An Alliance of Socialists and Conservatives Against Liberal Centrism: Not Such Strange Fellows After All

Orientation
The socialist left trashes attempts to unite the left and right
Is it possible to oppose this centrist drift to the middle of the political spectrum by uniting socialists and conservatives? In the United States socialists howl at the prospect of uniting with conservatives. “How stupid” they might say. “Conservatives are pro-capitalists, pro-war and anti-communist. Besides, conservatives want to bring back the power of the church, the aristocrats and the king. What a dumb idea! How could any socialist find common ground with conservatives?” In the first place, our socialist leftist have mixed together two kinds of conservatives, neoconservatives on one hand and reactionaries on the other. There is a very different type of conservative I will be advocating for that comes out the work of Alain De Benoist and the New Right in Europe in his book The Populist Moment which I will discuss later in this article. But first, let’s be explicit about what reactionaries and neocons really stand for.

Reactionaries
Reactionaries have the following characteristics:

They oppose time and irreversible history.
They see progress as an illusion.
For reactionaries, technological development is not an elixir.
Descartes’ division of the world into subject and object is a disaster.
They oppose the mechanistic world of Newton and support an organic view of nature and society.
They oppose science which reduces quality to quantity.
They prefer education of arts and humanities to education in the sciences.
Nostalgia for reactionaries is a program for actual return.
Reactionaries mostly support religion.
Reactionaries are usually supported by wealth based on land as opposed to trade.
Reactionaries are usually an expression of kings, aristocrats and the Church power elites.
Theoreticians include de Maistre, de Benoist or Maurras.

In the 19th century people like Louis de Bonard and Joseph de Maistre denounced the tyranny of popular sovereignty because they claimed power can only come from above.

De Benoist asks how has the right, naturally attached to conservation been able to consistently support a capitalist system so destructive of what it intends to conserve? How has it been able to believe that this capitalist system could be reconciled with conservative, patriarchal or even feudal values? De Benoist contends that conservativism has not been able to implant itself durably in France because the revolution of 1789 conservatives never succeeded in distinguishing itself from the reactionary characteristics above. What has resulted in the obliteration of the political space conservatives could have occupied between the liberals and the reactionaries. According to de Benoist, conservatives have never enjoyed a good press since the end of the 19^th century. He claims that ever since the old aristocracy was devoured by the bourgeois class, the Right has supported capitalism because feudalism was not coming back and they had nowhere else to go. When conservatives speak of property, they are thinking of patrimony, especially land, often associated with family. Over time patrimony and wealth based on land died out. Between the wars conservativism was confused with fascism. In World War II rightwing leaders fell into the orbit of conservative and petty-bourgeois nationalism. They were very far from their original conservative home.

After 1945 the context of the Cold War and anti-Sovietism led the right to assume solidarity with the “free world” dominated by U.S. imperialism. It supported the worst dictatorships. After the Second World War liberal ideas never stopped gaining ground on the right. The few times the right has developed an economic and social doctrine it has always been with a declared intention of putting an end to class struggle by supporting corporatism, a unity of state and unions. For the right, none of their proposals were accompanied by any fundamental analysis of the nature of capitalism. They spoke of “just wages”, recommended good works and paternalism. De Benoist points out acidically that the right are imbeciles who think it is possible to defend both traditional values and a market economy that never stops destroying such values.

What About the Neocons?
As I wrote in my article on Dugan:

Dugin does not support the liberal conservatives of the United States because they do not condemn liberalism across the board. Rather, they say yes and no to liberal proposals. Liberal, because when it says yes it merely attempts to step on the brakes; “let’s go slower”, “let’s not do that now” it says. They agree with the general trends in modernity especially around capitalism and individualism.

