self-consciousness to create agents capable of challenging liberal orders.

The formula is sufficiently vague and open-ended to be articulated in a wide variety of registers across different cultural contexts. It can target different kinds of capital, state forms, and representations of elites and subordinate groups (migrants, refugees, minorities) said to be benefiting from liberal managerialism at the expense of the existing majority culture. In this framing, the main line of conflict is no longer between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie (or between social-democratic advocates of the welfare state and the defenders of finance capitalism), but between those who wish to preserve and deepen liberal infrastructures of global governance and those who want to dismantle these infrastructures to conserve traditions, inherited communities, and their sources of authority.

There is no clear consensus among the diverse right-wing forces converging around this counter-hegemonic challenge regarding what sort of world order should replace what is generally referred to as the liberal international order. Broadly speaking, most alternative geopolitical imaginaries on the right tend to revolve around visions of a non-hegemonic world order based on the implementation of protectionist, neo-mercantilist (or in some cases autarkic) policies in several states, and the division of the world into spheres of influences. While some see a re-assertion of the nation-state as the key feature of this postliberal world order, others argue for the creation of larger federated units best suited to operate in the economic and geopolitical environment of the twenty-first century. What is common to most positions is an emphasis on the importance of recognizing differences and regulating for a strong degree of political separation between cultures, nations, and ethnic groups. 

In the final chapter, you and your co-authors discuss how the right, while influenced by social science and IR theory, ventures to create a new path vis-à-vis civilizations, which exist in a fractured, multipolar world. How do Western rights contend with this idea, either explicitly or subtly? And given the recent interest in non-intervention, how can those thinkers and political actors expect to uphold quasi- or outright isolationism?

At the most general level, much of all this resonates with the “clash of civilizations” theses developed by the likes of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington in the late 1980s and 1990s. But this civilizational mode of geopolitical thinking goes much further back in the intellectual history of the radical right, especially in Europe. In its current iteration, the argument rests on the claim that American decline, the perceived failures of liberalism, and the rise of China, India, and other non-Western illiberal states have created the conditions for a re-organization of the world order into regional blocs under the leadership of great powers claiming to represent not just particular nations or groups of nations but distinct civilizations. In this vision, civilizationalism is a geopolitical project to be realized—a postmodern (or post-postmodern) attempt to create a sense of continuity and evolution from past origins that can provide ideological support to forward-looking modes of ethno-political socialization. 

In the most radical versions of this narrative (in the writings of Alain De Benoist, Guillaume Faye, or Alexander Dugin for example), each civilizational bloc is to evolve and develop according to its own spiritual, political, and epistemological belief system. There is no universal history or common ethical globality here. Civilizations are culturally and metaphysically incommensurable—i.e. they have few or no common standards of judgment and measurement. This vision echoes or/and builds on the “differentialist” anthropologies developed and promoted by the French and European New Right since the 1980s and 1990s. I suspect your readers will be familiar with this. Differentialism emphasizes the diversity of cultures, ethnic groups, and races. It advocates substantial separation between them while insisting on the absence of objective criteria for determining a normative hierarchy between different ethnicities, races, and cultural communities. The aim is to preserve what its thinkers see as a healthy degree of cultural pluralism while at the same time pushing back against liberal multiculturalism, cultural hybridization, and miscegenation.

You are right to be skeptical about the possibility of coexistence in this differentialist vision of segregated cultures and civilizations. These accounts of cultural and civilizational diversity are disingenuously narrow, and they leave very little room for diplomatic structures of interaction that could mediate between worldviews—or that could constrain the exercise of power based on rational, objectified frameworks such as international law, multilateral security networks, or shared institutional structures of strategic stability. It’s not at all clear to me that legalistic norms of state sovereignty and non-intervention are so important to these civilizational visions, other than as devices to attack liberal internationalism, human rights, and other universalist programs. What seems to be more central are notions of spheres of influence, continental blocs, great power prerogative,s and regional policing responsibilities defined in cultural or ethnic-racial terms. Isolationism in this context means a disengagement from international institutions and networks of multilateral cooperation, but not necessarily an unwillingness to intervene when allies are under attack, or where national or civilizational interests are being challenged. 

But as I said, this is an ideological project rather than a political reality. In the present conjunctures, the significance of these alternative visions of world order lies more in the strategic articulations and broad transversal coalitions they enable between movements, social forces, and states capable of realigning international politics in explicitly anti-liberal directions. In recent years, for example, the “differentialist” standpoint underpinning these civilizational discourses has facilitated the articulation of often ambiguous but powerful ideological equivalences between right-wing counter-hegemonic positions and those of other authoritarian, traditionalist or subaltern forces across the North-South and East-West divides. It has also allowed the radical right in some contexts to find common cause with illiberal states, such as Russia and China, who advocate a more multipolar world.

I now want to close with the question we always ask, which is about the concept of illiberalism. Do you think that a term like illiberalism has utility for describing the political trends we are seeing today, or should we be content with the traditional formulations of New Right or radical-right parties?

The term illiberalism is very useful in capturing different aspects of the ideological landscape in contemporary politics and international relations. It is particularly useful when discussing authoritarian regimes or ideological forces and parties in non-Western parts of the world where the historical Left-Right dichotomy does not always translate particularly well—or when referring to right-wing positions articulated as a response to the perceived failures of previous liberal-democratic policies and experiments. But using it more generally to describe what we conventionally call radical-right parties and ideologies in the Western world risks eliding the important elements of historical continuity with the politics and ideological traditions of the twentieth century. For me, the concept of illiberalism is there to complement rather than to supersede our existing analytical tools, allowing us to better capture complex and ongoing ideological transformations associated with different challenges to liberal politics around the world. 

---

Jean-François Drolet…