This article is a translation of a piece that first appeared in French in Le Grand Continent
James Hunter’s book, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, states that the question of values lies at the heart of political mobilization in the United States. According to his thesis, Protestant fundamentalists and conservative Catholics joined forces in the 1970s to challenge progressive hegemony in American culture. Since then, two camps have clashed: on one hand, the “orthodox,” for whom moral truth is static, universal and divinely sanctioned; on the other, the “progressives,” who consider moral truth to be evolving and strictly contextual.
It is through the context of this culture war’s history that we ought to understand the success of the campaign that put Donald Trump in the White House. Between 2016 and 2024, MAGA ideologues succeeded in taking control of the Republican Party, ousting the liberal right. Does the rise of movements with Trumpist roots and the accompanying critique of “wokeism” reflect a return to conservative tradition and values? And can we expect a domino effect in the European political arena?
In Europe (mostly Western Europe), the right has, in recent decades, been more inclined to align itself with progressive values—it has almost universally endorsed the right to abortion and even same-sex marriage. In most countries and at the European level, it has accepted its role as a bulwark against far-right governance above all.
But that’s over now. In Europe, as in the United States, we are witnessing the collapse of the liberal right—such as the Bush family’s Republican Party, the British Tories, Italy’s Christian Democrats and the Gaullist movement in France, which is increasingly tempted by the far right—or its alignment with national-populist movements that emphasize the defense of conservative values and a white, Christian identity.
Central ideologues of Trumpism, in this case Steve Bannon and Vice President J. D. Vance, are trying to mobilize the European right around the issue of traditional values, marking a split from geostrategic themes such as the defense of the free world, which enabled the formation of the Atlantic community.
The fascination with Trump is evident in this new European right wing, even if it is based on a paradox clearly underlined by the results of the Eurobazooka survey: how can an international coalition of values be set up among brutal apologists of national egoism, going so far as to advocate interference and vassalization?
Whether the Trump factor is one of the reasons for the redrawing of the boundaries between the right and the far right, or whether it is merely a symptom, is of little importance. The important question is whether there is a coherent vision of a value system at odds not only with progressivism but also with the defense of human rights and what is understood by the label “woke,” as well as with the classic liberal right.
The Three Rights and the Impact of Trumpism
To understand this, recall René Rémond’s typology of Legitimists, Bonapartists and Orleanists. Outside of France, we could name these three groups as Traditionalists, Caesarists and Liberals. The first two are doing well in their new guise, but the third is in crisis.
Legitimism and Christian Nostalgia
Legitimists are hardly royalists anymore, but they cling to a conservative Christianity whose norms they want to impose by law rather than by faith, since they are confronted with the decline in religious practice—slower but just as real in the United States. The fight against abortion, feminism and LGBTQ+ rights are at the heart of their struggle. Paradoxically, in Europe, secular France stands next to Poland in the expression of a particularly virulent Christian traditionalism: La Manif pour Tous, opposition to abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, defense of the Latin Mass and a return to an old Gallicanism wary of a Pope who does not seem European enough.
The counterrevolutionary Catholicism that is at the heart of this Christian nostalgia is logical, since Protestantism has become secularized or, in its evangelical form, is mostly found in immigrant circles, with little concern for a white, Christian identity.
In the United States, it is Catholic intellectuals—mostly converts from Protestantism, such as J.D. Vance—who are leading the intellectual crusade against progressivism, even though, in electoral terms, it is Protestant evangelicals who make up the bulk of support for Trumpism. This inability of evangelicalism to produce an intellectual avant-garde is interesting and could be explained largely by a certain contempt for culture in general and high culture in particular. Church Fathers, among them St. Augustine and St. Benedict, are summoned to reestablish natural law and anchor society in transcendence.
Techno-Bonapartism or Authoritarianism Without Values
According to Rémond, the second right-wing category that lies at the heart of populist mobilization is Bonapartism. An authoritarian leader is expected to clean the Augean stable thoroughly, even if leadership can be feminized in the current context. However, Bonapartism is not in itself the bearer of a system of values, other than respect for authority. Indeed, it is this dimension that contributes to the “techno-Caesarist” graft carried by Silicon Valley and its quest for an effective authoritarianism that would resolve the shortcomings of democracy by establishing a “geek monarchy.”
The Death of Orleanism or the Neoliberal Impasse
The great rupture on the right is the profound crisis of political liberalism—Orleanism, according to Rémond. This trend was a dominant feature of the center-right parties that, from North America to Europe, have managed our societies, while alternating with social democrats, since the end of World War II, advocating democracy and the rule of law, defending the market economy, and taking an anti-communist, anti-fascist, Atlanticist and pro-European line.