William Kristol was one of the founders of neoconservatism. The Project for New American Century includes projects of the Greater Middle East and Greater Central Asia where the goal is to uproot inertia, national, political, social, religious and cultural models and their replacement by the operating principles of American economic liberalism. For neocons liberalism must penetrate the depths of all societies. Contemporary neo-conservatives call for a global liberal revolution rejecting all isolationism. They do not like leftists and continue to fear communism. Neither do they like right-wingers like Evola and Guenon who we will discuss as part of the new right.

Where are we going?
My goal in this article is to reveal how an alliance between the new right conservatives and socialists is not as far-fetched as it seems. My first step was to distinguish the new right from both reactionaries and neocons. From that point on:

I want to describe the increasing unpopularity of centralists parties throughout the West. I discuss Alain’s statistical report on the voting patterns in Europe over the past 20 years which show the declining numbers of people who are voting for centrists.
I want to describe how populism is a reaction to the dead-end of centrist politics but without a clear party alternative whether it is of the right or left.
I will defend the meaning of the much-maligned political term “populism”. I discuss stereotypes of word, what populists say they want and the history of populism in Russia and in the United States.
I will then describe the characteristics of the new right in Europe and how it differs from liberal centrism.

I proceed to make a direct comparison between liberal centrists and across 17 categories including: attitude towards capitalism; political intermediate bodies; attitude toward progress; the rights of humanity; the type of democracy and what is human nature.

Up until now de Benoist has been content to distinguish the new right and populism from centrism. However, at the end of his book he demonstrates how he questions the validity of the political spectrum itself.

The very division of the political spectrum into left vs right is obsolete and only benefits centrists.
Socialism and leftism are not the same thing. In fact, there was socialism 50 years before leftism. Leftism was a strategy used by socialists and liberals specifically at the end of the 19th century. But this alliance has turned into an ideology of leftism benefitting centrist liberals and weakening socialists. It has been a strategy to keep socialists and conservatives from uniting.
It is necessary today for socialists make a break with any kind of leftism which opens the door to an alliance with the European right.

Centrism in Trouble
In his book The Populist Moment: The End of Right vs. Left, Alain de Benoist writes that in September 2016 a poll revealed that 85% of Frenchmen in the presidential election of May 2017 would be disappointed no matter what the result. In the same year, the share of Frenchmen describing themselves with no party preference was continuing to rise among the young 35%; blue collar 37% and white collar students at 38%. In France 71% of Frenchmen admitted to having a poor opinion of their leaders. 76% have no confidence in their leaders and 49% judge them as corrupt. Seven out of ten Frenchmen say they have no confidence in either the right or the left. People’s attitude commonly oscillates between lack of interest and rejection, abstention and systematic opposition. This dissatisfaction goes a long way back. In the presidential election of 2002 less than half of the French voted in both rounds. In the first round 64% chose neither Chirac nor Jospin. We have to go back 40 years to find anti-system candidates not receiving much attention. In 1981 anti-system candidates received only 2% of the vote but 21 years later there is quite a different story. 34% voted for an anti-systemic candidate in 2002, 2007 and 2012. The result is that today’s majorities of major parties receive barely 25% of the peoples’ vote.

Problems for political centrism are not unique to France. In Italy Christian Democrats and the Communist Party have practically disappeared. In Austria the two government parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Social Party, received only 22% of the vote in the Presidential election of 2016. Alternative for Germany, a far-right populist party created only 3 years ago got 21% of the vote. Centrist parties have no prestige left. Labor unions enjoy little credit and office holders enjoy no prestige. We can even speak of an adamantine contempt for representative democracy. Among the elites, in the recentering of party programs there is a neutralization of political discourse. In fact, another poll carried out in 2006 shows that 6 and 10 French people are no longer able to tell the left from the right.

In fact centrism has infected the entire region of Europe with the presence of the European Union since its beginning in the 1980s. EU policies in the service of global capitalism has resulted in the disappearance of whole layers of state sovereignty The EU deprived them of the ability to make sovereign national decisions regarding monetary policy. Thanks to globalization, Europeans are thrown into competition with underpaid workers of the Third World. The EU has destroyed the collective bargaining power of workers.

