End of an Era

The election results in November were remarkable. Donald Trump’s victory was decisive. And it was impressive. He overcame the nearly universal opposition of establishment voices and institutions. An establishment enforces norms and standards in public life. It determines what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. Trump’s ability to stiff-arm his establishment critics and gain a majority of the popular vote—in the face of their vociferous and unstinting smears, censure, and lawfare—suggests that his triumph foretells something far greater than the usual change of parties in power.

In my 2019 book, Return of the Strong Gods, I argue that we are finally reaching the end of the twentieth century. 1914 marked the beginning of a senseless conflict that consumed millions of lives in inconclusive battles. Communist revolution in Russia led to the deaths of millions more. In 1939, an even more destructive war began, one marked by indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets and haunted by genocide. Jews use the word Shoah to refer to the Nazi genocide. It is a Hebrew word meaning “disaster,” “catastrophe,” “ruin.” One can rightly say that Auschwitz came at the end of an era of ruin. The decades from 1914 to 1945 were dark with calamity. The first half of the twentieth century was a civilizational Shoah.

In reaction, after World War II, the West settled upon an American-led open-society consensus. It blamed the disaster on authoritarianism and other forms of over-consolidated authority. Against these perils, the open-society consensus emphasized anti-totalitarianism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and anti-racism. After the Soviet Union collapsed, this consensus was deemed victorious, and it became even more powerful.

Our establishment remains the custodian of the open-society consensus and the enforcer of its anti– imperatives. In the summer of 2020, the contagion of Black Lives Matter swept through every major institution, not because black Americans were subject to discrimination, but rather because anti-racism had long ago become a bedrock imperative, a cause always to be championed. And one was never, never to be accused of lacking vigilance in opposition to racism. Early in his term as president, Joe Biden denounced electoral reform in Georgia as “Jim Crow 2.0.” In so doing, he was sure that he stood on high ground. And he was confident that such rhetoric would score points for him in his battle against Republican opposition.

Biden was born in 1942. He came of age in the postwar era. As a young senator, he was surrounded by older men who had fought against German fascism and Japanese militarism. It’s not surprising, therefore, that in his 2024 State of the Union address he reached for what he imagined were the most powerful rhetorical weapons in the political arsenal. He evoked the specter of Adolf Hitler, and he reminded his listeners of America’s epic battle against fascism. He recalled Abraham Lincoln and the struggle to overcome slavery. Those dangers have reemerged, Biden warned. Vladimir Putin (whom he named in his address) and Trump (to whom he gestured without naming) are on the march. “Freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and overseas, at the very same time.”

The implication was clear. Our president would lead us into an election in which we, the American people, would be called to affirm freedom, democracy, the Constitution, indeed, decency itself—and reject the standard-bearer of a racist, sexist, fascist darkness that lurks in the shadows of American society.

Freedom versus fascism? All that is good and true versus Hitler? My synopsis makes Biden’s rhetoric sound more than slightly mad. And it was. Weren’t voters more concerned about inflation, immigration, and endless foreign wars than by nightmares of Hitler returning to power? But the truth of the matter is that madness reigns. Our establishment seems unable to resist transforming an early twenty-first-century populist challenge to establishment power into a Manichean struggle against evil. Take a look at The Atlantic. This fall, tens of thousands of words were devoted to depicting Trump as a political bogeyman. Anne Applebaum turned the volume up to eleven, associating the New York real estate developer with every dictator of the twentieth century (“Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini,” The Atlantic, October 18, 2024). Her breathless warnings amounted to a self-parody of a way of speaking that has been all too common in the last eight years.

The French writer Renaud Camus has written about the role Hitler plays in our collective imagination. (See “The Second Career of Adolf Hitler” in the recently published collection of Camus’s work, Enemy of Disaster: Selected Political Writings.) In the November issue of First Things, Alec Ryrie chronicled the way in which the West lost its collective conception of pure goodness and defaulted to a consensus about absolute evil (“The End of the Age of Hitler”). Both writers note that the German dictator may have died in a Berlin bunker in the final days of World War II, but he haunts the West, alive as the embodiment of civilizational disaster. In our political culture, the name of Hitler serves as (in Camus’s words) “an absolute weapon of language, as its supreme fulmination, the atomic bomb of maledictions.”

What’s striking about November 5, 2024, is that the atomic bomb did not explode. The supreme fulmination had no effect. The establishment rattled on like a machine gun about Trump’s threat to “our democracy,” but it was shooting blanks.

