The federal government’s newly minted Religious Liberty Commission has just dropped a 224-page draft report that reads like an anxious syllabus for a graduate seminar in continental philosophy. In a bizarre twist of state-sponsored theology, the commission has singled out three dead European thinkers—Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Paul Sartre—as the intellectual cartel responsible for importing secularism and dismantling the moral fabric of the United States.
Predictably, the mainstream media and center-left commentators immediately deployed their favorite intellectual "gotcha". They sneered, laughed, and pointed out the supreme irony: how can a political movement led by a man who treats objective facts as malleable PR claims attack the high priests of postmodernism? They argue that the right-wing establishment is hypocritical because its leader is, in fact, the ultimate postmodern politician—operating entirely on vibes, power, and the denial of objective reality.
It is a clever line. It is also completely wrong, intellectually lazy, and a profound misdiagnosis of both modern populism and 20th-century philosophy.
By trying to paint the political right as hypocritical postmodernists, the intellectual establishment is trying to protect their favorite French and German radicals from the consequences of their own ideas. The truth is far more uncomfortable. The Trump commission’s historical timeline is a laughable work of fiction. Yet, their core philosophical panic is entirely correct: if you take Nietzsche, Foucault, and Sartre seriously, the entire moral and legal foundation of the American experiment is a lie.
The Lazy Gotcha: Why Populism is Not Postmodernism
The argument that populist politicians are "postmodernists" because they bend the truth relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of what postmodernism actually is.
Postmodernism is not merely "lying" or "ignoring facts." Politicians have lied, manipulated media, and created alternative narratives since the days of the Roman Republic. Demagoguery is as old as democracy itself.
Postmodernism, specifically the strain that emerged from mid-century France, is a highly sophisticated, deeply cynical critique of power, language, and institutions.
- Michel Foucault did not simply say "facts do not exist." He argued that what we call "truth" is an apparatus of institutional power (pouvoir-savoir). He analyzed how prisons, clinics, and schools use the language of "objective science" to discipline and control human bodies.
- Jean-Paul Sartre did not advocate for political showmanship. He argued that existence precedes essence, meaning humans are condemned to absolute freedom and must construct their own morality in a universe devoid of inherent meaning.
- Friedrich Nietzsche argued that the search for objective, universal truth was merely a secularized leftover of Christian metaphysics.
To equate these rigorous, deeply challenging critiques of human existence with a politician changing their crowd-size estimates is an insult to the intellect. Populism is not postmodern; it is pre-modern. It is transactional, tribal, and instinctual. To dress it up in the language of Parisian theory is to give it far more intellectual credit than it deserves.
The Commission's Fiction vs. The Philosophers' Friction
To see through the noise, we have to look at what the commission actually claims, and where they actually get it right—and spectacularly wrong.
The commission's historical narrative is pure fantasy. It claims that secularism was imported to America in the 1950s by European intellectuals. This requires a deliberate, collective amnesia regarding America's own founding.
You do not need Sartre to find secularism in American history. Thomas Jefferson was a deist who literally took a razor blade to the New Testament to excise the miracles, leaving behind only the moral teachings of Jesus. Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason was a savage, public eviction of orthodox Christianity. The separation of church and state was not a French export; it was a practical, domestic solution to keep European-style religious wars from burning down the colonies.
But while the commission's history is terrible, their philosophical anxiety is spot on.
The American system—whether viewed through a conservative or liberal lens—is built entirely on the concept of Natural Law. The Declaration of Independence asserts that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. This is a metaphysical claim. It assumes there is a rational, objective moral order to the universe that human reason can discover.
Nietzsche, Foucault, and Sartre did not just attack the church; they systematically dynamited the foundation of that rational, objective moral order.
1. Nietzsche's Evisceration of Human Rights
If "God is dead," as Nietzsche famously observed, then the Christian metaphysical foundation that underpins the concept of "equal human rights" is dead too. Nietzsche mocked secular liberals who thought they could discard Christian theology while keeping Christian morality. He argued that if you lose the Christian God, you eventually lose the concept of the inherent dignity of the individual. For Nietzsche, "universal equality" was just another herd-morality trick designed to suppress the exceptional.
2. Foucault's Dismantling of Liberal Progress
To Foucault, the "Enlightenment" was not a grand march toward freedom and human rights. It was simply the transition from crude, physical violence (monarchical torture) to a more insidious, pervasive form of psychological and social control (the disciplinary state). If Foucault is right, then the American Constitution is not a blueprint for liberty—it is merely a highly sophisticated handbook for managing and policing citizens.
3. Sartre's Rejection of Human Nature
Sartre’s existentialism asserts that there is no fixed "human nature." If there is no human nature, there can be no "Natural Law." Rights cannot be "unalienable" because there is no essential human template to which those rights can cling. We are entirely self-created, meaning all moral frameworks are artificial constructs.
The Uncomfortable Truth: The Left's Hypocrisy
This is where the liberal defense of these thinkers collapses.
The academic left has spent decades using Foucault to deconstruct American institutions, arguing that the law, the nuclear family, and the capitalist economy are merely constructs of white, patriarchal power. They have used Sartre to argue that gender, identity, and morality are entirely self-determined.
Yet, the moment a right-wing commission points this out and says, "Hey, these guys are trying to dismantle the philosophical basis of our republic," the left suddenly backtracks. They pretend that these thinkers are just harmless, brilliant academics who wanted everyone to get along and respect "diversity".
It is a deeply dishonest defense. You cannot spend your weekdays arguing that objective truth is a white supremacist myth used to enforce power, and then spend your weekends screaming that a political opponent is violating the "objective truth" of the Constitution. If Foucault is right, then the Constitution is just another text used by those in power to maintain their hegemony. You do not get to use continental philosophy to burn down the temple and then act shocked when the priests notice the smoke.
The Real War is Over the Source of Authority
The Trump commission is engaged in a desperate, rearguard action to restore a singular, theological source of authority to American civic life. They want to anchor the state in a highly curated, fundamentalist interpretation of Judeo-Christian heritage. It is a project that is anti-pluralistic and historically revisionist.
But the secular critics of the commission have their own crisis of authority that they refuse to face.
If you discard the religious and metaphysical foundations of human rights—as Nietzsche, Foucault, and Sartre did with unmatched brilliance—what replaces them? If rights are not given by a Creator, and they are not built into the fabric of nature, then they are merely legal conventions. They are rules we made up. And if we made them up, we can unmake them.
That is the terrifying truth that the right-wing panic has stumbled upon. By stripping away the transcendent, the radical philosophers of Europe left behind a vacuum. In that vacuum, the only thing that decides what is "right" is raw, unadulterated political power.
The commission is terrified of a world ruled by raw power. The irony is that their own political movement is the most potent expression of it. Both sides are screaming at the mirror, terrified of the reflection they see.
