If the 1990s marked a high point for the New Right, the meaning of all this attention was debated; it became the stuff of op-eds and academic argument. One commentator, the Swedish sociologist Goran Dahl, saw the development as a revival of Weimar Germany’s conservative revolution—that broad movement of proto-fascist writers, academics, and activists who supplied an aura of respectability to the ultranationalist politics that culminated in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich (a cause in which some, though not all, of those right-wing radicals would eventually enlist).[...]
One key to the New Right’s success, as Dahl predicted, has been its effort to capture a hip style of political engagement usually associated with the left. Starting in the late 1970s, the New Right appropriated environmentalism, anti-imperialism, and the sort of active citizenship for which the Greens became best known. Like the leftist counterculture that emerged from the 1968 student protests throughout Europe, the New Right is adept at styling itself as an “alternative milieu.” This is partly due to its origins in the same anti-establishment zeitgeist as the New Left, but it is also partly a self-conscious co-option of leftist notions, another way in which members of the New Right, as Weiss puts it, “seem to have learned from the left and offer themselves as ‘new ’68ers.’” [...]
As he shows, radical conservatism can accommodate a host of causes and enemies, with salvation of the West from a tide of Muslim immigrants the current favorites. But for today’s New Right, like the illiberal German right of earlier generations, the absolute enemy is always liberal modernity and the forces of universalism, which are seen as a threat to traditional identities and communities and the comforting authority they provide. [...]
Islamic fundamentalism, Weiss argues, is also an authoritarian revolt against the materialism and rootlessness supposedly spawned by liberal globalization. Ironically, Europe’s identitarians are ideologically closest not to their cosmopolitan fellow nationals but to the most pious among the Muslim immigrants who insist on holding onto their culture and religious identity.
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