The Postliberal Delusion that Trump will Restore Gods Allegedly Destroyed by the Open Society
A prominent critic of liberalism has no solutions so he puts his faith in Trump to resurrect the fallen gods of traditional orders
“Postliberal” conservatives were exultant after Trump’s reelection in 2024, convinced that it marked a great historical shift toward political and cultural renewal. They’re crowing a lot less since Trump kneecapped the economy on “Liberation Day,” but it’s worth going back and examining the thought process that led intelligent people to imagine that the MAGA whirlwind was ripe for reaping.
Here I’ll look at a recent essay by
, the pseudonymous author of the popular site The Upheaval on Substack. Lyons is a penetrating, insightful writer, capable of brilliant insight into the dysfunctions of contemporary society (see, for example, here and here)—but also plagued by gaping blind spots. In “American Strong Gods,” he portrays the 2024 election as a major historical turning point: the toppling of the false idols of the “open society” and the return of the “strong gods” of family, faith, and nation.Lyons claims that we are witnessing today the end of “the long 20th century”—the upheavals and horrors of 1914-1945, followed by 80 years of postwar welfare-state liberalism and the “liberal international order.” This narrative leans heavily on R. R. Reno, the editor of First Things, and his book Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West. Here is how Lyons sets up the story:
In the wake of the horrors inflicted by WWII, the leadership classes of America and Europe understandably made “never again” the core of their ideational universe. They collectively resolved that fascism, war, and genocide must never again be allowed to threaten humanity. But this resolution, as reasonable and well-meaning as it seemed at the time, soon became an all-consuming obsession with negation.
Hugely influential liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno helped convince an ideologically amenable post-war establishment that the fundamental source of authoritarianism and conflict in the world was the “closed society.” Such a society is marked by what Reno dubs “strong gods”: strong beliefs and strong truth claims, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, strong communal identities and connections to place and past—ultimately, all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies. …”
Now the unifying power of the strong gods came to be seen as dangerous, an infernal wellspring of fanaticism, oppression, hatred, and violence. … Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community entirely, labeling it as disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda” and smearing anyone who dared cherish as special his own homeland and history as a dangerous “racialist.” For such intellectuals, any definitive claim to authority or hierarchy, whether between men, morals, or metaphysical truths, seemed to stand as a mortal threat to peace on earth.
The great project of post-war establishment liberalism became to tear down the walls of the closed society and banish its gods forever. To be erected on its salted ground was an idyllic but exceptionally vague vision of an “open society” animated by peaceable weak gods of tolerance, doubt, dialogue, equality, and consumer comfort. …
The Long 20th Century has been characterized by these three interlinked post-war projects: the progressive opening of societies through the deconstruction of norms and borders, the consolidation of the managerial state, and the hegemony of the liberal international order. The hope was that together they could form the foundation for a world that would finally achieve peace on earth and goodwill between all mankind. That this would be a weak, passionless, undemocratic, intricately micromanaged world of technocratic rationalism was a sacrifice the post-war consensus was willing to make.
That dream didn’t work out though, because the strong gods refused to die.
It’s a good story—but, alas, one with little connection to actual events here on Planet Earth. Identifying Karl Popper as a primary intellectual architect of our atomized, alienated present is preposterously bad intellectual history. And imagining that Donald Trump is the agent for restoring what has been lost carries wishful thinking to delusional new heights.
The Open Society: Not a Modern Innovation
Popper was a philosopher of science who argued that it was impossible for any process of induction to establish what is true. He saw hypotheses as mere conjectures that could come from any source—but which must then be capable of being tested and falsified. Only propositions that are subject to the possibility of disconfirming evidence have the potential to qualify as scientific knowledge; the scientific method then consists of subjecting hypotheses to criticism and testing. Accordingly, for Popper, the freedom to criticize what is currently believed is the essential precondition for the accumulation of knowledge.
The two-volume The Open Society and Its Enemies, written during World War II, was Popper’s major contribution to political and social thought. His goal was to explore and identify the roots of totalitarianism, that terrible perversion of modernity that had transformed Europe into a blood-soaked charnel house.
It was in this context that he introduced his concepts of the “closed society” and the “open society.” The closed society, according to Popper, is the organic tribal group that is humanity’s original social form—what the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies called Gemeinschaft. It is composed entirely of concrete, personal, and usually familial bonds, it features little in the way of social differentiation or hierarchy, and it exists in a magical universe where the regularities of social life are as unquestioned as those found in nature.
