Jouvenelian Trilemmas and the Revenge of the Proletariat

by Miguel Nunes Silva (March 2025)

 

With the onset of the second Trump administration, we are hopefully entering the end of the woke era.

In liberal societies, it is quite normal to find marginal voices for fringe beliefs. Wokeism’s existence is not a problem in itself as people enjoy freedom of conscience, in the West, and thus have the liberty to reason as bigotedly as they like. It became a massive problem when it started being promoted by Blackrock, Brussels and the Beltway.

Todd Huizinga explains that cultural-Marxist finance of the ESG kind “(…) cannot on its own achieve the global woke capitalist utopia. For a world-transforming project such as Planned Capitalism, a “public-private partnership” with government is needed.” The Biden admin did its due diligence with the SEC launching an ESG Enforcement Task Force. Better yet, “the Eurocracy is not hindered by such bothersome concerns as being voted out of office,” and is “perfectly positioned to lead the member state national governments, and the member state citizens whom they so faithfully tax, into a new green world of social and environmental justice (…) forever helping make all the dreams of woke capitalism come true.”

This serves to ascertain that there are financial incentives and pressure for national politicians to comply with the woke agenda. However, the Left’s march through the institutions did not begin with Blackrock. It was rather its cultural influence that drove its message to the Davos crowd. More to the point, it was centrist politicians platforming of cultural-marxist principles and voices that began the change.

Environmental, social and governance principles (ESGs) came into prominence in the 2000s, in academia and international institutions. It followed the now passé concept of CSR or Corporate Social Responsibility which, in turn, dated back to the 1980s and 90s.

As the Cold War came to an end, Deng’s China moved towards market economics and communist regimes sunk into debt and famine around the world, the economic side of Marxism began to lose its edge. Communist parties everywhere saw their civic influence wane and their electoral success dwindle. Under pressure from Reaganomics and Thatcherism—along with their centre-Left iterations in Clinton and Blair—so did the trade-unions lose their might.

It was the Trotskyite and neo-Marxist Left that came to the rescue with its cultural criticism of capitalism and ‘American imperialism’. The USSR in shambles, the only critical voices of the new Washington Consensus were the anti-globalisation movements wrecking chaos in IMF, World Bank and WTO meetings. As the West became enthralled in its belief in ‘the end of History,’ cultural causes such as the environment and ‘human rights’ and other assorted ‘first world problems,’ became the influential platform for the expression of political grievances against the powers that be. In a reality without a clear foreign ideological foe, centrist politicians found themselves without arguments against the universalist social injustices denounced by the New Left. They had to adapt … or die. Thus, the old trade-unionists were replaced by the new internationalist NGO activists as the interlocutors of preference when it came to acquiring moral bona fides. Centrist establishment types spoke of GDP whereas the young activists preached puritanical morality. Wage and labour conditions negotiations were now replaced by ‘public-private partnerships for sustainability’ and ‘global compacts on human rights.’

Organisations such as the World Economic Forum were equally targeted by protests and it was this pressure that probably drove international financial bodies into kowtowing to the woke creed.

What was essentially occurring was a shift of alliances with the establishment liberal Left replacing its blue-collar partners with services sector QuaNGO urbanites, while exporting the manufacturing jobs to the third world.

This corresponds with Bertrand de Jouvenel’s theories developed in his On Power (1948), where he contends that elite factions triangulate power in order to further their own interests. Whereas during the Cold War the non-communist party affiliated far-leftists were seen as an ‘infantile disorder’ by both the establishment and the Marxist-Leninists, post 1989, these tendencies—mostly led by the soixante-huitards—became the partners du jour for the bona fides deficient centrists.

In the Old World, Blairism and the Third Way were seen as the way forward whereas in the New World, Clinton essentially corresponded with a vision of itself as ‘the first black president’ along with various military interventions but business friendly regulatory policies. The Third Way needed a credible ideological partner and, in time, the wokesters provided just that.

