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

by R.R. Reno

As I will show, the postwar left fixed its attention on moral freedom and cultural deregulation, seeing them as natural extensions of the anti-authoritarian imperative, while the postwar right focused on economic freedom and market deregulation for similar anti-totalitarian reasons. As the long twentieth century ends, this unified thrust is easier to discern, not least because the establishment left and right are closing ranks to denounce populism.

Solidarity is a ministry of the strong gods; the “we” is their gift. But the members of our leadership class cannot recognize the crisis of solidarity that threatens the West and fuels populism. They compulsively refocus attention on the problems the postwar consensus was constructed to fight: fascism, racism, conformism, and the authoritarian personality. Mention the erosion of the middle class, and someone is sure to observe that concerns about renewing solidarity amount to dangerous nostalgia. “The 1950s was an era of white male solidarity,” she’ll say. Someone else will object, “How can you say that lack of solidarity is our greatest problem when transgender people are still marginalized?” And if your interlocutor went to a fancy-pants university, you’re likely to be chided for being “logocentric,” “heteronormative,” or afraid of difference.

The Manichean tendency of the postwar consensus, which insists that either it must dominate or fascism and racism will return, blinds our leadership class to the realities of the twenty-first century and poisons our politics with an all-or-nothing moralism that is as self-serving as it is destructive. These days, the rhetoric of anti-fascism, and even that of anti-racism, has become a cynical way to discredit those who challenge the supremacy of our elites.

The mentality I encountered in that issue of the Financial Times—horror and disbelief rather than analysis and reflection—is widespread. The power of the postwar consensus makes it nearly impossible for educated people to accept its contingency—and its superannuation. Our leaders are profoundly loyal to the twentieth century, which is why my young friend’s plea for permission to live in the twenty-first is achingly urgent.

Popper knows that there will always be “state-worshippers” and other proponents of “collectivism.” They are the cause of the world’s troubles. Such people must be dealt with firmly; anyone who relishes his homeland and its history is a “racialist,” according to Popper. The vice affects more than the German people. It is a present danger in every nation. One can see how Popper anticipates our own era and its paranoid rhetoric. If someone worries about the effects of immigration on his nation’s culture, he is xenophobic. If he organizes a political party that seeks to restrict immigration, he is a fascist.

Therein lies the danger. A metaphysically ambitious philosophy leads to “medieval authoritarianism,” with its hierarchical culture of command and submission.9 Popper sees any form of transcendence as implicitly totalitarian. The recognition of something higher than the individual sets up a suprapersonal authority. If I can know what it means to be human, then I have a standard by which to judge individual behavior, and it is just such a standard, Popper argues, that is characteristic of a closed society. Long before the invention of words such as “logocentrism,” Popper denounced strong truth-claims as threats to freedom and midwives of totalitarianism.

Against the possibility of metaphysical knowledge, Popper endorses the nominalism of William of Ockham, the fourteenth-century Franciscan who argued that concepts such as “human nature” are not essences but merely linguistic conventions (nomen, “name,” thus “nominalism”). By Popper’s way of thinking, a “methodological nominalism” must play an important role in the reconstruction of Europe.10 Its anti-metaphysical linguistic conventionalism, which prevents us from imagining we can grasp the truth with concepts, encourages modesty with respect to truth, a disposition we need if we are to develop an open society.

The key to social progress is the restriction of truth-claims to those that are falsifiable, Popper insists, tossing out nearly all of what the West has regarded as religiously, culturally, and morally foundational. Thus he devotes a great deal of The Open Society to harsh criticisms of Plato and the metaphysical tradition more broadly. When informed social scientists are allowed to test their proposals in “free and open debate,” then and only then can we make social progress, improving the material conditions of our fellow citizens, perfecting democracy, and expanding freedom.

