Recently, a friend reminded me that when I hoaxed American Reformer with the Communist Manifesto, I said that the Woke Right has the same “architecture of belief” as Marxism, and he challenged me to give an analogy that clarifies what that architecture is so people can better understand why the Woke Right is “Woke.” 

Imagine we’re in a plane, say like a B-777 or something. We know flying is supposed to be safe and comfortable, and we expect our pilots are competent to provide that kind of air transport. But today there’s pretty severe turbulence, and it keeps coming up. The air isn’t smooth, and the flight is bumpy, even a little concerning. 

Most of us don't think anything about this. We know turbulence happens, and, even though it can be scary or inconvenient (hold on to that red wine they just poured into your little plastic cup!), we don't blame the pilot for the turbulence. Sometimes, though, when there’s a lot of turbulence, more of us might start getting frustrated not with the situation but with the pilots. Maybe they should be doing more. Maybe they’re responsible. 

This analogy will give us insight into the Marxian architecture of belief.

Imagine someone in the plane (our “Marxist”) decides that the pilot really is the problem, so he asks the stewardess to go up to the flight deck and tell him how to fly the plane. He’s never flown a plane before, but he’s flown in them, maybe, or even seen some things about planes or played some video games.

The stewardess, of course, tells him this is not possible. He objects, demanding to talk to the pilot, but he’s rebuffed again. He argues. The stewardess tells him not only is that not allowed and illegal, it’s also impossible. The flight deck door is locked from the inside so that no one can enter, and the pilots are trained not to open it except under certain circumstances.

Our good Marxist is not an understanding person. He does not believe that keeping the pilots protected from passengers, whether dangerous or distracting, is for the good reason of letting them exercise their expertise in flying the plane safely. He thinks the whole setup is a rigged game to keep people who could help the pilot fly better and end the turbulence for everyone out of the cockpit so the pilot can retain his status as “captain” and the power that grants him.

As he argues with the stewardess, the Marxist becomes convinced that she’s in on the game that’s keeping the flight turbulent. She could let him into the flight deck, she just won’t, and she cites all kinds of illegitimate (to him) reasons like laws and locked doors that are all designed to keep him out and therefore keep the flight turbulent and awful for everyone. She doesn’t even care that the passengers are suffering in all this turbulence, and it’s not like the plane is comfortable to begin with! She must be in on it to retain her status as “stewardess” and the power that grants her as part of the “flight crew.”

In his mind, in the Marxian architecture of belief, there are two kinds of people on the plane: the “flight crew” and the “passengers,” and they are intrinsically in conflict that is highlighted by the less-than-ideal circumstances of turbulence. To him, there is a system of rules, regulations, norms, expectations, and “reasons” why the flight crew gets to be in charge and, ultimately, fly the plane, and the passengers do not have any input into the way the flight is conducted, no matter how turbulent or uncomfortable. But the whole point of the flight is to take the passengers where they are going, so it’s really their flight, not the flight crew’s. The flight crew is alienating them from their status as the raison d’etre for the flight and the primary sufferers of the flight’s unpleasant conditions.

So he starts thinking to himself that he could actually get into the flight deck and seize control of the means of flying if he really wanted to. It isn’t impossible, and legalities are just social fictions, and no one can say why it matters that he “doesn't know how to fly a plane.” He knows there’s turbulence, and he knows what being on a flight is like, and it sucks. He also knows the flight is only flying for people like him. He’s entitled to a say, if not control.

He realizes he could actually storm the flight deck door if he tried hard enough, or take a stewardess hostage or win her over to his side and get her to call into the cockpit for them to open it from the inside. So he could get in. It would just take a kind of violent revolution (storm the door and break it down), “revolutionary terrorism” (take a stewardess hostage), or a certain Gramscian “boring from within” with a defecting stewardess or two (create a counter-hegemony within the stewardess class).

He realizes there’s a problem here, though. The other passengers.

The problem is that they’ve been brainwashed by the pilot, the stewardesses, who are there “for your safety,” by the law, society, “common sense,” and a belief in the “realities” of the complexity and difficulty of jetliner aviation, etc.. They would thwart him in storming the door or even from taking a stewardess hostage. If he wanted to convert some stewardesses, these other brainwashed passengers would also likely object and certainly wouldn’t help. They have a false consciousness about the true nature of the flight situation. (Some of them might even be praying for smoother air or God’s Hand on the flight, thus distracting them from the full appreciation of their circumstances.)

The problem in the Marxist architecture of belief is that the other passengers, who are actually sane, have been brainwashed into the “flight crew’s” ideology, whereas he has “woke up” to the “critical awareness” of his flying situation and the dismal turbulence it’s causing. He realizes he needs to wake up the other passengers so they have a critical flight consciousness like he does: the pilots and stewardesses, laws and policies, norms and common sense are all conspiring against them in a mutually reinforcing way to keep the passengers out of the cockpit and their hands off the means of flight production.

There’s a lot more of us passengers than there are of them controlling the plane and its cabin, he reasons, and if I can get enough of the other passengers on board to help, a few more than that more to at least support the hijacking, and the rest to be too afraid to do anything heroic to stop us, there’s no reason we, the passengers, can’t take this plane over and get the turbulence to end for the good of all passengers. Even the pilots and stewardesses will benefit because they suffer from the turbulence too.

Everyone just needs to understand that the captain just wants to be “captain” so he can be special and important and remain in control of the flight situation (which he also benefits from with a handsome salary and a ton of status and good reputation he doesn't deserve). The rest of the flight crew is the same. They’re responsible for alienating the passengers from a smooth and enjoyable flight experience in the name of “safety” and “law.”

This is the Marxian architecture of belief. The plane is society; the flight controls are the “means of flight production”; the flight deck is the government and elite strata of society; the captain and co-pilots are the capitalist class; the flight attendants and maybe first-class passengers are the bourgeoisie benefiting illegitimately; the regular passengers are the proletariat; the turbulence is society not functioning perfectly and sometimes uncomfortably or dangerously; laws, norms, etc., and “flight safety” are the ideology maintaining the two-tiered, illegitimate system.

Other analogies are made clear above, like to the Marxist methods of violent revolution, revolutionary terrorism, and Gramscian counter-hegemonic activism (long march through the institutions).

The Marxist in the seat is likely to believe that the flight crew is corrupt and certainly not doing their best with the situation. He believes the pilot could be flying a smooth flight if he wanted to and just thought more about the passengers, but he doesn’t, thus revealing a “contradiction” in the system and ideology of “flight safety” that impugns the pilots and flight crew. The stewardesses, he believes, are enforcing this status quo not for safety but because of the status it confers to tell passengers they cannot fly the plane or bother the pilots in flight.

Thus, we can understand how Marxists think.

So, what about the Woke Right? How would their mindset fit into this analogy?

Our Woke Right passenger would also experience the turbulence and conclude that it isn’t just part of the circumstances of flying that day (weather) but a deliberate failure by the pilot and crew. The problem, he would surmise, is not that the flight crew is hoarding status away from passengers like him but was actually made a pilot for illegitimate reasons. Maybe he’s a DEI hire, representing the degradation of standards necessary for safe, comfortable flight, and that’s the reason for the turbulent flight.

He would also conclude that there is likely someone on the plane who could advise or replace the pilot and relieve the passengers of their suffering in the turbulence, someone who would have been a pilot, perhaps, if not for the degenerate system that gave them the pilot they have. Of course, that pilot would also recognize the purpose of the flight is to move the passengers, and he would also identify with them.

Like his Marxist counterpart, he would likely conclude that the stewardesses and cited laws, regulations, and “common sense” were arranged to secure and maintain the illegitimate regime that places inadequate pilots in positions they obviously don’t deserve, and the other passengers just “don’t know what time it is.” The whole system is against him too, just for different reasons. Maybe this plane won’t crash, but it might, and sooner or later one will.

