The Elites Have Panicked, Not Fallen

Alain de Benoist, Christopher Lasch, and the work that starts after the culture war.

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

A cultural monopoly does not argue when it feels the first crack. It panics.

Watch the French press circle Vincent Bolloré and you can see the reflex working in real time. A television channel changes hands. A publishing house drifts off-message. A few stones come loose from the progressive wall, and the guardians of official taste start talking as though civilisation itself were under siege. Les Inrockuptibles runs “Culture against the fascists.” Actors and directors sign their petitions. The old emergency vocabulary comes back on cue.

Alain de Benoist reads it correctly. His recent interview even carries the verdict in its title: “the culture war has only been won by default.” He gives the outrage its proper weight. This is not confidence. A ruling culture sure of itself does not shriek at one lost channel. What we are watching is the flinch of a class that has held its monopoly so long that any loss of control now feels like sacrilege.

Alain de Benoist: "The culture war has only been won by default"

A confident regime can answer a challenge, ignore it, or swallow it whole. A frightened one reaches for denunciation and the blacklist and calls for quarantine. That reflex tells you what the old cultural caste actually guards. It stopped defending its arguments a long time ago. What it defends now is the power to decide which arguments are even permitted to sound respectable.

The Secession Lasch Saw

Christopher Lasch named the class behind the panic thirty years ago. In The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, he argued that our elites had not merely grown richer or more liberal. They had seceded.

They rose into a world of their own: universities, management, media, finance, the administrative machine, the culture industry. These are circuits that reward mobility over loyalty and treat rootedness as a failure of ambition. Up there a man learns to speak the whole grammar of democracy while quietly losing patience with the people democracy obliges him to share a country with.

None of this is a question of manners. It is structural. An elite that no longer depends on ordinary life can afford to hold it in contempt. It praises openness from inside closed institutions. It celebrates diversity while moving through circles of remarkable sameness. It calls rootedness provincial, faith backward, the nation a threat, the family a prison. Then it acts surprised when the people still attached to those things stop trusting it.

Lasch was not describing a revolt from below. He was describing one from above: a governing class walking out on the moral conditions of a shared life while keeping its hands on every institution. That is exactly what de Benoist’s French scene shows. A caste has confused its own position with civilisation, and it now treats dissent as an assault on the foundations of the world.

Their Weakness Is Not Our Strength

Which is why de Benoist’s real warning matters more than any victory lap over cracks in the wall. The progressive left has lost, he says. The conservative right has not won. The war has been won by default. It is a line that should cool the room, not warm it.

A regime can run out of energy long before it runs out of power. It can turn repetitive, sterile, faintly ridiculous, and still hold the universities, the grant committees, the theatres, the papers, the schools, the foundations, and the whole apparatus that decides who gets called respectable and who gets called dangerous. It can grow old without ever leaving.

This is where movements make their oldest mistake. They watch an enemy run out of steam and call it a corpse. Tired slogans, cancelled events, nervous columns, denunciations flying in every direction, and they start counting the days to a new world. What those signs actually prove is smaller and more useful than that. The monopoly no longer feels safe.

Which still counts for something. A frightened monopoly leaves gaps. Questions that were unsayable last year become sayable. People who thought they were alone find each other and take heart. But an opening is only an opening. Leave it empty and it fills with noise.

Metapolitics Without the Fog

So the real question is what we do with the gap. And here the word metapolitics has been worn smooth from overuse, so strip it back to what it means.

Metapolitics is not a highbrow name for having opinions about culture online, and it is not a licence to dress reaction up in citations from Gramsci and call the result a strategy. It is the work that goes on underneath elections and parties and the daily noise: shaping what people take to be normal, beautiful, shameful, serious, and worth their loyalty, long before any of it hardens into a vote.

I laid this out in an earlier essay, The Architecture of Long-Term Power, as a stack of layers: core assumptions at the bottom, then ideas, then culture, then the strategic public sphere, then mass politics on top. De Benoist comes at the same thing from culture. Lasch comes at it from class and the loss of a common world. All three of us are saying one thing. Power almost never begins where you can finally see it.

Culture is where the images and instincts live. Given time they soak into the imagination and quietly settle which arguments sound humane and which sound monstrous, which sacrifices look noble and which look absurd, which authorities deserve trust and which deserve a sneer. A law can force your hand. Culture decides which hand you reach out on your own.

The parties turn up late, every time. A politician can ride a shift in the public mind, but he rarely makes one. He can speak a language once somebody else has built it, act once enough people already believe the act is thinkable, govern a change once deeper institutions have quietly produced the people who wanted it.

Ideas Need Bodies

Lasch saw the same pattern from the side of democracy. A common world is not built out of speeches about The People. It is built out of families, trades, neighbourhoods, local memory, plain competence, and a rough equality of respect between men who know one another. When the elite secedes from that world, politics curdles into management. The governed stop being a people and become a caseload: clients, patients, consumers, voters, boxes on a form. The rulers keep the warm words, democracy and compassion, and drop the disciplines that ever made the words mean anything.

Resentment alone cannot answer a revolt from above. It can expose hypocrisy, break a spell, hand the excluded a voice. What it cannot do is rebuild the thing that was abandoned. For that you need institutions with bodies.

A post can embarrass the regime for an afternoon; an institution can form a person for life. A school teaches a child how to see. A journal keeps alive the fine distinctions the news cycle flattens by Thursday. A church drills reverence and obligation into people who would otherwise shed both. And somewhere off to the side, a small disciplined circle works out, years ahead of everyone else, the language that will one day sound like plain common sense.

This is why de Benoist, asked for the strategy, answers with a word most activists find deflating: work. Work, and the patient production of quality.

The Cheap Substitute

Our side usually prefers the cheaper option. React. Mock. Flip the enemy’s slogans back at him. Treat every fresh scandal as proof that the great turn has finally arrived. Mistake reach for authority, as though a big audience and real power were the same thing. All of it feels like combat, and almost none of it is.

A dying regime is happy to train its enemies this way. It feeds them outrage, speed, villains, metrics, little bursts of theatrical clarity, and they wake every morning to the same question: what did they do today? Build your whole identity as the answer to that question and you have made yourself a reflection of the thing you claim to hate. Nothing worth keeping was ever built as the afterimage of its enemy.

The other road is slower and gives you far less to brag about. It means writing the book that still matters once the scandal is forgotten. It means raising people who are competent and not merely loyal, which is the harder and duller job. It means building schools and journals and businesses and congregations with enough spine to outlast boredom, poverty, infiltration, and their own failures. And it means earning an authority that never has to ask permission from the institutions it intends to replace.

None of this means calling off the open fight. The old regime should be opposed, its panic studied, its hypocrisies named out loud, its quarantines broken. The hole in the wall is real. Widen it. Just don’t mistake a hole for a house.

The Opening and the Task

A vacuum does not inherit itself. The old elite can lose its confidence, its legitimacy, and its language and still leave nothing behind but rubble, if no one has bothered to build forms strong enough to catch power once it comes loose. This is the part the collapse-enthusiasts skip. A collapse can ruin the old rulers without rewarding a single one of their critics.

That is the hard lesson sitting inside both these men. De Benoist shows that cultural power is made of images, concepts, quality, and long unglamorous labour. Lasch shows that a class can walk out on the common world and keep every lever of its institutions in hand. Put them together and the task after the panic is plain enough. Do not mistake their fear for our strength.

The elites have panicked. They have not fallen.

What comes next turns on one question. When the serious people among us look at this opening, do they pick up their tools and build in it, or do they gather at the edge to narrate how interesting it looks?

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