International Fennellism?: The great populist critics of neoliberal modernity

While all unique in their own way, it almost seems like every developed country has produced a national prophet of rootedness and independence against neoliberal progressivism.

Left, right—or conservative revolutionaries?

As a Gael, Republican and Catholic, I’ve personally never seen much utility in the ‘left/right’ binary owing to the seating arrangement of the National Assembly of 1789 France. Irish history has rarely made much of it: was the Easter Rising, led by syndicalists like Connolly and mystical Catholics like Mac Piarais of ‘the left’ or of ‘the right'?

This seeming tension is best expressed in the thought of Desmond Fennell, as I’ve discussed previously. His unique blend of anti-imperialist nationalism, anti-capitalism and populist humanism seems totally anathema to much of English-speaking politics.

Still, Ireland may not be wholly alone here. While we may be best suited to express it, further inspection demonstrates that almost every major nation has its own version of this ideological heresy. By the end of this essay, the reader should be open to the notion that every country has its own Fennell.

Before getting into specicfic examples, a brief caveat is required about what this isn’t. It is not a list of neoconservatives—ideological liberals, ‘mugged’ by reality. Similarly, it is not to speak of any plethora of internet-based novelty ‘isms’ (whether that be “Duganism”, “MAGA Communism”, etc).

By the explicitly Christian, humanistic and democratic nature of the thought described here, these terms can be dismissed. Mere syncretism is not what is being discussed, but a hollistic populist critique of modernity itself.

Grant and Canadian Red Toryism

First, there is George Parkin Grant (1918-1988) who was a prominent Canadian political philosopher, widely recognized as the father of modern English-speaking Canadian nationalism. Like Fennell, his nationalist vision was eclectic, incorporating pacifism as well as a dire critique of Liberalism. For Grant, modern neoliberal society was dragging the world into a homogenizing technological tyranny.

Most relevant for the theme of this essay however is the ideology of ‘Red Toryism’. While Grant did not favor the term, it is an apt indicator of aspects of his thought, and in particular his paternalistic nationalism. It combines state intervention or anti-capitalism with a traditionalist anti-modernism.

This line of thinking is best expressed in the famous essay titled ‘Lament for a Nation’ (1965). Mirroring Fennell's defense of Haugheyite voters as ‘rednecks’, Grant bemoans the fall of former Red Tory PM John Diefenbaker as an emblem of Canada's decline:

The impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of Canada. As Canadians we attempted a ridiculous task in trying to build a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share with the most dynamic nation on earth. The current of modern history is against us.—Lament for a Nation, p. 67.

Despite being an obviously large country, Grant writes of the struggle for Canadian nationalism in the same sense as it was an anti-colonial independence movement. For him, the new American-led liberal world order was the greatest threat to national sovereignty.

The liberal-capitalist march of progress, through the power of free trade and consumerism, laid waste to all traditions.

To lament is to cry out at the death or at the dying of something loved. This lament mourns the end of Canada as a sovereign state. Political laments are not usual in the age of progress, because most people think that society always moves forward to better things.—Lament for a Nation, p. 2.

Still, Grant was always consistent in grounding his critique in the perennial wisdom of the West. To complain without any alternative is mere whining—instead, rootedness was the answer. All that is local, particular and an emenation of a wider zeitgeist is protected from mmodernity.

From this, we can see how 70s Irish Republicanism can overlap with the anti-imperialist nationalism of the Red Tory. Both are defenses of the particular, of the heartland over the imperial superpowers.

Mai 68’s and its nationalist reactionary critic

Next, we look at France, and in particular leftist revolutionary turned reactionary Régis Debray (b.1940). As a famous 1960s philospher-revolutionary, Debray offers the most radical formulation of ‘Fennellism’ that we’ll discuss. While his life story is too complex to summarise here, what’s most intellectually important is his defense of South American revolutionaries from a conservative nationalist perspective.

