A Marxist Homecoming

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, April 08, 2022

 

After a political career spent on the right-wing fringe of French politics, Marine Le Pen has adopted a new strategy for her failing presidential campaign: embracing the Left. She is not alone among so-called nationalists in doing so, and the phenomenon is not limited to France.

 

Le Pen’s political situation is a difficult one: The other right-wing candidate in the race, Éric Zemmour, may have made a bigger impression on American rightists than he has on French voters, but he is still drawing away enough of the far-right vote to undercut Le Pen, who is expected to make the second round of the election and then lose to incumbent Emmanuel Macron by double digits. Failing to find allies to her right, she is seeking them to her left, offering to appoint socialists to high government offices if she is elected president. One might be tempted to denounce her as a Vichy conservative if not for the fact that she is the scion of a dynasty of literal Vichy conservatives.

 

Le Pen’s solicitation of the Left is far from surprising, because it is far from unprecedented.

 

Her rather more successful American counterpart, Donald Trump, was at times a quite frank admirer of the far-left wing of the Democratic Party, describing his views on trade as “very similar” to those of Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders. This was not a one-off improvisation but a regular feature of Trump’s talk on trade, the lone issue on which he has held a reasonably consistent position — the wrong one — for the whole of his public life. “It’s like Donald Trump has co-opted Democratic trade policy,” Cato trade wonk Dan Ikenson observed during the 2016 campaign.

 

Senator Sanders would very much like you to forget that he once described Trump as someone he could work with on economic issues. Sanders would also like you to forget that his views on immigration in the 2016 campaign were substantively similar to Trump’s, with both candidates fretting about “open borders,” which Senator Sanders described as a billionaires’ scheme to flood the country with cheap immigrant labor at the expense of domestic working-class interests. That is not coincidence: Those who oppose the free flow of capital often take a very restrictive view of the movement of people, too, seeing people from a policy standpoint as undifferentiated lumps of labor.

 

This sort of thing is not limited to the practical work of building electoral coalitions. Having completed his ephebic-socialist and youthful-neoconservative phases, the infinitely adaptable secular-Shiite-turned-atheist-turned-ultramontane-Catholic Sohrab Ahmari has teamed up with a real-life Marxist activist — they still exist! — to launch a new journal of “radical” politics. Outright communism may seem like a leap for the former editor of the New York Post op-ed page, but Ahmari is one of those unhappy men whose loves are determined by his hates, and one who has pronounced himself “at peace with a Chinese-led 21st century” because the “natural virtue” of Chinese civilization offers a desirable alternative to the “decadent” habits of “late liberal America.” (Is it late, though?) Ahmari’s new journal takes as its stated mission the establishment of a “strong social-democratic state,” which is, of course, also the stated goal of Senator Sanders, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, et al.

 

The shared theme of these globe-trotting political adventurers is anti-capitalism, which is one prominent expression of a more general anti-liberalism. Le Pen is rooted in an Old World conservatism that has been fighting against free enterprise since the Middle Ages, and it is remarkable the extent to which the contours of the debate have stayed the same over the centuries. During 19th-century Britain’s Corn Laws debate, the case against allowing free trade in grain often was made in populist and nationalist terms — exports would cause the poor to pay more for their bread and imports would make the nation dependent upon enemies abroad — that just happened to coincide with the interests of powerful, politically connected market incumbents: the titled owners of the large farming estates, who operated as an aristocratic cartel. Some centuries before that, feudalism was defended as a bulwark of social stability and religion against moral disorder, economic disruption, and alien influence — which, without a doubt, it was. The desirability of preventing libertarian social change in that situation was more apparent to the great lords than it was to their serfs.

 

The Le Pens, Trumps, and Ahmaris of the world now present themselves as the champions of the serfs and the scourge of the aristocracy, but that is mainly play-acting, posturing that should be received with a high degree of skepticism if not outright contempt: Le Pen inherited her political position, Trump inherited his fortune, and Ahmari began his career as a London-based writer for the Wall Street Journal — all are charter members of the “overclass that controls government, culture, and capital,” which Ahmari’s new journal purports to oppose. Two well-heeled lawyers and a game-show host do not a proletariat make.

