By Dominic Green
Thursday, May 14, 2026
In 2018, Steve Bannon, lately disemployed by the first
Trump administration, attempted to launch the Academy for the Judeo-Christian
West in an 800-year-old monastery at Trisulti, south of Rome. The New Right was
rising in Europe and America, and Bannon wanted to harness the populist mood
across the West. Working with the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, a conservative
Catholic think tank, he devised a curriculum for training the young warriors of
a New Right international.
It sounds like a parody of The Magic Mountain,
Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel of decadence at Davos, or The Glass Bead Game,
Hermann Hesse’s 1943 novel of philosophical frottage in a monastery. It turned
out more like Mann’s Death in Venice — an old man capsized in a deck
chair as the unattainable image of youth flits away from him forever.
The Europeans needed no lessons from the American
impostor. They had impostors of their own. Also, their new populists were not
new at all. They already had intellectual outriders and party infrastructures.
Many of them had already worked in government, and were veterans of the
coalition management and bureaucratic ambushes that would waylay the first
Trump administration. Some were not conservatives at all.
While the Republican Party was stifling Pat Buchanan’s
primary challenge in 1992 and chasing the peace dividend of the Cold War,
European politics had taken a nationalist turn by popular demand. By 2017, the
Europeans were decades ahead. Bannon’s strategy of playing the left at its own
game was old news. The dust and tear gas of 1968 had barely settled before a
group of French intellectuals led by Alain de Benoist formed their Nouvelle
Droite and planned how to run the New Left’s “march through the institutions”
in reverse direction.
Government by hands-on, orange-faced charisma was
introduced in Italy by Silvio Berlusconi in 1994, while Donald Trump was
refinancing his casinos and married to Marla Maples. The watershed for
immigration restriction in Europe came in 2001, when the Danish People’s Party,
supporting a center-right coalition from outside the government, gave Denmark
Europe’s strictest immigration policy. Meanwhile, first-term president George
W. Bush wanted to give illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, and he softened
further in his second term.
In 2002, the neofascist bruiser Jean-Marie Le Pen broke
through the cordon sanitaire of France’s two-step presidential electoral
process, requiring the centrist candidates to ally in a “republican front”
against him in the runoff. In 2004, while Trump was limbering up for the first
season of The Apprentice, another entertainer with a blond bouffant and
well-timed zingers on immigration and Islam, Geert Wilders, launched the Party
for Freedom in Holland. Wilders’s signature policies, economic deregulation and
immigration restriction, were proto-Trumpian. So was his trolling of Holland’s
liberal media. By 2010, when Trump was asking where Barack Obama had really
been born, Wilders’s party was on the Danish track and supporting a
center-right coalition from outside the government.
In Britain, the long march to the Brexit referendum of
2016 started in 1993 and gathered speed after Nigel Farage became leader of the
UK Independence Party in 2006. Farage, like Wilders, is an economic liberal and
cultural conservative: an admirer of Thatcher and Reagan. So is Nicolas Sarkozy
of France. Sarkozy’s presidency, from 2007 to 2012, sounds like an out-of-town
warm-up for Trump’s. He mocked the experts and the big-city liberal bobos
(bourgeois bohemians) in the name of the silent majority, denounced immobilisme
in government, and used the media to make himself le hyperpresident
who personalized every issue. He ended up in jail for corruption.
As Hollywood upcycles European art-house movies for the
general market, so the New Right in America has drawn on familiar precedents
from the New Right in Europe. For over a century, however, America’s cultural
empire has exported English-speaking ideas in the other direction; the
directors Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, epitomes of the French New
Wave, worshipped American idols, especially the Hollywood movies of the British
director Alfred Hitchcock. In politics, these kinds of exchanges have produced
an unprecedented alteration on both sides of the Atlantic.
American and European conservatives have changed places.
Some of the most prominent American conservatives talk like Europeans, only in
English, while mainstream European conservatives think in English and speak in
subtitles.
***
Conservatism is two traditions, divided despite a common
interest in Edmund Burke. There is the English-speaking conservatism of ordered
liberty that emerged from within the liberal system of English
constitutionalism and that extracted a futuristic Protestant self-image from
the Hebrew Bible. And then there is the hard stuff. European conservatism
developed in aristocratic and Catholic reaction to Anglophone constitutions,
French revolutions, and the market exchanges that Thomas Carlyle called the
“cash nexus.” Compared with this, most American conservatism is classical
liberalism in risk-averse mode.
European conservatism was a reaction to the democratic
revolutions of 1649, 1776, and 1789. It sought to restore legitimacy to a
privatized and aristocratic political culture, and to rebind the theoretically
indissoluble bonds between the nation and the “church and throne” before they
were again unpicked by Jews, freemasons, heretics, and other beneficiaries of
the Enlightenment conspiracy. American conservatism is the product of this
“Anglo-Saxon” enemy: the middle-class, commercial, and public culture of contracts
and democracy.
The founders of this European reaction were French: the
Marquis de Sade before the revolution of 1789 and the Savoyard Joseph de
Maistre after it. “The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing
but a vast altar, upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without
end,” Maistre wrote, “without measure, without pause, until the consummation of
things, until evil is extinct, unto the death of death.” We can see why
Maistre’s stylish and morbid polemics against modernity fell from intellectual favor
after 1945. If you heard about him after that, it was in Isaiah Berlin’s
anatomy of the Counter-Enlightenment and the roots of fascism.
