"Right now in Europe, if you're looking for allies to protect gay rights against religious intolerance, moderate conservatives are a more dependable choice over progressives."
I think this only applies (if at all) to certain parts of Europe you may have more experience of.
I've witnessed homophobia from plenty of conservatives across Mediterranean Europe and Eastern Europe, and it is most definitely left and liberal circles picking up the pieces for LGBT people in a practical and political sense there.
Try asking some European gays what they think about this idea that moderate conservatives are the ones who have their back the best.
Interesting. Can you name some of the parties? In Italy, I guess this would apply to Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia? But does it also apply to the center-right Forza Italia? Even in my own country (Belgium), it really only applies to the center-right parties. Same with the Netherlands (where the assassinated right-wing leader Pim Fortuyn was himself gay). Support for gay rights from far-right parties remains disingenuous or shaky at best.
The same sex marriage vote last year in Greece is a good example. The governing center right Nea Democracia forwarded the bill but it only passed due to support from 3 left wing parties, as the government faced a rebellion of abstention and oppose votes within its own ranks. https://www.politico.eu/article/greece-legalizes-same-sex-marriage/
It's also key not to conflate the presence of a small number of gay politicians for a political movement to support gay rights. In Spain, the Partido Popular has a significant anti gay contingent and back in 2011 the party floated a repeal of the (publicly popular) same sex marriage bill. PP's Miriam Blasco has the dubious honour of being both a lesbian politician and having a voting record against same sex marriage.
I find the most reliable indicator of support for gay rights is if a person is socially bonded with gay people in some way. In conservative movements this support can emerge top down, rather than from the political base up, often driven by a small number of wealthy gay people who support centre right politics.
Point taken, but this is all about same-sex marriage, where support among the center-right is indeed unreliable or lukewarm. But bear in mind that even Barack Obama was opposed to same-sex marriage in 2008. Gay marriage is in a way the capstone of the gay rights movement, and I know that even some gays and lesbians are opposed to it (or just indifferent to it) for a variety of reasons. However, I was talking about much more basic freedoms, like the freedom to express your sexual identity in the public domain (showing affection or walking hand in hand). Since violent homophobia is much more prevalent among migrant (Muslim) communities nowadays (see Ruud Koopmans' research), it's a radioactive topic for the Left, but grist to the mill of the migration-sceptical RIght.
Excellent post! One note on the christian roots of Enlightenment, though.
I don't think it's controversial to claim that the idea that the world is knowable through ratio is a christian-adjacent idea. John Locke admitted as much in his Two Treatises. Instead of God directly prescribing law through scripture, humanity must use its God-given ratio to deduce God's purpose through natural law. In this sense, the Enlightenment thinkers replaced the soul with ratio, adding one degree of separation from God in the process.
Instead of rulers being directly appointed by God - the first Treatise is all about dismantling the Divine Right of Monarchs after all - they use their ratio to divine the optimal path forward. There is some 'reject the contents, keep the form' element to Enlightenment's rejection of Christianity.
This could influence how naturally Enlightenment values fit into other cultures without a similar history of thought. Doesn't have to preclude Enlightenment from taking root of course, but to say that acknowledging the christian roots of Enlightenment thinking is chauvinistic is a bit unreasonable.
I call this Retro-Revelation: the retroactive projection of scientific discovery onto Christian doctrine. The main issue is that long before Christianity, the ancient Greeks were already doing science—developing mathematics, conducting experiments, and identifying natural regularities or "laws." They clearly believed the world was knowable without invoking a divine lawgiver. Centuries later, Christian scientists sought theological justifications for their work, creating the misleading impression that Christianity was essential to science. I'm not denying that belief in divine "laws of nature" may have played a contingent, path-dependent role for some early modern scientists who happened to be Christian—but I'm strongly suspicious of the idea that faith of any kind is necessary to do science.
It was a central idea of Greek philosophers and then ported (partially) in Christianity. It's not casual that we had to rediscover Greek wisdom to get renaissance and then enlightenment.
