The New Political Religion—and How to Fight It

To read Paul Gottfried is to engage in a kind of political archaeology, to sift through the semantic rubble of a civilization that no longer remembers what its own words mean. The occasion for this exercise is The Essential Paul Gottfried: Essays from 1984–2024, a collection of essays from Passage Publishing that serves as a monument to a career spent in a particular kind of wilderness. Gottfried, an intellectual historian and self-described paleoconservative, has long been an outsider, an American scholar of the European right operating at a remove from the American conservative movement he disdains. His life’s work, as he notes, “had little influence on today’s conservative establishment.” The interest of this collection lies not in its record of battles won but in the precision of its diagnosis of a political order that has lost its mind.