If he conferred with our hypothetical Marxist, he would agree on many points of the problem, but he would disagree that it it is some passenger, in the generic, who should be flying the plane. That’s part of the problem. He’d agree that much of the Marxist’s analysis is right and that his general tactics for taking over the plane are generally correct, but that his solutions and appeals are wrong. There are natural elite representatives among the passengers who have taken more flights or played more video games than other people, perhaps, and they have a greater claim than the other passengers to fly the plane and run the cabin—even than the degenerate and corrupt pilots and flight crew.

Our good Woke Right reactionary, then, would agree with everything that makes the hypothetical Marxist “Woke” about the flight circumstance though not about some details of the specific nature of the problem or its solution. The analysis and solution would be, as we might say, “same in kind but different in degree,” where the kind in question is still “Woke.”

Thus we can understand the Woke Right mentality as being essentially Woke though with different particulars.

Forged in centuries of custom and compromise, liberalism now stands on trial, accused of engineering its own destruction—a charge that echoes ever louder amid the thunder of political turmoil and the gloom of cultural doubt. Few deliver this verdict with more solemn conviction than Patrick Deneen, who claims the mantle of conservatism as his basis for doing it. Though he acknowledges liberalism’s historic gains—religious liberty, constitutionalism, prosperity—he ultimately insists that liberalism has not merely faltered, but triumphed so catastrophically that it has obliterated the very foundations it once sought to secure. Liberalism, Deneen contends in parallel to Karl Marx, contains intrinsic contradictions such that by succeeding, it upends itself and “has failed.”

Let there be no confusion about the mission of these words. This essay is a challenge hurled against Patrick Deneen’s indictment of liberalism—a declaration that he has gravely misunderstood the very soul of what liberalism is, wrongly condemned it as a failure, and stands revealed not as a conservative, but as a revolutionary whose creed is the antithesis of the tradition he claims to defend.

Deneen writes, “I consider myself a conservative. I believe in preserving goods that have been inherited.” Yet his vision, as I will argue, contradicts that very conservatism at its deepest roots.

For this is not an abstract dispute. The fate of liberalism determines whether millions will live in freedom or under the boot of tyranny. What is at stake is nothing less than the liberty, dignity, and safety of ordinary human beings.

I contend that liberalism is not dead. It lives on in the habits and moral instincts of ordinary people, even when elites betray it. Deneen conceives of liberalism as an abstract, universal ideology—a blueprint of rules and rights meant to yield freedom wherever imposed. And indeed, some liberal theorists have spoken in precisely such terms. But that is not the liberalism I defend.

What I defend is not liberalism as a purely rational scheme of rights and rules, but as a covenant—a moral inheritance passed down through habit, memory, and mutual obligation. It is this covenantal liberalism that Deneen misunderstands.

And it matters profoundly that we understand the difference.

Patrick Deneen presents his indictment of liberalism in two books: Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023). In these works, he argues that liberalism is a tower built upon fundamental internal contradictions, and that revolutionary “regime change” toward a post-liberal order is not merely necessary but inevitable—not because liberalism has failed, but because it has finally arrived at the destination toward which it was always destined. As he puts it: “I don’t want to violently overthrow the government. I want something far more revolutionary.”

Yet here we see Deneen’s first—and perhaps deepest—failure to grasp the true nature of liberalism. What he perceives as an internally contradictory doctrine doomed to destroy itself is, in truth, a living tradition: the unfolding of a vibrant and successful culture across centuries. The thinkers whom Deneen would impugn as architects of liberalism were not inventing it wholesale, but giving language to a tradition they rightly cherished. 

That they did not capture every detail with perfect precision is largely beside the point. Liberalism is not a schematic doctrine to be imposed from above; it is a moral inheritance, shaped by lived experience and sustained by custom and character. It is easy for a doctrinaire mind to mistake this living tradition for mere ideological abstraction—but a mistake it remains in full.

Liberalism did not descend upon the world as a doctrine devised in pamphlets. It rose gradually and organically from the common life of the English-speaking peoples—from parish councils and local juries, from tradesmen who refused tyranny, from families who insisted that conscience stands higher than kings. By liberalism, I mean not a rigid ideological design, but a way of living: a delicate balance of mutual restraint and shared expectations, blending freedom with responsibility, individual rights with mutual respect, and law with moral obligation. It is the covenant of trust that binds individuals to one another and each to the shared rules that preserve freedom. What Deneen calls “our inherited civilized order” is not the victim of liberalism—it is liberalism’s cradle and wellspring.

This misunderstanding sits at the heart of Deneen’s indictment. He sees liberalism as a brittle abstraction, imposed upon societies from above, rather than as the organic fruit of cultural inheritance. He portrays liberalism not as a tradition growing from a people’s life, but as a scheme inevitably doomed to implode under the weight of the internal contradictions found in early attempts to articulate it that are fundamentally mistaken for organized doctrine.

What Deneen presents therefore more resembles Karl Marx than Edmund Burke or John Selden, nevermind Jefferson or Madison. And this is not merely a theoretical resemblance; it is the intellectual DNA of revolution resurfacing beneath a conservative cloak.

Far from being a truly conservative critique, Deneen’s analysis closely mirrors, in structure if not in lineage, the arguments of the revolutionary Left. It echoes Marx’s conviction that every social order is merely an ideological façade concealing domination and resonates with the critical theory of Horkheimer and Adorno, who likewise insisted that liberal principles contain the seeds of their own destruction. Deneen sees in liberalism little more than the infamous “dialectic of Enlightenment.”

There’s an even deeper irony in the counsel of post-liberals like Patrick Deneen. For all his invocations of tradition and conservative pieties, he stands not merely adjacent to the radical Left—but firmly within its philosophical ranks. This is the first point where Deneen’s critique betrays its own revolutionary impulse. A truly conservative mind would not place such faith in reason to dissect an entire political order and declare it bankrupt. Conservatism begins with humility toward the limits of human understanding—and with gratitude and reverence for the imperfect inheritance that time has delivered to us. It recognises that the moral and social order is not a schematic to be redrawn, but a living inheritance too intricate for reason alone to command.

Though Deneen sometimes speaks of patient rebuilding through local community and cultural renewal, his diagnosis ultimately leads him to advocate for deep systemic change—a vision that, however gradual its method, imagines society can be fundamentally refounded once the old order is swept aside. In this, he commits the very error he condemns: believing that reason can design anew what time and custom once built. That is not conservatism. It is radicalism in conservative dress.

This revolutionary impulse is not new. It precisely mirrors earlier moments when intellectuals attempted to strip institutions of their living context and rebuild society from abstract principles. Thomas Paine loved much about England’s liberties but believed that reason could isolate their true essence, purify them, and erect an entirely new social order. Edmund Burke saw that impulse for what it was: a leap from reverence into revolution. To strip institutions of their inherited context and reduce them to abstract axioms is to sever them from the living soil that gave them meaning—and that is how admiration for tradition turns, inexorably, into zeal to replace it.

And history shows what follows: not merely shattered ideas, but shattered lives.

For Burke, true conservatism meant prescription: profound caution about razing longstanding institutions, even when they harboured deep flaws. He taught that an institution might be corrupted yet still remain the vessel of wisdom accumulated across generations—and that to destroy it entirely was to gamble with forces reason cannot foresee. To put the point in contemporary context, he would look upon Harvard today and see much to lament, yet still seek to save it, precisely because it embodies memory and continuity no revolutionary blueprint can replicate. To call for total demolition because reason imagines something purer is the same arrogance that drove the Jacobins to bloodshed. But Deneen goes further. He does not merely wish to reform or replace corrupted institutions—he pronounces the entire liberal order a failure. That is not caution. That is a radical call to tear up the very roots of the political and moral inheritance that has shaped the modern West. There is nothing conservative about declaring the whole edifice beyond repair.

