The Book of Post-Liberalism

A reading from the Book of Post-Liberalism: In the beginning there was order on heaven and earth. Between Church and laity, state and subject, virtuous and perverts there was reverence and submission. And it was good. Then Francis Bacon stretched forth his hand and said “Let there be progress!” and thus brought about decay. So there was criticism, and unbelief, gays waving rainbow flags, and under-65s in open relationships. Then one day a man cast off the suit and tie God had made for him, put on a dress, and was neither shamed nor ashamed. And it was bad. And so God stretched forth his hand and said “My spirit will contend with this uppity decadence no longer. I will wipe from the face of the earth checks on government, respect for liberal rights, and critical race theory, for I can no longer abide these elitist ways.” But upon humble Harvard law professors, New York Post journalists, and east European dictators the Lord smiled and said “let these men have dominion over all life on this earth; the birds of the air and the uteri of women, the fowl of the earth and the irritatingly woke of California. For they—and only they—are truly the children of God.”

The recent National Conservatism Conference highlighted a deepening split on the American right. There are those who want to conserve what they take to be the country’s classical liberal heritage, exemplified by George F. Will and David French. And there are the post-liberals, a motley collection of religious philosophers and public figures who think that the political right has been in the business of conserving liberalism for far too long. For post-liberals like Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule liberalism has corroded belief in a common good, defined by a shared faith tradition, leading to nihilistic despair on the one hand and tyrannical ideological overreach on the other. Ahmari articulated the main disposition in typically shrill form in his Spectator article, “Tyranny is the Inevitable Consequence of Liberalism.”

At some point, the liberal has to admit that the powdered-wig version of his ideology contained in it the seeds of its woke, repressive variety: that enshrining individual autonomy and choice as the highest goods of human life would eventually create the conditions for a kind of private tyranny, precisely what the common-good tradition of classical and Christian thought had always warned about and sought to restrain. The past, in a realistic frame, is a mix of light and dark. Remove the rosy glasses of liberalism, however, and it is the present that looks more dark than enlightened.

Other post-liberal thinkers like Deneen and Vermeule are considerably more fine-grained. But they have still advanced arguments that have provoked shock and even anger from their more square conservative colleagues: describing originalism as a ruse to advance conservative policies which has now served its purpose and should be chucked for a forthrightly muscular right-wing jurisprudence, lyricizing about the “demonic side to the sentimentalism of saving lives at any cost” when discussing COVID restrictions, and getting jiggy with “illiberal” democrats turned outright kleptocratic authoritarians like Viktor Orbán. One might have expected that the repudiation of Trump in 2020 and the election of a blandly conventional centrist liberal like Joe Biden might have taken some of the wind out of the movement’s sails. But in fact post-liberalism has often thrived through adopting a contrarian posture, and the outlook at the National Conservatism Conference was fiery and audacious; with Deneen delivering a bellicose address that attacked right wing liberal capitalism and left wing liberal progressivism with equal verve.

It is certainly too early to speak, as some of the enthusiasts do, about a fundamental realignment taking place on the political right. To many American conservatives, a commitment to right wing liberalism or ordered liberty conservatism is non-negotiable. And they may be right to be worried. With growing and high public support for gay marriage, drug decriminalization, and the separation of church and state, a movement that openly pushes for illiberal policies and takes inspiration from soft-authoritarian regimes like Hungary and Poland opens itself to tremendous scrutiny and criticism. But there is no doubt that the post-liberals have impacted the conversation about the future of both American liberalism and conservatism. In the remainder of this piece I’ll discuss some of the key tenets of their arguments, building upon some earlier work on the subject. I will also offer a defense of liberal egalitarianism and explain why I think it does a much better job of accounting for and answering the objections of the post-liberals without succumbing to their disturbing defenses of integralism and flirtations with illiberal sawdustery.

