(Image source: Reuters / Stefano Rellandini)

On the eve of last fall’s Italian election, the result seemed all but certain. Giorgia Meloni and her Fratelli d’Italia party would surge to a commanding lead and build a coalition that would take the country further to the right than it had been in decades.

The foreknowledge of what was to come set off a mad dash among analysts to dissect the ideology of Meloni’s ragtag crew of partisans. Most settled on the label “post-fascist” — a word that tries to capture the political lineage that exists between her relatively new movement and the political parties built by the surviving remnants of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime.

Meloni and her lieutenants have never fully disavowed that history. Meloni herself, as a young activist, called Mussolini a “great politician.” Her party has obstinately refused to drop the slogans and symbols of Mussolini’s heirs. And in her party’s back rooms, parliamentarians regularly mingle with far-right extremists and reactionary operatives who would revive the ideology of Mussolini’s ill-fated regime.

Yet on the eve of her historic victory, when the New York Times came to visit, Meloni offered a different story of her ideological education: her immersion in the work of British fantasy writer and conservative J.R.R. Tolkien.

Meloni has long harbored an obsession with the characters of Tolkien’s world. She first read his books at age 11. The political gatherings she organized in her high school days, book clubs where Tolkien’s works were read alongside the writings of European fascists and philosophers, were nicknamed “the call of the horn,” a reference to the iconic horn of Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring.

As she rose to prominence, Meloni continually alluded to the symbolism of The Lord of the Rings. When she was made Minister for Youth in 2008, she posed for photos alongside a statue of Gandalf. And as she took to the stage for her final rally this fall, she was introduced with a quote from Aragorn, the series’ mythic hero.

“I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” Meloni told the Times that day in September. “I don’t consider The Lord of the Rings fantasy.”

(Image source: Lorenzo Matteucci)

For Meloni and many like her on the European far right, a deep love of Tolkien comes from more than just an appreciation of his rich fantasy world. Instead, it has become a kind of manifesto for an attitude and worldview that has long survived as an obscure undercurrent in Europe’s radical right-wing.

That worldview is the philosophy of Traditionalism, a spiritual doctrine based on a desire to return to a universal, primordial, and eternal Tradition that is in opposition to the individualism and progress of modernity. Though often marginal to far-right party politics, for generations, Traditionalism has furnished part of the ideological scaffolding of Europe’s right-wing militants and extremists.

Today, as it has mutated and shifted over the course of four generations, it’s easy to overstate the impact Traditionalism has had on the ideologies and attitudes of parties like Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, whose public platform contains a mix of “family values,” anti-immigration policies, and neoliberal economics that have become standard features of conservative politics around the world.

But among the newly empowered radical fringes of Europe’s far-right parties, including those at the margins of Meloni’s base, Traditionalism is key to understanding their reactionary worldview.

“Traditionalism has got to be part of the story, because Traditionalism is still part of that milieu,” said Mark Sedgwick, a scholar of Traditionalism at the Aarhus University in Denmark, in an interview. “Actually, I think, [it’s] increasingly part of that milieu.”

***

The origins of Traditionalism lie in the work of René Guénon, a turn-of-the-century French intellectual whose work grappled with the vast transformations wrought by the advent of the modern era.

Guénon’s output began with analyses of Eastern religious texts, then being translated and interpreted by anthropologists. Through these texts, Guénon constructed a notion of “Indian religion” as the repository of an ancient and unbroken Tradition (always capitalized) that embraced non-dualism, “pure intellectuality,” a cyclical understanding of time, and which predated modern ideas of individualism and historical progress.

In Guénon’s analysis, this Tradition had been expressed to various degrees of success across nearly all eras, cultures, faiths, and philosophies. His own convictions eventually led him to abandon Catholicism for Islam, which he viewed as a purer expression of monotheism. But it existed in stark opposition to the modern spirit of equanimity and individual freedom which had driven Europe forward since the French Revolution.