In Great Britain the leadership of both big parties, Conservatives and Labor, were favorable to remain (not Brexit). In the United States the Democratic Party has become a center-right party since the mid 1980s. In fact, de Benoist tells us that staunch right-wingers like Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Kagan showed in the end they had would have no problem voting for Hillary Clinton, once thought of as the queen of feminist liberalism.

In most Western countries the liberal representative democracy has won out.

This consists of substituting parliamentary sovereignty for popular sovereignty
It is an aggregate form of democracy that sees in the political filed merely a conglomeration of interests.
Individuals and groups are expected to maximize their best interests politically without any concern for the common good.
They limit popular participation as much as possible to an electoral ritual.

According to centrist liberals, the people are not well-suited to make their own political decisions. However, somehow they think the same people are perfectly capable of choosing their representatives. How convenient for these representatives! When democracy is defined as concentrating the laws of numbers, representational democracy will be as a lesser evil since it drastically reduced the number of deciders. Rousseau wrote that a people can only lose its sovereignty the moment it was turned over to representatives. For more on the differences between liberal representative democracy and participatory democracy see my articles Liberal Democracy At the End of Its Rope I and II

In short, the political centrist elites have gradually distanced themselves from what is popular by way of class contempt. The official centrist right left have settled in the upper middle classes. All the big parties of right and left are saying more or less the same thing. For centrist liberals the only institution called upon to regulate relations between people and social contract between people are commercial exchange and legal contract. There is a regrouping of formerly antagonistic governmental parties at the top who today realize that nothing any longer really separates them.

Seeing through the division of left and right has a long history among elite theorists. The left-right divide is scarcely mentioned by the first great elitist political scientist Robert Michels. The entire elitist school of political science of Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels and C. Wright Mills has demonstrated how the system of representation and parliamentary democracy unavoidably leads representatives to constitute themselves as an elite or oligarchy. On the other hand, an electorate drawn from both right and left is forming at the base. Liberal centrism provokes popularism.

What is Populism?
Stereotypes of popularism
Having become a political insult populism is presented as a sort of permanent infantile disorder of democracy. It has been called a “flattering of people’s base instincts.” Brexit is the victory of the most rancid sovereigntist and the most stupid nationalism”. For liberal centrists the solution is to quarantine certain complex matters such as foreign politics by removing them from the voting process. Populists are attacked for either not knowing what they want or when they do express preferences it is not reason enough to take them into account. Populists are seen as uneducated, malicious, xenophobic, and backward.

Populism has been characterized as the new clothes of the extreme right – maybe a yearning for dictatorship or a return to monarchy. The Enlightenment philosophers had nothing but disdain for the people. The socialist left is no better. De Benoist describes populism as the name the left gives the people whenever they do something the left doesn’t like. As a category of political science, populism has already been the object of a significant number of studies, but the specialists do not agree among themselves. At its best the word refers to confidence in the people which one encounters in Robespierre’s speeches or in Michelet’s writings.

Populism should not simplistically be associated with the right-wing. Populism is fundamentally directed against eliteswhile the right has nearly aways defended them. Other characteristics include:

The nostalgic reappropriation of values inherited from the past.
The demand for direct democracy – often based on referendum. It is not about the quantity of votes, suffrage, elections nor representation.
It carries a taste for charismatic leaders in the service of incarnate democracy.
It includes the virtues of honesty, solidarity, generosity, the spirit of giving, the sense of gratitude, honor, a taste of reciprocity and mutual assistance.

Yet it would be a mistake to make populism a matter of mere demagogy. Accusation of it forgets that demagogy is just as possible as representative centrist democracy as in the case of Obama in the United States. Populism contradicts liberal centrist democracy by aspiring to the political body’s unity, whereas liberal representative democracy institutionalizes differences as with the separation of powers. Populism appears in a tempest of rapid social change and immediacy as opposed to movements of long duration. It is inaccurate to say that populism expresses a disgust or rejection of politics. Those who disgust populists are liberal centrist politics.