This seems to raise an important question: What is freedom for in a liberal, open society? Historically, the West has appealed to metaphysics and religion for answers. Popper is aware of this question, and he gives an existentialist answer of the sort that Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and others would make popular in the early 1950s. We must accept the “strain” of freedom, the existential tension that comes from knowing that we must decide for ourselves the ends our freedom is to serve. It is up to us to define the truths that we need. As Popper emphasizes in italics, “Although history has no meaning, we can give it meaning.”12 This self-chosen path will require courage, but it is unavoidable, Popper argues. The very truth about reality itself depends upon us: “Facts as such have no meaning; they gain it only through our decisions.”13

Nietzsche thought it would take superhuman strength for someone self-consciously to give himself his own truth. Only a strong god—an Übermensch—can mint truths rather than discern and obey them. This is certainly not what Popper wants. His goal is modesty, not self-assertion. He therefore hedges, writing about “meaning” instead of “truth.” In this he is characteristic of the postwar era, which is deflationary when it comes to truth, not relativistic in a thoroughgoing way. Value-free facts alone constitute the domain of truth in Popper’s universe. Whatever we make of them amounts to “meaning.” We are the sources of our “value” terms, which are distinct from facts and truth. Knowing this to be the case should make us modest in asserting our “values,” which are only our opinions, after all. Popper thus neutralizes the strong god of truth, keeping it narrowly scientific. When we need a guiding and commanding language with which to govern our lives and set standards for society, we appeal to the weak god of “meaning.”

Like so much else in The Open Society and Its Enemies, the shift from truth to meaning is required by the Manichean political choice that the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century seemed to press upon the West: either an open society or Auschwitz. In the face of such a choice, the desire for transcendent truth, once considered healthy, becomes a dangerous temptation. According to Popper, the quest for a higher truth “is born of fear, for it shrinks from realizing that we bear the ultimate responsibility even for the standards we choose.”14 Since we often cannot endure the “strain” of freedom, we are tempted to invent truths and pledge our troth to them, setting ourselves on the road back to totalitarianism. The only way to avoi...

Popper, perhaps more than Conant, was aware of the self-contradiction of this counsel. The intellectual foundations of the open society must not go too deep or exercise too powerful a hold over our imaginations lest the intrinsically authoritarian metaphysical tradition be awakened. The open society must be intellectually circumspect and self-denying, even when it comes to defending the sanctity of the individual, which the open society exists to promote. That sanctity must be asserted, but it cannot be defended in metaphysical terms.

Clearing the ground with his critique, he then occupies it with his own temporizing rhetoric, which alternates between fact-based truth and self-chosen meaning. In an open society, reason restricts itself to pragmatic, procedural, and data-driven analysis and argument, supplemented when necessary with “meaning” and other ambiguous terms. In this way, Popper hopes to encourage an enduring but non-metaphysical loyalty to the ideals of the open society.

Capitalism and technology, he argued, release modern man from his traditional social bonds, leaving him homeless and atomized—a condition similar to Popper’s “strain” of freedom. Modern man, Schlesinger observes, is vulnerable to authoritarians who promise to restore national purpose or reestablish social solidarity around a collectivist economic model such as socialism.

Belief in a new, post-ideological way of life was widespread after World War II. Social scientists and psychologists such as Abraham Maslow, Karen Horney, Rollo May, and others may not have read Popper, but his ideas were in the air, and they developed his themes, casting them as timeless, empirical truths rather than historically conditioned responses to the crisis of the West in the first half of the twentieth century. They did not have the dangers of fascism directly in view. Instead, they were concerned about the bourgeois culture of middle-class America, which was thought to constrict the full expression of individuality. The middle-class milieu of the 1950s was defined as “conventionality”—the pyschosocial analogue to Popper’s “closed society”—and deemed an impediment to personal growth and authenticity. To counter these consolidating pressures, the influential psychologists of the era articulated the therapeutic forms of an “open society.” At the same time, the new pop psychology of “growth” and self-realization, following Popper, remained scrupulously anti-metaphysical, not explicitly but as part of the larger and increasingly powerful postwar consensus. In the postwar explosion of the literature of personal growth and self-discovery, a new therapeutic search for meaning supplanted the classical search for truth.