Deneen’s radicalism brings his betrayal of Burke, and of conservatism, sharply into focus. If Burke could revere Britain in the eighteenth century—a nation then beset by poverty, faction, and foreign threats—precisely because its liberties and institutions had evolved prudently out of the public consciousness, how much more would he revere America today, a nation vastly wealthier, freer, and more powerful relative to its rivals than Britain ever was in his time? For both Britain and America, liberalism was a political project: an ongoing effort to secure freedom under law, to reconcile liberty with order, and to build institutions that reflect the character and habits of the people. It worked imperfectly for Britain then, amid all its hardships, and it works still—indeed, more perfectly—for America now, flawed though it remains. Burke did not love Britain for standing still, but for having changed in ways rooted in custom and the genius of its people. He called for reform, never revolution. Thus, if what Burke said was true for Britain then, it is truer still for America today. And in this light, Deneen’s call to replace liberalism wholesale stands as a betrayal of the very conservative tradition he claims to inherit.

Deneen has crossed the point of no return: from cautious reform to sweeping revolution, from conservative stewardship to reckless obliteration.

Let us not be fooled by the conservative trappings, then. Deneen is no heir to Burke, but a man echoing the logic of the Brazilian Integralists—a radical 1930s movement spun off from a Catholic doctrine that rejected liberal individualism and sought to remake society into an organic national community—as well as the Jacobin Left, though he has apparently discovered these ideas from first principles, despite his conservative loyalties. His is therefore a principled conservatism that got hijacked by despair.

His arguments are not the measured cautions of a conservative mind; they resound with the same cries that fueled the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks, the Integralist Uprising, and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, which he has studied. He condemns liberalism not merely for its failures, but for what he sees as its very anthropological core: the vision of the human being as an unencumbered chooser, severed from tradition and community—a creed, he believes, so fatally flawed that it must ultimately be torn down to make way for something new.

By calling Deneen “revolutionary,” I do not mean he advocates mobs in the streets or immediate violent overthrow. He is, in fact, against such things. Rather, I mean it how he, himself, does. Namely, I mean that his intellectual project proposes a foundational break from the liberal anthropology and institutions that have sustained Western societies for centuries—a break that, whether gradual or sudden, is revolutionary in its nature and consequences. His vision of “regime change” is indeed “far more revolutionary” than violent overthrow, for it seeks a fundamental reconception of the entire Anglo-American tradition into something wholly new.

The Archimedian point of his error, though, is that he misunderstands what liberalism truly is and what threatens it. And it is precisely this misunderstanding—and how widely it is shared—that gives Deneen’s argument its dangerous power.

The philosophical systems Deneen critiques—many rightly deserving scrutiny for their excesses—did not emerge from nothing. They were efforts to give language to customs already shaping human hearts and laws long before theorists arrived to explain them. Liberalism’s great insight was not that history had ended, but that the duty and struggle to preserve liberty never ends—and that each generation must renew the moral habits that keep it alive.

This confusion finds a ready audience among contemporary conservatives who, too, have lost touch with the essence of their own living tradition. After decades of talk radio, television, and social media echo chambers repeating that the sins of the radical Left are the sins of “liberalism,” many now regard Deneen’s conflation as more truthful than any clear articulation of their own heritage. Though Deneen often attempts to distinguish between liberalism and radical Leftism, he nonetheless indicts what he calls “general liberalism” for the failures born of ideological extremism. Tragically, his devoted followers march with him into counter-radicalism, all the while believing themselves to be resisting it.

Deneen’s confusion deepens when he blames liberalism for the betrayals committed by those who abandon its principles as well as those who deliberately sought to subvert them. He writes:

“…such a political condition was ultimately untenable, and that the likely popular reaction to an increasingly oppressive liberal order might be forms of authoritarian illiberalism… For liberals, this would prove the need for tighter enforcement of a liberal regime, but they would be blind to how this crisis of legitimacy had been created by liberalism itself.”

And it is here that his critique grows most insistent—and most dangerous.

Here Deneen performs a rhetorical sleight of hand. He condemns as liberal those who act in ways he himself brands illiberal. He names the rebels as loyalists, the violators as guardians. But if their actions are illiberal, then they are not truly liberals at all, no matter what they call themselves.

This confusion is foundational for Deneen. As he writes, explaining his appearance on Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast to discuss Why Liberalism Failed,

“For me, however, the most striking aspect of the debate was our respective differences in views about the wellspring of contemporary ‘wokeness.’ For Bret Stephens—and, I suspect, Bari Weiss—progressive wokeness is an aberration from good, old-fashioned liberalism. What I attempted to convey to both of them, and to her audience, was that the key elements of ‘wokeness’ arise not from some successor philosophy, such as ‘cultural Marxism,’ as most classical liberals wish to claim. Rather, I argued, it is the natural and even inevitable outgrowth of liberalism’s core feature of transgression.”

Deneen largely grounds this conclusion on a single point drawn from Herbert Marcuse’s notorious essay in critical theory, “Repressive Tolerance,” wherein Marcuse engages with John Stuart Mill on the limits of tolerance. Mill, however, was grappling with one of the most difficult tensions in any liberal system—not laying down a rigid liberal doctrine. Marcuse exploits this point of stress to advance his own illiberal arguments, just as Deneen, in turn, seizes upon Marcuse to support his own indictment. By portraying culturally Marxist illiberalism as the inevitable endpoint of liberalism itself, Deneen completes his dialectic and arrives at the conclusion he always sought: that liberalism is fatally flawed and irredeemable.

As a result of this misplaced blame, Deneen continues from his earlier remark:

“Nearly every one of the promises that were made by the architects and creators of liberalism has been shattered. The liberal state expands to control nearly every aspect of life while citizens regard government as a distant and uncontrollable power… The economy favors a new ‘meritocracy’ that perpetuates its advantages through generational succession…”

This pattern runs through Deneen’s entire critique: he mistakes the failures of people and institutions for the failures of the traditions themselves. The system becomes corrupted, and he blames liberalism as the culprit. But these maladies—the swelling of state power, the concentration of wealth, the invasion of privacy—are not the offspring of liberal traditions. They are their betrayal.

Liberalism was never an instruction manual for technocrats. It does not prescribe surveillance states, nor does it sanctify an elite hoarding privilege. Liberal traditions gave birth to constitutional limits, to freedom of speech, to independent courts, and to local governance. These are the very instruments designed to restrain precisely the abuses Deneen decries. To blame liberalism for the acts of those who violate its spirit is like saying steel is the cause of rust, condemning medicine for the crimes of quacks, or blaming bridges for those who dynamite them.

But the damage is not merely rhetorical. The collapse of liberalism would mean the silencing of dissent, the persecution of conscience, and the crushing of lives under regimes that know neither restraint nor mercy.

Deneen insists:

“Liberalism created the conditions, and the tools, for the ascent of its own worst nightmare, yet it lacks the self-knowledge to understand its own culpability.”

No, it did not. What is true—and what is a fair criticism—is that some liberals became cowardly, complacent, naively convinced that all ideas would abide by the rules of civility if merely granted space in a pluralistic society. They forgot Karl Popper’s warning—that tolerance must sometimes refuse entry to those who would annihilate it, lest open societies be devoured by totalitarians posing as mere dissenters. But that is not proof that liberalism inevitably devours itself. It is proof that liberty requires courage and vigilance.

To bolster this vision of inevitable collapse, he leans on a familiar intellectual crutch.

Deneen’s argument gathers momentum when he claims that liberalism’s triumph led inevitably to a kind of universal arrogance—a belief that history itself had ended, and that liberal democracy would henceforth march uncontested across the globe. Here, his critique leans on a single, oft-misunderstood text: Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Yet Fukuyama’s thesis was never a hymn to perfection. It argued that with the collapse of communism and fascism, liberal democracy emerged as the most viable ideological framework—but with a cautionary note. He warned that citizens living in a purely materialist, rights-based order might experience spiritual restlessness and even seek new ideological certainties in forms of authoritarianism or populist fervor. In this sense, Fukuyama foreshadowed precisely the rise of thinkers like Deneen—men who mistake liberalism’s unfinished work for fatal failure and call for replacements that remain abstractions, because no real alternative stands ready to take liberalism’s place.