Like social democracy, Orleanist liberalism shares with Christian democracy—which also claimed to be politically liberal but defended its own value system—a humanism rooted in Enlightenment philosophy and a sense of ethics.
Political liberalism has erupted into a fundamental contradiction: it can no longer conceive of the social bond except in the abstraction of the rule of law. In economic terms, from the 1980s onward, it adopted a neoliberalism that undermined the foundations of the state and destroyed the social bond. While Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan claimed to defend traditional values, they actually endorsed the deregulation that set the destruction of the social fabric into motion. As Thatcher declared, “there is no such thing as society,” which turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In Europe, the liberal right has been “Berlusconized” with the same consequences, but this time without even the tribute vice pays to virtue: the right to enjoyment has become a privilege of the new leaders, who, from Berlusconi to Trump, far from shocking their electors, let them share in their antics.
Neoliberalism has thus been very “modern,” producing, as Marcel Gauchet notes, an exacerbated individualism obsessed with self-fulfillment and little concern for society. Wokeism, on the other hand, which defends contractual individualism, is a relative of political liberalism. The world of neoliberal business, from Walt Disney to Benetton, adapted perfectly to Wokeism right up to the brutal 2024 shift in favor of Trump.
In reaction to modern individualism’s perceived drift away from “human rights,” liberal thought returned to its origins: Pierre Manent, a former assistant to Raymond Aron, deplored the abandonment of the theory of natural law, which anchored the individual in both transcendence and nature.
How can we restore a foundation for value that cannot be reduced to a transaction between citizens? Politics should not be axiologically neutral: it ought to work toward the common good. This raises the question of the nature of the political community, of its relationship to the law as a condition of its freedom, and thus of its culture and identity. Here, the self-criticism of liberalism overlaps with legitimist protest and populist rejection of immigration, which brings with it a different culture that seemingly does not respect the identity of the nation.
Liberalism is perceived as a particular culture, no longer as an expression of universalism. The heirs of Raymond Aron have becoming sovereignist; they no longer believe in assimilation, specifically in the universality of their own culture. What were once thought of as universal values—human rights, evangelization—become identity markers of a specifically European, or even national, culture, under siege and under threat.
Liberalism’s defectors are now rethinking the state in a way that is closer to Schmitt than Locke, since it assumes the existence of an enemy: immigration (for Europe, this is Muslim migration) and the values of ‘68 (now labelled wokeism)–“Islamoleftism”—are said to be the two major causes of the crisis in the social bond. To combat them, they say, we need not a referee state, but a regal state, a strong state. They join a populism that does not want less state, but a state that is their state and that protects them. They want to reclaim the state—and that’s what the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is all about. Orleanism is well and truly dead.
The New Wave: Libertarian Currents
Once the demise of political liberalism has been acknowledged, we can see that the philosophical space it once occupied has now been taken over by a new movement: libertarianism.
Libertarians share the same voluntarist individualism but reject aspects of the social contract, such as the delegation to the state of the status of arbiter. If they believe in contracts, they believe in commercial transactions. The state can only be an obstacle. We do not take over the state, we destroy it.
The flood of executive orders signed by Trump as soon as he took office reveals a Schmittian vision in which the sovereign’s narcissism takes the place of the sovereign state. Until now, the libertarian movement has remained on the margin of political life, with Ron Paul its eternal candidate in the U.S. elections. But it has now become the ideology of the tech sector and is intervening directly in U.S. politics in the person of Elon Musk. Beyond doubt, libertarians are, for the first time, fully associated with power under Trump.
The New Clash of the Rights
Today we are witnessing a new configuration of the right, now dominated by populists, even if there are still three movements at work among those rejoicing at Trump’s victory: a Christian right, identity-based populism and an accelerationist, libertarian tech movement.Together, they are celebrating Trump’s election and working to export the model to Europe.
However, despite obvious overlaps—a shared detestation of liberal democracy and the rule of law, along with anti-immigrant, anti-tax, anti-woke, anti-regulation and climate-skeptic rhetoric—they represent three fundamentally opposed value systems.
Although European and U.S. versions of the Trumpist cocktail may mix these three ingredients in different proportions, the tensions are the same and will erupt sooner or later. If it is easy to unite them in opposition, it is harder to keep them together when in power: to follow through on your ideas radically, you must choose.
The Christian and Reactionary Right: A Minority Vocation?
