Was this really necessary? Yes.

My depiction of the failure of the New Right has now been controversially discussed, to put it mildly.

(Picture: Midjourney)

Before I address substantive criticism, I must say something about the accusation that is all too clearly implied behind this criticism: Was this really necessary? Did you have to say it out loud? Of all the points of criticism, I take this barely articulated one the most seriously. I would have done our cause a disservice if, out of intellectual vanity, I had voiced an ugly truth that serves no purpose other than to fuel the enemy’s propaganda.

Of all the reasons that compelled me to elaborate and publish these thoughts on the failure of the New Right, which I have carried with me for the past few years, the most significant is that over the past year, I have witnessed the erosion of the political middle structure of the right. Of the intelligent people who, despite often significant commitment, do not live off politics, have no financial dependence, and have no reason for their engagement other than their belief in the cause.

This belief has suffered greatly under the populist circus, the repeated betrayal by those one is forced to regard as ones own political representatives, and the realization that the methods and strategies of the last decade are obviously no longer sufficient. The frustration tolerance of good people, who don’t need to put up with this, is a limited resource. Collapses come quickly and drastically. At first, people grumble and carry on, no one says anything. But when a shock comes, the house of cards collapses.

This brings us to the methods and strategies of the last decade. I wrote that one must understand the history of the New Right to understand its failure. Understanding history is different from giving belated advice. I have no intention of going back to 2012 and saying how things could have been done better. Back then, actions were taken based on the situation at the time. This is a historical justice that New Right representatives today, with appropriate distance and sine ira et studio, should also grant to the old right of the skinhead era. Given the influx of this last youth culture of the working class into the political right and a middle class that was still far from being affected by population replacement, a New Right strategy paper in 1990 would have been pointless as well.

This historical justice also includes recognizing that the views and statements of a political movement are not the product of pure thought but arise under an external selection pressure that may have nothing to do with the truthfulness of a statement.

The best example is this depiction of the so-called “circular flow of power” from Martin Sellner’s Regime Change von Rechts¹:

This “circular flow of power” has been standard Identitarian training material for many years. Anyone looking at it will surely wonder why the power flows in one direction and not the other one. Why, above all, the state cannot create a dominant ideology. The reason is that this circular flow of power and the underlying models and theories primarily served the purpose of preventing twenty-year-olds from acquiring an illegal firearm for “Day X.” If something like that happens even once, it’s enough to criminalize a movement like the Identitarian Movement. Accuracy and completeness are not even secondary considerations, and naturally, such courses do not provide a comprehensive theory of political power, be it simply because such a theory would have to address the role of violence, and that section would be a citation mine for political persecution. So, you simply don’t to this.

Every era has its own requirements. A mistake or falsehood that is irrelevant in one era can be deadly in another. We are stuck in a dead end today, and the way out of this dead end, if we find one, will change what the Right is at least as much as the transition from the Old Right to the New Right once did.

Now let’s turn to the substantive criticism. One demand I simply refuse is to provide a timetable to support my claim that the New Right has failed. One can only speak of failure, it’s argued, if the set goal is not achieved by the deadline. By this logic, someone who sets out on a hike in the morning, intending to arrive by evening, cannot realize at noon that his map is wrong. Not even if he is already hopelessly lost. I have demonstrated the structural inferiority of the New Right’s metapolitics compared to the populist circus strategy under the conditions of democracy and the rule of law. If I am right, then the New Right, which largely defined itself through the metapolitical approach, has failed. If I am wrong, well, I am no more wrong than if I had provided an incorrect timetable.

Regarding the most significant reason for this—the fact that immigration creates facts on the ground and personal rights that, in a state governed by the rule of law, are not inherently irreversible but require far greater efforts to reverse than the other side needs to let new immigrants in after winning a democratic election, meaning there is no democratic equality of arms and, in practice, a ratchet effect that protects population replacement from effective remigration—two objections have been raised:

The first objection is the accusation that I am engaging in the opponent’s framing. Framing is the presentation of a situation. Honestly, I cannot imagine how one could frame this situation more favorably than as a game with loaded dice. The other possible frames for the same situation can be read at Correctiv² or in the domestic intelligence agency’s reports³.