The “open society,” by contrast, corresponds to Tönnies’ Gesellschaft, the impersonal social order that brings large numbers of unrelated strangers together in webs of social cooperation. The organic unity of society breaks down as different occupational groups and social classes emerge; social differentiation creates pluralism and the beginnings of individualism with a proliferation of different perspectives; new forms of personal relationship based on choice arise. The repertoire of possible social moves becomes so complex that it can no longer be guided by specific customs and taboos, leading to a morality of general rules and new challenges of moral choice when these rules conflict because of the inevitable tensions born of complexity.
For Popper the scientist and critical rationalist, the defining aspect of the open society was its openness to discussion, criticism, and possible alteration of its beliefs, institutions, and ways of living. “The transition takes place when social institutions are first consciously recognized as man-made,” Popper wrote, “and when their conscious alteration is discussed in terms of their suitability for the achievement of human aims and purposes.”
Although Popper was an unbending partisan of the open society, he recognized that its great benefits came with substantial costs. The open society, Popper conceded, was also an “abstract society.” “There are many people living in a modern society who have no, or extremely few, intimate personal contacts, who live in anonymity and isolation, and consequently in unhappiness,” he recognized . “For although society has become abstract, the biological make-up of man has not changed much; men have social needs which they cannot satisfy in an abstract society.”
Popper referred to this fundamental tension between the liberating potential of openness and our hard-wired social natures as “the strain of civilization.” He believed that this strain—the nostalgia for the old, unquestionable certainties of the closed society—was behind the rise of 20th-century totalitarianism. Fascism and communism, in Popper’s view, represented reactionary backlashes against the rigors of the open society. In different ways, advocates of these totalitarian ideologies exploited real costs and challenges of the open society to persuade people to adopt their vision. But they were wrong about the balance of costs and benefits, and they offered false promises about the benefits of their own systems and the ability to return to a pre-modern closed society.
Reno and Lyons’ attempt to identify the open society ideal as the source of modern social and cultural dysfunction is badly misjudged. The open society as Popper describes it, both as an actually existing historical phenomenon and an ideal type, long predates Popper’s time. He evokes the open society not to concoct a blueprint for postwar social and cultural change, but to clarify the nature of the contest between totalitarianism and already existing liberal societies.
I agree with Lyons that the threat of totalitarianism is not gone. We are right to worry about the totalitarian potential of contemporary managerialism, a potential that exists on both sides of the current democratic divide and that is likely to be greatly enhanced by continuing developments in AI-managed surveillance. Lyons has written eloquently about this threat; indeed, it is his sense of contemporary democracies’ vulnerability to a kind of soft but suffocating totalitarianism that motivates his break with liberalism and his denunciation of the “open society” ideal.
But here’s the thing: “alertness to the threat of totalitarianism,” which clearly characterizes Lyons’ writing (see here), is just another way of saying “commitment to the ideals of the open society.” Lyons sees managerialism as a profound threat to pluralism in the social realm and to critical discussion and the search for truth in the realm of ideas—but these are precisely the central values of the open society ideal that he then claims to oppose. Much like Molière's Monsieur Jourdain, who had no idea he’d been speaking prose all his life, Lyons is clueless that he is both a living embodiment and a zealous partisan of the open society as Popper conceived it.
Not by Reason Alone and Other Popperian Limitations
I will concede this much: the history of the postwar years has exposed real inadequacies in Popper’s conception of the open society. Those inadequacies did not have any meaningful causal connection to the postwar developments that Reno and Lyons denounce, but they still exist. And for contemporary supporters of the open society ideal—by which I mean, contemporary liberals of both left- and right-leaning varieties—reflecting on those inadequacies can be helpful in clarifying the challenges we face.
Popper thought that the chief threat to the open society was an atavistic longing for connectedness—a hopeless yearning for the organic unity of the tribe. In the 21st century, however, it is an epidemic of disconnectedness and social disintegration—falling marriage and birth rates, declining church membership and attendance, reduced involvement in community activities, and rising loneliness and mental distress—that poses the present danger (emerging not from a longing for tribalism but a need for basic social connectedness that affluence undermines by diminishing the dependence on, and therefore the need for, tight-knit relations and bonds, as I argued in the longer essay). An atomized society simply lacks the distributed sources of power needed to resist the slide into authoritarianism.