Travelling to support Che Gauvara in Bolivia, as well as Castro's Cuba and Allende's Chile, Debray inverts the common understanding of these struggles. Unlike the terms of progressive and internationalist which usually define them, he emphasized them as national struggles of independence from foreign occupation. They were a defense of what was local, traditional and national against a homogenizing liberal world order:

“I had too much of a sense of tradition to wing it,” he wrote in 1996. “A run-of-the-mill conservative becomes a reactionary. Only a radical conservative can become a revolutionary. In a corrupt society, you have to return to the source.”—Quote from Debray in Caldwell's article.

This source, was the same ‘spirit of 68’ that Fennell speaks of, which drew him and others to rural Conamara. Unlike the bourgeois, urban and youth-led student protests, they sought a revolution from within the nation, a sort of traditional revival.

Progressive internationalism had always been a core principle of Marxism, much to the opposition of nationalists like Grant, but Cuban socialism was notably distinct in this way. Mostly a movement of rural plebians, their goal was to upend the transnational control of their country by foreign hucksters, most evident in Batista's Las Vegas-style casino joints.

Looked at this way, Debray would have recognised an implicit ruralist, nationalist and communitarian ethic which the US empire feared most. In many ways, the Cold War was one of the progressive soft-power of consumer-capitalism as against the militaristic state power of orthodox socialism:

The Red Army won the Second World War against Nazism; the United States 1 the peace that followed. The Soviet Union had a constellation of garrisons and missiles across Eastern Europe and Central Asia after 1945, but no communist civilization capable of transcending and federating stand-offish locals emerged out of it. Moscow lacked nylons, chewing gum and hot dogs, to say nothing of Grace Kelly and Jackson Pollock.—Debray, p. 21.

Of course, none of this to say Debray's value or significance here is as an apologist for Soviet-era regimes. It is instead to highlight a type of conservative ethic within anti-capitalist forces, rarely seen today. In many ways, this can also be seen in the kibbutz of early zionists, a combination of ultra-traditional, rooted identity, along with a socialistic politics.

As he grows older, Debray increasingly shares a Grantian scepticism toward our mass-information, technological age. The encroachment of the American empire over our language, mind and national borders must be resisted, lest we all become enslaved fully to the tyranny of global capitalism:

in the year 2000 we have more points on the map than in 1900, but far greater difficulty than our forebears in tracing the contours that link some with others. We know many things, but they do not make sense. We have more information and less perspective.—Debray, p. 94.

Like Grant's conservative anti-capitalism, Debray's revolutionary nationalism eschews the binary of modern political dialectic.

Spanish syndicalists and Thomism

Following on from this theme of the absurdity of modern politics, the work of Spanish philosopher Gustavo Bueno (1924-2016) is a necessary read. In a sense, Bueno is a sort of mix of Grant's advanced ontological understanding of politics, as well as Debray's attachment to revolutionary socialism. Stemming from materialist and Thomist circles in Spain’s philosophical world, Bueno increasingly developed his own unique brand of national syndicalism as he grew older.

In his 2003 work ‘El mito de la izquierda: las izquierdas y la derecha’ (The myth of the left: the left and the right), Bueno attacks the arbitrary terminology of modern politics. For him, constructive political justice is achieved through the nation-state, by the real mass of the collective will.

Modern political rhetoric seeks to obscure this, and pits an imaginary ‘left’ versus an equally illusory ‘right’:

There is, no doubt, a tendency towards dualistic polarization ('Manichaeism'), to assume that the left/right opposition, proper to the political sphere, is biunivocally correlatable with oppositions given in other non-strictly political categories... From the perspective of philosophical materialism, this polarization, because of its monism, must be viewed with great suspicion.—Bueno, p. 34 (translated).

A properly rooted philosphical materialism can ground ones understanding of politics. So often, thanks to the political compass as well as Americanised rhetoric, the left/right divide is simplified down to that which liberal/illiberal. Rather than an historically grounded politic, this seperates the workers of the nation from criticism of capitalism.

This is due to the Americanised emphasis on ‘liberty’ from the state and nation. Is laissez-faire economics an inherently ‘left-wing’ notion due to its leaning toward libertarian minarchism? Certainly the rural peasantry of the world, the first victims of austerity and capitalist exploitation, did not share this feeling.

