“Before we can begin to analyze any specific form of liberalism,” the Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar wrote in 1989, “we must surely state as clearly as possible what the word means.” This is no easy task, for liberalism boasts a long list of dogged impersonators. Its detractors equate it with ideas ranging from the technocratic policies of the contemporary Democratic Party to the chilly rationalism of the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes. Shklar cautioned that its opponents were also wont to identify it with “modernity,” by which they meant a miasmic mist of “technology, industrialization, skepticism, loss of religious orthodoxy, disenchantment, nihilism, and atomistic individualism.” Liberalism is the European Union, but it is also Ruth Bader Ginsburg votive candles. It is a political platform, but in the eyes of its critics, it is more essentially a social atmosphere.
Shklar’s warnings, it turns out, were prescient, but they were also futile, for an ascendant group of conservative thinkers persists in defining liberalism as everything and nothing. The movement’s core personalities — Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, journalist Sohrab Ahmari and Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen — hail from the Catholic right, though the self-proclaimed post-liberal coalition also includes some Jews, such as Israeli nationalist Yoram Hazony, and token representatives of other denominations, such as Greek Orthodox iconoclast Rod Dreher. This motley crew might have served as an advertisement for liberalism’s commitment to religious toleration, were its denizens not united by their shared distaste for globalism, the sexual revolution and allegedly latte-lapping elites.
If Milton Friedman and other fetishists of the free market were lodestars for an earlier generation of GOP luminaries, the emerging clerisy is in the business of devising alibis and apologias for the likes of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (whom they have advised) and Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio (with whom they have appeared affably on public panels). Vermeule, Ahmari and Deneen diverge sharply from their predecessors in both their openness to governmental intervention in the economy and their appetite for thinly veiled authoritarianism. They represent a threat as much to fusionism — the conciliatory conservative philosophy that has wrestled libertarians and social reactionaries into an uneasy alliance for the past 60 years — as to the liberal consensus.
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Though the post-liberals fault their rivals for failing to paint a positive picture of how life should be lived, they have thus far only gestured at the political order they favor. Two new books, “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future,” by Deneen, and “Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It,” by Ahmari, promise to present a more comprehensive program. Both begin with a portrait of contemporary life that rings terrible — and true. Deneen and Ahmari describe an ailing society in which inequality is rampant, the exploitation of workers is widespread and community life is disintegrating.
Post-liberalism is seductive because many of the problems it purports to tackle are real. Does this mean we should accept its attempts at solutions?
At first glance, the post-liberals may look like tempting allies for, well, liberals. They are vocal critics of several of the GOP’s most entrenched shibboleths: Dreher, for example, confesses that he broke with mainstream Republicanism when he tired of its disregard for environmental degradation and its “uncritical enthusiasm for the market.” To the post-liberals, both the Republicans and the Democrats are in league with the enemy: the liberal leviathan.
By their lights, one of this bogeyman’s hallmarks is its amnesia. Deneen writes that “the past is largely irrelevant” for liberal elites. But despite his cadre’s ostensible reverence for history, they offer a shamelessly schematic genealogy of our present predicament. The drama of contemporary life has two acts: First came pre-modernity (stretching from the dawn of time to around 1685), which was good; then came modernity (beginning in 1685 and continuing to the present), which was worse. Dreher once wrote: “There were five landmark events over seven centuries that rocked Western civilization and stripped it of its ancestral faith.” It may seem as if seven centuries contained more than five events, but five is too many for Ahmari, who wrote in a previous book, “The Unbroken Thread,” that “the Enlightenment took hold. Three centuries later, most of us take it for granted that liberty means being able to select how we live from the widest possible range of options.”
In this group’s telling, only one important thing has really ever happened: Modernity took root. The pre-moderns understood that true freedom resides in “self-rule, self-discipline, and self-government,” as Deneen opines, but liberal modernists catastrophically reimagined it as “liberation from limitations imposed by birthright.” One does not have to squint hard to see a medieval serf, munching gruel and savoring its freeing flavor. Admittedly, this malnourished specimen was sometimes subject to the arbitrary whims of his aristocratic overlords, but he was also cradled in the warm embrace of a tightknit social order. If he was illiterate, he was at least spared the travails of attending a “woke” university with a gender studies department. All in all, he had it better than today’s liberals, who are hedonic, individualistic, relativistic, rootless (and cosmopolitan to boot), vehemently secular, bent on the exploitation of the natural world (after all, they thwart God’s plan by using contraception) and, most important, zealously invested in progress for its own sake.
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“Modern thought,” writes Deneen, “rests on a core assumption: transformative progress is a key goal of human society.” The avatars of “modern thought” and “human society” (two domains that I confess to finding dauntingly broad) are rarely named or quoted. Deneen’s disregard for details, among them the awkward fact that no one actually defends the position he attributes to practically everyone, is unfortunately characteristic. The post-liberals are dramatic, even hysterical, stylists, prone to sweeping pronouncements about the entirety of culture since the dawn of time. “The aim of modern liberal civilization is individual expressivism and self-creation,” Deneen thunders. “The modern West” — if you read enough of the post-liberals, this begins to seem like a halfway definite location — “is unfree because it is irresponsible, unbounded, unattached,” Ahmari once bellowed in the Catholic magazine First Things.
