On post-liberalism - J. Colin Bradley in The Point:

‘The enduring appeal of this political vision today is manifest in the work and popularity of a group of thinkers on the right known as the “post-liberals,” Chad Pecknold, Gladden Pappin, Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari among them. Post-liberals begin from the conviction that liberalism is corrupt. It is politically corrupt in that its pretense to neutrality masks the imposition of a specific, comprehensive vision of the good life. And it is morally corrupt because that vision—characterized by the celebration of self-discovery, self-expression and the jubilant shedding of all natural limits—has isolated and deformed the souls of those whom it promises liberation. To the post-liberal mind, liberalism’s chafing against limits is the common root of society’s myriad ills: from the offshoring of manufacturing jobs and creeping surveillance of tech corporations, to ruinously woke universities, the decline of the nuclear family and church attendance, and increases in “transgenderism,” addiction, suicide and divorce. Liberalism, they say, encourages us to see personal choice as paramount, promising an illusory kind of freedom we purchase at the cost of melting into air all that is solid.’

(…)

‘Deneen, a professor of political science, struck a deep vein with his 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed. In the hand-wringing early days of the Trump administration, he accomplished the rare feat of winning plaudits from Rod Dreher, Cornel West, Barack Obama and Viktor Orbán for his “courageous” diagnosis of liberalism’s collapsing morale and crumbling institutions. His follow-up, Regime Change, is an effort to move beyond diagnosis, seize the interregnum and lay the groundwork for a badly needed successor ideology.
Deneen embraces the idea, popular in classical political theory, that politics is essentially a contest between the few and the many. With this framework, Deneen constructs a political cosmology that resolves into four categories along two axes. A political view either takes the side of the few or the many. And it either conceives the many as intrinsically conservative or intrinsically progressive. Liberals of various stripes are elitists because they fear either the radical progressivism of the many, or their backwards conservatism. Marxists pretend to side with the many whom they hope are—but deep down know not to be—progressive, slipping despite themselves into elitist vanguardism. Deneen’s post-liberal conservatism, by contrast, resolutely sides with the many, whom it knows to be conservative. Like much else in the book—besides his recounting of the suffering of canceled speakers at the hands of the college mob—this all happens rather quickly. Those familiar with Aristotle’s Politics, for instance, may doubt Deneen’s claim that the philosopher was an outright democrat; readers of Marx’s The Civil War in France likewise may resist Deneen’s attempt to paint the father of communism as an elitist.’

(…)

‘Working-class people are “grounded in the realities of a world of limits.” They know the “rhythms of seasons … born of close experience with reality.” They exhibit “frugality, inventiveness, craft, common sense, gratitude for small blessings, and, often, stoic cheerfulness even in the face of penury and suffering.” As for working-class “vices,” they “harbor resentments.” They are “crude and parochial” and run the perpetual risk of “simplemindedness,” “xenophobia” and “baseness.” Deneen even suggests that these vices have gotten the upper hand in the battle for the workingman’s soul, which explains the epidemic of deaths of despair.’

(…)

‘Sohrab Ahmari distinguishes himself from the other post-liberals by clearly linking social ills to capitalist domination. Though he dedicates Tyranny, Inc. to “Adrian, Chad, Gladden, and Patrick” he is not, unlike those four, a contributor to the “Postliberal Order” newsletter. He also is not, unlike those four, an academic. Trained as a lawyer, he is a journalist and writer. In 2019 while op-ed editor at the New York Post, he wrote a widely discussed essay in the conservative Christian magazine First Things. In “Against David French-ism,” Ahmari attacks the “depoliticized politics” among the flaccid conservative establishment, advocating instead the “moral duty” to “recognize that enmity is real” and to play the culture war for keeps. He parlayed that notoriety into co-founding Compact magazine, which publishes the kind of takes from left and right that complain of being blinked by “liberal orthodoxy,” and seeks to nurture a pro-worker, anti-progressive populism.
In Tyranny, Inc., Ahmari observes, with journalistic detail, the many ways in which the ostensibly “free market” so lionized by his compatriots on the right is in fact suffused with coercion. He chronicles how through just-in-time scheduling practices, nondisclosure agreements, arbitration clauses, the devastation of firms and jobs by vulture capital, the privatization of essential services and the erosion of local media, and the cynical manipulation of bankruptcy law, “neoliberal elites” and the corporations they own grind the working class into submission and despair. For anyone with a humane interest in avoiding suffering and enabling flourishing, this situation is intolerable, a point masked only by ideology or cruelty. In his concrete, detailed account of how the system is rigged against many working people, Ahmari’s book provides welcome relief from the dizzying and dubious intellectual histories offered by Deneen.’

(…)

‘Despite these differences with other post-liberals—and whatever the rhetoric about a left-right synthesis—there is no question that Ahmari is still a man of the right. Part of the explanation, no doubt, has to do with his culturally conservative views, informed by his Catholicism (he converted in 2016). He is openly hostile to what he called, after a visit to the Labor Notes conference in 2022, “lifestyle leftism” with its “obsession with boutique sexual causes,” its concern for immigrants and refugees, and its “corrupt bargain with the subsidy-hungry green wing of capital.” But it isn’t so much his social views that divide Ahmari from the labor leftists whose views he expresses broad sympathy for. (Indeed, similar criticisms of “lifestyle liberalism” and “green capital” can be found on the “anti-woke” left—as Ahmari is keen to point out. And in Tyranny, Inc. he avoids wading into social issues at all.) Rather, it is his understanding of politics as “the shared quest for the common good of the whole” that he shares with other post-liberals like Deneen.’

(…)

‘For the post-liberals, this is a monkey’s paw: individual freedom inevitably leads to social malaise. And they are correct that liberal freedom, or negative liberty, is an inadequate basis for a flourishing society. Where they go astray is in concluding that the sole alternative to undisciplined liberal freedom is subordination to an external authority.
In his 2021 paean to tradition, The Unbroken Thread, Ahmari recounts the story of Maximilian Kolbe, a Catholic priest from Poland who sacrificed himself to save the life of another prisoner in Auschwitz. Ahmari writes admiringly of Kolbe, “his apparent surrender becomes his triumph. And nailed to the Cross, he told his captors, in effect: I’m freer than you.”1 Kolbe’s story is moving and makes for useful catechism. To be free is not to be limitless. Rather, to be free requires being guided by reason. For Kolbe, reason’s light emanated from Catholic teaching. But this insight is not the exclusive province of a classically oriented Catholicism. It is a key insight of Enlightenment republicanism.’

(…)

‘Freedom, for republicans like Kant, consists in having no masters. In politics, having no masters is a condition that can only be brought about by the once-subordinated class itself. If the masters remove their own crowns willingly, they have the power to put them back on; republican freedom is something that by definition cannot be given, only taken. The post-liberals overlook this because they conflate “having no master” with “having no limits.” But these are not the same thing. Recognizing the value of having no masters reminds us that the goal of building countervailing power among the poor and working class is not to achieve balance and to preserve the common good “of the whole,” which takes for granted that “the whole” must include an elite that dominates an underclass of the poor. The point is to overcome a world with masters.’

Read the article here.

Post-liberalism appears to be what in Europe is called populism, socially conservative, economically somehow progressive, al least for the right people, not for foreigners and other undesierable entities.

I’m not sure that the desire of the many is not the desire to serve a master.

That desire is slightly overlooked in this article, and this desire is the core problem of democracy, what if a considerable minority wants nothing but to be seduced by a master who appears to be a con man by other parts of the electorate.

Who decided who is the con man?