Before we get into what makes this election so important, perhaps it is worth saying a few words about the election itself...

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It is not often commented, but judicial textualism bears many of the same hallmarks as philosophical postmodernism. When this is properly appreciated, many of the results of textualist legal reasoning can be better understood. Textualism is founded in much the same principles as postmodernism. Understood in this way, textualism operates as a sort of system of gears allowing postmodern culture to infiltrate the legal apparatus. Since postmodernism’s aim is ultimately to undermine the legal apparatus, textualism thus becomes an instrument of subversion.

These questions have been brought into much sharper focus with the recent ruling in Bostock vs Clayton County where the Supreme Court expanded the protections offered in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include not just discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, but also ‘gender identity’ and ‘sexual orientation’.

Those criticizing the ruling have tended to fall into two camps. In the first camp are those that argue that the Bostock ruling was a perversion of textualism. This position is untenable. Textualism claims to be a positive, not a normative theory. If there is no agreement on core issues within the textualist canon then the theory is manifestly a vehicle for something else. In the second camp are those that point out that textualism is an empty formalism and that this leads to a lack of resistance against nihilistic liberal political culture. Recently this second position has been expanded by Adrian Vermeule who posits that the key driver of controversial court decisions is what he calls the “hidden constitution”. This is a set of liberal presuppositions about culture that exert what he calls a sort of “gravitational force” on court decision-making (Vermeule 2020).

In this essay, I want to expand on this second view and, in a sense, radicalize it. I want to make the case that the “hidden constitution” is, in fact, an anti-constitution; something resembling a legal computer virus that is geared toward undermining the legal apparatus itself by exploding the implicit hierarchy on which it rests. Textualist theory is where the rubber meets the road. Like utilitarianism in ethics, textualism is an instrumentalist theory that allows corrosive, nihilistic and anarchistic theories to gradually undermine the legal apparatus from within. Lacking a positive telos of its own, textualism automatically adopts the anti-telos that has been embedded in our culture by the postmodernists.

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Wishing everyone a very Merry 2,025th Christmas!

Gentile da Fabriano, 1423.

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Searle had been critical of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, and was a prominent part of the Free Speech Movement that started in 1964 at UC Berkeley, where he taught for over fifty years. But he also grew alarmed at the excesses that came to define student protests as the decade wore on. As he complained in the 1990 documentary Berkeley in the Sixties:

We attracted to Berkeley the worst collection of kooks and nuts you’ve ever seen in your life. Everybody saw this on television, and they had a completely distorted conception of it. They thought, “What you do is you go to Berkeley, and you riot and you just have a great time. It’s one big political, sexual, drug feast.”

Unsurprisingly, his objection to the radicals’ hijacking of the cause of free speech earned him criticism from the Left. In Searle’s estimation, these new enemies were not much different in spirit from his older ones. In his 1971 book The Campus War, he wrote:

I have been attacked by both the House Un-American Activities Committee… on the one hand and by several radical polemicists on the other. Stylistically, the attacks are interestingly similar. Both rely heavily on insinuation and innuendo, and both display a hatred – one might almost say terror – of close analysis and dissection of argument.

Searle sometimes characterized his approach to these matters as a defense of Enlightenment values. But in fact he was simply upholding the fundamental imperative of philosophy itself, as it has been understood since Socrates – the imperative to allow reason the freedom to pursue the truth. Searle saw those who wanted to stifle free speech as denying this freedom. And he judged those who abused this freedom to be uninterested in the pursuit of truth.

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If we look at the modern day European Union, for example, we cannot understand it without reference to thinkers like Alexandre Kojève who not only influenced, either directly or indirectly, most of the European thinkers after the Second World War but also played a large role as a French civil servant in the creation of what would become the European Union. Kojève viewed the creation of the European Union as an explicit project to realize Hegel’s universal and rational state. We see something similar if we look at the American empire that developed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The key ideologist for this empire – this liberal empire – was of course Francis Fukuyama who saw it as a manifestation of Hegel’s End of History.

None of this is a coincidence. Philosophers, especially those in the European tradition, have long seen it as their goal to supersede Hegel. But try as they might they never do. Whenever a liberal thinker requires a philosophy to justify liberal institutions they inevitably end up back with Hegel. Serious philosophers in this tradition tend to find themselves following the same trajectory. Whether they start with Nietzsche or with Heidegger, they inevitably find themselves, in one way or another, dealing with issues they find in the old German master. There is a very concrete reason for this: in the modern European tradition Hegel really is the philosopher par excellence. Alfred North Whitehead once said that all European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. We might say that all modern European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Hegel.

In a recent review of my book The Collapse of Global Liberalism, Peter Leithart has questioned my use of Hegel to chart the collapse of liberalism – both as an ideology and as embodied in concrete institutions. He is not the only one to do so. Theologians and philosophers with a background in religion have tended to be the most attuned to liberalism’s recent collapse – and they have, for the most part, asked why I insisted on dusting off Hegel to chart the rise and fall of liberalism. In this essay I would like to explain the rationale for this – because in doing so we can better understand just how interdependent liberalism and Hegel really are. In a sense, Hegel is liberalism and liberalism is Hegel, to paraphrase Hillaire Belloc. In tracing out the broad developments of Hegelian thinking and its offshoots we can better understand the trajectory that liberalism has taken as a concrete political philosophy since the Enlightenment period.It will then become clear why the only way out is through: only Hegel can bury liberalism, and he can only do so by simultaneously burying himself.

