Conservatism is just like an old German shepherd that the vet sent home to sleep peacefully next to the manor’s parade pillow. He got so fucked up that even Robert Habeck recently said it would be a shame if this country no longer had a solid conservative party. Only someone who is sure to disappear, their opponents want back. In spite of this, or perhaps because of that, there will be the narrow Suhrkamp volume “Radical Conservatism” this autumn.
The Austrian right-wing extremism researcher and publicist Natascha Strobl demonstrates the model of militant conservative influence and securing power using the example of the Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who has now been several times, and his radical combatant Donald Trump. Both politicians were ultimately thrown out of office because of excessive power, but can still serve as examples of the endeavor “to create a fundamentally different version of reality and to take as many people as possible with us”.
While classical conservatism seeks to preserve society with the order it is in, radical conservatism creates chaos and disorder
This is the really big opera, directed by Natascha Strobl it has the following plot sketch: While classical conservatism wants to preserve society with the order that is valid in it, which would be bad enough, radical conservatism ensures chaos and disorder, while – now the good guys come into play – “the left-liberal forces continue to rely on mediation and compromise”. In short, Trump and Boris Johnson are presented as impresarios of darkness, invented only to “put left and liberal forces in a state of permanent excitement”. Oh well. It really takes an operetta chancellor like Kurz, or the English one, to get leftists and liberals excited today Prime Minister of the empty grocery shelves?
When you think of radicalization, other ideologies come to mind than conservatism gasping with exhaustion. And it comes to mind the British feminist and linguist Kathleen Stock, who has been threatened by gender activists for months because she believed that you can’t just get rid of biological sex just because you are in the mood for disgrace. Stock has given up her chair at the University of Sussex because apparently her physical integrity was no longer guaranteed.
Natascha Strobl: Radicalized Conservatism: An Analysis. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2021. 192 pages, 16 euros.
Especially when you think of Natascha Strobl’s thoughts on Sebastian Kurz, you rub your eyes: “The leader has an almost religious status.” Kurz likes to portray himself as a savior floating above things, writes Strobl, and at the latest now one understands from what the author draws the excited claim to explosiveness and urgency. From the principle of exaggeration and an alleged hypertrophy of the real organs of power. As if the Chancellor of little Austria had his thumb on the very big ideological cement mixer that will ultimately become the concrete for a radical conservative state building.
Strobl shows how slippery one’s own analytical coordinates can be with a comparison: The FPÖ is notoriously upset because of the alleged ban on celebrating St. Nicholas because it would annoy people of different faiths. The right-wing extremist terrorist Anders Breivik, who killed 90 people on Utøya in 2011, wrote precisely this argument in his confessional manuscript as an argument for the Islamization of Europe. With this analogy one begins to suspect that Natascha Strobl is playing with marked cards. It does so on the imaginary line between fascism and conservatism. Somehow, Natascha Strobl wants to prove that both are closely related, but she doesn’t really dare. That is why she writes of a mixed spectrum between fascism and conservatism, so you can always get away with it without having to commit yourself.
Conservatism, says Natascha Strobl, is an “anti-legal, anti-revolutionary, class-harmonizing attitude whose highest values are order and property”. To put it more simply, conservatism would be nothing more than the opposite of socialism. So nothing too spectacular. Which classes should today’s conservatism actually want to harmonize? And by what means?
The definitions that Natascha Strobl offers are just as old as their analogies to the Weimar Republic
The class of SUV drivers from Pankow with the class of the last home buyers in the Tempelhofer Fliegerviertel, where a row house in the size of a towel now costs two million euros? And these two in turn with the class of the unvaccinated? The definitions that Natascha Strobl offers are just as old as their analogies to the Weimar Republic. Strobl lets the concept of the “conservative revolution” introduced by Armin Mohler fall into the water glass as a historical split tablet, so to speak. As if this movement, by whose activists, for example, the then Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau was murdered in 1922, had stretched its arms to the present day. But even in Austria under Super Chancellor Kurz there were no street battles between identitarian and left-liberal forces.
If the past is already being invoked: Why is there no mention of the conservative resistance in Nazi Germany in Strobl’s essay? Why is the Kreisau Circle not mentioned? And were Hans and Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst and Kurt Huber left-liberal resistance fighters? No, they were humanists from the very Catholic-bourgeois milieu, that is, conservatives in the best sense of the word.
“There is no room for contradiction,” writes Natascha Strobl in the Conservatives’ studbook. That may be correct. On the other hand, is it conceivable that an activist who contradicts Greta Thunberg or Luisa Neubauer would have a stable future within the climate movement? Strobl’s explorations are a fine example of how one has to fail out of one’s own ideological bubble when attempting an objective socio-political analysis. Radical movements and figures of thought, both right and left, always have authoritarian guides. Conservatism is not only a defensive movement, but it also has its own ideological inventory, writes Natascha Strobl, as if this did not apply to liberalism and socialism as well as to the climate protection movement, gender activism or the religious charge that network activists are using Demonstrating the joy of tech companies for a “free internet”.
The Merkel era is the epochal example of conservatism without any armor
Obviously, Natascha Strobl did not want to give the long, stable and at least strange years of office of Angela Merkel no place in her chain of circumstantial evidence. The Chancellor appears only in the blurb, presumably to simulate argumentative completeness. Yet it is precisely this Merkel era that is an epoch-making example of conservatism without any armor. The state parental allowance, equal partnerships that can be legitimized with marriage for same-sex people, the withdrawal from compulsory military service, the withdrawal from nuclear energy, are all left-wing or left-green issues from the days of the now older Federal Republic of the “Hofgarten Bonn” model in the meantime, ironically enough, it has been implemented with the signaling involvement of conservative politicians. If there was supposed to have been a radical move here, then it was the way to align with the left-liberal milieu and its interests. Incidentally, even in the previous decades, the radical forces of conservatism tended to travel in Germany as small groups.
When the great conservative Richard von Weizsäcker declared in the Bundestag in 1985 that May 8, 1945 was the day of liberation, only a few dreary Stahlhelm factionists around Alfred Dregger protested. They were quickly and rightly put in their place as the yesterday. And don’t figures like Kurz, Johnson or Orbán awaken the need among conservatives to hang garlic and crucifixes over every doorstep that one of the three could walk through these days? The hell wall painting that Strobl creates looks strange and unrealistic when you look at how radically conservatism is fighting against its loss of meaning.
If you look at Natascha Strobl’s bibliography, you will see that the list of online sources is more than 18 pages long, the analogue scientific literature only four and a half pages. There are no standard works such as Axel Schildt’s great study on conservatism and the work of the Greek historian Panajotis Kondylis, who explains that conservatism (Kondylis uses this term) as a term after the fall of the European nobility is actually no longer really useful.
In honest work, however, counter-theses should not simply be dropped under the table. Unless you build your impregnated presentations around a single observation tower, from which you can look into the future without irony, but with a sense of mission. There, Strobl’s memorandum ends, a left, post-capitalist world should be made visible. Because: “The great strength of the political left is that there is a differentiated and dazzling mosaic of different concerns, movements and expertise.” That is certainly not wrong, and there are many good examples of left theories that also question your own point of view. Natascha Strobl’s essay is really not one of them.