Return of the Strong Gods

Two books have come to my notice – the first Return of the Strong Gods – nationalism, populism and the future of the west by Rusty Reno (2019) is a right-wing intellectual history of the past 80 years which attacks a hero of mine – Karl Popper and his idea of the “Open Society”

The second, Anger, Fear, Domination - dark passions and the power of political 

rhetoric is a small book (120pp) by William Galston (2025). The first was reviewed 

thus 

Reno’s argument is that after the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century, the ruling 

classes of the West chose to create societies of “openness, weakening and disenchantment,” 

in an explicit attempt to prevent the “return of the strong gods”—“the objects of men’s love 

and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that united societies.” Rather than 

simply trying to wall out only the terrible strong gods, the ruling classes chose to wall 

them all out: truth along with fascism; loyalty along with Communism. 
He starts by acknowledging post-liberals such as Patrick Deneen and (an early voice) 

Alasdair MacIntyre, and if I had not read this book, I would have guessed that Reno 

mostly agrees with them. Yet, after some wavering, comes down on the side of the 

Enlightenment—that is, of liberalism, of atomized freedom, and the destruction of all 

unchosen bonds in a desperate quest for total emancipation. For Reno, we find, it was 

not 1789, but 1945, which was the year that it all went wrong. 

The book starts with a bang...

... the emphasis on openness and weakening in highly theorized literary criticism and cultural studies in universities, often under the flag of critique and deconstruction, and in popular calls for diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusivity, all of which entail a weakening of boundaries and opening of borders (p8).

Nor is the cultural influence of the postwar consensus confined to the left. The same insistence on openness and weakening is found in libertarianism as well, which seeks cultural deregulation so that individuals are not constrained by shared norms.

It is felt in free-market economic theory and sociobiological analysis of politics and culture, both of which adopt a reductive view of human motivation that disenchants public life. Openness, weakening, and disenchantment are at play in postwar sociology, psychology, and even theology. In every instance, they rise to prominence because they are seen as necessary to prevent the return of the strong gods…..I want to understand how the West was reconstructed after 1945 in accord with openness and weakening and how they debilitate us today, threatening to destroy the Western tradition they are meant to redeem.

Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led. Fearful of strong loves and committed to ever-greater openness, the postwar consensus cannot formulate, much less address, these problems.

Unable to identify our shared loves—unable even to formulate the “we” that is the political subject in public life—we cannot identify the common good, the res in the res publica. Under these circumstances, increasingly prevalent in the West, civic life disintegrates into the struggle among private interests, and in this struggle the rich and powerful win. In the twenty-first century, oligarchy and an unaccountable elite pose a far greater threat to the future of liberal democracy than does the return of Hitler.

Our troubles do not stem from William of Ockham, the Reformation, John Locke, capitalism, or modern science and technology. It is true that there are atomizing, deracinating, deconsolidating trends in modernity. Many historians, philosophers and social critics have pointed them out. But it is always so. The fall of man left every civilization, every era under the law of entropy, which is why renewing shared loves and unifying loyalties is one of the primary arts of leadership. This is what we lack today.

The distempers afflicting public life today reflect a crisis of the postwar consensus, the weak gods of openness and weakening, not a crisis of liberalism, modernity, or the West. The ways of thinking that became so influential after 1945 have become unworkable and at the same time obligatory. We need to recover the “we” that unites us, but the postwar consensus is an undying zombie. The West needs to restore a sense of transcendent purpose to public (and private) life. 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. And for that, we will require the return of the strong gods.

There is an interview about the book on this podcast

Rhetoric is hardly Trump’s strong point but Twitter has given him a powerful 

means of communication which is explored in Anger, Fear, Domination 

- dark passions and the power of political rhetoric 

There are a couple of video presentations here and here.