The Specter of Postliberalism

Sep 29, 2024

Today’s rabbit hole is postliberalism, an ideology identified with a trio of professors and a former columnist and editor with the Wall Street Journal opinion pages whose names crop up regularly in articles about JD Vance’s intellectual influences and fellow travelers.

rabbit hole : a complexly bizarre or difficult state or situation conceived of as a hole into which one falls or descends (Merriam-Webster)

The conventional representation has it that postliberalism is economically populist and socially conservative. A fair amount of postliberal critique of trade, labor policy, immigration, and corporate monopolies sounds like it could have been cribbed from a Bernie Sanders speech. The appearance of common ground is deceptive. “Conservative” for its part is a woeful misnomer for a social component that is extreme, reactionary, and theocratic.

The nomenclature lends confusion. Liberals are not only people ordinarily thought of as liberal. Conservative elites, sometimes referred to as neoliberals and economic libertarians, are also guilty of liberalism. Liberals of both varieties are denounced with fervor reminiscent of anti-Marxist invective of the 1950s.

Postliberals have in mind classical liberalism with its commitment to individual autonomy, laissez-faire economics, an unfettered free market, and limited government with minimal if any regulation or other interference in the private sector. This flavor of liberalism is commonly thought of as political libertarianism, distinct from welfare liberalism associated with Roosevelt’s New Deal, Johnson’s Great Society, and campaigns in the 1960s on behalf of civil rights, equal rights for women, and a social safety net, all denounced by screeching Southern Democrats turned Republican for obvious miserable reasons in the Deep South of my youth.

The principal theorists of postliberalism are Patrick Deneen, a political science professor at Notre Dame, Adrian Vermeule at Harvard Law School, Iranian-American journalist Sohrab Ahmari, and Gladdin Pappin, once a professor, now president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, the state foreign policy research institute. I have been unable to find a current, definitive bio for Pappin. As best I can piece it together he was formerly an associate professor of politics at the University of Dallas and visiting senior fellow at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest. He is also a founder of American Affairs, where he is currently listed as deputy editor.

Their vision of a postliberal order involves the radical transformation of American government and institutions in the service of a radical transformation of society and culture. They reject both limited government and the separation of church and state. A strong, authoritarian government subordinate to the church is necessary to enforce the church’s spiritual mission, by which they have in mind Catholic doctrine of a severely conservative and rigid bent. All are Catholic: Deneen and Pappin grew up in Catholic households; Vermeule and Ahmari, like JD Vance, converted to Catholicism as adults and bring fanatical conviction to newfound faith.

Deneen describes himself as “a former man of the Left, who certainly isn’t comfortable in today’s Left, but doesn’t feel completely comfortable in today’s right, either.” In a lengthy interview conducted by Ezra Klein, Deneen relates the argument presented in his book Why Liberalism Failed “that both the Left and the Right, in their various liberal guises, have advanced an economic program and a social program that has particularly affected in a negative way those of less means and education in our country” (Ezra Klein interviews). Fair enough. Deneen goes much further in the essay “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Conservatism,” cited by Klein, with the sweeping claim that

the national trajectory over the past 75 years has been one of a continuous movement to ever more extreme forms of liberalism…liberalism’s internal logic leads inevitably to the evisceration of all institutions that were originally responsible for fostering human virtue, family, ennobling friendship, community, university, polity, church.

Klein quotes another Deneen essay, unfortunately not by title, where he wrote, “liberalism offered to humanity a false illusion of the blessings of liberty at the price of social solidity. It turns out that this promise was yet another tactic employed by an oligarchic order to strip away anything of value from the weak.”

Gladden Pappin distinguishes three main categories of American conservatism that emerged after 2016:

(1) those who opposed Trump, still oppose him, and hope to regain control of the Republican Party on the standard pro-business, laissez-faire platform of recent decades; (2) those who were initially skeptical about Trump but have rallied around the cause of nationalism; and (3) those who have used the occasion of the Trump presidency to push for a new Right. (Pappin, From Conservatism to Postliberalism)

The first group is a dwindling and endangered species; the second clings to an illusion of relevance. Pappin and his confreres are among a nest of odd bedfellows positioning themselves as standard bearers for a new right. As noted earlier, Pappin is now affiliated with the Hungarian government. Prior to that his focus had been

to game out a theoretical framework for big-government conservatism and to articulate some of the policy reforms that would follow, including tighter restrictions on access to pornography, an overhaul of the Senate that would assign seats to representatives of business sectors rather than states, and much more aggressive efforts to strategically protect and foster key American industries. (Oppenheimer, Gladden Pappin Wants)

Deneen fleshed out the vision in a speech before a conservative audience at Catholic University of America in Washington DC, asserting that

the major fault line in American politics is no longer one between the progressive left and the conservative right. Instead, the country is split into two warring camps: “the Party of Progress”—a group of liberal and conservative elites who advocate for social and economic “progress”—and the “Party of Order,” a coalition of non-elites who support a populist agenda that combines support for unions and robust checks on corporate power with extensive limits on abortion, a role for religion in the public sphere and far-reaching efforts to eradicate “wokeness.” In his new book Regime Change…Deneen calls for anti-liberal elites to join forces with the Party of Order to wrest control of political and cultural institutions from the Party of Progress, ushering in a new, non-liberal regime that Deneen and his allies on the right call the “postliberal order.” (Ward, ‘I Don’t Want to Violently Overthrow the Government. I Want Something Far More Revolutionary.’)

