Lately I’ve been perusing the English translation of The Twilight of Ideologies, a thoughtful work by Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora y Mon, (1924-2002) the Spanish polymath whom Stanley Payne has designated the most impressive Spanish conservative thinker of the second half of the 20^th century. Although a self-identified figure of the Spanish intellectual right, unlike others with this association, de la Mora was not a Catholic clericalist;  he was a rationalist, according to his own understanding of that term. In 1983, he founded a journal Razón Espanola, which continues to be published and whose contributors caution against the totalitarian impulse in political modernity.

De la Mora strenuously distinguished religious faith from ideology, something he insists deals with political rather than spiritual matters. He was conspicuously critical of religious bodies that become entangled in political affairs, just as he excoriated ideologues who tried to sacralize political decisions and political heroes. One has the impression that as a Spaniard, de la Mora was especially sensitive to his country’s longtime role as the spearhead of Catholic orthodoxy throughout Europe. But having reservations about being a church state did not require him to oppose religious groups entering the political arena when they were forced to. What other alternative is available to Christians who are being badly treated by a particular regime, say the Biden government in the U.S., or within Islamicist states? Should these Christians suffer abuse without engaging in an explicitly political reaction? 

Arguably, however, de la Mora was more concerned with the attempted spiritualization of politics than with keeping religion out of political debate. Throughout his book, he warned against the “spiritualization” of political utopias. The author liked to think of politics, at least ideally, as a rational process, one that should be conducted among educated people who control their passions and agree about civic virtue.   

  One finds similar arguments about the preconditions for a decent civic life in de la Mora’s absorbing diatribe Egalitarian Envy (1984). In this work that has long existed in English translation, the author offered a searing indictment of the jealousy and ill will that he discerned in the relentless drive toward equality, a passion that de la Mora believed is inherent in modern democratic politics. Nowhere in this highly readable work can one find a celebration of our current concepts of democracy. De la Mora would certainly have had no use for what our leftist establishment and state managerial class laud endlessly and compulsively as “our democracy.”

 It would be fair to describe de la Mora as a conservative liberal in the older European tradition. The Polish political theorist Ryszard Legutko and the Austrian aristocratic critic of democracy, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddhin, would fit the same description; and I would be honored to be included in their company.

De la Mora spoke positively in The Twilight of Ideologies about what might be described as a hiatus in the modern infatuation with ideology. In Spain, the angry passions left by a brutal civil war seemed less virulent (at least on the government’s side) in the 1960s than had been the case during the two preceding decades. Moreover, the managerial politics represented by the European Union and the Soviet gerontocracy indicated that government administration was more about management than promoting new crusades on behalf of an ideal future. De la Mora understood the situation that existed in the 1960s as the “twilight of ideology,” and that twilight remained until a new upsurge of ideological fanaticism occurred a few years later. A more agitated epoch commenced with the Sixty-Eighters and has continued down to the present in the form of a government-subsidized war against historic and biological identity and especially against the non-indoctrinated white race.

From the standpoint of de la Mora’s razionalismo, which stresses the dispassionate examination of political differences, this interlude between two periods of ideological fanaticism was actually a passing triumph over irrationality. The retreat from political religion would not result, as de La Mora assured us, in ending all political debate. Rather, the post-ideological age would offer the possibility of expressing reasoned disagreement without “utopian enthusiasms.” Alas, we still haven’t reached such an age or political culture.

 De la Mora was aware that most political parties in Western countries have ideological points of origin and continue to appeal to these founding visions. But these ideological remnants, he maintained, have little to do with the daily operation of political parties and how they cope with practical questions. Obviously, when de la Mora was surveying his age, he was not thinking about our present Spanish, German, or French social democrats or the American Democratic Party, groups that are entirely driven by leftist ideology. That was not the future de la Mora hoped for when he wrote his book in the 1960s.

For me, the best part of this work is its grappling with political terms, a subject that I discussed with the author at a conference for conservative political thinkers we both attended in Santigo, Chile in December 1986. Despite my interlocutor’s elegant Spanish, I encouraged him to speak French, which I know much better than his native tongue. He rose to this linguistic challenge quite easily.

 According to The Twilight of Ideologies, political designations like democracy are “situated at the meeting points of passions and interests.” Further, “the harsh treatment of doctrinaires, statesmen, demagogues and the plebs deforms and wears them out. They follow a triumphant path to volatilization.” “Ideology” was a more accessible term for de la Mora, since it represents “a vulgarized political philosophy” that was born with the French Revolution. It also has a leftist reference point, whether we are discussing what Marx denounced as false consciousness or the revolutionary left, including Marxism, which de la Mora regarded as beset by ideological distortions.

De la Mora was at his best when he discusses what ideology is and is not. Although initially an idea and one invented by some intellectual, ideologies quickly degenerate into something “radicalized and deformed.” “At best ideologies are reasonings that are caricatured and corrupted after an intense process of logical and psychological extrapolation and ultimately of massification,” he wrote. They also assume a religious quality, which has become characteristic of the present age. De la Mora regarded this contemporary object of worship as a political ideal that lends itself easily to vulgarization and massification (i.e. mass appeal) and therefore to ideological use. One can only imagine how trenchantly de la Mora, if he were still around, would examine the present ideological rage. He’d have a field day dissecting this vulgarized form of reasoning in its present grotesque form.