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

by R.R. Reno

This consensus in favor of disenchantment led to a psychological ambivalence in the minds of most educated Americans in the 1950s. They accepted their social roles as necessary. The old norms reasserted themselves with a special vigor after the war as people sought the relief of “normalcy” after two decades of economic and political tension. But at the same time, the postwar consensus was training them to regard “questioning,” “spontaneity,” and modes of anarchic self-expression as pathways to a more humane and just world. The 1960s were in fundamental continuity with the 1950s. The student radicals of the 1960s were socialized into the postwar consensus as children. In a sense, their rebellions expressed the conventional wisdom of the era, carrying forward the logic of an open society to its next and fuller stage. The late 1960s was a time of turmoil. Yet the liberal establishment soon digested the radical demands, eventually adopting them as its own and recasting these challenges to “the system” as new forms of the openness that it had been encouraging all along.