This is a good thought-piece, but I think you’ve missed the pattern match to the current situation in the USA.
Your image of the French Legislative Assembly is an eerily good fit to the ideological horseshoe of the US here in 2025. (Other than the flipped color scheme of course.)
Our equivalent of the Jacobins have appropriated the label “Progressive”, but they’re every bit as radical as those French predecessors, who brought in the Reign of Terror. The true keepers of the Enlightenment flame in France were the Girondins, the Moderates in your image.
The Progressive movement in the USA broke through under Republican presidents Roosevelt and Taft at the beginning of the 1900s. They also were archetype moderates.
MAGA and the Trump autocratic personality cult have about the same percentage of the body politic as the Monarchists did in Paris in 1791. American moderates are currently split, again, very close to the French: 40% red/Republican, 60% blue/Democrat.
Thanks, interesting! To be honest, Trump is hard to categorize: the word "Again" in "Make America Great Again" is nostalgic and even reactionary, while his desire to smash the system, destroy institutions and drain the swamp is revolutionary. And his alliance with the tech right is also techno-optimist and aspirational. Fascists were also a strange mix of revolutionary and reactionary impulses.
Indeed, the red coalition has no ideological coherence. It's a collection of factions only held together by the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend bond and the raw calculus of how to win elections in our strange model of one-acre-one-vote.
The biggest faction, the MAGA personality cult, is under threat of schism at the moment, between the hardcore isolationists and the Christian Zionists, and it will be fascinating to see how it plays out.
The tech right is libertarian, not fascist. It views woke as the greater statist threat, but might be waking (up to now they're in the minority of reds who get the pro wrestling joke ... and Trump amuses them ... they're basically arrested development trolls who don't have girlfriends). See the way Musk split off angrily before Susie or Thiel or whichever cooler heads explained to him the mutual risks of a hard split. That one is far from stabilized, as the Sergei Gor sideshow is exposing.
It all adds up to our situation being more of a rhyme of the French pattern than a repeat.
The core MAGA sheep, though, are the Archie Bunkers and Dixie rednecks who just want to turn the clock back to whichever era they fancy the most (early 1950s before Civil Rights; 1890s before the Progressive Era; 1850s when they could keep the n*****s in chains; 1780s before the Federalists got their way with the Constitution ... pick one, or a mishmash of all). They're not ideological in the sense of a stack of mutually supporting ideas. Hot button issue voters.
"The first one is postmodernism, which turned the weapons of the Enlightenment against itself and undermined the belief in objective truth, rationality and moral progress..."
I would stipulate further that (more specifically) Hegel and Marx established a perverse faith in historical and economic determinism. In short, "We are all economic slaves, and science is an instrument of domination." This warped pairing led directly to Critical Theory and all of its anti-Western offshoots.
Oddly enough, Critical Theory "deconstructs" this deterministic world view and, surprise!, its neo Marxist adherents seem to know how it can be overturned. Through revolutionary praxis. Now we are still wallowing in the fruit of this poison tree.
Generally, I find that the study of human progress is an exploration of the counter-intuitive. That is, so many things that are “obvious” on the surface turn out completely wrong upon further exploration.
Most political movements are not simply equipped to get their members to think this way. They don’t want to reframe people’s minds, they want to feed their confirmation biases.
For example, nobody wants to hear that:
—Tariffs harm the very people they try to help
—Wealth inequality can rise while poverty falls
—Poverty, famine, and war are less common now than in the past
—Immigrants create net jobs
—The good old days weren’t really “better” for most.
Yet, there is a good case for all of the above being true. The progress movement is a willingness to look beyond what I call our human “reality distortion field” and see the unfiltered reality of how we got here, where we are, and hopefully, lead us to a place we go next.
