Rest in peace, Boris Yeltsin. How long will people remember the elected leader who stood on a tank and defied the communists, the reformer who re-founded Russia by destroying the U.S.S.R.? Or will the cynical autocrat Putin and his successors make it very hard to remember that there was a revolution at all in 1991? History has no value when only power has value. In theoretical terms, what should one call the post-modern secular authoritarian regime with oligarchic capitalism and the bullying power of oil and nuclear weapons and assassinations? I will call it the Nihilist State.
A Nihilist State is not what Yeltsin wanted. I will remember him as the leader who brought Solzhenitsyn back to Russia; who rebuilt an enormous cathedral destroyed by the Soviets; who replaced the hammer and sickle with the Imperial eagle; who restored “God Save the Tsar” as the national anthem; who received the Romanov claimant; and who solemnly buried the bones of the Imperial Family executed at Ekaterinburg in 1917, even though DNA testing disproved the authenticity of these remains, and the Patriarch (for that reason) refused to preside. [See note 1] I will remember Yeltsin as a man who played with symbols, who tried to find a history for an ahistoric regime, to seek ethical and spiritual content for an ethical and spiritual vacuum, at least to encourage people who understand the value of these things to seek roots for a rootless regime. He knew that the town squares, stripped of their statues of Lenin, were as empty as the Russian soul after seventy-two years of communism.
------------------------------Yeltsin reverences the putative Imperial relics, 17 July 1998.
I deny that Yeltsin was merely looking for a new sentimental basis for Russian patriotism, to replace the dead socialist ideal. I do not mean to make him a saint, or to put him on the same level with Solzhenitsyn or Pope John Paul II. His case is a fable: the leader who tries to create a “national soul” for a country whose soul has been killed by totalitarianism. Russia’s is the problem of every country newly freed from communist tyranny. There are soulless democracies too, pursuing an ideal of freedom that is nihilistic, slowly emptying themselves till they become a void too.
Where does one study a political science that would be the alternative to this nihilism? To whom does one apprentice oneself, besides Solzhenitsyn and John Paul II? Who has worked out the theory?
Here is someone who thought hard about the problem, and his is a name that should not be forgotten: Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909-1999), author of Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse, writer of articles for National Review and Criticón, professor, linguist, novelist, artist, an Austrian who went into exile in the 1930’s because he had criticized the Nazis and did not return until 1947. I am grateful that I knew him.
-----------------------------------------------Erik Maria Ritter von Kühnelt-Leddihn
Kuehnelt-Leddihn described himself not as a “conservative” but as an “arch-liberal and man of the right.” How can one be a “conservative” when there is no respectable status quo to conserve? He called himself a liberal because he believed in an order of freedom which would enable citizens to pursue every kind of excellence, not an order of equality which punishes excellence. He called himself a man of the right because the right is evolutionary and values the human being in every dimension of his existence and understands that society is a spiritual corporation, whereas the left is revolutionary and reduces individual men to consumable fuel in the struggle for utopia and believes that there is no ethical or practical limit to the State as a vehicle to achieve utopia. All totalitarians are inherently leftists; demagogues are inherently leftists; the Nazis were leftists. When he said this, as Austria united with the Third Reich, he had to leave.
I knew Kuehnelt-Leddihn in his post-World War II phase, when he had transformed himself into a missionary to the Anglo-Saxons, explaining to them the disasters of the twentieth century, which originated as Middle-European disasters, in which American foreign policy played no small part. He had lived under the ancien régime of the double-headed eagles; he knew what had been lost; he knew that Woodrow Wilson’s post-World War settlement set the conditions for World War II. The mentality of Wilson is still with us: a sinful obliviousness to the realities of history and national character, a sinful presumption about drawing new borders on old maps and contriving new constitutions for countries much older than one’s own.
