R.R. Reno’s The Return of the Strong Gods traces 20th-century upheavals to WWI’s ideological extremism and post-war liberalism’s "never again" consensus, which prioritized rights over faith or nationalism—critiqued in Popper’s Open Society and Schlesinger’s Vital Center. Trump’s "Make America Great Again" and emphasis on walls mark a shift from openness to permanence, reflecting younger generations’ rejection of fluidity for stability. Reno cautiously argues liberty can thrive within belief and love, offering a Catholic-inflected critique of liberalism’s paradoxical suppression of enduring values. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with R.R. Reno.
I do not subscribe to many journals, three.
I subscribe to three, but one of them is First Things, and it is probably one of the best collections of writing in the country.
It contains incredibly thoughtful writing by some of my favorite writers like Carl Truman and Mary Harrington and Erica Bakioki and the tremendous and undervalued Angela Franks, who really writes some brilliant stuff.
R.R. Reno is the editor and executive editor of First Things, and he is also the author of many books.
One of them, The Return of the Strong Gods, Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West.
I finished it just a couple of days ago.
This book came out in 2019 and kind of went under the radar, but now suddenly people have discovered how prophetic and insightful it is.
So I'm happy to have R.R. Reno with us.
Rusty, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Pleasure to be with you.
And by the way, I agree about Angela Franks.
She's a great expositor and not just expositor, but she can frame theologically the whole postmodern canon.
And she's done a series of essays for it.
So we've got a final one that'll come out in a couple of months on Althusaire.
And I just think it's so valuable because I think it helps inoculate the rising generation against a kind of naive hero worship for these characters.
Yes.
While still helping them understand, well, what is it?
What were these projects really all about?
So I think she's great.
Thank you for commending her.
Well, what I love about her is she takes them seriously, which is the cruelest thing you could possibly do.
It's just devastating.
So this book did kind of get ignored when it first came out, right?
But now suddenly everybody's talking about it.
Probably two factors.
I think one is the pandemic, which kind of clips so much.
And then secondly, I think a lot of people, and many on the right, wanted to believe that Trump was a kind of weird episode and that we were going to go back to normal and the politics of the West broadly.
And I think that his election to another term in 2024 really caused a lot of people to go, no, no, something's really going on.
And I want to understand it.
And my book is an attempt to explain to readers why it feels like the ground under our feet is shifting.
So let's talk about this.
I mean, I thought one of the most interesting and it was kind of obvious after you said it was that where we are is historically based.
I mean, a lot of the things that we, that some people are now talking about as if they were eternal truths or actually truths that are linked into a moment in history.
Can you explain to people what the thesis of the book is so everyone knows what we're talking about?
It's a straightforward thesis about the 20th century that the 20th century has two basic movements.
They all revolve around the catastrophe of 1914 to 1945, the senseless bloodshed on the Western Front, and then the political upheavals, more pronounced in Europe than they were in the United States, but maybe culminating with the Spanish Civil War.
And many people really believed that the future was going to be either communism or fascism.
And then 1939, the beginning of World War II, culminating in two nuclear weapons dropped on Japanese cities and the revelations of the scope of genocide in the death camps in Europe.
So I think those really it knocked the stuffing out of Western civilization, those events.
And the victors of World War II, especially Americans, really put their minds to trying to understand what went wrong and how we can prevent it.
And so the second half of the 20th century is dominated by the never again imperative.
And this leads to what I call the post-war consensus or the open society consensus.
It's a notion that we need to really drive out the passions and the fervor that gave rise.
This is how the analysis goes, that the ideological passions need to be cooled.
And to do that, we need to put our civilization on a much more modest footing.
Detenocratic reason, liberty and rights become super important to protect the dignity of the human person.
And that this project, this post-war consensus, I'm sure I would have supported it in 1950.
And to be honest with you, I went to college in 1979 and I was educated in it and I thought it was common sense.
And it's really only really after the end of the Cold War, when paradoxically it ought to have relaxed its grip, it actually went into overdrive.
And this consensus has been turned into a kind of all-out assault on any kind of permanent anchor in society, or as I put it differently in other places, it's been an assault on love.
Because love is an anchoring, it's an anchoring impulse of the human heart.
You know, the things you love, you cling to.
The things you love, you defend.
And this kind of galvanizing of the soul is seen as a potential threat to society, the open society.
So basically, if you love your country, if you love your God, you're immediately Hitler.
I mean, it's amazing how quickly people leap to calling each other Hitler.
Yes, it's also interesting that this is, if you look at Renault Camus, French intellectual, has a wonderful essay called The Second Career of Hitler.
And we published an article called The End of the Age of Hitler by Alec Riri, who's an English historian.
And he notes that Hitler doesn't really come into our vocabulary as the image of absolute evil until the 1960s.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, there was, I think, a more balanced approach.