Popper sought to defend the open society from an unrealistic and ultimately destructive nostalgia for the kind of connection offered by closed societies. But he failed to consider that the willingness to subject all our beliefs and institutions to critical scrutiny might metastasize into something ruinous. He knew that any society’s traditions were a mixed bag: some vitally important and some perverse and harmful. He imagined that an ongoing, open-ended process of critical inquiry and discussion would, on its own, be capable of separating the wheat from the chaff—that is, of preserving and defending beneficial traditions while opposing and seeking to reduce the influence of harmful ones.
If everybody were like Karl Popper, that might work. Popper went through life without religious convictions, but he never seemed plagued by a God-shaped hole in his heart. Instead, he maintained a kind of rational faith unsupported by revelation or metaphysics.
I can relate. This is exactly the kind of agnostic faith that has sustained me throughout my life. It worked for Karl Popper, and it works for me. But as
argues in his new book Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Christianity, it doesn’t work for most people. “In today’s America,” he writes, “we see evidence everywhere of the inadequacy of secular liberalism to provide meaning, exaltation, spirituality, transcendence, and morality anchored in more than the self.” As Rauch, a lifelong atheist, admits, for a long time he welcomed the erosion of organized religion as spiritual progress, but the steady pileup of countervailing evidence has changed his mind. “In American civic life,” he writes, “Christianity is a load-bearing wall. When it buckles, all the institutions around it come under stress, and some of them buckle, too.”
The original theorist of the open society understood this. Although Popper popularized the term “open society,” he did not coin it. The term was originated by the French philosopher Henri Bergson in his 1932 book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Bergson looked back at the history of religion and morality and saw two distinct and competing manifestations of the religious impulse. The older, primordial “static religion” develops out of the social pressure of the group toward conformity and obligation and serves to maintain social cohesion; it distinguishes sharply between insiders and outsiders; it proscribes through taboo; and it connects its members to each other and the rest of the world through ritual, myth, and magic. The “closed morality” that accompanies static religion encompasses only the specific group and is focused exclusively on the group’s survival and security.
“Dynamic religion” is a newer entrant on the scene. According to Bergson, it emerges out of the mystical experience of exemplary individuals—saints, prophets, heroes—and bursts through the limits of static religion and closed morality to pursue a vision of universal brotherhood and love. Dynamic religion and open morality lead people beyond the narrow confines of the tribe to broader moral and spiritual horizons. While static religion attends to existential stability, dynamic religion inspires spiritual growth; static faith imposes obligations and nourishes our roots, while dynamic faith creates aspirations and gives us wings.
In Bergson’s view, the open society is an ideal type, an asymptote that can never be reached. All actually existing societies are in some measure closed societies, oriented ultimately toward cohesion and group survival. They vary, however, in their degree of opening—in the extent, that is, of their embodiment of the universal values of human brotherhood. There is no purely open society in the real world; relatively open societies must maintain closed foundations if they are to persist.
I’ve written previously about the fundamental dualism of human nature, captured in Kant’s idea of humanity’s “unsocial sociability.” We are, on the one hand, highly social creatures who are constituted and sustained by our relationships with other people; at the same time, we are an intensely curious and competitive species, although these traits (in particular, the combination of high intelligence and openness to new experience) are distributed with greater variance across the population than our need for human contact and belonging. Since a healthy society is one that promotes human flourishing, a healthy society must support and encourage both sides of human nature—it must feed our roots and grow our wings. Bergson thought that actual societies must maintain some closed elements or else face dissolution. The extensive social disintegration we see all around us attests to the fact that we’re now well along into the “or else” phase.
The Dilemma of Open Societies
But how do open societies stay open? Here Bergson’s contributions are needed to compensate for Popper’s theoretical inadequacies. Those who favor the open society should recognize that its health and stability lie not in pushing “openness” to the maximum possible extent, but in maintaining a balance between openness and secure foundations.
Take two constituent elements of our open society today: modern science and liberal democracy. Modern science’s amazing successes in expanding knowledge of the natural world rest on a host of unprovable assumptions: the trustworthiness of our sense data, the uniformity of the regularities in nature, the comprehensibility of those regularities to human minds. Liberal democracy likewise rests on presuppositions of the civic equality of all citizens and the moral equality of all human beings.
These assumptions can be called foundational truths, as opposed to final truths. If accepted, they allow for processes of ongoing exploration and discovery—uncovering nature’s eternal truths and managing the ever-changing collective action problems of modern, technologically advanced societies. These processes have no endpoint—no perfect certainty for science, no perfect harmony for democracy. From fixed foundations, they open up indefinitely. But they are still unprovable assumptions, and their generative potential is best realized to the extent that they go unquestioned. Unfortunately, indiscriminate hostility to authority has been gnawing away at these foundations for decades now.