He suggests that “a new majority could be born” that seeks to promote “an idea of the economy and markets that serve ordinary people…the common good…[and] make it possible for people to flourish even if they’re not among the top 20 percent of wage earners of America” (Ezra Klein interviews). This might at first thought resonate with comrades at Jacobin as it does here at Portable Bohemia before we read on through a formulation that is just too pat, all-encompassing, and reductionist, traits it has in common with caricature versions of Marxism and with a lot of perhaps well-intentioned but less than rigorous analysis from progressives under the umbrella of antiracism, critical race theory, diversity, inclusion, social justice, and so on and so on.

Victor Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” in Hungary is a model for implementation of the postliberal order, with the requisite disclaimer that the Hungarian system would not be imposed here in toto because of differences in national culture, norms, and traditions. Deneen presents it as “a model of a form of opposition to contemporary liberalism that says, ‘There’s a way in which the state and the political order can be oriented to the positive promotion of conservative policies’” (Klein interviews).

Orbán and his governing party Fidesz have effectively turned Hungary into a one-party state with Fidesz controlling all three branches of government and using its supermajority in the legislature to change the country’s constitution as needed to maintain power and implement its agenda. Attacks on press freedom, academic freedom, LGBTQ rights, and minorities and asylum seekers are features of the program (Murphy, Viktor Orban: Hungary 'autocracy'). Media outlets have been turned into “propaganda factories.” What remains of independent media is “confined largely to websites read by a few people in Budapest’s liberal bubble.” Central European University (CEU), “one of the most respected institutions in the region,” was harassed into leaving Budapest for Vienna, and the fifteen state-funded research institutes at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which dates to 1851, have been placed under control of the government ministry of technology and innovation (How Viktor Orban).

In 2019 Deneen accepted an invitation from Hungarian government to meet with Orbán in Budapest.

In the presidential palace on the banks of the Danube River, he and Orbán talked about Why Liberalism Failed and discussed Hungary’s family policy, which includes interest-free loans to heterosexual couples planning to have children and up to three years of maternity benefits for new mothers. (Ward, I Don’t want)

Financial and other support for heterosexual family formation goes hand in hand with opposition to same-sex marriage. The family configuration in mind appears to be the traditional one where the man’s role is to be the provider and the woman’s place is in the home bearing children and caring for them, although Deneen and the rest, choosing their words more carefully than JD Vance, do not state this explicitly. Divorce is to be discouraged by making it as difficult as possible to obtain. Human life with all its attendant rights begins at the instant of conception. The position on abortion is as draconian as one would expect, with limited exceptions to protect the health and life of the mother grudgingly allowed in extreme circumstances, maybe.

A sense of victimization and grievance runs throughout postliberal discourse about liberal dominance of the universities. Deneen for example appears to resent his denial of tenure as a young professor at Princeton. “Although he knew at the time that it wasn’t uncommon for junior faculty members to be denied tenure, Deneen wondered whether his skepticism of the liberal tradition” and the fact that he “was clearly not sympathetic to the Rawlsian project, nor to some of the dominant currents in political theory” played a role in the decision. People who knew him at Princeton believe this “reinforced and intensified [his] already strong dislike of liberalism” (Ward, I Don’t want).

“What to liberalism seems a tolerant and decent regime, in the eyes of its predecessor tradition seems nothing more than cruel indifference, allowing clear vices not only to proliferate, but to enjoy implicit public approval,” he [Deneen] writes, calling for a return to pre-modern Christian politics in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas. (Beauchamp, The intellectual right’s war)

In an article in U.S. Catholic, Steven Millies places Deneen, Vermeule, Pappin, and Ahmari in the tradition of Catholic integralism, whose aim is “the integration of political power and religious authority” (What is Catholic integralism?). Integralism goes back to the fall of the Roman Empire when the Catholic Church took on many of the functions of the state. The church began to shift away from integralist doctrine after World War II (Jenkins, The strange world). Of late it has experienced a resurgence through the writing and teaching of Catholic intellectuals and has been endorsed in First Things, a magazine published by The Institute on Religion and Public Life, and Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal (Millies).

