Weak Truths, Strong Tyrants
The postwar left dismantled the only moral framework capable of condemning evil — and the results are everywhere
. Reno calls the resulting settlement the “postwar consensus.” It was characterized not by what it affirmed but by what it opposed: Western elites defined themselves as anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist [4]. The strong gods — loyalty, nation, inherited culture, religion, strong truth-claims — were driven out of public life not because they were inherently evil but because they had been implicated in the catastrophe [5].
This produced a general theory of society: whatever is strong leads to oppression, while liberty requires the reign of weak loves and weak truths [6]. An open society must be committed to openness above all things, not to truth. Strong commitments of any kind were recast as proto-fascist temptations. Derrida turned this historical consensus into a timeless philosophical principle, making disenchantment the theoretical basis of culture. What began as a reasonable post-war precaution became an ideology of perpetual weakening with no natural resting point.
The Soviet collapse in 1989 was the moment to relax. Instead, the postwar consensus intensified. People began monitoring pronouns and hunting microaggressions where they had once hunted actual totalitarians [7]. As Reno writes, the imperative of ever-greater openness has become as unbalanced and dangerous as the ideological fevers it was designed to replace — its ideological opposite, and just as dangerous [8].
The Architects of Anti-Westernism
The intellectual scaffolding was provided by a tradition running from Edward Said through Howard Zinn and into the contemporary academy. Said’s project is singularly anti-Western in its framing — uninterested in crimes committed by non-Western powers, interested only in subjecting the West to a Marxist critique of power [9]. The deep irony is that the postcolonial tradition’s answer to Western cultural dominance is Western Marxism — an ideology developed by a man with next to no knowledge of non-Western societies.
The downstream effect has been systematic. History has been made into a history of Western sins, with ignorance reigning not only over everything the West ever got right but over everything anyone else has ever gotten wrong [10]. As Brendan O’Neill argues, the post-October 7th hysteria was the rotten fruit of the West’s abandonment of its own civilizational inheritance — the trading of Enlightenment ideals of rational deliberation for the dead end of identity politics and competitive grievance [11].
What Moral Realism Actually Means
Nigel Biggar offers the clearest definition of what has been lost. Moral realism holds that human understanding of right and wrong is preceded by, and responsible to, a moral order rooted in objective reality — not in whoever currently holds power [12]. This is a philosophical claim: that there is something against which moral arguments can be measured, something that cannot be reduced to a power relation.
The postwar consensus explicitly dismantled this. All truth-claims are historical, power relations shape the meta-narratives, and at every juncture commitments must be disenchanted [13]. The logical conclusion is stated with unusual clarity in The Technological Republic: if all beliefs are equally historically contingent, there is no superior moral position from which to condemn even the most abhorrent practices [14]. The postwar consensus judged that strong moral convictions were more dangerous than moral relativism. The result is a left that can produce infinite critique of Western imperfections and zero condemnation of theocratic murder.
Kaczynski — whose intellectual gifts, whatever his crimes, are not easily dismissed — identified the psychological root: self-hatred is a leftist trait [15]. It runs deeper than politics. It is the product of a culture taught since 1945 that strong attachments to one’s own civilization are the first step toward fascism.
What Abolition Knew
The sharpest evidence that the West once possessed a working moral realism is the abolition of slavery. The movement that ended the transatlantic slave trade was driven not by postmodern critique but by a popular, national movement grounded in a Christian ideal of basic human equality [16]. The argument was absolute: enslaving another human being violated a moral order that existed prior to and independent of any human political arrangement.
What followed was the most consequential demonstration of moral seriousness in the modern era. Britain not only abolished the trade in 1807 but deployed the Royal Navy globally to suppress it, growing the West Africa Squadron until a sixth of the entire Royal Navy was committed to that mission [17]. British taxpayers spent almost as much suppressing the slave trade as the country had profited from it, with the government dedicating roughly 40% of the national budget to compensate slave-owners upon emancipation [18]. Scholars Kaufmann and Pape confirmed this constituted the most expensive example of costly international moral action recorded in modern history [19].
Murray puts the question directly: every schoolchild now knows about slavery, but how many can describe, without irony or caveat, the great gifts that the Western tradition has given to the world? [20] The abolitionists were not operating from moral relativism. They were operating from moral realism — the conviction that a wrong is a wrong regardless of who commits it.
The Left Has No Language for Evil
The contrast with the contemporary left could not be more complete. The tradition that began as the defense of the weak against the powerful now defends the powerful against the weak whenever the powerful can be coded as anti-Western. Without a moral order higher than power relations, “anti-oppression” politics simply realigns with whoever can most plausibly claim victim status relative to the West — regardless of what that party does to its own people. The framework cannot condemn Maduro’s Venezuela, because Venezuela’s oppression is internal; it cannot condemn Khomeini’s theocracy, because Islam can be framed as a victim of Western imperialism; it cannot condemn Hamas, because Palestinians are the oppressed party in a Western colonial project. The framework produces exactly the politics we observe, reliably and logically.
