In my last post, I described what R. R. Reno sees as the social consequences of banishing the strong gods. In this post, I’ll look at what Reno sees as the political results.
By Reno’s reckoning, many of the destabilizing political consequences of the banishing of the strong gods were kept at bay by the looming threat of the Cold War. The widespread recognition of the threat of Russian communism provided a basis for a social unity even in the absence of the strong gods:
Of course, in the early decades of the postwar era, the proponents of an open society could take its underlying solidarity for granted. The Cold War kept the West tensed with collective purpose. But the demise of the Soviet Union removed limits to utopian ideals of openness, which now bear upon us with dissolving urgency.
In the absence of the threat posed by the Soviet Union, the gates for the “utopian ideals of openness” were thrown wide open. Policy was set to uphold and support openness for the sake of openness itself. But the more open and borderless a society becomes, the less distinct and substantial the sense of community will be within it. The people of a country cannot feel and sustain a distinct sense of shared purpose, identity, and loyalty when borders are pulled down, and anyone from anywhere can come and go as they please. Just as the loyalty within a family would be diminished if the family did not treat each other preferentially, the loyalty that holds countries together will come undone without similar obligations.
Thus, one consequence Reno sees from the banishing of the strong gods is a backlash against this sense of lost community, leading to the resurgence in populism. This resurgent populism, Reno says, is being motivated by a sense among the population that political leaders are not loyal to the citizens of their own countries:
More and more voters in the West sense this strange inability among our leadership class to affirm their loyalty to the people they lead. And so voters suspect, correctly, that those who lead are not willing to protect them…Their leaders will not do what leaders are supposed to do, which is to protect and preserve the realm, to sustain and build up our shard home.
The voters suspect more than a mere lack of loyalty from the leadership class – they have a sense that those at the top actively look down upon them and despise them. This sets the stage for populist movements to ascend:
Populism, which is unique to democratic modernity, is not a political philosophy. In a democratic system, a governing consensus ordinarily frames the back-and-forth of partisan electoral politics. At certain times, however, the consensus becomes decadent and dysfunctional. The demos becomes unsettled. Out of this restlessness populism arises, which is often undifferentiated and sometimes destructive. When the ruling class ignores or derides the unsettled populace (“deplorables,” “takers,” “racists,” “Islamophobes,” “fascists,” and so forth), the restlessness jells into an adversarial mood. A populist gains political power on the strength of this adversarial stance. He opposes the governing consensus, attacking its political embodiment, the establishment. By this definition, Trump is undoubtedly a populist, as are the anti-establishment politicians in Europe.
The other large political consequences Reno sees is the emergence of identity politics. The strong gods, recall, are the objects of shared loyalty and devotion and love that unite people across a society. These gods might be banished, but the void left behind still calls out to be filled by something else. “Throwing off social norms and cultivating ‘individuality’ are not natural impulses. On the contrary, as social animals we’re inclined to live in accord with the dominant opinion,” Reno says. Weakening a strong sense of shared national identity and national loyalty doesn’t eliminate this fundamental human desire – it merely redirects it. And with the framing provided by the postwar consensus, this desire has been redirected into a fractious identity politics:
Those who gravitate toward “identity” have the correct intuition that solitary requires shared loyalty. Because the relentless pursuit of the open-society agenda deprives them of a strong civic identity, they fall back on race, sex, sexual orientation, or some other “identity,” a process that reinforces and is reinforced by the postwar consensus. Identity politics accentuates the differences that diversity and other therapies of openness promote and redirects our desire for solidarity by focusing it on DNA (race or sex) and sexual practices. These are open-society tropes as well. Identity politics constructs a pseudo-politics that depends on grievance and moral outrage, preventing citizens from consolidating around shared civil projects – other than reaffirming the open society as an end in itself.
This does not merely enable the multicultural nihilism on the left, but also the white nationalist populism on the right:
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 only be remediated by true loves.
And this perverse redirection of impulses is what drives Reno’s ultimate idea. As Reno sees it, the strong gods can never be eliminated permanently, they can only be substituted. The strong gods banished by the postwar consensus have left a void filled by a destructive populism and the rise of identity politics. These movements might be destructive, but they grow because they speak to a fundamental human need that the philosophy of the open society leave perpetually unfulfilled. This means these destructive movements themselves can’t merely be dispelled – something must substitute for them to fill the need these movements have fed upon. And, Reno says, that will require the return of the strong gods.
In my next post, I will outline what form Reno thinks this return should take, and how it might be achieved.
