European New Right
The European New Right (Nouvelle Droite) is the intellectual current founded around Alain de Benoist and GRECE (Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne, 1968) — the attempt to rebuild anti-liberal thought on metapolitical foundations after classical fascism's defeat.
Doctrines
- Metapolitics: culture precedes politics; win the "battle of ideas" before contesting power (a Gramscian strategy inverted to right-wing use).
- Ethnopluralism: against both universalist liberalism and assimilationism — the "right to difference" of peoples and cultures, weaponized against immigration while claiming anti-racist form.
- Anti-Americanism and anti-market liberalism: critique of "total market" society, hedonism, and Atlantic hegemony; sympathy toward a "Europe of fatherlands" and, in Dugin's variant, Eurasian multipolarity.
- Pagan/classical self-assertion against Judeo-Christian universalism.
Assessment
The Nouvelle Droite is the serious right's long march: it supplied the theoretical vocabulary (identitarianism, ethnopluralism, metapolitics) for today's nationalist movements. Marxist critique notes its constitutive evasion: capital is never named as class relation — "market" and "system" are criticized abstractly while the social relations of exploitation are left intact, and cultural conflict substitutes for class struggle. Infrared's line: take their anti-liberalism seriously, reject their racialism absolutely (see Arktos Media, Curtis Yarvin, Strasserism).