The financial markets are currently in turmoil. The impact has yet to hit the stock market, but bond markets all over the world are creaking. The problems seem to have started in Japan where the country’s currency, the yen, is in free-fall. So far interventions by both the Japanese and American governments appear unable to stem the bleeding. Japan sneezed and the whole world caught a cold. Bond yields across the West are rising rapidly and many analysts are bracing for a major market event.

If this comes to pass, in the coming weeks and months many will focus on the short-term drivers of these problems. But in reality, they are the culmination of decades of poor economic management. To understand this a little history is needed. Prior to the First World War, the main currency used in global trade and held in reserve was the British sterling. In the interwar period, sterling dominance started to collapse, and the world slid into a Great Depression. After the Second World War policymakers were intent on not allowing this to happen again so they implemented the Bretton Woods system.

The Bretton Woods system fixed exchange rates in the Western world. Other countries pegged their currencies to the US dollar, and the US dollar was in turn pegged to gold. The system was designed to ensure that there were no serious trade imbalances in the global system. If a country began to run large trade deficits – say, Italy, who was a serial offender – it would be pressured to devalue its currency until its exports became cheap enough and its imports became expensive enough that the trade deficit was eliminated. The United States itself was constrained in running trade deficits because, since the US dollar was pegged to gold, if it ran sustained trade deficits gold would flee Fort Knox as foreign creditors cashed in their surplus dollars for gold.

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“Complaints against the ‘imperial presidency’ are back in vogue,” wrote Harvey Mansfield in 2007. They are so, again, in 2026—particularly under Trump 2.0. It is a perennial debate. However, in the criticisms for supposed abuses of presidential power, it is often ignored that the American republic was always intended to have a strong executive. During critical moments of U.S. history, such as the Civil War, the sweeping expansion of executive power, manifested in episodes such as Lincoln’s suspension of habues corpus and the unilateral emancipation proclamation, were necessary to ensure the future and security of the United States. A belief in a strong executive does not mean that one does not place high importance on the rule of law and the separation of powers. Antonin Scalia, a prominent proponent of the unitary executive theory and former Supreme Court Justice, placed the separation of powers and the Constitution’s structural elements “higher in importance than above its more well-known provisions protecting individual rights.” Only a purposive executive directed towards substantive ends safeguards itself as a constitutionally structural element.

Throughout American history, the executive has been understood as the branch entrusted with what Alexander called “energy” which is the capacity for “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch” that the legislature, by its very design as a deliberative body, cannot and should not supply. Hamilton’s defense of a single executive in Federalist No. 70 was explicit on this point when he said that plurality within the executive branch would tend to “conceal faults and destroy responsibility,” while unity secures both vigor and accountability at once. Article II of the U.S. Constitution is clear in itself: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” Advocates of a unitary executive emphasize that “the most important word in that sentence is the indefinite, singular article ‘a.’” This was not an incidental feature of the founding design but its deliberate correction of the enfeebled plural executives of the state constitutions and the Continental Congress.

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Earlier this month, an edited clip resurfaced of then Senator J.D. Vance supporting managed de-dollarization, a policy designed to reduce the dollar’s strength and the associated market distortions linked to King Dollar’s reserve currency status. In his remarks, Vance argued that reserve currency status is a “resource curse” that contributes to America’s $40 trillion national debt while placing U.S. exporters at a competitive disadvantage.

The reactions were predictable.

Glenn Beck responded incredulously, asking, “Wait, what?” before warning that the dollar losing reserve currency status would somehow “make us Mexico overnight.” Clutching her pearls tightly, Dana Loesch gasped, “what on Earth?”. Marc Thiessen, who insists decline is a choice and apparently not likely the result of decades of military adventurism in the Middle East, dismissed managed de-dollarization as a product of isolationist ideology.

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Modern philosophy is widely perceived to be more hospitable to atheism than ancient and medieval philosophy were. And it has been, certainly during the last two centuries of its history. But at its beginnings, theism was as central a feature of most of the great modern metaphysical systems as it had been of their predecessors. The difference was that the moderns put their theism on novel foundations, and took it in novel directions. While these differences were not atheistic in intent, they arguably weakened theism in a way that helped grease the skids for atheism, and for heterodoxy among those modern thinkers who retained some sort of theism.

