
If you’ve been following U.S. politics and specifically the U.S. conservative movement, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered something known as “Postliberalism” in the last few years. Postliberalism is a movement in New Right political theory that appeared over the last 20 years, and has accelerated since the mid 2010s. It purports to offer a communitarian brand of conservatism that intentionally rejects and distances itself from the “classical liberal”-infused Anglo-American conservative tradition (i.e. John Locke, Adam Smith, and the American founders), which it views as irredeemably polluted by libertarian individualism.
I view this development with great skepticism, and would be inclined to ignore it as a fringe political theory except for the fact that it currently enjoys a high level of political patronage right now. Vice President J.D. Vance, for example, is a self-described postliberal, and many postliberal intellectual figures hover around his circles in the White House. I therefore offer this more detailed explanation where I work through my thoughts about Postliberalism, and why I consider it a threat to basic American values.
1. I didn’t declare war on Postliberalism. Postliberalism declared war on economics, and specifically free-market economics. If you read the Postliberal literature going back for the last 20 years (at least), free-market or “libertarian” economics is the central scapegoat for almost every grievance that Postliberals have with the world, be it real or imagined.
2. For all their grousing about economics, most Postliberals don’t understand economics at a fundamental level and don’t exhibit any interest in educating themselves about what mainstream economists do or believe. They’re as bad as the Marxists in this regard, and the modal Postliberal understanding of the field consists of an eclectic assemblage of conspiracist prejudices and cranky heterodox “alternative” schools of economic thought that they’ve pieced together based on perceived agreement with their ideological priors.
3. If the Postliberals were content to stay in their own lane of political theory and/or theology, I’d probably still disagree with them but I’d also be inclined to ignore them and leave them to their weird little corner. But again, they decided to declare war on economics – a subject they don’t understand – and specifically, they decided to wage that war within what could be called the broader “conservative movement” umbrella.
4. The Postliberals’ explicitly-stated objective in their “conservative movement” war – as openly articulated by their theorists Patrick Deneen, Gladden Pappin, and numerous other examples – is to drive the economic libertarians out of the umbrella. Economic libertarians have never been more than a minority faction under that umbrella, dating back to William F. Buckley’s coalition with Milton Friedman and a few other like-minded economists in the mid 20th century. But it’s been a fairly collegial home for them. They often disagree with others in the umbrella on some social and military issues, but it’s always been within the realm of friendly debate. And more importantly, the economic libertarians entered the umbrella in the first place knowing full well that they weren’t going to convert a bunch of conservative traditionalists to social libertarianism. So they never really tried that – all they wanted was an overlapping political alliance with conservatives who were mostly friendly to tax cuts, and who would at least pay lip service to deregulation and keeping government out of our economic lives.
5. By contrast, the Postliberals weren’t even an original member of the “conservative movement” in the US and they didn’t really start showing up at all until the late 2000s/early 2010s at most. Ever since they got there though, they’ve been on a discord-sowing mission to disrupt that coalition, put themselves in charge, and drive out the economic libertarians.
6. I’d readily concede that economic libertarians don’t need to be a part of the aforementioned movement & most manage to do fine as an intellectual camp of their own. But setting aside the scapegoating and unprovoked warfare from the Postliberals, it’s difficult to deny that the economic libertarians brought intellectual value to the rest of the conservative movement umbrella. Even if they weren’t always listened to, they served as an economic conscience of the right – steering it away from the temptations of big government, adding intellectual rigor and depth for grappling with complex economic issues that inevitably emerge in the political world, and equipping it with arguments to answer the economic left and far-left (the latter being the major foil of the conservative movement in the 20th century due to communism, and remaining so today with the resurgence of socialist doctrine). The economic libertarians also tended to be more resilient than cultural conservatives to the various racist & antisemitic extremes that always hover around the periphery of any political movement, so they helped to keep that in check.
7. Since the Postliberals began their war to drive economic libertarians away, they’ve also sought to fill the void with other elements of the far-right that they perceive as being more conducive to their cultural and theocratic priorities. In doing so they apply almost no standards (other than ensuring that whoever they’re making an alliance with at the moment is not an economic libertarian.) That includes opening the door – previously shut by Buckley and others – to racist cranks, anti-semites, conspiracy theorists, and similar garbage that’s now running rampant on the hyper-online right wing “influencer” scene. The evidence of this is overwhelming, from Postliberal promotion of weird little blogs run by white nationalists, to Postliberal celebrations of racist apocalyptic novels like Camp of the Saints, to the Postliberal embrace of racist crackpots like Curtis Yarvin, to Postliberal coziness with authoritarian political figures like Viktor Orban, to an increasing Postliberal tolerance of bizarre boundary-pushing conspiracism (e.g. Tucker Carlson’s obsessive promotion of WWII revisionists who openly flirt with Holocaust denial). It’s difficult to deny that these new coalition partners have made the conservative intellectual ecosystem worse off. And some parts of it have become toxic sewers full of the worst caricatures that the left could ever dream up about the far-right.
8. Adding to the spillovers from the sewer they’ve opened, Postliberals have become increasingly strident about attacking other core tenets of the conservative movement’s intellectual tradition, namely the American Founding. This hostility was always a latent part of Postliberalism, again going back to the stuff Deneen, Pappin, and others were writing in the 2000s and early 2010s. But as their communitarian and religious brand of “conservatism” has become more assertive, it’s also begun to clash more directly with the limited government, individualistic, and, yes, philosophically libertarian dimensions of the American founding – dimensions that are pretty much hard-coded into our constitutional system and founding documents. This has led many Postliberals of late to focus their energies on discrediting the American founding as well by portraying it as another corrupted and overly-individualistic extension of economic libertarianism. In the political sphere, it’s also made them perfectly willing to run roughshod over basic constitutional norms and principles in order to obtain greater political power. There is no better illustration of this latter development in action than Deneen protege and self-described Postliberal J.D. Vance.
9. When you confront Postliberals about any of the problems I’ve mentioned above, the best you’ll ever get out of them is a shrug and a sneer. They’re wholly unbothered by what they’ve unleashed, and many of them seem to relish in it. They view the things they are destroying as obstacles to political power that need to be overcome so that they can better wield it. And they view the racist, conspiracist garbage they are unleashing as an acceptable and even welcome price to pay to position themselves in places of power and influence. Postliberals are wholly unbothered by the unethical practices and behaviors they’ve unleashed, and the harms they’ve caused, because in their minds the Postliberal end goal is innately “virtuous” and they are its embodiment.
10. While I don’t need the world to have a healthy conservative intellectual ecosystem (and not any more than I need it to have a healthy progressive intellectual ecosystem), I much prefer to live in a world where the conservative ecosystem (and the progressive ecosystem) are at least rigorous, thoughtful, honest about their intentions and disagreements, and willing to tolerate debate in their respective ranks. The toxicity of Wokeness and the Critical Theory turn on the left came about roughly a decade ago because its ecosystem ceased to tolerate dissent in its own ranks, drove out intellectual rigor, and replaced it with a sewer of crazy, vicious, and hate-driven far-left activism. With the Postliberals, I see the same patterns playing out on the right. And both of those developments have unambiguous negative spillover effects on society at large because they are politically assertive in ways that inevitably push the sewage they’ve cultivated out into the societal mainstream.