The open-society consensus has economic dimensions that dovetail with the cultural project of breaking down boundaries and creating a more inclusive society. As I detail in Return of the Strong Gods, free-market advocates made a moral case against socialism by arguing that markets coordinate buyers and sellers without relying on coercion. After the end of the Cold War, our establishment fixed on this promise. Free trade knits the world together, we were told. Freedom, peace, and prosperity flow from capitalism.

Michael Novak was an exemplary spokesman for the moral and spiritual benefits of free markets. His seminal book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982), fused the anti-authoritarian thrust of the open-society consensus with the dynamism and adventuresome spirit of entrepreneurial capitalism. Novak recognized the importance of stable and unchanging moral truths, as well as the indispensable anchor of religious authority. He was not a proponent of openness without limits. But his emphasis fell on the need to crack open over-consolidated and coercive societies and thus release the creative potential of the human condition.

In the early years of the twenty-first century, our establishment supported a left–right open-society consensus. Democrats embraced economic globalization, the foundations for which were laid during the Clinton administration. Republicans accommodated the cultural transformations wrought by the sexual revolution and echoed the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion. In effect, the left was pro-capitalist, while promising to mitigate the excesses of capitalism through welfare spending. The right was pro-liberation, while promising to protect social conservatives by defending religious liberty.

The open society of diversity, equity, and inclusion is a utopian ideal, as is the open economy and its dream of the frictionless free movement of capital, goods, and labor. The ideal of a life without limits and a world without borders is always under threat from dark forces: racism, xenophobia, and close-mindedness; nationalism, isolationism, and protectionism.

Our establishment has been trumpeting these dangers in recent years, but to little effect. The reason is simple. A decade ago, a plurality of Americans (and citizens of other countries in the West) became aware that they were victims of the open-society consensus, not beneficiaries. The free movement of capital and goods in the globalized economy had undermined working-class prosperity. Immigration disrupted cultural continuity. The erosion of marriage and the decline in religious observance had made life less stable and emotionally secure. The censorship regime, created to squelch dissent from the open-society consensus, annoyed and alienated many.

The recent election indicates that this plurality has grown to a majority, and for good reason. As I wrote two months ago, our greatest challenges flow from the excesses of the open-society consensus (“Our Problem Is Disintegration,” November 2024). Many commentators note that Trump enjoyed significant support from voters because he called for rigorous enforcement of our southern border. No doubt that is true. But a sensible observer must wonder why the border had become so porous in the first place. Other commentators claim that an ad faulting Kamala Harris for transgender extremism gained Trump crucial support in the final weeks of his campaign. Again, in all likelihood that observation is true. And, again, one asks: Why would an entire political party allow itself to become hostage to such an unpopular cause?

Note well, both issues concern borders and boundaries, one between countries, one between the sexes. Our establishment, wedded to the open-society consensus, cannot endorse strong boundaries. To do so would be to court a dangerous and xenophobic nationalism (which is to say, fascism)—or transphobia, a gateway illness to homophobia, which is in turn linked to racism, anti-Semitism, and hatred of the “other.” In short, at this late stage of the open-society consensus, it’s either open borders or Hitler, “gender-affirming care” or Jim Crow 2.0.

Once again, I’ve framed Trump’s electoral victory in ways that seem absurdly simplistic. Either open borders or Hitler? “Nobody talks that way,” some are certain to say. They’re wrong. In the last few years I’ve heard the name of Hitler and charges of fascism in the public square more often than in all the previous decades of my life combined. This frenzy of accusations, all aiming to root out long-past evils, bespeaks the senescence of the open-society consensus. It may have served good purposes two or three generations ago, but today its effects are destructive.

In Return of the Strong Gods, I dwell on Karl Popper’s 1945 book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, which exercised great influence in its day. I’ve entertained the notion of writing a book to oppose Popper: The Love Society and Its Enemies. Love is jealous. It seeks to defend, protect, and promote the beloved. To this end, it establishes boundaries and enforces borders. It defends thresholds and fences altars. And when loves are shared, solidarity is strengthened. Put simply, love makes a home.

Our establishment, animated by the open-society consensus, has mounted a sustained assault on love. We are not to love our country, for to do so makes us racists, fascists, and nationalists. We are not to love our civilization, for to do so makes us xenophobes. We are not to love even the truth, for doing so paves the way for authoritarianism. (Karl Popper makes this argument.) And we’re certainly not to love God, the paradigmatic totalitarian who demands our devotion, heart, mind, and soul.

This assault on love has done great damage. It’s long time past for us to reject the open-society consensus and retire Adolf Hitler from public life.