The problem of the State on the Right

One of the main ideological tensions on the so-called dissident Right – also known as the populist, nationalist or hard-right – concerns the role of the State. In fact, as with so many other aspects of what passes for right-wing political “thinking” these days, it is more a matter of confusion rather than tension.

There are broadly two types of views, each with their own variations. On the one side, constituting the great mass of right-wing activists, are those who believe in a strong State, and see it as a good thing. This is even a phrase that remains quite popular in British Conservative circles: Believing in “the good that the State can do”. In recent history, this idea was the guiding light of the Theresa May and then the Boris Johnson governments, which, in the wake of Brexit, thought it was time to bring back socialistic Industrial Strategy and Levelling Up policies – ie, state dirigisme and redistribution of national wealth by another name. It leads to absurdities such as building “space industry hubs” in places with no space industry. 

And it’s not just the now-discredited Tories who embrace this statist model as a way to cut through the country’s problems. On the economic front, the fantasy of a powerful central government launching big new infrastructure projects across the land or “restoring manufacturing” by ministerial decree is one shared by the new insurgent right-wing parties as well. What they don’t propose is even more telling: You won’t hear much about any radical cuts to the obscene welfare system or to the bloated and horrendously inefficient National Health Service. Not for them any serious, Javier Milei-style chainsaw-ing of the public sector and the Civil Service with its useless, borderline traitorous mandarins at the top.

Most of the deafening noise coming out of these new-Right outfits and their outriders – often, angry Zoomers with big TikTok accounts but whose political education barely stretches back to the days of Covid – is pretty much just the usual rants about woke, Net Zero, immigrants and “liberalism” in general. 

What passes for “policy”, in this milieu, is usually nothing more than absurd, generalist student society-type promises to “restore” this or that and to “reverse” the other, mostly – we are told – by repealing whole areas of statute law and implementing various energetic measures as a matter of national urgency. All this is well-intended from a patriotic and (increasingly, ethno-) nationalist perspective, but more often than not it is entirely divorced from the practicalities of actual policy-making and policy delivery – especially on the sensitive issue of handling the political fallout of heavy-handed State action. It’s easy to shout, hard to govern – democratically.

But here we come to the crux of the matter: The key reason this large (perhaps dominant?) strand of the insurgent Right is so enamoured with the idea of a strong State is precisely because they want that massive State power for themselves in order to “sort things out” by steamrolling any opposition, without bothering too much with existing “rules”. They feel things are so bad, the Left has so mutilated our laws and infiltrated our institutions, that only drastic and fast action that cuts through the tangled web of distorted democratic checks and balances can fix things.

This is nothing more than the old tendency of the hard Right – which it shares with the hard Left – to draw ever closer, by degrees, to various forms of authoritarianism. The motivations are certainly different in each case: On the Right, it comes from a (correct) appreciation of the danger of continued drift of the country – any of our blighted Western countries – towards socio-economic and cultural disaster, and an impatience with the cumbersome democratic process as the vehicle of redress. 

Corners must be cut, rules must be bent, even broken, at a time of emergency, in order to save the country. It’s a fair point, as far as it goes; the problem is that this same logic can be used by your opponents, to which they add their more sinister and vastly more ideological purposes. Because the Left’s inbuilt authoritarian tendency derives not from a natural sentiment of loyalty to the nation and a concern with saving it (whatever that may mean to different people), but, chiefly, from a manufactured Marxist ideology with its commitment to re-engineering the nature of social and economic relations themselves, dismantling the nation as such, and with building a whole new world – ultimately, a communist world, whether they call it that or not.

Many people on the Right today will baulk at any suggestion that they might have anything in common with the Left, and especially that they could ever be tending towards anything “authoritarian” or undemocratic. After all, the “fascist” slur is the principal Leftist line of attack against the populist or hard Right. But the reason why this Leftist trope sticks is because it carries a grain of truth. The “fascist” accusation is absurd, as anyone who knows anything about actual historical fascism can tell. But it’s the fascist fascination with the State and the central wielding of government power – again, something obviously shared by the communists – that echoes quite often across the populist-nationalist movements of today.

And the main reason this is happening and is in fact getting worse is because of the rise and spread of the so-called “post-Liberal” worldview on the insurgent Right, especially among the fast-and-furious Zoomerheads. We’re witnessing the culmination, the reaching of the end-point of a long intellectual tradition on the Right, predicated on critiquing the foundations of the liberal philosophical tradition. 

What started with Edmund Burke’s denunciation of the French Revolution as a pure expression of Radical Enlightenment and absolute, unmoored liberté gone mad, and then became part of conservative political tradition by way of Moderate Enlightenment-based classic-liberalism, is now culminating in a complete, wholesale rejection of all of the Liberal tradition and indeed of the entire Enlightenment itself.

Much of this is a result of the fatal distortion of the term liberal, developed strictly in the American political context, to mean simply “left-wing” or “progressive”. This inexcusable American mangling of the notion of liberal and Liberalism has done untold damage to the political future of human civilisation. The very word, liberal, has become a slur among right-wing activists, especially the young ones, who apparently don’t realise that things like freedom of speech – in the name of which they fight the “woke” and other things, are actually liberal inventions of the original Liberal tradition encompassing the likes of John Stuart Mill. 

Veterans of older and more recent political struggles for genuine democracy and freedom – whether the anti-communists during the Cold War in the West, the anti-socialism crusaders during the Reagan and Thatcher eras, the 1989 revolutionaries in Eastern Europe, or, for example, the anti-EU and pro-Brexit campaigners of the 2010s – would find the right-wing cry for “post-Liberalism” baffling. 

