Rescuing Postliberalism from the Postliberals

Eight years ago, a wave of conservative academics declared a new ideology, “post-liberalism,” which would both explain and justify international right-wing populism. While their beliefs were hardly uniform, their promises were. They declared that they could explain all of modern politics as the rejection of the “old” Republican Party. In their view, Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016 represented the repudiation of the “neoliberal paradigm” of the Ronald Reagan years, in favor of a new ideology which sought virtue rather than freedom.

This project has failed. Post-liberals seem entirely disinterested in the actual values of Trump voters or the political moment, and they have thus created a marginal theory disconnected from the conservative movement. This movement has centered a broad, indescript rejection of liberalism rather than anything particularly post-liberal, producing a wave of “illiberal post-liberals.” But post-liberalism may still be salvageable, albeit in a quite different form from how the first wave of post-liberals discussed it. The salvageable form of post-liberalism will, in fact, explain the political alliances, ideology, and policies which underpin the current Republican Party. It will show how post-liberalism can build on liberal theory while rejecting that liberal ends are the only proper ends of politics, implying a view that is post-liberal, not illiberal.

The central view of the post-liberal movement is that Trump’s success represents the rejection of many conservatives’ focus on free markets and, more broadly, freedom as an end. Liberalism, according to post-liberals, is the belief that the main value of government is to ensure freedom rather than to try to enforce particular moral values. This view has underpinned both historic American conservatism and progressivism, from Ronald Reagan’s support for markets to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s support for labor regulations.1 Post-liberalism’s founding political theorist, Patrick Deneen, argues that the loss of a monoculture has led America away from liberalism to a “communitarian moment” in which voters desire greater powers for communities and fewer freedoms for individuals. This implies the need for a broad “statist” movement which can defend both greater government spending and socially conservative policy. Trump’s election, says Deneen, was an expression of this desire.