The Christian right is strongly reactionary: it wants to return to the philosophy of the pre-Enlightenment and defends a well-defined anthropology that, as it argues, should be at the foundation of society—the traditional family, along with the rejection of feminism and homosexuality. Freedom does not exist without the recognition of Truth. We must return to the “natural law” theorized by Thomas Aquinas. This is what Vance and Bannon are talking about.
This intransigent right, however, no longer relies on a fading faith. It does not particularly proselytize, as it clearly identifies Christian identity with the domination of Western civilization, or even of the white race. It therefore relies above all on the law to impose its preferences, even if this means being akin to a kind of right-wing wokeism.
This ideology’s main battle is the ban on abortion and, incidentally, the defense of the Latin Mass. It advocates punitive legislation and rejects the charity championed by the Pope. It is at the heart of the U.S. Republican Party, along with Protestant evangelicals, but is led by Catholic intellectuals, often from Protestant backgrounds, such as Vance.
This right-wing movement is more marginal in Europe, where it is experiencing electoral setbacks due to trouble with transforming itself into a majority project. Everywhere, in the United States and Europe, even Poland, it comes up against a steady decline in religious practice. Despite the activism of Vincent Bolloré and the public success of the Puy du Fou, re-Christianization is not working, except in a forbidden way. It then tries to ally itself with identity-based populism (e.g., Éric Zemmour in France), but the question of values and practice then come into focus: most populist leaders do not lead a Christian life, even outwardly.
For the Majority: Identities of the End of History
Identity-based populism, which has the wind in its sails, is in fact more nostalgic than reactionary. It defends a way of life, that of France’s “30 glorious years,” that of the 1950s in America and, paradoxically, that of East Germany.
This populism, dominant in Europe, has largely integrated the libertarian values of the 1960s, if not in the wording of its programs, then at least in the personal lives of its voters and leaders. With Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage and Alice Weidel, they are turning certain supposedly universal liberal values—such as feminism—into Western identity markers, opposed to the medieval values attributed to Muslims. If they do not question abortion rights or gay marriage, it is because, for them, the Christian reference is merely a metaphor for defending a “white” West and opposing the “great replacement.” Among them are also anti-Christian neo-pagans and white supremacists, who are more likely to resort to violence.
The Christian reference, purely rhetorical among Identitarian populists, leaves out the Catholic traditionalists—as illustrated by the dismissal of Marion Maréchal by her aunt, Marine Le Pen. Freedom is the ability to lead one’s life unhindered by regulation, taxation and the presence of immigrants.
They just want to continue enjoying themselves as before. They are the usufructuaries of a world in decadence: after them will come the deluge of geopolitical breakdowns and global warming. The great realignment between the drift of the center and the breakthrough of the far right is taking place in this way: European societies, supposedly lurching more to the right, seem to be increasingly liberal on the question of morals, while increasingly voting to the right on the question of identity.
Digital Acceleration: Organizing Democratic Separation
Finally, the third player is now libertarian tech: a few men, like Elon Musk, with extraordinary power. Of course, they are not populists but elitists, and they are therefore followers of a form of Caesarism, or techno-Caesarism.
They have a mission: to organize the separatism of a white, wonderful elite, locked away in their “gated communities” and other zones free from the masses, produced by Quinn Slobodian’s“ fragmentation capitalism,” while waiting to go to Mars.
They do not care about the people, who are meant to deliver pizzas or consume their digital services. They do not need the poor. Hyper-rich, they believe not in diplomas but in the genetic transmission of genius. Therefore, there is no redemption for the little people. There are certainly a few Christian fundamentalists among them, but their horizon is not a return to the anthropology of the Council of Trent or the natural law of Thomas Aquinas: it is transhumanism that drives techno-libertarians.
The sky they dream of is not that of the Lord’s Prayer but that of a rocket taking off. Demiurges or Prometheus—they have nothing but contempt for the creature and therefore the Creator. Their vision of the world is the antithesis of Christianity—in all its forms.
Contrary to neoliberals, who played on the myth of self-realization within everyone’s reach—which made neoliberal capitalism perfectly woke-compatible—techno-libertarians assume that there are damned of the Earth who are to be abandoned to their fate.
They do not care about the state: they seek not to limit it but to privatize it, thus destroying it. Turning the Pentagon into a private militia—their dream should be every sovereignist’s nightmare. Preparing for a post-human future—their goal should be anathema to Christians.
Who Loses in this Game?
In this game, the first losers are already the Christian fundamentalists. They think they have won on the central point: abortion. But they have failed to understand that banning abortion is in no way a return to the Christian family; it is a norm for the sake of a norm. For the great discourse on which the unbridled elitism of tech legitimizes itself is that of unlimited masculinity. It was almost comical to see Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Meta, discover in the autumn of 2024 that he’s a diminished man with drooping pecs. Meanwhile, women are to be put in their place: the implementation of abortion bans is inquisitorial and in no way accompanied, as the Christian tradition would have it, by a policy of charity toward those most in need.