De Benoist tells us that populists feel a triple exclusion: political, social and cultural.

Experientially it is as when you partly feel, rightly or wrongly like a foreigner in your own land. You also might feel your neighbor as a threat because of their ethno-cultural origin or religion. Among the popular classes restlessness is not a result of ignorance but of repeated disappointment with the liberal center combined with no political outlet. De Benoist writes that great historical disasters have more often had their origin in the failure of elites than the blindness of the people. Centrist liberals imagine that in politics expertise is what matters. But in the participatory politics, competence does not reside in technical knowledge but in the ability to decide between several possibilities in their capacity for making good decisions about what is to be done in the short-term and the long-term. Being an expert does not necessarily mean the quality of decisions is automatically good.

Left-wing populism

Populism should not be associated with the right-wing because there is a left popularism represented by Christopher Lasch as in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. Others include a left-wing conservativism which includes Orwell, Jean Claude Michea, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Gunther Anders and Piers Paolo Pasolini. Left-wing popularism can also be found in the resurgence of republicanism of antiquity and the Renaissance which wanted virtue to be the foundation of citizenship. Conservatives of the left criticize a left that limits itself to class struggle. Marxists are unable to explain the persistence of religion, pro-family, personal responsibility and reduce it to false consciousness.

Which social classes are part of populism?
De Benoist declares that if we add white collar workers, small farmers and other ill-paid and threatened groups to the working class we get most of the economically active population. This is why nearly all populist movements defend both living standards and ways of life. Poverty, distress a feeling of abandonment all explain the breadth of the crisis. Populists are infuriated when the sole response to their concerns is they result from xenophobic fantasies. Populism expresses not a horizontal left-right opposition but a vertical one, the people against the elites.

Conditions for the arrival of popularism
Populist movements found themselves confronted with dramatic demographic, cultural and economic challenges which the obsolete left-right party political spectrum fails to address. Centrist liberals no longer engage the reality and depth of capitalist crisis as it affects the middle and lower classes.

History of Populism in Russia and the United States
Most historians agree that historically speaking populism appeared at the end of the 18th century, both in Russia and the US. Between 1860-1880 the Narodniki (narod = people) were Russian socialists who wanted to “go to the people” bringing basic literacy to the peasant masses. They were hostile to westernization and they considered the peasantry the only revolutionary class. The principle representatives of Russian populism were Alexander Herzen, Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Dmitry Pisarev.

Yankee populism asserted itself as a rural movement in the second half of the 19th century. It was created in 1867 by Oliver Hudson Kelley. The Grange movement sought to enlarge agricultural workers’ social rights as well as protect small producers’ autonomy. This was followed by the People’s Party, an agrarian populist party founded in 1891. Its ideas rested on the Jeffersonian dream of smallholders’ autonomy. The Narodnik opposed the rural way of life to capitalism while the Grangers denounced the finance capital of the banks that reigned in the large cities. Latin American populism included Mexican Cardenismos or Argentine Peronism.

The New Right of de Benoist
The conservative revolution in Europe
There have been many conservatives in European history who are neither reactionaries nor neocons. Among the theorists was Arthur Moeller, van den Bruck, Ernst and Friedrich Junger, Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Werner Sombart, Othmar Spann and Friedrich Hielscher. They also included Titus Burckhardt and Leopold Ziegler. Dugin informs us that the Conservative Revolution is a term first coined by Hugo von Hofmannsthal which has come to designate a loose confederation of anti-liberal German thinkers who wrote during the Weimar Republic. They are opposed to capitalism and communism in favor of a synthesis of aristocratic traditions and spiritual values with socialism. Dugin names de Benoist as one of the pioneers of the European New Right. Dugin says they write with uncompromising consistency and persistence and not with the thoughts of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Unlike neoconservatives in Yankeedom, the New Right in Europe does not trust the state and identifies more with intermediate organizations the way Tocqueville did. Historically, The Enlightenment philosophy of liberals began in the 17th – 18th centuries by attacking organic communities. This constituted the ideological basis of the rights of man. While neoconservatives distance themselves from any kind of attachment other than nationalism, the New Right identifies with “the common good”. While neocons identify with capitalism, the New European Right is critical of capitalism.

