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Where do we go after Donald Trump?
The question has divided the right. When it comes to charting the correct course, a book published during the president's first administration is timelier than ever: R.R. Reno’s "The Return of the Strong Gods."
'The perverse gods of blood, soil, and identity cannot be overcome with the open-society therapies of weakening,' writes Reno.
MAGA 2.0?
One faction of the right appears keen to continue delivering on the promise of Trump’s “Golden Age” by leaning further into a muscular and nationalistic conservatism.
Liberal interlopers and other ideological refugees with forward operating bases situated right-of-center have been working ardently to politically neutralize this camp ahead of the 2028 election, smearing, for instance, some of those in Vice President JD Vance’s orbit as “woke right.”
Such liberal saboteurs are right to be fearful of this camp, as its dominance — affirmed by a Vance win — would signal the MAGA movement wasn’t a sprint but a marathon.
Libertarian libs
The second camp, whose potential champion in the 2028 primary field appears to be Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), is keen both to act as though the populist upheaval of the 2010s hadn’t irreversibly changed the game and to slink back onto the rhetorically conservative, libertarian-minded side of the liberal coin.
This is the politics that has purchased cultural and economic deregulation, a ruinous series of foreign entanglements, a demographic crisis, and a low-trust society marked by an anemic sense of “we.”
The old guard in both parties — those who’ve long railed against and/or sought to undermine the MAGA agenda — would doubtless regard the success and empowerment of this camp as a godsend.
Early polling data provide strong indications, however, that there is little appetite among likely Republican primary voters for a return to a George W. Bush-era style of Republican leadership. The reason is perhaps best explained in a book first published six years ago.
Weak loves vs. strong gods
In “Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West,” R.R. Reno, a political philosopher and editor of First Things magazine, discusses both what was behind and what is ahead of the recent nationalist and populist uprisings in the West.
The book, which Reno has touted as an “essay in the politics of imagination,” is an engrossing elaboration on an article he penned years earlier detailing the full-spectrum campaign spearheaded by classical and progressive liberals after the Second World War to "disenchant and desacralize public life” and to produce an “open society” wherein the “strong gods” — the “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies” — could inevitably be neutralized and/or replaced by “weak loves” such as relativism, diversity, and tolerance.
Reno suggests that the reasoning behind this project of societal opening and weakening was that earlier in the 20th century, strong gods had supposedly rendered the masses easily manipulable by demagogues and set the stage for those totalitarian regimes that warred against humanity.
The general theory of society underpinning the postwar consensus became, according to Reno, “characterized by a fundamental judgment: whatever is strong — strong loves and strong truths — leads to oppression, while liberty and prosperity require the reign of weak loves and weak truths.”
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Making monsters
This, Reno insists, was a catastrophic overreaction.
In their campaign to water down dark loves, the war-traumatized liberal elites of yesteryear also watered down the powerful loves and intense loyalties that hold Western civilization together and supply a sense of belonging, purpose, and solidarity — such as family, nation, religion, and transcendent truth.
Reno notes that this campaign not only produced a dysfunctional society but incubated some of the very dark loves it was meant to destroy.
“The perverse gods of blood, soil, and identity cannot be overcome with the open-society therapies of weakening,” writes Reno. “On the contrary, they are encouraged by multiculturalism and the reductive techniques of critique. In its present decadent form, the postwar consensus makes white nationalism an entirely cogent position.”
“We cannot forestall the return of the debasing gods by reapplying the open-society imperatives. False loves can be remedied only be true ones,” adds Reno.
'A language of love'
While the postwar liberal regime enjoyed great success in producing monsters and in disenchanting, disorienting, deracinating, and rendering homeless those guns-or-religion deplorables for whom America’s detached elites still brazenly express contempt, its success karmically set the stage for a popular yearning for anchorage, belonging, and a sense of “we,” which in turn prompted a rejection of the postwar consensus.
That rejection has manifested in various ways but most clearly in the rejection of the open society and its possessing forces of weakening that occurred on Nov. 8, 2016.
During his first term and again over the past several months, Trump has pursued reconsolidation and protection as opposed to deregulation and openness and delivered significant results along the way.
Those who’d seek to steer the right back toward the open society and sell voters on a rebrand of the postwar consensus stand a better chance of sweeping waves back into the sea.
While well-positioned to lead, those in the first camp may nevertheless want to heed Reno’s caution about the open society: “This project cannot be opposed solely on political grounds, as if nationalism alone can overcome the ‘destiny of weakening.’ We need strengthening motifs across the board.”
“Our task, therefore, is to restore public life in the West by developing a language of love and a vision of the ‘we’ that befits our dignity and appeals to our reason as well as our hearts,” wrote Reno.
