1 Between metapolitics and apoliteia: the New Right’s strategy for conserving the fascist vision in the ‘interregnum’ The basis of the article ‘Between metapolitics and apoliteía: the New Right’s strategy for conserving the fascist vision in the ‘interregnum’, Modern and Contemporary France vol. 8, no. 2, Feb. 2000, pp. 35-53. Professor Roger Griffin Department of History Oxford Brookes University Gipsy Lane Campus Headington Oxford OX3 0BP Part Two: The Persistence of Fascist Metapolitics in the Contemporary ‘New Right’ The emergence of the ND as heirs of the Conservative Revolution It has been established in the first part of this article that Mohler and Evola offered two distinct but complementary conceptual frameworks (though they would prefer the term ‘Weltanschauung’ or ‘visione del mondo’) within which to adapt fascism’s core values to the inauspicious climate of the post-war era. In particular, they both made it possible i) to uphold fascism’s core belief in the basic decadence of socialism and liberal democracy as ideological forces; ii) to account for the defeat of the Rome-Berlin Axis by portraying the two regimes as having travestied the type of new order called for as a solution to the crisis of the modern age, firstly through their demagogy (so that they were insufficiently based on a new spiritual elite), and their myopic nationalism (which made them insufficiently European in scope); iii) thereby to dissociate themselves from the calculated destructiveness and inhumanity of those regimes (in particular the Nazi programmes of euthanasia and attempted genocide), and; iv) to explain both why any sort of ‘anti-egalitarian revolution’ was no longer imminent while at the same time vindicating the hope that it would ultimately triumph. By celebrating the primacy of culture over politics as the premise to a revolution in the spirit of ‘right-wing Gramscism’, and by identifying ‘spiritually’ with the Conservative Revolution (CR) or the Tradition rather than the programme of any political party or terrorist group, right-wing intellects who longed for the transformation of the entire ‘system’ could now take refuge in