A primer on postliberalism, written for the French reader who’s catching up on the last decade of avant-garde American thinking

Like all political thought, postliberalism emerged in response to events. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, American conservatives widely accepted Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, which asserted that liberalism was the only viable universal ideology. American conservatism became a liberal movement. It was defined by an unreflective belief in free trade, an obsession with making the country more multicultural through mass immigration, and an unwavering faith in the value of military interventions designed to spread liberalism around the world. These commitments, which became consensus after the Reagan years, persisted throughout the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Then Donald Trump descended the escalator. His shock victory in 2016 showed that the fin de siècle consensus had lost its grip. Donald Trump forced American conservatives to re-examine their whole relationship with liberalism. Patrick Deneen, a professor of political philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, was the first thinker to take up this challenge.

In Why Liberalism Failed (2018), Deneen criticized a key liberal commitment that is also rooted in the thinking of the American Founding Fathers: a suspicion of a substantive conception of the common good. This suspicion, Deneen argued, is destructive of genuine social life and real human flourishing. Deneen’s book was spectacularly successful. Widely debated across the political spectrum, sometimes bitterly so, Deneen’s book helped to turn postliberalism into major intellectual current.

But the question that has vexed postliberalism is what will replace liberalism. In Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen’s tentative conclusion seemed ambiguous, perhaps even fitting within a liberal framework: he aspired to something “worthy of the name liberal.” As the legal scholar Adrian Vermeule wrote in his review of Deneen’s book, Why Liberalism Failed was “half a masterpiece.” The book describes the problem with American liberalism, but offered few solutions. Since 2016, therefore, conservative intellectuals sympathetic to Deneen’s argument and to postliberalism have developed distinct narratives about the postliberal project and what its goals are. Donald Trump’s return to the White House as a “world-historical event” and postliberal president—Fukuyama himself described it as such—shows how the winds of history seem to be blowing in favor of postliberalism. Postliberalism gains ground not only through elections, but also through friendships and through formal and informal intellectual networks, through the creation of new think tanks and journals, and through the force of several powerful personalities. Postliberalism is ascending closer and closer to real political power. However, postliberals are divided. In the years to come, different strands of postliberalism will be vying for political and intellectual influence. Here’s an overview of the main camps.

Integralism

Deneen had long been sympathetic to the Catholic critique of liberalism, so it’s not surprising that after the publication of Why Liberalism Failed, the first people to take up the postliberal cause were anti-liberal Catholics. “Integralism,” once a pejorative term, was adopted as a possible and desirable political project. Among its most eloquent advocates were the political philosopher Gladden Pappin, the theologian Edmund Waldstein, and Adrian Vermeule himself. Integralism had, at least on the surface, a clear postliberal objective. As defined in its most important publication, The Josias, integralism “holds that political rule must order man to his ultimate end… and since man’s temporal end is subordinate to his eternal end, temporal power must be subordinate to spiritual power.” But this version of postliberalism, which calls for a confessional and Catholic state, is founded directly on Catholic theology. It has only limited appeal: it should never be forgotten that, while a plurality of American conservative intellectuals are Catholic, the movement’s base is dominated by Protestants. Moreover, the proponents of integralism made it clear that they did not think this theological-political vision had any real chance of being applied in the immediate future. Gladden Pappin and Adrien Vermeule never repudiated integralism, but they turned their attention to law and the administrative state, articulating what we might call a juridical postliberalism. Like the other postliberal camps, juridical postliberalism takes up Catholic ideas about the common good and natural law, but makes them accessible to people of good will more broadly. Once again, events shaped the development of postliberalism.

Juridical Postliberalism

During his first term in office, Donald Trump reshaped the Supreme Court of the United States in the way American conservatives had long desired. He appointed judges who subscribe to “originalism,” a textual interpretation of the law based on its original public meaning. However, in those years the Supreme Court did not appear to have won any major victories for conservatives. In Bostock v. Clayton County in June 2020, the Court held that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protected employees from discrimination on the basis of gender identity, even though this category was not mentioned in the Act. The Court’s majority opinion was written by an originalist torchbearer, Neil Gorsuch. This decision lit the fire of juridical postliberalism. According to Vermeule, originalism was not a conservative jurisprudence, but a liberal methodology that could be used to build up transgender rights. The Bostock decision provided an opportunity to advance Vermeule’s project of ‘Common Good Constitutionalism’ as a replacement for originalism. It was a project largely rooted in natural law and early European jurisprudence, but one that moved away from the tradition of twentieth-century American conservatism by embracing rather than rejecting the administrative state. Moreover, enthusiasm for judicial review distinguished common good constitutionalism from much of the American conservative movement, which had long campaigned against the rise of judicial activism. Vermeule was a controversial figure, but his arguments fascinated many conservatives. They were prepared to re-examine their skepticism toward the judiciary and the administrative state: Deneen, for example, abandoned his earlier skepticism. Juridical postliberalism seemed ready to supplant originalism, pushing it aside in the same way that Trump had knocked aside the old consensus on free trade.

