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

by R.R. Reno

But Buckley was a public intellectual trying to persuade the American people to adopt the views he thought best served the commonweal. As early as God and Man at Yale, he intuited, at least in part, that he could engage in public life only if he adapted his arguments to the growing postwar consensus in favor of the open society. That meant no strong gods—no large truths, no common loves, and no commanding loyalties. Thus the appeal to pluralism and other themes of openness—not, for Buckley, as ends in themselves but as a tactic to give conservatives a place at the table. Over time, the tactic became a strategy, and in American conservatism the open society and free economy overwhelmed whatever was solid and permanent. Arguments from truth became arguments from meaning—or arguments from “viewpoint diversity” or some other rhetoric of weakening drawn from the postwar consensus. On the American right that process was largely complete by the time George H. W. Bush sang the praises of open trade, open borders, and open minds to the gathered delegates of the United Nations.