At first glance, it seems obvious that politics without principles and personal growth without determinate ends are by definition open and capacious, for there is no basis on which to exclude particular ideas or initiatives. Consensus liberals like Schlesinger congratulated themselves for embodying that very openness. But in the main, consensus liberalism since 1945 has punished dissent, which it has consistently deplored as signaling a return of illiberalism, fascism, and other pre-1945 evils. The heightened rhetoric of anti-fascism should not surprise us. As Popper makes clear, pragmatism in politics—the end of strong truth-claims in public life—produces paradoxically powerful political and cultural imperatives. It requires denying principled political arguments and policies. Championing authenticity in personal life demands rejecting the authority of traditional moral norms. You can’t lead young people to the “post-conventional” promised land without condemnations of “conventionalism.”

The “never-again” imperative imposes an overriding and unending duty to banish the traditionalists, who are loyal to the strong gods that are thought to have caused so much suffering and death. As the students rioting in Paris in 1968 insisted, “It is forbidden to forbid.” Those who forbid must be censured and silenced—for the sake of an open society.

Pragmatism and Popper’s “social technology” shorn of metaphysics cannot tell us, which means we cannot maintain a liberal society solely on the basis of fact-based social policy and a consensus about “openness.” We need solid convictions about what it means to be human so that we can discern what to be open to, for we cannot be open to everything. After all, the whole point of postwar reconstruction was to close off the possibility of a repetition of the catastrophe that wrecked the West between 1914 and 1945.

Too great an emphasis on truth, they presumed, leads to the ideological mindset and thus to incipient totalitarianism. An open society must be true to openness above all, not to truth.

They did not use Popper’s closed-versus-open terminology, favoring instead the distinction between the “prejudiced” mentality, which makes one hostile to those of different races and religions, and the “unprejudiced,” liberal mentality, which fosters a more welcoming attitude. The resulting volume, published in 1950, proclaims in its title their diagnosis of the great evil that World War II was fought to overcome: The Authoritarian Personality.

The Authoritarian Personality is a long, sprawling report, full of charts, correlations, and interview transcripts. A great deal of the analysis depends upon a now-discredited Freudian theory of psychological development. The survey questions are tendentious and today would not pass muster in an undergraduate class in social psychology. But seventy years later, these shortcomings are of no importance to us. What’s striking is how familiar the analysis sounds. When the authors synthesize their results, they hit the notes of the emerging postwar consensus. The potential fascist is an American who was raised in a hierarchical family with black-and-white rules. His outlook on life is characterized by “conventionality” and “rigidity.” He engages in right-versus-wrong thinking that supports “the dichotomous conception of sex roles and of moral values.”20 This potential fascist has a “prejudiced outlook,” which conforms to the “ethnocentrist” mentality of the closed society. But the fascist mentality need not predominate. We have a different personality type in our midst, the authors observe. “There is a pattern characterized chiefly by affectionate, basically egalitarian, and permissive interpersonal relationships.”21 This personality type exhibits “greater flexibility” and adopts a more accepting disposition toward others. It embodies the virtues of an open society.

There can be no substantive end or purpose to life. After all, someone who defines an end or purpose for man becomes a black-and-white thinker, a potential fascist. Like Arthur Schlesinger and the consensus liberals, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality rely on warm gestures and open-ended ideals—“behaving realistically,” achieving “self-insight,” and “being fully aware.” Such phrases, right out of Popper’s lexicon, are versions of the postwar rhetoric that develops open-ended, fuzzy substitutes for words such as virtue and truth.