Compare Maistre’s rantings about ritual sacrifice with
James Madison’s measured warnings against faction in politics, or Sade’s
elaborate flagellation rituals with Stormy Daniels’s tapping a rolled-up copy
of Forbes magazine on Donald Trump’s rump, and we see the civilizational
divide between Anglophone conservatism and the rest of the West. To map the
differences of American and European conservatism, we should subtract Britain
from Europe, as usual in the history of politics and gastronomy. Do that, and
in America’s first 150 years we find little traffic with conservative
intellectuals in Europe outside the channels of liberal Protestant theology and
Catholic social doctrine.
In the early exchange programs — Carlyle and Emerson in
the 1830s, Poe and Baudelaire in the 1840s, Henry James with himself in the
1880s — the American partner seems more interested in his interlocutor’s
aesthetics than in his hostility to mass democracy. Nietzsche did not detonate
in America until the 1920s, via the paraphrases of H. L. Mencken. Europeans
liked American novelists but had no use for American political theories,
discounting, that is, a mutual interest in the kind of trashy racial science that
Tom Buchanan reads in The Great Gatsby.
After 1945, aligning Western Europe with American
priorities became a strategic necessity. The purging of European conservatism’s
illiberalism and its alignment with the Anglo-American tradition was part of
Europe’s reconstruction. The conservatism we know as the “Burke-to-Kirk”
syllabus is an artifact of the early Cold War. It assimilated the market
theories of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman into the prosperity doctrine of
American progress. It applauded émigré skeptics such as Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss
when they warned that democracy was susceptible to mass irrationality; had not
the sainted Burke warned as much? But the romance of unreason gave conservatism
much of its appeal. The sainted Burke had admitted that too.
European conservatism was to politics as Madame de
Staël’s Romanticism was to aesthetics. In On Germany (1813), de Staël
called Romanticism a sensibilité, a “way of feeling” with origins in
poetic memories of chivalry and Christian spirituality. This medieval mélange
is pure Maistre. In the commercial world of English-speaking conservatism, it
became an affected kind of Tory bohemianism: Benjamin Disraeli’s ruffles,
Russell Kirk’s pipe and haunted slippers, William F. Buckley’s asking Allen
Ginsberg to read a poem on Firing Line and admitting that he likes it.
These mannered irrationalities are the harmless tribute of private vice to
public virtue.
The fusionists of post-1960s American conservatism
excluded the irrational and emphasized the bottom line. After 1945, Western
Europeans first adopted Anglophone liberalism as part of their moral rehab,
then watched enviously as Britain and America administered the tough love of
the markets to get out of their 1970s slump. The European governments stalled
for as long as they could: Sarkozy’s 2007 victory was expected to initiate
France’s Thatcherite age, but it never happened. In Eastern Europe, conservatives
learned the hard way that ordered liberty, even of the Orbán kind, is a bulwark
against tyranny. After 1990, no one in Europe cared about sensibility and
chivalry. They wanted market liberalism and the nation-state.
***
Today, the leaders of European conservatism sound like
the children of Thatcher and Reagan. Britain’s Nigel Farage has positioned his
Reform UK party in the pro-market, center-right niche that made the
Conservatives the most successful party in Western democracy. Polling suggests
that he will win Britain’s next elections. In Holland, Geert Wilders moved his
Party for Freedom (PVV) into the same lane. In the 2023 elections, the PVV
became the largest party in the Dutch parliament and entered the ruling coalition.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni may have started in neofascist
youth groups, but she governs in the center-right Christian Democratic
tradition that developed as an antidote to fascism in post-1945 Western Europe.
In Sweden, Jimmie Åkesson’s Sweden Democrats are the second-largest party in
the Riksdag and support a center-right coalition from outside the government.
In Hungary, Péter Magyar, whose Tisza party in April’s elections ended Viktor
Orbán’s and Fidesz’s 16-year run, wants to trim the state and reduce the public
debt.
Though France is the exception on economic policy, Marine
Le Pen’s National Rally is unexceptional in becoming the acceptable face of
once unacceptable opinions. Her long campaign of dédiabolisation,
freeing her party from her father’s sinister shadow and France from the memory
of its fascist collaboration, has paid off. Though Le Pen is banned from
running in the 2027 presidential elections because of an embezzlement
conviction, her likely heir, 30-year-old Jordan Bardella, leads the polls by
offering a classically French menu of state intervention.
While the Europeans sound Burkean, the voices of unreason
dominate American conservatism. They dominate American liberalism, too, but
conservatives were supposed to be the adults in the room. We know how they let
this happen. The decline of mainline Protestantism hollowed out cultural
values. Globalization hollowed out the middle class. The teachers’ unions
hollowed out education. State-mandated racial discrimination hollowed out the
promise of colorblind meritocracy. Mass immigration hollowed out the coherence
of American society. Identity politics and resentment filled the fearful
hollows. Social media merely accelerates the transmission and percolates the
pattern of the old European reaction into the space where Burkean
constitutionalism used to be.
The Democratic Party has adopted anti-Jewish politics to
bridge the social gap between affluent white liberals and their non-white rank
and file. The metaphysics of resentment and delusion have eaten into all levels
of the party and its allied institutions, especially the universities and the
schools, and fused into a single ideology. The same mutation is metastasizing
at elite and popular levels among Republicans and conservatives, especially
among the young. As the Trump era enters the home stretch, conservatives must
now decide if the Republican Party will go the same way.
America has always had racists. But where does the
current march of folly lead? European conservatives are perplexed to see
American conservatives, for so long the embodiment of reality-principle
politics, disinterring dusty and dangerous fantasies from Europe’s past. They
expect better from Americans. So do most Americans.
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