This realignment has been much discussed given the salience of the woke ideology during the past decade in the West; the Frankfurt School is ubiquitous in many an analysis focusing on the origins and influence of the modern Left. What is much less discussed though, is how a similar realignment took place on the Right of the political spectrum.

For many, the Reagan and Thatcher years were a boon of conservative governance. So influential was that tandem that its ideological influence can still be seen today with figures such as Paul Ryan, Javier Milei or Liz Truss. Yet, the Reagan legacy was not only utterly sullied in the subsequent decades but was not itself actually much of a departure from the creeping technocracy that had threatened the political system since the days of Wilson and Roosevelt.

Both republicans and democrats have, since the end of the Reagan administration, expanded the size of the federal government, grown the public debt, multiplied military interventionism, increased citizen dependency on government handouts as well as overseen a decrease in religious devotion and family integrity. The Obama administration was particularly toxic, taking cultural Marxism to such an extreme that society now actively racially discriminates against whites, approves bigoted public policies against men, promotes revisionist History in the curriculum and even normalises the butchering of minors, not to mention seeking to erase caucasians demographically. Far from looking out for their own interests, corporations actually try their best to ‘get with the program’ as fast as possible. Yuppie 80s libertarian conservatism was a mere bump in the road, not an inversion of the trend.

It gets worse because if one actually looks into the policies of Atlantic right-wingers in the 1980s, in many cases they really were complicit with many of the negative trends whose consequences we suffer today: Reagan increased the public debt by 150% and continued third world mass immigration. If true that he was not much of an interventionist, his rhetoric was bellicose and his successors have seized on it to dramatically expand Atlanticist military commitments to unsustainable levels. In part, the reason was the Cold War and the necessity seen by many, in assigning considerable portions of the budget to military expenditure. In due course, there were three main factions arguing fervently for confrontation with the Soviet Union: the conservative Right, the religious Right and neo-Marxists incensed against Stalinism, from Max Schachtman to Christopher Hitchens—later on a vociferous supporter of the Bush administration throughout the Iraq War.

Indeed, there was a shift from the Goldwater to the Reagan era, culminating in a squeeze of working class conservatives—demanding less government interventionism—by the puritanical conservatives and the cosmopolitan neo-Marxists, then consolidating into the neoconservative movement. Both neocons and theocons favoured a crusading policy against communism as well as paternalistic social policies, eventually synthesising into George W. Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’ of the 2000s.

 

In his posthumously published opus Leviathan and His Enemies (2016), [Samuel Francis] claimed that the religious Right had turned out to be a serious impediment to the goals of the ‘New Right,’ a populist coalition of working-class and middle-class Americans who opposed the cosmopolitan and interventionist policies of the managerial state (…) Francis more explicitly suggested in Leviathan that elites in the Republican Party and the established conservative movement had made use of the religious Right in order to distract and derail “a potentially revolutionary and nationalist movement” that was more interested in class-based issues than abortion or school prayer (…) —Grant Havers, “A Paleoconservative Dialectic,” in A Paleoconservative Anthology, 2023

 

This realignment of the Right thus explains both Pat Buchanan’s and Ron Paul’s candidacies against the Bush dynasty, with both the paleoconservatives and the paleolibertarians rebelling against the neoliberal and progressive Washington Consensus, following the end of the Cold War.

In Europe, a similar phenomenon has been observed. The aftermath of the Second World War had catapulted Christian-democrats into a dominant force in the continent. This was due to their appeal to moderation as a contrast to the folly of continental totalitarian movements of the 30s. Adenauer headed the German CDU but was elected chancellor thanks to the votes of the FDP and the national-conservative Deutsche Partei. De Gaulle dominated the French Right but strongly favoured an independent foreign policy. In 2003, the influence of these Christian-democrats was still felt when both France and Germany opted out of the intervention against Iraq.

