On post-liberalism - Jan-Werner Müller in LRB:

“In the US, three strands of post-liberal thought have emerged over the last decade. Most prominent are the self-declared ‘populists’, such as Sohrab Ahmari and the GOPsenator Josh Hawley, who seek to replace the Reaganite fusion of pro-market ideology and traditional morals with a ‘working-class conservatism’. Then there are the ‘National Conservatives’, who are opposed to globalisation in general and the institutions of ‘global governance’ in particular, but are much more likely than populists to praise ‘free enterprise’. Finally, there’s a smattering of religiously inspired theorists – mostly hard-right Catholics – who are less interested in big societies than in big states promoting, or even enforcing, traditional morality.
For these American post-liberals, liberalism is guilty of more than the destruction of Gemeinschaft. It is, they say, profoundly hypocritical: liberals talk about tolerance and individuality, but are dangerously intolerant and eager to enforce conformity. They deploy state power to eradicate ways of life devoted to anything other than the pursuit of individual autonomy: a much cited example is the requirement, introduced by the Obama administration, that employers provide workers with access to contraceptives through their insurance plans (this was restricted after a legal challenge by the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic group). According to post-liberals in the US, liberalism only pretends to be neutral in conflicts between what John Rawls called ‘conceptions of the good’; in reality, its insistence on a single human good amounts to totalitarianism.”

(…)

“What is Trumpism? After all these years, we’re still asking the question. For some, Trump’s second term has revealed the fascism that was there all along; others diagnose a peculiar combination of 1970s New York swamp politics and Southern white supremacy. One thing is beyond dispute: recent months have seen an extraordinary concentration of executive power and an unprecedented weakening, perhaps the outright destruction, of what US civics textbooks once touted as a robust separation of powers. A simple explanation would be that the GOP and Trump’s lackeys on the Supreme Court are letting him do it. A more interesting account – in fact a justification – is provided by thinkers often grouped together as ‘post-liberals’.
Like other terms featuring what has sometimes been called a ‘magical prefix’, ‘post-liberal’ has both a complicated history and many conflicting meanings. It was first used in the 1970s by American theologians who sought a post-liberal alternative to forms of Protestantism that had made too many compromises with the modern world. More than a decade later John Gray, disillusioned with Thatcherism, proposed post-liberalism as a new path; more important, the English Anglican (leaning heavily Anglo-Catholic) John Milbank radicalised the theological project, breaking with liberal thought as well as the social sciences, and influencing what came to be known as Blue Labour and Red Toryism. Representatives of both tendencies turned against laissez-faire capitalism; both claimed that excessive individualism and an increasingly overbearing state were not in opposition, but constantly reinforcing each other. One proposed remedy, the Big Society, amounted at most to Thatcherism with a human face: the Cameron government talked of empowering communities and local associations, but the reality was austerity and deregulation.
In the US, three strands of post-liberal thought have emerged over the last decade. Most prominent are the self-declared ‘populists’, such as Sohrab Ahmari and the GOPsenator Josh Hawley, who seek to replace the Reaganite fusion of pro-market ideology and traditional morals with a ‘working-class conservatism’. Then there are the ‘National Conservatives’, who are opposed to globalisation in general and the institutions of ‘global governance’ in particular, but are much more likely than populists to praise ‘free enterprise’. Finally, there’s a smattering of religiously inspired theorists – mostly hard-right Catholics – who are less interested in big societies than in big states promoting, or even enforcing, traditional morality.
For these American post-liberals, liberalism is guilty of more than the destruction of Gemeinschaft. It is, they say, profoundly hypocritical: liberals talk about tolerance and individuality, but are dangerously intolerant and eager to enforce conformity. They deploy state power to eradicate ways of life devoted to anything other than the pursuit of individual autonomy: a much cited example is the requirement, introduced by the Obama administration, that employers provide workers with access to contraceptives through their insurance plans (this was restricted after a legal challenge by the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic group). According to post-liberals in the US, liberalism only pretends to be neutral in conflicts between what John Rawls called ‘conceptions of the good’; in reality, its insistence on a single human good amounts to totalitarianism.
What might a post-liberal politics look like? Those lacking a general political theory tend to gesture towards a specific place: Hungary. Viktor Orbán’s self-declared ‘illiberal democracy’ has become a Disneyland for the international far right. Its attractions include natalist policies, an unashamed ‘Hungary First’ attitude, the promotion of Christianity in public culture and an assault on academia intended to end a supposed left-liberal hegemony. In 2024, J.D. Vance declared that ‘the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary. I think his way has to be the model for us.’ (It has indeed proved to be the model for the second Trump administration, except that Orbán is too intelligent to gut scientific research.)
But Hungary is a small, highly centralised Central European country with relatively little ethnic diversity and an industrial base reliant on German car manufacturers. Does it really provide a plausible template? Symptomatic of post-liberals’ uncertainty about which direction to take was a book called Regime Change by Patrick Deneen, one of Orbán’s great fans and fellow-travellers, which was published in 2023. Deneen, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, had risen to prominence five years earlier after the appearance of his short book, Why Liberalism Failed. After the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump, liberals were not only embarking on Trump safaris in Appalachia and repenting of their supposed failure to pay attention to the ‘left behind’, but were seeking too to signal an openness to non-liberal ideas, with even Obama praising Deneen’s ‘cogent insights’. At that point, however, Deneen’s prescription was curiously defeatist: a retreat into illiberal communities in small-town America, in the hope that the increasingly totalitarian liberal state might somehow leave you alone.
By the time Regime Change was published, Deneen’s recommendations had changed. Rather than telling conservatives to flee to the countryside, he called for a great replacement – of one elite by another. Anti-liberals should tear off the ‘Botox-smoothed meritocratic mask’ worn by liberals and form their own ‘better aristocracy’. Once this elite had come to power through the application of ‘muscular populism’, it would take good care of what Deneen called the ‘commoners’. The masses, he said, wanted ‘continuity’ and ‘stability’; therefore the new regime should pursue ‘common good conservatism’. The phrase ‘common good’ appeared 68 times in Regime Change. This pointed to the growing influence of Adrian Vermeule, a thinker who seemed able to offer a proper political as well as legal theory of post-liberalism. Born into the New England intellectual aristocracy (Emily Dickinson is a distant relative), Vermeule went to Harvard Law School and then clerked for the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. As an academic at Chicago and then Harvard, he became a wunderkind in the field of administrative law, writing a number of important and exceedingly dry justifications for a powerful state bureaucracy.
Vermeule’s justification of robust state action came in handy during the ‘global war on terror’. With another legal scholar, Eric Posner, he advocated an unconstrained executive in the face of threats to national security. In The Executive Unbound (2010), they rejected James Madison’s scheme of separating powers, siding instead with Alexander Hamilton, who thought that ‘energy’ in the executive was indispensable for ‘good government’. ‘Unbound’ wasn’t supposed to mean ‘unlimited’: Posner and Vermeule argued that ‘public opinion’ would act as the ultimate constraint on a wayward president. That seemed a tad naive, given the obvious pathologies of the US media system and the rise of polarisation entrepreneurs. Less naive, unfortunately, was their statement that ‘if the president can credibly claim to the public that [a] violation was necessary, then the public will be unlikely to care too much about the legal niceties’ – as succinct a description as any of Americans’ responses to torture under George W. Bush.”

