When asked in the past, I have most frequently associated myself with Daniel Bell who famously described himself as "a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture." More recently, undoubtedly influenced by the perilous direction of current events, I have have probably become maybe moderately more "socialist in economics," moderately more "liberal in politics," and moderately more confused about culture - probably a little less "conservative" on particular cultural issues, while still responding nostalgically to the fundamental "conservative" critique of the corrosive character of modern culture. Thus, of all the factions that make up the intellectual New Right - so well described by Laura K. Field in her recent Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton University Press, 2005), about which I posted last week - the only one which at all resonates with me morally, culturally, and intellectually is "post-liberalism," whose "aestheric" Field characterizes as "sober, traditionalist, and highbrow."
The academic most associated with "post-liberalism" is Patrick Deneen, one time student of Wilson Carey McWilliams, currently professor of political science at Notre Dame, author of Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023). That later book suggests some sort of post-liberal conservatism that focuses on the "common good" as liberalism's replacement. Steeped inthe Catholic philosophical tradition, I find the language of "common good" attractive, but less o its advocates and what they appear to propose.
In 2018, former President Barack Obama recommended Why Liberalism Failed as part of his summer reading list. Obama wrote that he found Deneen's book "thought-provoking. I don’t agree with most of the author’s conclusions, but the book offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril." Even as what was not so long ago a "conservative" critique of modernity's failings has increasingly degenerated into an apologia for cruel authoritarianism, that critique remains relevant. Any serious attempt to get beyond the present political impasse needs to grapple with secular modernity's colossal failure, which Obama rightly described as a felt "loss of meaning and community."
In a somewhat similar vein, Field characterizes Deneen as "the most palatable, sanitized version of Trumpy populism that one is likely to encounter. His writing combines a stern social conservatism and republicanism with strident anti-liberalism and anti-elitism. It is likely to be alienating to economic liberals (so to both neoliberals and neoconservatives) but appealing to anyone who cares about culture and community, or about the environment, or who has suffered the vicissitudes of late modern capitalism in their own lives."
Deneen's critique comes out of a Catholic conservative tradition, which has long harbored reservations about liberalism's individualistic premises and the amoral and ultimately nihilistic directions in which it has steadily been leading society. But Deneen developed his argument to a cynical extreme. As Field notes Deneen effectively "accused liberals of being without genuine affection, feeling, or meaning in their own lives." She cites Ezra Klein's response to this kind of caricature during his own interview with Deneen, "Everybody I know is tangled up in complex family, loving, critical, difficult, beautiful family relationships."
There is, of course, probably some degree of truth in both positions. Liberalism does undermine all not-autonomously assumed obligations, and so at some level is profoundly damaging to all traditional ties, including those of family. And anyone who doubts that should just read contemporary ethical advice columns, which often presume the primacy of the individual and celebrate liberation from traditional ties, even family. On the other hand, people are complicated. Without condoning late-life marital separations, for example, society needs to recognize and grapple with the new relational challenges posed by longer life-spans. That aid, te human craving for relationship and call to community are powerful natural forces which still survive even despite an officially professed individualistic liberatory ideology. Those same ethical advice columns that may undermine traditional relationships and strong community bonds also testify to the perennial persistence of such relational anc communal needs.
The problem with "post-liberalism" is not that it fails to diagnose what we have lost, but that it offers no plausible path to something better. In 2018, Deneen echoed Rod Dreher's 2017 Benedict Option in advocating local community building efforts, which do have a certain real merit (especially, I would suggest, when religiously motivated). But that can only go so far. Most people cannot (let lone will not choose to) go off the grid into pseudo-utopian sectarianism. Short of that, even a religiously motivated life must continue to be lived in late-capitalist, consumerist, relationship-impaired modernity. More basically, it must also be lived amidst disagreement on even the most fundamental matters, the perennial problem of politics.
Of course, it is still possible to imagine solutions to at least some of our problems. "Democratic Socialism," while sharing many of modern liberalism's liberatory impulses and hence its corrosive approach to community, can offer real, more genuinely just alternatives to our presently established regime of extreme oligarchy., which liberalilsm has failed to protect people from. For its part, "Post-liberalism" can clealry diagnose, for example, the failed economic policies which have produced our astronomical degree of inequality. But it cannot overcome the straightjacket of contemporary political divisions, which limit the set of acceptable solutions and confine political actors within polarized tribal limits which inhibit crossing the barriers necessary to experiment with diverse solutions, regardless of their ideological origins.
Catholic convert Sohrab Ahmari, founder of Compact Magazine, recognized as much when he wrote in Newsweek in 2023, that Trumpy populism could not succeed in helping working people to "attain lives of security and dignity," because he realized that "the Republican party remains incorrigibly a vehicle for the wealthy."
Thus, the alliances that "post-liberalism" is inevitably attracted to are - as inevitably - a dead-end. They seem likely further to foster the intolerance, lawlessness, and cruelty that liberalism initially sought to ameliorate. The price paid by society for liberalism's moral relativism and nihilism has been high, but the post-liberal nostalgia for a less free, less mobile, more closed community also exacts a price, and we are seeing all around us how dangerously high that price can also be.
