No One Knows What ‘the West’ Is

The significance of an ideological split on the far right

Among all the skirmishes, schisms, and attempted excommunications on the right in recent months, one that garnered relatively little attention was the sacking of (the wonderfully named) editor Constantin von Hoffmeister by his erstwhile employer, noted far-right publisher Arktos Press. Arktos made its name as the premier English-language imprint for such Nouvelle Droite luminaries as Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, and Guillaume Faye, as well as canonical right-wing thinkers like Julius Evola, Oswald Spengler, and Alfred Bäumler (the official Nazi exegete of Nietzsche). In recent years, Arktos also became the main venue for the translated work of Aleksandr Dugin.

Arktos’s statement on Hoffmeister’s dismissal is vague, stating that he “has engaged in associations and dealings which potentially misrepresent Arktos’s own affiliations and commitments” and “has increasingly engaged in disseminating perspectives which drift too far away from Arktos’s core values and priorities.” A more detailed indication of what was behind the split can be found on X, where the press highlighted a post by Hoffmeister that declared “multipolarity is the future,” illustrated with an allegorical cartoon in which (racistly caricatured) figures representing China, India, and Africa leer menacingly over much smaller figures US, British, and French imperialism, the idea evidently being this turning of the tables is a good thing. The official Arktos X account quote-tweeted this post, saying that it demonstrates “his priorities have drifted too far away from Arktos’s core values.” The press’s mission, the post went on, is to “advocate civilisational renaissance, not ‘Third Worldism.’”

In simple terms, we could understand this as the sort of bizarro-world version of left-wing cancel culture we might expect from the online right, where instead of being canceled for being racist, you get canceled for being not racist enough (an approach leading online right figures have openly advocated). But the schism also reveals a split in how “the West” and “civilization” are perceived within far-right circles. Is “the West” merely one bastion of cultural particularity equivalent to others, the internal integrity of which must be preserved (roughly, the multipolarist view)? Or is “the West” fundamentally superior, the pinnacle of all civilization, and therefore entitled to some sort of global preeminence over its inferior counterparts?

Hoffmeister’s preference for the multipolarist view seems to have led to a rift with his employers, but it is largely in sync with the outlook of several major authors in the Arktos canon. Last year, the political theorist Miri Davidson wrote a fascinating analysis of the multiple convergences between de Benoist and Dugin—whose titles make up a considerable portion of the Arktos catalog—and left-wing “decolonial” thought. Like the Third-Worldists of the left, de Benoist and Dugin denounce Eurocentrism, globalization, and cultural homogenization, and proclaim a “right to difference.” Davidson quotes from a 2012 manifesto co-written by de Benoist that effectively collapses the opposition between “Third Worldism” and “civilizational renaissance” asserted by the Arktos leadership. While calling for a “European renaissance,” Benoist and his co-authors also state that their movement “supports peoples struggling against Western imperialism.”

There are two ways to understand the appeal of “decolonial” arguments on the far right. De Benoist, who calls himself a Gramscian, appears to have self-consciously co-opted left-wing anti-colonial rhetoric because he understood that in the post-imperial era, appeals to national self-determination were more likely to gain traction in elite discourse than proclamations of racial superiority. At the same time, such a position spoke more authentically to the forms of ethnic consciousness that emerged within the West over the past half-century. Amid the influx of migrants from the developing world, whites in the former imperial core were more likely to see themselves as victims of “colonization” than as “colonizers.” Hence, as Davidson notes, “Renaud Camus, theorist of the Great Replacement, has praised the anticolonial canon—‘all the major texts in the fight against decolonization apply admirably to France, especially those of Frantz Fanon.’”

But my sense is that the vanguard of the younger online right is a lot less inclined to identify with Fanon than with the pieds noirs. How else to explain the popularity of content about Rhodesia, a country that ceased to exist in 1979, on X? For instance, in a thread from last year that was viewed nearly 8 million times, Will Tanner, the publisher of a minor right-wing site called The American Tribune, declared the short-lived nation “a normal Western country typical of the century prior to its destruction.’” The fall of Rhodesia, Tanner lamented, “shows why the West is no longer what it once was.”