However, after Trump’s departure from office in 2021, the originalist Supreme Court began to redeem itself. It proved to be a major check on the Biden administration’s many abuses of power. Then in 2022, the Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which had created, without any textual basis, a constitutional right to abortion. For decades, overturning this decision had been a key objective of conservatism and originalism. Adrian Vermeule lost the initiative. By the time he published the print version of Common Good Constitutionalism, he had failed to significantly shift the discourse to dislodge originalism. Deneen’s second book, Regime Change, published in 2023, also tried to build on Adrian Vermeule and popularise a new “common good conservatism.” But it failed to live up to expectations; if Deneen had been brutally attacked by liberals and conventional conservatives over Why Liberalism Failed, the sequel was severely attacked by the new postliberal right to which Deneen helped gave birth. As one of its ascendent figures, Charles Haywood, wrote:

I looked forward to this book, which should have been the culmination of Deneen’s bold decade-long project to discredit and replace the so-called Enlightenment, and should have cemented his position as one of the most important leaders of the postliberal American Right…but here Deneen’s project dies with a whimper.

Rather than forge a new ethic, Haywood argues that Deneen’s book regurgitated old conservative clichés about the mixed constitution, repeated multicultural platitudes about diversity, and restricted its proposals to a few modest institutional reforms. It was a missed opportunity.

Back to the Founding Fathers?

Another camp of postliberalism was just as critical of liberalism as Deneen, but argued that liberalism was not inherent to the American Founding. This camp claimed that the Founding provided a substantial common good: exactly the kind of detailed as well as test-driven political project that postliberalism should embrace.

We might call this project “postliberal paleo-conservative constitutionalism.” The term “paleo-conservatism” refers to an older current of American conservatism, which was originally much more traditionalist and which defended a moral and Christian orientation for American society. This current had often criticized the doctrine of the Founding Fathers for the reasons Deneen discusses in Why Liberalism Failed: the doctrine of natural rights liberalism adopted by the founders of the United States is too thin a basis for establishing a substantive common good, leading to a society characterized by individualism and autonomy. But after 2016, some thinkers associated with the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think tank, began to argue that the Founding Fathers’ conception of natural rights was deeper than had been appreciated. It could achieve paleo-conservative and traditionalist goals: the American Founding offered a way to overcome liberalism. It was also open to Christianity. According to the Founders, the government should cultivate public support for certain virtues ranging from temperance to manly endeavour and—as the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) put it—”Christian forbearance, love and charity.” It is in this context that we can speak of a Christian nationalism, a position explored by conservative Protestants at the new Christian journal American Reformer. Although the Founding Fathers did not seek to establish a national confessional state, they did presuppose a substantial morality and religion: a Christian people, a Christian nation. Religious and political leaders should strive to overcome liberalism and realize this vision.

Save for the integralists—and who sometimes speak of the heresy of “Americanism” raised by Pope Leo XIII—the aforementioned postliberal camps tend not to see the American context as wholly corrupt. Although Deneen’s enemies attacked his views as anti-American, he admires the political and economic criticisms of the American populists of the early twentieth century. Vermeule also looks to American history: in Common Good Constitutionalism, he argued that before the 1960s, there was an American jurisprudence rooted in natural law. With the notable exception of the integralists, these different postliberal camps believe that American history can still provide a viable model and reference for moving beyond liberalism. Other camps of post-liberalism believe that this is impossible.

Entering the Postliberal Era

In the late 1990s, the political theorist Paul Gottfried described a different kind of postliberalism. Rather than seeing postliberalism as an aspiration to build a new conservative political order, Gottfried argued that we had already entered the postliberal era. It’s just not the one that Deneen or other conservative critics of liberalism might have wanted. Taking his cue from the German jurist Carl Schmitt and the American writers James Burnham and Samuel Francis, Paul Gottfried argued that the managerial state has replaced the liberal state.

In the new postliberal era, it is therapeutic management, not representative institutions, that governs us. Gottfried’s writings are now being read more carefully. Along with Burnham, Francis and Schmitt, Gottfried’s thesis seems to better describe the world in which we actually live: the world of “actually existing postliberalism.”

If this is true, the question is not how to diagnose the errors of the founding of the United States or to debate whether that thinking was always liberal and flawed. That would be like debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The real question is how to escape the increasingly tyrannical managerial order. We need a political program: a new American revolution.

Like much postliberal thought, this program develops from liberal and Catholic premises. The argument for a right to disobedience is based on natural law. Lex mala, lex nulla: a government that applies laws that violate natural law and threaten natural rights is upholding illegitimate laws. If the government persists, it loses its legitimacy.

So far, that’s Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and John Locke. But the thinkers who defend this view go beyond Locke and liberalism when they argue that if we were to exercise this right in the contemporary context (taking prudential considerations into account), we would almost certainly have no hope of restoring the republic. The most realistic outcome of a new American revolution is not Cato or Cicero, but Caesar. Drawing on classical, modern and French sources, these thinkers debate whether it is right for Caesar to cross the Rubicon, then or now. This postliberal current is Caesarist postliberalism.

