The Fall of Orban's "Illiberal Democracy." Fukuyama Was Right.

 

        Viktor Orban with J. D. Vance and Rod Dreher in Washington, D.C., November 2025

     

                                                                        Peter Magyar

"It's nice to have a strong man running your country."  That's what Donald Trump once said about Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary.  One indication of his political strength is that he has been Prime Minister since 2010, which makes him the longest serving Prime Minister in Europe.

But that could be ended by the parliamentary elections coming up on April 12, because polling shows that Peter Magyar is leading Orban in the race to become the next Prime Minister.  Magyar is a former Orban loyalist in Orban's Fidesz party who now leads the opposition party Tisza.

If Orban loses, that would signal the collapse of the international right-wing movement for populist nationalism because Orban's illiberal regime in Hungary has been the model for that movement.  That explains why Trump and Vance have endorsed Orban for reelection, and why Vance has been visiting Hungary to support Orban.  There are reports that Vance will appear with Orban at a campaign rally in Budapest a few days before the election.  Trump and Vance are desperately worried that Orban's defeat would be a crushing blow to the international MAGA movement.

But Magyar's victory would be just the final nail in the coffin for Orban's regime, which has been in decline for years now.  There are at least three signs of that decline.  Orban's policies for strengthening Hungary's families have failed to raise the female fertility rate.  Orban's promotion of a "Christian Hungary" has failed to revive Hungarian Christianity.  And, finally, huge numbers of Hungarians have been voting with their feet against Orban's regime by emigrating to Western European countries that offer them a better life than what they can have in Hungary.  The fact that these emigrants are going to those European nations that rank high on the Human Freedom Index confirms the argument of Francis Fukuyama that most human beings today regard the liberal social order that secures human freedom as the best regime.

THE ILLIBERAL STATE

As a young student and lawyer, Orban was originally a liberal anti-communist.  In 1988, he was one of the founders of the Alliance of Young Democrats (with the acronym FIDESZ), which challenged the Hungarian Young Communist League.  In 1989, Fidesz became a political party that supported the overthrow of the communist regime in 1990.

In 1989, Orban studied at Oxford University on a research fellowship funded by George Soros, the Hungarian-born philanthropist whom Orban now denounces as the conspiratorial funder of liberal causes in Eastern Europe.

In 1990, he left Oxford early so that he could return to Hungary to run in the first post-communist parliamentary elections.  He was elected a Member of Parliament, and he became a leader in Fidesz.

In 1994, after Fidesz lost the parliamentary elections badly, Orban decided that if he was to have any chance of becoming Prime Minister, he would have to move Fidesz away from its center-liberal position and towards the sort of right-wing populism that had propelled Silvio Berlusconi to become prime minister of Italy (Higgins 2025; Szelenyi 2022).  He was willing to change his political principles if he thought that would help him win votes and gain political power.  And, indeed, he became prime minister in 1998.  But he lost the general election in 2002.

In 2010, Orban returned as prime minister, and this time, he wanted to make sure that he would remain in power for many years.  He began silencing or taking over media outlets that he considered hostile to Fidesz.  He had the government fund an elaborate propaganda apparatus serving Fidesz.  He wrote a new constitution that would make it difficult for his opponents to win control of the parliament.  He removed the civil service protection for many government employees, and replaced them with his loyalists. He also took control of the courts so that he could appoint judges loyal to him.  

All of this supported what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way (2002, 2010) have called "competitive authoritarianism."  Somewhere between a fully authoritarian regime and a fully democratic regime, a competitive authoritarian regime has multiparty elections, but they are not completely free and fair, because the incumbent's abuse of power tilts the electoral playing field against the opposition, and basic civil liberties are restricted to make it hard for the opposition to challenge the ruling party.

Under competitive authoritarianism, opposition forces can compete seriously for power.  And, occasionally, the opposition can win an election, and the incumbents lose.  But this regime is still not fully democratic, because the ruling party uses its power over the government to attack opponents and co-opt critics.

These three regime types are distinguished by the kind of countervailance--power checking power--that they allow.  A fully authoritarian regime allows little or no countervailance.  A fully democratic regime allows strong countervailance.  A competitive authoritarian regime allows weak countervailance.

In a speech in 2014 that attracted attention around the world, Orban explained that "the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state."  He said that this would break away from the principles of liberal democracy that had dominated the global regime (including Hungary) from 1990 to 2010.  Beginning with the global financial crisis of 2008, he argued, it had become clear that the Western liberal social, economic, and political order based on the principle of individual freedom had failed.  This created an opening for newly emerging global powers based on illiberal nationalism--nations like Singapore, China, India, Russia, and Turkey.

Previously, Orban observed, the liberal states in Western Europe had been organized around the liberal principle of individual freedom: "With regard to the relationship between two people, the starting point of the liberal organization of society is based on the idea that we have the right to do anything that does not infringe on the freedom of the other party."  Here Orban paraphrased the definition of freedom adopted by John Locke--freedom as not being constrained or coerced by others, so long as one does not infringe on the same freedom for others (see Locke, Second Treatise, para. 57).

Notably, Orban did not completely reject this liberal principle of freedom.  But he did insist that this would not be the central organizing principle of the illiberal state.

What is happening in Hungary today can accordingly be interpreted by stating that the prevailing political leadership has today attempted to ensure that people's personal work and interests, which must be acknowledged, are closely linked to the life of the community and the nation, and that this relationship is preserved and reinforced.  In other words, the Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community that must be organized, reinforced and in fact constructed.  And so in this sense, the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.  It does not reject the fundamental principles of liberalism such as freedom, and I could list a few more, but it does not make this ideology the central element of state organization, but instead includes a different, special, national approach.

So Orban's illiberal state would secure some individual freedom, but there must also be a "national approach," because "the Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community."  Here you see why the conservative communitarian critics of liberal individualism--like Patrick Deneen, Roger Scruton, and Rod Dreher--have all made their pilgrimages to Budapest to honor Orban and receive his praises for their promotion of Orbanism in the United States and the UK (Szelenyi 2022).  Dreher moved to Budapest in 2022 so that he could be a part of Orban's propaganda operation--particularly, the Danube Institute, a state-backed think tank for disseminating Orban's ideology (Worth 2026).

I should say, however, that the Danube Institute does show some commitment to the liberal principle of open debate and freedom of thought.  Their mission statement includes this passage:

Our primary audience is the universe of centre-right intellectuals, political leaders, and public-spirited citizens. But we will also engage our counterparts on the democratic center-left in vigorous and principled public debate on as many occasions as possible and appropriate. We hope to draw upon the best minds of our day across national boundaries in international forums.

A recent example of their commitment to the liberal principle of intellectual freedom and debate is their event debating the question "Is Liberalism a Threat to Religious Liberty?"  One of the invited participants was Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern University, who is best known for his philosophic and legal arguments for gay rights.  His response to the proposed question was to suggest that this was a weird question, because since religious liberty originated as a principle of Lockean liberalism, to suggest that liberalism could threaten religious liberty was nonsensical.

If you peruse the website of the Danube Institute, you can see their concern for thinking through all of the themes of Orban's illiberal state, two of the most prominent being Christianity and family life.

DECLINING CHRISTIANITY

In 2018, Orban declared that Hungary must be a "Christian democracy," and "a Christian democracy cannot be liberal" (Orban 2018).  A Christian democracy cannot be liberal because "it gives priority to Christian culture" over all other cultures, and therefore it denies the liberal principle of multiculturalism.

But Orban was vague about what exactly he meant by "Christian culture."  Most confusing was his claim that in affirming the importance of Christian culture, he was not affirming any Christian doctrines of faith.

Christian democracy is not about defending religious articles of faith--in this case Christian religious articles of faith.  Neither states nor governments have competence on questions of damnation or salvation.  Christian democratic politics means that the ways of life springing from Christian culture must be protected.  Our duty is not to defend the articles of faith, but the forms of being that have grown from them.  These include human dignity, the family, and the nation--because Christianity does not seek to attain universality through the abolition of nations, but through the preservation of nations.  Other forms which must be protected and strengthened include our faith communities.  This--and not the protection of religious articles of faith--is the duty of Christian democracy.

Orban's statement is incoherent.  On the one hand, he says that a Christian democracy must be illiberal.  On the other hand, he says that a Christian democracy must not enforce any religious articles of faith and must secure the freedom of all "faith communities," which sounds like the liberal principle of religious liberty and toleration.  

