Trump No Champ Of 'Strong Gods' Of Faith, Family And Community

2025-03-10 03:19:18

(MENAFN- Asia Times) “Men don't care what's on TV. They only care what else is on TV.” - Jerry Seinfeld

N S Lyons is a popular essayist in the“national conservative” tradition. His Substack, The Upheaval , is recommended reading, even though I agree with less than half of what he writes.

He is well-read and well-informed, he integrates information from across many domains, and he isn't afraid to think deeply about the big questions of history in real time. Reading him will help you better understand the beliefs of the modern Right. On many questions, such as the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan , his message is one that people in the MAGA world desperately need to hear.

In a recent essay entitled“American Strong Gods”, Lyons identifies what in my opinion is a deep truth about our current historical moment. He writes of the end of the“Long Twentieth Century”, a period that was defined by liberalism (social, political, and economic), and anchored by rejection of Adolf Hitler:

Like all good essays, this overstates its case. The American-led liberalism of the postwar order was not a purely defensive project. The UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were not motivated by fear of Hitler's return, but by a desire to expand the boundaries of human freedom and dignity beyond anything seen in the prewar period. Ronald Reagan didn't need Hitler as a bogeyman to proselytize his vision of American freedoms as a universal ideal.

And yet there is an important sense in which Lyons is right. The spectacular horrors and the spectacular failure of Hitler's regime provided a moral anchor that liberals could always use to argue for greater liberalism. Advocates of the Civil Rights Act and other liberalizing laws in the US and Europe often used Nazi Germany as a rhetorical foil.

Anticommunism provided the Right with an alternative Satan for a while, but it never quite had the same power, because America had been Stalin's ally in World War 2; after the Soviet Union fell, anticommunism was quickly forgotten, but Hitler and the Nazis were not.

Lyons is right that the Trump Era marks the end of Hitler as the summum malum of Western culture - at least in the United States. Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson , the two most popular media figures on the American Right, have invited Darryl Cooper - a revisionist historian who downplays Nazi atrocities and views Winston Churchill as the true villain of World War 2 - to speak on their shows. Here is one of Cooper's (since deleted) tweets, just to give you an idea:

This tweet, I think, is illustrative of the thinking on the American right. It would be wrong to say that the Trump movement, or modern National Conservatism, represents a wholehearted endorsement of Nazism . But it should be uncontroversial to say that the American Right views wokeness as a greater threat than the potential return of Hitler.

Why has the legend of Hitler lost its terror? There are several reasons. The generation that fought and defeated the Nazis has largely passed away, meaning that for most Americans, Hitler only exists as a character in movies and books; as with Tamerlane or Genghis Khan, the fear of a mass murderer fades as the centuries pass.

The Palestine movement has effectively removed Jews from the Left's list of protected minority groups whose rights might be defended with riots. Social media has led to the overuse of the Nazi label, leading to the popular phrase“Everyone I don't like is Hitler .”

Lyons is far more sanguine about this shift than I am. Personally, I think it was a good idea to vilify Hitler. As a general moral principle,“don't be Hitler” honestly seems pretty solid. And even if your only concern is the might of Western civilization, a man whose ideologically-motivated military campaigns led to the end of European global empires1 , slaughtered over 20 million Slavs, ended Germany's status as a great power, and cemented Soviet rule over half of Europe seems like he should probably serve as an example to avoid.

But Lyons believes that the end of anti-Nazism as the West's guiding principle will pave the way for the return of morality, community, rootedness, faith, and civilizational pride - the kind of things conservatives like:

I'm not quite so sure about Lyons' reading of history here. After all, as Robert Putnam chronicled in his book“The Upswing “ , the postwar decades in America saw the greatest surge in church attendance, civic participation, family formation, and social solidarity since the early days of the Republic. Here's church attendance, which surged after World War 2 and remained high for people over 40 until the 2010s:

Source: Pew

And here's Putnam's index of social solidarity, which combines measures of civic and religious participation and family formation:

Source: Robert Putnam via Jefferson Educational Society

The New Deal and the postwar period even saw a huge upswing in the use of the word“we” instead of the word“I” in American books:

Source: Robert Putnam via Peace Corps

The“strong gods” were never stronger than they were among the generation of Americans who grew up listening to FDR preach liberalism on the radio and who went on to crush Adolf Hitler into the dust. Nor is it difficult to draw a causal line between the unifying struggle of the Second World War and the great American unity that followed.

The Greatest Generation believed with all their hearts that Hitler was Satan on Earth. But they did not believe that family, community and tradition were little Hitlers that needed to be crushed in order to uphold the open society.

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