Identity Politics and the Decolonization of the Western Mind: The Intellectual Resilience of Alain de Benoist and the Nouvelle Droite

What is it about?

This article argues that parallel to and accompanying the populist backlash tormenting Western democratic societies, a new discourse has emerged to compete with liberal pluralism, progressive multiculturalism, and the ideology of universal human rights. This discourse runs contrary to the stances expected of the exclusionist right. Rather than originating in a vulgar national populist reaction against liberal democracy and minority rights, this competing framework of ideas comes from an almost paradoxical synthesis of proto-fascist ideas developed in the early twentiethcentury and current pro-diversity and anticolonialist theories. In attempting to understand this perplexing ideological conjuncture, it can help to follow the ideological evolution of the French writer and ideologue of the French and European new right, Alain de Benoist. Despite the fact that he has been absent from intellectual debate in France and Europe for almost two decades, the ideas he developed in the 1980s and 1990s,and expanded in recent years,have contributed to synthesizing an ideological trend that is becoming central in the current debate on the populist backlash in Western democratic societies, a trend defined as postcolonial ethno-pluralism.While de Benoist was not the only one, he was one of the first to introduce and weaponize the discourse of the Weimar Conservative Revolution for current times.

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