In my last post, I considered death and the “immortality project.” Today, that idea has carried over into politics, making Odysseus a symbol of conservative restoration and a challenge to liberalism. Next Wednesday, the focus will be on the Prodigal Son and the moral judgment it overturns.
Conservatives love John Wayne and Walt Disney, Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry, Norman Rockwell and Thanksgiving Dinner, Jimmy Stewart and Mr. Smith goes to Washington.Charlton Heston, ben hurAndrew Wyeth and Thomas Kinkade. Columns and symmetry. pastel and neon. Cowboy hat, country music and American flag.
Liberals included Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Alan Alda, Hawkeye Pierce, Sidney Poitier, Guess who’s coming to dinnerJane Fonda, go home. James Baldwin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol. Glass and steel, asymmetrical. Earth tones and rainbow stripes. Folk songs, protest marches, peace signs.
These are caricatures, with many characters rejecting the camp they are assigned to. Still, conservatives are good at turning politics into a sense of belonging, a story of a recognizable world that can be lost and regained.
Now, in Christopher Nolan’s work, odysseythey have Odysseus.
The backlash over Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen of Troy shows how iconic territory is at risk. Elon Musk, Matt Walsh and others see Black Helen less as an artistic choice and more as another capitulation to “woke” decline. As part of the right wing, Odysseus becomes a symbol of civilization’s restoration, returning to reclaim his home from an out-of-control godless culture.
Nolan’s films give monumental heroes to the right, while conservative political theorist Patrick Deneen’s films american odyssey Homer’s epic poem is depicted as the story of an America divided between restless wanderings and a desire for home.
In a more reactionary version of that interpretation, the emphasis is on the return. Odysseus finds the usurper draining his fortune, ignoring customs, courting the queen, and mocking his successor. He tests loyalty, strings the unbendable bow, and restores order by force. Homer’s heroes don’t just come home. He takes back his country.
Politics will be reclaimed. A lost country is reclaimed by the people who believed it was theirs all along.
Conservatism refined this narrative of dispossession – institutions occupied, heritage squandered, old loyalties ridiculed. This diagnosis is less about policy and more about a man on a horse calling for his country to be taken back. Those who rebel against powerless elites often surrender to more brutal elites.
Deneen’s reading is richer than that. The wanderer finds that freedom cut off from home becomes exile. But even this description can lead Homer to a reactionary revival. Ithaca will be reclaimed. The old order will return.
But the romance of restoring domestic order can obscure who must leave the room when “power in this household” is regained. Women are silenced while sexual coercion and the treatment of women as property remain embedded in the heroic world.
Liberals have a cause, a platform, a policy document. They defend equal citizenship and the rule of law. But no one arrives with the hero’s bow. No one steps into the chaos and makes the world make sense again.
This is an aesthetic crisis. At a forum at Harvard University, Becca Rosfeld, Jon Baskin, Cass Sunstein, and James Wood debated whether liberalism could offer a vision of the good life or only the freedom to choose one side or the other.
New emblems are less heroic: Sweetgreen, HR terminology, Equinox class, parks and recreationa glass-enclosed apartment that is more than a retail store. They suggest a smooth, well-managed society where there are options but little value returning to.
Sunstein’s defense captures the moral strength and imaginative weakness of liberalism. The government should not dictate which life is more beautiful, but should only protect the people’s right to decide. It is important to suppress it. Imposed visions of goodness have a dark history.
But freedom is not self-evident. An order that allows for many ways of life must explain why it is worthy of attachment. Choice opens doors, but gives no one a reason to stay there.
What liberalism lacks is a narrative of quid pro quo that it can claim, rather than another strongman promising to drive out intruders. Home cannot be reduced to ancestral property protected from outsiders or treated as a place over which we have no lasting claim.
Liberal Ithaca is worth restoring because it has expanded through travel and learned who it once excluded. Belonging no longer depends on who arrives first.
But Homer’s Odysseus does not return home in victory. He returned disguised as a beggar. He lies, tries, waits. Recognized through his dog and nurse, then Telemachus, and finally Penelope. Homecoming depends not only on his return, but on whether others recognize who he is.
Even at the climax, no simple solution is presented. Odysseus locks the door and turns his home into a slaughterhouse. The maids are hanged. Melantius is severed. The epic ends on the verge of civil war, as the families of the suitors come together for revenge. Odysseus cannot secure peace through force alone. Athena must stop her revenge.
Homer leaves a warning upon his return. Restoration increases purity. Injury becomes a license for brutality. Reclaiming the nation turns into hunting intruders and punishing treachery until anything that disturbs the old house seems disposable.
Liberalism has been wary of the “family.” But politics without attachment leaves the field to those who define belonging by blood and obedience. The question is whether a country can feel like home without needing enemies to make it complete.
“Everyone is a stranger and a beggar to Zeus.”
Liberal Odysseus will return to protect what needs to be preserved and to repair what is broken. He will know that no family is innocent and that revenge will not ensure peace. Returning home does not mean strengthening walls.
That tension runs through our politics. Conservatives face the difference between repair and revenge, between loving one’s country and cleansing it of those who question its past.
Liberals face another challenge. The question is whether resistance alone is enough, whether organizations can command loyalty without sacrificing belonging, and whether we can talk about patriotism without shame.
Amid polarization and anarchy, two comforting illusions are crumbling: that defeating the enemy will restore order, or that once rules are restored, justice will continue.
You cannot save a country by banishing it, and the world cannot survive with rules that no one enforces.
Democracy becomes a homeland only if defeat does not mean exile.
notes and reading
“I go home and hope every day that I will come back again.”
-Homer, odyssey 5.219–220, trans. In Murray.
“Everyone is a stranger and a beggar to Zeus.”
-Homer, odyssey 6.207–208, trans. In Murray.
Christopher Nolan deserves recognition for his accomplishments as writer and director, the film’s IMAX scale, and its exceptional reviews. The question posed here is not so much about the film’s accomplishments as about the political and cultural meanings assembled around them.
“Do liberals want a beautiful world?” Harvard University, March 23, 2026. Hosted by James Wood, Becca Rosfeld, Jon Baskin, and Cass Sunstein examined whether liberalism can offer a richer vision of life, or whether it only protects freedom of choice. In the explanation of the event itself, the salad chain, the consultant’s story, parks and recreation as a symbol of the aesthetic thinness of liberalism.
Patrick J. Deneen American Odyssey: Ancient stories reveal our divided souls (2026). As mentioned in the previous post, Deneen odyssey As a story of America’s restless wanderings and desire to return home. His postliberal conservatism lends much richness to this reading, but his greater defense of roots and community may glorify “homeland” and understate its exclusion.
“Aesthetic Politics and Political Aesthetics: An Important Distinction”—Katya Mandoki, August 8, 2023. Mandoki, a philosopher, writer, and experimental artist, distinguishes between the political use of aesthetics to legitimize, persuade, or intimidate, and the use of political power to impose a preferred aesthetic order. This distinction helps explain how cultural symbols can serve as instruments of belonging, exclusion, and domination.
cleaning of death
This time it’s a fire
Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
