The Age of Revanchism
Wherein I discuss the Regime's campaign of revenge against dissident insurgents…
A great deal of territory has been lost, perhaps irrecoverably—but those who have lost it are keen to take it back.
This, I think, is the crucial point to remember about our age, and it is one that many are all too apt to forget or overlook in the first place. It’s also a point that bears incessant repeating: the twenty-first century was to be a century of unchallenged left-liberal hegemony, an end-of-history utopia that had been foretold by the liberal millenarians of the nineties.
And then, at a time and a place of its own choosing, history reasserted itself with a vengeance, and thereby dashed the fondest hopes of all the smug prophets of liberal democracy. Perhaps it really did begin on that beautiful Tuesday morning in September of 2001, with the toppling of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City; certainly, that was when the first cracks in the foundation of the Western world began to manifest themselves, with the Patriot Acts and forever wars and Departments of Homeland Security and TSAs and airline security theater.
Or maybe it was the housing crash, the collapse of Enron, and the financial crises of 2008? Was it Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump? Or was it the further slippage of the mask in 2020—the Year of COVID and the undisguised, naked authoritarianism of the liberal democracies?
Maybe it was all of these things—or maybe they were merely the symptoms of the underlying sickness. Greater minds than mine have argued over this issue, and will doubtless continue to do so for a long time to come. What matters is that the fissures and widening fractures in the pillars supporting the liberal empire—that which is called the “Cathedral” by followers of Yarvin, or “the Eye of Sauron” by certain other wits—are now too obvious to ignore. The contradictions, the inconsistencies, the hypocrisies, the lies and subterfuge and blatant criminality that have always underlain this regime are exposed for all to see, like the bloated, wriggling things uncovered by the sudden removal of a rock.
The response, salutary and healthful, has been a revelation to behold. Right-wing movements, which are the only true and principled opposition to the regnant left-liberal regime that has achieved a near-total global empery, have taken shape, gathered strength, outlined plans and ideas for the future, and in some cases found success and even power. The growth of the real Right has been fitful and uncertain to begin with, and that is not entirely unexpected—after all, like an atrophied limb, it has proven taxing to flex the proper muscles after long disuse. A long and arduous process of rediscovery and relearning has ensued, but new technologies—primarily the internet, social media, and new publishing and film production enterprises—have drastically cut down on the time required for the intellectual rehabilitation of the Right in the wake of that decades-long, post-war torpor during which the liberal regime has reigned supreme.
In Western Europe, in many ways the beating heart and active brain of the left-liberal regime, what do we see? In Italy, synonymous in the most essential way with Western Civilization, and one of the “Inner Six” founding members of the European Union, the people elevated Giorgia Meloni—who is variously described as “far-right,”1 “hard-right,”2 “post-Fascist,”3 “white supremacist,”4 and a “right-wing populist and nationalist”5—to the office of the prime ministership.
As we should all know by now, Meloni’s party is the “Fratelli d’Italia,” which derives from the “post-Fascist” Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance), the post-war successor to Mussolini’s Fascist Party. The hyperventilating that all this complicated genealogy—nearly as tortuous as the family trees of the Sforzas or Borgias—engendered in the international press was easily worth the price of admission.
Meloni, we were given to believe, was, if not “literal Hitler,” then certainly “literal Mussolini”—only in high heels and with glossy lipstick. Which, for all we know, may have literally been Mussolini’s thing as well.
Giorgia Meloni took power on October 22, 2022, and—to the unmitigated horror of the entire Western left-liberal regime—she did so as an unrepentant rightist and upon an unapologetically right-wing platform. She opposes all of the morbid sexual obsessions of the Left—abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, trans ideology, the endless proliferation of “genders”—and is militantly against the “hate speech” restrictions and unfettered “immigration” favored by the left-liberal regime across the Western world, and which is more aptly called “Le Grande Remplacement” by the French author Renaud Camus.
One has only to see her fiery speech in the Italian Parliament from 2018, when she addressed the Global Compact for Migration, and unhesitatingly called it out for what it really is:
“The Migration Compact is exactly what is needed by those who have used illegal immigration in recent decades to complete the grand plan of financial speculation to deprive nations and people of their identity. Because without roots you’re a slave, and when you’re a slave you serve the interests of Soros.”
Moreover, Ms. Meloni has not been reticent to name the enemy and to enumerate its schemes, as she memorably did earlier this year in Orlando during her speech at CPAC:
“We are fed up of a Left that presumes to lecture us, even on what the Right should be, what it should do, how it should behave, and even how it should define itself…We on the Right know exactly who we are, and what we stand for. It’s the same all over the world…so-called ‘progressives’ use the power and the arrogance of their mainstream media to force their political opponents to change to be allowed into their inner circles. Except that, once right-wing men and women are admitted into progressive inner circles, they will have changed so much that conservative people will no longer recognize them, and will stop supporting them.
“And that’s exactly what they want. A right-wing on a leash, irrelevant, in chains—as a monkey.”
Now, the Western press has been rather mum on the matter of Ms. Meloni’s government in recent weeks. Perhaps that’s because she is governing competently, and doing so while following through on her right-wing bona fides? A perusal of recent headlines shows her clashing with France’s Macron over “migrants,” refusing safe port to migrant ships, reforming abuses in Italy’s welfare system, banning rave parties favored by leftist “demonstrators,” crafting a new Africa policy, pursuing several lawsuits against libelous left-wing media figures, and even raising the threshold of permissible cash payments in a bid to obviate or at least stall the EU’s rush toward a cashless economy.
