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Elon Musk’s salute at Trump’s inauguration caused a lot of talk. His gesture served as a political Rorschach test, in which people projected their own views. For the Left as a whole, it was an unequivocal Sieg Heil. Anti-Zionist Jews were keen to point out the proof that Elon Musk was an anti-Semite. In fact, anti-Semitism and Zionism go hand in hand, since Herzl himself said that hatred of Jews would guarantee the immigration of Jews for his ethno-racial state. However, the philo-Semitism of Calvinists and their heirs is a fact. The name “Elon” itself is Hebrew. It means “oak”.

On the Right, libertarians and neocons swore up and down that Elon Musk was a clumsy autist who didn’t know how to express affection, and that’s why he made a gesture twice, that consisted of beating his chest and raising his arm outstretched, with the palm of his hand facing down. Perhaps this version was invented by the Zionist lobby, since the ADL rushed to explain that Musk was just making an awkward gesture.

More sober-minded people, however, were able to recognize it as the Roman salute, which, judging by the explanations that have popped up on the internet, seems to be better known in France. And there’s a very simple reason for this: its presence in the symbolism of the French Revolution.

In this world plagued by polarizing propaganda, it’s useful to reflect on what led a billionaire who is sympathetic to anarcho-capitalism to make a gesture of the French revolutionaries and be labeled a right-wing extremist.

The history of the salute

The Roman salute is a neoclassical fantasy. The Romans didn’t greet each other this way. The Roman salute probably has its birth certificate in the painting Le Serment des Horaces (1785) by Jacques-Louis David. Four years later, the French Revolution broke out, persecuting the Church and establishing the Republic. Since the Republic was a Roman invention, the revolutionaries’ imaginations turned to the distant pre-imperial – and pre-Christian – times of Cicero. About 130 years later, another republican and anticlerical movement appropriated the neoclassical aesthetic: Italian fascism.

It is because of this coincidence that the fasces lictoris (a small hatchet made of a bundle of sticks) symbolizes Italian fascism, but also appears on the coat of arms of the French Republic. And for the same reason, the Roman salute, in a simpler version (without the part of hand on heart), was adopted by fascism. Later, Mussolini’s Austrian fan would introduce the Sieg Heil. However, in general, Nazi Germany was against the adoption of Roman symbolism, and the fasces lictoris does not appear in the Third Reich.

And do you know where else you can find a modified Roman salute, plus a fasces lictoris and a lot of neoclassical aesthetics? In the United States. The Bellamy Salute – with hand on heart, then arm extended first with the palm down, then turning it upwards – emerged in the late 19th century and lasted until World War II. It was eliminated from schools because of its similarity to Nazi-fascist gestures. The fasces lictoris, on the other hand, appears quite a bit in the national symbols of the United States: it is on the Senate coat of arms, in the Oval Office, in the hands of Abraham Lincoln at the Emancipation Memorial…

The symbolic vacuum of liberalism

Of the neoclassical trio, fascism is the black sheep, because it is the only anti-liberal movement. It is anti-liberal because it concentrates power in the discretion of the Duce, who does whatever he wants without worrying about a social contract, the notion of human rights or parliament.

On the other hand, both the American Revolution and the French Revolution were liberal. Obviously, this is not economic liberalism, but rather political liberalism, which does away with the medieval structure of three states (clergy, nobility and people) and transforms the political body into a great social contract where all citizens have equal rights – even if only in the letter of the law, and many are excluded from citizenship. The French Revolution was carried out by the bourgeoisie (the wealthy part of the people) and, in its most bloodthirsty formulation, had the goal of hanging the last nobleman with the guts of the last priest. After a tremendous bloodbath, with mass executions (including of peasants, part of the people), the revolutionaries instituted the Rights of Man (1789) – notoriously called bourgeois rights by Marx.

The liberal form par excellence is the Republic. France, however, did not have the first liberal revolution in history. That was the Glorious Revolution (1688), whose product analogous to the Rights of Man was the Bill of Rights (1689).

England came from a much more chaotic context than France. The nobility had already reached the 16th century acting as a bourgeoisie, and had come into conflict with the king and the church to expel the people from the communal properties with the infamous Enclosures. With the sanction of Parliament, the nobles expelled the people from the lands, destroying their homes and starving them to death. Their intention was to use the land to raise sheep and generate wool, which would be woven by increasingly modern looms – which would eventually lead to the Industrial Revolution. In addition, there was a problem between the English monarchy and the Church (with Henry VIII wanting to marry in series), a religious civil war, some beheadings, a Calvinist Republic…

In the end, the state of affairs created by the Glorious Revolution was that of a veiled republic: instead of the bourgeoisie killing the nobles, the nobles became bourgeois; instead of extinguishing the clergy, a new church was created, submissive to the State; and, instead of ending the monarchy, a king of the state church was installed, with his hands tied by Parliament.

This left the liberals of England in a comfortable position: it was not necessary to create, ex nihilo, a national symbolism to give the country an identity after the destruction of traditional institutions. The shell of the old Church and the shell of the old nobility were there. The other republican and anticlerical regimes, liberal or not, had to invent a symbolism ex nihilo. And the first of them (the United States and France) sought it from Ancient Rome, which bequeathed the Republic to posterity.

This lack of symbolism indicates the novelty of liberalism: making the State a single, supreme and totally rational authority. With liberalism, all authority emanates from the State. Before liberalism, it was possible to resort to ecclesiastical authority to escape the secular yoke, for example. The difference between political liberalism and Mussolini’s anti-liberalism does not lie in the State being larger or smaller, but rather in the State’s self-restraint mechanisms: in liberalism they are present; in fascist anti-liberalism they are absent, and the power of the State is concentrated in the Duce.

Common points

In the case of the United States, a Protestant nation, it is surprising that all national symbolism leaves out Christianity. They could use a cross or a fish, for example, but they did not: they preferred symbols of a pagan civilization, in addition to the Masonic symbols.

But the Ancient Rome imagined by all of them (Americans, French, Italians) is incredibly modern, because it is rationalist and irreligious. We do not see public men anxious about the interpretations of the haruspex in front of bird guts. Everything is intended to be exclusively Apollonian and rational, like modernity, not like antiquity. The identification with Rome was something almost entirely arbitrary. Faced with the cultural and symbolic vacuum of liberalism, the only thing left was to use the symbols and aesthetics of the culture that created the only thing with which liberalism identified itself: the Republic. And if in modernity there are no haruspex or pythonesses, there are scientists and philosophers.

Apart from Rome, we can think of two successful scientific movements that adopted flags invented ex nihilo and hoisted them on public buildings: Nazism, with its swastika devoid of any connection to Germanic history, and Wokism, with its gay flag with a triangle with the trans’ and colored’s colors (this is the Progress Pride flag, which can be seen here). Both Nazi-fascism and the various shades of liberalism, by adopting the State as the supreme institution, end up creating this cultural vacuum, and filling it with fantasy.