Hegel, In Himself and For Himself

Let us start with Hegel himself. What makes Hegel the liberal thinker par excellence? Certainly, Hegel is not the most articulate exponent of liberalism as a political ideology. No professor teaching a course on Liberalism 101 would reach for Hegel’s work – not even as a primary source. The key to understanding why Hegel is so important for understanding liberalism is rather because Hegel’s philosophy represents liberalism in its most stable form. In my book I distinguish between what I call ‘hard liberalism’ and ‘soft liberalism’. Hard liberalism is liberalism in a purified form. It is what happens when liberalism is taken literally and the abstract diktats that undergird it are applied directly to society. We have seen a lot of hard liberalism recently – and it has inevitably led to the collapse of the ideology itself. Soft liberalism, on the other hand, is liberalism alloyed with ideas from other traditions. In the West these ideas tend to be broadly Christian in origin. My argument in the book is that soft liberalism is somewhat “stable” because the non-liberal ideas provide ballast for the liberal ideas and prevent them floating off toward self-destructive extremes.

Hegel’s philosophy represents the most comprehensive and stable form of soft liberalism ever proposed. Hegel explicitly recognises that hard liberalism is dangerous and risks tipping into instability due to its extreme individualism or, at a societal level, into a cacophony of irrational desires. For example, in his Philosophy of Right Hegel says the following of the hard liberal ideas of Jean-Jacque Rousseau:

Rousseau considers the will only in the form of the individual will… and regards the universal will not as the rational will as such, but only as the common will which proceeds from the individual will as conscious wills. The result is that he reduces the union of individuals in the state to a contract and hence to something based on their arbitrary will and opinions, and on their express consent given at their own discretion.

The solution to this is not to give up on liberalism as such but rather to temper it and channel it into rational institutions and laws. This is the goal of Hegel’s political philosophy. He does not want a society stripped of its substance, as some of the liberal thinkers seem to espouse, but rather one that integrates purely formal rights with morality. Hegel calls this fusion “Sittlichkeit” which translates to the “ethical life” or the “ethical order”. Hegel’s idea is to explicitly integrate the moral structures of the society that he lives in – broadly, Lutheran Christianity – into the state structures. Other thinkers in the liberal tradition tend to add the moral dimension as an afterthought, but Hegel integrates it directly into his political philosophy. In doing so, he provides the fullest expression of what I call soft liberalism.

Yet Hegel’s thought contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. Hegel is still a liberal after all – and if I am correct, liberalism is an inherently unstable ideology. Hegel’s philosophy fails because it has only a purely formal conception of morality. If the reader searches in Hegel’s writings for concrete pronouncements on what constitutes the Good Life – on what morals the ideal State should follow – he or she will come up empty. Morality in Hegel is merely the allusion to morality. He never grasps the nettle and deal with complex moral questions like, for example, Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle do. Hegel seems to broadly take morality for granted.

Related to this is Hegel’s reading of Christianity. Deeply influenced by his Lutheranism, Hegel expounds what today would be recognised as liberal Protestantism. While he never explicitly states it, he seems to view the New Testament as a largely mythic doctrine – something that would be more perfectly espoused by Hegel’s student, David Strauss. No doubt he views the morality that the New Testament embodies as being evolutionarily superior to the morality found in other religions across time and space. But nevertheless, he seems to view this morality with the same hypersubjectivism that one would find in extremely liberal Protestant churches today. For Hegel Freedom is the highest virtue – and while this Freedom is certainly not libertine freedom of the sort promoted by liberals today, it is nevertheless highly subjectivised. It is far closer to the liberal conception of freedom than it is to the Augustinian. Hegel seems to want an absolute minimum of rules governing personal behaviour and maximum scope for creating one’s own life in line with one’s own “reason”.

Hegel, like the soft liberalism that he perfects, wants a minimum of constrictions on human freedom – and, importantly, that freedom is seen as coming from within. It is written on the heart of every man and in the process of living it is realised through a dynamic process of interaction with the world. Social and political institutions are primarily there to channel these sentiments of the human heart and form themselves in its image. This is sola scriptura transformed into a political project and a blueprint for the ideal State. It is ultimately a bet. Give a man a Bible and the freedom to read it and he will become a model citizen. Set up a State that integrates the whims of this model citizen and you will create a model society. In this framework any imposition on the citizen’s right to form his own conception of the ethical life is seen as an arbitrary impingement on his freedom. Hegel, and soft liberalism more generally, reluctantly defend some hierarchies in society – but only what they see as a minimum necessary for channelling the Spirit of Man. This is the Geist – the Hegelian embodiment of the march of Enlightenment ideals. The Geist is definitively liberal Protestant.

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PLO: You’ve described global liberalism as a “delusional” post-Cold War vision about a frictionless free-flowing global economy. Can you tell us what made that delusion plausible for a time?

PP: To a large extent late liberalism just cannabilised what was left of the pre-liberal social capital. On my reading, liberali…

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To be sure, the Executive Order itself is, on a close inspection, less radical than some have supposed. It does not pretend to undo the Court’s decision, but emphasizes finding ways to prosecute those who happen to burn the flag in connection with other offenses. But it provides a good occasion to revisit the more fundamental questions. Was the Supreme Court right to hold that flag burning is speech protected by the First Amendment? And do individuals have, in any event, a moral right to flag desecration? I would answer both questions in the negative. Let’s consider them in reverse order.

