#postliberalism

Jason Wilson at The Guardian:

In a December 2023 speech, JD Vance defended a notorious white nationalist convicted over 2016 election disinformation, canvassed the possibility of breaking up tech companies, attacked diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts and talked about a social media “censorship regime” that “came from the deep state on some level”.

The senator’s speech was given at the launch of a “counterrevolutionary” book – praised by the now Republican vice-presidential candidate as “great” – which was edited and mostly written by employees of the far-right Claremont Institute. In the book, Up from Conservatism, the authors advocate for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act, for politicians to conduct “deep investigations into what the gay lifestyle actually does to people”, that college and childcare be defunded and that rightwing governments “promote male-dominated industries” in order to discourage female participation in the workplace. Vance’s endorsement of the book may raise further questions about his extremism, and that of his networks. The Guardian emailed Vance’s Senate staff and the Trump and Vance campaign with detailed questions about his appearance at the launch, but received no response.

‘Congratulations on such a great book’

Vance’s speech was given in the Capitol visitor center in Washington DC last 11 December, according to a version of C-Span’s subsequent broadcast of the event that is preserved at the Internet Archive. The occasion was the launch of Up from Conservatism, an essay collection edited by Arthur Milikh, the executive director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. In his introductory remarks on the day, Milikh said the book “maps out the right’s errors over the last generation … on immigration, on universities, on the administrative state”.

The book, however, appears more directed towards supplanting an old right – seen as too accommodating – with a “new right” focused on destroying its perceived enemies on the left.

In the book’s introduction, Milikh writes: “The New Right recognizes the Left as an enemy, not merely an opposing movement, because the Left today promotes a tyrannical conception of justice that is irreconcilable with the American idea of justice … the New Right is a counterrevolutionary and restorative force.” Also in that piece, Milikh offers a vision of the new right’s triumph, which has an authoritarian ring: “We like to say that one must learn to govern, but a truer expression is that one must learn to rule.” In his speech, Vance first offered “congratulations on such a great book, and thanks for getting such a good crew together”, and then warmed to themes similar to Milikh’s. “Republicans, conservatives, we’re still terrified of wielding power, of actually doing the job that the people sent us here to do,” Vance said, later adding: “Isn’t it just common sense that when we’re given power, we should actually do something with it?”

Brad Onishi, author of Preparing for War, a critical account of Christian nationalism and the host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast, said: “Vance, many Claremont people, including some folks in this volume, and especially the ‘post-liberal’ conservative Catholics that he hangs out with, have advocated for a form of big government that will wield its power in order to set the country right.” He added: “And you may think, well, OK, that doesn’t sound so bad. But here the common good is rooting out queer people, making sure non-Christians don’t immigrate to the country and outlawing things like pornography that are currently a matter of personal choice. “You end up with this conservatism that promotes an invasive government conservatism rather than a small government.”

[...]

‘Free our minds … from the fear of being called racists’

In the book, commended by Vance, a series of authors take reactionary – or “counterrevolutionary” – positions on a number of social and economic issues. In one chapter, John Fonte writes of disrupting narratives of civil rights progress: “The great meaning of America, we are told, comes from liberating so-called oppressed groups and taming the power of privileged groups. Thus, our history is one of liberation: first of Blacks, then of women, then of gays, and now of the transgendered.” Fonte retorts: “Not only is this narrative false; it will take us further down the path of national self-destruction … On the questions of slavery, American Indians, and racial discrimination, the progressive narrative is not a historically accurate project designed to address past wrongs, but a weaponized movement to deconstruct and replace American civilization.”

Like other authors in the collection, Fonte offers policy recommendations. He proposes heavy-handed federal intervention into education: “[T]he US Congress should prohibit any federal funds in education to support projects … that promote DEI (“diversity, equity and inclusion”) and divisive concepts such as the idea that America is ‘systemically racist.’” In his chapter, David Azerrad tells readers: “We need to free our minds once and for all from the fear of being called racists.” The assistant professor and research fellow at rightwing Hillsdale College, and former Heritage Foundation director and Claremont Institute fellow, also claims that conservatives have been too conciliatory on race: “For too many conservatives, the goal is to outdo progressives in displays of compassion for blacks … yet blacks continue to vote monolithically for the Democratic Party and progressives have only ramped up their hysterical accusations of racism.”

