Against the Liberals, Part 1
By Armin Mohler
Recently I have been uploading very little to this blog. The reason is that almost every project I plan for myself seems to balloon into something much larger than I originally anticipated. More original essays are forthcoming, including a study of an Australian thinker whose work has fallen into undeserved obscurity; but I don’t wish to keep the audience starved of content, so I shall be uploading some translations from German thinkers that I admire to tide the audience over. Since I make no money from this blog, and no current English translation of the following text exists on the market, I hope that the copyright holders will not object.
With that being said, I should introduce the subject. Armin Mohler (1920-2003) was a German-speaking Swiss national who became a very influential figure in the German New Right after WWII. His first book, which was his dissertation, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932, will probably be familiar to many readers.1 It covered the astonishingly fruitful period between the end of WWI and the accession of the NSDAP to power, when a number of radical right figures were in their prime. Many of them are still influential today: Edgar Julius Jung, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, among others. Mohler played a prominent role in promoting awareness in the post-war era of the ideas of these thinkers, and used them as a basis from which to work out a framework for thinking about his own time. But despite this important work, Mohler was arguably at his best when writing short, punchy essays of a polemical nature. The following is one of my favourites of his, called Gegen die Liberalen (Against the Liberals). My source is the small hardback of the same name, published by Verlag Antaios as part of their Kaplaken series.2 It first appeared in 1988 in the magazine Der Rabe, and the influence of the somewhat different times in which he lived show in this text. And yet we can still recognise the contemporary liberal in his description from well over 30 years ago, and more besides remains essentially the same. Without further ado, here it is.
1. Nothing like Good Intentions
Who is a Harmless Right-Winger?
If you are dealing with a “right-winger”, try to find out who his number one enemy is. If it is the communists, you are dealing with a fundamentally harmless person. He does not realise that communism is only a matter for underdeveloped peoples—a matter that can only be imposed on us through foreign political entanglements and with the help of war. If, however, the man is primarily focussed on the liberals, the matter becomes more serious. For this rightist has an enemy who is already operating within the castle and softens our defences so that the external enemy can penetrate.
Enmity against liberals is considered offensive by many people. To start in a completely different corner: when I once slipped a few nasty remarks against overly crazy ecomaniacs past my lips, a sympathetic middle-aged lady looked at me in horror. She asked me with reproachful eyes: “Yes, don’t you enjoy it when the little birds sing?” I really couldn’t think of an answer to that. You can feel the same way when you say something against the liberals. Then come the half uncomprehending, half indignant questions: “Are you against freedom? Shouldn’t people be nice to each other?” The best you could say in response is: “It’s precisely because I’m in favour of freedom that I’m against the liberals.” But since my name isn't Willi Schlamm,3 that’s not enough. I cannot avoid saying why I am against the liberals, why I don’t like them. And even more: why they are enemy number one for a conservative of my kind. I can get along with a leftist under certain circumstances, because all too often he has a partial truth for himself. With a liberal, however, there can be no understanding.
So—let me make this clear: I have nothing against the values that liberals profess. I do not question these values. Neither freedom, nor tolerance, nor the right to criticise. I am not discussing values at all. The values of the liberals, those briefly mentioned here and those not mentioned, are all well and good, nobody can say anything against them. Incidentally, they are not values that are the sole property of the liberals; perhaps there are people in our society who do not put up these values and yet realise them more than some liberals. But this is just a small interjection. The problem lies elsewhere. What I cannot forgive liberals for is that they have created a society in which a person is judged by what he says (or writes)—not by what he is. And since this still sounds a bit metaphysical, I’ll be more precise: a society in which a person is judged by what he says—and not by what he does.
The fact that I am not so wrong about this can be seen from one of Rudolf Augstein’s4 tactics: at a time when people were still debating with the right, he used to start arguments with representatives of this movement with the precautionary warning that they should not come back to him with the distinction between “ethics of conviction” and “ethics of responsibility”. As a clever fellow, he knew where his liberals’ weak point was. Max Weber called the ethics of conviction the claim to be rewarded for one’s good intentions (convictions), which is widespread throughout society today. The great sociologist thought much more highly of the ethics of responsibility. It only respects moral demands that, firstly, can be fulfilled and, secondly, according to which those who make these demands also and first and foremost behave themselves.