Natural law and flag burning

It should go without saying that what is at issue here is the burning of one’s country’s flag, specifically. I am not claiming that it is always necessarily wrong to burn flags of other kinds. Nor, of course, can it be denied that there are some conceivable circumstances where it would be licit to burn one’s country’s flag – for example, if it had somehow become contaminated with deadly pathogens and had to be destroyed so as to prevent infection.

What is at issue is whether it is licit to burn one’s own country’s flag as an act of protest, and in particular as an expression of hostility or contempt for what the flag represents. This sort of act, I argue, is immoral. Some critics will object that this is merely an emotional response. That people feel offended by the practice does not, they will say, entail that it is wrong.

It is certainly true that flag burning generates strong emotions. But the critics who dismiss opposition to it as grounded in nothing more than emotion get things backwards. It’s not that people judge flag burning to be immoral because they find it offensive. Rather, they find it offensive because they judge it to be immoral.

To be sure, the average person may not be able to give a philosophically sophisticated explanation of why he judges it to be immoral. But that’s true of most commonsense moral judgments. The average person is also unlikely to be able to give a sophisticated explanation of why adultery, stealing, oreven murder are wrong. That hardly entails that he is mistaken in judging these things to be immoral. And neither is he wrong to judge flag burning to be immoral. His negative emotional reaction to it – like his negative emotional reaction to adultery, stealing, and murder – reflects an inchoate understanding that these practices are all contrary to natural law.

The key to understanding why flag burning is wrong lies in what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the virtue of piety. Piety is the disposition to show gratitude and respect for those on whom one depends in a fundamental way. For example, one owes such gratitude and respect to one’s parents, and ultimately to God above all. But in between one’s parents and God comes one’s country, on which one also depends and to which one also owes gratitude and respect. Patriotism is thus a component of piety, analogous to the honor one owes one’s parents and the reverence one owes God. Hence, just as it is wrong to show contempt for one’s parents or to blaspheme against God, so too is it wrong to show disrespect and ingratitude toward one’s country.

This is what flag burning does, and that is the reason most people find it so offensive. Defenders of flag burning lump it in with criticism of political leaders or of government policy, but it is not at all like that. The flag does not represent this or that leader, party, or policy, nor does it represent even any particular form of government. It represents the country itself. The flag burner is not like someone who merely disagrees with his father. Rather, he is like someone who publicly burns a picture of his father or otherwise publicly shows contempt for him. Political disagreements are like quarrels between family members. Flag burning, by contrast, is like declaring that one not only disagrees with other family members, but has contempt for the family itself.

Now, just as patriotism, on Aquinas’s analysis, falls under the virtue of piety, piety in turn falls under the virtue of justice. In this way, flag burning is a sin against justice, because it iscontrary to the respect and gratitude to which one’s country, like one’s parents and God, is entitled. But it is also a sin against charity. In particular, sins that tend to undermine the unity of a social order (such as discord and schism) fall, on Aquinas’s analysis, under the category of sins contrary to charity. And flag burning of its nature tends to undermine unity. For the flag burner’s act evinces his own alienation from the larger social order, and by its public nature it tends to (and indeed is typicallyintended to) encourage others to feel a similar alienation.

If parents tolerated such expressions of insolence from their children, their authority would be undermined and the stability of the family threatened. For a country to tolerate public expressions of contempt for it such as flag burning tends to destabilize it in a similar way. That is not to say that the analogy is exact or the danger as grave. Obviously, one or two insolent children in a family of six are more destabilizing than one or two flag burners in a nation of sixty million. All the same, because flag burning of its nature tends to undermine unity to some extent, the more common it becomes and the more tolerant people are of it, the greater the disunity that will prevail in a country.

The state thus has a legitimate interest in curbing it. To be sure, making flag burning illegal may, under certain circumstances, do more harm than good. Hence there may be practical reasons why, though a government has a right to make flag burning illegal, it would be better for it not to exercise that right. The point, though, is that it does have that right under natural law. Whether to exercise it is a matter of applying the virtue of prudence to concrete circumstances of time and place.

But don’t individuals themselves have a moral right to express themselves in this way, even if we concede that it would be better for them not to do so? Isn’t this especially so if the flag they burn is their own private property? The answer to both questions is No, at least given the account of rights developed by natural law theorists in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition.

As I explained in a previous Postliberal Order essay, according to natural law theory, rights have a teleological basis. That is to say, they exist for a purpose, namely the purpose of facilitating the realization of the ends set for us by our nature. For example, as rational social animals, we are by nature directed or aimed toward discovering what is true and good and communicating itto others. We could not do this if others were at liberty arbitrarily to interfere with our attempts to communicate it. Hence we must, under natural law, have the right not to be interfered with in that way. This is the foundation of the right to free speech. It is better thought of as the right to express what is true and good.

But if communicating what is true and good is the aim or point of the right to free speech, then there can hardly be a right to communicate what is false or evil. Now, this does not entail that your speech can be interfered with merely because some other particular individual, or the government, or the majority of one’s fellow citizens judges that what you are saying is wrong. For their judgment might itself be wrong. And the way we typically find out which side is wrong is through the give and take of debate. Hence, though there is no right to express error as such, the right to free speech nevertheless must be broad enough to tolerate a certain amount of error.