Azerrad continues with white nationalist talking points on race, crime and IQ, writing: “It is not racist to notice that blacks commit the majority of violent crimes in America, no more than it is to incarcerate convicted black criminals … There is no reason to expect equal outcomes between the races … In some elite and highly technical sectors in which there are almost no qualified blacks, color-blindness will mean no blacks.” Elsewhere, Azerrad writes: “[C]onservatives will need to root out from their souls the pathological pity for blacks, masquerading as compassion, that is the norm in contemporary America … This is most obvious in the widespread embrace of affirmative action (the lowering of standards to advance blacks) and the general reluctance to speak certain blunt but necessary truths about the pathologies plaguing black America – in particular, violent crime, fatherlessness, low academic achievement, nihilistic alienation, and the cult of victimhood.”

[...]

‘Do not subsidize childcare’

Helen Andrews, meanwhile, offers “three things we could do right now that would put a big dent in the multiplying lies that have come from feminists for the last forty years about women and careers”. Her first proposal is to “stop subsidizing college so much”, since, according to Andrews, in the 22-29 age group, “there are four women with college degrees … for every three men. That is going to lead to a lot of women with college degrees who do not end up getting married.” “Second,” Andrews continues, “the Right can do more to promote male-dominated industries. Reviving American manufacturing and cracking down on China’s unfair trade practices isn’t just an economic and national security issue; it’s a gender issue.” Her third proposal is “do not subsidize childcare” – since the fact that “many working moms are struggling” with childcare costs “might actually be good information the economy is trying to tell you”. Andrews is the print editor of the paleoconservative magazine the American Conservative and has previously written sympathetically about white supremacist minority regimes in Rhodesia – renamed Zimbabwe after white rule ended – and South Africa.

Scott Yenor claims in his chapter that before the 1960s, America lived under a “Straight Constitution, which honored enduring, monogamous, man-woman, and hence procreative marriage. It also stigmatized alternatives”. Yenor is a political science professor at Boise State University and a fellow at the Claremont Institute. He then claims: “We currently live under the Queer Constitution”, which “honors all manner of sex”, and under which “laws restricting contraception, sodomy, and fornication are, by its lights, unconstitutional”. Yenor claims: “These changes in law are but the first part of an effort to normalize and then celebrate premarital sex, recreational sex, men who have sex with men, childhood immodesty, masturbation, lesbianism, and all conceptions of transgenderism.”

Yenor says the state should intervene in citizens’ sex lives: “In the states, new obscenity laws for a more obscene world should be adopted. Pornography companies and websites should be investigated for their myriad public ills like sex trafficking, addictions, and ruined lives. The justice of anti-discrimination must be revisited.” In a separate essay co-written with Milikh, the editor, Yenor advocates in effect destroying the current education system and starting again. The essay includes a recommendation for school curriculums: “Students could start building obstacle courses at an early age, learning how to construct a wall and how to adapt the wall for climbing … Students could learn to build and shoot guns as part of a normal course of action in schools and learn how to grow crops and prepare them for meals.”

In that sense, post-liberalism suggests that, while liberal ideas about individual freedom are important, they need to be supplemented by a deeper, more communal understanding of what binds society together."

They are neither Left, Right, or Center, but rather describe philosophies standing in contrast to stark individualism and acknowledge the communal nature of society and individuals.

