The new empires against the internal enemy

The alliance between American and Russian imperialism has been brewing for decades, and right now we are witnessing the blossoming of a cultural and political project with roots much deeper than Donald Trump's anger at Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House. Children of the moral logic of the 20th century, we think that the past century was marked by a three-way battle between fascism, communism and liberalism: the former was defeated in World War II, and the latter lost the Cold War. With these glasses on, Putin's Russia and Xi's China represent the resistance of the old authoritarianisms to disappear, and Europe and the United States a natural alliance to protect free societies against these regimes.

But since the 1950s, a dark current of American radical right-wing ideologues has been telling a very different story. For these esoteric voices, the great wars of the last century should not be understood as a military struggle, but as episodes within a cultural war between two possible futures for Western civilization. Rather than a conflict between powers with different models, the real battle would be fought within each bloc between those who defend traditional values and what, during the last election campaign, Donald Trump called the "internal enemy." The leaders of the new authoritarian international should not compete among themselves, but against an equally international virus that they all have to one degree or another in their respective homes. There are voices on the American right that have been proclaiming an alliance with the Russians for seventy years.

For example, Francis Parker Yockey saw this clearly in November 1952, when Stalin hanged fourteen Jewish members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Yockey is a largely unknown figure to the general public, but he was one of the leading authors of the radical right for decades. His great idea, and it was a merit to formulate it in the midst of McCarthyism, was that, despite appearances, liberalism and communism had common assumptions about the fundamental equality of all human beings that united them more than they separated them. And for Yockey, this egalitarianism was a spiritual poison responsible for the decline of the West (his idol was Oswald Spengler, of whom he was the author of the book). Ferran Saez (He speaks often in these very pages.) A consummate anti-Semite, Yockey’s enemy was what he called “cultural Marxism,” a coalition of the theories of Marx and Freud designed to undermine Western culture’s self-confidence and natural right to dominate the world. For Yockey’s neo-fascism, “the source of government is inequality among men,” and societies should not be based on absolute individual rights but on the subjection of the people to the authority of leaders. In the trial and purge of the Jewish communists in Prague, Yockey found evidence that “Russian nationalists” had gained control of the regime over the “Jewish Bolsheviks,” describing the eventual end of the Marxist state and its return to a “traditional Russian regime.” The article he wrote in the wake of these events became required reading for an illiberal right-wing movement that would strive for a global realignment identical to the one we are experiencing today.

If we said earlier that Trump used the phrase "internal enemy" explicitly in his campaign, we Europeans remember JD Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, in which he said that Europe's challenges do not come from external adversaries such as Russia or China, but from internal threats such as expression and expression of restrictions. Along with this, the idea that the cultural exceptionalism of the West is not that of a project of justice and equality, but of domination and hierarchies, was also expressed by Trump in the speech with which he addressed the American Congress on Monday, where he said: "We will forge the freest, most advanced civilization, never the most dynamic."

The new right has a well-defined internal enemy and is organizing itself to help each other in exchange for respecting the spheres of influence of each empire. As Yockey said, the thread that unites this common rival, from liberalism to communism, is the presumption that all people have a common nature regardless of biological characteristics or the culture in which they have been raised, and that the function of politics should be to organize this equality to fight against the exploitation of the powerful, instead of institutionalizing it. Perhaps the greatest irony of our times is that this internal enemy has always been defined as a well-organized Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, but today the egalitarian majority is completely deactivated and the only ones who are thinking and acting in international terms are the leaders of the new right.