The Historical Right is long dead, nothing but ashes remain - de Maistre’s vision of order under Church and Crown could not withstand the onslaught of all the forces arrayed by Capital. Long before the storming of the Bastille, the feudal order of Europe had grown ever more feeble as the bourgeoisie grew in power, and by the time of the Restoration the staunchest ultra-royalist could do nothing to truly uproot their power, as the reign of the European aristocracy had been over for centuries. The Historical Left championed the causes of Liberalism, Capitalism, Nationalism, and Modernism and with time imposed some combination of them across the globe: that which we know as the Contemporary Right proclaims their devout loyalty to free enterprise, their patriotic love for their nation, and the need to preserve so-called traditions that barely stretch back two generations. In this sense, the Contemporary Right is nothing more than a degraded form of the Historical Left. Indeed, the typical Rightist cannot imagine a world which is not dominated by these forces, and even those “dissident” rightists who seek to disentangle themselves from the mainstream cannot help but cling to these products of modernity. Often the Dissident Rightist’s contention is not with capitalism itself but merely its form, hoping that some return to the consumerist glory days of Fordism or some idyllic republic of small businesses which never was. Even those wise enough to recognize capitalism’s failure can only envision a world modeled after the one just before its advent, a late stage feudal order that was the very soil which capitalism sprang from, or a heightening of capitalism into some exaggerated form in hopes that the refined plutocrats it renders might serve as a substitute for lost aristocracy. Wherever it turns, the Right cannot escape the iron grip of Capital.
If capitalism has the Right in a death grip, then nationalism, capital’s handmaiden, has irreparably poisoned its body and mind. The nation is a byproduct of modernity and the emergence of the capitalist class, the vehicle by which regional plutocratic cliques advance their interests. The concept of “patriotism” often lauded by modern rightists is rarely ever more than fealty to such regional cliques, obscured and mystified by rhetoric. Attempts to project the concept of such nations onto the pre-modern past is a typical ploy of capital and modernity, which seeks to present its power and presence as timeless and ever-reaching. The dynamic of asabiyyah, that is to say social group consciousness which extends beyond the limits of blood kinship, is retroactively transformed into “nationhood” by modernist scholars and rhetoricians, but examination reveals that the two are opposing. That is to say that the social consciousness of asabiyyah, of tribes, the pre-bourgeois social forms erroneously called “nations” without clear distinction, proceeds from common social life, whereas the conception of a modern nation *precedes* common social life - it is a bourgeois project which seeks to establish a unified market, an enclosured territory, and a common language of commerce. Even when imposed under such artificial conditions, the common social life of the nation is temporary and fleeting as it naturally dissolves and homogenizes in the global market. The project of rallying around the cause of the nation, most especially in the contemporary West, is rallying around a body of water that has already dried up and evaporated. Nationhood has no substantial past, nor any substantial future - it is a temporary, liminal state passed through under capitalism.
Tied to both of these incurable blights on the body of the Right is the embarrassing fixation on race, another product of modernity formed to serve the needs of capital. Unable to find any real asabiyyah within nationality in the Western world where nationhood means nothing for one’s common bonds, the hope of solidarity among the imagined “white race” (another product of modernist thought) is clung to by the most backwards rightists who can only assemble an identity centered around ressentiment without any basis in history or common experience. Whiteness is an invention of American settlement, the root of almost all modernist poisons, making it all the more embarrassing when neopagan reconstructionists or heterodox Christian reactionaries attempt to pair white identity with anything other than godless capitalism. There is no meaningful white asabiyyah, just the empty promise of a tenuous social position. White identity is nothing more than the detritus of colonialism, and the process of colonialism is intimately tied to the degradation of culture and virtue. As the great rightist thinker Samuel Johnson observed in his writings on the American colonists, “the only motive of their settlements is avarice, and the only consequence of their success is oppression.”
The last innovative period for Rightist political thought was the early 20th century, where for a brief moment there were articulate critiques of modernity being advanced, shortly before they were crushed underfoot by the high modernist Fascist movements of Europe. In Germany, shortly after defeat, some rightist thinkers began to take radical new approaches to their understanding of history and politics. These were the Conservative Revolutionaries, engaged in a critique of the old conservatism of the German Empire and liberal democracy generally, and driven by the hopes of restoring what they perceived as “natural law” and the virtues of chivalry, though this school of thought was unfortunately often derailed by their fixation on nationalism and anti-communism. Foremost among these dynamic thinkers was Oswald Spengler, whose “Copernican” model of history pushed back against the eurocentric, Enlightenment vision of perpetual progress. Instead, histories are particular to mass cultures which are defined by an organic cycle of growth, beginning with the end of a nomadic period and moving through processes of urbanization and centralization, out of which eventually emerges “civilization,” which for Spengler did not come about for the West until the Napoleonic Wars entrenched capitalism in continental Europe. Democracy in the Spenglerian model is nothing more than the rule of money, which reigns over the dissolution of culture, a return of a sense of psychological rootless “nomadism” among the dwellers of the megalopoli, and a period of stagnation. Spengler foresaw the eventual end of the “rule of money” by the advent of Caesarism, that is to say the “rule of force,” some time in the 2000s and 2100s, which would see a reversion to “older forms of politics” and the assertion of despotic rule which would reign over society in this state of stagnation until some outside shock brings about the collapse of civilization and the return of physical nomadism. This outlook of “Cultural Pessimism” acknowledged the inability to return the world to the past as it was, even at the point of Caesarism, or to stop the organic decay of culture, but instead acknowledged the inevitability of the decline and eventual dissolution of “Faustian” Civilization, that is to say the Capitalist and Settler-Colonial West.
