This is the last of three parts of this important analysis of our epoch-changing times. You can read Parts 1 and 2 here.
DONALD Trump is a man of action, not rumination (let alone self-recrimination), and he clearly possesses a high tolerance for risk. He is instinctual, not actuarial. He is relational, not rationalistic, valuing loyalty and possessing a prickly sense of honour. He utters common truths with no regard for whether this offends the sensibilities of others, and has little patience for endless ‘dialogue’ or established procedures. And, an unabashed nationalist, he doesn’t hesitate to wield strength on behalf of American interests, or to put those interests ahead of others’ around the world. He is, in other words, neither cause nor mere symptom of populist upheaval but in a real sense an embodiment of the whole rebellious new world spirit that’s overturning the old order.
Trump’s policies so far in his second term also reflect this new zeitgeist. His blitzkrieg of executive action has struck directly at the three pillars of the Long Twentieth Century: closing the nation’s borders and purging the state of the latest ideological evolution of open society orthodoxy (‘Diversity, Equity, Inclusion’) while inspiring the broader culture to do the same; moving to dismantle the managerial state, including by affirming the elected Executive’s direct, personal control over the sheltered proceduralist (i.e. democratically uncontrollable and unaccountable) bureaucracy; and transforming US foreign policy by rejecting liberal proceduralism in the international sphere as well, putting national interests ahead of the interests of the ‘international order’ and declining to automatically play the role of global rule-enforcer.
The very boldness of this action reflects more than just partisan political gamesmanship – in itself it represents the stasis of the old paradigm being upended: now ‘you can just do things’ again. This mindset hasn’t been seen in America since FDR and his revolutionary government remade the country and established the modern managerial state; no one has dared to so much as jostle the machine he created since the end of WWII. Now Trump has.
Abroad and in Washington, this brash attitude has caused much consternation and confusion (‘Why is Trump threatening to invade Mexico, bully Canada, and annex Greenland from a Nato ally? Wasn’t he supposed to be an isolationist?’) But the principle behind all Trump’s behaviour here actually appears to be quite straightforward: he is willing to use American might however it may benefit the nation, rather than caring very much about protecting the status quo liberal international order for its own sake or adhering to polite fictions like international law. Turns out ‘you can just do things’ on the world stage too. Diplomacy and alliances are logically seen as of value only insofar as they benefit America. This is indeed what ‘America First’ always meant. In this way the Trump Doctrine is simply a rejection of the neurotic, confrontation-avoidant post-war consensus in favour of the restoration of standard muscular, Western Hemisphere-focused, pre-twentieth century American foreign policy, in the style of a president Andrew Jackson, William McKinley or Teddy Roosevelt.
New Secretary of State Marco Rubio has even explicitly described the idealism of the global US-enforced liberal international order as an ‘anomaly’, noting that it ‘was a product of the end of the Cold War’ and that ‘eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet’. This revitalization of the spirit of national sovereignty and international competition seems to already be spreading and inspiring a turn back towards stronger gods around the world. As Hungary’s conservative-nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, recently put it to a gathering of European populists, ‘Our friend Trump, the Trump tornado, has changed the world in just a couple of weeks. An era has ended. Today, everyone sees that we are the future.’
So while at a surface level the vibe of the Trump revolution might be mistaken as merely marking a return to circa-1990s libertarianism, with its individual freedom and ‘greed is good’ free-market mindset, he represents a far more significant shift than that: back – or rather forward – more than a century. The globalist neoliberalism, interventionist one-world internationalism, and naive social progressivism of the 90s open society is dead and gone. Despite his political alliance with the right-wing progressives of Silicon Valley, Trump’s new world is in a real sense distinctly post-liberal.
It is little wonder then why Trump so horrifies the aging aristocracy of the Long Twentieth Century: they fear above all the return of the strong gods, which their whole project of moral and political world-building was conducted to preclude.
Note, for example, the appearance of increasingly panicked admonitions (in between or in haphazard fusion with accusations of fascism) about the imminent danger of ‘Christian Nationalism’. This is a term that welds together two strong gods – nationalism and religion – and so is a particularly triggering phantom. This is also why a certain type of limp conservative (known most politely online as the ‘cuckservative’) displays particular hysteria about Trump and populism. This type really is a conservative, in the sense that his priority in life is to prevent change to the status quo, decrying any decisive action, including any legitimate exercise of democratic power, that risks disrupting the open society consensus. Although he may mouth selective disagreement with progressive ‘excesses’ that also risk undermining that consensus, at his core such a man is foremost a servant of the weak gods of managerial timidity.
