Postliberalism and the romantic lie

René Girard’s mimetic theory submits that human desire is mimetic, or imitative: we learn what to want by watching other people. Our very sense of self arises from these wants. However, we fool ourselves into believing we are the sources of our own desires. Instead of defining ourselves with others as collaborative models of desire, we define ourselves over-against them. We take them as rivals in competition for luxury goods, high-status jobs, or even just the privilege of being a parent’s favorite child.

Because our sense of self arises from our desires and (we imagine) from their achievement, our rivals become obstacles to our personal fulfillment. Some scandalous other is always the explanation for my failure to self-actualize. At a certain critical mass, when such discontent permeates a whole society, this blame game coalesces around a single marginalized person or group, who becomes the target of everyone’s frustration: the scapegoat, who must be expelled.

Rather than recoil in horror at its collective violence, society actually finds itself better off for having gotten rid of the scapegoat; murderers experience not guilt but catharsis. In the ultimate act of self-deception, Girard posits, archaic societies enshrined this experience in religion—especially in human sacrificial rites—and justified their violent origins in myths. All human culture is unconsciously patterned on this ritualistic expulsion of negative feelings and the victims that carry them off. Institutions and prohibitions—the things we consider sacred—arise from this core belief in the violent management of violence.

Yet alongside the human sacred, there is also a truly divine revelation telling us a different story. In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard explicitly connects mimetic rivalry and the unanimous violence it generates to the meaning of sin in Judaism and Christianity. God’s counter-pedagogy begins in the Old Testament as he condemns human sacrifice (Jer. 7:31) and ultimately insists that he desires no sacrifice at all but rather mercy, a “broken spirit,” and a “contrite heart” (Hos. 6:6; Ps. 51:17).

Christ echoes this desire, inviting humanity to imitate him as he imitates God the Father (John 14:9). His death as an innocent victim of mob violence is not a sacrificial payment to God; it’s a revelation of the scapegoat mechanism and the idols it creates, the “powers and principalities” formed by our own violence and to which we are enslaved (Eph. 6:2). Finally, Christ’s resurrection—his vindication by God (Rom. 1:4)—reveals once and for all the divine character hidden for millennia by human myth and religion: the Spirit of God exists in loving solidarity with the hidden victims of violence.

I hope this summary of Girard’s theory can help us understand the present scandals to which he’s connected. Girard has been a subject of journalistic scrutiny roughly since venture capitalist Peter Thiel—an outspoken Girardian—first contributed to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Before this, Thiel was notable as an early investor in Facebook, anticipating social media’s powerful harnessing of mimetic desire. Interest in Girard surged again in 2022, when J. D. Vance won the Ohio Senate race thanks in part to Thiel’s donations. A 2020 article written by Vance himself deepened the connection. Thiel had introduced Vance to Girard’s thought back in 2011, and mimetic theory quickly became a cornerstone in Vance’s spiritual and political life.

The curiosity about Girard’s influence, for a time confined to Silicon Valley subculture, morphed into concern in 2024 when Vance was criticized for scapegoating Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Writing for Politico, Ian Ward explicitly connected Vance’s rhetoric with Girard’s scapegoat theory. He noted the glaring discrepancy between Girard’s negative view of scapegoating and Vance’s apparently pragmatic use of it to galvanize Trump’s base.

Most attempts at understanding Girard’s influence on right-wing politics come down to squaring this circle. Some commentators have been content to boil the contradictions down to hypocrisy or opportunism on the part of his readers. Others have looked for lines in Girard that might justify these worrying yet seemingly good-faith applications of his work. Ward, for example, concludes that Girard’s spiritual ideal is inspiring but not ultimately credible to those in the world of partisan politics, where scapegoating remains a necessary evil for the sake of social cohesion. Writing for Arc, Lee Konstantinou wonders whether this “pragmatic balance between violence and Christian peace” is a paradox underlying mimetic theory itself.

Ultimately, the details allowing us to speculate are sparse. Thiel has previously recruited Girard into a triumvirate of conservative political theorists including Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, articulating a bleak but vague future for liberal democracy and calling for major (usually technological) interventions. Vance has described Girard’s influence on his life but has said relatively little about how mimetic theory shapes his policy. In the end, the interpretations of Girard that end up in the liberal media ecosystem are colored by the writers’ worst fears (mine included) about his acolytes and what they represent. As a result, Girard is often presented as a prophet of doom—pessimistic about human nature, an advocate for what sociologists call the “naturalness of hierarchies,” grieved but resigned to the inevitability of violence, and prone to spiritualizing systemic problems.