“We must attend to the strong gods who come from above and animate the best of our traditions. Only that kind of leadership will forestall the return of the dark gods who rise up from below.”
How anti-fascism became the West’s civil religion
At the end of World War II, much of the West stood in ruins. Europe’s great powers were shattered, millions were dead, and political leaders searched for a framework that would prevent another civilizational collapse. What emerged was what R.R. Reno later described as the “postwar consensus”: an elite agreement to reorganize Western society around a single overriding moral imperative — never again allow a figure like Adolf Hitler to rise.
Anti-fascism became the West’s civil religion. This was understandable in the immediate aftermath of the war. Nazi Germany’s atrocities demanded more than mere condemnation. But over time, anti-fascism ceased to function as a historical judgment and instead hardened into a permanent moral framework. In the process, it began to distort politics, hollow out institutions, and undermine the concept of the nation itself.
The longer conservatives wait to make reasonable corrections, the more radical — and likely authoritarian — the eventual correction will be.
Anti-fascism served a second, less acknowledged function. The United States and its allies had partnered with the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler. That alliance was strategically necessary but morally grotesque. Communist regimes starved millions, persecuted Christians, liquidated entire classes, and carried out ethnic cleansing on a scale easily outstripping the Nazis.
To sustain the moral legitimacy of the postwar order, Nazism had to remain the singular, unrivaled evil of modern history. Any serious moral accounting risked an intolerable conclusion: that the West had joined forces with a regime at least as monstrous as the one it defeated.
Because communism retained elite defenders in academia, media, and politics, fascism became the only ideology that could be universally condemned. Conservatives opposed both, but liberals embraced or excused communism. Anti-fascism thus became the sole moral language the entire ruling class could share.
That imbalance persists. Public figures openly describe themselves as socialists or communists without consequence. Communist symbols appear on clothing and merchandise, sometimes celebrated as ironic rebellion. Fascism alone remains socially radioactive.
The power of taboo
This asymmetry transformed the definition of fascism into a weapon.
Anything directly associated with Nazism became forbidden, and soon anything vaguely adjacent followed. Online platforms remove or demonetize historical content for displaying Nazi imagery, even in documentary contexts. History itself must be censored to comply with the taboo.
Meanwhile, symbols of communist regimes that murdered tens of millions provoke little more than mild disapproval. A guy wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt or a hammer and sickle may earn a sneer. Wearing a swastika ends careers — even lives.
Absolute stigma confers absolute power. Control the definition of fascism, and you control the moral boundary of acceptable thought.
Mission creep as strategy
The left quickly grasped this dynamic and began expanding the category. Traditional social institutions were recast as latent fascism. Academic works such as Theodor Adorno’s “The Authoritarian Personality” asserted that family structure, masculinity, Christianity, national identity, capitalism, and law and order were markers of authoritarian psychology.
Over time, the list expanded from Nazi symbols to Confederate flags, Christian imagery, art styles, gestures, numbers, and ordinary behaviors. Organizations like the ADL and Southern Poverty Law Center labeled everything from physical fitness to drinking milk and the “OK” hand sign as potential indicators of extremism.
Conservatives often mock the more absurd examples, but many accepted the earlier ones. Borders became suspect. So did preferring some immigrant groups over others. Explicit national identity became a huge red flag. Christianity as a political foundation became authoritarian.
Anti-fascism succeeded not because it was coherent, but because it was unchallengeable.
A society without tools
The result is a civilization that has locked away the tools required for its own survival.
A functional society requires cohesion: shared language, culture, norms, and traditions. Not everyone must conform fully, but enough must for assimilation to mean something. When every mechanism of cohesion is labeled fascist, cohesion becomes impossible.
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Crime, educational collapse, family breakdown, falling birth rates, and social fragmentation are not impossible to fix. The corrective measures are well understood. But they have been rendered politically illegitimate because they’re all somehow hallmarks of fascism. Conservatives often avoid them out of fear — or worse, oppose them in the name of anti-fascism itself.
This does not prevent authoritarianism. It guarantees it.
What remains
If the present trajectory continues, only two outcomes remain.
One is an increasingly authoritarian managerial state that governs a disintegrating society through surveillance, regulation, and bureaucratic coercion. The other is a decisive leader who smashes the glass labeled “fascism” and uses the forbidden tools outright.
The longer conservatives wait to make reasonable corrections, the more radical — and likely authoritarian — the eventual correction will be.
Nazism was evil, and opposing it was obviously right. But elevating anti-fascism into the West’s single, unquestionable religious principle has been catastrophic. It has stripped societies of the means to govern themselves prudently and ensured that when the correction finally comes, it will be far harsher than anything its most ardent anti-fascists claim to fear.
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