All the same, since we are by nature rational social animals, the right to free speech cannot be so broad that it would allow for speech that is positively destructive of reason itself or of the very social order. That would be perverse. Hence governments can legitimately suppress speech that tends to be destructive either of reason or of the social order. This is why, as even the most ardent advocates of free speech typically acknowledge, it is perfectly legitimate for a government to suppress speech that attempts to incite others to violence, or which defames others. The natural law theorist simply points out that there are also other, less extreme cases where governments have the right to suppress speech that is inherently subversive of the social order. And that remains true even when there may be good circumstantial reasons for a government not to exercise that right in a particular case.

What is true of the right to free speech is, according to natural law theory, true also of the right to private property. That right too exists in order to facilitate our flourishing as rational social animals. As I have argued elsewhere, when worked out in detail, the natural law account of property entails a wide-ranging right to use our possessions as we see fit. But that right too has limits. It cannot be so broad as to permit what is positively destructive of either reason or the social order.

In light of these principles, we can see that because flag burning of its nature tends to be corrosive of the social order, a person’s rights to free speech and to his private property cannot be strong enough to entail a right to burn the flag. There simply can be no such right under natural law. Again, it may nevertheless be imprudent, under certain circumstances, for a government to suppress the practice of burning the flag. The point, though, is that it would not be unjust for a government to do so.

The constitution and flag burning

Even readers who sympathize with this argument may judge it to be moot. Suppose that natural law theory would indeed permit a government to suppress flag burning. The U.S. Constitution, it might be objected, nevertheless does not permit this. So, the reader might conclude, natural law considerations are of purely academic interest. For all practical purposes, the question has been settled in favor of the flag burners, at least in the American context.

But there are two problems with this reply. First, the overturning of Roe v. Wade should make anyone think twice before confidently asserting that some controversial matter of constitutional law has been settled. And Texas v. Johnson, I would argue, was, like Roe, simply wrongly decided. The Framers of the Constitution did not lay the foundation for a right to flag burning any more than they laid the foundation for a right to abortion. Many conservatives suppose otherwise because Justice Antonin Scalia sided with the liberal majority. But ironically, dissenting liberal justice John Paul Stevens was closer to the truth when he stated that the majority were essentially “judicial activists” when pretending to find a right to flag burning in the First Amendment.

The First Amendment rules out laws “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” But no one supposes that the Framers intended this in an unqualified sense. For example, no one thinks they intended to rule out laws prohibiting libelous speech or speech that incites violence. And if the words of the First Amendment do not protect even all forms of speech, they can hardly be said to protect also “all expression” beyond speech (as Scalia claimed they do).

Certainly the First Amendment was intended to protect the expression of certain ideas. But as Stevens and Justice William Rehnquist pointed out in their dissenting opinions on Texas v. Johnson, to prohibit flag burning would in no way prevent the expression of any idea. For any idea the flag burner might want to express in that way could be expressed instead in another way, such as in words. Moreover, while Scalia was correct to hold that the First Amendment was intended to protect “speech critical of the government,” it is simply a non sequitur to conclude that this protects flag burning. For as I argued above, flag burning goes beyond merely criticizing a particular official,administration, party, policy, or even form of government. It is an expression of contempt for the country itself.

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Debate over President Trump’s tariff policy too often proceeds as if we are faced with a choice between classical liberal free trade theory on the one hand, and a rigid protectionism (perhaps even mercantilism) on the other. This is a false choice.

The Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law theorists who hammered out Catholic Social Thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had much of importance to say about these matters. Their inclination was to reject doctrinaire trade theories of either a free trade or protectionist kind. They advocated a middle ground position which recognized that concrete policy in this area greatly depends on the judgment of prudence and cannot be determined a priori by appeal to abstract principle. In my opinion, they provide a model for contemporary postliberal thinking about these matters.

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Frederick Childe’s “Fourth of July 1916”

In my neighborhood, we’ve been hearing fireworks for days. I love it. I don’t even need to see them. Just hearing them go off is comforting. A few neighborhoods over, the City of Alexandria has banned fireworks entirely. The mayor prefers the colors of the rainbow to the dawn’s early light, and he would rather sig…

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Rioters are very different from everyday offenders – thieves, murderers, and the like – who typically do their work in secret. Even robbers are typically seen only by their victims, and quickly flee the scene. The mode of such lawbreaking manifests an overall fear of the law and of police. These offenses are also typically committed on a small scale, by one or a handful of individuals, and directed only against other particular individuals rather than against the law as an institution. Moreover, police and other public officials are usually able to enter the picture only after the fact, to punish the crime rather than prevent it.

A riot, by contrast, involves a large number of people openly and brazenly showing contempt for the law, and for the police and public officials who are sworn to uphold it. And it is not a brief episode that police can react to only after the fact, but an ongoing event that they can and must respond to as it happens. For public authorities to dither in the face of a riot, or to treat rioters with kid gloves, is to aid and abet the rioters in their aim of bringing the law and its representatives into contempt and making them appear ineffectual. Such toleration thus has an inherent tendency to weaken the state. In this way it is analogous to a failure to repel an act of war.

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Multipolarity is a weekly geopolitics and geo-economics podcast, featuring Postliberal Order contributor Philip Pilkington, and British journalist Andrew Collingwood.