Nevertheless, from the 2000s onwards, most centrist right-wing parties were complicit in adopting undemocratic methods against insurgent forces on the Right. Jörg Haider and the FPÖ were outright removed from power thanks to a cabal of EU technocrats and European heads of government, many of whom were Christian-democrats. Much the same was attempted against Geert Wilders and the PVV on different occasions. In Germany there are active debates on how to ban the AfD. In Sweden, the Tidö Agreement denies the Sweden Democrats ministerial positions in the coalition government. In Portugal, CHEGA! was denied its due deputy-speaker of parliament position for years, with the complicity of the country’s EPP affiliated parties.

After denouncing multikulti as a failure, early in her tenure, Angela Merkel then decided to become the chief proponent of the open borders policy which led to the migrant crisis and the demographic chaos in Europe, after 2014. She also banned nuclear power and facilitated awarding more competencies to the European Union. Social-liberal parties such as the FDP or the LibDems—in Europe, neoliberals being on the Right of the spectrum—have largely gone along with progressive policies which proves that both mainstream conservatives and liberals prefer to have the Left rule or adopt leftist policies than to empower the national-conservative Right.

In fact, both liberals and Christian-democrats have outright proven this stance by constituting coalitions with socialists and radical Marxist forces, explicitly against the threat of national-conservatives: such was the case, for instance, in Germany with the Jamaica and Kenya coalitions, in France with Leftists and centrists uniting against the national-conservative Right in the 2024 elections, and the case recently in Romania with socialists and Christian-democrats coalescing around Elena Lasconi against the conservative candidate Călin Georgescu.

The renaissance of blue-collar centered electoral factions is not exclusive of the Right, either. Perhaps the foremost example of the resurgence of the proletarian Left is Germany’s Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), a German blue-collar ‘populist’ anti-establishment party which seceded from the, now rather woke and neoliberal, Die Linke. The BSW sits at 7% of the voting intentions in the Federal Republic and has made large inroads in regional elections gaining double-digit results in East German federal states. For the time being, BSW has opted to enter into coalitions with establishment Christian-democrats and socialists but BSW’s stances on Ukraine and immigration make these coalitions very much contra naturam. Should the electorate skeptical of NATO support for Ukraine and against mass immigration, perceive BSW as collaborationist with the establishment, the pressure on BSW to defect from the anti-AfD regional coalitions in the East may grow.

In France, this process is somewhat more advanced.

On the Right, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) has become the working-class alternative to the communist Left and it too rejects NATO’s military adventures, as well as mass immigration. On the Left, the France Insoumise movement (LFI) has come to replace the French Communist Party as the working-class option, once again echoing military retrenchment and a skepticism of multiculturalism.

In the past month of December, RN led right-wing parties and LFI led left-wing forces united in parliament to bring down President Macron’s centrist government led by PM Michel Barnier. Macron’s affiliated forces had only secured a plurality in the 2024 legislative elections and a united opposition was only a matter of time in the absence of a parliamentary coalition with one of the partisan blocs. A destructive coalition is not, of course, the same as a constructive one but for years now, French figures such as influencer Idriss Aberkane, have been calling for a pragmatic alliance between working-class conservatives and socialists to end neoliberal policies in France.

In a way, the appeal of the Trump coalition to figures such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard reflects the same instinct in the United States. The jouvenelian trilemmas are now being extrapolated onto the national stage with socialists and conservatives increasingly opposing liberal individualism.

Establishment parties have fueled their oppositions with extremist policies such as mass immigration and demographic replacement, media censorship, ‘forever wars,’ economic suicide through industrial delocalisation as well as green ‘degrowth’ or crony monopolies, sexualisation of children and demonisation of nationalism.

The question now is whether one of the ideological wings manages to secure power as was the case in Hungary or rather if proletarian movements on both sides of the spectrum manage to escape the rhetorical stigma of the establishment and cooperate to restore patriotic common sense governance.

 

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Miguel Nunes Silva is the director of the Trezeno Institute and a municipal councilman in Portugal. He worked for a number of UN and EU agencies and has previously published with such outlets as The National Interest, The American Conservative and The European Conservative.

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