Return of the Wrong gods?

By Kurt Hofer

The New Right is in the midst of a historical memory war. Seminal thinkers in the New Right, such as Rusty Reno and Yoram Hazony, argued that the dated paradigm post-Cold War conservatism evinced a preference for internationalism over nationalism, for the protection of the postwar “liberal order” at the expense of the nation-state. Reno and Hazony also argued that this preference for globalism over nationalism was founded on the fear that “nationalism’ would inevitably augur the return of Fascism. They argued eloquently that it was time to move past the taboo–particularly on the right–of nationalism and harness the same as a tool of consolidation and political cohesion. In 2019, the year of publication of Reno’s book Return of the Strong Gods, this seemed like a common sense proposition for many conservatives. Now, in the year 2025, with Yoram Hazony seeing the need to clarify that the right indeed does have an embedded problem with antisemitism, the lessons for conservatives of the legacy of WWII have come, once again, into sharp relief. The old memory wars on the right have returned.

I see the conflict as having both intergenerational components and ideological ones. But it mostly boils down to one of what I will call “living memory.” There are, in fact, two kinds of “living memory". The first is the lived experience of the witnesses themselves. The second is based on the witnesses of the witnesses. My German-born grandfather turned 18 in 1945. I born in 1985, which means my grandfather was in his mid 50s at the time. He will always be–and always was–an old man in my eyes, but he was hardly at death’s door for the better part of my childhood and into my twenties. Through him, I was a witness–or rather, a witness to an eyewitness–of the horrors of WWII.

As I pondered Rod Dreher’s incisive piece on the Nick Fuentes controversy, (“Nick Fuentes: Political Punk”), I understood that the New Right’s civil war over (American support for) Israel and the distinction between legitimate critique of the former versus outright antisemitism is both an ideological conflict AND an intergenerational one. All that separates me from (aspirant) New Right firebrands like Nick Fuentes is a decade–give or take. And all that separates me from eminent (establishment) New Right boomers such as Hazony or Reno is a little more than two decades.

In the eyes of the left I always was the oppressor: a straight white male. What is MORE surprising is that from the increasingly “edgelord” perspective of the New Right, I am becoming much the same. That is, at 40 years old, I am an old fart shaped mostly by old fart boomers who have brow-beaten me into excessive guilt over the legacy of WWII. Would Fuentes have been so flippant about the holocaust if he’d been ten years older and his own grandfather had told him of the horrors of the Nazi regime in his formative years of early adolescence in the 1990s and early 2000s? By the time I was a teenager, most eyewitnesses to WWII were either drooling or dead; by the time controversial Fuentes came of age, they were dead. Period. Full stop. Or, conversely, they were simply too young to be able to convey concrete memories of the trauma’s they’d witnessed.

The difference is subtle but, I would argue, not insignificant. I saw the embers of WWII, but Fuentes only saw the (innocuous) ashes. My civilizational home was not properly on fire, but the kindling was still there. His had already burned to the ground. What this means in practice is that he can jeer and jest about the Holocaust and WWII in a way that I simply can’t. Even if I could, I wouldn’t want to, because such an act would be a defilement of my grandfather’s grave and a dishonor to his memory.

Nick Fuentes and his cabal think the age of apologizing is over. Not coincidentally, in my view, he is also of the age where the “living memory”--the connection between eyewitness and witness to the eyewitness–has been severed.The great irony, of course, is that New Right firebrands of the boomer generation, such as Yoram Hazony and Rusty Reno, were the first to argue that Western guilt over the horrors of WWII had gone too far, and that a return of the “strong gods” to use Reno’s ingenious phrase, was in order. Now, yesterday’s leaders of the dissident right are fast becoming the reactionaries in the eyes of an increasingly pugilistic and Nietzschean Gen Z. The fate of Trumpian populism or America First nationalism seems to hinge on an ideological tightrope: Can the New Right reign in the forces which were the catalyst of its own creation and born of legitimate grievances with the neocon consensus while still maintaining its own credibility as a disruptive political force, or will it implode under the reign of zealots, like Fuentes, who seek to inaugurate a new reactionary reign of terror?

Will we ultimately see a return of the strong gods or a return of the wrong gods? Only time will tell.

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Kurt Hofer has a PhD in Spanish literature. His writing may be found at his substack “Killing Enchantment.”

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Photo: Viborg. "Fackelträger" statue (1939), by Arno Breker.