As US hegemony weakens, it aims to chart the rise of the new multipolar world order. Over the past two years, it has covered everything from the new era in hypersonic missiles, to the fisc…

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But the word also has more, narrow, technical, and pejorative senses. Sometimes, to call a system of ideas an “ideology” is intended precisely to indicate that there is something wrong with it. This is the sense of the word operative when someone is labeled an “ideologue,” a term never used as a positive or even neutral description.

There are two main ways in which “ideology” is used as a pejorative. One of them is associated with Marxism, in which an ideology is a false system of ideas that functions to uphold an oppressive economic order. Marxism itself, on this view, is not an ideology, but rather simply the correct description of socioeconomic reality, which exposes rival descriptions as ideological. There are various critical questions one could raise about this view, such as whether it can provide a non-question-begging rationale for taking Marxism alone to be exempt from unmasking as a mere ideology. But the Marxist sense of “ideology” is not what I’ll be addressing in this article.

I’ll focus here instead on the pejorative use of “ideology” common among conservative intellectuals (though not only among them). On this usage, an ideology is, to a first approximation, a system of ideas that describes social, political or economic reality in too simplistic and dogmatic a manner, and an ideologue is someone in thrall to such an ideology. Typically, for those who use the term this way, Marxism itself is indeed an ideology. But those who use the term in this way would not necessarily regard all views that they disagree with as ideologies. For on this usage, a view could be mistaken but nevertheless not simplistic or dogmatically held, and thus not “ideological.”

This usage describes a real phenomenon, since there are certainly views about social, political, and economic reality that are simplistic and adhered to dogmatically. But more needs to be said, which is why I described my characterization of this sense of the term “ideology” as merely a first approximation. For people of any political persuasion are, of course, capable of thinking simplistically and dogmatically. Is there something the terms “ideology” and “ideologue” capture that goes beyond these familiar human foibles? There is, but to see it requires a bit of explanation. Let’s start with a common but, I think, inadequate conservative approach to explaining what makes a view “ideological.”

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Family policy is much bigger than family policy. Family policy is, in fact, the fulcrum on which the entire global conservative movement will soon turn. This movement will have to redefine itself, root and branch, to accommodate family policy – and if it fails our societies will be engulfed in a demographic winter that will cause economic and social collapse. More on that, in a moment.

I want to start by talking about something a bit broader. Namely, the American conservative movement. That may sound a little obscure, but the reality is that most of the conservative movements in the Western world have taken their cue from the American conservative movement – although what the Hungarians have been doing for the past 15 years. My thesis is that family policy – and the problem of demographic decline that it addresses – poses a fundamental problem for the American conservative worldview typically referred to as “fusionism.”

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When J.D. Vance criticized the limits of free speech in Germany at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, the German political class responded with outrage. Central to his criticism was Germany's established “firewall”policy—the cross-party practice of politically isolating the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), whic…

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DB: Typically, the individual and the state are perceived as being in opposition to oneanother. In your book, Why Liberalism Failed, you argue that this is not the case. Could you elaborate on this perspective?

PJD: According to liberal philosophy, humans are by nature autonomous free individuals. The theory holds that the state comes into being in order to protect their individual rights. If and when the state exceeds that mandate, it becomes an oppressive force limiting the natural rights of individuals, and needs to be trimmed back.

Of course, the theory of naturally free human beings is completely false:

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Is it immoral to be rich? Are the poor virtuous simply because they are poor? One would think so from the use some make of certain scriptural passages. The socialist philosopher and self-described “heretical Christian” Philip Goff asks “Does the Bible mind if you are rich?” He answers by quoting scriptural passages such as Christ’s warning that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24, RSV), and the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, in which poor Lazarus is saved while the rich man is damned (Luke 16: 19-25). Goff’s attitude is common among progressive Christians. And it can hardly be denied that criticism of the rich is indeed a longstanding theme of Christian preaching, perhaps most famously exemplified by St. John Chrysostom’s sermons on the Lazarus parable.

But merely citing such texts hardly suffices to establish that the Christian tradition “minds if you are rich,” if that is meant to imply that there is something inherently wrong with being rich. For we need to know exactly why the rich are often criticized in scripture and in the broader tradition. Is the fact that they possess wealth in itself evil? Or is the problem rather with something that is commonly – but nevertheless only contingently – associated with riches? That there is more going on here than Goff and other progressives suppose is evident from the fact that the Old Testament describes such figures as Abraham, Joseph, David, and Job as wealthy but also as righteous, and commands that “you shall not show partiality to a poor man in his dispute” (Exodus 23:3, NKJV). Then there’s the fact that after warning of the dangers of wealth, the Book of Sirach immediately goes on to say:

Blessed is the rich man that is found without blemish… He that could have transgressed, and hath not transgressed: and could do evil things, and hath not done them: Therefore are his goods established in the Lord, and all the church of the saints shall declare his alms. (31:8,10-11, Douay-Rheims)

Even just from a cursory reading of the Bible, then, it is evident that Christianity does not in fact hold that the rich are evil simply by virtue of being rich, or that the poor are always to be favored simply because they are poor…

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The American invitees were noteworthy in at least one respect: Wolf, Lighthizer, and I represented not only various miens of the American “New Right,” but a different flavor altogether from the mainstream of Canadian conservatism. As was evident in the profusion of various booths in the hallway outside the main meeting hall, together representing a wide variety of Canadian organizations, interest groups, industries, and think tanks, Canadian conservatism remains firmly under the control of the “Old Right” - the Right of Reagan-era fusionism, and even today heavily overrepresented by libertarian business interests. I encountered not just one, but several booths proudly sporting the visage of Ayn Rand as an icon of a “conservatism” — a label that Rand herself rejected, and a form of “conservatism” that many Americans now rightly suspect of not having conserved anything at all. Joining her on one banner - the “Ladies of Liberty Alliance” - was the libertarian, transgender economist Deirdre McCloskey, dedicated foe of conservatism. Such is the general state of conservatism in Canada.

