‘The Culture War Has Only Been Won by Default’

While progressive hegemony wavers across the media, Alain de Benoist analyzes the fury unleashed by the slightest breach in their system. In his view, progressive dominance has collapsed on its own — but the conservative right has won nothing. Faced with this, he argues for producing content of real quality.

Faced with the “far right,” billionaire Matthieu Pigasse wants to “wage the cultural war” — and “to the bitter end.” Hence the cover of Les Inrockuptibles (which he owns) leading with “Culture against the fascists,” along with a petition signed by actresses Camille Cottin and Judith Godrèche, and by the comedian Guillaume Meurice. Six hundred figures from the film industry voice their indignation in Libération against Vincent Bolloré, fearing a “homogenization” of production.

In the media and on the red carpet, the battle for influence rages on. The Observatoire du journalisme (OJIM) turned to Alain de Benoist, often called out in the mainstream press for having theorized the “cultural war” as far back as the 1960s. Born in 1943, French essayist and journalist, founder of the journal Éléments, he is the principal theoretician of the Nouvelle Droite and the author of an extensive body of work.

OJIM: What is at stake here? Cultural hegemony, or the survival of a caste?

Alain de Benoist: The two are linked, but I would say first and foremost the survival of a caste. For decades, the dominant ideology has taken the form, in the cultural sphere, of a political-ideological-media micro-milieu that cultivates l’entre-soi [TN: closed in-group sociability; mixing only with one’s own kind] as the most natural thing in the world.

Tocqueville said that in an egalitarian society, even the smallest inequalities come to look like a scandal. Something similar is going on here: although progressive liberalism is not merely dominant but holds something close to a monopoly in the cultural domain, the smallest window of freedom that opens anywhere provokes indignant protest along the lines of: How is this possible? What on earth is going on?

CNews, about which a great deal could be said (and not necessarily in its favor), is just about the only television channel, among hundreds, where one occasionally hears views that run against the current. That is enough to give the functionaries of human-rights ideology the vapors — to provoke barrages of complaints, denunciations from professional informers [TN: French sycophantes in its original Greek sense of “denouncers,” not the English “flatterers”], calls for censorship, and blacklists.

And since we live in a world of ever-intensifying hysteria in social relations, things escalate at once to the extreme: Bolloré has bought up two publishing houses — when do the camps reopen? All of this is obviously absurd. The people understand none of it and couldn’t care less. The only thing they take away is this simple observation: the truth lies elsewhere.

OJIM: Alain de Benoist, you have been a journalist, an essayist, and an editor; you founded a think tank (G.R.E.C.E.). You have been living the “cultural war” for half a century, and indeed have paid a price for it, having been the target of numerous defamatory media campaigns. Does your analysis need to be updated?

Alain de Benoist: I don’t think so, but one must of course take new facts into account. First, the role of social media, which encourages an escalation of Manichean brutality and serves as a sounding board for the most brazen defamations, setting itself up as a permanent tribunal in which any accusation amounts to a conviction. But the underlying principle remains the same: culture carries images, values, and themes which, in the long run, end up saturating the symbolic imaginary and modifying collective behavior. What is at stake in the cultural war, as it always has been, is hegemony.

Today, hegemony still belongs not to “the left” — as is too easily said — but to a progressive camp which, for want of anything left to say, contents itself with turning the prayer wheel, repeating the same mantras (”antiracism,” gender theory, “republican” values, universalism). This camp is dominant, but it feels threatened. The privileged fear losing their privileges; the mutins de Panurge [TN: Philippe Muray’s coinage an inversion of the proverbial moutons de Panurge, the sheep of Rabelais’s Quart Livre who blindly follow one another to their death. Muray’s “mutineers of Panurge” are pseudo-rebels who imagine themselves transgressive while in fact conforming to the dominant consensus] fear losing their subsidies. By dint of warming the ice floe, they discover that it is melting under their feet. Like dogs afraid of losing their bone, they bare their teeth. This is entirely normal: if they were really strong, they could afford the luxury of indifference. We ought rather to take heart from it: their system will eventually implode, the accumulated mud will eventually dry up.

OJIM: Outlets like Radio Nova traffic in humor that is deliberately shocking and brutal. Other outlets, on a more moderate left, denounce a return of antisemitism. Can one laugh at everything?

Alain de Benoist: Pierre Desproges’s [TN: French humorist (1939–1988), famous for the line “On peut rire de tout, mais pas avec n’importe qui” — one can laugh at everything, but not with just anyone] well-known answer doesn’t satisfy me. Yes, of course, one ought to be able to laugh at everything — but that does not mean that everything is laughable. We are living in an age in which everything that was once naturally honored and respected is held up to derision. Mockery is an infirmity of the soul. Charlie Hebdo is free to publish what it likes, but I am among those who believe that the role of the school is not to show pupils cartoons they consider blasphemous.

In any normal society, there is a zone of the sacred; it must be off-limits to those who want to profane it the way others piss on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Today’s humorists only make low minds laugh. And besides — let us remember — we are not on earth merely to crack jokes!

OJIM: What metapolitical strategy would you recommend today to those who reject both liberal-progressive homogenization and the merely inverted mirror image of a purely reactive “combat right”? You seem to be denouncing our contemporaries’ inclination toward the path of least resistance.

Alain de Benoist: The only strategy is work, and the production of quality. A great many people “on the right” today think they are on the verge of winning the “cultural war.” But what war are they talking about? What battle has been won when those who hold authority in the political-media system still refer only to “incontestable authorities” who think the opposite of what the majority of people think?

The truth is that the cultural war has at best been won by default. The progressive left has lost; the conservative right has not won. The adversary has not been defeated — it has collapsed on its own. But it has not, for all that, lost power. When “the right” can field a few dozen researchers, philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, biologists, and physicists capable of articulating a worldview alternative to the one that dominates today, we can return to the subject. But I don’t think that day is tomorrow.

https://www.arktosjournal.com/p/alain-de-benoist-the-culture-war