For Guénon, writing as Europe wrestled with rapid industrialization and socialist revolt, modernity was a uniquely Western sickness, accelerating the advent of a dark age. Individualism, capitalist consumption, democracy — all were proof that we were living through a “kali yuga,” a time of worsening crisis when, as he writes in his magnum opus Crisis of the Modern World, “the blind lead the blind… the inferior judges the superior… [and] nothing and nobody is any longer in the right place.”

For many of his age, Guénon’s writing tapped into a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the changes being wrought in society, “inverting,” in Sedgwick’s words, the rhetoric of inevitable human progress that defined modernism. “Once the modern world is understood in terms of decline rather than progress, almost everything else changes, and there are not many people left you can usefully talk to,” Sedgwick writes in Against the Modern World, the seminal study of the Traditionalist movement.

But confrontational as Guénon’s project was, it was also largely removed from political concerns. “Guenon never saw Traditionalism in a political way, he saw it in a spiritual way,” said Christian Giudice, an Italian scholar of Traditionalism. His politics were directed to the creation of “an intellectual elite,” Giudice says, “which could tell normal people … [how] to direct themselves in order to live a more authentic life.”

But Guénon’s spiritual project gained a political edge in the work of the Italian Traditionalist Julius Evola, whose oeuvre has had an outsized influence on the intellectual trajectory of Europe’s radical right. Emerging during the rise of fascism in the 1920s and ‘30s, Evola’s writing helped define a heroic, muscular self-image and theology for the right, even as it remained largely marginal to the fascist project in Italy.

Evola’s Traditionalism also came with real teeth. Whereas Guénon presented an esoteric strand of Traditionalism, Evola aligned himself with the kshatriyas, the Hindu warrior caste. His ideal, Giudice explains, was the Nordic Aryan warrior of Nazi propaganda, and his model society was powered by racial hierarchy, elitism, and a violent assertion of the will. In his writings, he imagined the “man of Tradition” as a member of a superior “spiritual race,” standing amid the ruins of the modern world, reconstituting for themselves a pre-modern society of enlightened rule guided by primordial Tradition.

As a philosopher of the radical right, Evola’s work was predictably hostile to women’s emancipation, psychoanalysis, and the “skin-deep reactivity” of modern man, echoing many of today’s conservative talking points. Perhaps less predictably, though like many on the far-right in his time, Evola was also opposed to the Catholic hierarchy and Christianity itself, preferring a revival of pagan spirituality as closer to the authentic Tradition of his “spiritual race.”

But Evola’s vision for society was never actually realized, and his philosophy became increasingly marginal to Mussolini’s fascist project, which made peace with Catholicism, valorized industry, and elevated the Italian “worker” in a manner deeply at odds with many Traditionalist beliefs. For Evola, the failure of fascism to live up to his ideal was simply further proof of Western society’s corruption and the evolution of the dark age. His subsequent work took on an increasingly pessimistic, accelerationist color.

“It might be better to contribute to the fall οf that which is already wavering and belongs to yesterday’s world,” Evola wrote in Ride the Tiger, one of his most influential post-war works, “than to try to prop it up and prolong its existence artificially.”

For both those disappointed by Mussolini’s fascism and those who had supported the regime only to see it crumble, Evola’s new tone resonated deeply. The next generation of partisans would take his words to heart — waging street battles and bombing train stations to try and push the country into crisis in Italy’s infamous “Years of Lead.”

***

Unlike Germany, Italy never underwent a process of “denazification” in the wake of the Second World War. As the country rebuilt from fascist devastation, Mussolini’s lieutenants were allowed to reconstitute their movement as the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), where Meloni chose to begin her political career.

MSI never achieved much by way of electoral success. In 1972, at the height of its power, it earned only 8.7% of the vote. But to look at its electoral performance alone is to greatly underestimate the influence of neo-fascist ideas in post-war Italy.