But what does Girard himself say?

Given his healthy, Augustinian belief in original sin—in violence as the substrate of human reason itself, in fact—Girard does present as a pretty pessimistic thinker. Yet his pessimism is not nihilistic; he is a humanist, despite his low anthropology. He is always looking to the greater goods we’re capable of so long as we don’t become too enamored with ourselves. Writing for the French publication Esprit, Bernard Perret argues that Girard’s postliberal readers essentially push his humanistic pessimism toward something more like misanthropy:

While [Girard] was undeniably anti-modern, in the sense that he did not share the progressive optimism of the political currents that held sway at the time his thinking was formed, he was not reactionary. Not believing in the automaticity of progress, he did not believe that it was possible to stop history, much less to go back in time. He never failed to criticize the idea of ​​the social contract as a theory of the foundation of society, but he was nonetheless deeply attached to liberal democracy and without illusions about the virtues of political conservatism. [my translation]

I generally affirm this characterization of Girard. In fact, Girard spent most of his career trying to understand what we might recognize as a very reactionary form of society: After a crisis is resolved by sacrifice, there follows a rage for order, a moral code to prohibit all the behaviors that led to the crisis in the first place. Sacred institutions emerge to keep this order, alongside myths—stories that justify the community’s commitment to doing whatever it takes to prevent the crisis from happening again.

Girard is relentless about exposing these mechanisms. At the same time, he’s sympathetic to those who still operate by them—which is to say, most of us. As he tells the story, this is how human cultures operated for millennia, how civilization emerged at all. There are clear positives to a definite social order. Learning a better way to live takes time, effort, and divine intervention.

In this sense, Girard presents as what I might call “critically conservative.” He recognizes that, as history marches on, not all of a community’s cherished insights and values are worth carrying forward into the future. In fact, many are so biased, unjust, and imbricated with sacrificial violence that they merit our outright rejection. Still, that sifting process may reveal other wisdom we’d do well to preserve; sometimes you do have to throw the champagne out with the cork, but it’s still wise to take a sip first. A critically conservative attitude is critical about what is and is not worth conserving but insistent when it finds something unfailingly true.

One of these unfailing truths, and one that contributes to Girard’s skepticism of any notion of absolute progress, is humanity’s tendency to dissemble our violence—to disguise it, justify it, anything to avoid owning up to it. While premodern forms of self-justification included religion and myth, Girard laconically refers to our more modern self-­deceptions as the “romantic lie.”

The romantic lie is our way of negatively coping with the ambiguities of a self that arises only through desire and imitation—less individual, Girard says, than interdividual. Instead of seeing the beauty in this relational truth of our being, however, we fool ourselves into believing we are the sources of our own desires, radically free and autonomous. We downplay how much of our own being we owe to others. In fact, our very efforts to forget this lead to much of our rivalry and violence.

This self-deception is baked into us almost from the moment we’re born. As Robert Horwitz writes, the defining assumptions of America’s economy include “the play of individual preferences in the free competition between individual actors with individual capacities.” We’re raised to believe that each person is radically their own, a blister pack of self-­contained dignity and agency. Yet Girard would call this a deeply inauthentic way of being human. The ideal citizen of a neoliberal democracy is the product of an illusion—the oldest and most dangerous illusion. As Geoff Shullenberger writes for Compact, mimetic theory “is fatal to [an] enduringly influential narrative of individual liberation” which, despite our devotion to it, does not seem to liberate:

In the more delimited worlds of premodernity, where an individual’s life was circumscribed by social class, hereditary line, family, guild, and other hierarchical structures, the apprenticeship of desire was predetermined: One’s models were provided in advance. The modern world, in liberating the individual from these hierarchies, in fact simply gives him greater leeway in choosing whom to serve. This may look like freedom, but it gives rise to new forms of servitude: enslavement to fashion, to public opinion, to those other individuals in our social milieu we may arbitrarily elevate to the status of a lodestar.

Girard does not advocate any sort of return to premodern hierarchical structures. They may be effective at managing desire, identity, and violence, but they do so violently and at the cost of human dignity. Democracy is inarguably an improvement, a wager on the positive powers of desire and imitation. Yet for these very reasons, Girard cautions, democracy’s superiority can’t be glibly taken for granted. The aspiration toward absolute equality also places us in the volatile situation of imitating everyone else all the time. A society that does not understand this lends itself to novel and insidious forms of rivalry.