Zack Beauchamp at Vox:

It’s been a rough week in the world of the online intellectual right, which is currently in the midst of two separate yet related blowups — both of which illustrate how the pressures of power are cracking the elite coalition that aligned behind President Donald Trump’s return to power. The first fight is really a struggle over who should determine the philosophical identity of MAGA, pitting a group of anti-woke writers against a wide group of illiberal or post-liberal figures. The lead figure in the anti-woke camp, the prominent pundit James Lindsay, has been attacking his enemies as the “woke right” for months. In his mind, this group’s emphasis on the importance of religion, national identity, and ethnicity is the mirror image of the left’s identity politics — and thus an existential threat both to American freedom and the MAGA movement’s success. In response, his targets on the right — which range from national conservatives to white nationalists — have started firing back aggressively, arguing that Lindsay is not only wrong but maliciously attempting to fracture the MAGA coalition. This might seem like a niche online fight, but given that niche online discourse has been a major influence on the second Trump administration’s thinking, it might end up mattering quite a bit. The same could be said about the second fight, which revolves around Curtis Yarvin — the neo-monarchist blogger who has influenced both Vice President JD Vance and DOGE. A recent post by rationalist author Scott Alexander accused Yarvin of “selling out” — aligning himself with Trump even though he had long denounced the kind of “authoritarian populism” that Trump embodies. Yarvin defended himself with some fairly bitter attacks on Alexander, drawing in defenders and critics from the broader right-wing universe in the process.

Each of these fights is telling in their own right. The “woke right” contretemps shows just how deep the divisions go inside the Trump world — between anti-woke liberals, on the one hand, and various different forms of “postliberals” on the other. The Yarvin argument is a revealing portrait of how easy it is to get someone to compromise their own beliefs in the face of polarization and proximity to power. But put together, they show us just how hard it is to go from an insurgent force to a governing one.

The “woke right” redux

The “woke right” debate first came on my radar back in December, when the anti-woke pundit James Lindsay tricked a Christian nationalist website, American Reformer, into publishing excerpts of The Communist Manifesto edited to sound like a critique of modern American liberalism. It might seem to make little sense to describe a 19th-century text on resistance to capitalism as an example of 21st-century identity politics. But Lindsay, who sees himself as a right-wing liberal, is using an idiosyncratic understanding of “wokeness” that equates it with collectivism — the idea that the politics should be understood through the lens of interests of groups, be it the proletariat or Black Americans, rather than treating all citizens purely as individuals. Thus, for Lindsay, communism is a form of wokeness, even if the term “woke” postdates Marx by nearly 200 years. This broad definition also allows there to be right-wing forms of wokeness. Neo-Nazism, Christian nationalism, Catholic integralism, even certain forms of anti-liberal conservative nationalism — all of these doctrines give significant weight to group identity in their understanding of what matters in the political realm. Thus, for Lindsay, they are threatening to American liberalism in exactly the same way as their left-wing peers.

“Woke Right are ‘right-wing’ people who have mostly adopted an identity-based victimhood orientation for themselves to bind together as a class,” he writes. “Like the Woke Left, then, they happily offer the trade-off usually used to describe Marxists: people who will ask you to trade some of your liberty so that they might hurt your enemies for you.” Personally, I find Lindsay’s definition of “wokeness” so broad that it ceases to operate as a meaningful category (if it ever was one in the first place). But the charge has clearly stung his antagonists on the right, where calling someone “woke” is basically the worst thing you can say about them. Prominent figures on the illiberal right, ranging from Tim Pool to Mike Cernovich to Anna Khachiyan, shot back at Lindsay — calling him a “grifter” out to undermine the MAGA movement. Meanwhile, Lindsay’s allies, including biologist Colin Wright and Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, accused them of being the true traitors to MAGA. The most interesting intervention in this debate is an essay recently posted on X by the Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony. Hazony’s main project, the National Conservatism conference, has served as a hub connecting various different strands of illiberalism to each other and to power. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have all given notable speeches there.