Thanks, J.K., I share your sentiments! I've always been interested in our deeply engrained human intuitions and how they pose obstacles to scientific understanding. Did you read Lewis Wolpert's book The Unnatural Nature of Science, or Robert McCauley's Why Religion if Natural and Science is Not? They mostly explore intuitive physics (euclidean geometry, impetus theory) and intuitive biology (teleology, essentialism), but it also applies in economics: zero-sum thinking, the lump of labour fallacy, intuitions about finiteness and growth, etc. Not to mention the intuitions underlying many forms of techno-phobia (GMO, nuclear, etc.) Human did not evolve to understand markets, exponential growth, or large-scale trade networks. My piece about the Seven Laws of Declinism was largely about psychology. https://maartenboudry.substack.com/p/the-seven-laws-of-declinism
Liberalism is abstracted axioms derived from fundamental religious claims
rooted in Judaism. The Torah is the most cited source, used to ground Liberalism, in Locke’s FIRST treatise of government. In as much as Christianity was an ark that carried these axioms to the West, this is how Christianity is the root of the Enlightenment flower. Your critique of the church is correct but irrelevant to the historical relationship between Torah and Liberalism.
Como ocorre com quase todos os esquerdistas, sua visão de esquerda e direita se baseia totalmente no que a esquerda diz de si mesma e sobre a direita, nunca procurou saber o que a direita diz sobre si mesma e sobre a esquerda. O resultado é a Falácia do Espantalho. Veja "Dez Princípios Conservadores" de Russell Kirk. Hayek e Kirk são mais que compatíveis, são completares.
Interesting article, and I am impressed that you had a pubic debate with the Prime Minister of Belgium!
Great post, Maarten!
"Right now in Europe, if you're looking for allies to protect gay rights against religious intolerance, moderate conservatives are a more dependable choice over progressives."
I think this only applies (if at all) to certain parts of Europe you may have more experience of.
I've witnessed homophobia from plenty of conservatives across Mediterranean Europe and Eastern Europe, and it is most definitely left and liberal circles picking up the pieces for LGBT people in a practical and political sense there.
Try asking some European gays what they think about this idea that moderate conservatives are the ones who have their back the best.
Interesting. Can you name some of the parties? In Italy, I guess this would apply to Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia? But does it also apply to the center-right Forza Italia? Even in my own country (Belgium), it really only applies to the center-right parties. Same with the Netherlands (where the assassinated right-wing leader Pim Fortuyn was himself gay). Support for gay rights from far-right parties remains disingenuous or shaky at best.
The same sex marriage vote last year in Greece is a good example. The governing center right Nea Democracia forwarded the bill but it only passed due to support from 3 left wing parties, as the government faced a rebellion of abstention and oppose votes within its own ranks. https://www.politico.eu/article/greece-legalizes-same-sex-marriage/
The cultural context there is different compared to Northern and Western Europe, as public opinion at the time of the vote was slightly opposed to same sex marriage https://gayexpress.co.nz/2024/01/public-opinion-divided-on-same-sex-marriage-in-greece-as-government-proposes-new-laws/
It's also key not to conflate the presence of a small number of gay politicians for a political movement to support gay rights. In Spain, the Partido Popular has a significant anti gay contingent and back in 2011 the party floated a repeal of the (publicly popular) same sex marriage bill. PP's Miriam Blasco has the dubious honour of being both a lesbian politician and having a voting record against same sex marriage.
I find the most reliable indicator of support for gay rights is if a person is socially bonded with gay people in some way. In conservative movements this support can emerge top down, rather than from the political base up, often driven by a small number of wealthy gay people who support centre right politics.
Point taken, but this is all about same-sex marriage, where support among the center-right is indeed unreliable or lukewarm. But bear in mind that even Barack Obama was opposed to same-sex marriage in 2008. Gay marriage is in a way the capstone of the gay rights movement, and I know that even some gays and lesbians are opposed to it (or just indifferent to it) for a variety of reasons. However, I was talking about much more basic freedoms, like the freedom to express your sexual identity in the public domain (showing affection or walking hand in hand). Since violent homophobia is much more prevalent among migrant (Muslim) communities nowadays (see Ruud Koopmans' research), it's a radioactive topic for the Left, but grist to the mill of the migration-sceptical RIght.
thx for the text!; cannot wait to read your book, any estimation on its availability in ENG?