The tradition of political liberalism—from Burke to Tocqueville to Isaiah Berlin—has always been marked by tragic realism, not triumphal dogma. Deneen’s portrayal, then, is a misstep: it presents liberalism as if it proclaimed itself complete and eternal. But the real lesson of The End of History is the opposite: liberal democracy, by itself, is never enough and demands renewal through moral and cultural life.

To cast liberalism as a naïve creed of universal triumph is to fight a phantom. It is to burn down a scarecrow while the real inheritance of liberal societies stands weathered but still upright. The tragedy is not that liberalism imagined itself eternal and invincible. The tragedy is that too many forgot how hard-won and easily lost its blessings truly are—Deneen among them.

Those who would torch liberalism in a fit of despair ought to name the darkness they mean to unleash in its place.

Deneen writes:

“Citizens of advanced liberal democracies are in near revolt against their own governments, the ‘establishment,’ and the politicians they have themselves selected as their leaders and representatives…”

Here again, he finds only signs of collapse where there are also signs of life. He sees citizens restless and indignant and concludes that liberalism is breathing its last. Yet in truth, such discontent is not the death knell of liberal societies—it is proof that they still possess breath enough to protest, to debate, and to demand redress.

It is true that citizens of liberal democracies grow weary of distant elites, of unresponsive bureaucracies, and of systems that seem captured by privilege. But such anger is not evidence of liberalism’s demise. It is evidence that free societies remain awake. The very act of railing against corruption, of assembling in squares and speaking in defiance, is the lifeblood of the liberal tradition. It is the spirit of a people who have not yet surrendered to silence. Authoritarians see a protest and cry “collapse.” Liberals see the same crowd and think, “Tuesday.”

For the right to assemble, to speak, to demand justice is not merely theoretical—it is the shield behind which human beings keep their dignity and hope.

When Deneen describes citizens turning against establishment power, he is describing the deepest liberal instinct: to hold authority to account, to resist new aristocracies, to protect the rights of the many from the encroachments of the few. The tumult he laments is not chaos for its own sake—it is the righteous turbulence of a society that remembers it was born to speak freely and to correct its course when justice falters.

The crises Deneen describes are real. Liberal societies are in peril precisely because too many have forgotten the civic and moral foundations upon which liberty rests. Yet the presence of protest, of public indignation, of open dissent, is not proof that liberalism has collapsed. It is proof that the inheritance of a free people still breathes—and still remembers how to fight for itself.

Even in our weariness, liberal societies remain freer, safer, and more just than any order humanity has ever known. We could drift in decline for decades and still grant our peoples a life more humane than that offered by absolutist thrones, theocratic zeal, fascist banners, communist tyrannies, or the savage tumult of warlord rule. To cast aside our hard-won inheritance for some gleaming new ideological experiment is not prudence—it is reckless oblivion.

This, then, is covenantal liberalism—a tradition worth defending not merely for its ideas, but for the covenant of human dignity and freedom it sustains.

The kind of society Deneen longs for—a place of mutual care and inherited wisdom—is not some undiscovered country waiting beyond liberalism’s frontier. It is the very soil from which liberal societies once grew. Our task is not to abandon liberalism, but to remember how it was cultivated, why it flourished, and how to mend it where it has begun to split.

To be fair, Deneen’s longing is not for chaos but for a society more rooted in virtue, community, and shared moral horizons. Yet the question remains whether his path leads toward those goods—or toward new radicalism wearing traditional dress.

So I say this: If Patrick Deneen believes liberalism is doomed, let him—and those who agree—name the alternative that could match its moral inheritance, its record of human dignity, and its capacity for peaceful self-correction—preferably one that doesn’t involve powdered wigs, pitchforks, or radical ideological abstractions.

Because the most telling thing of all is that Deneen finds fatal flaws in a system that, for all its imperfections, has delivered more liberty, dignity, and peace than any other in human history—yet can offer only vague hints at alternatives. And in this, he joins a long line of radicals, from the English Puritans to the French Jacobins to the Russian Bolsheviks to the Brazilian Integralists, who condemned flawed orders as dead while offering no clear plan for what should replace them—only to discover that wreckage is easy, but building something better is hard.

Let us be clear: Deneen is not defending conservatism as it has long been understood. Though he names himself a conservative, he wields the intellectual tools of radical critique—tools that historically belonged to the revolutionary Left—to tear down the covenant he claims to revive. In so doing, he risks replacing a flawed order with a far more perilous void.

This is the very heart of my charge: that Deneen misunderstands liberalism, wrongly condemns it as a failure, and harbours a revolutionary impulse utterly alien to true conservatism.

It is true that liberalism must remember its moral culture to endure. But only liberalism offers the space, the freedom, and the humility necessary for that remembrance to occur without tyranny. History shows that lament is easy, and demolition easier still. Yet the patient work of reform belongs to those who remember that liberty and virtue need not be enemies.

This is covenantal liberalism—the tradition I stand for.

Until then, the call remains clear: let us repair, not raze—for the covenant endures, and the story of liberty still has more plot twists than any ambitious pamphlet by Patrick Deneen.

And let us remember why we make this stand. Because liberalism is not merely an idea—it is the hard-won inheritance that shields human beings from tyranny. Because it has not failed, and is not finished. Because those who condemn it as dead misunderstand what it is, misread its trials as its grave, and mistake their own radical fervour for wisdom. Let them name what they would build in its place. For in the absence of that answer, we stand with liberalism still—for the sake of those yet unborn who will one day judge whether we kept faith with freedom.

by James Lindsay

You’re supposed to start a book review by saying something nice about the book you’re reviewing. In this case, the best compliment I have is that Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West (2019) by R.R. (“Rusty”) Reno is short, for which I am grateful. It could probably stand to be shorter, but at a relatively brief 140 pages or so, it’s less to suffer through than it might be. Life is too short to read much analysis this bad.

Of course, there’s a spirit of charity that’s deserved here, and here especially. Reno published this short treatment in 2019, which, crucially, is before 2020. That excuses him, some.

Before 2020, most of us didn’t know what’s going on, and even those of us who did could only make out vague contours of the Balrog, not yet fiery (but mostly peaceful), looming before us in the thinning fog of normalcy bias. For his part, Reno mistakes this bias to normalcy for the trappings of a strange historical current, namely the recalcitrance of the “long 20th century” to get around to ending. Being this wrong about the world we inhabit, even as a post-liberal conservative, was the default state of affairs even as late as 2019. But 2020 was coming—and with new beginnings—but it was still only in its final approach.

So, when Reno makes foundational declarations like, “But we are not living in 1945. Our societies are not threatened by paramilitary organizations devoted to powerful ideologies. We do not face a totalitarian adversary with world-conquering ambitions. Insofar as there are totalitarian temptations in the West, they arise from the embattled postwar consensus,” we are not just tempted but called to forgive him. Critical Race Theory, backed by the paramilitary organizations of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, both devoted to the totalitarian ideology of Maoist Communism (with American characteristics, we might say) had not yet burst onto the scene in open cultural revolution. Sure, they had both been a significant concern and public nuisance—especially in the Pacific Northwest and a handful of American big cities—since at least 2014, but 2020 was an eye-opener, for sure. Nonetheless, the signs were already there, and Reno had missed them. Completely. The 21st century, if we adopt Reno’s reckoning and ignore the financial crash of 2008 and most of the events of the 2010s, may have started on any of a variety of fateful dates in 2020, the year after Reno put down his stake in completely the wrong territory.

What Reno Gets Right

To continue the spirit of charity, it’s not that there’s nothing insightful or redeeming about the book; it’s just that it’s all wrong. In the last twenty or thirty pages—starting with the end of the second-to-last chapter and through the end—Reno makes the valid and important point about the profound sense of homelessness that our current sociopolitical milieu has foisted upon us. About this he’s right, even if he’s not right—rather, mostly not right—about why we are in this state. In fact, here, Reno strikes his essential point, one we must all learn from: “we need a home,” and the evils of the current system are systematically depriving us of one, even in our own lands.