The “Entrenched”
Criticising liberalism automatically raises the temperature of some people and prevents them from making clear distinctions. It is therefore best to be guided by experience in this matter too. In all human relationships, this can only be historical experience; it offers us opportunities for comparison and allows us to make reasonably accurate statements. In history, everything has been tried out before—only the costumes, the ways and means change. From this perspective, liberalism is characterised by a curious split.
Today, people all over the world claim to be liberal—even the chief in the bush tries to assert himself with liberal slogans. The Soviet constitution was one of the most liberal constitutions in the world. In practice, however—although the liberal claim has existed at least since Socrates—liberal societies are extremely rare and brief events in history; geopolitically, they are limited to one per cent of the earth’s surface at most, or not even that. Liberal practice was able to develop in particularly protected island locations, for example in England, or in small city states in the lee of history, for example in Switzerland. But even there, since the smashed shop windows in Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse, the liberal consensus no longer seems to be so self-evident.
The real political problem of liberalism is that liberal practice is only possible if certain traditional habits and deeply ingrained mores are still in place to help society overcome its difficulties. To put it crudely: six conservative centuries allow two generations to be liberal without causing mischief. But once these resources have been used up in a permissive society, the best-intentioned liberal slogans become fuses.
Smarter liberals sometimes even admit this themselves. For example, the Düsseldorf entrepreneur Carl Zimmerer, who was one of the most controversial liberal pens in the Federal Republic for many years. In a newspaper from 1980, one could read the following sentences from his pen: “We have exaggerated liberalism—we have gone from preachers of ‘freedom for what’ to ideologues of ‘freedom from what’. Liberalism no longer stands where responsibility, duty and the goal of economic progress were, but where anarchists, chaotics, cranks and, above all, the expropriators are.”
Is liberalism therefore something that should only be administered in homeopathic doses? One recalls the characterisation of economic liberalism as a virgin theory that has so far been spared the test of realisation; it is irrefutable because it has never been applied in practice. Welfare state safeguards had always been built into all attempts at realisation from the outset, so that the scythe of the free market economy could never cut radically. The theories of Hayek and Milton Friedman are so conclusive because they were developed without the frictional resistance of social reality, in empty space, so to speak.
The Three O’Clock in the Morning Mindset
Are liberals really so out of touch with reality? Are they really addicted to abstractions? The defenders of liberalism do indeed repeatedly present us with liberals who are quite different—who have a talent for the practical, who know how to find their way around reality quite well. But this is a sleight of hand: we are dealing with two completely different types of people, one of which disappears into oblivion so that only the other can be seen. You could make it easy for yourself and say: one is the “real liberal” and the other is only the “apparent liberal”. Let’s put it more neutrally: one is the inventors of liberalism and the other its beneficiaries. (Although we don’t want to rule out the possibility of slipping from the first category into the second here and there).
The inventors of liberalism are all victims of the most widespread mental illness there is: the intelligibility mania. (With five i's please.) It consists of identifying what you have in your head with the world as a whole. Which is, of course, a huge overestimation of the human being. How can a person who is reminded every hour of his finiteness, his inadequacy and mortality, even come up with the idea that he can follow the course of the world with his brain down to all its ramifications? You could laugh about it—but the delusion has its consequences. The person afflicted by it knows exactly what is good and right and how to carry it out. He doesn’t realise that life goes in zigzags. Nor does he know that you first do the wrong thing and then only do the half-right thing. He knows the way, he says the way, he draws it confidently with bold strokes on a map that consists only of a white surface, without contours and without colour.
Anyone who doesn’t look so closely will naturally consider this portrait of the liberal who is addicted to abstractions to be exaggerated. Does the liberal not have the individual as the highest value from which all his thinking is based? Is there anything more concrete than the individual? Well—the critic of liberalism, who does not merely tinker with symptoms, says: the individual does not exist. It is an invention. The idea of an autonomous “individual”, which is so dear to the liberal’s heart, is the worst of all abstractions. It is almost banal to realise this: every person is part of a life context from which they think and react. He is rooted in his family or in his ties to other people, he stands in his landscape (even if it is a metropolitan landscape). He behaves with regard to the historical situation in which he finds himself and with regard to the task he has set himself. A person can only be understood from what he does (an insight of the most theoretical of all political thinkers, Georges Sorel). He is an “individual”, as the liberals imagine it, at most in the middle of the night, when he wakes up at three o’clock, when everything around him is motionless, when all the threads to life are cut, when even his pulse beats only slowly—and he has the feeling of being interwoven and involved in nothing. At such moments, perhaps all evil begins...
