Donald Trump and the Return of the "Strong Gods"
With Trump's inauguration, the 20th century finally comes to an end
When Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States last week, the 20th century finally came to an end.
Even though the calendar may read 2025, we’ve been living under a regime of ideas promoted by American and European elites since the end of the Second World War that has kept us locked in a set of failed 20th century political, cultural, and economic priorities. The commencement of Trump’s second term as president brings to a definitive close that “postwar consensus” vividly described in R.R. Reno’s 2018 book, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West.
To that consensus let us say, “good riddance.”
Since well before Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, pundits and commentators have tried to make sense of Trump and our Trumpian moment as a country, but none of them comes as close to describing the epochal shift taking place like Reno’s 2018 book, Return of the Strong Gods. It is a shift that is bigger than Trump himself.
According to Reno, European and American intellectuals were so horrified by the carnage of the First and Second World Wars, they committed to challenging foundational assumptions about Western culture so that we would never again face the specter of totalitarianism and global war.
But however noble this instinctual reaction, the “postwar consensus” that emerged completely misread the root causes of World War II and mislead every generation since about what it really takes to maintain a flourishing, free society.
The postwar consensus mistakenly claimed that the violence of the world wars was the result of something inherently evil in Western civilization, the conviction that we must restrict loves that command our fierce loyalty, loves that Reno calls the “strong gods:”
By “strong gods,” I do not mean Thor and the other residents of the Old Norse Valhalla. The strong gods are the objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies. They can be timeless. Truth is a strong god that beckons us to the matrimony of assent. They can be traditional. King and country, insofar as they still arouse men’s patriotic ardor, are strong gods. The strong gods can take the forms of modern ideologies and charismatic leaders. The strong gods can be beneficent. Our constitutional piety treats the American Founding as a strong god worthy of our devotion. And they can be destructive. In the twentieth century, militarism, fascism, communism, racism, and anti-Semitism brought ruin.
But the postwar consensus concluded that all strong gods must be rejected, and that to avoid future tyranny we must insist on a weakening of all convictions and truth claims that might be held too tightly. “The inescapable lesson, most came to believe, was that war and destruction arose from close-minded modes of life and thought,” Reno wrote.
Paradoxically, the postwar consensus insisted that we must enforce (violently, if necessary) a culture of openness, weakness, and disenchantment. We must be skeptical of all truth claims. We must insist on the supremacy of the individual to find his or her own “meaning” in life. We must worship diversity and multiculturalism as the only antidotes to creeping fascism.
The result was that a critical mass of Americans eventually accepted the postwar consensus. On the left, this meant an absolute commitment to moral relativism and the supremacy of the individual will against all societal traditions and moral standards, which we see in the left’s steady embrace of secularism, abortion, and sexual libertinism.
On the right, the postwar consensus required a commitment to free market fundamentalism that destroyed domestic jobs and social mobility. Eventually, both sides grudgingly accepted the core assumptions of the other as givens in a “free” society. “Just as the center-left reconciled itself to the postwar emphasis on openness in the economy, the center-right made its peace with ever greater cultural openness,” Reno wrote.
For all Americans, it became the norm to be suspicious, if not outright hostile, to the idea of patriotism. Religion, taken too seriously, was viewed as a dangerous source of division and even violence. Immigration had to be embraced in order to prove that we aren’t unwelcoming. Toleration of increasingly bizarre and destructive lifestyle choices became the greatest (and perhaps only) moral imperative. Generally speaking, Americans across the political spectrum accepted these assumptions.
The postwar consensus helped effectively define the West against Soviet collectivism, which was a good thing, but with the end of the Cold War, we have found it impossible to let go of the tyranny of the soft gods. This is why anyone who questions the postwar consensus is attacked as a “fascist” from the left, or a “socialist” from the right.
“The Manichean tendency of the postwar consensus, which insists that either it must dominate or fascism and racism will return, blinds our leadership class to the realities of the twenty-first century and poisons our politics with an all-or-nothing moralism that is as self-serving as it is destructive,” Reno writes.
Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led. Fearful of strong loves and committed to ever-greater openness, the postwar consensus cannot formulate, much less address, these problems. Unable to identify our shared loves—unable even to formulate the “we” that is the political subject in public life—we cannot identify the common good, the res in the res publica. Under these circumstances, increasingly prevalent in the West, civic life disintegrates into the struggle among private interests, and in this struggle the rich and powerful win. In the twenty-first century, oligarchy and an unaccountable elite pose a far greater threat to the future of liberal democracy than does the return of Hitler.
It is possible to believe in “strong gods” and not be a fascist. The “shared loves” that give our lives meaning – family, faith, love of country – these are, in fact, the sources of deep loyalty and commitment that give us the will to defend our objects of devotion from sources of genuine tyranny. Without them, we are incapable of mustering the will to fight for anything. “A man who cannot affirm the border between male and female will find it difficult to defend a border between nations,” Reno writes.
Americans have hungered for the strong gods without even knowing what they were longing for. Donald Trump has given us permission to once again believe in them.
In contrast to the postwar consensus of perpetual “opening,” Trump has given us permission to have boundaries, and the commonsense notion that nations should be able to secure its own borders is affirmed.
In contrast to the postwar consensus of perpetual deference to other countries and their interests, Trump gives permission to put “America First.”
In contrast to the postwar consensus of disenchantment with all truth claims, Trump gives us permission to robustly love our country, to be unabashed in our religious faith, to insist on the obvious biological facts of male and female difference.
It was natural that the postwar generation was concerned about the return of totalitarianism. But their conclusions about where the violence of war came from, and how to prevent it, were wrong.
We can believe in family, and God, and country - believe in them deeply in fact - and not disintegrate into incivility and prejudice and violence. In fact, these “strong gods” are the only things that can effectively unite us as a people, and help us transcend the superficial differences of race, class, and ancestry.
All of this explains Trump’s appeal. Americans long to believe in something again, something bigger than our individual, subjective searches for “meaning,” something that gives us solidarity with others in ways that transcends our personal “identity” groups. This is the essence of the slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
Let the 21st century finally begin.