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What the two fights reveal about the Trump era

Both the “woke right” and Yarvin debates revolve fundamentally around power — specifically, how it should be wielded once you have it. The “woke right” debate is, at heart, about what the ultimate ends of the Trump administration should be. While both sides agree that the “woke left” should be wiped out, they disagree on what an alternative vision should look like. Lindsay and his allies argue for a restoration of some kind of right-wing liberal individualism; Hazony and his camp believe that the task is replacing liberalism with some kind of hazy alternative rooted in religious or ethno-cultural identity. This debate is taking place on purely abstract grounds — there’s almost never any reference to concrete policy disagreements — but it reflects an assumption that there are very real implications of this argument for the next four years of American politics. Lindsay has repeatedly argued, in tweets and interviews, that the rise of the “woke right” threatens to derail the entire MAGA project and return power to the left. The Yarvin debate poses a related, but more introspective, question about power: How corrosive is it for intellectuals to be in proximity to it? Alexander, the most intellectually rigorous person in either debate, suggests the answer is “very.” In Yarvin, he sees someone who he long took seriously as tainted by access — by, for example, Vance citing Yarvin as an influence in a podcast appearance. Yarvin’s own conduct in their debate vindicates his assessment. Put together, these debates point us to two major themes worth watching throughout the remainder of the Trump administration. First, how much the administration’s policy choices intensify the fractures in its elite coalition.

Hazony is right that hostility to the left is what brought disparate groups together under the Trump banner. But now, in a world where the administration has to govern, some of those factions are bound to feel like they’re losing or even betrayed.

Jerome Coplusky for The UnPopulist:

“The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,” announced Justice Anthony Kennedy at the opening of his majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), recognizing the constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry with “equal dignity in the eyes of the law” and receive the legal and material benefits that flow from government recognition of the relationship. ... The nation’s pivot to support for same-sex marriage was swift and, for religious conservatives, jarring. With Obergefell, some feared that their decades-long culture war might be a lost cause. In their eyes, the decision did not merely announce an expansion of rights to gays and lesbians (providing legal sanction to a lifestyle they deemed sinful) but amounted to the remaking—or destruction—of the very institution of marriage, premised on a novel understanding of human nature and the purpose of the family. The legal protection of homosexual marriage, aside from its increased social acceptance and widespread cultural celebration, effectively announced the United States as a post-Christian, even anti-Christian, order and portended the persecution of the faithful. The expected election of Hillary Clinton in 2016 would solidify that liberal triumph and ensure civilizational collapse. ...

The Benedict Option

[T]he conservative editor and commentator Rod Dreher suggested that “the common culture—insofar as we have one—is so far gone into decadence and individualism that the only sensible thing for us to do is to strategically retreat from the mainstream to strengthen our Christian commitments, and our church communities.” ... For Dreher, same-sex marriage was the decisive battle in the culture war, and the Supreme Court’s landmark Obergefell decision became “the Waterloo of religious conservatism.” He thus pronounced the American culture war concluded, with “hostile secular nihilism” the victorious and “traditional, historical Christianity” the defeated. ... Dreher made his case at length in his bestselling 2017 book, The Benedict Option. ... The problem wasn’t simply the overreach of the courts but something much deeper and more ingrained. The United States was indeed a secular, liberal, Enlightenment polity, and it was founded on the false and dangerous Enlightenment program—the attempt to rely on reason alone to “create a secular morality,” “impose man’s natural will upon nature,” and unleash “the freely choosing individual.” ... The “end point of modernity,” in Dreher’s recounting, was already announced by Justice Anthony Kennedy in his 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Dreher acidly observed that the pronouncement was a celebration of “the autonomous, freely choosing individual, finding meaning in no one but himself.” Such was the fundamental maxim of our decadent post-Christian era. It heralded the arrival of a new dark age. Decisions like Obergefell were not betrayals of the founding ideas but really the logical outworking of them. There could be no way to reconcile a truly authentic Christian life with liberal modernity. ... And so Dreher proposed a postliberal project ... whereby the truly faithful might ... engage in “a strategic withdrawal.” ... Dreher dubbed this “the Benedict Option,” elaborating on something the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote at the end of his influential book After Virtue. Lamenting the loss of a moral consensus, MacIntyre suggested that those who endeavored to live serious and ordered lives might choose to establish “local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.” MacIntyre famously closed his meditation with the pronouncement [...]