Rhodesia has become something of an obsession for the “America-First” camp of the online right in a curious parallel with the left’s newfound fixation on the concept of “settler-colonialism.” If America’s true founders, as influencer Matt Walsh has insisted, were “settlers” and not “immigrants,” it presumably makes sense for America-Firsters to see white Rhodesians as kindred spirits embodying their own nation’s lost ideals.

But Tanner went further than claiming Rhodesians as spiritual descendants of American pioneers: He asserted that the embattled nation was a “normal Western country.” This might seem like an odd claim to make about a territory not located anywhere close to “the West” in which a small population of recently arrived settlers culturally loyal to a faraway land presided over a heterogeneous native population. But one way to read it is as a version of an idea elaborated by, for one, (Arktos author) Oswald Spengler, for whom what characterizes the West is a constant reaching beyond itself—a restless dissatisfaction with territorial, cultural, and intellectual limits. One finds versions of this notion in contemporary right-wing influencers like Bronze Age Pervert, for whom the quintessential Western spirit is that of the marauding, conquering Männerbund. (He views Spanish conquistadors and white settlers in subsaharan Africa as later historical avatars of this spirit.)

Once we get here, though, we’re not that far from the neocon outlook that the New Right supposedly repudiated. Perhaps this is why some original alt-righters, like Richard Spencer, ended up splitting with the right and throwing in their lot with NATO during the Ukraine War: The global American imperium might not be the optimal vehicle for their ideal of Western supremacy, but it’s preferable to Duginite multipolarism, which would deny “the West” its vocation of conquest and expansion. Although Arktos hasn’t gone that far, its dismissal of Hoffmeister points in a similar direction: “Civilizational renaissance” doesn’t mean settling for the post-imperial rump states, but seeking once again to conquer distant lands and subdue inferior peoples (which is why Trump 2.0’s potential neo-imperial ventures may well appeal to an online right that supposedly stood for foreign policy restraint).

These fractures within the far right also run through other segments of the political spectrum that, in different ways, lay claim to “the West.” If you read Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism, the founding text of National Conservatism, you will find that Hazony claims nations enjoy a “right to their own unique laws, policies, and traditions,” which might sound like it puts him in the same camp as multipolarists like de Benoist. But he then goes on to cite America’s invasion of Iraq and Israel’s bombing of foreign nuclear facilities as examples of “unique laws, policies, and traditions” that must be protected from meddling transnational bodies. We find an odd inversion of this perspective on the other end of the spectrum, where Atlanticists of the Anne Applebaum type who find all parochial nationalisms abhorrent make an exception for Ukraine’s, which for them embodies the Wilsonian ideal of national self-determination. Hence, the Azov Battallion becomes the point of convergence of liberal internationalists and erstwhile Nazis like Spencer.

These are not mere contradictions, however. Rather, I would read them as unwitting expressions of a paradox at the core of what is called “the West” which few if any of its self-designated champions are capable of grasping. I will give the closing words to Compact contributor Ralph Leonard:

What we often mean by “Western civilization” is the form of modern bourgeois society and culture of the past five centuries that began in Europe and spread across the world. Contrary to the anti-woke conservatives’ invocation of a solid, stable legacy, this version of the West is fundamentally revolutionary. It is the product of the greatest uprising of the oppressed in the 10,000 years of human history.

The revolt of the third estate, culminating in the universalization of free labor, the emergence of a cosmopolitan civil society, and in the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, made possible the ideal of universal freedom. Humanity now had the capacity to consciously transform itself and society—as Thomas Paine put it, to “begin the world again.” This was not a simple continuation of the ancient heritage of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem; it was also a break from it. Our shared legacy tasks us with realizing the modern project of freedom—a task that ought to be renewed. Who is worthy of it?

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