When the Old Order Falls, the West Learns to Fear Its Heirs

A conservative counterrevolution?

In recent years, narratives about a conservative counterrevolution, the decline of the left, and even the revival of Catholicism in the secularized West have multiplied. Each of these claims tempts us. But is each of them entirely true? Perhaps these intuitions describe a series of phenomena that belong to a far broader process.

Across Western democracies, we do indeed see the relative weakening of left-wing formations. Yet this decline does not unfold in a straight line, and it differs greatly from region to region. Nor does it simply come at the expense of traditional right-wing organizations. Look more closely, and traditional right-wing politics has also been losing ground in recent years.

The vacuum has been filled by organizations, parties, and ideas of the New Right, sometimes called the alt-right interchangeably, though not always accurately. This current has captured part of the social base once held by social democracy and the traditional left.

The left searches for a new identity

The new left on the other side of the barricade, however, remains largely an aspiration, not to say a slogan. The left, which had been merging with liberals since the 1990s, perhaps partly without even realizing it, began its own transformation. It now differs considerably from the old social democratic parties.

Of course, the old social democracy was never uniform, nor was it free of its own radicalisms. At its best, with some Scandinavian parties serving as the model, it managed to keep a balance between the market economy and redistribution. In international politics, it could be assertive, realistic, and strongly rooted in identity. Community and civic life did not stand in opposition to social policy. In other words, in many respects it embodied what the contemporary right now aspires to become.

The paradox of the left, the paradox of a passing world

After its marriage with liberals and corporations, and after the significant realization of egalitarian demands, the left began drifting toward its current shallows. The community gave way to communities. These were often small communities, radicalizing as they built a shared sense of exclusion and discrimination. Workers’ rights yielded to the influence of lobbyists. The left shifted its rudder from redistribution toward consumption and radicalism. Trade unions were replaced by HR departments.

Significantly, the example of the United States and the Make America Great Again movement now shows that the right has begun moving along similar tracks. The difference is that within right-wing axiology, this does not strike at its own foundations.

A language no one understands anymore

In addition, the language of the left, which in Poland we might call the language of the intelligentsia, or at least of experts, began giving way to academic language. For decades, the university was where the left could dominate discourse. The conceptual world it developed there became incommunicative, exclusive, and, in short, foreign to everyone outside its own bubble. The academy, in turn, began creating the world anew, together with the problems it would later heroically set out to solve.

As long as the end of history lasted, this caused little trouble. But the world after 2020 and 2022 exposed problems that had existed for a long time: inflation, energy crises, vulnerable supply chains, and other weaknesses of a slowly contracting globalization. As a result, the middle class, already shrinking in places such as the United States, came under pressure. Poorer people, meanwhile, began to see the approaching threat of impoverishment more clearly.

Security changes the political map

This is not an environment in which sexual minority rights or demands for an ecological energy transition will play the leading role across entire societies. The left still cannot fully see this.

The New Right has moved into this abandoned space of security, understood on several levels at once. Not the traditional right, but the new one. More populist, radical, and emotional. Another feature also stands out when we look across the world of Western democracies: no coherent ideology binds the new right-wing currents together. Anti-establishment feeling and rebellion against the status quo unite them. The Promethean attitude, left-wing in spirit, has passed without a fight into the hands of the New Right.

The left returns to its foundations

Today, the left is trying to forge itself anew and return to its foundations. This road will not be easy, and not everyone will endure it. It leads through the weakening of left-wing establishments and their privileged position, and above all through a turn away from capital and back toward society.

The state, the community, the borders

This does not mean a return to the social democracy of half a century ago. If a new left really is to emerge, it will have to become more social than academic. It will have to care more about work, housing, security, and public services than about multiplying ever more subtle identity divisions. It will probably also have to make peace again with the state, the national community, and political borders, without renouncing individual rights. In other words, it must return to society without trying to turn society back into the past.

This will inevitably set another process in motion. As the left competes with the New Right, it will gradually tighten the noose around the traditional right. In the next phase, the old conservatives will have to reinvent themselves as well. And they will have to adapt to a changing reality.

The old order will not return

It is telling that the traditional right is also losing support. We are not witnessing the restoration of the old order, but its disintegration and the replacement of political elites. That seems a more accurate conclusion than various narratives about a “conservative counterrevolution,” which so far have rested mainly on anecdotes.