I'll translate it myself and tailor it to an international audience in the process. Probably published in 2026 (but I don't have a book contract yet). In the meantime, here's another essay drawn from the book. ;-) https://quillette.com/2025/06/19/the-enlightenments-gravediggers-rousseau-zizek-anti-western/
Looking forward & fingers crossed 🤞🏻
Is the book coming out in English?
I hope so! I'll translate it myself and tailor it to an international audience in the process. Probably published in 2026 (but I don't have a book contract yet). In the meantime, here's another essay drawn from the book. ;-) https://quillette.com/2025/06/19/the-enlightenments-gravediggers-rousseau-zizek-anti-western/
Looking forward to it
Thanks, very good one
Thought-provoking, thanks!
Excellent post! One note on the christian roots of Enlightenment, though.
I don't think it's controversial to claim that the idea that the world is knowable through ratio is a christian-adjacent idea. John Locke admitted as much in his Two Treatises. Instead of God directly prescribing law through scripture, humanity must use its God-given ratio to deduce God's purpose through natural law. In this sense, the Enlightenment thinkers replaced the soul with ratio, adding one degree of separation from God in the process.
Instead of rulers being directly appointed by God - the first Treatise is all about dismantling the Divine Right of Monarchs after all - they use their ratio to divine the optimal path forward. There is some 'reject the contents, keep the form' element to Enlightenment's rejection of Christianity.
This could influence how naturally Enlightenment values fit into other cultures without a similar history of thought. Doesn't have to preclude Enlightenment from taking root of course, but to say that acknowledging the christian roots of Enlightenment thinking is chauvinistic is a bit unreasonable.
I call this Retro-Revelation: the retroactive projection of scientific discovery onto Christian doctrine. The main issue is that long before Christianity, the ancient Greeks were already doing science—developing mathematics, conducting experiments, and identifying natural regularities or "laws." They clearly believed the world was knowable without invoking a divine lawgiver. Centuries later, Christian scientists sought theological justifications for their work, creating the misleading impression that Christianity was essential to science. I'm not denying that belief in divine "laws of nature" may have played a contingent, path-dependent role for some early modern scientists who happened to be Christian—but I'm strongly suspicious of the idea that faith of any kind is necessary to do science.
It was a central idea of Greek philosophers and then ported (partially) in Christianity. It's not casual that we had to rediscover Greek wisdom to get renaissance and then enlightenment.
This is a good thought-piece, but I think you’ve missed the pattern match to the current situation in the USA.
Your image of the French Legislative Assembly is an eerily good fit to the ideological horseshoe of the US here in 2025. (Other than the flipped color scheme of course.)
Our equivalent of the Jacobins have appropriated the label “Progressive”, but they’re every bit as radical as those French predecessors, who brought in the Reign of Terror. The true keepers of the Enlightenment flame in France were the Girondins, the Moderates in your image.
The Progressive movement in the USA broke through under Republican presidents Roosevelt and Taft at the beginning of the 1900s. They also were archetype moderates.
MAGA and the Trump autocratic personality cult have about the same percentage of the body politic as the Monarchists did in Paris in 1791. American moderates are currently split, again, very close to the French: 40% red/Republican, 60% blue/Democrat.
Thanks, interesting! To be honest, Trump is hard to categorize: the word "Again" in "Make America Great Again" is nostalgic and even reactionary, while his desire to smash the system, destroy institutions and drain the swamp is revolutionary. And his alliance with the tech right is also techno-optimist and aspirational. Fascists were also a strange mix of revolutionary and reactionary impulses.
Indeed, the red coalition has no ideological coherence. It's a collection of factions only held together by the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend bond and the raw calculus of how to win elections in our strange model of one-acre-one-vote.
The biggest faction, the MAGA personality cult, is under threat of schism at the moment, between the hardcore isolationists and the Christian Zionists, and it will be fascinating to see how it plays out.
