This post is adapted from a chapter in my new book, How to Think About Democracy in the 21st Century.
R.R. Reno, a conservative theologian, offers an interesting thesis. According to Reno, the first half of the 20th century was defined by the very powerful “strong gods” of nationalism, racism, communism, and fascism. The postwar world, in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, is defined in reaction to and against these things, as a series of “anti-“ ideas. Anti-racism, anti-fascism, anti-communism. In their place we have promoted “weak gods” like tolerance, difference, openness, and so on, to preserve our society against those earlier, bloody threats that mobilized people’s passions with religious fervor. In some manner, these earlier strong gods seem to be coming back.
Like conservative political theorist Patrick Deneen, Reno argues that this postwar liberalism was too weak and too individualistic to hold a society together. It therefore undermined itself, which led in turn to people seeking stronger forms of meaning, connection, and politics. Hence, the “return of the strong gods.” There is much to this thesis. We could think of it as the return of history thesis, an antidote to the triumphalist (and misguided) end of history thesis.
This thesis overlaps with and resonates with much of the critique offered by the left, which is deeply opposed not just to extreme neoliberal economic policies but to the very individualist political theory that informs such policies, which deprives us of community, the common good, and other shared elements necessary for participation in democratic citizenship (Wendy Brown, for instance, makes some of these points).
Francis Fukuyama was right when he stressed that 20th century state-centered communism, as a challenger to the west, was not just an economic or political ideology but really a comprehensive worldview and powerful collective narrative. When it died it left many countries and people without any shared narrative to make sense of their world. The problem, as conservatives like Reno and Deneen note, is that the liberal democratic countries also lack a unifying narrative. Hyper-individualism is not adequate to bind a society together.
These concerns are not limited to the right. If anything, they have become as or more prominent on the left. Whereas many on the right have embraced the attempt to marketize and privatize all aspects of life, participatory democrats like Benjamin Barber have demonstrated how local participation could create strong, democratic forms of citizenship. Historians like Christopher Lasch combined elements of left and right thinking in their critique of American individualism. Communitarian-oriented thinkers from the center to the left, such as Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer have been exploring these considerations for decades. Radical democrats like Wendy Brown and Sheldon Wolin have critiqued the totalizing and hollowing power of markets. It is some of these very concerns that led to my dissertation chapter “Is Democratic Community Possible?”
Thus these concerns regarding the eroding power of modern individualism are not limited to the right. Further, it seems clear that elements of Reno’s thesis are true. Why are eastern European countries like Hungary and Poland turning to authoritarianism and xenophobia? For one, they lack any other cohesive narrative. The oligarchic, privatizing neoliberal conception of citizenship, economy, and state is not enough to bound a society together. If anything, it only rends it further apart. Thus, citizens in these societies which have very few immigrants find themselves turning to exclusionary and authoritarian visions of nation and meaning. In Reno’s terms, the “weak gods” of markets and privatization were inadequate—leading many to unsurprisingly, if lamentably, turn back to the “strong gods” of nationalism and exclusion.
Reno characterizes the postwar US consensus as the belief that “a sense of solidarity based on widely shared prosperity rather than on the strong gods will allow us to achieve a stable common life.” There is much truth to this. It also leads directly to the power of the leftist diagnosis of the contemporary crisis—a major part of the breakdown of this postwar consensus is the loss of “widely shared prosperity.” For if that is the basis of institutional legitimacy, then stagnant wages, precarious labor, declining benefits, growing inequality, longer work hours, more expensive housing, education, and healthcare, rising deaths of despair, urban deindustrialization, and a society in which children are no longer guaranteed to be more prosperous than their parents all contribute to the collapse of legitimacy, the demise of the postwar American dream, and the consensus it informed.
With the center disappearing, the middle class falling apart, and community hollowed out, the strong gods rush in to fill the void.