The Perils of "Post-Liberalism"

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.

Advent

As it was in the days of Noah,
so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.
In those days before the flood,
they were eating and drinking,
marrying and giving in marriage,
up to the day that Noah entered the ark.
They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away.
So will it be also at the coming of the Son of Man.

(Matthew 24, from the Gospel for this First Sunday of Advent)

Last month, I watched the new Netflix movie, A House of Dynamite. All of the principal characters in the film's three sequences have private lives. They are married with children (or are planning to get married), when suddenly and unexpectedly a missile appears out of the Pacific with Chicago as its target. It reminded me of how, back when I was a kid in the deep freeze of the Cold War, we regularly participated in "civil defense" drills, hiding under our desks during an imaginary nuclear attack, Yet, in between such moments of intensely focused apocalyptic expectation, we went about our ordinary lives and planned our futures, as if we fully expected the world to have a future. As it was in the days of Noah.

Sadly some recent iterations of apocalyptic seem to have an even darker dimension, as (at least according to some worried reports) some of the more contemporary generation appear to be foregoing marriage and family formation, claiming climate change and other contemporary calamities as their excuse. The calamities are legitimste, but not the excuse. Somehow some seem to have forgotten the basic imperative to keep the human story going- despite our fears and worries - as it was in the days of Noah.

All of which suggests that the Church's annual Advent message may be increasingly timely. Ostensibly the most future-oriented of seasons, Advent is in fact really a sort of stand-in for the entire Christian life, lived (as it inevitably must be) in the present - between the first coming of Christ and his hoped-for final advent. As Christians, we live our lives literally in this interval between Christmas and the end, which is what Advent is ultimately all about. We live in intensely focused apocalyptic expectation, while simultaneously preoccupied with our ordinary daily lives and planning our this-worldly futures - as it was in the days of Noah.

Indeed, as we pray every day at Mass, we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ. The point, however, is not when Jesus will come (an obsessive preoccupation found far too frequently in sectarian American Apocalyptic) but being ready for his coming – not as something to be put off to some far-off future, but as our present preoccupation. The future will indeed come – at its own time and on its own terms – but our task is the present, which is what, in fact, will determine who we will be in the future.

Obviously Advent, especially the way we celebrate it in the Church today, relies a lot on the seasonal imagery of darkness and light that defines this time of year in our northern hemisphere. Folkloric customs like Advent wreaths with their evergreens and candles all attempt to employ that natural seasonal imagery. Symbolic beings that we are, we readily respond to such signals. But we must be careful. Advent uses seasonal symbolism to make a point, but Advent is more than some sort of seasonal pageant. The Christian life is not a season, nor is it a play. The world really was in darkness before Christ – the darkness of alienation from God. and, inasmuch as so much of the world still suffers that same alienation, the darkness persists, coexisting with the light coming from Christ. But, unlike natural darkness, our world’s persistent alienation from God is not some abstract natural force.

We are the ones who have contributed – and continue to contribute - to this world’s darkness. For this reason, Advent was long rightly regarded as a penitential season. Pope Innocent III even prescribed black as the liturgical color for Advent - although violet eventually beat black to become the season’s official color. Conveniently, one and the same color can simultaneously symbolize both the purple of royalty (Christ the King coming in glory) and the violet of repentance.

The penance appropriate to Advent is, of course, what Paul commanded the Christians of Rome - to throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light (Romans 13). So, we all need to ask ourselves, exactly what is it that keeps us in so much darkness? Why isn’t the light of Christ shining forth from us and through us to light up our communities, our country, our world? Paul’s words challenge us to be attentive to what is happening right now. Living as we do in a culture of institutionalized irresponsibility, Advent’s message is a radical wake-up call to mean what we say - really to throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.