“They always had a double path,” explains Giulia Chielli, a doctoral researcher in far-right movements at the University of Toulouse and the University of Grenada. “One is the parliamentary path — the legal party, which aims to justify their politics, their policy. And the other part, which … supports and provides safe havens for these more extreme movements.”

Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, street violence routinely raged in Italy between paramilitaries of the radical right and radical left, known as the Years of Lead. On the right, these so-called “extra-parliamentary” movements, their ranks swelling with youth too radical for the MSI, took their ideology directly from Julius Evola. Continuing to hold court at his house in Rome as the “philosopher-king” of the far-right, Evola infused the movement with a heady mix of anti-democratic nihilism, aristocratic elitism, and racism.

Evola explicitly eschewed parliamentary politics, seeing it as a modern invention, and many of his followers swore off political participation in favor of nihilistic street violence, hoping to accelerate the collapse of democracy in Italy. But many could not swear off politics forever. Over the years, the far-right groups inspired by Evola would furnish many of the next generation’s parliamentary leaders.

In practice, while these politicians took pains to distance themselves from the partisans waging violence in the street, the distinction between these groups was “a theoretical and academic one,” the historian Elisabetta Cassina Wolff writes in her study of the period. “The very same people continuously went in and out” of both groups.

Though these years of extremist violence far predate Meloni and her party, many of those on which she today relies for counsel earned their stripes with exactly these kinds of movements. “People like [current President of the Italian Senate Ignazio] La Russa, people like [current Senate vice-president Maurizio] Gasparri, they were in the streets with molotov cocktails in the ‘70s,” Giudice says. “They were highly influenced by Julius Evola, and that entire milieu.”

But as the ‘70s wound on, the old symbols and street violence of fascism ceased to be as effective as they once were. The new younger members of Italy’s far-right began to look for renewal — and it was at this moment, of all moments, that the first Italian translation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work appeared on the scene.

For those ensconced in the traditionalist worldview of Evola, Tolkien’s writing provided a new lexicon for describing the world of their fantasies. Young neo-fascists saw themselves as born kings like the dispossessed Aragorn, destined for aristocratic rule over a willing and worshipful populace. For those less grandiose, Tolkien’s simple Shire folk offered an archetype of agrarian, pre-modern life. Much was made of Tolkien’s own hostility to industrialization and racial essentialism in the text, where the camaraderie of simple, idealistic folk is pitched against Mordor’s industrialized, black hordes in an indisputable battle between an eternal good and a cancerous evil.

In 1977, the Fronte della Gioventù (Youth Front) — the MSI youth wing which Meloni would herself join just over a decade later — organized its first “Hobbit Camp”: a place that functioned, in Meloni’s words, as a “political laboratory,” where concepts and motifs from art, cinema, literature and politics were remixed and reinterpreted to generate a new vocabulary for the radical right.

(“Campo Hobbit.” Image source: Marina Simeone)

“You have a generation change,” says Sedgwick. “You get new guys who are not fascist — they were too young [during the war]. And simultaneously, we get the period where Evola starts being popular again.”

Italy’s right was not alone in reinventing its lexicon. At the same time, in France, Traditionalist ideas were undergoing a profound transformation into something more akin to the rhetoric of today’s radical right. Through his think-tank Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE), Alain de Benoist, a French white nationalist and journalist, undertook the work of translating Traditionalist teachings into political positions more palatable for a post-fascist Europe.

“He modernized Evola, and made his philosophy even more acceptable — something you could sell to the electorate,” Cassina Wolff explained to me. Retaining Evola’s nihilistic attitude to liberal democracy and Christianity, de Benoist had his greatest success in redefining Evola’s “spiritual racism” as “ethnopluralism,” the idea that ethnic groups should exist in homogeneous “ethno-cultural regions.” Playing on national pride and cultural exceptionalism at a time when France was facing waves of African immigration, de Benoist defined a language of racist xenophobia for a new generation of European voters. No amount of globalization, immigration, or multiculturalism could overcome cultural differences, he suggested — better just to keep the immigrants out.

