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The Right-Wing Backlash to Mass Democracy
In the tumultuous European aftermath of the First World War, the breakthroughs of mass democracy confronted a right-wing backlash that came to adopt anti-status quo pretentions historically identified with the left. The spectacle of industrial warfare was felt to have possessed a higher world-historical significance, cruelly travestied by post-war upsurges of subaltern classes demanding social reforms bordering on revolution.
The Culture of Heroic Resistance
In post-war Italy and Germany, the armed exploits of demobilized veterans and patriotic volunteers offered a bonding experience of collective violence, celebrated in a discourse of heroic resistance to governments of national humiliation. Spengler’s assessment of this outcome expressed the exasperation felt by men of property and education: ‘The Labour leader won the War. That which in every country is called the Labour Party and the trade union, but is in reality the trade union of party officials, the bureaucracy of the Revolution, gained the mastery and is now ruling over Western Civilization.’
The ‘Revolution from the Right’
A miscellany of opposition to the welfare state, godless Marxism, and a more nebulously conceived cultural levelling, the ‘revolution from the right’ was essentially a call to true elites to stand their ground against a worldwide revolt of the masses. Intellectuals heartened by this counter-offensive sought to give it greater spiritual meaning as a struggle to overcome the illusions of the nineteenth century, framing the current tribulations of modernity—war, economic dislocation, and class struggle—within an epochal perspective on the destiny of the Occident.
The Broader Influence of Anti-Systemic Thought
Even writers who played no role at all in these events would come to feel the gravitational force of this new problematic of the anti-systemic right. While this discourse incubated the Alternate Modernity of the Inter-War Right in the civil-war conditions of Central Europe, it resonated more broadly from London to Bucharest. Beleaguered elites often liked the sound of this ‘transvaluation’ to an extent that is now hard to fathom.
Colonial Legacies and Racial Ideology
One must recall that in this late autumn of European colonialism, a shared language of race and nation linked conservative establishments to zealots of the extreme right. The idea of a white supremacy over all other peoples ran deep, although defiant voices from an outer world of native multitudes could increasingly be heard in the metropoles.
The Fear of Global Displacement
In a world-political atmosphere saturated with racial phantasms, a certain rhetoric of the decline of the West spoke to widespread fears that a wracked and drifting post-war Europe was being thrust off the stage of world history by American creditors and a Bolshevik Russia. The latter in particular was a cause for alarm. What could Christian-bourgeois Europe do before this ruthless new despotism, bent on inciting the exorbitant demands of Western workers and an uprising of ‘the coloured races’?
A Metaphysical Turn in Anti-Semitism
Responding to these perceived existential threats, there arose a new, metaphysical variant of anti-semitism that decried a single, nihilistic will to destruction operating behind these multiple fronts, one that needed to be overcome by an opposed will.
Intellectual Echoes of the Zeitgeist
The works of the most distinguished right-wing political writers of the period—Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, or Leo Strauss, for example—cannot be reduced to the semantics of this zeitgeist without effacing their conceptual specificity. But its leitmotifs do, in fact, inhere in their work, as subtext and background music. ‘The rise of the masses’, ‘the spirit of technology’, ‘the destiny of the West’—such were the distinguishing phrases of a mythological discourse infused with a visceral structure of feeling.