For eight decades now the old elite, left and right wings alike, have been unified by their shared prioritization of the open society and its values. Although it may have surprised some Americans to see previously right-coded figures like Dick Cheney side with the political left in the last election, it should not have. Cheney was a radical proponent of the open society consensus – just in the form of neoconservatism, the American church militant of imposing the gospel of openness around the world at the point of the sword. In this he was never that different from dedicated leftists like George Soros, who founded an activist institution named quite explicitly after his objective (the Open Society Foundations) and used its vast network of influence to subvert and deconstruct conservative cultures around the globe, including in the United States.
That both men would do this as powerful scions of the same Western establishment is not contradictory but completely logical, given that what united that establishment was the open society consensus. Even the most radical ‘counter-cultural’ rebels of the 1960s were really no such thing, given that their goals were identical to those of the post-war establishment: progressively to advance the opening up of society. They disagreed only on the pace of change, and the establishment soon accommodated their zeal and brought them into the fold.
Trump and populist-nationalist movements are the first real break from this consensus since its conception. They herald the arrival of a very different world.
Despite its obsession with ‘openness,’ the world of the post-war open society has in truth always been, in its own way, a strictly enclosed and deeply stifling place. It is a world in which human nature, indeed our very humanity, is viewed with great suspicion, as something dangerous to be surveilled, suppressed and contained – or, even better, remoulded into a reliable cog to fit safely into a predictable, riskless machine. Its dream of a world of perfect freedom, equality, rationalism and passivity has always been one ‘in which no great heart could beat and no great soul could breathe,’ as Ernst Jünger put it.
From the very beginning of the Long Twentieth Century, some clear-eyed liberal thinkers, such as Leo Strauss, could foresee that attempting to entirely ignore the realities and banish the values of the ‘closed society’ in pursuit of ‘a pacified planet, without rulers and ruled’ was always liable to end only in rebellion, bloodshed and self-destruction. Open society liberalism’s dogmatic pursuit of negation would, Strauss warned, undermine the very virtues – like loyalty, duty, courage, and love of one’s own – that all societies rely on to survive and sustain themselves. As Matthew Rose astutely observes, Strauss understood that the strong gods of the closed society ‘are permanent truths, not atavisms, no matter how unpalatable they are to the progressive-minded’. And that a ‘society that cannot affirm them invites catastrophe, no less than does a society that cannot question them’.
Such warnings were ignored. The traumas of the twentieth century made ideas such as nationalism, or even any clear distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, into taboos that were impossible to discuss seriously. That finding the proper balance between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ values is necessary to maintain a healthy society was a fact carefully ignored for decades.
Now the strong gods are nonetheless being haphazardly called back into the world as the vitalistic neo-romanticism of our revolutionary moment of reformation tears down the decaying walls and guard towers of the open society. Their return brings real risks, or course – although the return of risk is kind of the point. The thing about strong gods is that they’re strong, meaning they can be fearsome and dangerous; which is precisely why they also have the strength to protect and defend. It remains an open question whether this necessary renewal of strength and vitality can be reintegrated harmoniously into our societies, or whether our world will again be plunged into a time of significantly greater strife, danger and war.
But we no longer have much of a choice in the matter; the strong gods’ restoration has become inevitable, one way or another. We’re living in a whole new century now. The Long Twentieth Century has run its course, the world it bequeathed to us in the West having proved a wholly unsustainable mix of atomization, listlessness, self-abnegation, and petty impersonal tyranny. Our societies will either accept the offer of revitalization or fade out of existence, to be replaced by other stronger, more grounded and cohesive cultures.
As Reno rightly concludes in Return of the Strong Gods, ‘Our time – this century – begs for a politics of loyalty and solidarity, not openness and deconsolidation. We don’t need more diversity and innovation. We need a home.’ God willing, we can all find that home again as we enter the twenty-first century.
This article appeared on The Upheaval on February 13, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
