For one reason or another, conscription has been in the news recently. In the past few years, several European countries have reintroduced some form of “national service,” with Latvia doing so in 2023 and Croatia doing so earlier this year. More notably, there have been growing discussions and proposals to impose similar conscription in larger Western European countries, such as the hapless Conservative Party government in Britain in 2024, or the increasing possibility of Germany reintroducing a draft. While it is somewhat unsurprising that this would be discussed in Europe, given the anti-Russian obsession of the European elite, similar proposals have been raised in the U.S.

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The second Trump presidency is embedding a new regime, in Stephen Skowronek’s parlance, in American politics. While many continue to debate how to place Trump in political time, that being the time which measures “the years that unfold between periodic resets of the nation’s ideological trajectory,” it can be discerned from his approach to executive governance during the second term thus far that Trump 2.0’s is a reconstructive presidency. By which we mean, Trump is repudiating, rhetorically and institutionally, the conservative insurgency of Ronald Reagan—the last president to reset political time and institute a new regime, which has defined the nation’s ideological trajectory up to this point.

The ideology underpinning the Reagan regime, which lasted from the 1980s until it eventually ran out of steam under the presidency of Joe Biden (2021-2025), was fundamentally liberal. This regime was defined by the promotion and institutionalization of global free trade, deregulation at home, a highly interventionist foreign policy, and the internalization of the dogma that American identity was not fixed to a certain people or place, as JD Vance proclaimed it is, but that anybody born anywhere in the world could become an American simply by proclaiming that they believed in a set of liberal values. Since America’s primary adversary collapsed not long after Reagan left office, and America was globally preponderant in its power and reach at the unipolar moment, his mythification in American politics had, for the majority of the post-Cold War era, seemingly validated the ideology and politics he represented. This is why every one of his successors, even those from the opposite party, as Skowronek himself has shown, “has been subject to political expectations that he set; everyone has tested and manipulated standards that he established.” For example, a major issue for George H.W Bush, Reagan’s “articulator,” in sustaining his leadership authority was the difficulty of defining himself in relation to Reagan’s overbearing shadow in foreign and domestic policy; ultimately, his perceived betrayal of the Reagan Revolution, through his raising of taxes and advancing a pragmatic yet unlofty form of (small ‘C’) conservatism, contributed to his declining support amongst conservatives.

In order to appeal to a polity who had been captured by the Reagan regime, Bill Clinton and his New Democrats sought to shift the Democratic Party away from its insistence on pacifism abroad and social programmes at home, such as welfare, to reshape the party in accordance with the changes in American politics and economics made by Reagan; leading Jack Godwin to write How Bill Clinton Reengineered the Reagan Revolution by further modernizing the federal government through outsourcing, more budget cuts, as well as continuing Reagan’s deregulatory trajectory vis a vis Wall Street which ended up making big banks “too big to fail.” George W. Bush has been characterized as an “orthodox innovator” who sought to broaden the appeal of the dominant conservative regime to those on the supposed opposite side of the political through constructing new and broader appeals to conservativism, a “compassionate conservatism,” as they called it back then. Thus, Lou Cannon referred to Bush as Reagan’s Disciple.

However, just as Skowronek, the progenitor of the “regime cycle theory” of presidential history, posited was the case with Reagan and his repudiation of FDR’s new deal liberalism (which was the paradigmatic ideology of U.S. national politics until eventually it could no longer be rejuvenated and its legitimacy waned during Jimmy Carter’s years of malaise), Trump’s second term leadership represents something wholly unexpected. And, like Reagan, Trump came into office, in both his first and second terms, on a platform that recalled the great reconstructive crusades of presidential history. Like Reagan, and other reconstructive presidents, and especially during Trump’s first term (2017-2021), Trump met with stiff institutional resistance to his order-shattering authority within “an ever thicker government that can parry and deflect more of their repudiative thrust.”

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The confusion here is so deep that it reaches right down to the most basic definitions. The detractors of postliberalism seem to think that it is a positive political program – like communism or, dare I say it, liberalism itself. But even the term itself suggests otherwise: postliberal – it is defined by a sort of temporal negation. ‘Post’ is a Latin prefix meaning “after” or “following”. Here we might refer to “postbellum” as it is used in American historiography: it simply means the period after the American Civil War. Likewise, ‘postliberal’ simply means “after liberalism”. Postliberals do not really think in terms of postliberalism – that is, postliberalism as an “ism”. But rather they think in terms of postliberalism – that is, the historical-intellectual moment after liberalism.

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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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