Post- and anti-liberalism

One of the most unusual features of post-liberalism is the “post” prefix, which purports to signify a doctrine that emerges after liberalism but nevertheless retains some of its major features. This is odd since many of the major post-liberals are decidedly backwards looking, producing an endless stream of op-eds and books defending the virtues of a time and way of thinking that existed before liberalism came along to muck everything up with its amoral permissiveness and constant questioning of traditional authorities. Indeed it is tempting to simply regard the “post-liberal” label as little more than some projected time where liberalism has been abandoned. Or it is a branding exercise to play down the potentially unappealing illiberal elements of the movement by suggesting at least some elements of liberalism will be safe with them. In either case post-liberals have their eyes firmly set on the past, and all the major thinkers offer cataclysmal stories of the decline and fall of venerable wisdom into liberal nihilism. Many of these draw inspiration from Alasdair MacIntyre’s classic book After Virtue, but are far more willing to flirt with anti-modernist and religious arguments and demands.  

The apocalyptic narratives developed by post-liberals vary in their sophistication and histrionics, ranging from genuinely rich and interesting with figures like Deneen to the fully coked out in the case of someone like Michael Anton. In Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, Francis Bacon is the primary villain of the liberal tradition. It was Bacon who theorized that there was no higher teleological purpose to nature than to be the object of manipulation for human desires, opening the door for an endless series of demands to be freed from natural limitations. Knowledge, after all, was power and the point of power was to do as one liked. Drawing “liberally” from the darker parts of Alexis de Tocqueville, Deneen argues that over time this catalyzed into a dramatic expansion of state power wherever liberal subjects thought that was necessary to better achieve their desires. Now, Deneen argues this statist expansion has been directed against religious conservatives who humbly insist that we must abide by the limitations imposed by nature. 

On the other end R.R. Reno is unusually candid in criticizing Locke’s arguments for government by consent and toleration, since over time “this demand for free consent erodes political respect for natural authority. In our time, feminism, gay rights, and transgenderism insist that the male-female difference deserves no authority over our laws and social mores.” Indeed Locke is a frequent target of the post-liberals, since the philosophy of self-ownership as the epicenter of his thinking is seen as abetting the emergence of libertarian doctrines that see permissiveness as the highest social virtue. After all if we do happen to own our bodies as a natural right, that puts serious pressure on anyone critical of abortion rights. 

When he isn’t demanding the creators of Pornhub be “tarred and feathered” as an act of Christian mercy, Sohrab Ahmari offers a rather disjointed argument that the demanding wisdom of the past articulated by St. Augustine and Confucius has been abandoned for the easy temptation of simply doing what you want, consequences be damned. The latter accounts for the alleged superficiality of the liberal era, though personally I find it hard to respect the depth of a philosophy that spends an awful lot of time worrying about the “rise of the woke” as a fundamental political problem. 

Yoram Hazony’s devil is Immanuel Kant, whose transcendental idealism opened the door for a universalistic morality that ends with rootless cosmopolitanism and the demand that nation states and their traditions be abandoned for international law and liberal rights. Interestingly, Hazony goes even further than many of his post-liberal kin in drawing an explicit connection between liberalism and “Marxism”—for him a catch-all term that effaces the many distinctions between different progressive doctrines. In his essay “The Challenge of Marxism” (criticized by me here) Hazony describes a “dance” between liberals and “Marxists,” where the latter endlessly insist the former aren’t going far enough in securing “abstract” principles like freedom and equality for all. Liberals may initially resist this siren’s call, but they eventually concede to many of the “Marxist” demands leading to a cycle of radicalization and the alleged suppression of conservative opinions and ways of life. As Hazony puts it:

It is often said that liberalism and Marxism are “opposites,” with liberalism committed to freeing the individual from coercion by the state and Marxism endorsing unlimited coercion in pursuit of a reconstituted society. But what if it turned out that liberalism has a tendency to give way and transfer power to Marxists within a few decades? Far from being the opposite of Marxism, liberalism would merely be a gateway to Marxism.