The tech right is libertarian, not fascist. It views woke as the greater statist threat, but might be waking (up to now they're in the minority of reds who get the pro wrestling joke ... and Trump amuses them ... they're basically arrested development trolls who don't have girlfriends). See the way Musk split off angrily before Susie or Thiel or whichever cooler heads explained to him the mutual risks of a hard split. That one is far from stabilized, as the Sergei Gor sideshow is exposing.
It all adds up to our situation being more of a rhyme of the French pattern than a repeat.
The core MAGA sheep, though, are the Archie Bunkers and Dixie rednecks who just want to turn the clock back to whichever era they fancy the most (early 1950s before Civil Rights; 1890s before the Progressive Era; 1850s when they could keep the n*****s in chains; 1780s before the Federalists got their way with the Constitution ... pick one, or a mishmash of all). They're not ideological in the sense of a stack of mutually supporting ideas. Hot button issue voters.
Excellent. Thank you, Maarten.
Great stuff! I've long had similar thoughts but never had the chance to put it into writing. Look forward to the English translation of your book.
Thanks, I hope I'll manage to publish an English edition!
"The first one is postmodernism, which turned the weapons of the Enlightenment against itself and undermined the belief in objective truth, rationality and moral progress..."
I would stipulate further that (more specifically) Hegel and Marx established a perverse faith in historical and economic determinism. In short, "We are all economic slaves, and science is an instrument of domination." This warped pairing led directly to Critical Theory and all of its anti-Western offshoots.
Oddly enough, Critical Theory "deconstructs" this deterministic world view and, surprise!, its neo Marxist adherents seem to know how it can be overturned. Through revolutionary praxis. Now we are still wallowing in the fruit of this poison tree.
Generally, I find that the study of human progress is an exploration of the counter-intuitive. That is, so many things that are “obvious” on the surface turn out completely wrong upon further exploration.
Most political movements are not simply equipped to get their members to think this way. They don’t want to reframe people’s minds, they want to feed their confirmation biases.
For example, nobody wants to hear that:
—Tariffs harm the very people they try to help
—Wealth inequality can rise while poverty falls
—Poverty, famine, and war are less common now than in the past
—Immigrants create net jobs
—The good old days weren’t really “better” for most.
Yet, there is a good case for all of the above being true. The progress movement is a willingness to look beyond what I call our human “reality distortion field” and see the unfiltered reality of how we got here, where we are, and hopefully, lead us to a place we go next.
Thanks, J.K., I share your sentiments! I've always been interested in our deeply engrained human intuitions and how they pose obstacles to scientific understanding. Did you read Lewis Wolpert's book The Unnatural Nature of Science, or Robert McCauley's Why Religion if Natural and Science is Not? They mostly explore intuitive physics (euclidean geometry, impetus theory) and intuitive biology (teleology, essentialism), but it also applies in economics: zero-sum thinking, the lump of labour fallacy, intuitions about finiteness and growth, etc. Not to mention the intuitions underlying many forms of techno-phobia (GMO, nuclear, etc.) Human did not evolve to understand markets, exponential growth, or large-scale trade networks. My piece about the Seven Laws of Declinism was largely about psychology. https://maartenboudry.substack.com/p/the-seven-laws-of-declinism
You’re a libertarian (and good for you).
Liberalism is abstracted axioms derived from fundamental religious claims
rooted in Judaism. The Torah is the most cited source, used to ground Liberalism, in Locke’s FIRST treatise of government. In as much as Christianity was an ark that carried these axioms to the West, this is how Christianity is the root of the Enlightenment flower. Your critique of the church is correct but irrelevant to the historical relationship between Torah and Liberalism.
Como ocorre com quase todos os esquerdistas, sua visão de esquerda e direita se baseia totalmente no que a esquerda diz de si mesma e sobre a direita, nunca procurou saber o que a direita diz sobre si mesma e sobre a esquerda. O resultado é a Falácia do Espantalho. Veja "Dez Princípios Conservadores" de Russell Kirk. Hayek e Kirk são mais que compatíveis, são completares.