Christian democracy would be truly illiberal if it meant some form of Christian integralism or theocracy (like medieval Catholicism or 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony).  But clearly Orban does not want that.  If he doesn't want the state to enforce any religious doctrines, that sounds like liberal democracy.  Indeed, Rod Dreher has said that authentic Christianity "can't exist if liberal democracy goes away" (Worth 2026, 36).  And as Koppelman pointed out, when the Danube Institute defends religious liberty, they're defending a fundamental principle of Lockean liberalism.

Moreover, if Christianity supports "the preservation of nations," as Orban says, does that mean the preservation of nations with diverse religious traditions?  Europe has some predominantly Muslim countries--such as Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Turkey--and in some cases, these Islamic traditions go back to the Middle Ages.  So it would seem that Orban's nationalism would have to allow for Islamic nationalism.  But then Orban's Christian democracy has been interpreted by many of his supporters as a defense of Christian Europe against Islam.

Another problem here is that by insisting that the state must not enforce any religious doctrines, Orban implies that religious freedom should include freedom of thought for atheists.  The fundamental religious doctrine of monotheism is "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth" (the Apostle's Creed), and if Orban does not think the state can enforce belief in that doctrine, then he must think that atheists are free from persecution.

So in saying that Christian democracy supports Christian culture but not Christian doctrines, Orban implicitly endorses the kind of atheistic religiosity promoted by conservatives like Roger Scruton, who want to enjoy the religious feelings that sacralize a national culture but without the religious belief in the real existence of God outside the human mind.  (The vacuousness of ritualized Christian culture without Christian belief was manifest three years ago in the coronation of King Charles III as the Christian King of Great Britain.)

But in the long run, believing in the importance of Christian culture without believing in the truth of Christian doctrines fails to slow the decline of that Christian culture.  We can see that in Orban's Hungary.

According to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, the majority of Hungarians do not identify themselves as religious.  In the census of 2022, 42.5% identified themselves as Christians, 1.3% as non-Christian religious believers, 16.1% as not religious, and 40.1% refused to answer.  Since it's unlikely that religious believers would refuse to answer the question, those who did refuse are probably not religious.  That means, then, that 56.2% of Hungarians do not identify themselves as religious.  And since most of the houses of worship in Hungary reportedly have few people attending, we can assume that most of those who identify themselves as religious are not devout believers.

If creating a Christian democracy in Hungary means that at least a majority of Hungarians are serious Christians, then Orban has failed to achieve that.

But that doesn't mean that Christianity cannot rebound in Hungary.  The number of Catholics and Reformed Protestants has dropped by about one half in 20 years.  But Hungary's fastest growing Christian church is the Hungarian Faith Church, which is a charismatic Pentecostal form of Christianity.  With its headquarters in Budapest, it has over 150,000 members, of which over 70,000 are in Hungary.  In a nation of 9.8 million people, those are impressive numbers when you consider that this church was founded as recently as 1979 by seven Hungarians.  Notably, Orban's son Gaspar Orban converted in 2014 to the Faith Church, and he has even become a minister in the church who claims to have received revelations from God and witnessed miraculous healings.

As I have argued, Christianity originated as a charismatic or Pentecostal form of religion rooted in animistic shamanism.  Animism was the first religion, and shamans were its first practitioners.  The religious experience of animistic shamanism is the natural seed in the human mind from which all subsequent religions have evolved.

The defining feature of Pentecostal doctrine is the teaching that all true Christians can be filled with the Holy Spirit, and the most prominent gifts of the Holy Spirit include healing, praying, prophesying, and preaching through speaking in tongues.  Here we see, once again, Christians becoming shamans who, through extraordinary states of ecstasy, engage with divine entities and provide services like healing and divination.

                              A Fresco of the Pentecostal Dove, Symbolizing the Holy Spirit

As long as we have liberal social orders with religious liberty, we will have free markets in religion that will allow the more charismatic Pentecostal religions to gain a growing share of the market because they appeal to the natural human desire for religious transcendence in making contact with the spiritual world through shamanic practices.  Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in the world, with over 600 million adherents worldwide.  So while Christianity in general might be in decline today in Hungary and elsewhere, we can expect a continuing revival of charismatic Christianity.

DECLINING FAMILIES

One reason why Christian culture is so important for Orban is that he sees it as supporting the traditional family with lots of children.  And that's important because families having and rearing many children resolves what Orban has said (in a 2017 speech) is "the greatest existential question for European civilization"--Will the drastic decline in Europe's population continue until there are hardly any Europeans left?

In that 2017 speech, Orban lamented that the population of Hungary had declined from 10,709,000 in 1980 to 9,799,000 in 2017, so that in less than 40 years, Hungary had lost almost a million people, which was more than all the casualties that Hungary sustained in World War II.

Orban announced that "Making Families Strong Again" would be the motto for the Hungarian government's family policies directed to raising the birth rate.  He explained:

It is important to highlight that the restoration of natural reproduction is a national cause; and it is not just one national cause among many, but the national cause.  And it is also a European cause: not just one European cause among many, but the European cause.  The goal of the Government of Hungary is to raise our birth rate to 2.1 per cent by 2030, which would be a replacement rate for our society.  At present, this figure stands at 1.5 per cent.

The technical term for the birth rate is the "total fertility rate" (TFR), which is a measure of an imaginary woman who passes through her reproductive life subject to all the age-specific fertility rates for the ages 15-49 that were recorded for a given population in a given year.  So this rate is the number of children a woman would have if she was subject to prevailing fertility rates at all ages from a single given year, and if she survived throughout all her childbearing years. 

If there were no mortality until the end of a woman's childbearing years, the replacement level of TFR would be around 2.0.  The replacement fertility rate is close to this for most industrialized countries.  For the global average, the TFR at replacement is about 2.33.  Here "replacement" means maintaining the present level of population into the future.

The drop in fertility rates that has occurred in most of the wealthier nations over the past hundred years has been called "the demographic transition" by demographers.  In the most developed societies today, the rich and powerful tend to have low fertility rates, and it's the lower class people who have higher fertility rates.  So as societies become wealthier, the total fertility rate for the whole society tends to drop, and over the past 70 years, it has dropped below replacement levels.

I have argued that one can explain this in Darwinian terms through the "embodied capital theory of human life history."  In the developed societies, the economic and social success of children depends ever more on their acquired technical skills and educational training, so that as adults they can compete for jobs that require special talents and knowledge. Consequently, rearing successful children in such societies requires that parents make increasingly costlier investments in the education of their children.  And as the cost of children has thus increased, the quantity of children demanded by parents has decreased, because parents now express their natural desire for parenting successful children by investing more resources in fewer children, thereby choosing quality over quantity in their children.

Moreover, for human beings to be able to invest so much in their children, they must first invest time and energy in their own education and career development and in the search for suitable mates.  Consequently, successful people in modern developed societies must often delay their marriage and having children, and thus the average ages for getting married and having the first child have risen.  When women do this, they sometimes reach the end of their reproductive years, and so produce fewer children than they would have desired.  It's likely that one reason for the total fertility rate falling below replacement levels is that couples who desire two or three children delay marriage and reproduction for so long that the women reach the end of their physiological fertility sooner than they had expected.  Then couples must rely on fertility treatments or adoption to satisfy their parental desires.

Orban has been trying to reverse this tendency to lower fertility through governmental policies that promote marriage and large families.  Hungary has a large per-child tax deduction that gets progressively larger with the second and third child.  Mothers of two or more children are exempt from paying income taxes for the rest of their lives.  Women with three or more children can have all of their student loan debt cancelled.  Families with home mortgages can have a large portion of that debt paid by the government in proportion to the number of their children.  The government has built or renovated infant day care centers around the country, and day care costs are heavily subsidized by the government.  The government has also built "family-friendly" infrastructure in the cities, such as beautiful playgrounds and parks, where parents can take their children to play.

But as of now, it appears that all of these pro-family policies have failed to raise the fertility rate.  In 2011, when Orban first became prime minister, Hungary had Europe's lowest TFR at 1.23.  By 2021, it had risen to 1.61.  But in 2025, it was back down to 1.27--essentially, the same all-time low as in 2011.

It is possible that policies designed to incentivize having more children may have had the opposite effect.  For example, providing tax exemptions for mothers of two children might provide a work incentive for those mothers.  European women are career-minded, and giving them tax exemptions could be reinforcing the idea that they should be earning more money, which directs the mother to invest more time and energy in her career rather than in her children.

When it comes to housing, Hungary's policy of subsidizing mortgages could be increasing the demand for housing but not the supply, which creates bidding wars that make homes less affordable.

Now let's consider how Hungary compares with the United States with respect to population growth and the fertility rate.  Unlike Hungary, the population of the U.S. has been growing steadily for over a hundred years.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the U.S. has grown every year since 1900, except for one year during the Spanish flu epidemic, growing at an average of 0.85% per year since 2000.  As of today, the population of the U.S. is 342,415,867, which makes it the third largest national population in the world, behind only India and China.

This is surprising since the TFR for the U.S. is only 1.79, which is substantially higher than Hungary's 1.23, but it's still below the replacement level of 2.1.  What explains the growing population despite the below-replacement TFR is immigration.  Consider these calculations for the U.S. from the U.S. Census Bureau:

One birth every 9 seconds

One death every 10 seconds

One international migrant (net) every 97 seconds

Net gain of one person every 45 seconds

This shows that the mistake make by Orban's Hungary has been in limiting immigration into Hungary.  If Hungary had allowed more freedom of movement of immigrants into Hungary, comparable to that allowed by the U.S., Hungary could have had an increasing population.

Now, of course, if Trump's policies for closing the U.S. borders and deporting immigrants continues, this could reverse the century-long trend towards increasing population and bring about the sort of depopulation crisis that has afflicted Hungary.

This supports my argument for open borders and freedom of movement.

DECLINING FREEDOM LEADS TO DECLINING POPULATION

I have pointed to two causes of Hungary's declining population--low fertility rates and low rates of immigration into Hungary.  But there's a third cause: the emigration of Hungarians out of Hungary.

According to Hungary's Central Statistical Office, a total of 367,515 Hungarians have officially left the country during the 15 years that Orban's Fidesz government has been in power.  This is actually an underestimation because foreign statistics often record nearly twice as many new arrivals from Hungary as Hungarian authorities do departures.  Another reason for this being an underestimation is that many Hungarians living abroad retain a Hungarian address.  Adjusting for these factors, there could be as many as 640,000 Hungarian emigrants who have left the country.  Notably, most of these emigrants are aged 25-49 years old--the prime age for people who could contribute to the economic and social life of Hungary.

What's most interesting about these emigrants is that prefer to emigrate to countries that rank high on the Human Freedom Index.  This should not be surprising if one recognizes, as I have argued, that countries ranking high in freedom tend to provide the best conditions for people to live good lives because they have wider opportunities for freely pursuing their happiness.

Here are the five most popular destinations for Hungarian emigrants, with their Human Freedom Index ranking in parentheses: Austria (22), Germany (17), UK (19), Netherlands (9), and Switzerland (1).

By comparison, Hungary ranks 67th out of 165 countries.  Previously, Hungary ranked much higher at 26th in 2009 the year before Orban's Fidesz came to power.  Hungary's rankings have dropped steadily during Orban's time as prime minister.

So Hungarians are voting with their feet against Orban's illiberalism and for freedom secured in a liberal social order.  Declining freedom thus leads to declining population.

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AT THE END OF HISTORY?

This failure of Orban's illiberal Christian democracy confirms Francis Fukuyama's famous argument in 1989 for "the end of history," in which human beings show their natural desire for the freedom--both economic and personal freedom--that comes from liberal democracy.

Actually, the appeal of the liberal principle of individual freedom is so powerful that even Orban cannot reject it completely.  As we've seen, Orban accepts the importance of securing that Lockean liberal conception of freedom in any good regime, although this cannot be the central organizing principle of his "illiberal state."  Consequently, Orban's "illiberal state" is not absolutely illiberal.  Someone like Rod Dreher (2023) can even defend Orban as the "guardian of liberal freedoms"!

We can see this in Hungary's rankings in the Human Freedom Index.  Under the rule of Orban's Fidesz party from 2010 to the present, Hungary's freedom ranking has fallen from 26th to 67th out of 165 countries.  But notice that a 67th ranking puts Hungary well above the world average.  Most countries rank lower.  Here are some examples of the lower ranking countries:  Mexico (91), Indonesia (92), India (110), Kuwait (113), China (149), Russia (152), and Iran (164).

If you look at how Hungary ranks in the various categories of personal freedom and economic freedom, where 10 is the highest possible score, you will see that Hungary ranks low in "rule of law" (4.9), "expression and information" (5.4), and "size of government" (6.1).  But Hungary ranks high in "freedom of movement" (9.9), "security and safety" (9.6), and "freedom in relationships" (8.8).

Thus, Orban's illiberal democracy is really very liberal, but not liberal enough for those Hungarians who have voted with their feet against Orban by leaving the country, and for those who will vote against him in the coming election.

REFERENCES

Dreher, Rod. 2023. "Orban: Guardian of Liberal Freedoms." The Critic, November.

Higgins, Andrew. 2025. "Viktor Orban's 'Propaganda State' Is Starting to Show Cracks." New York Times, October 12.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2002. "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism." Journal of Democracy 13 (April): 51-65.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Orban, Viktor. 2014. "Speech at the 25th Balvanyos Summer Free University." July 26. Tusnadfurdo (Baile Tusnad), Romania.

Orban, Viktor. 2017. "Speech at the 2nd Budapest Demographic Forum."  May 25.

Orban, Viktor. 2018. "Speech at the 29th Balvanyos Summer Free University." July 28.

How Leo Strauss Predicted the Nietzschean Nihilism of Trump's Intellectuals

                                                                          Leo Strauss

Francis Fukuyama has published an essay for Persuasion on "A Chilling Prediction by Leo Strauss."  He reproduces an excerpt from a lecture on "German Nihilism" that Strauss gave in 1941 at the New School for Social Research.  In his prefatory remarks, Fukuyama says that we should find this text "chilling" because Strauss's intellectual analysis of the young German nihilists supporting Hitler's Nazism describes perfectly the thinking of those far-right intellectuals who today are supporting Trump.

Just like the German nihilists described by Strauss, Fukuyama observes, American far-right thinkers today--like Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, Curtis Yarvin, and Costin Alamariu ("Bronze Age Pervert")--want to destroy liberalism because it is morally degrading in promoting the soft hedonism of the open society rather than the hard heroism of the closed society. 

This points to Strauss's primary claim in his lecture:  "German nihilism desires the destruction of modern civilization as far as modern civilization has a moral meaning." He explained: 

It is a moral protest.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the internationalism inherent in modern civilization, or, more precisely, that the establishment of a perfectly open society which is as it were the goal of modern civilization, and therefore all aspirations directed toward that goal, are irreconcilable with the basic demands of moral life.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the root of all moral life is essentially and therefore eternally the closed society; from the conviction that the open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral: the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness.

Strauss saw that the intellectual godfather of this German nihilism is Friedrich Nietzsche--the Nietzsche who scorned the ignoble pleasure-seeking life of the "Last Man" based on the slave morality dictated by the Christian principle of the equal dignity of all human beings, which denied the master morality of the few noble masters fit to rule over the multitude of inferior human beings.  In foreseeing the future emergence of a new nobility of those few superhuman higher men entitled to enslave the many subhuman lower men, Nietzsche has had a seductive appeal to those young nihilists who imagine themselves becoming the masters at the top of the natural order of rank in a new hierarchical closed society at war with its liberal enemies.

As Strauss indicated, what made this intellectual attitude "nihilistic" was that while it was clear about what it denied--liberalism--it was not clear about what it affirmed because its preferred alternative to liberalism was vague.  Since its No was more emphatic than its Yes, it was nihilistic in its passion for destruction--for Nothing--without offering any vision of what exactly would replace liberalism.

Similarly, Fukuyama suggests, today's "post-liberals" have no coherent conception of what should replace liberalism.  On the one hand, Deneen and Vermeule seem to want something like Catholic integralism--a Catholic theocracy enforcing a religious morality.  On the other hand, Yarvin and Alamariu are atheists who want to return to some kind of pagan hierarchy enforced by a strong, even tyrannical, government.  All that the two sides have in common is their hatred of liberalism.

This hatred of liberalism is also what moved the German nihilists to support Nazism.  And, as Fukuyama indicates, Strauss seemed to clearly reject Nazism in his 1941 lecture when he identified it as the "lowest, most provincial, most unenlightened and most dishonorable form" of German nihilism.  But still, Strauss argued, liberals needed to understand the nihilistic roots of illiberal politics in order to see the power of the Nietzschean nihilistic critique of liberalism.  Fukuyama thinks the same is true today in America: liberals need to understand why the American far-right intellectuals hate liberalism and why that hatred of liberalism as rooted in Nietzschean nihilism has such an appeal for many people today--particularly, the young men supporting Trump.  

Actually, Fukuyama does not explicitly mention Trump in his remarks, but the implicit reference to Trump is clear.  It should be noted, however, that while Fukuyama explains the far-right intellectuals supporting Trump as illiberal nihilists, he has explained Trump himself as motivated not by any ideology but by what Nietzsche called ressentiment--"acute resentment of others based on wounded pride, perceived disregard, fears of inadequacy, and a desire to exact revenge on those who had earlier failed to pay adequate respect."  I have explained this resentment as an expression of Trump's chimpanzee grandiose narcissism.  Moreover, Fukuyama has suggested, the core of the MAGA movement is mostly moved not by any ideology--like the illiberal nihilism of the far-right intellectuals--but by the shared resentment of people who think they have not been respected by those who belong to the elites and look down on them with disdain.  This explains why Trump's staunchest supporters will remain loyal to him even when they suffer economically from his policies--such as high tariffs that will harm many of Trump's voters.

I agree with everything Fukuyama says here.  By the way, I also agree with Fukuyama's defense of liberalism as first announced in his 1989 "End of History?" article.  

But I do think Fukuyama misses three crucial flaws in Strauss's reasoning that should come out of a careful reading of his "German Nihilism" lecture that are pertinent to our understanding of, and our response to, both German and American nihilism.  

First, Fukuyama does not notice Strauss's quiet endorsement of the "young nihilists" that Will Altman and others have identified as evidence that Strauss was attracted to the nihilism of the Nazis.  

Second, Fukuyama also does not notice that in naming Nietzsche as the godfather of illiberal nihilism, Strauss failed to recognize Nietzsche's support for liberalism in the writings of his middle period (particularly, Human, All Too Human).  

Third, Strauss had also failed to see how philosophic proponents of liberalism like John Locke and Adam Smith had shown that liberalism cultivates the moral and intellectual virtues, which refutes the charge of the illiberal nihilists that liberalism must be ignoble and degrading.

Since I have previously elaborated each of these points, I will only briefly summarize them here with links to previous posts and references to the 4th edition of Political Questions (PQ4).

STRAUSS'S NAZISM?

Fukuyama's excerpt from "German Nihilism" does not include this passage:

I have tried to circumscribe the intellectual and moral situation in which a nihilism emerged which was not in all cases base in its origin.  Moreover, I take it for granted that not everything to which the young nihilists objected was unobjectionable, and that not every writer or speaker whom they despised, was respectable. . . . Let us then not hesitate to look for one moment at the phenomenon which I called nihilism, from the point of view of the nihilists. . . . A new reality is in the making; it is transforming the whole world; in the meantime there is: nothing, but--a fertile nothing.

Notice that in taking "the point of view of the nihilists," Strauss actually goes a long way towards endorsing their position: some (most?) of that to which the nihilists objected really was objectionable, and some (most?) of the writers and speakers whom they despised really were despicable.  This is one piece of evidence cited by Will Altman for his provocative claim that Strauss supported Nazi nihilism in its attack on liberalism (PQ4, 491-99).

In "German Nihilism," Strauss took "the point of view of the nihilists" in explaining their argument that an illiberal "closed society" was ennobling, while a liberal "open society" was degrading.  Any reader of Strauss will know that he often embraced this idea that every healthy society--and particularly, the premodern societies like Athens and Sparta--was a closed society as opposed to the modern open societies of liberalism that inevitably became corrupt.  Actually, as I have argued, Athens was a much more open and liberal society than Strauss was willing to admit--that's why the philosophical schools of Plato and Aristotle could flourish in Athens but not in Sparta.

Strauss did not allow "German Nihilism" to be published while he was alive.  It was not published until 1999 (in Interpretation), which was 26 years after his death in 1973.  Was this because he feared that it was too open in suggesting his sympathy for German nihilism?

Similarly, Strauss's praise of Martin Heidegger in "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism" was not published until 1989 (in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism), 16 years after his death.  Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933.  He offered vigorous philosophic defenses of Hitler and the Nazi Party.  And he never apologized for his support of the Nazis--right up to his death in 1976.

Strauss had been a student of Heidegger, and he praised Heidegger as the greatest thinker of the twentieth century.  In "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," he left his reader doubting whether there was any good refutation of Heidegger's Nazi attack on liberalism:

All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power.  One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate.  I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism.  Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight.  But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.

Notice how emphatic Strauss is in using the word "I" here.  He once explained that one form of esoteric writing was to use the word "we" to seemingly endorse a common opinion, rather than saying "I," which suggested that one was truly endorsing that opinion. 

This is part of the evidence supporting Altman's argument that Strauss saw himself as the culmination of the "Third Wave of Modernity" that overthrew liberalism--first Nietzsche, then Heidegger, and finally Strauss.

Although I am not fully persuaded by Altman, I am persuaded that he has proven that Strauss often implied some endorsement of the Nazi attack on liberalism, and he never publicly and emphatically rejected Nazi nihilism and affirmed liberalism--as did some of his friends like Hans Jonas.  That was a moral and intellectual failure on the part of Strauss. 

NIETZSCHE'S DARWINIAN LIBERALISM

Another of Strauss's failures was in saying that Nietzsche initiated the Third Wave of Modernity that would lead to the illiberal nihilism of Nazism.  Although this might be true for the early and late writings of Nietzsche that were so often praised by the Nazis, it is not true for the writings of the middle period, and particularly Human, All Too Human.

In this book, Nietzsche defended a Darwinian liberalism that rejected many of the main ideas of his later writing--such as the celebration of the Ubermensch (the Superman or Overman), which became a theme for the Nazis.  

One can make a good case (as Bruce Detwiler does) for "Dionysian aristocratic radicalism" as the political teaching of Nietzsche in his early and late writings.  But one also needs to recognize that Nietzsche's endorsement of liberal democracy rooted in Darwinian evolution in the writings of his middle period contradicts what he says in his other writings.  Then, if one compares those two teachings, one can make a good argument that Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism is morally and intellectually superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism (PQ4, 457-60).  This is Nietzsche's defense of liberalism against the attack of the German nihilists.

Strauss failed to see this.

LOCKE AND SMITH ON LIBERAL VIRTUES

Strauss also failed to see how Locke and Smith had made powerful arguments for liberalism's moral and intellectual virtues.  One of Strauss's most influential pieces of writing--particularly among the far-right intellectual critics of liberalism--is his interpretation of Locke in Natural Right and History, which presents Lockean liberalism as promoting a vulgar and soul-deadening soft hedonism, which Strauss famously called "a joyless quest for joy."  This is the Locke that "post-liberals" like Patrick Deneen have scorned.

But as I have argued, this ignores much of what Locke wrote about how a free society secures the liberty that allows for the cultivation of moral and intellectual excellence--including the freedom to live the philosophic life (for people like Strauss!) (PQ4, 489-91).  So, while critics of liberalism like Deneen insist that Lockean liberalism teaches "pursuit of immediate gratification" and the "absence of restraints upon one's desires," he says nothing about how Locke contradicts this claim in Some Thoughts Concerning Education.  In that book, Locke stresses the importance of parents educating their children so that they have a sense of shame in caring about their good reputation (secs. 56, 61, 78).  Locke says that "the great principle and foundation of all virtue and worth is placed in this, that a man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclinations, and purely follow what reason directs as best though the appetite lean the other way" (sec. 33). "It seems plain to me that the principle of all virtue and excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires where reason does not authorize them" (sec. 38). Children must be taught that "covetousness and the desire of having in our possession and under our dominion more than we have need of" is "the root of all evil" (sec. 110). 

Above all, Locke insists, children must be taught and habituated to show "civility"--respect and good will to all people (secs. 66-67, 70, 109, 117, 143-44). Here Locke's emphasis on the need for "civility" is part of what Norbert Elias identified as the "civilizing process" promoted by early modern liberalism to overcome the incivility, violence, and corrupt manners of medieval pre-modern Europe.  Deneen and Strauss are silent about all of this.

They are also silent about Smith's argument about how a liberal society--"allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice"--promotes the moral and intellectual virtues.  Strauss said almost nothing about Smith, but Strauss's thinking about liberal political philosophy shaped the interpretation of Smith developed by Joseph Cropsey, Strauss's student and colleague.  Cropsey claimed that in Smith's "commercial society," commerce takes the place of virtue.  But as I have indicated, Cropsey ignored or played down everything Smith said--particularly, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments--about how the moral and intellectual virtues are cultivated in a free society (PQ4, 340-48).

Moreover, Cropsey was completely silent about how Charles Darwin saw that Smith's moral philosophy was confirmed by his scientific theory of moral evolution, and how this has been deepened by the evolutionary studies of morality over the 150 years since Darwin's Descent of Man (PQ4, 316-28).

Strauss and the Straussians have failed to see how a careful reading of Nietzsche, Locke, and Smith can reveal the nobility of liberalism in securing the liberty that makes virtue possible, thus refuting the moral critique of liberalism by the illiberal nihilists, including those today who try to provide the intellectual justification for Trump's illiberalism.

Trump and the History of Fascism: He Cannot Take Power by Majority Vote or by Force

The Roman Fasces, A Symbol of the Authority and Unity of the Ancient Roman State

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                                 The January 6th Insurrectionists Storm the Capitol Building

Is Donald Trump a fascist?  If he is, does the history of fascism help us to predict whether he is likely to take power as a fascist ruler?

My answer to the first question is Yes.  My answer to the second question is that the history of fascism tells us that fascists cannot take power by majority vote or by force, because they need to be given power by conservative elites.  For Trump to become a fascist ruler, he would have to be put into power by the political and military elites.

THE CONCEPT OF FASCISM

Since he is one of the leading historians of fascism, Robert Paxton has often been asked whether he identifies Trump as a fascist.  Up to the end of Trump's term as president, Paxton said No.  But on January 6, 2021, as he watched the Trump-inspired insurrection on Capitol Hill, which was meant to overturn the election of 2020 and keep Trump in power, he changed his mind.  A few days after the insurrection, he wrote an essay for Newsweek explaining how that insurrection was the final piece of evidence pointing to Trump's character as a fascist.

We now have even more evidence for that conclusion coming from General Mark Milley, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump's presidency, and retired General John Kelly, who was Trump's Chief of Staff for almost a year and a half.  They have reported that Trump wanted to use the military against his political opponents and that he expressed his admiration for how Hitler had used his generals.  Both Milley and Kelly told Trump that their oath to uphold the Constitution would take precedence over their loyalty to the President.  And both concluded that Trump was a fascist.

Paxton's position in the debate over Trump's fascism is unusual.  There are two questions in this debate.  Is Trump a fascist?  And is it helpful to identify him as a fascist?  Most people in the debate either say yes to both questions or no to both.  As he told the New York Times, Paxton says yes to the first question but no to the second.  Yes, Trump is a fascist.  But no it doesn't help the debate to say that, because "fascist" is "a word that generates more heat than light."  

I agree that most of the time "fascist" is a sloppy epithet that we throw around to express our moral disgust with someone we disagree with strongly, and therefore using that word enflames emotions without clarifying the debate.  But when a historian of fascism like Paxton says that Trump is a fascist and explains the exact similarities and differences between Trump and fascists like Mussolini and Hitler, that illuminates the debate by showing how the history of fascism might explain and predict Trump's behavior.

Recently, Trump has said that he is planning to use military force against the "enemy within," which includes "bad people" like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff.  This convinced John Kelly (Trump's Chief of Staff from July 2017 to December 2018) that he needed to speak out, and he was interviewed by the New York Times.  Kelly read aloud a definition of fascism:

"Well, looking at the definition of fascism:  It's a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy."

"Certainly, the former president is in the far-right area, he's certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators--he has said that.  So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure."

Much of the discussion among historians is about whether there really is a "general definition of fascist."  Some historians argue that since Benito Mussolini originated the term, it should apply only to the specific historical movement of Mussolini's Italian fascism.  In 1919, Mussolini coined the Italian fascismo from fascio--a bundle or sheaf--recalling the Latin fasces:  an axe encased in a bundle of rods carried in public processions to symbolize the authority and unity of the Roman state.

This explains why the Oxford English Dictionary identifies the primary definition of "fascism" as "a nationalist political movement that controlled the government of Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini."

But then the OED also provides a generic definition of "fascism": "an authoritarian and nationalistic system of government and social organization which emerged after the end of the First World War in 1918, and became a prominent force in European politics during the 1920s and 1930s, most notably in Italy and Germany; (later also) an extreme right-wing political ideology based on the principles underlying this system."

As Paxton indicates, there are two reasons for why it's hard to reach agreement on these or any other definitions of fascism.  First, it is hard to define fascism as an ideology because the fascists did not care very much about ideas or doctrines.  They were devoted more to action than thought--they were driven more by feelings than by reason.  That explains why there is no authoritative statement of their ideas comparable to say Marx's Communist Manifesto as a statement of communist doctrines.  Mussolini and Hitler did issue some programmatic statements of fascist ideas.  But then their actions often contradicted what they had promised to do, and they never felt compelled to justify their actions as consistent with their ideas.  By contrast, Marxist leaders like Lenin and Stalin had to make elaborate arguments for why their actions were in conformity with the texts of Marx and Engels.

The second reason for why it's so hard to define fascism is that fascism never had a fixed or static identity because it changed as it passed through five stages: (1) the initial creation of a fascist movement, (2) the rooting of the movement as a party in a political system, (3) the acquisition of ruling power by the fascist leader and his party, (4) the exercise of that ruling power, and (5) the long term development of fascist power towards radicalization or dissolution.  Fascism looks different at each of these stages.  And while every fascist movement reaches Stage One, only a few reach Stage Two.  And very few--maybe only in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany--reach Stage Three by actually gaining ruling power.  (Most of what have been commonly assumed to be examples of fascists taking power--like Franco in Spain or Salazar in Portugal--are really examples of traditional authoritarianism rather than pure fascism.)

Paxton has explained this fascist history of five stages in an article--"The Five Stages of Fascism" (1998)--and he has elaborated this history and analysis in a book--The Anatomy of Fascism (2004).

Despite his reluctance to reduce fascism to a single definition, Paxton does think that from this history of fascist actions in five stages, one can deduce the ideas implicit in those actions, which he summarizes in one long "functional definition of fascism":

"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion" (1998: 21; 2004: 218).

He also states this as nine "mobilizing passions" that "belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions":

(1) "a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;"

(2) "the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;"

(3) "the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;"

(4) "dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;"

(5) "the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;"

(6) "the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group's historical destiny;"

(7) "the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason;"

(8) "the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success;"

(9) "the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle."

Do Trump and his MAGA party manifest most of these fascist passions?  You can answer this for yourself by watching the video of the recent Trump rally at Madison Square Garden and checking off the items on this list.

Okay, so you're not going to watch all six and a half hours of this!  But you can skip around it and see if it shows the "mobilizing passions" of fascism.

Now there are a few items in Paxton's definition and list of passions that don't show up here.  For example, Trump and his people don't express any interest in "external expansion"--they're not proposing to invade other countries.

We also might question whether there's any "collaboration with traditional elites" here, since the speakers repeatedly attack the "elites" in the Democratic Party.  But there is certainly a collaboration with some economic elites (such as Elon Musk) and some of the conservative elites in the Republican Party.

On the other hand, there are some distinctive traits of American Fascism here that are not prominent in Paxton's sketch of fascism.  While fascists like Mussolini and Hitler have been secular or perhaps pagan, American Fascists are often Christian Nationalists defending American Christians as the Chosen People of God against their godless enemies.  So, you'll notice that the Madison Square Garden rally begins with a prayer read by Tiffany Justice, one of the founders of "Moms for Liberty," who prays for God to intervene in support of Trump's election, and she thanks God for His miracle in saving Trump from being assassinated.  Later in the rally, David Rem holds up a cross at the podium and declares that Kamala Harris is the "Devil" and "the Antichrist."  Thus, we have the image of Trump as God's Chosen One fighting for America against the forces of demonic evil led by the Antichrist in the Last Battle as described in the book of Revelation.

Previously, I have written about the Christian Evangelicals who identify Trump as being the Messiah like Cyrus in the Old Testament.

NEITHER BY VOTE NOR BY FORCE

So, how do fascists come into ruling power (Stage Three)?  And does the history of fascists taking power help us to predict whether Trump's fascism could come into power in America?

It has been commonly assumed that fascists have come to power by force alone--through a coup d'etat.  Or, occasionally, you'll hear people say that fascists like Mussolini and Hitler took power through majority vote at the ballot box.  As Paxton and other historians have shown, both claims are false.

"Both Mussolini and Hitler were invited to take office as head of government by a head of state in the legitimate exercise of his official functions, on the advice of civilian and military counselors.  Both thus became heads of government in what appeared, at least on the surface, to be legitimate exercises of constitutional authority by King Victor Emmanuel III and President Hindenburg.  Both these appointments were made, it must be added at once, under conditions of extreme crisis, which the fascists had abetted."  We should see then that "no insurrectionary coup against an established state has ever so far brought fascists to power" (Paxton 1998: 17; 2004: 96-97).

The story that Mussolini's Fascists seized power over Italy through their "March on Rome" is fascist propaganda.  It is true that on October 28, 1922, about nine thousand Blackshirts marched to the gates of Rome.  But they were "poorly armed, wearing makeshift uniforms, short of food and water, and milling about in a discouraging rain" (Paxton 2004: 89).  Mussolini arrived in Rome from Milan on the morning of October 30, and he met with the King.  Although the King had plenty of soldiers who could have dispersed the Blackshirts, he foresaw that this would be bloody.  He decided, instead, to appoint Mussolini as Prime Minister.  Mussolini was bluffing, and his bluff worked.

The next day--October 31--with Mussolini already in office, ten thousand Blackshirts marched in a parade through Rome.  That evening, Mussolini had all of his Blackshirts sent out of town in fifty special trains.  The parade had established the myth that his Blackshirts had taken power by their own will and force.  October 28 became a national holiday and the first day of the Fascist New Year.

A year later, Hitler showed that he had been taken in by Mussolini's propaganda about the "March on Rome."  He attempted his own "march" on November 8, 1923.  During a nationalist rally in a Munich beer hall, he tried to kidnap the leaders of the Bavarian government and force them to launch a coup d'etat against the federal government in Berlin.  This "Beer Hall Putsch" was easily put down by police who fired on the Nazi marchers.  Hitler was arrested and imprisoned.  He learned the lesson that fascist political power could not be taken by force alone as long as the police and soldiers remained loyal to the government.

Hitler also learned that while he would have to work within the parliamentary party system, he could not come to power by winning a majority vote for his party.  The Nazis became the largest party in the German Reichstag in the parliamentary elections of July 31, 1932, when they won 37.2 percent of the vote.  But this dropped to 33.1 percent in the election of November 6, 1932.  Even when Hitler had become chancellor, and he could use his Storm Troopers to intimidate voters, the Nazi Party won only 43.9 percent of the vote in the elections of March 6, 1932.  By comparison, the Italian Fascist Party won 35 out of 535 seats in the parliamentary election of May 15, 1921.

Just as Mussolini had become the Italian Prime Minister by the appointment of the King, Hitler became the German Chancellor by the appointment of President Paul Hindenburg.  In both cases, conservative elites decided that appointing fascist leaders as the heads of government was the only way to form parliamentary majorities capable of vigorous governing without having to form coalitions with radical socialist and communist parties.

These conservatives saw this as the only way to resolve the unprecedented crises that they faced.  The first crisis was the social and political crisis created in the wake of World War One, which included the threat of a communist revolution in Western Europe sparked by the Russian Revolution.  The second crisis was the Great Global Depression that began in 1929.  By 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor, over 30% of the German workforce was unemployed.  Part of this was the "crisis of liberalism" insofar as it seemed that liberal democracy could not solve these problems.

On February 28, 1933, a fire set by a Dutch communist youth gutted the Reichstag building in Berlin.  This was generally believed to be the beginning of a communist coup.  This provoked President Hindenburg into using his emergency powers under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, and he issued a decree suspending the legal protection of personal liberties.  This allowed Hitler's Brownshirts to use violence against Jews and others suspected of left-wing activities.  Then, on March 24 of 1933, parliament passed an Enabling Act that delegated its legislative powers to the executive.  This allowed Hitler to rule by his own personal authority from 1933 to the end of the war.  He was free to use violence against the "enemies of the people."  Here we see the fatal flaw in the Weimar Constitution--its openness to unchecked executive prerogative powers.

So, what does this history suggest as to whether and how Trump's fascism could gain ruling power in America?  First, we should say that Trump has never won an election by majority vote, although he won in 2016 in the Electoral College.  Like Hitler, he seems to have about 35-40 percent of the voters as a solid base.  When he ran in 2016, he was not clearly identified as a fascist candidate.  But now, after the January 6th insurrection and his open threats to use military force against the "enemy within," his fascist propensities have become clear to many voters.  And that's why I am predicting that Harris will win this election.

But if he does win, perhaps only in the Electoral College, can't we predict that he will make himself a fascist dictator?  And even if he loses, can't we predict that Trump will say the election has been stolen again, as it was in 2020?  And won't he lead his MAGA movement into a violent insurrection to take power by force alone?  

Well, sure, we can imagine that he will try something like this.  But from what we have seen from his failure to overturn the election of 2020, we can predict, as I argued a few years ago, that Trump will not have the guts or the guns to launch a successful coup.  

In his last year in office, Trump's fascist advisors told him that he needed to declare martial law (under the Insurrection Act) and order the military to suppress the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and to overturn the election.  He did not act on their advice because he lacked the courage to try this, and because his generals had told him they would not obey his orders if they violated the Constitution.  There is no reason to believe that there will be any change in these circumstances after the election.

Here is where I disagree with Robert Kagan's argument that regardless of whether Trump wins or loses the election, his fascism will destroy liberal democracy in America.  As I explained in my response to Kagan, the "crisis" that America faces today is nowhere near as deep as the crisis faced by Italy and Germany between the wars.  There is no threat of Communist Revolution in America despite Trump's silly assertion that the Democrats are Communists.  There is no Great Depression in America.  The American economy is more prosperous than it has ever been.

And, most importantly, there is no "crisis of liberalism" in America today comparable to what may have happened in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.  While I agree with Kagan's claim that Trump's fascism is rooted in an American tradition of illiberalism, the American liberal tradition is stronger today than it has ever been.  One sign of that is that Trump and his supporters must insist that of course Trump is not a fascist, and of course the theme of his campaign is "freedom."

Moreover, even Kagan recognizes that illiberal fascists like Trump are desperate to win this election because they recognize that America is experiencing a "demographic shift" that favors liberalism over illiberalism:  as America becomes ever more multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, and religiously pluralistic, it becomes impossible for any single ethnoreligious group to dominate American politics and culture, and the appeal of liberalism as the only means of holding such a pluralistic society together will grow ever stronger.

In this election and its aftermath, we will see the confirmation of Francis Fukuyama's argument for the "end of history":  liberalism will prevail over fascism.

THE LIBERAL REFUTATION OF ILLIBERALISM: BY FORCE OF IDEAS AND ARMS

Remember the ninth "mobilizing passion" of fascism:  "the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle."

Lockean Liberals can accept that challenge and agree that liberalism must prevail over illiberalism through Darwinian cultural group selection in the war of ideas and arms.

Although ideas don't matter very much to fascism, particularly in its later stages when it takes political power, ideas do matter in the early creation of fascist movements.  I have written about the "Nazi philosophers"--from Plato and Fichte to Nietzsche and Heidegger.  And I have suggested the ways in which liberalism wins the intellectual war with illiberalism.  Indeed, the intellectual victory of liberalism has been so clear that even those who pose as antiliberals--Patrick Deneen, for example, turn out ultimately to be liberals.

Moreover, as Locke saw, there is a practical expression of the theoretical appeal of liberalism when people "vote with their feet" and choose to immigrate to those countries with more freedom, which is one form of cultural group selection.

But Locke also saw that the power of liberal ideas must ultimately be backed up with the power of liberal arms in the "Appeal to Heaven."  So, for example, the Declaration of Independence was not only a declaration of the "self-evident truths" of equal natural rights but also a declaration of war, in which the outcome would depend on the "popular Lockeanism" of the Americans fighting in the war.

Then, in 1861, the Confederate States of America declared themselves a nation conceived in the liberty of white men to enslave others and dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal; and they engaged in a great war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.  That nation did not endure because it was defeated by a Lockean liberal regime with a larger population of well-armed fighting men, including emancipated slaves, many of whom understood that they were fighting for the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  As the proslavery Southerner George Fitzhugh admitted, the Union defeat of the Confederacy was the victory of John Locke over Robert Filmer.

But that was not enough to ensure the "new birth of freedom."  The use of military force to suppress the fascist militias of the Klan in the Reconstruction Era and then in the Second Reconstruction (the Civil Rights Movement) to reform the Jim Crow South was required for overthrowing the illiberal tradition of the American South.  This included a Black tradition of armed self-defense and rebellion.  Ultimately, Lincoln's rhetoric of equal liberty defeated George Wallace's rhetoric of freedom as domination.

Similarly, in World War Two, we saw a test in war of the fascist "right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint."  And with the defeat of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in war, we saw that there is a sense in which might does make right, when people in the state of nature exercise "the executive power of the law of nature" to resist and punish those who would dominate them.

REFERENCES

Kagan, Robert.  2024.  Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart--Again.  New York: Knopf.

Paxton, Robert O.  1998.  "The Five Faces of Fascism."  The Journal of Modern History 70 (March): 1-23.