Our traditional account of Christ's coming into the world sets his birth during the night, the light of Christ coexisting with the darkness of a world of imperial decrees, forced migration, and. homelessness. At his final coming, of course, darkness will be destroyed. Meanwhile, however, here and now, in this interim time – between Christmas and the end – darkness and light continue to coexist, the darkness a constant challenge of a sinful present resisting Christ's brighter future

Of course, as even our annual rush to start celebrating Christmas earlier and earlier each year suggests, most of us aren’t very good at waiting. We want to know as much as possible in advance, so that we can rush into the future. The good news of the Gospel, however, is that it is precisely the present that matters. Jesus’ warning about those long ago days of Noah, reminds us how common, how universal, the experience of the present really is. We are - as we should be - still eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage – as it was in the days of Noah. The fact that the present time is limited (something one become if anything even more acutely aware of with each passing year) just makes it all the more precious, makes it matter that much more. 

Whatever surprises we may be hoping to find under the Christmas Tree this year, the coming of Christ is not one of them. Christ has already come. (If he hadn’t, we would have no Advent season to observe - let alone Christmas!) The question is whether his presence in our world today matters enough to make a difference in the way we live and what we care about – whether and how we are making the most of our limited but precious present time to become now what we hope to be when he comes again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Now that the shutdown is done and air travel has returned to something resembling normal, I - like so many of my fellow Americans - have flown across the country to celebrate with family and friends this most American of holidays Thanksgiving Day. 

Increasingly, I hate air travel, hate traveling cross-country, and do it less and les. Last year, I was so worn out from two major official trips that I skipped Thanksgiving travel altogether. In the end, I think I regretted that and was resolved not to repeat that mistake again this year. Travel may be a pain, but it is the only way to be with what little natural family I have left, which makes it worth the effort - especially on Thanksgiving.

As a pastor, of course, I had liturgical responsibilities on Christmas, but Thanksgiving is not that kind of holiday. Despite its origins in an explicitly Protestant American sensibility (or perhaps precisely because of that), for those of us outside that historic tradition, Thanksgiving has always been a more secular celebration of family and community, especially when family was much more accessible - just over the river and through the wood. The fact that everyone celebrated it made Thanksgiving a truly national celebration. Smaller and fewer families and the contemporary fraying of our national bonds have diminished communities to the detriment even of Thanksgiving. Hence the somewhat silly annual anxiety about how to talk to people about politics at Thanksgiving. The very question (1) implies that we do not talk much to each other the rest of the year (a problem in itself), and (2) it highlights the perversely disproportionate importance of politics in our contemporary life. Why talk about politics on Thanksgiving, when we ought ideally to share so much else that we can talk about?

Long before "post-liberalism" became an academic meal ticket, the corrosive effects of liberal modernity on family, community, and country were already obvious. Inevitably, the effect would also be felt on Thanksgiving, which liberal modernity has increasingly degraded into "Black Friday Eve." Back in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving Day holiday, he mentioned "our national perverseness and disobedience." Try talking about that at any Thanksgiving table!

Thanksgiving Day has always been a celebration of plenty, of American abundance. But it also painfully highlights the absence thereof. One parish I know has had a 50% increase in the number of turkeys distributed to needy families in anticipation of the holiday. While such sharing is and ought to be a characteristic of Thanksgiving's observance, it also points to the deepening distress that is endemic in our society at this time, which no Thanksgiving festivities can completely cover over. This increasing inequality and the deepening distress that has accompanied it - not some real or imagined squeamishness about political polarization - is the real challenge that overshadows and darkens ourThanksgiving holiday.

Furious Minds

 

What passes for "conservatism" in the U.S. - including in its current MAGA iteration - has long been both a populist movement (often quite extreme, sometimes at the fringes of the larger movement, more recently closer to its mainstream) and a serious intellectual movement worthy of study as political theory. In Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton University Press, 2025), sometime academic political theorist. Laaura K. Field has chronicled the intellectual antecedents and expressions of this modern political movement.

The author was herself educated in part in the intellectual traditions (notably Straussianism) which were he antecedents to today's :furious minds." This is one of the book's assets, although the book does suffer somewhat from perhaps overly frequent interjections by the author highlighting her own disagreements with these authors, disagreements which often enough reflect predictable ideological positions. On the other hand, her background may have helped her to appreciate conservative insights which mainstream liberal academia notable fails to appreciate.