The resulting movement, known as the “New Right,” has in the intervening decades paved the way for the revival of the right-wing electoral influence we are now witnessing. In the Italy of Meloni’s youth, where a country of emigrants had just begun to experience the immigration crises that now dominate headlines, these ideas found a captive audience. “The biological racism, which characterized parties like MSI, transitioned to cultural racism,” Cassina Wolff says. It was into this climate that Giorgia Meloni, the politician, was born.

***

As a 15-year-old growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Rome, Meloni was, by the early 1990s, already a contrarian. Rejecting the communist politics of her absentee father, she joined the Youth Front, still openly neofascist, and immediately began organizing against progressive education reforms with her student organization dubbed “The Ancestors.”

For twelve years she campaigned as a member of the MSI’s youth wing and its successor, Azione Giovane (Youth Action). She attended the various attempts to revive the Hobbit Camps of the 1970s, dressed in hobbit cosplay, but achieved more success with her own version, named “Atreju” after another hero of high fantasy who fights against encroaching darkness. It would later attract far-right luminaries like Hungarian President Viktor Orban and Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who came to Rome to bemoan the ills of liberal democracy.

But Meloni’s meteoric rise through the ranks of Italy’s post-fascist movement came as it was radically transforming its outward image and flirting with power in a way not previously possible.

From Guenon to De Benoist, Traditionalism’s reactionary spiritual worldview had engendered a deep hostility to many of the darlings of the post-Cold War consensus: capitalism, finance, globalization, representative democracy, America, and even the Catholic Church.

For a party that wanted to take its electoral chances seriously, the efforts to stake out a “third way” — a social and political model distinct from communism and capitalism — risked alienating a more moderate public. Under the leadership of Gianfranco Fini, considered by many to be Meloni’s “political father,” the MSI and its successive party, the Alleanza Nazionale, adopted a neoliberal economic and foreign policy.

With these changes in places, those who retained a desire to reconstitute an aristocratic society opposed to communism and capitalism left to join extra-parliamentary groups, like Forza Nuova and its successor CasaPound, named for the poet and fascist collaborator Ezra Pound. For these groups, Evola’s Traditionalism remained “some kind of religion,” according to Giovanni Baldini, a researcher with the anti-fascist group Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia. “You can study him, but not discuss it. He’s like a saint. A picture of Evola is often found in their offices.”

To this day, Meloni seems somewhat ambiguous about this shift in her own party. While supporting Fini at the time, she has since said he risked destroying the “glorious history” of the Italian Right. In 2012, Meloni left with her allies to form her own party, the Fratelli d’Italia, running on the fascist-era slogan of “God, Fatherland, Family” and a platform that was militant on immigration, opposed to EU integration, and reactionary on reproductive and LGBTQ rights.

“All the old guard of Alleanza Nazionale were very much influenced by Traditionalism, and Traditionalist ideas,” said Giudice. “When Meloni founded Fratelli d’Italia, they all moved with her…. So they probably saw something in Meloni that they did not see in [her rivals].”

***

Exactly how much of this obscured Traditionalist undercurrent has survived in the whirlpool of Italian politics is a matter of some debate. Meloni’s personal politics, as well as that of her “national conservative” movement, have not been entirely consistent on this front.

(Image source: Alessandro Bianchi for Reuters)

For Giudice, Meloni’s ideological lineage is too muddled to tie her to figures like Evola. What Traditional influences remain, he says, are “so fringe as to be almost considered negligible.”

Chielli, to some extent, agrees. “I think the Traditionalism that you can find is more in the propaganda and the external face that they present their electorate,” she says. “They see the Western societies as always in danger. [There is] always this need to protect Western society… [by] looking at the past.”