Berkeley’s neglected but interesting version of theism affords an example. He is best known, of course, for his thesis that esse est percipi or “to be is to be perceived.” For Berkeley, only minds and their ideas exist. That does not mean the table in front of you isn’t real. What it means is that what that table is just a collection of ideas – the idea of the table you have when you look at it from this angle, the idea you have of it when you look at it from that angle, the idea you have when you touch it, the idea another person has when he sees it, and so on. All the ordinary objects of our experience, in Berkeley’s view, are collections of the ideas we have in seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling them.

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Out of any time in the past century, the COVID pandemic was probably the most revelatory with regard to the Western liberal ruling class and its intentions. What was essentially a bad flu was used as an excuse to shut down society and to exert truly tyrannical levels of state power for ends directly deleterious to the common good. Americans, for instance, witnessed as churches were closed while strip clubs were open under the orders of various governments. They saw how the elite, after spending months tyrannizing law-abiding Americans, turned a blind eye to the violent and destructive riots of the summer of 2020. As someone who was a High School student in California at the time, I witnessed firsthand how the pandemic derailed the lives of many of my previously promising peers and did irreparable harm to much of our youngest generation.

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A few weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance committed political heresy: he said that Richard Nixon’s “historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance,” and joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow “it would be like a 12-hour news story”. Cue the media freakout. CNN ran a story with the headline ‘Why JD Vance is downplaying Richard Nixon’s corruption’; Joe Scarborough took to his morning perch to warn that Vance’s take on the former president was “dangerous”. Vance’s comments hit a deep nerve with the liberal media class—and it seems likely that Vance knew exactly what he was doing. What is at the root of this reaction and what does it mean for American politics today?

America’s 37^th president, Richard Nixon, was no saint and certainly not perfect. Which president was? Nixon did, like all of us, have personal flaws and, as the release of the Nixon tapes revealed, perhaps said some things in his life which he would regret. Conspiracy theories notwithstanding about the true causes of the event, Watergate was obviously a massive scandal and, as the tapes revealed, Nixon clearly did want to cover it up, although his knowledge about the break-in is disputed.

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If you go to a philosophy department in Oxford or, especially, Cambridge today they will glow with the pride of carrying on a tradition. Of course, these colleges tend to emphasize the importance of their tradition regardless, but there is a big difference between pointing to the historic traditions of an institution and claiming to be part of an intellectual tradition. The former is a sort of adornment – a nice supplement to the status of the intellectual work being produced at a university – but the latter is different; it dictates the type of intellectual work being produced.

Their tradition is generally known today as “analytic philosophy”. Of course, analytic philosophy is also very influential in the United States and many of its key proponents in the 20^th century – like Searle or Quine – were Americans. But the British lay claim to the movement’s origins. It all started at Cambridge with the work, first, of G.E. Moore and then of Bertrand Russell. Europeans were soon imported into the mix. Ludwig Wittgenstein first – who would achieve mythic, or perhaps even mystical status – and later Karl Popper.

English ‘Wit’ as Argument

Today the analytic tradition seems stale. Early promises of a complete, potentially mathematical formalization of philosophy were not new – the idea of the Mathesis Universalis goes back to van Rooman and Descartes in the early-17^th century. Nor was the failure of these ideas anything new – the Mathesis Universalis came to naught, so too did the totalizing ‘logicism’ of Frege, Russell and Whitehead. It is arguable if the edifice of analytic philosophy ever even really held together – Wittgenstein’s later writings, for example, famously become cryptic to the point of mysticism, the very thing that the analytic philosophy was supposed to cure philosophers of. Yet despite its problems, the overall vision that analytic philosophy created structures the late liberal world that we have inhabited since the end of the Cold War. In that sense, analytic philosophy is, as Marx would say, a tradition that weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

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This week I appeared on the Seeking Truths From Facts podcast with Alf Beckinsale. Alf is a student at Oxford University, an independent podcast host and a postliberal enthusiast. His podcast is focused on geopolitics, history, political philosophy, and more. In the podcast we discuss postliberalism, its critics, Hegel, the British analytic tradition and much more. Well worth giving it a listen.