In their invitation to me, the organizers expressed their hope and belief that it would benefit Canadian conservatives to hear an alternative perspective such as mine. Ironically enough, in spite of various trade imbalances, it appears that America today has a booming export industry of “new conservatives,” while places such as Canada at the moment lack a home-grown brand. Or, at least, that appears to be the current state of things, until the many young people whom I met at the conference begin to assume positions of power and influence over these or altogether new institutions. They are perhaps several years “behind” their American counterparts, but many (in sotto voce tones) expressed utter disillusionment with the institutionalized “conservatism” in Canada, and spoke of their great interest in the ideas being explored by the American “new right.”

However, as in the domain of natural resources, in fact Canada has a rich if today subterranean vein of postliberalism already at its disposal, ripe for exploration and rediscovery. During my talk I underlined the prescience and wisdom of Canadian political philosopher George Grant, a figure almost forgotten not only in the broader conservative world, but even among conservatives in his native Canada. If my efforts will bear any fruit, in the not-distant future, such conferences will display far fewer pictures of Ayn Rand (or, ideally, none whatsoever), and far more of George Grant.

The dire need for a reintroduction of Grant to Canadian conservatism is no more vividly demonstrated than in the dramatic reaction of mainstream Canadians in response to President Trump’s expressed interest in making Canada America’s 51st-state, particularly in a dramatic swing in opinion polls in advance of the Canadian election taking place on this coming Monday, April 28.

In the wake of the felt threat of American imperialism, Grant’s analysis in his classic if largely-forgotten 1965 work Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism provides a discerning analysis of why this dramatic shift in electoral support, away from Conservatives and toward Liberals, was not only unsurprising, but could have been predicted. Grant also provides a roadmap for how Canadian conservatism needs to remake itself, especially if it loses in a few days’ time, but even if it wins.

Grant’s most famous work is often and not altogether incorrectly regarded as a deeply pessimistic threnody for the prospects of Canadian nationalism - as its subtitle attests. Its immediate occasion was the defeat of then-Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who served as Canada’s PM from 1957-1963.1 Grant’s opening chapters lament not so much the electoral defeat of Diefenbaker by the Liberal party, but Diefenbaker’s failure (in his view) to articulate, defend, and institutionalize a distinctive form of conservative Canadian nationalism. Grant’s analysis prophetically intuited that Canadian conservatism instead would become dominated by libertarian impulses, which - in his correct view - would prove supine to the anti-nationalist forces of modern capitalism. In Grant’s estimation, Diefenbaker did not see clearly enough that the effort to forge an alliance between more rural, nationalist elements of Canada with the business interests located especially in Toronto and Montreal would inexorably draw Canadian conservatism into its current form: “no such combination was possible, and therefore our nation was bound to disappear” (16).2

Reading Grant’s descriptions of Diefenbaker was striking for striking similarities to the very recent history in America, and specifically, the titanic opposition of the establishment toward Diefenbaker which anticipated the more recent response to Trump. This early paragraph in particular jumped out at me:

It is interesting to speculate why Diefenbaker raised the concentrated wrath of the established classes. Most of his critics claim that he is dominated by ambition, almost to the point of egomania…. His actions turned the ruling class into a pack howling for his blood. Astute politicians who are only interested in political power, simply do not act this way.

The parallels don’t end there. Diefenbaker was propelled to victory through widely populist support, in open opposition to forces that were undermining Canadian sovereignty. The main force, at that time, was not called “globalism,” but rather, “continentalism,” or the effective merging of Canada to the liberal economic and military juggernaut of the United States. To the extent that Grant deeply admired Diefenbaker - and thought he might have been the vehicle for the birth of a modern, Canadian nationalism - it was to the extent that he believed that Canada must remain both culturally and economically distinct from the United States and the temptations of “continentalism.”

This would have had to have been accomplished by uncompromising commitments to two main programs:

1. Rejection of the libertarian hostility to government, and even an embrace of “planning” against the supposed benefits of the invisible hand of the “free market.”

2. A strong working alliance between the older Tory tradition of the English-speaking stock who had departed America at the time of the revolution, and the more traditionalist Catholic French-speaking Quebecois.

Grant’s positive praise for Diefenbaker’s nationalist economics would be all but unrecognizable to most of the denizens of contemporary Canadian “conservatism” (based on what I saw and heard at the recent conference). Grant spoke admiringly of Canada’s tradition of public projects and a committed civil service (in the British tradition, he underscored). But he also noted the incoherence to be found in Diefenbaker’s position, one which combined “prairie populism” with “private-enterprise ideology,” and noted that “his talk of free enterprise” stood at odds with “an older Canadian conservatism” which “had used public power to achieve national purposes” (14-15). Ultimately, in Grant’s telling, “the free-enterprise assumptions of the Diefenbaker administration led to actions that were obviously anti-national.” Grant would be entirely unsurprised that, in the not-distant future, both right- and left-liberals in the U.S. and Canada would strike free-trade agreements that rendered the idea of nationalist economics all but moot for both nations.