Reno relates this story near the end of the fourth (second-to-last) chapter:

During a debate in Europe about immigration, an impassioned speech by a young French woman opened my eyes to the fragility of the now decadent postwar consensus. She told her listeners that she was middle class and therefore could not afford to live in French-only neighborhoods that have no Muslim immigrants, as the rich French do. So she knows their ways, which include returning to Tunisia or Algeria during the holidays to visit relatives. They are explicit, she said, in how they describe these trips. They are cherished opportunities to “go home.” Her voice then broke with emotion, and she asked, trembling, “If I lose France, where can I go?” The room was silent. We all felt the piercing anguish of her question, which we knew we could not answer.

Reno is right to relate this story and to convey its point. It’s by far the most powerful and important part of his treatment. We in the West face homelessness—not just political homelessness but literal homelessness, in the national and community sense—and the fault for this is at least partly down to an effete, corrupt “liberalism” that has over the course of the 20th century completely sold us out while metastasizing into something deliberately toxic. That’s where Reno’s analysis stops, however. There’s more to the story, of course, but laying some blame on deracinated “liberal” characters, at least, like John Rawls is something Reno is fairly right to do.

More important than laying blame, I think, is the point. Reno points to a problem here, and without a solution, we should expect only catastrophe, likely eventual war and/or societal collapse. We in the West built a home and are being robbed of it through what amounts to geopolitical squatters’ “rights”  based, at least superficially, on something like “political correctness” and, not to miss the beat, “climate change.” These accursed doctrines, of course, are nothing short of tyranny writ small-but-global, as has been explained in the past, but, like Reno’s whole analysis, there’s still a lot missing from it.

Cloward, Piven, and Rusty Reno

To take the short diversion—much of the woe of our immigration problem throughout the West can only be blamed on liberalism, in its badly neutered “postwar” form, for having failed to be a proper gatekeeper where a sound gate needed to be kept. Maybe here Reno’s thesis gains purchase. We liberals should have remembered our inheritance and stood for it better than we have, and perhaps we failed for some of the bad “postwar consensus” reasons Reno outlines. Still, much of the woes of immigration, both legal and illegal, in our imperiled Western nations is the result of a deliberate socialist strategy to undermine us. It even has a name and is named for the two socialists who helped cook it up: the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

Outlined in 1966 by Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven, the strategy is a political theory suggesting that overwhelming the welfare system of a hybrid-economy nation with excessive demands upon it could expose its flaws, create a crisis, and push for radical reforms, potentially leading to a guaranteed income or socialist policies. Mass immigration of low-skilled individuals likely to put these sorts of strains on the system is an explicit part of the strategy, nevermind the capacity for this sort of immigration to be the importation of a near-permanent liberationist (neo-Marxist) proletariat and class conflict, which most of the West lacked in the second half of the 20th century.

Reno doesn’t blame Cloward or Piven for this manufactured catastrophe, though. Neither does he point a finger at a single neo-Marxist beyond the unrelated Theodor Adorno and his demonic tome of anti-conservative psychobabble, The Authoritarian Personality. Instead, he lays his blame on allegedly neoliberal characters like Karl Popper with his vision for the “open society,” Friedrich Hayek for his prescient warnings in The Road to Serfdom, and the famous free-market economist Milton Friedman, whom he compares to Albert Camus. No, really: “Milton Friedman was an American version of Albert Camus.” That’s a direct quote. So is the sentence before it, “Camus was the poet who sang in praise of Hayek’s anti-totalitarian vision.” The mind boggles, but we must suppose in the interest of great undeserved charity that perhaps it is only the “liberal” mind that cannot grasp this post-liberal perspicacity.

Reno and His Cousins Against Modernity

Another explanation than our own limited perspective as presumable libtards leaps at least a half a dozen times from Reno’s pages, however. It is a famous Bedouin apothegm that reads, “It is me against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin; my brother, my cousin, and I against the stranger,” though perhaps being against the alien is more to the point. 

Perhaps the post-liberal Reno doesn’t want to blame Cloward and Piven because while they are not exactly his ideological brothers, they are rightly recognized as his ideological cousins. Liberalism is the stranger (allusion to Camus’s novel intended), or, in fact, the alien, who alienates. Socialism, on the other hand—especially Marxian-inspired socialism—is post-liberal too, after all, just in a left-handed way instead of a right-handed one. As Marx himself explained in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844, pdf),

Communism [is rightly understood] as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore [is rightly conceived of] as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. (Marx’s emphasis removed; given emphasis added)

Marxism didn’t dream of throwing out liberalism’s fruits, including “the entire wealth of previous development,” including capitalist development. It was only the liberalism it wanted gone. In fact, Marx imagined transcending liberal capitalism while “embracing” (keeping) all of it. Marxism isn’t anti-liberal, then; it is magically post-liberal. As with Marx, so with Reno, who wishes to keep much of what we have accomplished in two and a half centuries of American Classical Liberalism, though in a way that returns us consciously to ourselves as social (i.e., human) beings—like Marx, but very differently.

The Glaring Omission

We don’t have to speculate that Reno feels this way, though. He is quite clear. His beef with Friedman is largely that he’s derivative to Hayek, and his beef with Hayek is that he’s basically a quasi-right-wing Popper. “Popper and Hayek champion the individual against the collective,” he moans, calling back to his definition of the troublesome “postwar consensus” itself, to which we will return momentarily. First, though, his beef with Popper is a lot deeper than just this individualism over collectivism concern. It’s fundamental.

Popper’s slashing and unmeasured criticisms of the metaphysical tradition of the West were a sign of what was to come. As the postwar consensus gained strength, it cultivated a purely critical faith, a negative piety. The “never again” imperative imposes an overriding and unending duty to banish the traditionalists, who are loyal to the strong gods that are through to have caused so much suffering and death. As the students rioting in Paris in 1968 insisted, “It is forbidden to forbid.” Those who forbid must be censured and silenced—for the sake of an open society. (emphasis added)

It’s remarkable that Reno—by all accounts an educated and informed man—could write that paragraph without mentioning the name its words do a séance to: Herbert Marcuse. It’s nothing short of a shocking omission, not least because he invokes Patrick Deneen, whose analysis leans heavily on Marcuse’s, more than once. Here he describes in some detail the entire ethos of the “liberating tolerance” Marcuse and the Marcusian neo-Marxists demanded from “Repressive Tolerance” (1965) forward, but not only is Marcuse not mentioned here; he also never merits a single mention in the entire book. Marcuse, not famous for being succinct, summarized his program neatly enough:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: …it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word.

“To be sure, this is censorship, even precensorship,” Marcuse confesses, but it’s justified, he insists, because “the whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger.” That cannot be allowed, obviously, as he explains:

Withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements before they can become active; intolerance even toward thought, opinion, and word, and finally, intolerance in the opposite direction, that is, toward the self-styled conservatives, to the political Right—these anti-democratic notions respond to the actual development of the democratic society which has destroyed the basis for universal tolerance. The conditions under which tolerance can again become a liberating and humanizing force have still to be created. When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted. And when this perversion starts in the mind of the individual, in his consciousness, his needs, when heteronomous interests occupy him before he can experience his servitude, then the efforts to counteract his dehumanization must begin at the place of entrance, there where the false consciousness takes form (or rather: is systematically formed)—it must begin with stopping the words and images which feed this consciousness.

Doesn’t that sounds like the “postwar consensus” Reno devotes his entire book to describing? The reason it does is because it is. Even Marcuse’s justification for all of this matches, and not just a little:

But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.

