August 28, 2006 Issue
Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative

Paul Gottfried

Defining the Right may be easier than defining the Left. The Right resists the Left with determination, however the Left may define itself at a given point in time. It is not hard to locate a place on the Right for the octagenarian warrior against feminism, immigration, and alternative lifestyles Phyllis Schlafly. But the same cannot be done so easily for David Brooks, the New York Times’ “conservative columnist,” who favors gay marriage and liberal immigration and who is now talking up Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate.

The Right is not just a watered-down version of its antithesis. It is passionately against the Left and in favor of what is intact of a bourgeois Christian society. But the Left—marshalling mostly united armies of the media, educational establishment, and entertainment industry—has been able to create its own opposition. Thus the media establishment has given lots of coverage and newspaper columns to neoconservative critics, who accept most of the same picture of social and historical progress as the one embraced by the acknowledged left-center. By this duplication of itself as an oppositional force, the Left has removed from discussion the kinds of questions that only the real Right would engage. It can therefore limit debate to secondary issues, such as whether our borders are to be protected less negligently once illegals are granted de facto amnesty, without having to bring up such fundamental questions as the value of defending an inherited cultural identity in the U.S.

The true Right has covered a wide historical terrain depending on the type of Left that it has had to confront. In the interwar period, at least some elements of the European bourgeoisie rallied to fascist movements, which were thought to be able to oppose the Communists and other revolutionary leftists better than the weakened parliamentary governments of the time. In Spain and Austria, the bourgeoisie were generally correct in the 1930s to support the authoritarian Right as the lesser of two evils; in Mussolini’s Italy, bourgeois supporters of the fascist government may have been justified in their initial endorsement of the “fascist revolution,” given the history of anarchist violence that had given rise to the revolutionary Right. In Germany, however, a different situation existed. There the Nazis did not furnish a bulwark against organized violence and, like the Communists, were a variation on the anti-bourgeois forces of political and moral upheaval.

The Right that has survived no longer talks, in the manner of Latin fascists, about a corporate economy and a national revolution. It is in fact critical of government overreach and generally favors local control over political life. But what makes this Right what it is today is its reaction to the democratic welfare state as a vehicle of leftist change.

Another defining characteristic of the Right is its distinctiveness in relation to conservatism. The term “conservative” has lost any specific or long-term meaning and has been extended to leftist projects such as conquering the world for human rights. But at one time that term did have a grounded meaning, for example, when Edmund Burke and his continental counterparts resisted the French Revolution, as defenders of a traditional society, an established church, and a monarchy. The organically developed, historical rights that these textbook conservatives defended belonged to a bygone world, even if these thinkers, as social theorist Robert Nisbet spent much of his life arguing, still deserve our respect.

In the 19th century, the bourgeoisie assumed the work of defending nation states, a market economy, and strong nuclear families. The bourgeoisie would eventually give life to the modern Right as well. This would happen when those traditions came under attack, first from revolutionary socialists, then from democratic administration, and most recently from the multicultural Left.

“Right” and “conservative” are sometimes applied interchangeably, but these terms of reference do not share the same genealogy. Conservative is the now anachronistic description of a contemporary political side, one that, like its official opposition, is social democratic in its beliefs. The Right, by contrast, denotes an existing but weakened political force.

A key dividing line between the Right and other political positions is its appeal to the people in opposition to political elites. In The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch exemplifies this right-wing populism. Lasch exudes praise for “the people,” who seem drawn from a 1950s vignette of a Catholic working-class family. His ideal wife is depicted as packing her husband’s lunch pail and then preparing her offspring for their departure to parochial school. Against this charming but archaic conception of “the people,” Lasch portrays the elites who are besotted with vice and have no attachments to either nations or communities. The question that is never posed, and one that right-wing populists studiously avoid, is how did this Catholic working-class family permit social degenerates to take power? And why do they waste their hard-earned money on consumerist products produced by those whom they are supposed to despise?

The major change that the Left has undergone over the last 30 years is the replacement of an economically-oriented socialist persuasion by a multicultural one. Up until the 1960s, the Left invoked Marxism or some more diluted, gradualist road to socialism. This Left was not necessarily concerned with feminist or gay issues. The present Left, by contrast, accentuates lifestyle radicalism. It even urges the state to punish those who hold reactionary moral views. The updated Left plays down such old-style socialist goals as nationalizing productive forces, and it favors the market when commerce can be used to break down regional and national barriers and to achieve cultural diversity.

The current Left swoons over Third World immigrants, a group whom it celebrates as a source of cultural enrichment. It is also willing to tax its majority European population to pay for the cultural comfort and social services of those whom it happily welcomes from the Third World. But these gestures should not be equated with recrudescent Stalinism or authentic European socialism. The Left assumed a new identity when its working-class base began to dwindle and when it traded that base for yuppies and self-assertive Third World constituencies. The Left then proceeded to move in a culturally radical direction, a development whose consequences we are now seeing. 

Paul Gottfried is professor of the humanities at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of The Strange Death of Marxism.

August 28, 2006 Issue