Meanwhile, the suspicion of the Quebecois toward English-speaking Canadians was likely only matched by the the inherent anti-Catholicism of the old Tory stock, rendering Grant’s second hope stillborn. Both of these aims were unmet, and even proved to be unworkable, by the end of Diefenbaker’s term.

But even had Diefenbaker successfully held at bay the libertarian impulses within his own party (and himself), and even had an alliance between the conservative elements of English- and French-speaking Canada been possible, the massive gravitational pull of the United States (and, in Grant’s view, modernity itself) was simply irresistible:

“Modern civilization makes all local cultures anachronistic…. The argument that Canada, a local culture, must disappear can, therefore be stated in three steps. First, men everywhere move ineluctably toward membership in the universal and homogenous state. Second, Canadians live next to a society at is the heart of modernity. Third, nearly all Canadians think that modernity is good, so nothing essential distinguishes Canadians from Americans…” (53).

He recognized the irresistible dynamic that was likely insurmountable by any single political figure, no matter how gifted:

The United States is [simply] the most progressive society on earth and therefore the most radical force for the homogenizing of the world. By its very nature the capitalist system makes the national boundaries only matters of political formality” (42-3).

Grant’s lament was not only for a missed opportunity, resembled the impotent cry of Cassandra against a prophecy discernible by recognition of near-inevitable forces.

The failure Canada to develop a distinctive form of conservative Canadian nationalism is today evident in the dynamics of its imminent election and, in particular, the dramatic shift in polling for the Conservative and Liberal parties coincident with the exact moment of President Trump’s inauguration.

Famously or infamously, President Trump began sounding his interest in incorporating Canada - whether fully or in part - into the United States (along with Greenland). Until that point, the Conservative Party, led by Pierre Poilievre, had been comfortably leading in the polls, reflecting deep dissatisfaction and exhaustion with Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. Recognizing his deep unpopularity, Trudeau stepped down on January 6, 2025. The current Prime Minister, Mark Carney (Liberal), was selected as party leader on March 9 and appointed as Prime Minister five days later on March 14. By that time, however, the fortunes of the two main parties had already dramatically switched, with polling indicating that the Liberal party now would comfortably beat the Conservatives. This sudden shift occurred in early January, allowing the possibility that Trudeau’s resignation was the cause; however, nearly every observer recognizes that the shift occurred at the very moment that Trump began expressing strong interest in making Canada into the U.S.’s 51st state.

What’s so striking and even peculiar about this reversal is, on its face, how unexpected such a reaction should be. Around the world, in nearly every advanced liberal democracy, the conservative party is also the party of a renewed nationalism - parties that now insist on stronger borders, a bolstered national identity, economic nationalism, and suspicion toward trans-national institutions or “globalization.” And yet, in response to the nationalist assertions of Donald Trump, Canada quite suddenly, dramatically, and instinctively, piled in behind the Liberal party effectively as their “nationalist” response, in defense of Canada’s sovereignty against the incursions of the American behemoth.

In the most philosophic chapter of his book - Chapter 5 - Grant makes a startling claim, one all the more arresting when recognizing that it was written in 1965 in the midst of the Cold War. While Marxism, he writes, is indeed a progressivist and revolutionary doctrine, it stops short of the far more thoroughgoing revolutionary nature of modern liberalism. Marxism, Grant argued, was premised on the theory that revolution would elicit in a certain political fruition, namely, a world in which alienation between the classes, between man and his work, between man and nature, and between man and man ceases to exist. “Marxism includes therefore a doctrine of human good (call it, if you will, happiness)…. But such a doctrine of good means that Marx is not purely a philosopher of the age of progress; he is rooted in the teleological philosophy that pre-dates the age of progress” (54-5).

By contrast, liberalism “denies any conception of the good.” That denial is the root commitment of liberalism, its fundamental essence. “Nothing must stand in the way of our absolute freedom to create the world as we want it. There must be no conception of the good that puts limitations on human action. This definition of man as freedom constitutes the heart of the age of progress. The doctrine of progress is not, as Marx believed, the perfectibility of man, but an open-ended progression in which men will be endlessly free to make the world as they want it.” (54-55; emphasis mine).

At this point Grant makes his most extraordinary claim, especially in light of the era in which he wrote it: the greater threat of revolutionary progressivism arises not from Soviet Marxism, but from liberalism, particularly as embodied in Canada’s powerful neighbor to the south - the United States of America. “North-American liberalism expresses the belief in open-ended progress more accurately than Marxism.” Grant’s claim that America — as the consummately liberal nation — was more revolutionary than the Marxist Soviet Union departs quite notably from the then-regnant “conservative” theories in the United States, especially those of Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin (toward whose thought Grant nevertheless expressed admiration). According to their accounts, which proved more attractive to American conservatives for reasons likely to do with a tendency toward self-congratulation amid the Cold War —American liberalism was a more conservative philosophy than Marxism, because it was premised on a theory of fixed human nature (as depicted in Locke’s “state of nature”). Grant — arguably more capable of discerning the dangers not only from Marxism, but even more insidious dangers emanating from American liberalism — recognized that liberalism was more radical due to its fundamental commitment of freedom that ultimately sought (and required) liberation from human nature itself. Grant was especially attentive to the close alignment between liberalism and an embrace of transformative technology. “The conquest of human and non-human nature becomes the only public value” (56).