And also, there was a desire to get on with life.
And there was a certain impulse to forget.
And so really, it takes on the stronger element.
In fact, one of the theses of the book is that the baby boomer radicals in the 1960s, late 1960s were not rebelling against their parents' values.
They were rebelling against what they thought were their parents' hypocrisy because the open society consensus became the dominant consensus in the 50s, but we still had this many strong institutions and middle-class consensus.
And they wanted to perfect it and extend it.
And that's been the project of my lifetime.
I mean, my entire adult life has been lived under the kind of accelerating power of the open society consensus.
Because it does strike, on first looking at it, it strikes you me as strange.
I think it would strike most people as strange that from the idea of open societies, you get people like George Soros who want to let people out of prison if they're the wrong color.
You get people censoring your opinion.
I mean, basically violating our right to free speech.
How do you get from there?
The idea is that if you don't love anything, if you don't love your God, if you don't love your country, somehow we'll all be more free and we'll be saved from the excesses of communism and fascism.
And yet it ends up being kind of a fascist mentality, doesn't it?
Obligatory openness.
It's a paradoxical situation, but every society has to have a consensus, and that consensus has to be defended and in some cases imposed.
And we live under this open society consensus.
I mean, in the book, I look at what I think is a signal document in the formation of this consensus.
It's the Harvard report titled Education for Free Society.
Now, the president of Harvard at the time was James Conant, and Conant was the civilian head of the Manhattan Project.
And in 1943, there's the Battle of Stalingrad in summer of 1943.
And at that point, he was aware of our technological advantage, which ultimately culminated in the bomb.
The realities on the battlefields of Europe were now clear.
We were clearly going to win the war.
And he formed this committee at Harvard in the fall of 1943 to think about like how do we effectively, how do we reconstruct our civilization?
So in this report, the faculty members of the report, they wanted to balance the authority of the Western tradition, the canon, the Western canon, but they wanted to open it up to greater freedom for students to ask critical questions.
So they were trying to balance, if you will, the authority of our tradition with this new emphasis on openness.
But all of the prestige went to openness.
And so over time, this erodes the balance.
Or you can even think of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s book from 1949 called The Vital Center.
And the vital center is his recognition that in a modern technological capitalist society, that you have all this dynamism and change, and it needs to be balanced in the vital center, to create a vital center.
It needs to be balanced by security and a sense of belonging.
And I think that those, like I say, I think I probably would have agreed with that.
In fact, I went back and reread The Vital Center recently.
It's a marvelous book of political propaganda.
He was very good.
And it's a smart book.
And that balance is a desirable balance.
But, you know, I got to college.
I was in the last wave of students to do obligatory Western sieve, year-long class, Plato to present, as we called it.
And we read the great touchstones of the Western tradition.
But our faculty members, they had no, they felt they had no right to tell us what to think about those books.
And then by the time you get to the 80s, you get the Cannon Wars and you got Jesse Jackson at Stanford University in 1989.
Hey-ho, Western SIFS, got to go.
And by the time you get to the 90s, the canon itself has been tossed out.
And all you have is the openness, critical questioning side of the equation.
And so, you know, and someone like George Sorich, you can understand.
I mean, he was a refugee from Budapest.
I think he grew up in Budapest.
So Jewish refugee, survives the war, comes to England, studies at University of London where Karl Popper was teaching.
And Karl Popper had an explanation for what went wrong.
And he published in his famous book, Open Society and Its Enemies.
And who is the great enemy of an open society and open society and enemies?
Plato.
Who is the foundation of the Western philosophical tradition?
Plato.
And so if you look at anti-Western ideology in the academy today, it is simply an outworking of Popper's own thesis.
I mean, it's not a logical outworking.
It's more that Popper, like, you have a civilizational crisis, 1914, 1945.
You have Popper, who was, you know, from Vienna.
He was deeply traumatized by, I think, the rapid fascist takeover of the fled and wound up, I think, teaching in New Zealand or something during the war, when he wrote the book.
And, you know, so he gives his explanation for what went wrong.
And he goes deep, right?
I mean, the rot's at the very root of our civilization.
And so we have to put things on a fundamentally new footing for him.
And Karl Popper didn't want people to be released from prison.
And he wasn't on an open borders.
You know, these are all things that he could probably never have.
Same-sex marriage, transgender ideology.
They're all erasing borders.
They're all efforts to make things more open.
He could never have imagined those things.
But that way of thinking, when it starts to gain momentum, leads us to where we are today, or at least where we were until only recently, because there are forces gathering.
Efforts to Make Things More Open00:05:52
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That's what I wanted to ask you about next.
You mentioned in the book that you're a Catholic.
First Things is an eclectic magazine, but it has a Catholic atmosphere, I think, about it.
And there is a movement among Catholics like Patrick Denin to sort of give up on the liberal idea, to give up on the idea of really liberalism going back to the idea in the 19th, 18th centuries.