The socialist, whether nationalist or internationalist, is concerned with the “general welfare” or “common interests,” a way of thinking Hayek calls “collectivism.” The collectivist imagines society to be governed by powerful forces that merge individuals into a single “we.” The purpose of the state is to serve the higher ends of the “we,” to which the interests of the individual must be subordinated. This pattern of thinking about social and political life, argues Hayek, characterized Hitler’s race-based fascism as well as communism’s class-based totalitarianism, an analysis that made The Road to Serfdom influential in the postwar era.

According to Hayek, collectivism stands in contrast to the signal Western insight, beginning in the Renaissance, that the individual is the sacred center of culture. An individual’s desires, needs, and interests are the only social realities available for rational analysis, which must serve as the basis of responsible statesmanship. It is individualism, which he sometimes calls liberalism, that provides the proper social philosophy for those who wish to defend the West, and individualism stands opposed to collectivism.

Since the basic principle of individualism is individual liberty, we must resist anything that compels our choices, even holding at arm’s length the compelling character of solid and significant moral truths. “There is nothing in the basic principles of liberalism to make it a stationary creed,” Hayek writes.27 The essence of individualism is the freedom of every individual to be “the ultimate judge of his ends.”28 I must have the liberty to decide what is good or bad for me. By “good or bad,” the economist Hayek undoubtedly means increasing or reducing my utility rather than congruent with morality or not. Nevertheless, in a number of passages, Hayek, like Popper, treats metaphysical realities—the social bond, moral truth—as threats to the individual. He, too, advocates a severe intellectual asceticism. Only the individual is real; notions such as the general interest and common good are, at best, placeholder terms for aggregations of individual interests and welfare. At their worse they are bewitching idols that become sources of tyranny.

Hayek’s metaphysical minimalism stands in contrast to collectivism, which presumes “the existence of a complete ethical code in which all the different human values are allotted their due place.”29 A social philosophy of this sort marshals political and social pressure to bring individuals into conformity with what is purportedly good for us. If we allow ourselves to think in terms of the common good—or any substantive good—we are on the slippery slope to socialism and collectivism, the road to serfdom. Although he does not say it explicitly, Hayek implies that there is always greater freedom for the individual when the social consensus about right and wrong is weakened. The prerequisite of cultural deregulation and the reign of the weak gods was already evident in John Stuart Mill’s defense of individualism, On Liberty, published nearly a century earlier.

Hayek, by contrast, offers a thoroughgoing criticism of the technocratic approach. He places Keynesian economists and progressive social scientists into the collectivist camp. By his way of thinking, the scientific planner—the “social technologist,” to use Popper’s term—is perhaps worse than the old-fashioned autocrat, for in traditional, pre-modern societies those in power lacked the technical means to control individuals. Today, however, there is a real danger that planners will use social science to design a top-to-bottom mechanism to govern society on supposedly rational principles.

The marketplace is the paradigmatic instance of this kind of order, he argues, which is why Hayek became a hero for postwar conservatives in the United States. Individuals in free-market economies enter into a rule-based framework that enforces procedural fairness and evenhanded dealings. But these rules are formal and remain agnostic about the ends individuals seek. In a well-ordered framework, the price mechanism allows buyers to find sellers, and a mutually beneficial exchange takes place. Over the longer term, firms are established, individuals enter into employment contracts, and supply chains develop, resulting in a harmonious social order without the totalitarian temptation of state-sponsored planning. Hayek recognized that rules are necessary for stable, open, and fair markets. But the object of the rulemaking should be to secure the greatest possible individual freedom in competitive markets.

Buckley was not criticized for his free-market views, nor was he censured for his traditional beliefs about the divinity of Christ. What irked the liberal establishment was his assertion of these views and beliefs as solid truths. One reviewer insinuated that the book was colored by Buckley’s “Roman Catholic point of view,” which is based on authority, unlike Yale’s Protestant heritage, which relies upon individual conscience. Another reviewer invoked the specter of totalitarianism: “The methods he proposes for his alma mater are precisely those employed in Italy, Germany, and Russia.” Still another wrote, “The book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face.”