One especially polarizing example is identity politics. Girard’s writing is shot through with concern for social justice, but he also observes, at the turn of the 21st century, Western society transforming victimhood from an ethical demand into a political strategy. The identities and rights of victims become desirable in themselves because of the social legitimacy they confer. The romantic lie worms into victimhood and commodifies it, and the social activism it inspires protects victims mostly to bolster the self-righteous identities of the activists themselves. “The spectacular demonstrations of piety towards the victims of our predecessors,” Girard writes, “frequently conceal a wish to justify ourselves at their expense.”

At its worst, such activism can only imagine reparations through the creation of new, “deserving” victims (in the vein of Mao’s Five Black Categories). Social justice in the internet age often becomes an engine for moral one-upmanship that, in the process, cynically obscures the realities of systemic violence and so makes them easier to dismiss.

Yet despite these shortcomings of democracy, Girard does not advocate a hard reset. Instead he wants us to understand what a responsible democracy truly entails: a more conscious awareness of mimesis and rivalry, with less emphasis on individual rights and a more mature, interdividualistic notion of community. There is wisdom in recognizing, as Girard does, that public policy will never produce this maturity. True liberty requires crossing a spiritual threshold, a conversion away from the romantic lie. It demands, per the late David Lynch, that we “fix our hearts or die.”

For all the emphasis on mimesis and scapegoating, conversion might actually be the most important word in the Girardian lexicon. In his early work on literature, Girard observed the protagonists of great novels stumbling upon the insight that they are not autonomous, desiring beings; they have models. They are brought into being by others. They find catharsis not through scapegoating but through what the Christian tradition calls kenosis: they relinquish their need to bring themselves into being, to be the sole determiners of their destiny. Unpredictably, gratuitously, in a moment of “mystical apprehension,” they learn to be needy instead.

This perfectly secular conversion is completed in Christianity, Girard says, where it is inseparable from an intimate identification with the dead and risen Christ and, through him, with the victims of violence “hidden since the foundations of the world.” Countless souls have been sacrificed to fuel our lies about peace, power, and the righteousness of our own desires, all in the name of God. The atonement is God’s counterargument about Godself, scandalizing those of us who believe we do the will of God by purging our communities of impurity. We are thrown back on ourselves as creatures who, James Alison writes, “rely on violent contrast in order to survive.” By taking on the consequences of our violence, Jesus reinstates the only difference that matters: Creator and creation in loving communion.

This is not an overnight transformation. Though human destiny is transfigured in the shadow of the cross, history and human evolution continue their glacial pace. Charity is frequently the handmaiden of power. Under the banner of concern for the victims of violence, Christendom still waged countless wars. This, Girard says, is Christianity’s great paradox: By revealing our violence, it also accelerated our violence. Though the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit advocates for the scapegoats and calls us to ever higher justice, humanity has not forgotten its ancient, reliable safeguard against its own violence. As ever, the human condition is an impulsive, defensive no to the gentle command to “be still” (Exod. 14:14).

We now face a choice: Learn to forgive, to accept our needfulness and our need to become together, or double down on the romantic lie and destroy ourselves. Girard shows his pessimism when he gnomically says, “History is a test. Mankind is failing it.”

Girard was no doomsday preacher. Given what his studies taught him about human nature and its vicious reciprocities, he simply watched the world stockpile nuclear weapons and interpreted what he saw. Still, there is something finally and unavoidably apocalyptic about his thinking. Perhaps this is why Girard’s more public disciples tend to cleave away from his staunchly nonviolent Christianity—the coming apocalypse is too urgent for that kind of thinking. We need muscle, a pragmatic balance between violence and Christian peace. We prefer the “Christianity of Constantine to the Christianity of Mother Theresa,” as Thiel once put it.

While Vance’s Christian imagination is subtler than Thiel’s, it still scandalizes me. In “How I Joined the Resistance,” a 2020 essay for The Lamp magazine, he writes:

In the Christian telling, the ultimate scapegoat has not wronged the civilization; the civilization has wronged him. The victim of the madness of crowds is, as Christ was, infinitely powerful—able to prevent his own murder—and perfectly innocent—undeserving of the rage and violence of the crowd. In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else.

Vance emphasizes that civilization wronged Christ; for Girard, Christ emphasizes how civilization wronged its poorest and most vulnerable members. Vance emphasizes Christ as infinitely powerful and perfectly innocent; Girard emphasizes the kenosis, the letting go of divine power and retribution which we are meant to imitate. Vance’s Jesus exposes our moral failings and reinforces God’s holy demand for perfection; Girard’s Jesus collapses all that we hold sacred into a straight and narrow path toward reconciliation.

By his own account, Vance has already had the experience of recognizing his desires as vapid and unfulfilling. He can have that moment again. All of us can.