Around the same time in Italy there was the emergence of an artistic and political movement looking in the opposite direction. The Futurists made explicit their love for technological advancement, the speed of automobiles and aeroplanes, and the dynamism of war, violence, anarchy, and upheaval, as well as their total disdain for the past and tradition, a decisive break from most past rightist movements. If the Conservative Revolutionaries accepted the demise of the old culture, the Futurists took this further and celebrated it, embracing the possibilities that the vacuum created would allow for a rejuvenated sense of heroism and adventure. It must be acknowledged that the futurists were militantly anticlerical, advocated legal gender equality, the creation of agricultural and industrial cooperatives, the socialization of land ownership, and wanted to abolish the institution of marriage, and ultimately even the systems of prisons and police - by what metric then can they be considered rightists given such social and political views? Besides their nationalism, which as we have established is the residue of the Historical Left, is the emphasis on heroism, of politics not derived from the principles set forward by the Enlightenment but leadership by a new aristocracy drawn from artists. Both the Conservative Revolutionaries and the Futurists envisioned a social order in which the bourgeoisie were subjugated once more and heroic radical leadership might take the reins. Unfortunately for them, their respective countries experienced the opposite instead, as the powers of key capitalist fractions were entrenched by modernist thugs.
The ideologies of the Conservative Revolutionaries and the Futurists are often cited as the forerunners of Fascism, but the latter embodies a total rejection of all that was meritorious in the former two strains. The sober recognition of modernity’s impermanence and instability found in Spengler’s writings could not be further from fascism’s dream of an eternal modernist present modeled after kitsch advertisements of suburban consumerism. Meanwhile, the dynamic creativity and cultural experimentation of Futurism is suppressed and denounced in favor of derivative imitations of past styles, mawkish imitations of past empires to which the contemporary countries bore only a tangential relationship. The advent of fascism was a deathblow to any glimmers of hope left in rightist politics which the Conservative Revolutionaries and Futurists were still able to provide. Fascism, all that really remains of “rightist” politics, in practice is nothing more than an attempt to realize Fordism through the rapid accumulation of land and unfree labor, that same motivating force behind colonialism and Americanism which Samuel Johnson rightfully disdained.
So, the old aristocratic order is dead. It cannot be revived, and why should we want to do so? After all, it was this order of things that got us here in the first place, even if we can find virtue in the original intent of an aristocratic order when we consider “aristocracy” in the literal and classical sense of leadership by the best. Nonetheless, we can still find value in the old ways of humanity. The virtue of tradition, as Edmund Burke summarized it, is that “the individual is foolish… but the species is wise.” In that case, what wisdom can we derive from the experience of the human species across hundreds of thousands of years? That is to say, considering the factor of longevity in lifestyle and practices, what were the most resilient and adaptable forms of social organization? Compare the recent emergence of capitalism to the long, drawn out history of the Palace Economy model, in which a centralized administration directs labor and distributes resources according to need, a model that can be found from Pharaonic Egypt, to the Indus Valley, to Minoan Crete, to the Incan Empire. This is the system of “Oriental Despotism,” the economic order as old as civilization itself, far older than capitalism and which was revived in the 20th century with the spread of communist revolutions.
Older even than the Palace Economy model, and often coexisting with it is nomadic existence: itinerant movement without being bound to the land, emphasizing the bonds between guest and host. In our own time the logic of capitalism has reached such a point that nomadism becomes increasingly predominant: both in the sense of uprooting, disconnection from a sense of connection to a specific location in favor of pragmatic mobility for the sake of survival, and that sort of psychic nomadism in which aspects of culture and worldview are taken as they are found to be useful, constantly synthesizing a perpetually dynamic and innovating culture. In this sense the possibility of an asabiyyah exists where tradition and futurity are bound together: progress is our tradition, the transformation of nature is the nature of human beings. Futurity turns tradition on its head with its celebration of speed, dynamism, innovation, technology, and promethean triumph over nature, but by setting tradition on its head futurity also sets tradition back right: the fundamental human tradition is adaptation and mercurity, bounded together by those models which are most resilient and adaptable to different circumstances, such as the Palace model.
Here lies the possibility of a Post-Right, an archeofuturist political tendency which might reconcile these two abandoned threads of ancient tradition and radical futurity which are ultimately bound together, and take back up the mantle of the struggle against fascist modernity. It is a project which calls for the dissolution of capitalism, of nations, of colonial relations, and even of the conventional relations of the family and gender. It is the celebration of asabiyyah based on craft and art, of a dynamic mass-aristocracy derived from true excellence in these fields, and of Promethean freedom in the ability to pursue these as one will. Only when every modernist burden has been destroyed - the wage system, the settler colony, the nuclear family, bourgeois patriotism, lifeless suburbs and exurbs, etc. - can a meaningfully aristocratic social order emerge, and the fundamental, underlying ideals of the old rightists be realized.