Reno’s diagnosis is correct: the political and cultural crisis of the West results from our refusal — perhaps incapacity — to honor the strong gods that stiffen the spine and inspire loyalty. The insistence that every motif of weakening serves the common good because it forestalls the return of Hitler presumes we are still living in 1945. We are not. The threat today is not paramilitary nationalist organizations. It is the vacuum the postwar consensus created: a civilization that has disenchanted itself so thoroughly that it has no language left for evil.
Conclusion: Recovering the Language
The argument here is not that the West is without sin. The historical record is genuinely mixed — the same empire that abolished slavery also committed real brutalities, and honest accounting requires holding both. The argument is that the capacity to make that honest accounting requires a moral order that transcends power. The abolitionists had it. They could recognize slavery as evil in themselves, in Arab slave traders, in African kingdoms that sold captives. The condemnation was universal because the moral framework was universal.
The postwar consensus dismantled that framework. It replaced universal moral claims with an epistemology of power relations, then expressed surprise when a left emerged that cannot distinguish oppressor from oppressed once the oppressor can be coded as a victim of the West. The cure is not nationalism, not religious fundamentalism, not a denial of Western failures. It is the recovery of a position old enough to have survived every attempt to replace it: that there is a moral order prior to and independent of human power, that some things are wrong regardless of who does them, and that this conviction — not openness, not diversity, not disenchantment — is what once made it possible for a civilization to look at itself and say: this must end, whatever it costs.
The abolitionists proved it could be done. The question for the contemporary West is whether it still believes anything worth paying that price for.
Referenced Highlights
[1] “In recent years, the critics of the West have marked themselves out through a set of extraordinary claims. Their technique now has a pattern. It is to zoom in on Western behavior, remove it from the context of the time, set aside any non-Western parallels, and then exaggerate what the West actually did.”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise
[2] “Demonization of the West and of Western people is now the only acceptable form of bigotry at international forums such as the United Nations.”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise
[3] “Two major problems come from celebrating all non-Western cultures. The first is that non-Western countries are able to get away with contemporary crimes as monstrous as anything that has happened in the Western past.”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise
[4] “We continue to define ourselves culturally, even spiritually, as anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist. I call the atmosphere of opinion that sustains these anti imperatives the ‘postwar consensus.’”
Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise
[5] “Postwar liberals understood, however tentatively, 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.”
Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise
[6] “In the pages to follow, I will show how anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism inspired a general theory of society...it is characterized by a fundamental judgment: whatever is strong-strong loves and strong truths-leads to oppression, while liberty and prosperity require the reign of weak loves and weak truths.”
Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise
[7] “After 1989, we did not relax our vigilance. On the contrary, people began to monitor pronouns and search for ‘microaggressions’ to punish.”
Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise
[8] “The imperative of ever-greater openness has unbalanced the West. Our openness is the distorted mirror of the singular, untempered, and destructive passions and ideological fevers that shipwrecked the West in the first half of the twentieth century; it is their ideological opposite. And it is just as dangerous.”
Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise
[9] “Like other postcolonial writers, Said’s central claim is singularly anti-Western. He is uninterested in crimes committed by non-Western powers.”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise
[10] “History becomes the history of Western sins. And ignorance reigns not only over anything good the West ever did but over anything bad that anyone else has ever done.”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise
[11] “It seems to me that the post-October hysteria was the rotten fruit of the West’s turn against civilisation. Of our creeping abandonment of reason. Of our trading of the Enlightenment ideals of rational thought and democratic deliberation for the dead end of identity politics and competitive grievance.”
After the Pogrom — Brendan O’Neill. Open in Readwise
[12] “Moral realism takes the view that human understanding of what is good and right is preceded by, and responsible to, a moral order that is rooted (somehow) in the nature of things-in objective reality.”
In Defence of War — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise
[13] “All truth-claims are historical, power relations shape the meta-narratives, and so forth. At every juncture our commitments need to be disenchanted-weakened and lightened.”
Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise
[14] “If all beliefs are equally true or historically contingent, if the belief in reason is simply an ethnocentric Western prejudice, then there is no superior moral position from which to judge even the most abhorrent practices.”
The Technological Republic — Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. Open in Readwise
[15] “Self-hatred is a leftist trait.”
The Unabomber Manifesto — Ted Kaczynski. Open in Readwise
[16] “Inspired by a Christian ideal of basic human equality, a popular, national movement arose in late-eighteenth-century Britain to bring about the abolition, first, of the trade in slaves from Africa across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and the American colonies, and subsequently of the institution of slavery itself throughout the empire.”
Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise
[17] “Britain also led the world in the abolition of that trade. And Britain not only abolished that trade for itself but used its navy to seek to wipe out that trade in all parts of the world the navy could reach...grow the fleet until a sixth of the ships and seamen of the Royal Navy were employed in the fight against the slave trade.”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise
[18] “It has been proven that British taxpayers spent almost as much suppressing the slave trade for forty-seven years as the country profited from it...The British government of the day spent 40 percent of the entire national budget to buy freedom for the people who had been enslaved.”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise
[19] “Kaufmann and Pape conclude that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade (alone) in 1807-67 was ‘the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history’.”
Colonialism — Nigel Biggar. Open in Readwise
[20] “Every schoolchild now knows about slavery. How many can describe without irony, cringing, or caveat the great gifts that the Western tradition has given to the world?”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise