Even though I like the broad brush-strokes of Reno’s ideas, as I mentioned in my previous post, I think there are important points where Reno goes wrong.
First of all, while Reno (to his credit) acknowledges that the banishing of the strong gods was motivated for good reasons, and in response to real horrors, he often seems entirely too blasé about the prospect of such horrors returning. He argues that people are too focused on the problems of the past, and talks as though those problems are simply behind us:
Our societies are not gathering themselves into masses marching in lockstep. Central planners do not clog our economies. There is no longer an overbearing bourgeois culture bent on “exclusion.” Bull Conner isn’t commissioner of public safety in Birmingham.
Later on in his book he reiterates his claim that these concerns are misplaced, or at least given an undue level of focus:
But we are not living in 1945. Our societies are not threatened by paramilitary organizations devoted to powerful ideologies. We do not face a totalitarian adversary with world-conquering ambitions.
In fairness to Reno, he wrote these words for a book that was published in 2019 – not so long ago, but enough has changed since then that the idea of totalitarian governments bent on conquest doesn’t exactly seem like a problem of the past, nor does the threat of authoritarianism within our own society. Still, Reno’s words remind me of this point made by Matt Yglesias, highlighted by Scott Sumner. Yglesias pointed to an article in the progressive publication American Prospect, arguing that insurance companies were overrating the risk of fire in areas like Eaton Canyon in California, because there hadn’t been a major fire there in a long time. This led them, in Yglesias’s words, to the belief that “activist regulators could price this risk better than the market.” Of course, this proved grimly ironic because not long after the American Prospect article, the whole area was engulfed in flames. A problem can lay dormant for a long time without ever truly being behind us.
Indeed, one could argue that the authoritarian risk Reno dismisses only seems remote precisely because of the kinds of ideas he finds so lamentable. There was a headline in the New York Times that has been the butt of many jokes that read “Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops.” The joke, of course, is that one could easily and plausibly claim that the prison population growing is responsible for the crime rate dropping, and this scenario is a sign of success and not a basis to argue that prison populations are too high. (“Firefighters continue to hose down house, despite receding flames!”) Reno does briefly anticipate this, but he asserts that social disunity is a larger threat than the prospect of authoritarianism from within or without. Unfortunately he’s very thin on arguments detailing the relative risk between them. He does spend a great deal of time arguing in detail about the causes and nature of the social disunity that troubles him, and why it’s a serious problem – but the argument for why it’s the greater problem is minimal and rather hand-wavy.
So it’s possible for someone to read Reno’s book and agree with him that there is a problem of social fragmentation, and agree with him about what is driving this fragmentation, yet not be convinced by Reno’s claim that it’s a larger risk relative to the prospect of authoritarianism or social oppression. Note, I’m not making the claim that Reno is wrong is his assertion about the relative risk – I’m only making the weaker claim that his argument isn’t sufficient to justify the conclusion.
But aside from that, Reno makes many stumbles when discussing both economics and the ideas of economists. I’ll be detailing those problems in the next post.
READER COMMENTS
Monte
Mar 6 2025 at 8:09pm
Really enjoying this series, Kevin. Carry on!
Reno continues:
Roger McKinney
Mar 7 2025 at 11:50am
The strong god of liberty! Excellent point!
Keep in mind that Catholics are stuck in pre-Reformation Europe and long for its return. They think all problems come from the Reformation, especially liberty. They despise liberty. They are intentionally ignorant of the role of Christianity in birthing liberty.
Monte
Mar 7 2025 at 8:46pm
Astute observation, Roger, and one that hadn’t occurred to me. Christianity’s early focus on individual dignity, challenge to authority, and development of the idea of natural law, it certainly has contributed significantly to the birth of liberty.
Mactoul
Mar 8 2025 at 9:06pm
Excuse me saying so, but this is pretty bracing bit of old anti- Catholic prejudice., almost designed to draw controversy. I just reply by noting that were the Protestant Europe not been tethered to Catholic Europe, it would have long dissolved in a welter of ever&fissuring dissenting sects. The history of English civil war is an example.
nobody.really
Mar 11 2025 at 7:25pm
Does liberty qualify as a strong god? In other words, do people really organize around the idea of liberty per se–or merely around liberty for themselves?
In the American War for Independence, members of the Continental Congress explicitly rejected the idea that a war against England would trigger the end of slavery, or give women the same legal standing as men.
True, many abolitionists during the US Civil War appear to have been motivated by a desire to extend liberty to others. But the war was triggered by partisans of slavery demanding an end to the Union, and was met by Unionists defending their Union–not specifically people demanding an end to slavery.
I suspect that liberty for all has an insufficient appeal to act as a strong god.
nobody.really
Mar 10 2025 at 2:51am
Noah Smith provides some context for evaluating Reno’s Strong Gods thesis.
First, Smith agrees with the general idea that Western liberalism has long been united in its opposition to Hitler more than its support for anything in specific. Conservatives gained some traction for a time by shifting the focus to anti-Communism, but the collapse of the Soviet Union let all the air out of that basis for challenging anti-Hitler-ism. Only recently have MAGA “conservatives” directly challenged the anti-Hitler focus. He noted that both Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan granted interviews to Carryl Cooper, a revisionist historian who argued that the rise of Hitler “was infinitely prefereable in virtually every way” to the rise of drag queens.
Second, Smith cites the social trends documented in Robert Putnam’s The Upswing. According to Putnam, social cohesion (presumably the mark of Strong Gods) peaked in the mid-1960s. This provides a real-world benchmark for evaluating the practices Reno would seem to favor.
Third, Smith seems to embrace Jonathan Haidt’s thesis from The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024). That is, Smith argues that the most recent and pronounced aspect of the decline of cohesion should be traced not to anti-Hiterism and the aversion to Strong Gods, but to the rise of technologies such as smart phones that reward anti-social behavior by both leaders and followers.
In short, the mid-1960 heyday of the Strong Gods featured lots of people engaged in face-to-face activities with their neighbors–religious meetings, scouting, PTAs, fraternal organizations, ladies clubs, little leagues, bowling leagues, etc. It also featured lots of kids. The MAGA people do not seem to be returning to church, or joining other groups, or having more kids than in the past. MAGA seems to be less a movement than an on-line fandom.
These facts do not, by themselves, undermine Reno’s love of Strong Gods. But they provide a context for understanding (as Kevin Corcoran argues) the reasons that Western liberalism sought to rein in the Strong Gods, and grounds to doubt that the MAGA “movement” will provide a practical vehicle for their return.