If the post-liberals militate for more social services, it is not because of any independent concern for the victims of free-market capitalism: It is only because they hope to escape that bloated enormity, “the modern West,” and return to a time before two-income families and birth control.
Deneen does not stray far from this nostalgic model. The main premise of “Regime Change” is that all polities are necessarily divided into two parts: the many and the few. This theory is a relic of “the tradition of the ‘mixed constitution,’” defended most famously by the medieval Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas, who recognized, Deneen writes, “that the attributes arising from these different stations were at once the source of distinct vices as well as potential virtues that were endemic to each class.” Cute caricatures follow, not unlike the results of a personality test in a magazine for teenagers.
The many can be “crude and parochial,” but, at their best, they possess a “localist temperament” and display an admirable “simplicity.” Unlike the airy elites, they are “grounded in the realities of a world of limits and natural processes, in tune with the cycle of life and rhythms of seasons, tides, sun and stars.” They tend to harbor an “instinctual conservatism” because they understand that the constraints abolished by liberalism — prohibitions on premarital sex, social sanctions discouraging us from moving far from our birthplaces — in fact protect their interests: “Governing cultural forms and norms are the best means of securing the prospects for flourishing especially of the weaker and disadvantaged.” The collapse of the institution of marriage, for instance, disproportionately harms “people in the working class,” who “are far more likely to exhibit various measures of social pathology such as divorce.”
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The uninitiated might wonder whether Deneen should have consulted a single ambassador of “the many” before making so many confident assertions about “what most ordinary people instinctively seek” — but it turns out that the elect are qualified to perceive the rabble’s true convictions from the comfort of their armchairs. The few are “more likely to attain cultivation and refined taste,” and, given their special gifts, it falls to them to rule with “chivalry.”
The distinction between the few and the many “rests less on differentiation of wealth than credentials and access to a foothold and success in the managerial economy.” In other words, it is not a question of tangible material advantages but of sensibility. Prestige is not irrelevant to cultural capital, of course, but absent a theory of how status is converted into power, sorting by way of social signifiers is no more than identity politics by other means. In “Regime Change,” the few and the many are delineated only in terms of window dressing: The many are “Walmart shoppers,” as Deneen wrote in a previous book, “Why Liberalism Failed,” while the “elites” make up “the laptop class.” This facile taxonomy is not class analysis; it is astrology for the bow-tie set. It lends itself to online quizzes: Do you have “refined taste,” or are you in tune with the “tides, sun and stars”?
The logical endpoint of this line of thinking is that character is the true currency of politics, and indeed, Deneen concludes that what we need is “not an economics that purportedly seeks the equalization of outcome” but an ethos that produces a more virtuous elite — one less abashed about its role as a de facto aristocracy. While there are a few halfhearted if unexpectedly compelling policy proposals crammed into the back end of “Regime Change” (for instance, that we should distribute the appendages of the federal government across the country instead of concentrating them in D.C.), the real upshot is not about political reform but about self-improvement: The craven liberals in control should be replaced with elites committed to the ancient art of “noblesse oblige,” so that we can enjoy the fruits of a properly “mixed regime,” an unappetizing melee that Deneen repeatedly and agonizingly analogizes to a salad. It is ironic that someone who laments the decline of the liberal arts and the study of the classical languages is apparently unrepentant about introducing the portmanteau “aristopopulism” — aristocracy/populism — into the modern vocabulary, a sure harbinger of civilizational decay. Deneen makes it easy to turn away from his politics of personality and his terminological indignities. “Tyranny Inc.” may be a more complex case.
Ahmari is best known as patient zero, by which I mean it was he who originally stoked panic about drag queen story hour. In an all-too-influential tirade in 2019 against the live-and-let-live outlook propounded by many of his fellow conservatives, he wrote that the right must “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square reordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” This call to arms is chilling, especially for those of us likely to be among the post-liberals’ quarry, but Ahmari is explicit that his new book is not intended as another fusillade in the culture war (or the more alarming effort to supplant the culture war with authoritarian repression). “Tyranny Inc.” makes no mention of “cultural concerns.” Instead, it mounts an attack on the moral scandal of American capitalism. There are a few slip-ups — wistful appeals to “the ancient statesman,” ominous paeans to the “common good” — but for the most part, “Tyranny Inc.” is as sane as advertised.
Its guiding argument is that “private actors can imperil freedom just as much as overweening governments” and that “unchallenged market power can impair our rights and liberties.” These are not new suggestions — they were advanced earlier, and with considerably more sophistication, by the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson in her 2017 monograph, “Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It)” — but they bear repeating. If “Tyranny Inc.” does not quite rise to the intellectual heights of moral philosophy, it is often compelling as a work of narrative journalism.
