No more heroes: or, seeking strong gods

I recently read N.S. Lyons’ interesting essay ‘American Strong Gods: Trump and the end of the Long Twentieth Century’. Yeah, apologies – another Trump piece … though Lyons casts the net wider. Anyway, his essay is kind of apropos to stuff I’ve been thinking and writing about lately, so I’m going to air it here. I’ll refer also to this recent essay from Perry Anderson. To deal in old political money, Lyons is a writer of the new right, while Anderson is the doyen of a ‘new left’ that’s no longer all that new – but a testament at least to his personal staying power in knocking out elegant political essays as he approaches his 90^th year.

Lyons’ thesis in essence is that Trump’s second term is an indicator of the end of a ‘long twentieth century’ that solidified after World War II in the form of the liberal-managerial state, the idea of the open society, globalisation, consumerism, the liberal depoliticization of the public sphere and other such ‘weak gods’ that replaced the ‘strong gods’ of communal identity, connection to place, past, family and faith that, in the eyes of the architects of liberal modernism, had caused such mayhem in the wars and genocides of the early twentieth century. With Trump and his ilk, according to Lyons, we’re back in the domain of the strong gods.

The first part of Lyons’ essay dissects the failure of the liberal-managerial state, the open society and their weak gods quite adroitly. He rightly links its rise to the ‘never again’ mentality of political elites in respect particularly of fascism after the mayhem of World War II. He doesn’t mention that it was also an attempt to rein in the mayhem caused by the unbridled, robber baron-style capitalism that climaxed disastrously in 1929 and also fed into fascism and global war.

It’s a significant omission, but still … although my political background is very much identified with the weak god politics of postwar liberal-modernism, I’ve come to reject that worldview and I found much to agree with in Lyons’ critique. I basically agree that “Today’s populism is more than just a reaction against decades of elite betrayal and terrible governance … it is a deep, suppressed thumotic desire for long-delayed action”.

In my 2023 book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future I likewise wrote about the way that people are animated by ‘mysteries ...