Exactly what is endangering Western society has shifted for Meloni over time. Previously, she railed against “nihilistic globalist elites, driven by international finance” — those who, she asserted, secretly encouraged illegal immigration “to destroy European identities.”

But today, though she continues to oppose immigration, her attitudes to international finance are more forgiving. Her party is now unabashed in support of neoliberal policies like trickle-down economics and the NATO alliance — a position that has risked alienating supporters, and even those coalition partners who find inspiration in autocratic Russia.

Meloni and her acolytes have also long departed from the anti-Christian attitudes that defined many Traditionalist icons. She and her party are unapologetically Catholic, even if they have at times clashed with the priorities of the current pope.

Employing rhetoric that would shock Guénon, Meloni has urged the defense of the Christian West against “Islamization” and supported the banning of new mosques. More recently, she’s employed similar rhetoric against the so-called “LGBT lobby,” which she accuses of trying to erase the traditional family and, with it, her identity as an “Italian, Christian, woman, [and] mother.”

For Sedgwick, even though this rhetoric comes from a place of far-right Catholicism, it “fits very nicely with Traditionalist ideas about modernity and tradition.” It takes aim at imagined enemies who would break down traditional societies and challenge immutable truths like gender, nationality, and family in the name of “progress.”

“What used to be an argument primarily fought about migration is currently changing shape to be about migration and LGBTQ [rights],” Sedgwick says, “and that while these appear to be quite separate issues, actually, in many ways, they’re not.”

In fact, Meloni’s muscular Catholicism may be an indication of a broader evolution underway in the Traditionalist current. Tobias Cremer, an Oxford-based researcher, recently noted that radical right movements across Europe “are intensifying their use of Christian symbols and language,” presenting a medieval-inspired Christian identity as a traditional contrast to the dominant secular culture of contemporary Europe.

“In times of decreasing religiosity and increasing distance from Christian traditions, religion is now experiencing such an unholy renaissance throughout Europe,” the political scientists Anja Hennig and Oliver Fernando Hidalgo write. “When churches speak about faith, right-wing populists speak about identity.”

This has caused some discomfort for the gatekeepers of Traditionalism’s legacy. De Benoist himself once said his New Right was more successful among Italians than in his native France; but faced with their refusal to disavow the Catholic Church, he denounced their views as a “misunderstanding” of his thought.

Yet, this kind of evolution has been central to elevating De Benoist’s biggest fans to the height of political influence in Europe. Meloni’s victory, analysts agree, is largely thanks to frustration with the existing governing parties — but it’s also a testament to her ability to avoid controversy. Meloni and her lieutenants have more explicit ties to fascism than any government in recent memory — and yet, Meloni has managed to praise former fascists’ “loyalty” to the cause while distancing herself from “nostalgic attitudes” to fascism.

Since becoming prime minister, hemmed in by European funding rules and fearful of international isolation, Meloni has been unable to stake out any but the most moderate of positions. It’s been a performance so mild, with its ideology so veiled, that some even wonder if her party’s neofascist spirit will survive a stint in government. “There are going to be very few traces left of the ideological positions which got the whole thing started,” Sedgwick says.

Chielli says it has been Meloni’s quality of ideological slipperiness, her ability to engage in a “double discourse” aimed at mainstream voters and Europe’s post-Traditionalist fringe right, that has been the key to her success. “It’s difficult actually to recognize just one origin [for her rhetoric], because it’s always a mix of things,” she says. “You cannot say it’s fascism, because it’s not completely fascist. You can’t say it’s Traditionalist, because it’s not completely Traditionalist. But I think … the key for the success of these parties is the way they mix these elements.”

Her interview with the New York Times is just one example. For many in America, where Tolkien’s work is not associated with far-right politics, her nerdy fandom is little more than a humanizing quirk.

But for Italians, it’s a dog whistle to an intellectual tradition that once informed the most militant partisans of the radical right.

John Last is a Canadian freelance writer, researcher and producer based in northern Italy.