The Weakening: How the Postwar Consensus Became a Self-Liquidating Ideology

Post 2 of 8 — The Inheritance: Western Civilization, Its Critics, and What Is Actually at Stake

Mar 22, 2026

Four P-51 Mustangs flying in formation — Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

The ideology now dismantling Western civilization did not begin as an attack. It began as a defense.

This is the most important thing to understand about the intellectual forces examined in this series, and the thing that is most systematically avoided in popular arguments about them. The postwar consensus — the complex of ideas, attitudes, and institutional reflexes that have organized Western cultural and political life since 1945 — was a response to genuine catastrophe. Two world wars, the Holocaust, totalitarianism in its Nazi and Soviet forms: these were real, enormous, and produced by specific intellectual and political currents that the postwar consensus was designed to prevent from recurring.

The problem is not that the response was malicious. The problem is that it generalized — and then could not stop generalizing. What began as a historically specific defense against fascism became, over seven decades, a systematic assault on every strong cultural attachment, every shared truth, and every inherited loyalty. In R.R. Reno’s formulation, it became a “weakening of Being” — and it is now consuming the civilization it was designed to protect.

The Trauma That Created the Consensus

To understand the postwar consensus, you have to take 1933-1945 seriously as a civilizational shock. What produced Nazism was, at least in part, a toxic combination of strong national loyalty, strong racial identity, strong ideological certainty, and strong charismatic authority. The lesson drawn by the intellectual architects of the postwar order was direct: if strong attachments of these kinds produced Auschwitz, then weakening such attachments is the path to peace.

This was not, in its original context, an unreasonable conclusion. Reno is clear-eyed about this. “Nearly all the leading intellectuals since 1945, left and right, have promoted the weakening of Being. The cultural-political project of the West should not be organized around strong gods, the postwar consensus has insisted” [1]. The driving logic was diagnostic: strong loves and strong truths had led to oppression; therefore liberty and prosperity require the reign of weak loves and weak truths [2].

The specific intellectual architecture was largely supplied by Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies — the argument that the key to social progress is restricting truth-claims to the falsifiable, “tossing out nearly all of what the West has regarded as religiously, culturally, and morally foundational” [3]. The open society, on this account, must be committed to openness above all — not to any particular truth, tradition, or cultural inheritance. These are too dangerous. They lead to Plato, and Plato leads to Hitler.

Reno, writing with precision, identifies the atmosphere of anti-imperatives this produced: “We continue to define ourselves culturally, even spiritually, as anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist” [4]. These anti-imperatives became the postwar consensus — the ground rules of respectable public life in the Western world.

The Generalization Problem

The consensus was coherent so long as the specific threat it was designed against remained real. During the Cold War, there was a genuine totalitarian adversary with world-conquering ambitions. Vigilance against strong ideological commitments made sense when the alternative was Soviet Communism.

But the consensus had a structural problem built in from the beginning. As Reno observes, postwar liberals understood that an open society is not self-inaugurating. It requires driving the strong gods out of public life and remaining on watch against their return [5]. This is a permanent project with no natural terminus. You cannot reach a point where you have weakened cultural attachments enough and stop. Any strong commitment that appears is, by the logic of the consensus, a potential proto-fascism.

The consensus therefore advanced even after the specific conditions that justified it had changed. After 1989, we did not relax our vigilance. On the contrary, people began to monitor pronouns and search for “microaggressions” to punish [6]. The anti-imperatives continued without an external enemy to give them direction — turned inward, toward the civilization itself.

This trajectory was also shaped, Reno notes, by Jacques Derrida’s decisive contribution in the 1970s and 1980s. Derrida was not, as his enemies claimed, a revolutionary. He was a theorist of the postwar consensus. His work became famous because he made disenchantment the theoretical basis of culture, laying the foundations for the fusion of economic and cultural deregulation that characterizes mainstream establishment politics today. His singular contribution was turning the historical contingency of the postwar consensus into a timeless, anti-metaphysical truth [7]. What had been a historically conditioned response to 1933-1945 became, through Derrida’s influence, a permanent philosophical commitment: all strong truth-claims are exercises of power, all cultural inheritance is oppression, all meta-narratives must be deconstructed.

The Paradox: Left and Right Both Caught

One of Reno’s most penetrating observations is that the postwar consensus is not a phenomenon of the left alone. “The same insistence on openness and weakening is found in libertarianism as well, which seeks cultural deregulation so that individuals are not constrained by shared norms. It is felt in free-market economic theory and sociobiological analysis of politics and culture, both of which adopt a reductive view of human motivation that disenchants public life” [8].

This is a point worth dwelling on, because it complicates the simple story of left-wing attack on Western values. The neoliberal economic consensus — open markets, open borders, open cultures, the dissolution of national particularity into global commercial integration — is, in its own way, an expression of the same postwar consensus that animates multiculturalism. Both seek to dissolve strong cultural attachments in favor of a frictionless openness. Both treat inherited loyalties as obstacles rather than resources. The culture war has two flanks, and the right’s economic flank has been complicit in the civilization-thinning that the cultural left is now completing.

Reno identifies the endpoint: “Only open markets are for the best. Only open cultures are for the best. Only open borders will bring saving diversity. Only open minds can stop the return of Auschwitz. There is simply no other way. When intelligent, educated, and responsible people talk this way, we know that we’ve reached a dead end” [9].

The Countercultural Illusion

One of the sharpest observations in Return of the Strong Gods concerns the fate of apparent dissent within the postwar consensus. Reno notes that what presents itself as countercultural — academic critique, artistic transgression, identity politics, radical theory — is “not ‘countercultural’ at all, as is obvious when these critiques are championed by elite institutions and rewarded with prestigious fellowships and prizes. Disrupting nothing other than what remains of the memory of the strong gods, they contribute to the weakening of Being, which is thought always to be morally salutary and necessary for an open society” [10].

This is a devastating point. The most transgressive, most radical, most aggressively anti-Western positions in contemporary academic and cultural life are not actually transgressing against the establishment. They are the establishment. What actually transgresses against the postwar consensus — nationalism, religious conservatism, cultural inheritance, loyalty to particular traditions — is treated as the extremist position. The consensus defines transgression as anything that maintains or transmits the strong gods it was designed to eliminate.

The Result: Dissolution Where There Should Be Solidarity

Reno’s diagnosis of where this leads is measured but bleak. “Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led” [11]. And further: “Our time — this century — begs for a politics of loyalty and solidarity, not openness and deconsolidation. We don’t need more diversity and innovation. We need a home” [12].

The postwar consensus set out to prevent the specific pathologies of strong attachment — ethnic nationalism, totalitarian ideology, racial supremacy. These were real pathologies. But the cure has created its own pathologies: the dissolution of the intermediate structures (family, church, civic association, national identity) that make it possible for people to belong to something larger than themselves without belonging to the state. When you strip away those structures, you do not get free-floating individuals enjoying open possibilities. You get loneliness, resentment, and a population susceptible to the first demagogue who offers them a community, however crude.

The postwar consensus was designed to prevent the strong gods from returning. Instead, it has created the conditions in which their return — possibly in a much uglier form than their predecessors — becomes more likely.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “Indeed, nearly all the leading intellectuals since 1945, left and right, have promoted the weakening of Being. The cultural-political project of the West should not be organized around strong gods, the postwar consensus has insisted.”