Seeking Truth from Facts

Seeking Truth From Facts: Episode 19 - Philip Pilkington (Part 1)

I was very pleased to discuss postliberalism and geopolitics with Philip Pilkington, a macroeconomist, columnist at UnHerd, and co-host of the Multipolarity podcast. In part one, we focus on postliberal philosophy, its ancient antecedents, and examples of postliberalism in practice around the world…

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2 months ago · 5 likes · Alf B.

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The rhetoric of human dignity is commonplace today, both in secular liberal circles and in the Church. It is often treated as if it were moral common ground between them. As Alasdair MacIntyre has warned, this is an illusion, and such rhetoric is in fact problematic and even dangerous. For it is like an empty vessel into which very different contents can be poured, some salutary but others poisonous. Everything depends on how human dignity is defined and grounded, and when this is left vague, ideas that are at odds with traditional Christian thinking can be smuggled in under a Christian guise. I discussed some examples, and the Kantian roots of contemporary rhetoric about dignity, in an earlier Postliberal Order article.

In her neglected essay “The Dignity of the Human Being,” the eminent Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe provides a model for how this subject should be approached. She is rigorous where others are woolly, and orthodox where others are unsound. (The essay can be found in the collection Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G. E. M. Anscombe.)

Rational animals

It is often said that all human beings are in equal possession of a special dignity that cannot be taken away from them. Anscombe agrees with this. But what does it mean, exactly? It cannot be a matter of being equal in goods such as wealth or voting rights, since these things obviously can in fact be taken away from people, and yet they remain human all the same. Nor is it any good to say that it has to do with everyone being equally human, because one could just as well say that all cats are equally cats. That hardly affords them any special dignity.

What human dignity does involve, Anscombe says, is our being “intellectual animals” and “having free will and [thus being] answerable for [our] actions.” That is to say, we have the power of reason, and can, accordingly, choose how we will act in light of what reason tells us. Nothing else in the physical world is like this, which is why our dignity is special. And unlike wealth and voting rights and the like, these powers cannot be taken away from us since they are partially constitutive of being human. That is what makes the dignity of all human beings equal.

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There is much that Thomas Jefferson can be criticized for. After all, he sympathized strongly with the French Revolution and held wacky theological beliefs. At the same time, he was one of the American nation’s paters patriae, and his role in the American War for Independence, as secretary of state, vice president, and then president, leaves him second only to Washington. On their own, these things mark Jefferson out as one of the greatest national heroes, independent of his ideological beliefs. However, there are certain aspects of Jeffersonianism which can be separated from Jefferson’s liberalism, and represent a pre-liberal worldview and should be recognized in any American attempts to move beyond liberalism.

Out of all of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson was probably the most liberal. It is common knowledge that Jefferson was deeply influenced by the philosopher John Locke, using Locke’s “Life, Liberty, and Property” when writing “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. Rejecting any notion of “the democracy of the dead,” Jefferson held that “the earth belongs to the living generation.” He was hostile to any religious establishment and is responsible for the “wall of separation” phrase that liberals like to throw around in their jurisprudence (this should not be confused with contemporary social liberalism; after all, Jefferson still favored castration as punishment for sodomy). Jefferson sympathized strongly with the French Revolution (though later in life believed that the French should have merely moved towards a British-style limited monarchy).