While liberal centrists stress the independence of individuals, the New Right in Europe recognizes individual autonomy but within a larger whole. Like reactionary conservatives, the New Right is dead set against any liberal notion of linear progress. The New Right is also against the rights of man if rights are understood as abstract, universal flight from any concrete community. Unlike liberal’s individualism, for the New Right, individuals are not understood as a creature of social contract, a pre-social being which has to construct themselves from nothing. Liberalism considers humans interchangeable because it only conceives of them in a generic, abstract manner. For liberals, the common good has no meaning beyond the sum of individual self-interest. Liberal individualism does not see citizen participation in the political community is an intrinsic good, constitutive of the good life. The Revolution of 1789 openly aimed at uniformizing France in order to replace the vestiges of a shameful past with the superior devices of reason to destroy the provincial spirit and the ripping out of loyalty to regional dialects. They want to be free from all forms of rootedness.

For the New Right, all the way back to Aristotle the individual is socially rooted and grounded in politics. For liberals all relations are associative and voluntary and the foundation is based on both commercial exchange and legal contract, not politics. For the New Right all relations, such as in Hegel are organic and holistic. While liberty for the liberal is based on the individual, for the New Right the framework for liberty are institutions.

What is the common good? For associative liberalism there is no recognition of the common good beyond the general interest. The general interest is only the addition of particular interests. For the New Right the common good is a historically grounded in a local political community with ethnic, regional attachments that the individual is born into. Yet like many reactionaries the New Right sees:

human nature is imperfect (as opposed to liberal belief in perfectibility);
some identities are already here when we are born and we cannot be whatever we like;
what is best is what has accumulated from past experience and is not to be taken lightly and
what is most valued is what is concrete and particular, not what is abstract and universal.

Here is a summary in table form which compares liberal centrists with the new right.

Liberal Centrists	Category of Comparison	The New Right Conservatives
Some trust of the state and nation vs intermediate bodies which interfere with the movement or capitalism	The state vs intermediate bodies	Distrust the state Support intermediate bodies
Distrust of all collective attachments	Collectivism	Accepts local ethnic, religious regional attachments
Trust	Capitalism	Distrust (Mauss’s gift-giving)
Independence of individual from society	Social-individual dialectic	Autonomy within a larger social whole
Linear progress	How is the new held?	Critical of linear progress Prefers what is familiar
Rights of man	Rights and duties	Duties of man
Pre-social beings have to construct themselves from nothing	Anthropology of the individual	Socially rooted and politically oriented
Associative relations based on legal contract and commercial exchange	Types of relations	Organic, holistic relations
Liberty based on individuals	Framework for liberty	Based on institutions
No recognition of the common good beyond the general interest- addition of particular interests	Common good	Common good is more than any individual
Representational democracy	Type of Democracy	Direct participatory democracy
Perfectible	Human nature	Human nature is imperfect
Chosen in the present	Identities	Some inherited from the past Some chosen
No sense of limit	Constraints	Limitations: good things can be easily destroyed but not created
What is best has yet to come	Future and past	What is best is what has accumulated from past experience
Universal	Universalistic vs particular	The particular
Abstract	Thinking processes	Concrete

