The ‘post-liberal’ dabbling in illiberal political philosophy by people of some influence is ugly. Times are hard, and the US is politically and culturally deeply divided, its core political institutions precarious and deeply lacking in confidence and effectiveness. It is easy to feel we are living through a profound crisis and irreversible national decline. Many will be persuaded that the time has come to ask openly whether our traditional commitment to limited government and individual rights continues to serve us well. Combine this with an openly seditious major political party with established ties to well armed if motley crews of radicals hungry for political violence and the chances of serious political mischief is very real.

How bad are things? Let’s suppose post-liberals are right and that they’re pretty bad. So what went wrong and what should we do? In looking for answers, those of us still committed to liberal democracy will want to start with three questions: Can liberal political philosophy diagnose what has gone wrong in recent decades and guide us to corrective policies that are consistent with its core commitments? Do contemporary liberal democracies have the material resources needed to implement these policies? And finally, is the current political culture sufficiently functional to find the will to adopt and implement these policies? Of these three I think the final is the biggest concern but here I want to look a the first. 

A revealing thing about post-liberal thought is how much of it is thoroughly liberal sans phrase. That their diagnosis of the economic woes of contemporary liberal democracies, and of the US in particular, makes contact with well established left liberal critiques of capitalism has not escaped the notice of post-liberals themselves. That much was lost with the decline of labor unions, that obscene inequalities in wealth and opportunity undermine families, communities, and cultures, that tax policies favoring the rich don’t also favor the poor through some kind of trickle down effects—all this has been established by thinkers well within liberal orthodoxy for decades. There’s nothing ‘post’ liberal about any of this. The rhetoric works only if we reduce liberalism to what Americans call ‘libertarianism’ and the rest of the world ‘neoliberalism’, but there is no warrant for doing so.  

So too with the post-liberal philosophical claims—however radical they fancy themselves, most of what post-liberals argue is familiar to anyone who followed the communitarian trends within liberalism that emerged as a reaction to libertarianism decades ago. That there’s long been communitarian resistance to the ‘there’s no such thing as culture only individuals’ social atomism that came with Thatcher and Reagan, and reams written by liberals on the dangers of an excessive emphasis on the individual, is never acknowledged. Names like Michael Sandel, David Hollenbach S.J., William Galston, to name a very few, simply never appear the writings of post-liberals. Nor will their readers be made aware of liberal thinkers, like Martha Nussbaum, who forgo appeals to state of nature stories and social contracts in favor of appeals to, well, Aristotle and the conditions of human flourishing. That even Rawls was well aware of liberal states’ need for a common political culture is ignored, as are his discussions of the kinds of common good a liberal political culture might recognize, and the political virtues liberal citizens need to embody. 

In short, there is little in the ‘post-liberal’ world that suggests a need for a radical rethinking of the underlying political philosophy—instead it suggests a need for a united front against the libertarianism that has dominated ‘conservative’ thought for decades. Clarity on this point could allow for a revived and more productive debate about the kind of ‘morality’ a more communally oriented state might promote. That such a debate can happen against a background commitment to traditional liberal values, including a commitment to individual liberties, is arguably what post-liberals want to avoid, and this is what is driving the rhetoric of a ‘new founding.’ So what is the appeal, aside from the frisson of being a radical?

It’s not much of a mystery. On many of the cultural issues which exorcise conservatives most we have already had the needed debates and the simple fact is conservatives lost. Over the course of decades, a consensus emerged across the political divide that a blanket ban on abortion would be wrong, that discrimination against gays and lesbians is unjust, and that women should not be constrained by traditional gender roles. Conservatives also lost debates about limiting free speech in the name of obscenity and blasphemy, prayer and creationism in public schools, and the social utility of stigmatizing divorce and sex before marriage, among other things. 

Using legislative power and a ‘common good’ friendly Supreme Court to reverse their culture war losses looks very tempting to conservatives, particularly when some of their European counterparts are having some political success with similar strategies in their own countries. What’s needed is a justification for running roughshod over the rest of the country in the name of ‘traditional values.’ How do make illiberalism sound good? The learned posturing of post-liberal political philosophy fits the bill. Still, we might wonder if it would be ‘post’ anything really. Authoritarian governments are nothing new after all, and have long used the supposed anomie of liberalism as justification for tyranny. 

Coda

I wrote this before Russia invaded Ukraine. The unspeakable brutality unleashed by an autocrat only recently celebrated for being ‘anti-woke’ and traditionally minded, and the strong and spirited defense of Ukraine by supposedly decadent liberal