But you don't seem to feel that way.
You seem to sort of still have hope that liberty can persist in an atmosphere of belief and love.
Or am I getting that wrong?
No, I do think so.
I mean, one thing is that I'm an American, and so one of the things I love is liberty.
Right.
And that's, you cannot found a society solely on that love, but that can be a powerful love within a society that shares other loves.
And so I just think it's, you know, look at JD Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference.
Great speech.
He basically chastises Europeans for failing to live up to the First Amendment.
So profoundly liberal.
But then he pivots and he accuses them of lacking democratic legitimacy.
And that is a very different, in effect, he says, you as leaders are no longer in solidarity with the people whom you lead.
And that solidarity is not a liberalism has no tools or very weak tools to promote solidarity.
And I think we're in a crisis of solidarity, most evident in the fragmentation of our society between the people who are in charge and then everybody else.
And populism is a rebellion against what is seen to be an out-of-touch elite that has its own interests at heart and not the interests of the ordinary man, basic structure of populism, I think.
And so repairing that breach between the leaders and the led, I think is one of the important tasks we have in front of us for the next decade.
And he was, so it's interesting.
He combined both in those speeches, in that speech.
Both, like, I'm an American.
It's outrageous that you have, how can you possibly, you know, I mean, in Great Britain, it's just unbelievable what they tolerate.
And that's a country with a great tradition of liberty.
But you can't pray within like 200 yards of an abortion clinic silently.
That's just kind of crazy.
But then he combines it with, and I think that that's true for the Trump voter.
I mean, the Trump voter both wants to go back to an earlier liberal settlement.
And in that settlement, you didn't have to carefully monitor what you said at the workplace.
You know, you could talk to people and say what's on your mind and so on instead of being surveilled 24-7.
So they want to go back and reestablish the public-private distinction, which is central, I think, to the liberal outlook.
But at the same time, they also want to make America great again.
And again, that's not a liberal project.
That's a project of national strength.
It's a project of, you know, wanting to, you know, I remember when Trump, one guy in 2016, who was driving me to the JFK who was from Armenia, and he was going to vote for you.
Oh, Trump.
Well, isn't he anti-immigrant?
I'm telling you, the devil's advocate.
And he goes, I don't want my children to grow up in a country that doesn't get respected.
And that feeling, wanting to be proud, this is back to love of your country.
I mean, I use the three Fs, faith, family, flag.
And those are all areas of life where they are actually paradoxically the foundations of a culture of freedom, but they are not zones of freedom, so to speak.
Pivot Away From Never Again00:10:22
That's the complexity, right?
It's the complexity.
Right.
And that's what I think, you know, hats off to Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
You know, like I say, the book is fun to read.
It's very dated, but it's fun to read as a kind of work of, he really goes after liberals who are sympathetic to communism.
He really, and it's interesting, he treats them as sort of, you know, weak need feminine figures.
And he says we need a more manly liberalism, a more virile liberalism.
And so if you think about today and this upsurge in, especially among men, interest in this sort of web figures who are touting manliness, and you go back and read Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and think, you know?
And so yes, and then back to Patrick Denin, I say in the book that we have all these genealogies of like what went wrong.
You know, nominalism is the root of all evil.
Reformation has caused a problem.
Private judgment.
Liberalism, you know, John Locke is the fateful wrong turn.
And I think, you know, every civilization has bad DNA, you know.
And I think nominalism is a mistaken metaphysical view.
I'm a Catholic.
I'm not in favor of the Reformation.
And I'm perfectly willing to allow that Hobbes and Locke and others pioneered a kind of de-eracinated view of the human condition.
But the question is, why did those, if you will, errors become so superdominant?
And I think there, the historical explanation is much more helpful.
And it really is the 20th century.
And it's a crisis.
It's an historical crisis.
And it's ending is what is really fascinating.
But that's a good question.
It's really ending.
It's 2025.
I mean, look at this.
Joe Biden talking about Hitler, for that matter, the Atlantic Magazine, 24-7 talking about Hitler.
If you go back to read campaign speeches by Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, I dare say none of them ever mentioned Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee.
And they were closer to the events of the Civil War than we are to the events of World War II.
But that language was, I mean, but it's interesting, they really amped it up in the last electoral cycle, but they were shooting blanks.
So that seems to me to indicate that the imagination or political, really even kind of metaphysical imagination as a civilization is starting to pivot away from the never again.
And it's very hard for baby boomers to get their minds around this.
I mean, my baby boomer friends, I mean, are people going to forget Auschwitz?
would be the worst possible thing they think and you know i'm all things pass i mean but Exactly.
But I want to know, why do you think you could have looked at the cataclysm of the world wars and we could have said, oh, this is because of the death of faith.
This is Nietzsche's catastrophe come to life.