Deneen’s Dreams

The political theorist Patrick J. Deneen arrived at a similar conclusion in his 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen charted the course of “liberalism”—an abstraction granted almost sinister agency—from its emergence in the seventeenth century to its fruition in contemporary Western society, a story of success that culminated in moral, social, environmental, and spiritual disaster. ... “The foundations of liberalism,” he claimed, “were laid by a series of thinkers whose central aim was to disassemble what they concluded were irrational religious and social norms in the pursuit of civil peace that might in turn foster stability and prosperity, and eventually individual liberty of conscience and action.” ... Liberals (and pre-liberals such as Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes) set out to remake the world according to a new—and false—anthropology. They conceived of human beings as “rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.” But they really aspired to free the individual from authority, culture, and tradition—even human nature itself. Liberalism undermined all the bonds of human solidarity that had been forged over time by the family, the church, and the whole range of social associations and institutions embedded in localities. In the place of all that, liberalism has produced an increasingly centralized and tyrannical state to “protect” the radically unencumbered individual’s enjoyment of rights, property, and pursuit of consumption. ... [...]

‘Common-Good Constitutionalism’

In an influential review of Why Liberalism Failed, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule praised Deneen’s diagnosis of the problem but suggested his proposed remedy was inadequate. ... Vermeule was ... dissatisfied with Deneen’s advocacy of a tactical retreat to a “vague communitarian localism.” ... An expert in administrative law whose own spiritual journey had brought him to Rome, Vermeule pitched ... a more audacious proposal that he believed to be “more consistent with Deneen’s own argument”: a quiet coup against the liberal “imperium.” He suggested that motivated and well-trained postliberal elites, rather than retreat from the world or try to build democratic majorities to reshape policy, ought to “strategically locate themselves within liberal institutions and work to undo the liberalism of the state from within,” and then use the machinery of the administrative state to impose upon the country their “substantive comprehensive theory of the good.” ... Vermeule’s point ... was that there was no need to withdraw to enclaves or dream of building a new order from scratch when they could deploy the administrative state and bureaucracy that liberalism had constructed as “the great instrument with which to restore a substantive politics of the good.” ... [...]

Rather than advise anti-liberal traditionalists to take flight from the battle and withdraw into an impotent localism, Vermeule proposed they use the force of the law, enthused and well-placed bureaucrats of the administrative state, and a powerful executive to orient the polis toward his conception of the common good. ... This counter-liberal proposal was, in short, a call for an American ralliement, to infiltrate and transform the liberal regime over time into a fully Catholic one, taking over the state bureaucracy (and sidestepping democratically elected representatives) so that it might rightly reorient its citizens. 

[...]

As it turned out, it would be Donald J. Trump—whose very “brand” had for years been gold-plated decadence—who emerged as the avatar of populist resentments and conservative Christian hopes. ... Already a celebrity businessman, Trump achieved political notice and notoriety as a purveyor of the racially charged “birther” conspiracy theory, and on the campaign trail he demonstrated an uncanny ability to tap into deep veins of populist anger and distrust (of “elites,” “experts,” “the deep state,” and so forth), and secure the devotion and loyalty of millions of heretofore “values voters.” His political rallies were likened to old-time revival meetings; he spoke to his supporters like a televangelist to his network flock. The slogan he chose for his movement, his political raison d'être, “Make America Great Again,” is a restorationist sentiment; it was complemented by his vow to put “America First!” ... The long-aggrieved would have their hopes fulfilled and fearful Christians their rights protected by the edicts of a charismatic strongman. “Christianity will have power,” the candidate told an audience in 2016. “If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else.” ... Instructed to regard the tussle of politics as spiritual warfare, a contest between the supernatural forces of good and evil, Christian Trumpists saw the election as a “miracle,” the unlikely president a providentially given instrument to shatter their enemies and restore an imagined Christian America. ... [T]hose books advocating a strategic withdrawal ... now seemed untimely. The advent of Trump (and the enduring spirit of MAGA) suggested that reconquest was possible. Why build arks when you can command battleships? Why endure the liberal American order when you can found a better one? Perhaps we await not a new St. Benedict but another—doubtless very different—Emperor Constantine?