At The Upheaval, N.S. Lyons suggests that the arrival of Donald Trump, version 2.0, may finally end the era we’ve been living in since immediately after the end of WW2:
The 125 years between the French Revolution in 1789 and the outbreak of WWI in 1914 was later described as the “Long Nineteenth Century”. The phrase recognized that to speak of “the nineteenth century” was to describe far more than a specific hundred-year span on the calendar; it was to capture the whole spirit of an age: a rapturous epoch of expansion, empire, and Enlightenment, characterized by a triumphalist faith in human reason and progress. That lingering historical spirit, distinct from any before or after, was extinguished in the trenches of the Great War. After the cataclysm, an interregnum that ended only with the conclusion of WWII, everything about how the people of Western civilization perceived and engaged with the world – politically, psychologically, artistically, spiritually – had changed.
R.R. Reno opens his 2019 book Return of the Strong Gods by quoting a young man who laments that “I am twenty-seven years old and hope to live to see the end of the twentieth century”. His paradoxical statement captures how the twentieth century has also extended well past its official sell-by date in the year 2000. Our Long Twentieth Century had a late start, fully solidifying only in 1945, but in the 80 years since its spirit has dominated our civilization’s whole understanding of how the world is and should be. It has set all of our society’s fears, values, and moral orthodoxies. And, through the globe-spanning power of the United States, it has shaped the political and cultural order of the rest of the world as well.
The spirit of the Long Twentieth could not be more different from that which preceded it. In the wake of the horrors inflicted by WWII, the leadership classes of America and Europe understandably made “never again” the core of their ideational universe. They collectively resolved that fascism, war, and genocide must never again be allowed to threaten humanity. But this resolution, as reasonable and well-meaning as it seemed at the time, soon became an all-consuming obsession with negation.
Hugely influential liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno helped convince an ideologically amenable post-war establishment that the fundamental source of authoritarianism and conflict in the world was the “closed society”. Such a society is marked by what Reno dubs “strong gods”: strong beliefs and strong truth claims, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, strong communal identities and connections to place and past – ultimately, all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies”.
Now the unifying power of the strong gods came to be seen as dangerous, an infernal wellspring of fanaticism, oppression, hatred, and violence. Meaningful bonds of faith, family, and above all the nation were now seen as suspect, as alarmingly retrograde temptations to fascism. Adorno, who set the direction of post-war American psychology and education policy for decades, classified natural loyalties to family and nation as the hallmarks of a latent “authoritarian personality” that drove the common man to xenophobia and führer worship. Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community entirely, labeling it as disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda” and smearing anyone who dared cherish as special his own homeland and history as a dangerous “racialist”. For such intellectuals, any definitive claim to authority or hierarchy, whether between men, morals, or metaphysical truths, seemed to stand as a mortal threat to peace on earth.
The great project of post-war establishment liberalism became to tear down the walls of the closed society and banish its gods forever. To be erected on its salted ground was an idyllic but exceptionally vague vision of an “open society” animated by peaceable weak gods of tolerance, doubt, dialogue, equality, and consumer comfort. This politically and culturally dominant “open society consensus” drew on theorists like Adorno and Popper to advance a program of social reforms intended to open minds, disenchant ideals, relativize truths, and weaken bonds.
As Reno catalogues in detail, new approaches to education, psychology, and management sought to relativize truths, elevate “critical thinking” over character, vilify collective loyalties, cast doubt on hierarchies, break down all boundaries and borders, and free individuals from the “repression” of all moral and relational duties. Aspiration to a vague universal humanitarianism soon became the only higher good that it was socially acceptable to aim for other than pure economic growth.
[…]
The Long Twentieth Century has been characterized by these three interlinked post-war projects: the progressive opening of societies through the deconstruction of norms and borders, the consolidation of the managerial state, and the hegemony of the liberal international order. The hope was that together they could form the foundation for a world that would finally achieve peace on earth and goodwill between all mankind. That this would be a weak, passionless, undemocratic, intricately micromanaged world of technocratic rationalism was a sacrifice the post-war consensus was willing to make.
That dream didn’t work out though, because the strong gods refused to die.
Update, 17 February: Welcome Instapundit readers! Thanks for dropping by. Please do look around at some of my other posts! I think the last time I got linked by Instapundit was back in 2008/9 just before I moved to the current location. Please do read the entire N.S. Lyons post, as this is just a taster of the full essay!