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We meet a new mother whose boss assigns her shifts at the last minute, a woman prevented from going public about sexual harassment in her office by a restrictive nondisclosure agreement and victims of myriad other injustices in the workplace. The blood boils as Ahmari explains that comically pro-corporate judges and administrators have permitted employers to “campaign against unionization in the workplace” and “frighten workers at captive-audience meetings by telling them that unionization would mean job losses and factory closures,” even though it is illegal to fire workers for unionizing.
Ahmari is clear that even well-meaning elites are no match for a system rigged so rampantly in favor of the bosses: An employer, simply by dint of being an employer, “faces an economic compulsion that forces him to coerce the worker, regardless of his cultural outlook.” At several points, “Tyranny Inc.” seems to issue almost direct rejoinders to Deneen’s “culturism,” “the notion that all we need are healthier cultural norms.” (Culturism is a vice to which progressives, with their mania for interpersonal moralizing, are also highly prone.)
To be sure, “Tyranny Inc.” is not a paragon of conceptual rigor. Its clearest arguments concern the human costs of the power disparities between labor and capital. The other offenses it documents — the privatization of public services such as firefighting, the destruction of local newspapers by predatory private-equity companies — are tragedies, but of different kinds. Capitalism is the culprit in every case, but capitalism appears in many guises, and I doubt that all of its failures and affronts are best parsed in one relatively short book, or best understood as acts of “tyranny.”
Still, Ahmari’s parting exhortations are fundamentally sound: “The goal should be a labor market in which most sectors are unionized.” Meanwhile, a “more equal distribution of income” would have “benefits beyond the material welfare of workers and the asset-less as a class, though that in itself is a most worthy goal. It can also check the compensatory power of an asset-rich few to coerce the many in realms outside the workplace.” This assessment is not just accurate but urgent.
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Those who care about the prospects of American labor should not be too squeamish to collaborate with anyone supportive of unionization efforts and redistributive projects — but one might still wonder why Ahmari has written such an anomalously sensible book. Though he may have acquired an earnest desire to extend olive branches even to drag queens exploited on the job, I suspect he follows Deneen in assuming that “the many” are essentially conservative — that, as soon as the masses are empowered to shape society, modernity will crumble and small-town chumminess will prevail.
But “the people,” insofar as there is any such thing, do not generally favor right-wing policies. Seventy-one percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. Sixty-one percent think abortion should be legal. Eighty-one percent think divorce, Deneen’s particular bugbear, is “morally acceptable.” Deneen counsels us to trust in the wisdom of “common sense,” but the whole premise of the American adventure is that one person’s common sense is another’s disaster.
The post-liberals’ deafness to the reality and inevitability of political friction is not unrelated to their principal embarrassment, which is that they are mistaken about what liberalism is. Their confusion reveals their true objection to modern life: their fetish for homogeneity.
At least since the 1971 publication of the movement’s urtext, philosopher John Rawls’s monumental “A Theory of Justice,” liberalism has been a specifically political doctrine, not an all-compassing ethics. Its central thesis is that the state expresses respect for its citizens by allowing them to determine and pursue their own values — a process that it has a duty to facilitate, in part, per Rawls and his left-liberal followers, via generous welfare policies and the redistribution of wealth.
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The chief claim of liberalism is not that progress should be pursued at all costs or that the self takes precedence over society: Indeed, these are the sort of specific determinations about how to live that a liberal state eschews. Instead, liberalism’s foundational credo is that each community — and each person within each community — has the prerogative to devise and realize their own conception of the good.
But liberals do not seek to prevent people from defending demanding systems of ethics in their capacities as members of churches, clubs and other civic associations. There is no inconsistency involved in believing, as Deneen and Ahmari seem to, that people should opt for white picket fences and also believing, as Rawls does, that they should not be pressured to do so. Tellingly, the kinds of communities that the post-liberals call for already exist: There are the Amish in Pennsylvania (whom Deneen has commended elsewhere) and the Hasidim in Brooklyn, to name only two.
The real problem, from the post-liberal perspective, is not that liberalism abolishes community life but that it permits the wrong kind of people to form communities. Many of the symptoms the post-liberals loudly lament — drag queen story hour, androgynous youths announcing their pronouns at parties — are evidence that many communities are organizing around particular ideals. Consider Provincetown, the queer seaside haven in Massachusetts, or a college campus where students and faculty have chosen to live in accordance with feminist principles. But the post-liberals do not just crave a rooted, historically informed and communally minded public: They demand the solipsistic satisfaction of living in a world in which they only ever encounter variations on themselves.
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post.
Regime Change
Toward a Postliberal Future
By Patrick Deneen
Sentinel. 269 pp. $30
Tyranny, Inc.
How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It
By Sohrab Ahmari
Forum. 252 pp. $28
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