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.