[…] AND ABOUT TIME. IT WAS PROBABLY WORSE THAN THE 14th: “Trump marks the overdue end of the Long Twentieth Century”. […]
Pingback by Instapundit » Blog Archive » AND ABOUT TIME. IT WAS PROBABLY WORSE THAN THE 14th: “Trump marks the overdue end of the Long T — February 17, 2025 @ 04:32
Excellent, thought-provoking post.
I like Popper’s deconstruction of Marxism as non-falsifiable pseudoscience, but one of the many problems with the antipathy to nationalism and enthusiasm for globalist ecumenism is the same one that communism ran into with capitalism: what do you do when the rest of the nations on earth refuse to join your project? Even the CCP had to concede eventually that, at least for now, they need to fight capitalism with capitalist features of their own, because capitalism outcompetes communism, every time. Just as nationalism outcompetes wan least-common-denominator globalism.
Despite our lofty dreams, the rest of the world doesn’t want to follow us there. Islam would rather destroy us and take the whole world for itself. Individual nations refuse to be subsumed into the giant blob, the featureless sprawl of consumerism. They quite enjoy their particularity and desire to keep it. And this fact is what has led to so many errors of apprehension and analysis among the Westetn ignorati: they assumption that all the peoples of the world think just like we do—that they have the same hopes and dreams and ideas of the good life and theories about what constitutes a good society. Or that even if they don’t, they soon will, if we just continue to expose ourselves to them, if we just allow more and more of them into our midst. After all, an enemy is just a friend to whom we haven’t yet sufficiently explained ourselves—or abased ourselves. Yes, we must redouble our efforts to sacrifice our society on the altar of mutual understanding in a gesture of goodwill. Then, and only then, will the obscurantist throngs from the third world agree to merge with us. Though at that point, of course, it will not be possible to identify “us”, since there will be no more “us” in any meaningful sense.
And when we finally have achieved this wondrous one-world government, where will the dissenters go? The answer is: nowhere. And that’s one reason why globalism is inherently totalitarian. (Though if we survive long enough as a species maybe one day we will open the Solar System and restore the escape valve of the frontier.
Comment by Polly Mathick — February 17, 2025 @ 05:53
There’s a lot more at N.S. Lyon’s site. I had to force myself to only quote enough to interest readers without stealing the thunder of the full essay.
Another is the one that Canada’s globalist class of political leaders (all of the federal parties except Maxime Bernier’s PPC) suddenly discovered a few weeks back: if you spend sixty years denigrating your national history and heritage — to the point of calling it all racist and even “genocidal” and denying the concept of there even being a Canadian nation — it’s hard to rally the troops when your biggest trading partner starts rattling the sabre over your manifest security and defence failings.
Comment by Nicholas — February 17, 2025 @ 10:22
This is a nicely written and worthwhile piece on a period of time I am very familiar with.
MOST of the pre-Baby Boom era teachers were thoughtful, knowledgeable, and relatively conservative in both politics and their lives.
They got pushed out as “stodgy” and out-of-date by the ones that flooded into the teaching profession in the mid-to-late 1960s. By the time my younger brother and sister were in high school, it was not uncommon for TEACHERS to smoke dope with their students. My brother reminded me that he had a “class” in wine-making, as a junior. He did enjoy learning about the chemistry and biology of it, and put it to use later in his life.
But, I know such cr@p was generally hidden from the parental taxpayers. That’s where the internet and X.com have been helpful – sweeping out Leftist enclaves, and skewering them on their own actions.
Comment by Linda S Fox — February 17, 2025 @ 09:30
My middle school teachers were mostly first-year teachers straight out of teacher’s college and they all wanted to be the stereotypical “cool teacher who can relate to the kids”. Long hair, weird clothing (although the male teachers still had to wear jackets and ties, they were psychedelic paisleys and neon stripes and whatever else they could find at the hippy markets). A few of them actually were good teachers, but most of them seemed to be more interested in encouraging us to be little hippies. In the suburbs. Let’s just say that it didn’t take. Going on to high school where most of the teachers were still “old school” was rather like being dumped out of a luke-warm bath into a freezing cold pond.
Comment by Nicholas — February 17, 2025 @ 10:15