Like any “ism,” liberalism is many things, but its diverse conceptual and political values are undeniably in crisis. From Viktor Orbán’s embrace of “illiberal democracy” and Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric to the British Blue Labour’s pro-worker yet anti-woke stance, reactions to liberalism’s decline vary widely. Yet, they share a common thread: postliberalism. Postliberalism itself is complex. To unpack its nuances, Reset DOC spoke with Chris Wright, history professor at the City University of New York and author of Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression (2022).
Today, we hear more and more about the theoretical and ideological current of postliberalism. But what does it actually mean?
The term “postliberal” has been used to refer to many different things, from far-right nationalist governments like Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary to certain left-wing ideologies in the UK. What they have in common is a partial or complete rejection of liberalism for its alleged undermining of community, social bonds, and “the common good.” Liberalism is viewed as inherently atomizing, given its elevation of individual rights, individual happiness, and individual freedoms over moral duties and social cohesion. If contemporary society seems as though it is in danger of falling apart, beset by crises from every direction, this is supposed to be because a dominant liberalism is approaching its logical, anti-social conclusions.
In a narrow sense, postliberalism denotes an ideological tendency among thinkers initially based in the UK and the United States, writers like John Milbank, John Gray, Maurice Glasman, Adrian Pabst, and, in the US, Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, Gladden Pappin, and Sohrab Ahmari. They and others draw on philosophy and theology, most often Catholicism, in their search for alternatives to liberalism. Some of them (notably Vermeule) embrace Catholic integralism, the integration of Church and State, and have decidedly anti-liberal values. Others are more left-wing, to some degree valuing individual freedoms but seeking to unite them with a communitarian emphasis on humans’ social embeddedness. The “Blue Labour” faction in the UK is a prominent example. It is culturally conservative but economically leftist—as, indeed, are some postliberals in the US, such as Ahmari, who defends social conservatism but strongly advocates a revived labor movement to resurrect the New Deal state. Most postliberals, however, place considerably more emphasis on the social (and religious) conservatism part than the economic leftism part.
Postliberalism is a very heterogeneous perspective. What is the most common postliberal formation?
Most often—and most naturally, given the valorization of social “order” and “cohesion,” religion and tradition, over individual freedoms—postliberalism is on the far-right. National conservatism, for example, as expressed by Yoram Hazony, is essentially a type of neofascism. The government should impose on the country a “national religion” and a relatively uniform national culture that prioritizes the patriarchal family and banishes all legacies of the 1960s’ New Left. Draconian immigration restrictions should be enacted. In Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Hazony goes so far as to say, “There is no inherent right to self-government.” But this is a natural position for postliberals to hold, insofar as they argue that freedom shouldn’t be allowed to go so far as to undermine community or birth a “debased” culture of, say, left-wing identity politics.
There are localist versions of postliberalism and (more commonly) nationalist versions, theocratic versions and semi-secular versions, fascist versions and laborite versions. Far-right politicians in the US, Italy, Poland, India, Israel, and elsewhere have been called postliberal, as have more leftist politicians in the UK. It’s a mutable concept.
In what context was the political thinking behind the postliberal current formulated?
Academic or “philosophical” postliberalism is often traced to the revival of virtue ethics in the twentieth century by philosophers like Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre, or, in the UK, to John Gray’s critiques of the Enlightenment (for instance in Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age, 1995) and the theologian John Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy school of thought. Around 2009 in the UK, the Red Tory and Blue Labour political factions emerged, the former being promoted by the think tank ResPublica, which apparently influenced David Cameron.
A few years later in the US, some anti-liberal Catholic traditionalists launched a blog called The Josias to elaborate and propagate their integralist ideas. Over time, they converted many to their cause, including the respected Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, whose aggressive advocacy has helped popularize their ideas. Patrick Deneen’s 2018 bestseller Why Liberalism Failed also strengthened the budding movement.
What philosophical assumptions do the theorists of postliberalism draw on?
“Postliberal” ideas have been around for a very long time, at least since the Counter-Enlightenment reaction against the French Revolution. Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre, for instance, denounced the Enlightenment’s rationalism and liberalism for corroding tradition, religion, and social bonds, thus causing the Revolution. Romanticism, in part a reaction against the Enlightenment, idealized the organic community, the Volk, religion, the Middle Ages. Catholic thought in the nineteenth century was generally very anti-liberal—see Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864)—although Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) shows that, to some extent, the liberal notion of “rights” is compatible with Catholicism.
Incidentally, much of this Counter-Enlightenment tradition has another telling similarity with contemporary postliberalism: its idealism. Liberal ideologies are seen as responsible for modern atomization, for the prevalence of greed, selfishness, and fissiparous social tendencies. Adrian Pabst, for instance, refers to “the self-erosion of liberal values such as freedom [and] equality,” “the inner logic of liberal ideology,” as if we’re dealing with a Hegelian self-unfolding of Spirit or the Idea. But Marxists since the 1840s have been condemning modern society for its selfishness, greed, and atomism—while blaming these things, realistically, not on liberalism but on the capitalist mode of production.
Is the critique of modernity made by postliberals too abstract?
Yes, it’s too focused on ideas as opposed to production relations. Liberalism, after all, has many different, and contradictory, manifestations, from communitarian anarchism to social democracy to right-wing laissez-faire economics. The crises of modern society result, surely, not from the dominance of some abstract philosophy but from the concrete functioning of capitalist institutions, the class interests that cause capitalists to commodify everything, to exploit humans and nature for the sake of profits.
