Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West

by R.R. Reno

contrary to its mythology, the rebellion of ’68 was not revolutionary. The attacks on traditional authority led to liberations of many sorts, but they enhanced the therapies of disenchantment, clearing away older loyalties or devotions that impeded the expansion of market exchange and its reliance on spontaneous order. The women’s movement freed women to pursue their own desires without the hindrance of older norms of motherhood and wifely duty. They entered labor markets in record numbers. Gay liberation was supposed to overturn the bourgeois order, but in fact the gay lifestyle has become the ne plus ultra of discerning taste and self-oriented consumption. An entire generation of high-achieving young Americans has been trained in multiculturalism, hard and soft. They slot seamlessly into jobs as management consultants, investment bankers, and Silicon Valley technologists. The literary critic Terry Eagleton sees the consistency of what seems contradictory. Postmodernism’s “nervousness of such concepts as truth has alarmed the bishops and charmed the business executives, just as its compulsion to place words like ‘reality’ in scare quotes unsettles the pious Bürger in the bosom of his family but is music to his ears in the advertising agency.”30 Del Noce’s explanation for the paradoxical role of postwar radicalism has many facets, but the basic insight is straightforward. At every juncture the rebellions sought inspiration “under,” not “above.”