The snide comments about his Catholicism, allusions to the Ku Klux Klan, and accusations that he was a fascist—by the mid-1970s these rhetorical excesses had become embarrassing for liberals. It was a reminder that the anti-anticommunists of the McCarthy era often trafficked in the kind of defamation they condemned, a foreshadowing of today’s punitive political correctness.

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.

Multiculturalism extends well beyond higher education, usually under the name of “diversity.” It is tempting, however, to overestimate its influence. Today, the great books of the Western tradition are more neglected than critiqued. In the 1960s, literary critics such as Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling commanded wide audiences. The graduates of the expanded postwar college and university system in those years looked to novels, and even poetry, for insight into the meaning of their lives. The cultural scene is very different in the twenty-first century. Few recent college graduates can name a living poet. We now turn to social psychology, brain science, evolutionary theory, and economics to understand our lives and our society. Science provides the tools to diagnose problems and formulate solutions, much as Popper had hoped. Devoid of transcendence, these ways of thinking are materialist, not in the moral sense of encouraging greed and consumption (though some do that too) but in the metaphysical sense of reducing human reality to instincts and biological processes. Why read Jane Austen when it’s obvious that economic theory provides a more objective and reliable guide to the dating and marriage marketplace?

Over the last two generations, economists have developed rigorous methods for analyzing social interactions not immediately economic in nature, often shedding useful light on the subtle play of interests. Gary Becker modeled marriage and domestic life in economic terms. Public choice theory frames the political process in terms of self-interested transactions. It seems odd, therefore, that economists are not modeling the educational “market conditions” that have allowed multiculturalism to displace the old tradition-and-experiment approach. Why no theories about the ideological marketplace in higher education, or for that matter in corporate America, which has adopted the language of multiculturalism as well? On closer examination, the neglect is not so strange, for it accords with the postwar consensus. According to Popper and Hayek, an anti-totalitarian culture requires sidelining the strong convictions that arouse powerful loyalties. The Harvard committee wanted to retain tradition but to moderate its authority by shifting from truth to meaning, from conviction to critical questioning. The anti-metaphysical materialism of the social sciences, it turns out, is crucial for this shift. The reductive explanations of the social sciences neuter the existential power of truth. Beliefs and convictions become preferences and interests. As a consequence, by the late twentieth century, the political-cultural significance of the social sciences, brain science, and sociobiology came...

This consistency isn’t obvious. How does the vague relativism of multicultural ideology square with the social and human sciences, which aspire to empirical rigor? At that level, they are indeed at odds. We live historically, however, not philosophically. As the postwar era unfolded, Popper and Hayek’s anti-totalitarian agenda advanced in two ways. The first was the way of critique, culminating in today’s diffuse but powerful ideology of multiculturalism. The second was the way of reduction, showing that human affairs can be explained by material interests and biological processes that govern us by default. These paths—critique and reduction—are therapies of disenchantment required by the postwar consensus. They dominate intellectual life today for political-historical reasons, not because of an intrinsic intellectual advantage. We prize them because we believe they promote an open society.

“Disenchantment” comes from the German sociologist Max Weber, who used the term to characterize the experience of living in a modern scientific age. Reason’s explanatory power does not just banish the supernatural from everyday life. It drains away the substance of Western culture’s beliefs in robust metaphysical truths. By Weber’s way of thinking, facts are distinct from values. Analytical precision and technical expertise shed no light on moral truths. If we are to be genuinely scientific in our approach, we must adopt a Spartan restraint when it comes to answering pressing questions about how we are to live and what we are to live for.

Instead of being seen as a hard, even bitter, fate, disenchantment came to be seen as redemptive. The postwar consensus embraced “critical thinking” as an indispensable cultural therapy, necessary to prevent the development of the authoritarian personality and forestall the return of totalitarianism.