Now I happen to think there are actually important points where liberalism and Marxism overlap, and so there is some validity to Hazony’s claim—even if the reasoning behind it and the conclusions he reaches are unconvincing. But I bring this up to showcase how insistent the post-liberals can be in rejecting any concession to liberal modernity as ceding too much to corrupt doctrines which have fundamentally warped and distorted human beings for centuries.

This genealogical style adopted by almost all the major post-liberal thinkers reveals how limited the repertoire of post-liberal arguments is. The kind of liberalism presented in their stories is almost inevitably highly theoretical, but unspecific. Instead of engaging with the claims of different individual authors or a school of thought, one instead gets a liberalism defined by a few sweepingly bad characteristics or a singularly villainous figure who is apparently the locus for anything post-liberals want to be wrong with the modern world. Ironically post-liberals often also want to have it both ways on this point, blaming liberalism for all of our woes while attributing the birth of science and responsibility for progress to Christianity or other kinds of religious doctrine. This is a very self-serving position. Claiming liberalism became a hegemonic doctrine which birthed a decaying (post) modern world … except for the admirable bits which we’ll take credit for thank you very much is ironically far less rigorous a take than the hated Karl Marx, who never denied the historical necessity of liberalism and capitalism in laying the conditions for his future utopian society. 

More importantly, they also brush aside the potentially lethal arguments about Friedrich Nietzsche, who offered a more genuinely profound and disturbing narrative about religion and liberalism than the post-liberals do. For Nietzsche, Christianity was not something overcome by liberalism and secularism. Secularism was latent within Christian doctrine, which espoused such a yearning for the “truth” that eventually people came to question the very truth of Christianity. When this occurred we got a secular age where many tried to carry on the legacy of Christian moralism, with its emphasis on the individual soul and equal dignity of all, through doctrines like liberalism and socialism. For Nietzsche the woke hyper-liberal feminists so despised by Ahmari and his friends aren’t anti-Christians. They’re what Christianity has become by the 21^st century, the consequence of the ultimate slave morality instantiating itself against all forms of authority of grandeur.

These kinds of serious problems and alternative takes are often brushed aside by the sheer drama of the stories post-liberals tell. Their monological narrative sweeps aside the actual arguments made by major liberal thinkers and its historical role as a catalyst for both emancipation and—all too often—oppression. Another irony on this point is that sophisticated Marxist critics of liberalism like Domenico Losurdo and Fredric Jameson are often far more dialectically multifaceted in their accounts of this history than the post-liberals are. There is something to be said for hard-edged materialism relative to speculative idealism on these points. These kinds of ambiguities and problems are also reflected in the more concrete historical and political arguments made by post-liberals. Beyond presenting a highly theorized but untenably general account of liberal philosophy, they are often unable to give convincing examples of how liberalism has actually produced pressing forms of tyranny and oppression. Authors like Ahmari and Deneen usually point to how majority Christian communities are prevented by law from advancing a vision of the common good, while being coy about how allowing them to do so would require far more dramatic kinds of oppression towards religious and cultural minorities of the kinds we now see in Hungary and Poland.

The metaphysical ambiguities of post-liberalism

In many respects it is not the precision or subtlety of post-liberalism’s arguments that give it power, but the capacity to tell a dramatic and affective story which aims first and foremost at the gut or the “deepest reaches of the human heart” as it is sometimes called. This can give post-liberalism the illusion of profundity. But the only real depth to post-liberalism lies in its yearning for knowledge of an eternal moral order that can tell us who we are and how we must set our lives.

