In 2023, Nick Fuentes appeared on Piers Morgan’s show. Morgan, a Boomer, pressed him on his support of Adolf Hitler, asking what is “so f*cking cool about Hitler”. The edits, responded Fuentes. Morgan looked baffled. Fuentes looked impatient, annoyed at the question even. They were not even disagreeing about politics in the ordinary sense. They were speaking from different political worlds, and neither had the vocabulary to explain the distance to the other.
I want to take that exchange seriously, because it captures something constitutional analysis keeps missing. My claim is simple: different generations now read constitutions through different formative crises, and this is why constitutional arguments increasingly talk past each other. When a Boomer invokes the rule of law and a Gen Z voice declares the framework broken, they are not disagreeing about how to apply shared standards. They are speaking from rival frameworks of ultimate justification. I call these frameworks generational political theologies: the implicit structures through which authority is legitimated, crisis interpreted, and order rendered meaningful, shaped by the formative experiences of distinct cohorts.
A constitution, on this view, is not merely a legal framework but a symbolic order, and crucially a temporal one. The historian Reinhart Koselleck argued that political life depends on holding together a community’s inherited past and its anticipated future within an intelligible present. When that continuity dissolves, constitutions persist as form while their capacity to command allegiance quietly drains away. Hannah Arendt saw the political cost: where citizens no longer experience themselves as actors within a shared world, authority survives as structure but dies as experience. The Fuentes-Morgan exchange is a symptom of precisely this dissolution.
Liberalism as anticulture
To explain how we got here, I lean on Patrick Deneen, the American political theorist whose Why Liberalism Failed argued that liberal societies erode the very traditions that make them livable. Liberalism succeeds, he claims, by dissolving the cultural conditions that sustain it, replacing inherited practices and intergenerational obligation with abstract law and market relations. The result is fractured time: weakened links between generations and a growing orientation toward the present.
I find this persuasive, and it has constitutional implications Deneen does not fully draw out. In postwar Western Europe, constitutional legitimacy rested on a shared narrative of reconstruction: constitutionalism as a moral response to catastrophe. As that narrative weakens, each cohort interprets authority and emergency through the crises that marked its own formation.
Four generational horizons
Boomers, shaped by totalitarian collapse and democratic reconstruction, experience constitutional order as a moral achievement grounded in restraint: a chastened constitutionalism. Generation X inherits this framework through Cold War fragility; institutions matter as stabilising mechanisms, a theology of containment. Millennials, socialised in apparent normality and then disrupted by financial crisis and technocratic governance, encounter a constitutionalism formally intact but hollow. This is Arendt’s warning realised: politics become administration. Theirs is a disenchanted proceduralism in which the forms are kept, but no one quite remembers why. Generation Z radicalises this. Formed by overlapping emergencies, it experiences the line between rule and exception as blurred, and evaluates authority by its capacity to respond to crisis. Its theology is permanent emergency. Fuentes is an extreme expression of this horizon, but not an anomalous one.
The religious dimension
The Boomer framework borrowed Christian grammar even as it secularised it: guilt, repentance, never again as covenant. Generation X came of age as the churches emptied; its containment ethic is damage limitation without redemption. Millennial disenchantment is recognisably a crisis of faith. And Gen Z’s permanent emergency is a post-Christian apocalypticism: the climate movement reproduces apocalyptic structure with striking fidelity, while Fuentes inhabits the same temporal grammar from the opposite pole. Both have lost what Christianity paired with apocalypse: the assurance that time remains meaningful and held.
Conclusion
This is why Morgan and Fuentes could not hear each other. Constitutional politics is no longer disagreement within a shared normative universe, but competition between rival frameworks of ultimate justification. Any recovery would require reconstructing a shared temporality, reconnecting memory, authority, and future obligation. The paradox is that this reconstruction may no longer be possible through the universalist language that helped dissolve the older horizon in the first place.