This is explicitly the justification Reno identifies for the “postwar consensus” and its repressive (in the name of liberation) sociopolitical regime. Reno writes in the opening salvo of his book,

The imperative is bracingly simple: Never again. Never again shall we allow totalitarian governments to emerge. Never again shall societies reach a fever pitch of ideological fanaticism. Never again shall the furnaces of Auschwitz consume their victims. This imperative—never again—places stringent demands on us. It requires Western civilization to attain self-critical maturity with courage and determination, which Popper hoped to exemplify with his full-throated attack on Plato, the founder of our philosophical tradition. We must banish the strong gods of the closed society and create a truly open one. (emphasis in Reno)

It’s pretty stunning, frankly. Most of the book reads, in fact, like Reno is describing the Marcusian neo-Marxist regime (what I have termed “living in Herbert Marcuse’s world”) without ever mentioning Marcuse or that it’s neo-Marxist in character. Given his detailed treatment of Theodor Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality, and his reliance upon Deneen, it’s difficult to believe this is mere oversight. A short treatise on a single essay with a little bit of history would have made a better book than Return of the Strong Gods, frankly. How can we, dear readers, explain this? Me and my cousin against the crowd, perhaps.

Reno and Cousin Marx

That’s a heavy charge I suppose I must substantiate, so I’ll let Reno do that work for me. Though he never mentions Marcuse once in the text—which is astonishing since he addresses the issues of what we call “Woke” now pretty directly (though wrongly, as might be expected if he’s skipping Marcuse)—he blames this failure specifically on Popper’s “slashing and unmeasured criticisms of the metaphysical tradition of the West.” We just saw this includes Plato, particularly, but can Plato really be given all the credit?

We should ask, to whom (else) does Reno credit those foundations as slashed by the odious Karl Popper? Let’s see:

The enormous influence of The Open Society and its Enemies in the decade following World War II seems, at first glance, improbable. The first volume is dominated by a detailed and highly critical, even abusive, interpretation of Plato, while the second volume treats Hegel and Marx with equal severity. Popper digresses into philosophy of science, metaphysics, and other abstract topics.”

Hmm, that’s funny. Must be a weird fluke that it’s Plato, Hegel, and Marx who are specifically named, right?

Popper theorized the progress of science in formal, procedural terms, trying to encapsulate it in the principle of falsification, which stipulates that beliefs, theories, and hypotheses can be held as true only if it is possible for evidence to come forth that can falsify them. In that sense, our theories are not-yet-falsified beliefs. Plato’s metaphysics does not rise to this standard, Popper argues, nor do Hegel and Marx’s theories of historical development. These seminal figures in the history of Western thought are “above” empirical testing, as are all other metaphysical or meta-historical theories.”

Apparently it wasn’t. After describing Hegel as “one of our tradition’s most brilliant modern exponents,” Reno goes on to credit the French poststructuralist Jacques Derrida with destroying the intellectual credibility of Marx, though in service to a kind of postwar-consensus mindset on overdrive. Perhaps not surprisingly, the antidote Reno recommends to Derrida, inter alia, is Martin Heidegger, which is its own giant and strange can of worms to open (and a bit much for this review).

Though Reno mentions Marx as a “seminal figure in the history of Western thought” something like five times in the text in the above capacity, surely he means something else, though? Right? Right?! Let’s ask him.

After a short discussion of James Burnham’s Suicide of the West roughly halfway through the book, Reno writes the following, describing a conference he was attending regarding the book,

I looked forward to the conference. There was a great deal to discuss. Burnham was obviously wrong about the world in 1964. Communism certainly posed a dire threat, but the Cold War blinded Burnham to the obvious: Communism, an ideology born and bred in the West, became the most powerful tool of Western cultural imperialism throughout the world in the decades immediately following World War II, expanding the global influence of European culture. Mao’s communist rule destroyed China’s traditional Confucian culture, paving the way for Westernization. The totalitarian application of Marxist ideology did more to Westernize Russia than the policies of Peter the Great. It provided a distinctively Western ideology for many third-world revolutionaries who sought to overthrow ancient monarchies, trival systems, and the remaining colonial administrative elites.

That’s something, and it becomes the basis for a remarkable accusation of hypocrisy against Burnham,

Burnham [in “an odd contradiction”] implicitly endorsed qualities found in abundance in 1960s communism. He argued for firm convictions (communist version: dialectical materialism) rather than mealymouthed relativism, affirmation of hierarchies (communist version: dictatorship of the proletariat) rather than unworkable egalitarianism, hard-nosed realism and philosophical clarity (communist version: Marxist orthodoxies) rather than aimless pragmatism and the plastic rhetoric of the open society.

As we can see, the “something” Reno’s treatment is, is positively alarming. It would do nicely to indicate just how thoroughly the preceding paragraph misunderstands Communism, but that would miss Reno’s point. Communism, wrong though it might be, provided “strong gods” for people to believe in, in stark contrast to his bugbear of the “open society” with its “mealymouthed” postwar consensus. Reno’s point is that people will have strong gods to believe in, whether heavenly or hellish, and at least Communism provided them.

Cousin Marx (and Comrades Lenin, Stalin, and Mao) knew something the effete liberals of the postwar consensus apparently don’t understand, to our peril.

The Postwar Consensus

So, we must ask, what on earth is this alleged postwar consensus we’re all committed to, maybe because of the allegedly enormous influence of Karl Popper and his slashing of Plato, Hegel, and Marx. Reno tells us this in reply,

We continue to define ourselves culturally, even spiritually, as anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist. I call the atmosphere of opinion that sustains these anti imperatives the “postwar consensus.”

It is these “anti imperatives” Reno describes as the “negative piety” of postwar liberalism, a “critical faith” of anti-totalitarianism that has itself, ironically, become totalitarian in the cause of preventing the rise of the collective, bound together by various “strong gods” that bind us together and provide for us a home and a will to defend it.

The violence that traumatized the West between 1914 and 1945 evoked a powerful, American-led response that was anti-fascist, anti-totalitarian, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist. These anti imperatives define the postwar era. Their aim is to dissolve the strong beliefs and powerful loyalties thought to have fueled the conflicts that convulsed the twentieth century.

The postwar consensus, in Reno’s telling, becomes something of a systemic power dynamic shaping the entire West after the Second World War, afflicting both Left and Right. “Nor is the cultural influence of the postwar consensus confined to the left,” he instructs.

Although there has been political contention between the left and the right, it has been a sibling rivalry. As I will show, the postwar left fixed its attention on moral freedom and cultural deregulation, seeing them as natural extensions of the anti-authoritarian imperative, while the postwar right focused on economic freedom and market deregulation for similar anti-totalitarian reasons. As the long twentieth century ends, the unified thrust is easier to discern, not least because the establishment left and right are closing ranks to denounce populism.

The operation of the “postwar consensus” is also systemic, he tells us.

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.

To summarize the logic of this pervasive system of power, agreed upon more or less universally by a broad, socially constructed consensus to exclude fascism, totalitarianism, colonialism, imperialism, and racism, anti-totalitarianism has become totalitarianism. I digress again to point out that this brilliant conclusion could have been derived merely by reading Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” exactly once, which would also have disabused him from laying the blame at the feet of the American Classical Liberal tradition he, as a conservative in that tradition, should be defending. No, literally:

I hope to illuminate the basic contrasts that have dominated the West since 1945—open versus closed, spontaneous versus authoritative, weak versus strong. The political and moral prestige of the open, spontaneous, and weak sides of these contrasts has, oddly enough, grown stronger, even authoritarian, in recent decades. Our task is to overcome this paradoxically totalitarian culture of openness and weakening.

So, the dynamic of “postwar consensus” of Rusty Reno can be summarized this way: the logic of openness has become closed; anti-fascism has become fascist; anti-totalitarianism has become totalitarian; anti-colonialism has become colonialist; anti-imperialism has become imperialist; and anti-racism has become racist, and the reason this has happened is that in seeking to prevent the return of the strong gods, the postwar consensus has summoned its own dark strong gods, with darker ones to come.

Same Energy, Opposite Direction

For someone in my line of work, this analysis is nothing short of pseudo-philosophical déjà vu.

The entire time I read this book, I couldn’t shake the uncanny feeling I had read it before, though differently through the usual Woke Left to Woke Right homomorphism (“same energy, opposite direction”).

