A Radical Right
Stephen Watt playfully reimagines a Scottish Right based on the Good, the True and the Beautfiul.
Scotland’s election: the view from the radical right
This is going to be an odd and rather speculative piece. It will represent no party that I am aware of in Holyrood, and no political force that has any likelihood of power in Scotland within the foreseeable future. It does not even reflect my own views where, politically, I would only regard myself as bound by the principles of Catholic morality and social teaching, with very little sense of how that might be put into effect beyond Dante’s culminating observation in Paradiso:
But my desire and will were moved already,
like a wheel revolving uniformly, by
the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.
That said, it represents something that might emerge from a perspective on politics whipped up from Alexander Dugin, Alain de Benoist and Steve Bannon. Behind that lies an influence they all explicitly share: that of René Guénon and Traditionalism. None of these are influences much discussed publicly even in right-wing circles within the UK where the main explicit preoccupations are with immigration and the economy. But even assuming the leaders of such UK movements don’t secretly share these intellectual preoccupations, others in the world do, which at least raises the question as to why we don’t. Beyond that, it is a viewpoint that has sufficient echoes in Catholic teaching that it might provoke a fruitful conversation.
So I’m going to cut the Gordian Knot of definitions here and create an imaginary Scottish Radical Right. My immediate sources for this invention are Dugin’s daughter, Daria Dugina’s A Theory of Europe, Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier’s Manifesto for a European Renaissance and Benjamin Teitelbaum’s War for Eternity: the Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Popular Right. But I’m happy to admit that this is all going to be a bit imaginative and even playful.
All that said, what’s going to be in our manifesto? Here’s a few suggestions.
Metapolitics:
UK politics and Scottish politics in particular are terribly shortsighted. In part, this is due to democracy: most people are immersed in the material world, and any attempt to appeal to them will inevitably appeal to their material desires. But politics is not just about the day to day or even the five-year election cycle. It also consists in addressing longer term issues about the workings of society of the sort discussed by classical political philosophers such as Plato. In current Scottish society, these issues are meaningless to the electorate and ignored by a governing class which is itself increasingly unable to appreciate anything beyond the world of business and economics. To the extent that anything like such a metapolitical concern does exist in Scotland, it is dominated by progressive thinkers rather than those animated by a respect for Tradition.
Of all our manifesto, this is probably the most important aspect. The absence of an intellectual right wing cultural sphere in Scotland is damaging, both to the development of a practical Radical Right politics in the future, but also to the wider cultural and political space in the country: unless a dominant progressivism is constantly challenged, it will become complacent and fantastical.
The Sacred and Kingship:
No other Scottish manifesto is going to contain these elements, certainly viewed as positives. We, on the other hand, as inheritors of Tradition, think that the Sacred should be at the heart of our society. Much of the decline of Scotland results from an abandonment of the Sacred and a concentration on the material. Given the practicalities of any foreseeable future in a formerly Protestant, largely secularised Scotland, we look for a coalition of various religious communities and the spiritual but not religious, gathered under the umbrella of the Good, Beautiful and True.
The King is the most potent political symbol of the centrality of the Sacred in national life. We can grumble about the actual members of the Royal Family, their constitutional Protestantism, the lack of a clearly Scottish King, but these are quibbles given the republican alternative. Far too many countries have thrown away their inheritance in this area. We should not follow them.
Scotland, nation and geopolitics:
The past certainties of nations and political alliances are dissolving. Whatever the future of Scotland as an independent state (and we welcome all cultural nationalists whether supporters of independence or of the Union) the Scottish Parliament in the current devolution settlement lacks responsibility for foreign affairs and defence. But that doesn’t mean that Scots thinking about metapolitics and national identity can afford to ignore these existential issues. Much of the Continental New Right is hostile to America and, more broadly, to the Anglo-Saxon, pinning the responsibility for the problems of globalisation and deracination on its mercantile culture. Given Trump’s hostile attitude towards Europe, a hostility that is likely to be increasingly reciprocated, Europe and the Anglo-Saxons are drifting apart.
Where does all this leave Scotland? An independent Scotland might sit more happily with the Continent. But a Scotland which, for the foreseeable future, is part of Britain, is liable to find it difficult to maintain such links and yet we will be uneasy allies for an Anglo-Saxon, but isolationist America.
This is an area where it is difficult to see a way out. Certainly, for the immediate future, it seems essential to ensure that Scotland -and that on any reasonable scenario involves the UK- is better prepared for military defence. But beyond that, Britain is in danger of finding itself suspended between great power blocs such as Continental Europe and the USA, with Scotland in the position of being powerless to negotiate its own place both within the UK and the wider world.
Immigration and popular unrest:
If radical right-wing politics are starting to achieve a greater prominence within the UK, it is in large part due to immigration. Quite apart from the genuine social harms caused by large scale immigration, it is also a convenient means to generate popular unrest for political purposes. Racism as fear and hatred of the other is a powerful psychological force, and the pretence that it is easily removed or is confined only to a few pathological characters is an easy lie.
Discussion of immigration control goes on, and no party seems able to handle the practicalities satisfactorily. But two elements of traditional thought seem underplayed. First, there should be a genuine horror at civil unrest. Public demonstrations and riots embody disorder in the State and reflect disorder in the psychology of those engaged in that public disorder. Disagreements about politics need individuals to exercise iron self-control, and if they cannot control themselves, the State must control them. Second, from a Christian perspective, all of us bear the image of God, and racism’s denial of that reality is blasphemous. This means that there are moral limits on what decisions are available and how they can be implemented. Tradition favours self-control and wisdom, modernity favours self-expression and lack of emotional restraint.
Solidarity:
If immigration is one of the main drivers of right-wing politics, the other is a sense that we are governed by globalised elites whose loyalty is to themselves. In traditional Western societies, elites felt themselves answerable to God and responsible for those in their charge. In the absence of this sacred hierarchy, self interest becomes culturally unchallenged, and other people merely things to be used. It is entirely possible that Scotland faces a grim economic and political future: civilisations flourish and wane, and there is no reason to suppose that we are immune to this pattern. But all of us have value and a place in society. The modern demand for equality is a pale shadow of the truth of solidarity: each of us, in different ways and according to our different abilities, has a role to play and no one should be abandoned.
Conclusion
Well, there’s some of the headings. More to be said and particularly short on practical solutions of course, but essentially that’s the point. Unless Scotland can wean itself off the drug of believing only a certain sort of progressive analysis of society has value, and unless we can start thinking about the permanent things of living in a community with deep traditions, we will drift and ultimately capsize. As MacDiarmid put it in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle:
I wad ha’e Scotland to my eye
Until I saw a timeless flame
Tak’ Auchtermuchty for a name,
And kent that Ecclefechan stood
As pairt o’ an eternal mood.
By Dr Stephen Watt
Stephen is a permanent writer and co-member of the editorial team. He teaches Philosophy at Edinburgh University and the Open University and is also involved in the Albertus Institute in Edinburgh.