You know, they were carrying, in World War I, they were carrying Nietzsche into the trenches.
And Hitler obviously adopted, the Nazis obviously adopted some of it.
Why did the narrative that we have to believe less win out over the narrative of, hey, let's return to our roots?
Christopher Dawson, that was his interpretation of the catastrophe.
That was T.S. Eliot's interpretation of the catastrophe.
I mean, there were contenders in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
There were contenders to explain what went wrong.
And we held them in tension, actually, during the Cold War.
Certainly on the right, we held them in tension, godless communism versus a free society, but not just a free society, but a free society that's rooted in faith or so on and so forth.
So we did hold them in tension, but why did it get the upper hand?
I mean, part of it, I think, was the exigencies of political life in America.
We do put the accent on freedom.
So the open society consensus chimed well.
We also faced our own internal crisis of racism.
And I think that that reinforced, I mean, for Europeans, it was, you know, Auschwitz is, for the German, it's Auschwitz.
For the Frenchman, it's Algeria and colonialization.
And for Americans, it's Jim Crow.
And so these crises, I think, I mean, I'm not, the book is a kind of journalistic history.
You know, it's not, I'm not, don't want to pretend to listeners that this is a kind of in-depth study of this time period.
And a better historian or a more thorough historian, I think, would try to establish the links between all of these crises, which are, which were, some of which quite justly interpreted as, especially in our racial segregation in the United States, you want to break down the barrier that prevents a black man from going into the bathroom, right?
But then fast forward an entire half a century, and we got to break down the barriers between boys and girls in transgender ideology.
And Richard Weaver in Ideas Have Consequences, he opens that book with an observation that we know specific things.
We have general principles, but at the deepest level, we harbor metaphysical dreams.
And I think that I see Heraclitus Parmenides, Heraclitus, all his flux.
Parmenides cling to that which is and cannot not be.
Heraclites change Parmenides' permanence.
Or you could say that there's a kind of sense that what's the greatest threat, claustrophobia, your greatest fear, or being abandoned is your greatest fear.
And we, as a society, really, our metaphysical imaginations revolved around this fear of claustrophobia.
And so our project was to break things down and make more space, open space.
But if you're 21 years old in 2025, you basically have grown up in a liquid world where everything has been kind of mobilized, made dynamic.
Nothing is permanent.
You're treading water endlessly in this liquid world, desperate for dry land where you can stand on solid ground.
And so that metaphysical, so the fear, the deep fear is changing from fear of claustrophobia.
You're a baby boomer, you come of age in 1968 and this kind of claustrophobic middle class consensus and all the hypocrisy and break things down, open things up, give room for experimentation.
But now the very same person who's at some fancy pants university, who's 18 years old, is reading stuff on the internet.
Next thing you know, he's going to Latin maths.
Right.
You know?
And it's a rebellion, but in a very different direction.
It's a rebellion against limitless openness, and it's a quest for permanence, a quest for, in the book I talk about, it's home.
People want to have a home.
And so we're moving from what I call a space-making or an open terrain project, which was the last 80 years.
We're pivoting towards a homemaking project.
And Make America Great Again.
Make America Great Again is just a kind of homemaking slogan.
Think about it too.
2016, this was what fed me and reinvigned the book.
One of the reasons I wrote it, Donald Trump, built a big, beautiful wall.
I mean, it's a metaphor for home.
I'm going to protect you, Mr. Ordinary American.
And then you look at his acceptance speech at the 2016 convention.
Ted Cruz, his adversary, the guy that stayed in the race the longest he gave a speech before Trump did.
It was Reaganism on steroids.
He must have used the word freedom 100 times in his speech.
Trump's acceptance speech does not use the word freedom.
And he might have said liberty twice, but he does not, I don't believe he ever used the word freedom.
And I just was watching that and I fell back in my chair and said, wow, the Republican candidate for president of the United States is not running on freedom.
He's running on homemaking, home rebuilding.
I'm going to build walls.
Walls are the basic necessity for a home.
Running on Walls00:00:57
And anyway, so my brain starts to twirl, and then I got going on other things and other directions and it gelled into the book.
You know, I'm out of time.
I have a million more questions to ask you.
I hope you'll come back and talk to me again.
But very interesting perspective on this.
And I think the question of where we go next is what I wanted to talk about more, but maybe next time.
R.R. Reno, the book is Return of the Strong Gods, Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West.
The magazine that he runs is First Things.
Excellent, excellent journal.
Thank you so much for coming on, Russi.
I appreciate it.
It's really nice to meet you too.
Good to meet you too.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
Once more, R.R. Reno, and I really recommend this book, Return of the Strong Gods, Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West, since you'll probably be at Amazon pre-ordering or ordering the return, the Kingdom of Cain.
You can get this at the same time.
And I also recommend First Things, terrific magazine.