Its democratic ethos and tradition of individualism were inhospitable to Marx’s class analysis, which gained little traction in American public life. Freud was a different story. He had quite different assumptions about the powerful forces underlying human affairs, and his psychoanalytical method focused more on the individual and his psychological well-being. In the intellectual culture of 1950s America, therefore, Freud was a more influential master of suspicion than Marx. The first wave of anti-totalitarian disenchantment in America was therapeutic, not Marxist.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, a general theory of culture written late in life, Freud posited two main human instincts.5 One seeks sexual satisfaction. The other is aggressive and seeks domination. Taken alone or together, neither conduces to the cooperation necessary for human beings to survive in the hostile conditions of life, much less flourish. Over time, then, human culture has evolved modes of socialization that sublimate man’s instinctual energies, redirecting them to the task of their own repression. Freud coined the term “super-ego” to describe this repressive agent. It is the voice of conscience but not the oracle of a higher law that calls us to live more nobly. Moral self-discipline is part of a complex economy of instinctual energy circling back upon itself in the form of cultural norms. What looks like a high ideal is in fact repressed sexual desire or the aggressive instinct transformed into a severe taskmaster.

Freud often turns to market metaphors. “Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual’s libido.”7 We can’t just spend, spend, spend to satisfy our sexual or aggressive desires. We must make regular deposits of instinctual energy into the repressive institutions and disciplines necessary to maintain cultural norms. But not too many deposits! We don’t want to end up with a culture that produces impoverished, threadbare emotional lives. What we need, therefore, is good technocratic management of psychic drives and cultural demands. The “yes” of instinctual satisfaction needs to be balanced with the “no” of its repression.

The management model of life and society operates widely today, especially in the artificial environment of the university, where a great deal of effort goes into establishing a bright line of consent to distinguish rightful from wrongful sexual relations. This effort to impose discipline reflects a desire to find a “no” that does not erode the general “yes” implied by the sexual revolution. Something similar happens with the #MeToo movement, which wants to re-regulate our sexual marketplace but not in ways that undermine the general norms of openness and permission. What’s wanted is a meaningful “no” that limits male predation but nevertheless supports the overall “yes” that regards sex between consenting adults as healthy and affirming.

At nearly every juncture during the 1950s, the dominant liberal establishment interpreted personal and social problems as flowing from one or another pathology of the “closed society”—overly repressive norms, a middle-class culture that disapproved of the unconventional, and an uncritical acceptance of social mores, to say nothing of racism, anti-Semitism, and sexism. As a consequence, most establishment leaders thought we should relax our cultural super-ego, tilting in the direction of change rather than commitment, experiment rather than tradition, permission rather than discipline. Children require more freedom to find themselves. People must be encouraged to discern and develop more individualized moral outlooks. Commitment, yes, but bespoke, not mass-produced. The consensus was in favor of openness; conservatives and liberals differed not about whether to loosen up but about how much.

The traumas of 1914–1945 explain this consensus. The entire cultural establishment wanted to forestall the development of the authoritarian personality. There was an emphasis on authority in the initial stages of the postwar era, true, but not strongly imposed and always open to experimentation. Convinced that a free society requires a foundation in the Western tradition, Robert Maynard Hutchins, the famous president of the University of Chicago, launched an ambitious Great Books project for a mass audience. Yet he too tilted against authority, even as he commended authoritative texts. “The [great] books should speak for themselves,” he wrote, “and the reader should decide for himself.” Tradition, yes, but the free individual has the final say. “The task of interpretation and conclusion is his. This is the machinery and life of the Western tradition in the hands of free men.”8

This was a dynamic tendency, not a stable position. The arrow of development always pointed toward more openness, more deconsolidation of old authorities, and more disenchantment, which is why the revolutionary rhetoric of the 1960s, while certainly disruptive, was more in continuity with the 1950s than in rebellion against it.

