This is the second of three parts of this important analysis of our epoch-changing times. You can read Part 1 here.
THE crusade for openness took on for itself a great commission to go and deconstruct all nations in the name of peace, prosperity and freedom. This conviction was only reinforced by the 9/11 attacks of 2001, which seemed to help demonstrate that the continued existence of closed-minded intolerance anywhere was a threat to tolerance everywhere. As one hawkish politician quoted in Christopher Caldwell’s 2010 book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe put it not long afterwards, ‘We 1741137919 live in a borderless world in which our new mission is defending the border not of our countries but civility and human rights.’
If you’ve been wondering why USAID was spending $1.5million to advance DEI in Serbian workplaces, $500,000 to ‘expand atheism’ in Nepal, or $7.9million to catechize Sri Lankan journalists in avoiding ‘binary-gendered language’, this is why. It’s the same reason the US government was pouring millions into funding ‘charities’ dedicated to breaking US immigration law and facilitating open borders migration: they believed they were fighting the good fight against the closed society in order to stop zombie Hitler (while skimming a whole lot of cash on the side for their good deeds). It’s also why, for decades, anyone who’s objected has been automatically tarred as a literal fascist.
Meanwhile, the development of the open society consensus went hand-in-hand with the universal growth of the managerial state and its occlusion of democratic self-governance. There was a very direct and deliberate connection. As Carl Schmitt noted early in the twentieth century, an ‘elemental impulse’ of liberalism is ‘neutralization’ and ‘depoliticization’ of the political – that is, the attempt to remove all fundamental contention from politics out of fear of conflict, shrinking ‘politics’ to mere managerial administration. This excising of the political from politics was at the heart of the post-war project’s structural aims. Just as Schmitt had predicted, the goal became to achieve perpetual peace through an ‘age of technicity’, in which politics would be reduced to the safer, more predictable movements of a machine through the empowerment of supposedly neutral mechanisms like bureaucratic processes, legal judgements, and expert technocratic commissions.
Actual public contention over genuinely political questions, especially by the dangerously fascism-prone democratic masses, was in contrast now judged to be too dangerous to permit. The post-war establishment of the open society dreamed instead of achieving governance via scientific management, of transforming the political sphere into ‘a social technology . . . whose results can be tested by social engineering’, as Popper put it. The operation of this machine could then be limited to a cadre of carefully selected and educated ‘institutional technologists’, in Popper’s phrasing.
Thus came about the great expansion of our modern managerial regimes, including the American ‘deep state’ that the Trump administration and Elon Musk are now trying to dismantle. Characterized by vast permanent administrative states of unaccountable bureaucracies, such regimes are run by an oligarchic elite class of technocrats schooled in social engineering, dissimulation, false compassion, the manipulation of allegedly neutral processes, and a litigious ethos of risk-avoidance. The obsessive management of public opinion through propaganda and censorship also became an especially key priority in such regimes, with the objective being both to constrain democratic outcomes (to defend ‘democracy’ against the masses) and to generally suppress serious public discussion of contentious yet fundamental political issues (such as mass migration policies) in an effort to prevent civil strife.
Nor was this managerial impulse toward depoliticization limited to the national level. The creation of a ‘rules-based liberal international order’ – in which all political contention would be managed by quasi-imperial supranational structures (such as the UN and EU) and war between states would become a relic of the barbaric past – was the pinnacle of post-war Western ambitions. Backed by the military power of the United States and its allies, this new international order would show zero tolerance for unauthorized conflict, depoliticizing the world and allowing open societies to flourish in peace.
The Long Twentieth Century has been characterized by these three interlinked post-war projects: the progressive opening of societies through the deconstruction of norms and borders, the consolidation of the managerial state, and the hegemony of the liberal international order. The hope was that together they could form the foundation for a world that would finally achieve peace on earth and goodwill between all mankind. That this would be a weak, passionless, undemocratic, intricately micromanaged world of technocratic rationalism was a sacrifice the post-war consensus was willing to make.
That dream didn’t work out, though, because the ‘strong gods’ refused to die.
Mary Harrington recently observed that the Trumpian revolution seems as much archetypal as political, noting that the generally ‘exultant male response to recent work by Elon Musk and his “warband” of young tech-bros’ in dismantling the entrenched bureaucracy is a reflection of what can be ‘understood archetypally as [their] doing battle against a vast, miasmic foe whose aim is the destruction of masculine heroism as such’. This masculine-inflected spirit was suppressed throughout the Long Twentieth Century, but now it’s back. And it wasn’t, she notes, ‘as though a proceduralist, managerial civilization affords no scope for horrors of its own’. Thus now ‘we’re watching in real time as figures such as the hero, the king, the warrior, and the pirate; or indeed various types of antihero, all make their return to the public sphere’.
Instead of producing a utopian world of peace and progress, the open society consensus and its soft, weak gods led to civilizational dissolution and despair. As intended, the strong gods of history were banished, religious traditions and moral norms debunked, communal bonds and loyalties weakened, distinctions and borders torn down, and the disciplines of self-governance surrendered to top-down technocratic management. Unsurprisingly, this led to nation-states and a broader civilization that lack the strength to hold themselves together, let alone defend against external threats from non-open, non-delusional societies. In short, the campaign of radical self-negation pursued by the post-war open society consensus functionally became a collective suicide pact by the liberal democracies of the Western world.
But, as reality began to intrude over the past two decades, the share of people still convinced by the hazy promises of the open society steadily diminished. A reaction began to brew, especially among those most divorced from and harmed by its aging obsessions: the young and the working class. The ‘populism’ that is now sweeping the West is best understood as a democratic insistence on the restoration and reintegration of respect for those strong gods capable of grounding, uniting and sustaining societies, including coherent national identities, cohesive natural loyalties, and the recognition of objective and transcendent truths.
Today’s populism is more than just a reaction against decades of elite betrayal and terrible governance (though it is that too); it is a deep, suppressed desire for long-delayed action, to break free from the smothering lethargy imposed by proceduralist managerialism and fight passionately for collective survival and self-interest. It is the return of the political to politics. This demands a restoration of old virtues, including a vital sense of national and civilizational self-worth. And that in turn requires a rejection of the pathological ‘tyranny of guilt’ (as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner dubbed it) that has gripped the Western mind since 1945. As the power of endless hysterical accusations of ‘fascism’ has gradually faded, we have – for better and worse – begun to witness the end of the Age of Hitler.
Energetic national populism is, then, a rejection of all the core obsessions and demands of the twentieth century and the open society consensus that so dominated it. The passionless reign of weakness, tolerance, and drab universalist utilitarianism being held up as moral and political ideals seems to be ending. And that means the gerontocracy of the Long Twentieth Century is finally dying off too. This is what Trump, in all his brashness, represents: the strong gods have escaped from exile and returned to America, dragging the twenty-first century along behind them.
To be concluded tomorrow.
This article appeared on The Upheaval on February 13, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