Conservative thought from Burke to postliberalism likes to dwell in the rarefied realm of philosophy and abstractions like virtue, honor, tradition, and the common good (abstractions with which postliberal writings teem). But if one really wants to revitalize the community, it is necessary to radically change the economic structures, the class structures, that have severed humans from one another and from nature.
How did the precursors of postliberalism develop in the 20th century?
The most destructive precursor of postliberalism was fascism, which indeed saw itself, in effect, as postliberal. It apotheosized the national community, tradition, and authority, and prided itself on overcoming the individualism, materialism, and selfishness of liberal modernity. Moreover, like most postliberals, fascists attacked not the capitalist class, the true agent of degradation, but “liberal elites” and people who didn’t belong to the community, such as intellectuals, socialists, and immigrants. The parallels between the past and the present are ominous.
Postliberalism continued to evolve after World War II, in a world that had officially rejected fascism. How did it take shape in this context?
In the United States, for instance, the New Right that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s incorporated anti-liberal, traditionalist, authoritarian views, frequently taking a religious form. Religious fundamentalism tends to reject liberal values that ostensibly undermine the patriarchal family, the community, the nation, and morality itself. One of its most prominent spokesmen, Jerry Falwell, declared in 1980 in his book, Listen, America!, “We must stand against the Equal Rights Amendment, the feminist revolution, and the homosexual revolution… The hope of reversing the trends of decay in our republic now lies with the Christian public in America. We cannot expect help from the liberals.” Such “postliberal” attitudes have spread widely since then, with far-right populist movements.
Paleoconservatism is another forerunner of postliberalism. Most famously identified with the Republican politician Pat Buchanan, it is rather hard to distinguish from many types of postliberalism, given its nationalism, xenophobia, social conservatism, religious inspiration, isolationism, and economic protectionism.
Postliberalism draws on communitarian values to counter the social fragmentation and economic instability caused by neoliberalism, offering an alternative to atomized individualism. But what specific socioeconomic correctives does it propose?
Postliberals often favor tariffs, the reshoring of manufacturing, vigorous antitrust enforcement, greater regulation of business, government investment in infrastructure and in vocational education, restrictive immigration policies and expansive pro-natalist policies (Orbán’s Hungary is much admired), and relative “de-globalization.”
Blue Labour advocates employee representation on corporate boards of directors, stronger labor unions, higher taxation of wealth than incomes, more social housing, investment in green manufacturing, and promotion of local economies and local democracy, in addition to the usual restrictive immigration policies. Also, like some other postliberal factions, it supports corporatism: “Tripartite institutions are needed to provide a balance of interests between labor, capital, and government in the negotiation of wages, working conditions, and investment decisions,” to quote Pabst’s essay “Three Faces of Postliberalism” (in The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism).
National conservatives, on the other hand, prefer a more American type of commitment to the “free market.” So, there are disagreements among postliberals on economic policy.
In what ways does postliberalism align with or diverge from neoliberalism?
Postliberalism defines itself in opposition to neoliberalism, so you’d think the two things are polar opposites. The irony is that, in practice, it tends to reinforce certain aspects of neoliberalism, while undermining others. Protectionist policies undermine the free-trade commitments of neoliberalism. But if we understand postliberalism in a broad sense, as referring mainly (with a few leftist exceptions) to far-right anti-liberal movements and ideas that are sweeping much of the world, it is quite useful to neoliberalism’s project of expanding capitalist class power. For it diverts popular rage to the wrong targets, as fascism did.
J. D. Vance, for example, styles himself a postliberal who cares about the public good, but he campaigned with a man whose administration is now trying to dismantle the administrative state, including onerous regulations on business, protections of unions and workers’ rights, protections of the environment, and tax policies that aren’t favorable to the ruling class. This is neoliberalism on steroids.
Doesn’t this dismantling of the state contradict the communitarian spirit of postliberalism?
It certainly does. In fact, national conservatism actually advocates a “drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state,” apparently unaware that this profoundly sabotages the common good and the functioning of the nation. For generations, it has been a major demand of the right-wing “libertarians” whom postliberals supposedly revile. So there isn’t much coherence in certain varieties of postliberalism.
How did postliberalism gain popular support?
Versions of it have had popular support since the late eighteenth century, in reaction to the shock of the French Revolution and capitalist transformations generally. Liberalism’s anti-clericalism has hardly been popular among religious communities, particularly Catholic ones. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the perception among many (semi-)rural communities that urban, “liberal” civilization was threatening their integrity, their cohesion, even their economic security—including age-old hierarchies of class and culture—has helped motivate anti-liberal resistance, as in the forms of fascism and religious fundamentalism. People don’t like to see traditions and hierarchies undermined. Again, it’s ironic that popular postliberalism tends to empower the capitalist class, which is the main force responsible for undermining communities and traditions.
In this perspective, what are examples of popular support for postliberalism today?
The MAGA movement, for example, which can be called postliberal in the vulgarized sense that all right-wing populism can, is very useful to capital in its scapegoating of immigrants and liberalism for social crises that are due to capitalists’ insatiable hunger for profits and power.
To take a common grievance: deindustrialization has, in fact, little to do with “liberalism”; it has to do with capitalism. By focusing attention on so-called liberalism, then, postliberals are performing a valuable service for the capitalist class. Doubtless, this is one reason their ideas have been subsidized and widely propagated. The billionaire Peter Thiel even signed the national conservative Statement of Principles, as did some right-wing libertarians.
For a genuine break with neoliberalism, it is necessary, on the contrary, to embrace the best of the liberal tradition, which is to say the labor movement, democratic socialism—class struggle.
Cover photo: US President Donald Trump in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on January 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP)
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