It’s also worth pointing out that the assumptions underlying modern science and liberal democracy are basically secularized expressions of Christian thought: an orderly Creation legible to humans, all of whom are equally endowed with immortal souls capable of salvation. The principles of science and democracy are thus not only under direct assault; with the decline of organized religion, their source and bulwark is likewise embattled and has already suffered serious reversals.
Which is why, in my own thinking about our current predicament and how to advance out of it, I’ve had to admit that the changes needed to overcome the contemporary crises of dynamism and inclusion are unlikely to occur in the absence of a powerful countercultural movement, secular or religious, oriented toward strong and cohesive communities that seek in some measure to provide for themselves. I would rally to a secular version—the environmental movement demonstrates the power of secular movements to change the culture—but I imagine that a religious revival of some kind would have many more takers.
MAGA Can’t Renew the Strong Gods, Either
Finally, a word about Lyons’ enthusiasm for Trump’s reelection as heralding the return of the “strong gods” and the kind of cultural renewal I’m hoping for. OK, make it six words: you’ve got to be kidding me!
Here’s Lyons on the significance of Trump’s return to power:
The “populism” that is now sweeping the West is best understood as a democratic insistence on the restoration and reintegration of respect for those strong gods capable of grounding, uniting, and sustaining societies, including coherent national identities, cohesive natural loyalties, and the recognition of objective and transcendent truths.
Today’s populism is more than just a reaction against decades of elite betrayal and terrible governance (though it is that too); it is a deep, suppressed thumotic desire for long-delayed action, to break free from the smothering lethargy imposed by proceduralist managerialism and fight passionately for collective survival and self-interest. It is the return of the political to politics. This demands a restoration of old virtues, including a vital sense of national and civilizational self-worth.
Here we see the asymmetry in Lyons’ analytical acuity. When he’s identifying and denouncing the dysfunctions of the status quo, he is razor sharp. But his assessments of populism betray an almost cult-like credulity that reminds me of left-wing political pilgrims fawning over Mao’s China or Castro’s Cuba. He sees only what he wants to see.
Trump’s success is no sign of impending restoration and reintegration; it is simply a sharp and accelerating turn in an ongoing downward spiral. It is both the product of social breakdown and the agent of further destruction.
Trust in established institutions and governing elites has been in decline for decades—due in part to elite failures, but in larger part to the changing media environment and the diminished capacity of the increasingly atomized and alienated public to trust any impersonal institutions and systems. What Weber called rational-legal authority is breaking down, giving way to the older, more primitive authority of charisma and personal patronage. Trump’s political career was made possible by this cultural regress, and the manic early days of Trump 2.0 show that he means to ride it as far as he can. A recent article by Jonathan Rauch surveys the current chaos and sees a reversion to the premodern governing style of patrimonialism—personal rule, in which authority comes from the person himself rather than the office he holds, and authority is exercised through personal favors for allies and vendettas against rivals and opponents. You can’t really run a complex modern society this way, but you can put on a good show for your fans until you eventually hit the wall.
“Fans” is the correct word here. The so-called MAGA “movement” is by and large yet another consumption community with a side of performative LARPing.
explains:The MAGA movement, you see, is an internet thing. It’s another vertical online community—a bunch of deracinated, atomized individuals, thinly connected across vast distances by the notional bonds of ideology and identity. There is nothing in it of family, community, or rootedness to a place. It’s a digital consumption good. It’s a subreddit. It is a fandom … Trump’s movement has been around for a decade now, and in all that time it has built absolutely nothing. There is no Trump Youth League. There are no Trump community centers or neighborhood Trump associations or Trump business clubs. For a very few people, the first Trump term was a live-action role-playing game; for everyone else, it was a YouTube channel.
Lyons, then, is as mistaken about where we are now as he is about how we got here. There is nothing generative about Trumpism; it carries no seeds of renewal. Look back through history and tell me: When has a brighter future ever arrived in a cloud of chaos, corruption, cruelty, and lies?
The American electorate has lost faith in our system and chosen chaos and destruction to shake things up. From the early indications, it looks like it’s going to get what it asked for good and hard. If the republic is still standing at the end of this, I hope we can treat the Trump phenomenon as a heart attack that scares us into living right and building a better system. And if we’re really lucky, maybe some of the spaces cleared by Trump’s destruction will open up opportunities for the builders. But that exhausts the positive potential lurking in this godforsaken moment.
An earlier version of this essay was first published in Brink Lindsey’s newsletter.
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