Caesarist Postliberalism

There are normative arguments for when it is just to rebel, but Caesarist postliberalism is largely motivated by assertions of political necessity. Charles Haywood, one of the proponents of this camp, regards the United States as a bloated and vacillating empire. It is a tyranny, yes, but it is likely on the verge of economic and political collapse.

The necessity of collapse means that we need to prepare for the future by forming new social and political institutions. This means preparing for the possibility of civil war. Due to the worsening vice of American imperial tyranny, it is becoming more dangerous not to rebel than to rebel. There are historical parallels: General Francisco Franco drew a similar conclusion after July 13^th, 1936, when the Spanish security services collaborated with the Left to assassinate the conservative parliamentary leader José Calvo Sotelo. America could be facing similar a moment. One wonders what could have happened after July 13^th, 2024, when an assassin’s bullet only missed Trump’s brain by inches.

Progressive Postliberalism

Caesarist postliberalism may seem extreme, but it capture an insight that sometimes eludes other postliberal camps. Liberalism depended on a particular social and technological order that is now disappearing. It depended on the written press, on the literate classes who read these media to form public opinion, and on a bourgeois social class that believed in the freedoms of speech, association, and property. That was the world of the 19th century, but it is not our world. Socio-economic and technological developments have transformed and will continue to transform our political and economic order in a way that moves away (for good or ill) from the old liberal society. There is therefore a certain convergence between the camp of Caesarist postliberalism and the progressive postliberal camp of Silicon Valley, exemplified by figures such as Elon Musk. Progressive postliberalism is progressive in the sense that it sees technological progress as a solution to most, if not all, of our political and social problems. Yet these postliberals argue that we do not live in an age that is conducive to technological progress. We are afraid of it, often because we think that progress will lead to some kind of ecological apocalypse. We can think of the fear of the development of nuclear power that is so prevalent in Germany and elsewhere. Progress is also hampered by sclerotic liberal democratic states (products of the last century), which are corrupted by incompetent bureaucracies. That’s why this camp is postliberal: it aims to move beyond liberalism in order to realize the full potential of the digital age. These postliberals believe that we need to renovate the entire state apparatus in order to accelerate the technological revolution. This requires, among other things, a more effective and efficient government than is possible under the old liberal democratic system. If you want to see signs of this version of postliberalism in the next Trump administration, just look at the Department of Government Efficiency, jointly headed by Elon Musk and another biotech entrepreneur and former presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy.

The Problems of Political Economy

The Caesarist and Silicon Valley strands of postliberalism have the whiff of revolution about them. However, there are more modest and less radical ways of envisaging socio-economic transformation. Shortly after 2016, journalist and Catholic convert Sohrab Ahmari rose to fame by challenging conventional American conservatism. He joined the integralists, but gradually changed course to focus on issues of political economy. Thanks to Trump, many leading conservatives have redefined what conservative political economy should look like. This version of postliberalism is more like “post-neoliberalism.” It’s an attempt to overcome the neoliberal political and economic consensus that gained momentum during the 1970s and prioritized individual freedom and laissez-faire capitalism, deregulation and privatization. Post-neoliberal advocates can be found at American Compass, a new think-tank launched by former Mitt Romney adviser Oren Cass; American Affairs, a public policy journal; and Compact: A Radical American Journal, which Ahmari founded with journalist Matthew Schmitz in 2022. Although these magazines cover a wide range of opinions, their proposals are a far cry from the fin de siècle American conservatism and are often much closer to those that would feature in the political programs of postwar Social Democrats or Christian Democrats. For example, conservatives in these circles focus on how government programs can make life easier for families trying to raise children, proposing natalist policies similar to those pursued in West Germany and in the France of the Fourth Republic until the presidency of François Hollande, who trashed the old structure.

The Case of J.D. Vance

This post-neoliberal framework helps us understand the most prominent Catholic politician in the world today, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance. Since his conversion to Catholicism and his repudiation of conventional American conservatism, Vance has attracted attention—and criticism—for advocating a Catholic-influenced postliberalism (he endorsed Deneen’s second book). Vance readily acknowledges that Catholic social teaching influences his thinking and his politics. His approach is to put political economy at the service of basically Catholic principles and morals. This, he believes, is what American conservatism has lacked. Commenting on his humble upbringing in Ohio, Vance states:

“I saw a lot of marriages fall apart… It wasn’t always because of financial reasons, but that was a big part of it. So if you believe in the sanctity of marriage, one of the things you want is families that are more stable financially.”

While a nationwide abortion ban seems further away than ever in the United States, there seems to be some bipartisan consensus around adopting national policies that will help families achieve financial stability, which could protect marriages and children. In the 2024 election, the Harris and Trump campaigns competed to promise a larger child tax credit. While it may be too early to speak of a “new center” or “new realignment,” as some postliberals are now doing, postliberal initiatives to overcome the excesses of fin-de-siècle liberalism have changed American politics.