Paxton, Robert O.  2004.  The Anatomy of Fascism.  New York: Random House.

Paxton, Robert O.  2021. "I've Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist.  Until Now."  Newsweek, January 11.

Schmidt, Michael S.  2024.  "As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator."  The New York Times, October 22.

Zerofsky, Elisabeth. 2024. "Is It Fascism?  A Leading Historian Changes His MInd."  The New York Times, October 23.

Catholic Integralists for Trump? Sohrab Ahmari and J. D. Vance

I have a question mark in my title because the Catholic integralists for Trump are often evasive in avoiding the term "integralism."  But if you look at what they say about what they call their "political Catholicism" or "common-good conservatism," it's clear that they are Catholic integralists who want to use Trump's MAGA movement as a step towards establishing America as a Catholic confessional state that would coercively enforce the authority of the Catholic Church and persecute Jews, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, atheists, and generally all non-Catholics.  

Sure, that's preposterous. And that's why they are so hesitant to say openly what they have in mind.  It's so preposterous that even many of the Christian conservative "post-liberals" like Rod Dreher and Patrick Deneen, who should be sympathetic to their cause, have scorned the integralists.  Dreher has said that his "unwillingness to fully surrender liberalism is in large part because we still live in a highly pluralistic and diverse society," and "liberalism arose in the first place to accommodate pluralism."  Consequently, "any non-liberal alternative would probably be tyrannical."  Notice what he is saying:  while claiming to be a "post-liberal," he is still a liberal, because he cannot endorse a truly illiberal alternative like integralism.

Clearly, people like Dreher and Deneen agree with Kevin Vallier's critique of integralism: "You can't go there, you can't stay there, and it's unfair."  You can't go there, because you can't establish a Catholic confessional state in a society like America where Catholics are a minority of less than 20 percent, and where even most Catholics would not want to persecute non-Catholics.  You can't stay there, because even if you could establish a Catholic confessional state, it would be overthrown by rebellion.  It's unfair, because an American Catholic state would have to be an unjust tyranny.

As I said in my previous post, the evasiveness of the integralists makes me suspect that their integralism is only an insincere affectation that disguises the fact that while they want to pose as opponents of liberalism, they are really liberals--like Dreher and Deneen--who cannot openly give up the liberal principles of religious liberty and toleration as necessary for preserving social order in a pluralistic society.

As I have pointed out, the French Far Right has the same problem: they pretend to be Catholic integralists, but even in a historically Catholic country like France, a Catholic state in a pluralistic society is absurd; and so, the fake French integralists remain liberals in accepting the liberal principle of religious liberty.

This raises an obvious question:  if integralism is such an obviously preposterous idea, why have some otherwise intelligent American conservatives tried to embrace it?  One way to answer this question is to examine the personal histories of the integralists to see what motivated them to adopt this idea in the first place.  For example, one could go to Sohrab Ahmari's memoir--From Fire, By Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2019).

Ahmari became one of the leaders of American integralism in May of 2019 with the publication of his widely discussed essay "Against David French-Ism" in First Things.  At the time, he was the op-ed editor of the New York Post.  He wrote to explain the reasoning behind a manifesto that had been published the previous March in First Things--"Against the Dead Consensus"--which was signed by mostly Roman Catholic conservatives who had supported Trump in 2016 in opposition to the "Never Trump" conservatives.  "There is no returning to the pre-Trump conservative consensus that collapsed in 2016," they proclaimed.  "Any attempt to revive the failed conservative consensus that preceded Trump would be misguided and harmful to the right."  The mistake of that earlier Reaganite conservative consensus was its commitment to a liberal conservatism of classical liberalism that "too often tracked the same lodestar liberalism did--namely, individual autonomy."  Ahmari's "Against David French-Ism" identified the classical liberal David French as the prototypical liberal conservative whose devotion to individual autonomy blinded him to the wisdom of Trump's common-good conservatism.

The most prominent passage of Ahmari's essay was his insistence that conservatives must "fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good."  "French prefers a different Christian strategy," Ahmari explained, because he has a different "political theology" from that favored by Ahmari and his friends.  A careful reader of Ahmari's essay could see that his political theology was Catholic Political Integralism, in which the "public square" is directed "to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good"--the "Highest Good" being the eternal salvation of the soul in Heaven.

That this required a Catholic confessional state was made clear by the Catholic integralists, particularly those writing for the online blog The Josias.  Edmund Waldstein, a Cistercian monk, summarized integralism on the blog in three sentences: "Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that, rejecting the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holds that political rule must order man to this final goal.  Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power.  And since man's temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power."  Of course, "the spiritual power" is the Catholic Church and its claim to be the only true religion with the authority to speak for God's Revelation of the Truth and to demand that the "temporal power" of the state be used to coercively enforce obedience to the Church.

Waldstein's statement and many other essays from The Josias were published in a two-volume book--Integralism and the Common Good: Selected Essays from "The Josias" in 2021 and 2022.  Waldstein identified Ahmari in the book as one of the most important proponents of integralism.  And Ahmari wrote a laudatory blurb for the book: "The good, the common good, the highest good--these and other concepts have once more come to permeate political discourse in the West.  While this is a salutary development, there is also much confusion in the air over what they really mean.  No more: this lucid and learned anthology is a fantastic one-stop primer for the perplexed layman."

As he tells his story in his memoir, Ahmari's conversion to Catholicism and Catholic Integralism in December of 2016, just after Trump's election, was the latest of many conversions that he had experienced.  He was born and raised in Iran in the years after the establishment of the Muslim Republic of Iran in 1979.  As a child, he and his family rebelled against the stultifying cultural conformity of fundamentalist Islam.  Then, as a teenager, he became a staunch atheist who looked to modern secular society, particularly in America, as the best way of life.  When he immigrated to the United States, at age 14, he was shocked by the religiosity of many Americans, particularly in Utah where he lived.

Then, just before his senior year in high school, he discovered Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and it took over his mind and heart.  He says that this book "set me off on an intellectual and spiritual road that, years later, would bring me to a most unlikely destination: the Roman Catholic Church" (85).  

If Ahmari had discovered Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human rather than Thus Spoke Zarathustra, this might have set him off on a different road that would not have led him to Catholic Integralism.  I think Lou Salome was right in seeing that after going through his middle period of writing in Human, All Too Human--devoted to evolutionary Darwinian science, Socratic philosophy, and liberal democracy, Nietzsche in his later writings--beginning with Zarathustra-- returned to his earlier fear of science as subversive of life--in The Birth of Tragedy--as he looked to "the eternalizing powers of art and religion" as the only way to restore meaning to life through religious transcendence.  In Salome's book on Nietzsche--the first book on Nietzsche's writings--she explained this history of his writing as showing his struggle with a "religious drive" that he could never shake off. On the one hand, he denied the God in whom he had devotedly believed in his Lutheran household by proclaiming "God is dead." On the other hand, he needed to replace that orthodox religion with a new Dionysian religion of the Superman. She thought that only in his middle writings--during the time of his deep philosophic friendships with Paul Ree and herself--did Nietzsche achieve a position of scientific skepticism and liberalism free of religious longings.

Just as Lutheran piety was instilled in Nietzsche as a boy, which created a life-long religious longing for redemption, Islamic piety had moved Ahmari as a boy in Iran.  In his Islamic education as a schoolboy, he says that he "discovered the Shiite faith's jagged beauty and deep pathos.  Most important, I learned about Hussein ibn Ali, the third Shiite imam and the greatest martyr in a faith of martyrs.  To this day, I hear in Hussein's story an echo of Christ's teaching that 'greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends'" (38).

When Ahmari announced his conversion to Catholicism in 2016 to his friends, who had known him as a classical liberal who was skeptical of religion, they questioned his motivation, implicitly asking "Had I found in the Catholic faith a way to express the reactionary longings of my Persian soul, albeit in a Latin key?" (18).  From my reading of his memoir, my answer would be yes.  Even Ahmari himself says: "that my becoming Catholic had something to do with being Iranian- and Muslim-born but that it was ultimately a response to the universal call of grace."

But before that conversion to Catholicism at age 31 in 2016, Ahmari went through four other conversions over a period of fifteen years--from Nietzscheanism to Marxism, then to postmodernism, and then to neoconservatism.  But none of these enthusiastic conversions satisfied the deepest longing in his soul.  

That deepest longing was manifest one day, when he was 18 years old, and he happened to open the Bible and read the Gospel of Saint Matthew.  As he read the first twenty-five chapters, he was not impressed: "Here we go with the hocus-pocus, blah-blah, Jesus is born, blah-blah, Jesus tells a parable, blah-blah, Jesus performs a miracle, blah-blah, another parable."  