 

(The name of Ahmari’s journal, Compact, apparently is meant to reference the Mayflower Compact. I suppose he is Sohrab Ahmari of the Mayflower Ahmaris. I am reminded here of Yoram Hazony’s new book, a long jeremiad against the classical liberalism without which there would not be a Hazony or an Ahmari living west of Istanbul.)

 

One of the political difficulties of conservatism — and here I mean American conservatism, not the imported kind — is that by its nature it does not offer much in the way of novelty, excitement, or even enthusiasm. It is a philosophy of least-bad options, necessary inconsistency, and moderate expectations. American conservatism is rooted in the values of the American Revolution and the American founding, which are largely liberal values in the classical sense, a source of some confusion to modern conservatives. American conservatism, informed by the liberal Anglo-Protestant commercial culture of our British antecedents, does not offer the romance and pageantry of Europe’s throne-and-altar rightism. It does offer an open society in which those and many other bad ideas can find adherents and be discussed freely.

 

(Change is irresistible even among those adherents: The spiritual descendants of the reactionaries who once defended the centrality of the Catholic Church in European public life today present themselves as the great defenders of French secularism. Somewhere, the ghost of Robespierre is laughing his ectoplasmic ass off.)

 

I think it is significant that among those on the American right who are dissatisfied with our traditional liberalism, my fellow Catholics are markedly overrepresented. There is some irony in that: The American founders were quite liberal in extending political and religious rights to people with names such as Dougherty and Buchanan, to say nothing of Ahmari. That was not an obvious choice: We have it on authority of no less a figure than James Madison that “one of the objections in New England was that the Constitution by prohibiting religious tests opened a door for Jews, Turks, and infidels.” John Adams was an adult and far from home before he ever saw such an exotic installation as a Catholic church — these were, of course, unknown at the time in Boston, where no public Mass had ever been said and which would have no Catholic church at all until the early 19th century. The ordination of the first Catholic bishop in the new republic presented tricky foreign-policy questions. Alexander Hamilton, like many Protestants of his time, identified Catholicism with tyranny: “arbitrary power and its great engine the Popish religion.” How strange that the skeptical Protestant colonists who believed that permitting Catholics to flourish in the United States would be an invitation to religiously informed illiberalism and the creeping sway of strange Continental ideas have turned out, after so many years, to have been kinda-sorta right.

 

It’s a funny old world. But, then, Marxism is a European import, too.

 

American conservatives in search of novelty and excitement almost always begin by turning their backs on our ancient liberties, especially our economic liberties, and generally end up under the sway of some foreign caudillo (Franco! Pinochet! Putin! Orbán!) or some exotic fanaticism (Neo-Nationalism! Integralism! Habsburg legitimism!), or else veer off predictably into race obsession and other distasteful enthusiasms of that nature. Because the hatred of adjacent heretics is more intimate and more intense than the hatred of distant infidels, these rightists end up doing things that would be otherwise inexplicable, e.g., making common cause with the Marxists so long as doing so gets up the noses of one or two of the three remaining active neoconservatives and the president of the Libertarian Club of Knockemstiff, Ohio.

 

(There are ordinary career-building and financial incentives in play, too, but let’s set those aside for the moment.)

 

The old “fusionist” approach to conservatism was based on the various right-wing factions’ having policy preferences and priorities that were in the best-case scenario complementary but in any case at least not mutually exclusive: Smith, who desired a more assertive U.S. foreign policy, found a reliable partner in Jones, whose main interest was minimizing economic regulation. Those who prized economic liberty could work with Irving Kristol’s “two cheers for capitalism,” but “Smash Capitalism!” is a very different kind of proposition. I don’t object to Le Pen’s offering to elevate the socialists or to Ahmari’s joint effort with the Marxists — these are their natural allies in the project of subjecting economic life to political regimentation. That project may be understood as conservatism in Aix-en-Provence or Castilla y León, but — call me parochial — I don’t think it can be understood that way in Houston or Jacksonville. With all due respect to this magazine’s beloved founder, I am not sure that there is any such thing as a “radical conservative,” and bitter experience suggests that radical rightism very often ends up running into the same ditch as radical leftism.

 

You can have the excitement, the radicalism, and the strange new respect for socialism — I’ll take boring old liberty and property rights, and the necessary means to defend them.