Liberalism and Odysseus
“I wish and long day by day to reach my home, and to see the day of my return.” —Odysseus, in Homer’s Odyssey
The last post considered death and “immortality projects.” Today follows that idea into politics, where Odysseus has become an icon of conservative restoration—and a challenge to liberalism. Next Wednesday turns to the Prodigal Son and the moral judgments it overturns.
Conservatives have had 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 and Ben-Hur, Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Kinkade. Columns and symmetry; pastels and neon; cowboy hats, country music, the American flag.
Liberals have had Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Alan Alda and Hawkeye Pierce, Sidney Poitier and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Jane Fonda and Coming Home. James Baldwin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol. Glass and steel, asymmetry; earth tones and rainbow stripes; folk songs, protest marches, the peace sign.
These are caricatures, and many figures refuse their assigned camps. Still, conservatives have been better at turning politics into stories of belonging—a recognizable world that can be lost and reclaimed.
Now, with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, they have Odysseus.
The backlash against Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen of Troy shows how much symbolic territory is at stake. Elon Musk, Matt Walsh, and others see a Black Helen not as an artistic choice but as another surrender to “woke” decline. For part of the right, Odysseus has become an icon of civilizational restoration, returning to reclaim the household from a godless culture run amok.
Nolan’s film hands the right a monumental hero, while conservative political theorist Patrick Deneen’s American Odyssey frames Homer’s epic as an American story: a nation divided between restless wandering and the desire for home.
In the more reactionary version of that reading, the emphasis falls on return. Odysseus finds usurpers draining his estate, flouting custom, courting his queen, and mocking his heir. He tests loyalties, strings the unbendable bow, and restores order by force. Homer’s hero does not just come home. He reclaims his country.
Politics becomes repossession: a lost country restored to those who believe it was theirs all along.
Conservatism has refined this story of dispossession—institutions captured, inheritances squandered, old loyalties mocked. The diagnosis calls less for policy than for a man on horseback to take back the country. Those who revolt against an effete elite often surrender to a coarser one.
Deneen’s reading is richer than that. The wanderer discovers that freedom detached from home becomes exile. Yet even this account can lend Homer to reactionary restoration. Ithaca is reclaimed; the old order returns.
But the romance of restored household order can obscure who must leave the room when “the power in this household” is reclaimed. Women are silenced while sexual coercion and the treatment of women as property remain embedded in the heroic world.
Liberals have causes, programs, and policy papers. They defend equal citizenship and the rule of law. But none arrives carrying a hero’s bow. None walks into the mess and makes the world recognizable again.
This is an aesthetic crisis. At a Harvard forum, Becca Rothfeld, Jon Baskin, Cass Sunstein, and James Wood debated whether liberalism can offer a vision of the good life or only the freedom to choose one.
Its newer emblems are less heroic: Sweetgreen, HR jargon, Equinox classes, Parks and Recreation, and glass apartments above retail. They suggest a smooth, well-managed society offering choices but little worth returning to.
Sunstein’s defense captures liberalism’s moral strength and imaginative weakness: government should not dictate which life is beautiful, only protect citizens’ right to decide. That restraint matters. Imposed visions of the good have a dark history.
Yet liberty is not self-explanatory. An order allowing many ways of life must still explain why it deserves attachment. Choice opens the door but gives no one a reason to stay.
What liberalism lacks is not another strongman promising to drive out the intruders but a story of return it can claim. Home cannot be reduced to ancestral property guarded against outsiders or treated as a place with no lasting claim on us.
A liberal Ithaca would be enlarged by the journey, worth recovering because it had learned whom it once excluded. Belonging would no longer depend on who arrived first.
But Homer’s Odysseus does not recover home through triumph. He returns disguised as a beggar. He lies, tests, and waits. Recognition comes through his dog and nurse, then Telemachus, and finally Penelope. Homecoming depends not only on his return but on others recognizing who he is.
Nor does the climax offer a simple resolution. Odysseus has the doors secured and turns his home into a slaughterhouse. The maids are hanged; Melanthius is mutilated. When the suitors’ families gather for revenge, the epic ends near civil war. Odysseus cannot secure peace by force alone; Athena must halt the vengeance.
Homer leaves a warning inside the homecoming. Restoration hardens into purity. Injury becomes a license for cruelty. Reclaiming a nation turns into hunting intruders and punishing betrayal until anything unsettling the old household looks disposable.
Liberalism has been wary of “home.” But politics without attachment leaves the field to those who define belonging through blood and obedience. The question is whether a country can feel like home without needing enemies to make it whole.
“For from Zeus are all strangers and beggars.”
A liberal Odysseus would return to defend what deserves preservation and repair what has been broken. He would know that no household is innocent and no peace is secured by vengeance. Homecoming would not mean fortifying the walls.
That tension runs through our politics. Conservatives face the difference between repair and revenge, between loving a nation and purifying it of those who question its past.
Liberals face another difficulty: whether resistance is enough, whether institutions can command loyalty without offering belonging, and whether patriotism can be spoken without embarrassment.
Amid polarization and disorder, two consoling fantasies are collapsing: that order will return when the enemy is defeated, or that justice will follow when the rules are restored.
A country cannot be saved by expulsion, and a world cannot survive on rules no one will enforce.
A democracy becomes a home only when defeat does not become exile.
Notes and reading
“I wish and long day by day to reach my home, and to see the day of my return.”
—Homer, Odyssey 5.219–220, trans. A. T. Murray.
“For from Zeus are all strangers and beggars.”
—Homer, Odyssey 6.207–208, trans. A. T. Murray.
Christopher Nolan’s achievement as writer-director, the film’s IMAX scale, and its extraordinary reception deserve recognition. The questions raised here concern not its cinematic accomplishment but the political and cultural meanings gathered around it.
“Do Liberals Want a Beautiful World?” Harvard University, March 23, 2026. Becca Rothfeld, Jon Baskin, and Cass Sunstein, moderated by James Wood, considered whether liberalism can offer a rich vision of life or only protect freedom of choice. The event’s own description invoked salad chains, consultant-speak, and Parks and Recreation as emblems of liberalism’s perceived aesthetic thinness.
Patrick J. Deneen, American Odyssey: What an Ancient Story Reveals about Our Divided Souls (2026). As mentioned in my last post, Deneen reads the Odyssey as an American story of restless wandering and desired homecoming. His postliberal conservatism gives the reading much of its richness, though his larger defense of rootedness and local community may romanticize “home” and understate its exclusions.
“Aesthetic Politics and Political Aesthetics: A Crucial Distinction”—Katya Mandoki, August 8, 2023. Mandoki, a philosopher, author, and experimental artist, distinguishes the political use of aesthetics to legitimize, persuade, or intimidate from the use of political power to impose a preferred aesthetic order. The distinction helps explain how cultural symbols can become instruments of belonging, exclusion, and rule.