I was at first reminded of Ibram X. Kendi’s ridiculous tome of “anti-racist,” anti-American historicism, Stamped from the Beginning. In that book, as does Reno through his own, Kendi ascribes a rather forced claim to an ideology of systemic racism as defining of our entire sociopolitical order. He even gives it in two forms (segregationist and assimilationist; cf. Popper and Hayek in Reno). For Kendi, these twin currents (right and left) are meant to be answered by a third, a radical one he calls “antiracism” that reimagines America’s landscape in racial-Maoist terms.

That comparison isn’t wrong, but it also feels a little unfair and inadequate, the kind of thing that would be dismissed more hastily than it should be because it’s so blatantly insulting. Reno, at least, is likely to be a good-faith actor and doesn’t seem to have been propped up by some crooked establishment. Reno does describe his project from the beginning of the book in resonant terms, however: “But I must be clear, This book does not offer a detailed history of the postwar era. It is an essay in the politics of the imagination.” He then continues, somewhat chillingly, somewhat whimsically,

In pursuit of those dreams the postwar imagination seeks the ministry of weak gods, or better, the gods of weakening who open things up. Today, one of our leading imperatives is inclusion, a god who softens differences. Transgression is prized for breaking down boundaries—opening things up. Diversity and multiculturalism suggest no authoritative center. The free market promises spontaneous order, miraculously coordinating our free choices, also without an authoritative center. Denigrating populist challenges to the political establishment as spasms of a “tribal mind” is a reductive critique that disenchants. I shall spell out these patterns of weakening. Rather than provide a comprehensive account, I instead analyze a few mainstream postwar figures and their important publications to illustrate influential dreamscapes, as it were.

My Kendi vibes reading this book are explained not by the historicism of “the politics of the imagination” so much as by the fact that he’s describing a systemic power dynamic (“influential dreamscapes”) the way Kendi describes “systemic racism.” The “postwar consensus” plays this role in Reno’s right-wing post-liberal imaginary, but Kendi vibes don’t go far enough. There’s something much deeper happening here than Kendi’s limited intellect allows. Reno kvetches about a broad, vague, deterministic system of power that excludes crucial viewpoints from the table so that it can maintain its own dominance, even as it becomes illogical and destructive through the maturity of its own internal contradictions.

The Dialectic of the Postwar Consensus

Strong Gods is a book of critical theory, no doubt. The comparison to Kendi at least goes that far, but Kendi couldn’t scratch my “I’ve read this before” itch. It took me until very near the end of Reno’s essay to realize where I had read it before. It’s simply Cousins Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/47) rewritten for post-liberal conservative dudebro semi-intellectuals. It presents its case from a right-wing positive dialectical slant rather than a left-wing negative dialectical one, but it’s equally blatantly dialectical.

Here, then we see the rationale for Reno’s defensiveness of Cousin Hegel. For Hegel, the dialectic operates according to certain rules, in particular that it is from within a system itself, not from somewhere outside it, that its ultimate negation arises. For Cousins Horkheimer and Adorno, the emphasis on reason in the Modern liberal era plants a seed of unreason that will eventually grow, blossom, and fruit as a new system of domination that reveals the ultimate flaws in the system itself—flaws that were present, though invisible, from its beginning. By embracing both the fruits of the system and its homegrown negation in a more holistic way that accommodates both, a new “synthesis” system can emerge, closer to the ever-unfolding Absolute system to come.

In specific, Horkheimer and Adorno’s magnum opus is generally considered to be the definitive book of the Critical Theory—which reintroduces Hegel’s idealism (strong god) to Marx’s dialectical materialism (apparently also a strong god, says Reno). Its basic premise is simple: in attempting to overcome mythology of all sorts, “Enlightenment” reason becomes instrumental and eventually a form of quasi-totalitarian unreason. Reason, in the aim to banish all mythology, becomes a totalitarian force that disenchants all of human experience, all in the name of supporting the inviolable, inescapable logic of the glorified capitalist system. They contend that instrumental reason—prioritizing efficiency and control—reduces nature, culture, and individuals to objects of manipulation, fostering totalitarianism, consumerism, and the “culture industry” that not just upholds capitalism but that also deliberately manufactures the culture of capitalism that maintains capitalism in order to maintain capitalism.

Of course, this is what we read in Reno. The postwar logics of “openness, spontaneity, and weakness” become their negations in toxic form. Anti-totalitarianism becomes totalitarianism, not because it was hijacked by a neo-Marxist parasite doing great mimicry of these projects but because their internal logic was always doomed to arrive here. Reason, by banishing myth, would become myth. Openness, by banishing authority, would become authoritarian. Weakness, by banishing true strength, would become toxic domination. I’ve read this book before.

Thus, by reason banishing myth, explain Cousins Horkheimer and Adorno, the world becomes disenchanted. This disenchantment, they argue, creates a sterile, dehumanized world where everything is a means to an end. Reno sees this in Hayek and Friedman. Though being short on solutions as Leftist Critical Theorists, they imply a need to restore a sense of meaning, wonder, or individuality lost in modernity. Reno calls this the return of “shared loves and loyalties.” They suggest that a reflective, non-instrumental form of reason could reconnect humanity with a more holistic understanding of existence, countering the alienation of a purely rationalized world. Reno locates this in religion and nationalist identity. For example, they critique the “culture industry” for producing shallow, standardized art, hinting that genuine, autonomous cultural expression could rekindle human creativity and meaning. Reno spends almost a chapter talking about postwar architecture.

Not only that. Emancipation is a core concern for Cousins Horkheimer and Adorno, but they view the Enlightenment’s promise of liberation through reason as having backfired. Instead of freeing humanity, reason has become yet another tool of domination—and an incredibly powerful, almost inescapable one—enabling systems like capitalism, bureaucracy, and totalitarianism to control individuals. This is virtually the same as Reno’s thesis, limited to the “postwar consensus.” True emancipation, they argue, requires breaking free from this instrumental rationality and the societal structures it upholds. This involves fostering a critical, self-reflective reason that questions oppressive systems and prioritizes human freedom over efficiency or profit. Reno calls to a “return of the strong gods” and prioritizes finding a home in the “shared loves and loyalties” of renewed nationalist identity over… efficiency or profit.

No, really:

A great deal of Capitalism and Freedom [Friedman] argues for the greater efficiency of market freedom as opposed to planning. This has become a standard argument from utility used by the postwar right and eventually adopted by the postwar left as well. Friedman also outlines, however, an economistic political philosophy that has become very influential. He echoes Hayek’s emphasis on the moral miracle of the market—bringing spontaneous order to civic life through countless individual exchanges. The market is anarchic in the precise sense of the term: there is no moral ideal, principle, or value that rules “from above.”

That is, what Cousins Horkheimer and Adorno demand as a kind of pseudo-re-enchantment is developing a Critical Theory. They are not against reason. They are post-liberal about reason. What Cousin Reno demands as a kind of re-enchantment is developing a different Critical Theory. He is not against openness and individualism. He is post-liberal about them.

Popper and Hayek champion the individual against the collective. Both suspect that strong metaphysical claims feed the totalitarian temptations. They insist that the future of the West depends on a renewed commitment to freedom—the open society.

And yet,

The perverse gods of blood, soil, and identity cannot be overcome with the open-society therapies of weakening. On the contrary, they are encouraged by multiculturalism and the reductive techniques of critique. In its present decadent form, the postwar consensus makes white nationalism an entirely cogent position. Based in the “little world” of DNA, it asserts its claim to recognition in the acclaimed celebration of diversity. We cannot forestall the return of the debasing gods by reapplying the open-society imperatives. False loves can be remedied only by true ones. A humane future in the West will require nurturing noble loves.

Sadly, since Cousin Reno’s treatment misdiagnoses the problem and appeals constantly to strength, too many of his readers and their associates have taken him at his word here. They have concluded that, in fact, Classical American Liberalism—that is, America as Constituted—is fundamentally the problem and that, in fact, white nationalism is an entirely cogent position. The noble loves of family, country, and God have turned to ethnos, ultranationalism, and would-be theocracy not somewhere out in the wild world but in the very camps Reno sought to instruct. The dialectic of the strong gods has not forestalled the debased gods. It has summoned them.