These stories are theologically compatible. They even need each other. Yet reading Vance’s words with the rest of Girard in mind reveals, I think, a crucial oversight, one regularly borne out in Vance’s political conduct: the vice president still approaches Jesus through the romantic lie. The self who encounters this Christ is radically responsible for their own virtue—which is to say, radically disconnected from other people. From this disconnection follows all the other consequences we’ve been exploring: If one does not start from a place of humility in their neediness, contingency, and interdividuality, all the other lessons of mimetic theory are learned slant. I may be attracted to Girard’s insights about the crowdsourced nature of desire, yet when I feel its gravitational force, I may start to see my neighbors through the lens of a herd mentality that I need to rise above. I remain committed to some version of the self not as interwoven with the desires of others but as dragged down by them. I become resentfully nonconforming, contrarian, obsessed with my own virtue. After all, if I can escape the pull of mimesis, then surely I deserve to be called virtuous, to be in a place where I can direct the desires of others. And if they reject me, well, their persecution is simply proof of my own innocence and power.

This anti-mimetic impulse is the shape much mainstream mimetic theory takes on its way out of Silicon Valley and into Washington—an ironic rivalry with mimesis itself. Yet it is also the absolute easiest oversight to make while studying Girard. It is the hardest hurdle to overcome, because it is so ingrained in who we are and how we’re formed. Each of us will probably make this same mistake the next time we get into a fight with a loved one, grieve a lost promotion at work, read the Bible, or seethe at the incorrigible enablers of systemic injustice in our country. Surely, as Christ said of us to the Father, we don’t know what we are doing. Each of us is always failing the test. And as Vance has repeatedly demonstrated since taking office, the more power one has, the higher the stakes for everyone.

My friend Suzanne Ross recounts one of the last times she met with Girard before he died, as part of a group of theologians asking what they might do to help right the world’s course.

“Nothing,” Girard said. “There is nothing to be done.”

“Now that was scandalous,” Suzanne told me.

Yet there is nothing to be done in conversion, either. Nothing to be done in the face of mercy, somehow inexorably saving this burning world. Nothing to be done with the hand that receives a loving God’s unmerited grace except to keep its fingers open, however stiffly—a little crack in what wants to be a fist.

Another Girardian friend, Joel Aguilar, writes in his newsletter, A Human Catechism, about his experience reading St. Paul’s conversion story with a group of Guatemalan pastors. The cohort comprised witnesses, survivors, and perpetrators of the Guatemalan armed conflict (1960–1996). One of the participants, an ex–special forces member, was first to share his impressions, saying, “I believe Saul converted to a follower of Jesus because he didn’t have an option. What was he going to do? Jesus was ready to pull his fingernails off one by one!” He mimicked the use of pliers pulling off his nails. He spoke from lived experience, as one trained to torture for the sake of what he believes is true and right.

Joel cannot make sense of it, but his heart tells him the Spirit of God is at work. “I will probably never know how,” he says. But he still feels something refusing to leave this man—even with his deformed desires—alone to fail his test.

“The [judgment] of God is more efficacious than ours,” writes J. P. M. Walsh:

He is at work where the need is greatest, outside the circle of [righteousness], where sin abounds. He is present and known in our reluctance to be trusting or to believe or to love. [In] our readiness to judge, to dismiss, to resent, to entertain murderous rage [in] denial of his charity and rejection of his Spirit; [when] we worship the idols of effort and entitlement—say[ing] to the works of our hands, “My God!”—and think we have standing to condemn our neighbor.

For this reason alone, I am thankful that those adhering to an ideology I consider destructive and dangerous have taken up the banner of a thinker I love, that they’ve allowed him to continue influencing their lives and values with his concern for victims. If his own story is to be believed, and I hope it is, J. D. Vance has already had the experience of recognizing his desires as vapid, unfulfilling, and in need of redirection; he can have that moment again. All of us can.

Despite what many of us grew up hearing, there is no “born again” moment. Repentance and redemption are a process, a series of stray glances between us and God in which we might choose, perhaps for the ten thousandth time, to turn away or to lock eyes in the little apocalypse each of us is always trying to avoid—maybe the only apocalypse that will ever matter.

However the postliberal right scandalizes me with their love of René Girard, and despite their use of him to justify the wounds they deal to others, I’m glad it’s him they’ve latched onto and not someone else. I pray his insights continue beckoning them toward those points of divine contact, toward metanoia, to more fragile and just selves. And I’ll try to travel that road, too—knowing myself a persecutor, scandalized and stumbling over my own shadow, trusting that it is in our limping that God draws near.