Another part of his mission was to tell conservatives to write their own “conservative ideology.” When conservatives talk of “ideology,” usually they mean a closed, reductive, and intrinsically fraudulent political mentality, a false science of politics and man. Kuehnelt-Leddihn meant that conservatives would be weaponless in political discourse if they did not become theoretical enough to agree on principles and a terminology for them, and write them down, at least tentatively. For the same reason he told them to be “utopian,” looking forward not to a perfect future but to a desirable future. Otherwise, conservatives would only be a resistive, negative force.
He provided an exemplary list of historic conservative “ideologists,” “positive thinkers with a vision”: Friedrich Julius Stahl, Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, Joseph de Maistre, Konstantin Leontiev, Alexei Khomyakov, Juan Donoso Cortés, Othmar Spann. [See note 2] It is an interesting and problematic list. It spreads out over the continent of Europe. I trust the reader to check Wikipedia to begin finding out who these writers were. What an excellent syllabus for a graduate seminar in political theory, for students who have read Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine and St. Thomas. (And who is not on this list? T. S. Eliot, Charles Maurras, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Hegel, Croce…)
To me, the most important name is Maistre, the “French Burke,” or, better said, the Catholic Burke, a Francophone but not a Frenchman, perhaps the first true European, born a Savoyard, a minister of the King of Sardinia, and an ambassador in the Tsar’s court during the Napoleonic campaigns. Maistre understood that the basis of authentic political order is religious, familial, historical, local, an inheritance of duty and not a free choice or contrivance; he understood that, while universal truths do exist, political regimes belong to their time and place and to the people born into them.
Kuehnelt-Leddihn always asked the right questions even when he did not have practical answers, and I would say the same of the writers in his list. One should read some of them, if one wants to be a scientific conservative, not a mere obstructionist to change.
I used the phrase “national soul” earlier as a metaphor for the ethical character of a nation. Only Hegelians and fascistic demagogues mean it literally, either as a collective mind or as an entity whose progress justifies the destruction of individual souls. The only souls that really exist are the souls of individual human persons, who are irreducible centers of being, knowing, willing. Nevertheless, the word “person” can be debased as much as any other word. Let us remember that the concept of the person, in the highest sense, was discovered and developed only because of the dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation. The human person is the created image of God. This is Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s starting point for a conservative “ideology.”
Amnesia, the oblivion of forgetfulness, the passing away of things as in a dream—this is one of the negative forces that characterize the Nihilist State. Kuehnelt-Leddihn often spoke of “the widening gap between the scita and the scienda,” i.e., between the things that are known and the things that need to be known. On the one hand are the scita: we are overwhelmed with new discoveries, new media, new layers of history as it takes place, an overwhelming flood of facts that we cannot digest and prioritize quickly enough before the next wave hits us. That flood constantly washes away our awareness of facts formerly remembered and trusted; it also washes away the sense that we are lacking something important, the things we never learned, the things totalitarian regimes did not want us to know. On the other hand, then, are the scienda: we are still responsible for finding those missing things, not only the history and culture that have been forgotten, but more importantly the invisible and transcendent truth that can be discovered only through lifetimes of meditation.
The two heads of the imperial eagle might symbolize the double heritage, classical and Christian, of pre-modern Europe. I will remember Yeltsin for trying to bring the eagle back to Russia. I will remember Kuehnelt-Leddihn as a child of the kaiserlich und königlich eagle who tried to carry a few fragments of wisdom out of the catastrophe of twentieth-century European history.
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[Note 1] The story of the DNA test was told to me by Peter Koltypin of the Order of Russian Imperial Union.
[Note 2] Spann was an eccentric Platonist who made the fatal mistake of thinking he could write an “ideology” for the Nazis. But he was not a Nazi, and he suffered for this mistake. Eric Voegelin wrote a doctoral dissertation contrasting Spann’s theory of law with Kelsen’s. Voegelin, on the other hand, wrote books critiquing points of Nazi doctrine, like Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and had to leave Austria too.