The Dialectic of the Strong Gods

Reno’s thesis is ultimately that the logic of anti-totalitarianism and “openness,” which he compares to “weakening” and “lightening” in a long discussion, itself becomes totalitarian and oppressive. The “strong gods” of truth, goodness, beauty, nationalism, and national identity meet their negation in the “weak gods” of meaning, relativism, and appeasement. The thesis statement of the book, suggested by its title, is that the strong gods must return if society is to survive. Reason must give way to loyalties and duties, particularly to nation and religion. Post-war tyrannophobia must relax. Never again must remain never again, but “This is absurd. It is not 1939. Our societies are not gathering themselves into masses marching in lockstep. Central planners do not clog our economies. There is no longer an overbearing bourgeois culture bent on ‘exclusion,’” Reno teaches.

Maybe, Reno suggests, the postwar consensus was erected for good reasons. The tyrannies of the 20th century were bad, he admits, and shouldn’t be repeated. Still, he demands, we cannot live like it’s still 1939 where some great force in the coming year will aim to achieve global domination for some totalitarian ideology. Let’s give him some credit, though. It was 2019 after all. 2020 hadn’t happened yet. How could he have known?

Misunderstanding the world around you has consequences. Your diagnoses will be wrong, even if your observations are poignant—even piquant. Your conclusions will be wrong too. So will your prescriptions. Anyone versed in Marx would readily understand this, at least if at further distance than his ideological cousin. Cousin Reno didn’t seem to. As a consequence, liberalism itself went on his dialectical altar.

[M]anifestations of political correctness are not epiphenomenal. They are late fruits of a singular historical judgment [namely, “Never Again”]. In the second half of the twentieth century, we came to regard the first half as a world-historical eruption of the evils inherent in the Western tradition, which can be corrected only by the relentless pursuit of openness, disenchantment, and weakening. That pursuit was already implicit in liberalism as Alisdair MacIntyre, Patrick Deneen, and others have pointed out. But after 1945 it became paramount, with nuance at first, but over time with greater ideological rigidity. The anti imperatives are now flesh-eating dogmas masquerading as the fulfillment of the anti-dogmatic spirit. … The recent, undying century won’t pass from the scene. Its anti imperatives have become sleepless monitors of public life, depriving [us] of solidarity born of shared loves and loyalties, the solidarity any normal human being seeks.

Reno is more hopeful than his Critical Marxist post-liberal cousins, however, but just as wary. The dialectic of liberalism is, for Reno, the dialectic of the strong gods. They must return, but they cannot come in the dark forms we’d today call the Woke Right: actual racism, actual fascism, actual National Socialism, actual xenophobia, actual enthic ultranationalism, actual totalitarianism. Something of the “openness” of the “postwar consensus” must be preserved. “Perverse loves of dark gods that rise from below present real dangers,” he warns.

Unfortunately, these debasing loves are easily fueled by the chthonian preoccupation with race and sex that dominates in so many circles. White nationalism makes sense to an open-society consensus that has reduced so much to biology. But these perverse loves do not create a “we.” They do not require free activity to sustain and promote a shared love. They are gods of identity, not of political community.

Sadly, again, Reno missed the opportunity to know what was—and remains—going on around him. Nothing in his dialectic can prevent the emergence of these dark, subterranean forces any more than the dialectic of “gender is a social construct” can keep a perverse man in a dress and eyeshadow out of a women’s changing room. Just as the dialectic of reason couldn’t resurrect some enchanted pre-capitalist rationality, so also cannot Reno’s answering dialectic of the strong gods resurrect a pre-modern community home. When one steps into the dialectic of Hegelian history, one forfeits all ability to say where that tornado will stop. The “gods of identity” are a Balrog, and Rusty Reno is no Gandalf.

Now, 2019 has come and gone, and we stand at the brink staring aghast at the stark reality that, pace Reno, it is 1939 again and Never Again is now.

Our Great Commission

I’ll end on a more generous and comely note, though. Reno means well, or at least it appears he does. His sincerity is as likely as his anguish about his society is clear. I share his concern, as far as it goes, and I remain grateful to his gut-punching analysis of a need for us to have a real home and to grow spines sturdy enough to defend it, even against dialectical subversion. That charge and challenge must not be ignored.

I’ve read this book before, though. The dialectic of Enlightenment, once run through Herbert Marcuse and his American-styled Maoism, unleashed at least ninety percent of what Reno mistakes for a “postwar consensus,” most of which started in the 1960s, not the 1940s, anyway. It did not bring emancipation but destruction, even if most of its theorists meant well and felt anguish about being trapped their capitalist society. The dialectic only churns. It cannot build a home.

The home we find ourselves wanting is the home we always failed to defend. Some truths are, in fact, self-evident and neither subjective nor contingent. We are individuals. Truth is not a matter of tribe. Political authority is a dangerous necessity and should be loaned in limited form to those we deem worthy on their merits. We are, in the eyes of Nature or Nature’s God, created equal in our claim on political authority and inherent dignity. America is a covenant with these traditions and these truths, and it is in fact our sacred duty to stand for them and live up to them. If these are America’s “strong gods,” they cannot be summoned but only revered. Because liberty of conscience is paramount to being human, it is our duty not to enforce this reverence by demand but to persuade our countrymen of its necessity and worth. Christians have a Great Commission to preach the Gospel, and Americans have a civic great commission to make America great again in every American heart and, when possible, abroad.

In 2019 when Reno wrote this book, he was standing at a ledge groping for an explanation few at the time were even ready to accept, if it even could have been articulated at the time. Something bad was about to happen. History was about to reveal itself, perhaps not in “fire and steel” but in syringe and “fiery but mostly peaceful” cultural revolution. Perhaps Reno did the best he could given the times, but his fatally flawed analysis, based in a dialectic he could not possibly control, not only failed to prevent what has happened since but also invited in the monster it weakly sought to forestall.

Postscript

There is some debate about whether or not Reno’s book qualifies as a “Woke Right” book. Given it is dialectical and critical, but for a right-wing “traditionalist” imaginary and its corollary sense of duty and loyalty, I think it qualifies unambiguously. What else could “Woke Right” mean? There are other hints through his text as well, but these can be left for the intrepid reader to find (tip, e.g.: search the text for H1-B visas).

Regardless of if it qualifies as “Woke Right” itself, it has been taken up as a centerpiece, if not a pillar, of the Woke Right movement since its publication, enjoying a significant rush of virality and support in the extended “Christian Nationalist” communities, inter alia, by at least 2021 at the latest.

Whether Reno, a Catholic of modest radicalist intent, intended for his book to inspire so many Protestants eager to turn America into their vision of a “Christian Nation” ruled by “strong God” of their religio-political imaginary, I do not know. But it served precisely that purpose, and, with the kitchen-sink-like notion of a vaguely bad “postwar consensus,” which seemingly can be blamed for everything the Woke Right doesn’t like (unless they’re blaming Jews, women, or gays), it has become a cornerstone of Woke Right analysis, thought, and radicalism that has now spread far beyond the confines of that malicious tribe. It was bad analysis when it was written, and it has not aged well.

For that reason, Reno has not rendered America, Christianity, or mankind any great service through his purposed dialectical treatment, and many hands who could have been ending the subversion and rebuilding the home he rightly calls for will now be displaced into dealing with a dangerous diversion that threatens everything. That, I deem, is a tremendous shame.

The dialectic cannot produce good. It can only produce a toxic and intoxicating mixture of good with evil, confusion with clarity, truth with lie, that over the span of months, years, or decades devolves into destruction. God, in Genesis, is the author of distinction, thus clarity. The dialectic is the author of confusion. It was a grave error for him to adopt a dialectical method explicitly predicated on the heretic Hegel. I hope he thinks better of it going forward and helps us clean up his mess.