As someone who was once at the margins of the political theory world (although not as a Straussian), I found the more academic parts of the book among the most interesting. In the end, If nothing else, I felt nostalgic reading about Straussians Harry Jaffa, Allan Bloom, and Harve Mansrield. That said, I am not convinced that the self-regarding MAGA intellectual elites will end up leading rather than following the MAGA populists in whatever that movement's future will be, but we have perhaps always overrated the intellectual dimension of American right-wing politics, what Field calls an "Ideas First approach."

Field divides the New Right into "the Claremonters, the Postliberalsm and the National /conservatives." The West Coast Struassian Claremonters are "youthful, bitter, masculinist, and counterrevolutionary." The Postliberals are less interested than the Claremnoters in the American founding and embrace "many elements of communitarianism and traditional Catholic social teaching, including a greater role for the state in shaping public life and morality." They are "sober, traditionalist, and highbrow." The National Conservatives are the movement's "big tent and umbrella." National Conservatism embraces an exclusive sense of American nationalism that "cuts against America's tradition of religious pluralism, as well as the Declarationist creedal elements of America's traditional understanding and civil religion." Its mood is "fervent and unyielding." Ideologically spanning these camps is what she calls the "Hard Right," which is "more hard-line, racist, misogyinistic, and violent in their rhetoric." It aesthetic is "hypermasculinist, desperate, and ruthless."

Field emphasizes how the New Right is so "untethered from the ordinary decency and commons sense that characterize America at its idealistic best - and from the pluralistic reality of the country as it exists today." She identifies a failure to reckon with basic political life "the fact that people really do think differently and disagree, about just about everything, and especially about the most important things, like the meaning of life, God, and the soul, and what is good."

To me, the most interesting thing about Field's work is that in her treatment of these dangerous ideas and directions, she also recognizes the fundamental weakness of liberalism which helped bring us to this pass. She credits the Straussian Bloom, for example, for conveying "how people in modern democracies are confused about the role that moral evaluations play in democratic life and politics. In the universities, this often means either that ethical and moral questions are avoided entirely or that the answers are presumed and righteously taken for granted."

Also of interest is the way the Postliberals appear to separate from the rest of the New Right is certain respects. The Postliberals "are more serious about moving beyond neoliberal economics in ways that would help the working class. They are also at once more skeptical of the New Right's crude nativism and. more free-thinking when it comes to international affairs. ... They are not beholden to GOP donors, or to the GOP base." As a result, "with the exception of their influence on JD Vance, they have been the least influential thinkers on the New Right." Indeed, the whole Catholic component of Postliberalism, to the extent it takes its Catholic claims seriously, serves to separate and marginalize Postliberalism. An extreme case is Sohrab Ahmari, who in 2023 finally realized that the Republicans "will never be the party of the working class" and remain "incorrigibly, a vehicle for the wealthy." 

Another important takeaway from Field's work, which is in a sense obvious at the popular level, but which deserves special mention is the intensely masculinist sensibility of so much New Right thinking. Field inverts the classical story of the Furies (who, of course, were feminine and pre-political and were displaced by a more masculine classical politics. A lot more attention probably needs to be paid to the primordial rage and anger that are revealed in the contemporary New Right - both in its intellectual as well as its populist performances.

Most important, however, is the challenge the New Right's rejection of liberalism poses for the inherent weakness of liberalism. Field notes "liberals have far too long accepted a minimalist self-understanding that avoids all talk of virtue and ethical vision; they have similarly refused to acknowledge and cultivate the moral worlds and traditions that sustain our lives."

The American Revolution Reconsidered

 

In anticipation of next year's Semiquincentennial of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, PBS last Sunday began to air the latest Ken Burns historical epic - a six-episode, twelve-hour documentary, The American Revolution. I watched the opening episode on our local PBS station and then watched the rest of the episodes on PBS Passport.