But then when he got to chapter 26, he began reading attentively the story of the crucifixion of Jesus.  "I was an atheist, yes, but I also held onto certain fragments of my Islamic education."  He thought "that the Jesus portrayed by Matthew is an extraordinary figure."  

"When the strong torment the weak, we pity the latter and are outraged by the former.  The martyrdom of Imam Hussein was the quintessential example of this. . . . But the Passion of Christ is radically different.  On the Cross, it is the strong one who condescends to the weak and evil many.  He allows them to persecute him" (109).

Ahmari wonders: "What was it about sacrifice, whether Hussein's or Jesus', that left such a searing imprint on my mind?  Why did I long for sacrifice?"

That spiritual longing was expressed again, five years later, when he was 23, and he happened to walk into a Capuchin monastery in New York City, where a Sunday evening Mass was beginning.  As a friar held up the bread that was the body of Christ and then the golden cup with the blood of Christ, Ahmari choked with sobbing.  "I was in the proximity of an awesome and mysterious force--a force bound up with sacrifice, with self-giving unto death, the idea that had made my heart tremble ever since I was a boy."  

After the Mass was ended, and he walked out to the vestibule, he happened to see a portrait of Pope Benedict XVI hanging on a wall.  Seeing that image of the Pope, he once again was choking back tears.  Ahmari explains:  "Pope Benedict XVI stood for the principle of continuous, even absolute, authority--the authority of the Catholic Church, in other words, which the pope embodied, and which shone through his portrait.  I longed for stable authority as well as redemption" (147).

From this point, he was no longer an atheist, but he had not yet fully assented to a Christian faith.  That came 13 years later, in 2016, when he was 31 years old, and he converted to Roman Catholicism.  He was in London, where he was an editorial page writer and editor for the European edition of the Wall Street Journal.  He had considered becoming an evangelical Protestant, but he saw a problem: "I couldn't help but detect the problem of authority in the Protestant orbit, which, I came to suspect, lay behind Protestantism's theological shortcomings.  At that point, mind you, I had yet to recognize the authority of the Catholic Church--though, as my weeping over Benedict's photo showed, I was instinctively drawn to Catholic authority.  But in 2016, my attraction to Catholic authority was strong enough that I sensed the fragility and thinness of authority among Protestants" (193-94).

Before he was baptized and confirmed on December 19, 2016, Ahmari underwent six months of instruction in the Catholic Catechism, guided by his reading of Monsignor A. N. Gilbey's book We Believe.  The critical first step was understanding and accepting the authority of the Catholic Church:

"Start with the authority of the Catholic Church.  To believe in God, it sufficed to rely on natural reason alone, as I had done.  But to go further with him, as it were, it was necessary to believe divine revelation on the authority of the Revealer.  And there was nothing wrong with accepting things on authority.  As Gilbey put it, 'We ought not to make heavy weather about doing in our relationship with Almighty God what we do daily in our dealings with other people'--that is, to accept all sorts of propositions solely on authority."

"And the whole of revelation turned on a single proposition: namely, that the Catholic Church was Christ's supreme revelation.  Assent to Jesus Christ thus meant assent to the Church he founded and the powers he granted her, chiefly to forgive sins (Jn 20:23; Mt 16:19) and to teach all nations (Mt 28:19).  Scripture and Tradition confirmed all this, yet the Church didn't need to appeal to these things for her authority.  Before Scripture or Tradition existed, the Catholic Church was there at the Cross and the Resurrection" (201).

Once he had accepted the supreme authority of the Church based on Scripture and Tradition, it was a short step to integralism.  If the Catholic Church is the only church with the authority of Christ's supreme revelation through Scripture and Tradition, and if Scripture and Tradition teach that the Catholic Church has the supreme authority to use the state as its "secular arm" in coercively punishing heretics, apostates, and schismatics, then the Catholic Church has the authority to establish a Catholic confessional state.

But while Ahmari rightly recognizes "the problem of authority" in the Protestant churches, he is silent about how the same problem of authority arises in the history of the Catholic Church.  The authority of divine revelation in Christianity depends on the belief that the Holy Spirit will convey the truth of revelation to all Christians.  But the inspiration of the Holy Spirit has always been too obscure to lead Christians to agreement about revelation.  Protestants believe that revelation comes from reading the Bible, but the Bible is so obscure that Protestant Christians disagree about its meaning.  Catholic Christians believe that while the Bible is sometimes obscure, Biblical revelation is clarified by the Church's tradition in which the Holy Spirit infuses priests with the truth of revelation.  But the history of the Catholic Church shows that this does not work, because even as conveyed through tradition, the Holy Spirit is obscure.

As I have indicated in some previous posts, the history of the Catholic Church's tradition is a history of schisms, in which divinely inspired Christians have disagreed about the truth of revelation.  There have been over two dozen major schisms in the Church--such as the Great Schism of 1054 that separated the Latin Church in the west from the Greek Orthodox Church in the east and the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.

Consider, for example, the case of Jan Hus.  In 1415, Hus, a Catholic priest who sought to reform the Church, was condemned by the Council of Constance to be burned at the stake for heresy.  He sang hymns as he was burned to death.  Hus was a charismatic priest who inspired his followers in Bohemia to defeat five consecutive papal crusades against them from 1420 to 1431--the Hussite Wars.  Hus and the Hussites were intensely pious Christians.  Similarly, Martin Luther and the other Protestant Reformers were all intensely pious.  Thus does the mystical experience of grace--of being divinely inspired with an experience of the transcendent--often move Christians to dissent from Catholic orthodoxy.

In 1999, Pope John Paul II offered a public apology for the Church's killing of Hus, praised him for his "moral courage," and condemned the Church's policy of killing heretics.  Thus, the Pope had to correct the Church's tradition of killing heretics.  Here the Pope was following the Second Vatican Council's "Declaration of Religious Liberty" that overturned the Church's tradition of Catholic Integralism.

Ahmari says nothing about this.

This shows that John Locke was correct in seeing that "everyone was orthodox to themselves," in that everyone must believe in whatever they decided was necessary for them to believe to be saved, but with the understanding that they might be wrong, and that others must be free to believe other doctrines that seemed orthodox to them.

Now, what does this have to do with Donald Trump and the MAGA populist movement?  In his 2019 essay for First Things, Ahmari suggested that conservatives had to support Trump in order "to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good," with the implication that this would require that America become a Catholic confessional state.

If this is what he was saying, it was just as preposterous as the general argument for Catholic Integralism.  Because it's preposterous to believe that most Americans--including the evangelical Protestants who support Trump--would ever agree to an American Catholic confessional state.  This is why I suspect that Catholic integralists like Ahmari are not really what they say they are because they cannot sincerely deny the American liberal principle of religious liberty.

For the same reason, I doubt the recent claim by Vallier that if Ohio Senator J. D. Vance became vice president in a second Trump administration, that could give an intellectual and political boost to Catholic Integralism.  Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, just a few months before Ahmari's Catholic baptism.  But it's not clear to me that Vance's Catholicism is integralist.

It is true, however, that during his campaign for the Senate in 2022, Vance spoke at a conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio, that was organized by Ahmari that was devoted to the themes of Catholic Integralism.  And yet, as far as I can tell from the reports about the conference, none of the speakers explicitly endorsed the establishment of a Catholic confessional state in America.

Josh Hammer, a Newsweek opinion editor, did say this during one panel discussion: "Overt biblically grounded lawmaking, a concomitantly biblically informed constitutional jurisprudence, and an approach to God in the public square that we might think of as an ecumenical integralism, represents our only hope for recovery at this late hour in our ailing, decadent republic."

Well, there it is--"integralism."  But, strangely, it's "ecumenical integralism."  Isn't that self-contradictory?  If "ecumenical" means cooperation among different churches, that must deny the integralist supremacy of the Catholic Church as the one true church.  

Was Hammer suggesting that Catholics and Protestants should cooperate in reaching agreement about what "biblically grounded lawmaking" means?  If so, that's not Catholic Integralism.  

But maybe he was suggesting a kind of Christian Integralism, in which American Catholics and Protestants would cooperate in coercively enforcing "biblically grounded lawmaking" that would persecute non-Christian believers (like Jews and Muslims) and atheists.  This sounds like what Father Antonio Spadaro has described as the "surprising ecumenism" of evangelical fundamentalism and Catholic integralism in America.

Even if that's a little less preposterous than Catholic Integralism, it's still hard to believe that most Americans would tolerate a government that would persecute those who would resist "biblically grounded lawmaking."