(…)

“Has this vision of an unconstrained but benign ruler now materialised? No one can doubt that we are living in an age ‘after the Madisonian republic’, as the subtitle of Posner and Vermeule’s book put it: the president, not Congress, now decides how money is spent and which tariffs can be imposed on Switzerland simply because its president wasn’t nice enough to Trump on the phone. All this is plainly illegal, but the Supreme Court, with its increasingly shameless MAGA majority, doesn’t mind. And despite the hope that Posner and Vermeule invested in public opinion, Trump seems unmoved by his declining popularity.”

(…)

“He recently wrote, sounding not only integralist but imperialist, that ‘as America becomes ever more Catholic (not necessarily as a statistical matter, but in terms of its governing principles and public culture), all that is true and good in American Protestant culture will be preserved, refined and perfected, while the dross that Leo XIII called “Americanism” will be discarded.’ What this has translated to in practice is Vermeule’s justification of Trump’s decision to send the National Guard into Washington DC, while conceding that crime there (‘in the strict legal sense’) has actually been declining.”

(…)

“Adrian Pabst, a political philosopher at the University of Kent, has said that National Conservatism has a ‘fundamental identity crisis. One day it wants to be anti-liberal, the next day it is ultra-liberal.’ Catholics in particular can hardly deny the moral equality of all humans; as Phillip Blond, the author of Red Tory, wrote in 2023, handing over universality to liberals ‘seems to be at best ill thought through, and at worst acquiescent to evil’.
All post-liberals have at one point or another declared themselves anti-libertarian. Why is it, then, that once in power supposedly post-liberal politicians re-enact Thatcherism and Reaganism, often going much further than those leaders did? (Reagan also vilified supposedly lefty universities, but wouldn’t have dismantled scientific research.)”

(…)

“What passes for post-liberalism today is either pernicious or impotent.”

Read the article here.

Yes, what’s Trumpism, besides Trump?

And Reagan wouldn’t have dismantled scientific research.

We already concluded that Bush Jr. and Cheney were in hindsight something close to saints. Yes, they tortured a bit, but who didn’t torture? And even Obama and Biden didn’t dismantle Gitmo. They couldn’t care less, needless to say.

Neo-liberalism is pernicious or important. That leaves us with liberalism, since conservatism has become post-liberalism in one way or another.

The other option is: L’art pour l’art.