Twelve hours are a lot for a contemporary audience, with a notoriously limited attention span. That same audience may be as notoriously unfamiliar with much of American history. It will be a challenge to get those with little or no knowledge or interest in history to watch the series. Ken Burns, with his popularly oriented stye and well established reputation, may well be the one best positioned to do so.

My generation did study history in school, and it was probably my favorite subject. Even so, what we learned was limited in so many ways. For example, we learned just one thing about the Battle of Long Island, that "Washington lost." But we learned little or nothing about how that defeat fit into the overall story of the Revolution, either militarily or politically.

Ken Burns' style is noted for its inclusion of many and multiple voices. This is always a challenge, but perhaps seldom more so that with the American Revolution which involved so many different individual actors and diverse communities. There is a famous satirical comment by John Adams in a letter to Thomas Jefferson: "Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington - fully grown and on his horse. Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod and the three of them, Franklin, Washington and the horse, conducted the entire revolution all by themselves." Obviously Adams and Jefferson and most of their contemporaries knew better, but ho many of our contemporaries do?

Burns' epic sets out to correct all such oversimplifications. It starts out by setting the scene of who the British colonists were, with their relationships were with one another, with their neighbors (Native Americans among and around them, the French to the north and west, etc.), with the enslave African population, and with the Mother Country, with which most originally identified and many continued to identify with until the end. The series highlights the colonists' relationship to land a a principal source of personal freedom and the conflict that inevitably created with the Indians and with Britain, which sought to limit the colonists' westward expansion. (The Revolution was also always "a war for empire," to wrest control of the Ohio Valley that the British had tried to keep the settlers out of.) The series also corrects any romanticized misimpression that the colonists were united as Americans and highlights how the American Revolution was actually a civil war among British Americans, thousands of whom remained loyal to the Crown and fought against their fellow colonists, dividing communities and families. (50,000 Americans served in Loyalist units.)

"Our late peaceful country now became a scene fo terror and confusion," a young Virginia woman is quoted as saying. Like other great conflicts, the Revolution was about big ideas and high ideals, but it was also an arena of terrifying fratricidal violence. The series spends less time on the bewigged idea-men and more on the experiences of ordinary soldiers and civilians, for whom the war was at times a terrifyingly violent experience. 

For some the war was a straight conflict between "loyalism" and "patriotism," but for many - especially the native tribes whose ancestral lands others were fighting over and enslaved Africans, it was often a complex calculation which side to fight for (or whether to take a side at all). In fact, both Indians and slaves fought on both sides. For some, such as the slaves who fought for the British and got to resettle in Canada, being on the losing side may have been a win. For the native Indian tribes, however, the Revolution resulted only in greater loss.

Burns captures all these complexities, without sllghting the larger canvas of great power politics, which eventually turned a rebellion in North America into a major world war fought on virtually every continent. It is good to be reminded that, however important the creation of the United States turned out to be in world history, at the time there were other places and conflicts that mattered more to many of the political players. 

Despite the infamous distortion of his role in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the series shows King George III in a more balanced light, reflecting the real complexities of the British constitution an the divisions within the British political establishment as well as the corresponding divisions within colonial society. It also illuminates the gradual transformation of opinion of those who started out wanting things to go back to the way they had been before but ended up wanting to start something new.

The series recognizes the unique and probably irreplaceable role played by George Washington. At the same time, the importance of the elite propertied theoreticians of the Revolution is balanced by the military significance of a Continental Army of largely propertyless men, all of which would have enormous implications for the democratizing dimensions of the Revolution and its aftermath. 

Obviously, any investigation into the American founding will have implications for how we consider our present. The British insistence on not leaving New York until they had arranged for Loyalists to leave as well is an obvious contrast to the ignominious American retreats from Vietnam in 1975 and Afghanistan in 2021. On the other hand, the series' emphasis on the diversity of the Americans and how new immigrants were constantly being added to the emerging society is a powerful reminder that America has always been about being a port of welcome for new and diverse peoples and has been immeasurably enriched by this experience.

Finally, we are reminded how the ideas and ideals of the Revolution have taken on a life of their own, apart from the complexities and compromises of the founding era and continue to matter not just on this continent but throughout the world.