The depth of this longing for the eternal is indeed the product of a world where four centuries of rationalism have convinced us that to be free of what Kant called transcendental illusion one must be content with limited knowledge, along with the contingencies and politics of a changing world that exists in real-time. The post-liberals are right that liberal philosophers were major figures in undermining our belief that the human mind could have knowledge of some eternal moral order beyond time, and that this is fundamentally related to their conviction that people should be equally free to ascertain their own vision of the good life for themselves. But what the sweeping generality of their thought misses is that the liberal philosophers developed dauntingly complex and ultimately convincing arguments for both their metaphysical positions and the moral and political payoff from them. The reason the kind of intellectualist liberalism foregrounded by post-liberalism triumphed over its competitors isn’t largely, as Deneen claims in Why Liberalism Failed, because it put forward the Luciferian prospect of unlimited power over nature and freedom from moral constraint. It’s because many people came to accept and internalize Hobbes’s arguments that a scientific approach to matter meant ceasing to regard nature teleologically, Kant’s arguments about both the universality of pure reason and the limitations of its capacity to answer or even pose big theological questions, and Nussbaum’s arguments that leading a good life in part means being able to define the meaning of the good life for ourselves.

To truly rebut the liberal position then would require far more from post-liberals than they have ever come close to offering since at least Eric Voegelin. Rather than just writing homilies about the personal and political benefits of believing in a transcendent moral order which will then be forcibly imposed upon all of us skeptics, they would have to argue for the actual existence of such a transcendent moral order.They would then need to go further and show how this transcendent moral order supports their own, conservative positions on morality and politics rather than the more progressive forms of religious doctrine I myself have argued for from a more modernist perspective. Finally they would have to do so in such a compelling way that it decisively or at plausibly could overcome all the metaphysical objections raised by Kant, Popper, and Mill, among many others. Arguments about how not believing in an eternal moral order and natural law makes people deeply unhappy, leads to relativism and nihilism, and worst of all to proliferating annoying woke activists and trans women demanding to use female bathrooms are not sufficient. Even if it were the case that without believing in a transcendent moral order we are doomed to being deeply unhappy, that would not be an argument for the existence of that moral order. It would at best be an argument for the efficacy of believing in such a transcendent moral order. And that is not nearly good enough.

Conclusion

Now if this is sufficient for the post-liberals personally then have at it. But even that doesn’t appear to be the case. The kind of illiberal demand that others conform to their beliefs in a transcendent moral order even if they don’t hold them—to argue, as Yoram Hazony does, that even conservative unbelievers must set aside their unbelief to mouth the correct pieties for the sake of fostering public support—immediately elicits a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion. This need to impose their moral views under auspices of committing all to the “common good,” even if they have no strong metaphysical arguments to back up the claim that their conception is either common or in fact good, makes one wonder whether the beliefs of post-liberals are in fact more fragile than they appear. One is tempted by the psychoanalytic arguments of someone like Slavoj Žižek, who observes that religious fundamentalism is often paradoxically driven by anxieties over the weakness of one’s faith which manifests in a demand that it be shared by all. There is a sense in which only if everyone else believes can I rest assured that my own belief system will be stable.

Despite what they say post-liberals remain free to practice their convictions both individually and through forming and maintaining voluntary associations and religious groups within the liberal state. Contrary to the rhetorical hyperbole, no one is preventing them from doing so and in fact many liberal states rightly facilitate the process through a generous array of financial and legal incentives offered to religious organizations. The primary way in which their social freedom is in fact limited—the “tyranny” invoked by Sohrab Ahmari—is how the liberal state prevents them from imposing their beliefs on others in contexts where they would have majoritarian support to do so. Or, since a majority of the population actually disagrees with them, using raw political power to succeed where democratic procedures fail. This is indeed a small limitation on their social freedom to live in exactly the kind of society they want. But it is far less dramatic a limitation than the actual tyranny which would be experienced by religious and sexual minorities, feminists, progressives, and more if post-liberals actually obtained power and could advance their agenda without constraint. And that should be the core objection all liberals make against post-liberals: at base, their arguments amount to a call for more authoritarian kinds of rule. To which should all say, hell no.