Appeal to tradition is a staple of postliberal scholarship and polemic. What counts as tradition appears to be for them self-evident. In Millies’ summation, for Deneen “the critique of liberalism is an argument with ‘A political philosophy conceived some 500 years ago, and put into effect at the birth of the United States nearly 250 years later.” A span of two hundred and fifty or even five hundred years is apparently not sufficient to constitute tradition. Upending these traditions and replacing them with traditions rooted in theological dogmatism and intolerance more commonly associated with dark ages is taken without question as a return to tradition.

In other other words, Deneen’s argument with what he calls ‘liberalism’ is really an argument with the separation of church and state, our whole way of life, and everything most readers probably assume is true about the world—such as, that the political presuppositions of American politics are good and true.

Millies argues that the integralist assault on liberalism is happening for a reason:

Our way of life has not stood up well in the decades since the end of the Cold War…
What we have learned since 1992 is that Americans are no less susceptible to ugly, xenophobic nationalism than anybody else, and the American system has not been an effective way to channel our conflicts through a legitimizing political process where everyone accepts the outcomes.
Liberalism, for everything that Deneen and the Catholic integralists mean by it, is in trouble.
The question is: What should we do? (Millies)

“Things are in the saddle / And ride mankind” (Emerson). Postliberal nostalgia for a quasi-mythical social and political order based on a parochial interpretation of Catholic doctrine comes up empty as an alternative to the utopian idea of boundless, endless progress to satisfy ever expanding human needs and desires as yesterday’s luxuries become today’s necessities, and of classical liberalism’s inability or unwillingness to take into account limits inherent in the human condition. It does no more to address liberal fallacy and excess than the fondness for conspiratorial railing against wealthy, oligarchic elites that postliberals share with friends and foes alike from across the political spectrum.

The story goes that a young Allen Ginsberg asked William Carlos Williams if he had any advice, older poet to younger poet. Williams was one of the foremost American poets of the first half of the twentieth century, also a pediatrician and family physician as highly regarded in that field as in poetry. He pointed to the window and croaked in his old man’s voice, “Lotta bastards out there.” That too is part of the problem. (N.B., I do not recall the source of this anecdote, which I picked up somewhere or other, and am unable to confirm its authenticity.)

Steven Millies points to something deeper in his article about Christian integralism.

The fundamental problem for integralism…is that integralists are to uncomfortable with sin. I don’t mean that they should get comfortable with it. But I do mean that it is a dangerous mistake to expect that we can live without it, or that any government really can do anything to make sin less prevalent. In their own way, that was what the Leninists believed. Our tradition tells us to have a different, more minimal expectation from politics.

The chief postliberal theorists may amount to little more than a handful of agitators who see themselves as a revolutionary vanguard awaiting the train that will deliver them from exile to rid the land of liberal tyranny. Nonetheless they find a ready audience at well-funded think tanks and religious institutions of a certain persuasion. They also have the ear of JD Vance, heir apparent to the throne if a Trump restoration comes to pass.

Postliberals, Christian nationalists, megachurch evangelicals, and fringier groups with overlapping but not identical agendas form something of a loose coalition banging at the gates of power under the banner of Trumpism. For now they present a more or less unified front against the common foe. One wonders how nicely evangelical fundamentalists and postliberal papists would play together if they break through those gates. There is also the not inconsequential matter as to the fate of the majority of Christians who hold divergent beliefs about what it is to be Christian and lead a Christian life, and what is to be the fate of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and countless others, including nonbelievers, under a postliberal dictatorship of the faithful.

All this goes without getting into the venture capitalist faction in JD Vance’s camp, for example, radical libertarian Peter Thiel, Vance’s mentor who financed his Senate campaign, and techno-optimist Marc Andreesen who holds that the answer to problems caused by technology is more technology. Their sophomoric faith in progress without limit, even the limit of human mortality, is the stuff of science fiction and would seem to clash with postliberal orthodoxy. They too might not be expected to play together nicely with others in a postliberal era.

I go back and forth about how seriously to take any of these blockheads. Perhaps the fever will finally break, the hysteria of the moment lift, and the threat posed by people for whom tolerance is an alien concept will fade. We need only look to history, however, to understand that we dismiss or ignore them at our peril.

So whatcha gon’ do, as my old French teacher Marie Laure used to say while we sat dumbly trying to figure out what exactly she had just asked en français and how to respond. Well. There are an awful lot of decent people out in the wide world who try to conduct their lives with consideration, compassion, and civility, who want to do the right thing in a terribly complicated world where it is not always clear what the right thing is, where all too often we are condemned to make difficult choices between bad and worse options. Such people remind us that in spite of all we persist, we hold to our values and sometimes even sacrifice for them. We take our stand in a thousand small ways and sometimes big ones for what might be thought of as progress with a small “p,” those painfully incremental steps out of darkness into the light of an always imperfect reason.

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Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt

David Matthews Portable Bohemia

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