More significant is the objection that immigration also involves breaking the law. Wasn’t the migrant wave of 2015 a million-fold breach of the law? Yes, it was, and this specific topic deserves its own analysis. But the short version is that the rule of law is based on the personal rights of individuals. In 2015, the general legal order was somehow violated. Fine, but who is now entitled to sue? When it comes to the rights of each individual who arrived back then, it’s very clear. The sentence attributed to Angela Merkel, “I don’t care if I’m to blame, they’re here now,” perfectly summed up the situation. As soon as they were here, within the scope of German legal order, they became legal persons within that very order. The fact that they achieved this status through a breach of the law was irrelevant. The legal order undermines itself in the process. Under the title “Erosion of the Legal Order and Resilient Communication,” I already addressed over a year ago how we should deal with this in our public relations.


Two further serious objections fundamentally challenge the elite theory, which I have drawn upon for part of my considerations. The first has been particularly emphasized by Martin Sellner. He considers elite theory overrated because it has not provided an alternative strategy to right-wing Gramscianism and metapolitics. Indeed, elite theory is initially a cold shower for anyone politically active, as it establishes the position from which one can act politically at all. Building elites is always quickly called for but very difficult to implement. But there’s no way around it! If a group that currently lacks political power pursues a political goal, every strategy must be measured by whether it answers the question of how this group can become one of those organized minorities that can actually shape politics. The means and methods summarized under the term metapolitics can be useful here. But not if one has magical notions of the power of cultural hegemony in his mind. That it is equally unhelpful to replace the hypostasis of “cultural hegemony” with the hypostasis of “power” is something I have already explained against Parvini under the title “Power Does Nothing.” I am fundamentally opposed to political shamanism.

These magical notions bring us to the second objection, which Simon Dettmann has formulated as follows:

“The overestimation of the scope and explanatory power of elite sociology is a mistake, primarily for substantive reasons. For its proponents persistently ignore that what applies to people in general also applies to representatives of the ruling class: they are entangled in perceptual and cognitive frameworks that Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, called episteme. It is only through the epistemic ‘lens’ that the empirically experienced world becomes comprehensible at all. The mutual interdependence of the largely time- and culture-dependent episteme, characterized by more general ordering frameworks, on the one hand, and the discourses shaped by more specific attitudes, which take on the structure of discourse formations, on the other, leads in Foucault to an epistemic infinite regress in which the human as an actor, and thus as a subject of himself, disappears. But one need not follow Foucault that far to admit that the triad of episteme, discourse, and discourse formation so strongly determines the thinking and actions of elites that it is impossible to regard them as autonomous or sovereign.”

Now, I don’t recall writing about the autonomy of the elite. Certainly not in the sense implied here, that the elite is detached from the world around them and could thus do whatever they want if only they could want what they want. On the contrary, I wrote: “With power postion comes position, and with position comes structurally determined interest.” This also turns me against the view for which Dettmann provides the best example here, namely that politics is solely determined by recursive opinions. Such recursive opinions exist, and they play a role, but in this schema of episteme, discourse, and discourse formation, reality vanishes.

Yet this reality affects the political opinions of elites far more strongly than those of the general population. For most people, politics is another form of football. Whether their opinions on it are valid or not has no bearing on their lives. Those who actually engage in politics, however, often receive painful feedback from reality. The result is far from perfect error correction—otherwise, we wouldn’t be where we are. But this feedback from reality is there. It comes with the fact that, for the politician, politics is indeed his world, not another world that only exists on television.

This, by the way, is why the metapolitical theory of power is now criticized everywhere in the Right, whereas ten, or perhaps even five years ago, such criticism would have been ivory-tower parlor games. Over the course of these years, partly through our own efforts, partly through circumstances, and partly through our opponents’ mistakes, we have reached a position where we can at least reach for power. In doing so, we also learn its limits. The New Right has failed because it emerged from a state of complete powerlessness and was adapted to it. It was never designed for the challenges of actual power possession. But it leaves behind a legacy of people and institutions that must be utilized. It must neither be squandered in populism nor burned out in frustration.

1. Sellner, Martin (2023): Regime Change von Rechts, S.46. In his explanation of this representation from 2023, Sellner merges the concept of dominant ideology with what is called the deep state, meaning those state, semi-state, and non-state institutions whose leadership is not elected and which therefore have the advantage of permanence over elected state offices. The term deep state became firmly established only through the experience of Trump's first presidency. It is very revealing for the development of the Right to see at this point which era the individual ideas originate from.

2. Left wing NGO in Germany which put up a lot of stink over alleged secret deportation planes after a right wing conference in Potsdam in 2023.

3. The German domestic intelligence agency the Verfassungsschutz publishes regular reports about alleged enemies of the constitution. Those reports do not have the force of a judicial verdict, but can be deeply deleterious to those accused in this way nevertheless.