The entire thrust of Grant’s powerful, short, work, was a Cassandra-like warning that Canadian conservatism should not model itself to the so-called “conservatism” of American liberalism. Canada might (or, might have) served as an alternative model (or, a path not taken,) for North America. By instead reviving a pre-liberal form of conservatism that combined economic common-good nationalism and social conservatism that was especially to be encouraged among the old Tory remnant and Quebecois Catholics, Canada might forge a distinctive path, providing an alternative model for conservatism in contrast to its massively powerful southern neighbor. Grant’s lament was that, by failing to take this path during Diefenbaker’s term, Canada had likely sealed its fate as a mere “branch office” of the American liberal imperium.

All of which brings us to the political dynamics of the past several weeks, leading to Monday’s vote. Had Canada generally, and Canadian conservatism in particular, heeded the counsel of George Grant, a very different response to Donald Trump could have been expected. If we imagine for a moment that Canada had developed this alternate version of conservatism, in the first instance, it might well have provided a model that would have been recognized far earlier by its southern neighbor. The Canadian nation would not have been surprised by the populist discontents that fueled the ascent of Trump, recognizing that liberalism is ultimately an anti-human philosophy, and therefore cannot be borne by ordinary citizens who have been drowning in the supposed “blessings of liberty,” both economic and social. The general attitude would more likely have been, “what took you so long?”

Such a conservatism would also have recognized that the best defense against a renewed American nationalism (even the stated threat against Canada’s own ongoing nationhood) would not be to rush headlong into support for left-liberals, who, as the vanguards of advanced progressivism, are animated by a deep mistrust toward the very idea of the nation. The irony of the Canadian reaction is rich, profound, and stunning: in response to the rise of American nationalism, and lacking any well-developed nationalist tradition of its own of the sort which George Grant had commended sixty-years ago, Canadians shifted their political support for its own continued existence to the party of … anti-nationalist globalism. One can only imagine how George Grant would simultaneously both laugh and cry at this absurdity.

Grant affords us yet further insight into the sudden shift of Canadian support to liberal left. Grant notes that there are two groups that deny that America is the “spearhead of progress.” The first - as we have noted - are the American “conservatives,” a.k.a., right-liberals. The second, ironically, are Canada’s Marxists, who regard American capitalism as the essence of “reactionary” and not “progressive” forces. Here again, a certain irony developed that Grant perceived even in 1965: believing Marxism to be more “revolutionary” than American liberalism, the Canadian left became “nationalist” in the name of their supposed more progressive worldview: “Canadian Marxists have therefore argued that Canadian nationalism serves the interests of progress because our incorporation into the United States would add to the power of reaction in the world. To be a progressive in Canada is to be nationalistic” (54; emphasis mine).

Again, the irony is thick. Canadian nationalism-qua-progressivism is ultimately anti-nationalist, ultimately a mirror image of the American liberalism it purports to oppose, while a genuine (conservative) nationalism would have afforded a far more genuine alternative to American liberalism and faux Canadian nationalism. Lacking that conservative nationalist tradition, the only “anti-American” mode that Canadians can conceive is to shift left - i.e., a “nationalism” that ultimately coincides with the anti-nationalist trajectory of advanced liberalism. Grant would not have been remotely surprised by the sudden and immediate shift to the left of the Canadian electorate in response to Trump, and would likely have simply said, if not “I told you so,” then “you should have listened.”

All is not lost. After all, Grant believed that liberalism was “baked into the American cake,” that America lacked any pre-modern tradition that might have served as a break on its inherent progressivist liberalism. And yet, unexpectedly, even miraculously, America has (at least momentarily) arrested its own progressivist liberal tendencies in its rejection both of liberal economics and liberationist progressive social ideals. As Grant would surely recognize, if America could achieve this unexpected achievement - in many ways against the grain of core aspects of its own liberal tradition - how much more likely might it be that Canada could achieve the same?

If Canada’s Conservatives are indeed licking their wounds on Monday night, they may be tempted to “blame Trump” and double-down on the “conservatism” of yesteryear, i.e., with appeals to the wisdom of Ayn Rand. But one hopes that their openness to the ideas from some of the countercultural conservatives “down south” - including yours truly - will nudge them to recognize that the departure from their own postliberal conservative tradition would have likely strengthened the Conservative Party in response not only to American nationalism, but American liberal globalism.

In the event the Conservatives win, the danger of misreading the election results is even more perilous, likely leading them to the temptation to continue business as usual (figuratively and literally). But, here again, right-liberals can never really “defeat” left-liberals, since they will always both be their slightly tardier doppelgängers, and will ultimately simply be absorbed into the project of radical liberation premised on the conquest of human and non-human nature.

Whatever the results of Monday’s election, conservatives of both nations should hope and pray that Canadians re-discover the best of their own tradition - captured and available in Grant’ extraordinary lament - while their American brethren acknowledge that they have much to learn from one of the greatest, if too-often overlooked, political philosophers ever to examine the great challenge and potential promise of a genuiely North American conservative political philosophy.