In the 80s of the last century, the right was very low in Portugal and in Europe. But it was strong in the Anglo-Saxon world, with Thatcher and Reagan. This Anglo-American right was liberal in the economy – “more market, less State” -, conservative in life and family values - against abortion and euthanasia – and, above all, in times of the Cold War, actively anti-communist, that is, anti-Soviet.
And it was successful, leading to something that no one thought possible – the end, by implosion, of the USSR. Now the Soviet Union and communist China (which, for national reasons, had clashed with Moscow during Maoism) wanted to impose socialist internationalism, a form of globalism, in which nations disappeared. It was the communist utopia of Humanity gathered in a single State, without God, without Country, without Family, without Property and governed by universal communism.
Once this single-party police utopia was liquidated, among the victors of the Cold War the opposite temptation appeared, or rather, with the opposite sign: to implement the liberal-democratic and capitalist model urbi et orbi. A globalism of another sign in which the nations, even if they continued formally, would be subjected to a globalist oligarchy, with the Economy ruling over Politics.
It was in this sense that the deindustrialization of Europe and the United States accelerated, relocating industries to Asia and Latin America, where labor was cheaper, with the corresponding impoverishment of the working classes of EuroAmerica and the penalization of the middle classes. And wars were also fought, from the Balkans to the Middle East, and attempts were made in the European Union, through the Commission and the European Parliament, to replace national sovereignty with the powers of Brussels and to impose an experimentalist and hedonist ideology as “new Human Rights”.
All of this was done in the interest, direct or indirect, of the super-rich and a governing techno-bureaucracy and conveyed as “apolitical” by a servile social media, reminiscent of the Alphas and Betas-A of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
The world that resulted from this is the world idealized by the Davos oligarchy; a world without politics, or where Economy commands Politics, based on a scientific-technocratic utopia à la Augusto Comte.
From here, as resistance to this project, a new right took root, which has other guiding values as its reference: nationalism, against Brussels federalism and globalist globalism; the defense of life, against euthanasia and abortion. The most radical pro-market positions of the 1980s have also changed in these right-wing groups, when there was totalitarian statism in the USSR and powerful unions in America and the United Kingdom that blackmailed the State. The new rights are now for regulation and social justice, defending, in the face of migratory laxity, the identity of the national community with historical roots.
This is the right that is at stake. The patriotic, popular and conservative Right that its enemies seek to caricature as Nazi-fascist and anti-democratic or as made by “opportunist populists” and elected at the polls by “mentally retarded people”.
Next Sunday, February 8th, in the Portuguese presidential election, this right, the right that remained after the “great migration” of “non-socialist” personalities, will be put to the test. And it is important, considering what is at stake, that it has a good result.
Political scientist and writer
The author writes according to the old orthographyfia
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