Wellington spoke of the four-o’clock-in-the-morning-courage: a praiseworthy thing, because—as soldiers in particular know—it is difficult for people to do anything hard in the grey morning. On the other hand, people seem to find it easy to think up non-binding stuff in the early hours. Three o’clock in the morning thinking redesigns the world with a light hand, because the existing world is far too complicated. So you think up a simpler world in which all the calculations add up. A world free of insolubilities—a world to which you can apply the small-group morality that you try to bring to bear in the family (and not even here always successfully). Situations in which there are only different kinds of failure, in which no justice is possible, where only wounds remain—the liberal cannot even imagine this. He holds on to his storybook world; if we only believe in it, this world becomes real, in which everything finds its smooth solution.
Basic Law
The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany is a monument to liberal thinking. It can only have been conceived at three o’clock in the morning. Liberalism, not as a non-binding attitude but as a form of political organisation, has always had a difficult time in a Germany that was open on all sides—necessity simply did not allow it. So after 1945, people wanted to put their money where their mouth was and introduce liberalism constitutionally once and for all, so solidly that it could never be shaken again. The result was the Basic Law with its catalogue of fundamental rights.
According to old experience, a constitution only works if it is limited to stating what is forbidden. And that means: which actions are prohibited. Only such a constitution can guarantee the degree of freedom that is possible in human coexistence, even in exceptional situations and in an emergency. A constitution, on the other hand, that seeks to determine which thoughts are forbidden and on which values we should base our lives—the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany is such a constitution—can only become a source of hypocrisy because it cannot be fulfilled. That would still be bearable.
More importantly, it canalises access to power: power falls to those who have the means to bindingly define how the constitution is to be understood (and above all: who the “enemies of the constitution” are). We have known since Marshall McLuhan at the latest that this is no longer done by the courts. The executive, legislative and judicial powers have long since been “integrated” by the media, which have assumed the form and power of a new trinity.
Basically, every citizen of the Federal Republic knows that all the fine intentions of the Basic Law remain pious wishes, because people and the world are completely different. But that is not the point. It is enough to verbally commit to the catalogue of wishes—then you belong to it, even if you do the opposite. Of course, this alone does not make you a member of the ruling class. This requires that you have some kind of influence on the interpretation of the constitution and on the definition of the enemy.
In the Federal Republic of Germany, the struggle for power is largely a competition for what the Anglo-Saxons call “opinion-leadership”. However, this does not mean that the new leadership class of “opinion-makers” will be recruited solely from the media. Opinion-making is not that professionally bound. Members of the previous leadership strata who are capable of learning can certainly participate in power if they are able to adapt their activities to the laws of show business. And it has also turned out that the acting talent among Germans of both sexes is spread to an extent that hardly anyone would have thought possible in this society, which is regarded as “amusing”.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Such a division of labour should actually lead to a wonderful social consensus: some play out the “best of all worlds” on stage, while others sit happily in the stalls and applaud. But unfortunately there are spoilsports. This brings us to the delicate point: the other type of liberal—not the inventors, but the beneficiaries of liberalism. There is a breed of people who soon discovered how convenient it is to reduce liberalism to mere declarations of intent. The postulates of liberalism are all unrealisable because they are based on a false assessment of man and a false view of the world. But it is never the liberals’ fault if liberalism is not realised—you can always find a scapegoat to blame. If it’s not the evil conservatives who are doing the sabotaging, it’s the weather or the unfavourable foreign policy situation or something else. More subtle minds say: the liberal meant well; now he’s failed, but he'll do better next time, let’s give him another chance. I recently heard a liberal say at the end of a long lecture full of wishful thinking with no chance of realisation: let’s hold on a little to the world as it should be, so that the world as it is becomes a little bit better.