The opposite movement is underway. Banning abortion is not defense of the family: it functions only as a ban, leaving the sexual freedom of the man intact. The proof: no sooner had Christian traditionalists celebrated what they thought was a victory than Trump announced an astonishing new subsidy for in-vitro fertilization.
American Catholic bishops were outraged: “Tuesday’s executive order promoting IVF is thus fatally flawed and stands in regrettable contrast to the promising pro-life actions of the Administration last month,” they said in a statement. But techno-libertarians did not understand: the acceleration is not Christian, it is trans-humanist, just as others are transgender. If they want children, it is not out of respect for Life, it is to perpetuate themselves. The defense of masculinity is not the return of the traditional family, because it is aimed at individuals, not couples. It is an ideology of bachelors, the most radical version of which is that of the incels, and which fits in perfectly with Musk’s polygamy.
Anthropologies of the Empire of Norms
We are therefore faced with three “anthropologies” and three opposing value systems. The traditional Catholics are very uncomfortable with the demiurgic science fiction of the techno-libertarians, who want to make God as useless as the little people. Neither, though, can they accept the joyful individualism of identitarian populists, who simply want to be left alone, without vaccines and migrants, but also without mass and confession. The identarian populists are also sovereignists because, to protect their way of life, they need the regal state that techno-libertarians want to destroy. They do not want the privatization of health care and security—they want the nation-state, unlike the techno-libertarians, who dream only of destroying the state and replacing it with a global consortium of entrepreneurs.
These three groups do not refer to a common vision of Western culture, even if they are all experiencing a form of deculturation. The Christian fundamentalists see themselves as outsiders to a culture that has become pagan. The libertarians are into the uchrony of science fiction: another world is possible, but elsewhere; video games and Lord of the Rings are the reservoir of their imagination; the past does not interest or inspire them. The populists are into “lifestyle,” permanent immanence, nostalgia for their parents’ youth. However, these three tribes have two things in common: resentment—and therefore hatred—and love of the norm.
The Christian fundamentalists believe in law—more than love—as the very condition of freedom; they complain about red tape only to the extent that it prevents them from applying their own standards, such as requiring their employees to adhere to Christian values. When they speak of freedom, they do not say “freedom” but “liberty;” not of much-hated individual freedom, but of the autonomy of the Church—libertas ecclesiae in canonical terminology. It is characteristic that Trump’s executive order granting amnesty to Christian activists speaks more of “religious liberty” than of “religious freedom.” The Christian fundamentalists seek to act by law, with their political strategy ultimately centered on the Supreme Court.
The populists and libertarians would seem much more opposed to any extension of the empire of norms they attribute to wokeism and environmentalism. But the opposite is true: they simply want to reverse the normative logic in their favor. Trump’s rise to power has led to an increase in normative pressure. To put an end to environmental regulation, such as the ban on plastic straws, Trump responds not with freedom of choice but with a ban on cardboard straws. While complaining about woke censorship, the new right is exercising a new, even more systematic censorship on books and education: instead of censoring an author, they censor an entire conceptual category—gender and race. This reflex can logically be found on a smaller scale within the French right: protest against woke censorship is expressed in demands to ban, to evict and to withdraw citizenship.
The paradox of libertarians is that they are against norms but sign up for an empire where norms apply to others. Norms then serve to enable the new elite to free themselves from norms. They are the condition for the exercise of omnipotence. The man of resentment can finally realize his Nietzschean dream: to do away with guilt.
This is why we need to keep a close eye on this debate on values. Election results in both Europe and the United States have long shown that people vote for their ideas rather than their interests: how else to explain why poor whites and minorities voted for Trump? But this war of values at the very heart of the populist electorate is very fluid. For when values translate into petty norms that affect every area of society and private life, without alleviating “cultural insecurity” or bringing prosperity, then perhaps freedom will become desirable again.
Olivier Roy is Director of Research at the CNRS and Director of Studies at EHESS, specializing in Islam. He was Special Representative of the OSCE Chairmanship in Tajikistan (July-November 1993), then Head of the OSCE Mission in Tajikistan (February-November 1994). He has taught at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris, and since 2009 has directed the Mediterranean program at the European University Institute in Florence. He is the author of numerous books, including The Failure of Political Islam (1994), Les Illusions du 11 septembre (2002), Jihad and Death (2017), and The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms (2024).