For that reason, talk of a great crisis of the left seems insufficient. The left, as the queen of the establishment in a rapidly transforming world, staggered first. It staggered under the weight of its own successes, achievements, and political mirages. Yet perhaps this does not mark its definitive defeat, nor the victory of the right. Perhaps it is a sign of the political West sliding into chaos. Or at least of its political transformation into something new and unknown.

The old right is falling apart

Looking at the successes of the right, and let us add at once, often the radical right, in the world of Western democracies, one might get the impression that parliamentary representations of the right have grown considerably stronger. Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany, National Rally in France, the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement in the United States, and even both Confederations in Poland all point in this direction. The left, meanwhile, seems to have been pushed onto the defensive, even where it currently shares power.

The right has become the point of reference. Cordon sanitaires form around it. Its language has finally begun to dominate the debate. So what is happening to the right? Is its influence really growing?

Conservatives lose their old position

The answer is both obvious and ambiguous. Since the left and liberals have entered the early stages of transformation, conservative centers naturally appear to show relative strength.

Yet conservative parties in Europe have clearly been losing their former position. Britain’s Conservative Party faces displacement by Reform UK. France’s Republicans, after years of dominance, have been squeezed between Macron’s camp and National Rally. Sweden’s Moderate Party faces strong competition from the Sweden Democrats. Germany’s Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union remain major forces, but Alternative for Germany keeps them under pressure. In Poland, Law and Justice still has a large electorate, but the right side of the political scene now shows growing competition.

Trump and the end of the Reaganite right

Even in the most stable party system in the West, the American one, tensions inside the Republican Party point to the triumph of the new Trumpian right over the Reaganite right, over which so many in Poland continue to weep.

More than that, at the level of political practice and tactics, the old right has actively taken part in isolating the New Right. This is especially visible in Germany and France. On the one hand, it shows that existing establishments stand ready to bury their hatchets in the name of preserving the status quo, which means keeping the New Right away from power. On the other hand, it reveals a real fear of radicalism and of abrupt shifts in political direction brought by new and increasingly powerful populist parties.

New Right politics grows out of chaos

The result is a civil war inside the right-wing camp: the old against the new. Although the New Right has taken some working-class voters from the socialists and some young liberal voters as well, its main avenue of expansion still runs through traditional conservative voters.

This creates a paradox. The right once gave people a sense of order. Today, it itself has become one of the main sources of chaos. Add the instability of international relations and the many challenges facing Western democracies, and the right becomes the source both of the greatest hopes and of entirely justified anxieties.

Here, the very nature of the conflict changes. Once politics stops managing a relatively stable order and increasingly becomes a matter of reacting to one crisis after another, the decision made in an exceptional situation grows more important. The New Right does not merely respond to chaos. More and more often, it presents its ability to act outside the ordinary rhythm of politics as proof of its own effectiveness. At this point, political sociology begins to meet a much older dispute over the nature of power itself.

New Right politics and the state of exception

The announcement of the order promised by the New Right appears in Donald Trump. His model of conducting New Right politics in his second term evokes the intuitions of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben concerning the reality of power as it reveals itself most clearly under a state of exception. Without question, radical turns, including within the actions of Trump himself and his administration, force us to treat American politics as a continuous state of exception.

In Trump’s political practice, we can see this in his frequent presentation of political problems, especially migration, border security, energy, and, needless to say, foreign policy, as exceptional situations requiring decisive action by the executive. At the very beginning of his second term, he declared, among other things, an emergency at the southern border and a “national energy emergency.”

Chaos as a method of government

This logic allows us to interpret his presidency through Schmitt and Agamben. Crisis becomes the justification for concentrating decisions in the hands of the executive. In turn, measures presented as extraordinary begin to function not as temporary exceptions, but as repeatable instruments of political action.

This reveals a foretaste of future politics in general, but also a new feature of New Right politics: chaos as a remedy for chaos.

We have completed a remarkable cultural circle. According to the Greeks, the world emerged from chaos. So too has the New Right, which, using chaos itself and standing in opposition to the existing order, will try to defend the world from itself. The eternal return of the same.

Read this article in Polish: Wieczny powrót tego samego? Zachód znów szuka porządku