Whether Giorgia Meloni will remain true to her rightist principles in the future remains to be seen; but for the time being, at least, she seems to be off to a good start. And elsewhere in Europe, there are more reasons for optimism. In France, the rise of the “far-right” presidential candidate Éric Zemmour (he describes himself as a “Gaullo-Bonapartist”), and his Reconquête political party, demonstrated that the nation at the very heart of Western Europe has not been able to fully neuter its right wing. After all, the country of the Revolution of 1789, of the Zones urbaines sensibles, and of Macron, is also the country of de Maistre, of René Guénon and Le Traditionalisme, of Dominique Venner, Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, and Le Nouvelle Droite, and of Renaud Camus and “the Great Replacement.”
Although Zemmour’s bid for the presidency failed, his campaign was redolent with the ideas and issues of the real Right, and as such forced the regime to contend with ideas that were thought to have been safely relegated to the realm of what the Romans called nefas—“unspeakable.” The announcement video for Zemmour’s candidacy, which was something to behold, was—to no one’s real surprise—neutralized by the regime Thought Police at YouTube, but the transcript has been preserved:
“My dear Countrymen—For years, the same feeling has swept you along, oppressed you, shamed you: a strange and penetrating feeling of dispossession. You walk down the streets in your towns, and you don’t recognize them.
“You look at your screens and they speak to you in a language that is strange, and in the end foreign. You turn your eyes and ears to advertisements, TV series, football matches, films, live performances, songs, and the schoolbooks of your children.
“You take the subways and trains. You go to train stations and airports. You wait for your sons and your daughters outside their school. You take your mother to the emergency room. You stand in line at the post office or the employment agency. You wait at a police station or a courthouse. And you have the impression that you are no longer in a country that you know…
[…]
“You feel like foreigners in your own country. You are internal exiles. For a long time, you believed you were the only one to see, to hear, to think, to doubt. You were afraid to say it. You were ashamed of your feelings. For a long time, you dared not say what you are seeing, and above all you dared not see what you were seeing.
“And then you said it to your wife. To your husband. To your children. To your father. To your mother. To your friends. To your coworkers. To your neighbors. And then to strangers. And you understood that your feeling of dispossession was shared by everyone.
“France is no longer France, and everyone sees it.
“Of course, they despised you: the powerful, the élites, the conformists, the journalists, the politicians, the professors, the sociologists, the union bosses, the religious authorities. They told you it’s all a ploy, it’s all fake, it’s all wrong. But you understood in time that it was they who were a ploy, they who had it all wrong, they who did you wrong…
[…]
“…we must take back our sovereignty, abandoned to European technocrats and judges, who rob the French people of the ability to control their destiny in the name of a fantasy—a Europe that will never be a nation. Yes, we must give power to the people, take it back from the minority that unceasingly tyrannizes the majority and from judges who substitute their judicial rulings for government of the people, for the people, by the people.”
It is rousing stuff, thoroughly nationalistic and rightist, and this is merely a sample.
Meanwhile, during the Swedish general elections earlier this year, the Sweden Democrats—a party that is predictably traduced as “xenophobic,” “racist,” “far-right,” “right-wing populist,” and other presumably pejorative epithets—combined with other conservative groups to form the country’s new government. The popularity of the Sweden Democrats owes much to their positions against immigration—the number of foreign-born citizens in the country is likely now over twenty percent of its population—and against violent crime, which has risen alarmingly in this once model nation of peace and prosperity.
So what does all this have to do with the title of this piece—the “Age of Revanchism?” To the Left, revanchism—that is to say, “revengism,” or the desire to reacquire lost territory—much always be a peculiarly right-wing sin. But it is not to the Right that the title of this piece refers, nor to irredentist tendencies on the part of right-wing movements.
Rather, I refer to the revanchism of the left-liberal empire, which—to its immense and everlasting shock—lost a great deal of ground in recent years, and wishes now to recover it. That ground is not physical, but deals in the intangible things that the global regime has always prided itself on with an insufferable and overweening arrogance—things like moral and political supremacy, financial and social stability, and the historicist sense of millenarian inevitability that inspirits committed progressives like some sort of pseudo-religion.
This is the ground that the liberal democracies have either ceded through arrogance and stupidity, or had wrested from them through cannier opponents. Now the regime is fearful, and backed against a wall, and that is when it is at its most dangerous. The mask has slipped, and the velvet gloves—so to speak—have come off, revealing iron fists. The age of left-liberal hegemony is over, but now the age of left-liberal revanchism has dawned, and it is already shaping up as an age of totalitarianism. It may be the “soft totalitarianism” of Rod Dreher, or the “Pink Police State” of James Poulos, but it is totalitarianism all the same.
The antics of Elon Musk may be amusing, but he is playing a very dangerous game by seizing control of one the most important organs of state propaganda and messaging control. A war is on, and it is as serious as any of the great shooting wars of the early twentieth century. The decade of the 2020s is to be—to make a rather tired pop-cultural reference—the decade when the Empire strikes back, and seeks to regain that territory it so unexpectedly lost and believes to belong to it by natural and inalienable right.
However that war plays out, the coming years promise to be anything but dull. And in the meantime, in the issues of this newsletter, I hope to explore some of the most interesting contributions of the Right to this ongoing struggle for the future of the world.
According to the BBC.
According to The New York Times. Is there some sort of difference between “far-right” and “hard-right,” I wonder?
Again, according to The New York Times.
According to Meloni’s English-language Wikipedia entry.