Understanding Political Conversion and Mimetic Rivalry

Abstract

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the French nouvelle droite under its doyen Alain de Benoist claimed that it had made a political ‘conversion’ from the revolutionary Right (or conservative revolutionary) milieu to ‘democracy’ and that it had created a ‘post‐fascist’ political synthesis. The paper under consideration will argue that the nouvelle droite’s political ‘conversion’ process was only exoteric in nature by mimicking the ideas of the New Left and that its esoteric orientation was of ‘true believers’ who never left a political pantheon of conservative revolutionary ideas with roots largely in the 1920s and 1930s. Using the model of the nouvelle droite, as well as the ideas of René Girard and Emilio Gentile in respect of mimetic rivalry between Right and Left and ‘political religion’ respectively, I examine other intellectual political conversions of the twentieth century from Benito Mussolini to Christopher Hitchens. Using these aforementioned examples, I trace a model of political conversion for the twentieth century and new millennium, with particular emphasis on conversionary prerequisites and processes, as well as the mimetic symbiosis and rivalry between Right and Left. I conclude that even in a secular age our political conversions involve both mimicry and syncretism vis‐à‐vis traditional religious conversion experiences, but they are generally short‐lived due to crises, collapse, generational change or ideological attrition.