As Fennell would say, the ‘rednecks’ in the hinterland of the nation—whether na Gaeil of Conamara, or the ruralites or Castro's Cuba—do not believe in liberal utopianism. Whig Liberalism, with its insistence on endless technological and social ‘progress’, is the domain of elites. In times past, it was ‘The Good People’, of D4 and elsewhere, who supported revolutionary liberal-capitalism:

The Great Revolution gave Liberty to millions of peasants and philosophers, but that liberty was the liberty to subscribe contracts, in fact, with exploiters, liberty to sell their labour power cheap, liberty 'to die of hunger'. The Great Revolution gave Equality, but a disguised equality that opened the door to the sharpest inequalities among them—Bueno, p. 148.

Seen this way, the strict 20th Century dialectic of anti-capitalist progressivism vs capitalist traditionalism will soon be regarded as the myth that it always was. For Bueno, if we are to develop a coherent history of political ideas, we must move on from this Cold War dialectic. If we fail to do this, such absurdities as ‘right-wing communism’ will begin to be referred to:

Armed with these criteria, the Communist Party in actual Russia will become 'the champion of the right,' since it opposes social change... By similar reasons, communism and fascism will appear classified, in the same grid, among the right.—Bueno, p. 26.

Despite his attachment to syndicalism, Bueno is helpful the left/right binary itself. One could mistaken considering Grant as a man of the conservative ‘right’ and Debray as one of the revolutionary ‘left’, but this really is a nominalistic obscurity. What these thinkers do yet provide is a clear-cut vision of what their politics actually looks like, in a proper historical reality.

Lasch as America’s leftist patriot

A figure who does get closer to achieving this is one Christopher Lasch (1932-1994). Sharing aspects of all the figures discussed here, Lasch is at once a Marxist, Freudian, populist and reactionary. The main approach running through all his work is that of social history, or an applied political philosophy.

His primary interest, beyond abstraction and intellectual critiques, is a social history of political radicalism. He found that much of ideological theory was detached from the masses, and in some ways actually a retreat into lifestyle individualism. Only a national, democratic and mass-bazed politic was a threat to the all-encompassing ethic of capitalist modernity, which transcended left and right:

We need to press the point more vigorously and to ask whether the left and right have not come to share so many of the same underlying convictions, including a belief in the desirability and inevitability of technical and economic development, that the conflict between them, shrill and acrimonious as it is, no longer speaks to the central issues of American politics.—Lasch, p. 22.

As we have seen, the modern Left and Right retain much of the same modernistic presuppositions. Often to such an extent that they obscure true democratic will. For Lasch, the development of Republican Democracy, particularly in the American tradition, tended to eschew the binary of ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’.

Seen this way, the proper political history we have been speaking of becomes clearer once more. It is not of worker and bourgeoisie, or even native and internationalist, but that of common sense against all that is least common: most utopian, progressive and mammonistic:

From the agrarian heart, a voice arose, not of Left's future nor Right's gilded repose, but a steadfast distrust of 'improvement's' grand design, a longing for limits, a more honest, human line. 'They saw the coming society and they did not like it.'—Lasch, p. 15.

This essential humanism runs through all the thinkers we’ve discussed here—think of Fennell's ‘Humanism of 1916’. But no-one elaborated on it quite like Lasch. Originating as a Freudian Marxist, he was always most concerned with the affairs of the human mind. Constructive social movements always had to capture the collective mind and spirit of a given age and place, otherwise it was simple lifestyle individualism.

This is where he excels: in articulating a positive vision of social justice, grounded in national and social traditions. Whether it be a nationalist lament for Canada, rural anti-imperialism in the third world or even Latin syndicalism—they all hold to a faith in the local and the traditional. It is a hope in the communities of communities which make up our countries, from the family to the parish, that we have the ability for self-rule within ourselves:

Hope is a grateful disposition that acknowledges everything that justifies its absence. None of this, of course, implies that this is the best of all possible worlds or that the struggle against injustice ought to be suspended on the grounds that whatever is, is right.—On Christopher Lasch, p. 161.

Bibliography

Bueno, Gustavo. 2003. El mito de la izquierda.

Debray, Régis. 2017. Civilisation: Comment nous sommes devenus américains.

Grant, George. 1965. Lament for a Nation.

Lasch, Christopher. 1991. The true and only Heaven.