But postwar America’s rejection of economic transformation discouraged him, and Brown became convinced that the rot went much deeper than the exploitation of the working class. By the mid-1950s, a study of Freud funded by the Ford Foundation led him to the conclusion that the entire sweep of human history entailed a terrible sacrifice of human happiness for the sake of repressive culture.

It’s easy to make fun of Norman O. Brown. He followed up Life Against Death with Love’s Body in 1966, an even more urgent and utopian call for Dionysian ecstasies that he promised would deliver us from the arduous demands of culture. The later book became a cult classic for those who wanted to theorize the Summer of Love. In retrospect, however, Brown’s season of fame followed a general pattern. Michel Foucault published his study of the evolution of the social treatment of mental illness, Madness and Civilization, around the same time. It adopted an entirely different set of categories for social analysis but arrived at pretty much the same conclusions about the stultifying, constraining, and life-denying role of cultural norms. The work of both authors resonated with the postwar consensus that had come to regard the cultural traditions of the West as a problem, even a curse, not a welcome inheritance. By Popper’s reckoning, totalitarianism is in the DNA of Western philosophy. Mainstream educators did not take such a dire view, at least not at the outset of the postwar era. But they, too, were less than confident in the old traditions. It was not just an anxiety about suburban conformism that drove liberal elites in Brown’s direction. Death camps and atomic bombs hung over Western culture. In postwar Europe, colonialism became a source of moral embarrassment and shame. In America, the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow sullied the nation’s shared inheritance.

There was nothing inevitable about the 1960s. It is simply false to assert that, given the choice, human beings will opt for what is immediately pleasurable. Throwing off social norms and cultivating “individuality” are not natural impulses. On the contrary, as social animals we’re inclined to live in accord with dominant opinion, as Popper recognized, which is why he made the open society an urgent project (and which is why it now requires the policing of political correctness). Neither inevitable nor natural, the trend toward liberation from traditional cultural norms took hold because it was mandated by the leading ideas of the postwar era.

Those who went to Woodstock were not in rebellion against their parents, at least not in any fundamental sense. They may have upset the tradition-and-experiment balance that so many establishment liberals hoped to maintain, but the young people of that decade were acting out the imperative of openness that underlay the uneasy settlements of the 1950s. The same holds for the women’s movement, gay liberation, and now transgender rights. These causes were not immediately endorsed by the postwar establishment, but over time they have been accepted, even embraced, as part of the general, presumptively beneficent trend toward diversity, inclusion, and openness. The liberation movements that focus on individual empowerment have become integral to postwar aspirations for an anti-totalitarian society. They are seen as barriers against the reemergence of the authoritarian personality.

To understand the last seventy years, we need to grasp their paradoxical character. The cultural consensus of the postwar era consolidated around an ambivalence about culture that, over time, evolved into an anti-cultural outlook. Figures such as Popper and Hayek implied that the norms of the Western tradition are not entirely sound and humane. They were not alone in this suspicion, which is not surprising, given the civilizational disaster that struck between 1914 and 1945. The mainstream liberal establishment was cautious. It wished to manage the tension between tradition and experiment, but the dark shadow of tota...

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 turmo...

Today, nobody remembers Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death or speaks of his “body mysticism.” Freud has been discredited as a social scientist. The Marxist utopianism that Brown reframed as a vision of the triumph of instinct (life) over cultural norms (death) holds little sway over our imaginations. Nevertheless, Brown outlined the basic program that still dominates culture in the West. We see it at work in postmodern academic theory, which reigns in universities and provides the intellectual underpinnings for multiculturalism. This theory teaches that social norms and cultural ideals are manifestations of primitive impulses and instinctual urges: sexual desires, will to power, self-interest, lust for domination, class oppression, and so forth. Even our selfish goals—to look thin or to dress for success—get analyzed as social constructs, serving, perhaps, to sustain patriarchy, “late capitalism,” or cisgender dominance. At every turn, we analyze “down,” be...