Cynicism about the state of democracy is justified, given the vast abuses we’re all witnessing; but the explicit turn against the Enlightenment overall is not just bizarre, it is a deep and self-defeating mistake. It’s especially odd in an American context to see Trump-aligned national conservatives pushing an anti-Enlightenment, anti-Classical Liberal argument, given the fact that the American republic itself is a product of the Moderate Enlightenment, with the Founding Fathers explicitly drawing on the likes of Locke in drawing up the contours of what would become US democracy.

It is no wonder, then, that when the very idea of liberalism is entirely subtracted from the populist Right’s ethos which is already predicated on State power, the fine line between a democratic and authoritarian future becomes ever finer, until it perhaps disappears. After all, the protection of the individual from State power – via civic rights under law, rather than through religious or royal dispensation – was the big Old Liberal project. Centuries of use and abuse of these ideas, and of new distortions inserted along the way, have certainly confused matters; but we shouldn’t throw the classical liberal baby out with the postmodern, post-fusionist neoliberal-progressive bathwater.

What of the second main type of view of the State among the dissident right-wingers of today, mentioned at the beginning of this article? If what we’ve discussed so far is the State-centred perspective, the other one is of course its opposite: a belief in the small State, and in localism rather than in grands projets run by central government and in full power wielded across the nation from its capital city. 

This is a dying intellectual tradition on the Right; its true adherents – in the sense of people with a coherent view of politics, rather than those who believe in contradictory things at the same time – seem to now be vanishingly few, at least compared with the chest-beating, foot stomping Statists. 

When asked, many of the dissident Right “hardcore” Conservatives will of course say that they are fully in favour of more local autonomy and more power at the local government level – yet in the next sentence they will also say that “the State” should do this and that, and rail against free trade and the closing of old industries. They don’t see any reason why you can’t have both: both a strong, high-spending State with top-down policies, and thriving local communities with lots of local autonomy. But that is because, like most people dabbling in politics or even who are at it professionally, they don’t have the discipline of coherent ideological analysis – and thus end up travelling in the same direction as the Left, and even doing their opponents’ work for them.

The question of localism is extremely important but difficult to get right. There are big pitfalls around it. The most obvious one is the mirage of the “community” idea, which traditional Conservatives are prone to sentimentalise and put on a pedestal. The late and great Roger Scruton’s brand of conservatism, with its elegiac treatment of the virtues of small communities and villages, is appealing to a great many “trad” right-wingers today. But it sails dangerously close to the very socialistic notion of “collectivism”, which itself links back, through the genealogy of Marxist thought, to the dreaded communal Longhouse. 

The individual and his civic rights fade away very quickly in the ideological debate on this point as we zoom in from national frameworks to local communities, being overtaken by various “communal bonds” and obligations – a much beloved idea of a certain type of vague (and often religiously-inflected) conservative discourse.

Another glaring issue with localism is that it sits in direct tension with nationalism – again, cutting against the prevailing wind in neo-right-wing politics today. Traditionally, the way to reconcile these opposing political vectors was to discuss them in terms of different “levels of allegiance”: One can be a nationalist on issues that concern the country’s collective interests, but a localist on issues concerning the running of day-to-day affairs in one’s local community. That’s all fine as long as the question of actual governing power doesn’t come into the discussion; this is why localism is often confused with simply the local level of public administration – an administration which remains centrally-controlled.

Real localism, however, would mean devolving true power and autonomy to local communities, including significant tax-raising powers beyond basic Council taxes, and real (close to full) control over things like law enforcement. A good analogy might be – ignoring the difference in scale – the powers of individual American states; transplanting equivalent versions of them at local city- or county-levels in smaller countries in Europe would approximate true localism. 

But then, that would effectively dilute the central State and the national idea; in many Old World countries it would upend the constitutional order. More broadly, it could open the way to a breakup of some existing nations back into smaller entities and city-states. This may, in fact, turn out to be the way forward for any political movement that is genuinely dedicated to the overthrow of the current globalist establishment regimes and to the restoration of genuine liberty and democracy under sane, conservative principles that don’t veer into Leftist deviationism.

The confusions and tensions within the dissident/insurgent Right, with respect to the problem of the State in their ideological dispensation, will inevitably come to a head sooner or later. It would be better to begin addressing them before a crisis ensues as a result of some disastrous spell in government. Some populist right-wing parties have a serious chance of forming the next government – including Reform in the UK – but if they come to power guided by half-baked or even self-defeating core views, their failure would not only destroy themselves and discredit the whole movement, but it could cost their own nations a great deal of trouble.

But it may be that these ideological questions will need to be confronted on the Right before the globalist Anciens Regimes gripping our countries are swept away – or precisely because they might prove too resilient to be toppled by the populists still acting, broadly, within a democratic framework. The nationalists have now been hammering at the globalist-held government gates for more than a decade, and only in the US, under Trump 2.0, is there a clear hope for a real, deep change of the establishment and direction. But even if it works in America, it doesn’t at all mean that the same approaches will work in Europe; on the contrary, they might backfire.

The time may be fast approaching, therefore, to consider a “Plan B” to national-populism as the Right’s chief anti-establishment platform. This could be a new type of supercharged localism, predicated on a clear stance against a strong central State, and on maximum devolution of power to local governments. 

A new historical direction could re-open again, towards recovering the old virtues of the smaller city-states, where the distance between the governed and their governors is shortened, accountability is strengthened and thus genuine liberty and democracy can flourish once again. What’s not to like?