In our soft-washed times, such a finely chiselled sentence will impress a significant proportion of the public. The beneficiaries of liberalism, however, laugh up their sleeves at such slogans. Let’s be clear about who we mean: liberal society is the ideal breeding ground for mafias of all kinds, from purely criminal organisations to groups that still conduct their murky business halfway within the framework of legality. A society in which declarations of intent are the only thing that matters is a springboard for unscrupulous people. They say their little slogan, join the right party and do what they want. I don’t need to give any examples; everyone sees them around them every day. This should come as no surprise in a society that tries to neatly separate communism from fascism on the grounds that the former still has “humanitarian goals”, even if it has “misused the means”. (I think Thomas Mann came up with the formula: “fallen angels” here, “devils from the beginning” there). But perhaps the writer himself is guilty of wishful thinking if he believes he can always clearly distinguish between the “idealistic liberal” here and the mafioso there. In the scandals that have rocked the Federal Republic since its foundation, there have certainly been cases where a little Al Capone has suddenly emerged from behind the Albert Schweitzer mask in the manner of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
The “Centre”
Of course, the “society of chatter” described here is a superstructure. According to the orthodox understanding of society, the superstructure is conditioned and determined by the substructure, the “base”. This is one of the many dogmas that have become obsolete as the Cultural Revolution has gradually petered out. And we must be careful not to replace it with the counter-dogma that, rightly or wrongly, invokes the communist thinker Gramsci—the dogma of ideas as the causa that creates political facts. Reality is, as always, complicated. The correct image would probably be that of an unpredictable loose connection: sometimes the current goes in one direction, then in the other, but it can also stop altogether at times. Beneath the spectacle described above, which attracts all the attention, massive structures have quietly formed in which the liberals at best still have the role of incense scatterer on duty.
The mafiosi are not identical to these structures—as real as they are, they should not be overestimated. Powerful shifts have also taken place in the great mass of citizens of our liberal world, which we have hardly yet understood. The most important is probably that these citizens have responded to the permissive oversupply of (theoretical) freedoms with a flight into highly material securities. Here, too, the USA was the role model. The political stage is increasingly being filled by a broad “centre”, which only maintains pseudo-conflicts within itself and has a tendency to become a whole. The political climate of this centre is a restructured liberalism that still cultivates the old pathos of freedom in the foreground; subliminally, however, a completely different regime is being pursued under the slogan “security before freedom”. It could be described with a malicious formula that George Steiner applied to this country after an extended stay in Switzerland: “disciplined mediocrity”. This refers to a consumer society with a considerably lowered level of prosperity that is regulated by the game of interest groups. The various types of mafia take on the function of leeches, which are intended to revitalise the blood circulation of a society that has become sluggish.
What this society needs more of, however, is a strong left and a strong right. But there is no room for them in the society of the mammoth centre. There are only “extremists from the left and right” who are pushed to the margins of society or underground. At best, there is still use for small circles of left-wing or right-wing intellectuals; they enjoy a certain fool’s freedom because their products are needed to maintain these illusory conflicts.
Today, the right is the real troublemaker in society. With some effort, the left can still be categorised in the liberal coordinate network—after all, they somehow still believe in the good man (the one from three o’clock in the morning). The rightist, however, is the absolute spoilsport. On the one hand, he is, with his illusionless anthropology; he sees man as a distinctly flawed being who needs to be supported by institutions, but also by deeply rooted physical and emotional ties. On the other hand, the rightist places expectations on this deficient being that would never occur to others. He believes that man will not be able to endure the role of an egg-laying machine in a fully industrialised chicken farm in the long run, but will open the door to a free trajectory—a free trajectory in which he can rise higher, but also fall lower.
An English translation of this was published by Radix in 2018. It is available here: https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Revolution-Germany-1918-1932/dp/1593680597/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.eJdX8i43TXMcBJj4GreF-ZSEq1M23Zxbw4kLakvGszP0FlrnQe8GXOB4GbOhoBX08nRcrPaSEV_2Y0aib_svznkGX1Z6YMQ01J3SfOG0QbX_q6WvEZS9zmTiVnx_JFhfVTX8xp_bc4224Iopi89DLJQ7iCksLFeAQXMvTIE7c7HXcwWWo3wmdgNKh9LbzX9iMXUtiuDK4vtex0Hcnazh7ASMChnR_ZJ8qdFvpyCM704.TAy3XZRyLP-Vud9cJJExSFuY5f6ixHdNmsYqGTp2lyQ&dib_tag=se&keywords=Armin+Mohler&qid=1742334676&s=books&sr=1-1.
The book can be found here: https://antaios.de/gesamtverzeichnis-antaios/reihe-kaplaken/1103/gegen-die-liberalen.
[Presumably the Austrian-American journalist who worked with William F. Buckley for a time. Ed.]
[Rudolf Karl Augstein (1923-2002), one of the most famous and prolific journalists of post-war Germany. Ed.]