Who Murdered Christendom?

Everybody heard the cracks, but when the system broke, no one seemed to know what to do. It began in late 2015. At the time, analysts labeled Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency at best “quixotic.” As time went by, the tensions that were bubbling under the surface of American politics since the beginning of the decade — think Occupy Wall Street — finally boiled over. Then came Charlottesville, George Floyd, the Capitol Hill occupation in Seattle, January 6, and Trump’s two assassination attempts during the 2024 presidential race. The reasons behind these episodes are far from unimportant, but they matter less than what they reveal about American society and politics.

What would that be? They reveal a proposition few people would venture to voice until very recently — some waiting until Trump’s second inauguration this past January to do so. Amid growing dissent, confusion, and discontent, Trump and his team made a sweeping re-evaluation of domestic and international policies — a shift on a scale not seen since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term in office in the 1930s. This shift has led many commentators to ask: Is the American liberal order over?

Moreover, changes are afoot in the international order as well. Irish macroeconomist Philip Pilkington has congratulated Trump and his team for ending international liberalism. At the Postliberal Order website (Feb. 11) he writes, “The liberal-internationalist framework was never an analytical one. Rather it was an ideology of the late liberal order. It was to American liberalism what Marxism-Leninism was to Soviet Communism.” Not light words. In Foreign Affairs magazine (Jan./Feb.), however, political scientists Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon, while agreeing that Trump sponsored the burial of the liberal order, write that the clergymen presiding over it are the apparatchiks in the Kremlin, who have “also conducted a long-term effort to cultivate the U.S. right.”

What are we to make of this?

Tomasi di Lampedusa, the 12th Duke of Palma, famously wrote in The Leopard that it is necessary that things change to remain the same. If the liberal order is dead — and I believe it is — why are we hearing the same rhetoric we’ve been hearing for the past 70 years? “America First” and “It’s the Russians” are the elevator music of American politics. This bland rhetoric has proved ineffective in bringing people together. It is mechanical, based on material needs and individual interests. No wonder it so often results in violence and death. This secular and materialist vision of politics has persisted for so long that the essence of these rallying cries was already addressed — and dismissed — by one Catholic American intellectual at the heights of the bipolar tensions of the 20th century. He argued that the problem of American politics is one of birth: When America was taking form as a nation, she forgot about Catholicism.