Socialism Beyond Leftist Linear Progress
How to stop being a progressive without being a reactionary
For centrist liberals all reference to the past is dismissed as nostalgia. As de Benoist says anyone who looks back is excommunicated. But as recently as the end of the 19th century when most of France was still largely rural, workers balked at the working methods of industry. Workers, whether they were socialists or not were quite often reserved about the ideology of progress. The first socialists saw themselves as forces of resistance to modernization. The first socialists were not enemies of the past either. Jean-Claude Michéa writes that French workers rightly contested the hierarchies of the French Ancien Regime but were in no way willing to abandon the solidarity, forms of mutual aid and social bonds that allowed people to face up to those hierarchies within traditional societies. They refused to set sail with liberal linear notions of progress. People still cherished the stability of long-term marital and intergenerational commitments. They honored common sense. De Benoist claims the conservative rehabilitation of popular precapitalist values is perfectly legitimate provided it is not accompanied by idealization or nostalgia. This is a dialectical view of the past. For the people, the past helps them to judge the value of proposals and innovations. Furthermore, in the past a good number of popular revolts have originated in a clear commitment to defend popular customs against the Church, the bourgeoisie and the princes.

Left vs right in the service of the center
De Benoist informs us that In 1980 only 30% of Frenchman thought the concepts of right and left were dated. But six years later the number had gone up to 45%. By 1989 the relevance of “Left vs Right” had gone up another 11% to 56% and by 2016 73% of the French people thought that the concepts of left and right really didn’t matter. It was in France that the concepts of left and right are generally thought to have been born within the French revolution. However, the concept of “the left” was not part of the revolutions of 1830, 1848 or the Paris Commune. Michéa recalls that socialism was originally neither of the Left or the right.it never would have occurred to Proudhon, Marx, Bakunin or Georges Sorel to define themselves as men of the left. The left at that time meant nothing beyond radicals.

It was only in the very last years of the 19th century that the dyad left-right took on its current meaning. During the Dreyfus Affair (1894 -1899) there was an alliance between socialism and the progressive left liberals out of a concern for a republican defense against the monarchist clericals and nationalist right. Specifically, it was a historical alliance that was formed between German social democracy, then by Marxism and the progressive left.

Benoist contends three great debates that kept the left/right debate alive for two centuries have today been concluded. The first debate was at the end of the 18th century beginning with the French Revolution. It concerned institutions of Republican constitutional monarchies vs those of a Divine Right of Kings. The second debate a little less than a century later was in the 1880s over the question over a clerical vs secular order. The 3rd debate was a social question of the impact of the First Industrial Revolution. In all these conditions, being on the left was not only a matter of being Republican or secular. It was how to be a socialist or communist. It was in the 20th century that the Left-Right divide experienced a golden age.

It was the theory of linear progress that blocked the socialists from joining with the right. Linear progress implies the repudiation of all archaic forms of belonging. In the progressive view any possible evaluation of the world as it was before, it necessarily comes from a nostalgic idealization of the past. To be on the Left one had to class oneself among those who on principle refused to look back, just as Orpheus was forbidden by Hades to look back on the pain of losing his beloved forever.

The Left-Right political spectrum today still cripples discussion between socialists and conservatives by the polemical use of some of these labels. For example:

For liberals, socialists and fascists belong to the same category – totalitarian.
For socialists, fascists and liberals belong to the same category – capitalists.
For fascists, socialists and liberals belong to the same category – The Enlightenment.
For liberals and socialists conservatives are labelled fascists.

Born of modernity in the West, the left/right divide is disappearing along with it. Deep social transformations induced by changes in the capitalist system into monopoly finance capital are most responsible for the rendering the Left-Right divide moth-eaten.

The Weakness of the Left
De Benoist throws down the gauntlet and states that the socialist left today is in no position to join with the New Right. In 1905 the socialist party’s goal was to socialize the means of production and exchange. Since then, the Social Democratic Left has mutated increasingly to socialist liberals. Socialists who identify as left are no longer socialist but progressive. The great weakness of the left is that it is tagging along like a caboose attaching itself to liberal ideas of progress even while it claims to renounce some aspects of progress. Virtually every left socialist thinks liberals are closer to them than conservatives. It alienates itself from the working-class population by imagining that the suppression of all norms is somehow synonymous with greater freedom. It celebrates endlessly the transgression of all moral and cultural limited inherited from past generations, whether it be mental illness, use of drugs or changing genders. De Benoist claims the new social movements of feminism, gay rights, welfare rights and agitation against racial discrimination have nothing in common. Their only coherent demand aims at inclusion in the dominant structures rather than a revolutionary transformation of social relations. Hatred of limits, contempt for norms people and compulsive praise for uprootedness is no answer.

Socialist-Conservativism with Heart
All Jean-Claude Michea’s work is an effort to rediscover the spirit of that original socialism and the left socialist subsequent discrediting of the values of rootedness and organic structures. Michéa is a libertarian socialist who supports participatory democracy and aspires to live in a classless society. He appeals to the followers of Marcel Mauss, George Orwell and Christopher Lasch, not of de Bonard or Joseph de Maistre and still less to Maurras. The virtue celebrated by Jean Jaures involves generosity, the sense of honor and solidarity to give, receive and give back which Marcel Mauss made the basis of the logic of gift and counter-gift.

Michéa refers to “common decency” which could be found in the work of Victor Hugo, Jack London, Elisee Reclus, Georges Sorel and Pierre Proudhon. He says the popular classes are still relatively protected from liberal egoism. They keep the most invasive forms of possessive individualism at bay from day to day In practices of mutual aid and systems of solidarity. There is ancient ethic of honor, which certain mental attitude and forms of behavior are simply dishonorable. Christopher Lasch says that ordinary men and women have a more developed sense of limits than the higher classes. But loyalty and solidarity are only effective if anchored in a social fabric of physical proximity, local places. Loyalty needs to attach itself to specific people and places, not to an abstract ideal of universal rights. It involves turning back to find a foothold the better to launch oneself forward.

Where Might the Socialist-Conservative Alliance Take Place?
It could take hold in Europe where the New Right conservatives have a foothold. A lot depends on whether the socialists in Europe can overcome:

their confusion between conservatives and fascists;
between reactionaries and the New Right and
their assumptions that liberal centrists are any closer to socialism than the new right is to them.

A socialist conservative alliance also has promise among the BRICS countries and their allies. After all, state socialist countries like China, Cuba and North Korea have to find a way to get along with Shia and Sunni Muslin countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia as well as the Hindu fundamentalists in India.

The United States is the least likely part of the world where a socialist-conservative alliance might be possible, both because the socialist left has few roots in the working class and because the presence of the neocons monopolized what conservativism exists here.

Conclusion
My goal in this article is to explain how an alliance between the New Right conservatives and socialists is not far-fetched. I began with some cynical comments by left-socialists in the United States about what they might say about why alliances with conservatives were ridiculous. In response, the first thing I did was to distinguish between reactionary conservatives, neoconservatives and then later in my article, the New European right. Then I pointed out the declining support for centrist parties throughout Europe while at the same time contending that the lack of clear political alternatives to centralism drives something called populism which I defended against attacks by liberal centrists and to a lesser extent left socialists.

Up until now de Benoist is content to distinguish the new right and populism from centrism. But then at the end of his book he questions the validity of the political spectrum itself which only benefits centrists. Following Jean-Claude Michea, de Benoist points out that socialism and leftism are not the same thing. In fact, there was socialism 50 years before there was leftism. The joining of socialist to liberalism as “the left” benefits centrist liberals while weakening socialists. It has been a strategy of centrist liberals to keep socialists and conservatives from engaging each other and joining forces. I closed by pointing out the places in the world where a socialist-conservative alliance has the most promise.

The post An Alliance of Socialists and Conservatives Against Liberal Centrism: Not Such Strange Fellows After All appeared first on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Barbara MacLean.

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