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Political and ideological processes shape historical understanding. We are witnessing a quiet shift in how Americans think about their country’s history, in both popular and academic discourse, due to political and ideological shifts in the society at large. As a student of history in college, I was taught to think about the concept of historiography, and its development, as the history of how people wrote and think about a particular history over time. As an historian, one should have a strong grasp about how one’s work will contribute to the relevant and existing historiography of one’s focus. In other words, it is incumbent on the historian to ask himself: Why is it that historians in certain places and times interpreted historical events and epochs in distinctive ways? To what extent does the available documentation available in one’s own time validate or invalidate a historiography’s way of thinking? And what caused the historiography to shift in ways of thinking about a certain place, period, and/or person? The answer to these questions, in short, is due to political nature of doing history. How a people of a certain time and place think and write about history is not solely a matter pertaining to the availability of sources but is largely determined by the prevailing values of their time, the political system under which they grew up and lived—as well as shifts between and within systems—and the extent to which that political system permits for an investigation into certain histories.

Let’s take, as an example, the historiography of the Soviet Union. For most of the Soviet Union’s lifespan, Arup Banerji shows, “history and historiography remained subject to specific restrictive constraints.” This is because the Soviet government controlled research institutions, publications, and themes to ensure that historical research did not manifest into output which contradicted the values and historical interpretations that the regime had popularized and officialized as the basis of its historical and political legitimacy. This means that the majority of Soviet historians were prevented from discussions with foreign historians, engaging with foreign publications, and being aware of western debates in relation to their own history. As Mikhail Gorbachev’s “openness” reforms later swept the USSR, how Soviet historians began speaking and writing about their history, particularly of the Stalinist era, changed accordingly. No longer were Soviet historians so fearful about presenting documentation which showcased the extent of Lenin’s or Stalin’s repression and the consequences of their policies, such as War Communism or collectivization. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent opening of the archives to historians from all over the world, revealed decades’ worth of information of secret arrests, disappearances, mass death, and other hidden crimes. This, nonetheless, is not to deny that western historiography of the Soviet Union during the Cold War was not heavily slanted with over-exaggeration with regards to the excesses of the Soviet regime, as history was used as part of the broader ideological struggle to mobilize western populations behind their governments; which partly explains why certain influential Cold War policy hawks, such as Richard Pipes, also wrote histories of the Soviet Union. Today there are growing murmurs that we need to take another look at the historiography surrounding the Second World War.

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Liberalism is collapsing. What, exactly, will emerge from its ashes? Across the world, the most vibrant political projects and the most inspiring political ideas are those that recognize the palpable exhaustion of the liberal, freedom-maximizing paradigm.

A liberal project that sought to free individuals from arbitrary hierarchies, which finally shed itself of its classical and Christian residues and hesitations in the 1960s and rose to global hegemony in the 1990s, has now, it seems, run its course. This advanced liberalism, valorizing radical autonomy, self-creation, and the arbitrary positing of values, has produced a similar set of destructive pathologies everywhere it has been tried. The collapse of traditional and religious communities, populations unable or unwilling to act on the basic human urge to reproduce the species, the aggressive public celebration of moral transgression, and the harassment of conservative-minded citizens who dissent—all are familiar across all the societies on which liberalism has made its mark, from San Francisco to Seoul.

The differences between liberal societies are variations on a single theme. America’s ritualized politics of racial guilt and Europe’s compulsion to manage demographic and economic exhaustion through mass migration both reflect the same anthropology: man as an interchangeable bearer of expressive impulses, rather than a creature oriented toward higher goods and formed by inherited loyalties, obligations, and ways of life.

During the period of liberal hegemony (hegemony in Antonio Gramsci’s sense: the fusing of state and civil society around the manufacturing of consent to a ruling ideology), acquiescence in liberal domination was secured in large part through the peculiar “parlor trick” of false neutrality. Liberalism, we were told, was “political not metaphysical”: a device for securing justice between adherents of radically different religious and philosophical conceptions of human flourishing, not a rival religion or philosophy of its own. (The devil’s greatest trick, after all, was convincing the world he didn’t exist).

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We are currently at a very strange moment in the recent history of political ideas. Around 10 or 15 years ago there was an upsurge in what presented itself as neo-reactionary nationalist philosophy online. It emerged from a sort of formless collective online Id that was opposed to the extreme progressive liberalism that reached its pinnacle in the Obama administration – especially in its second term. As late as five years ago, there seemed to be hopes that something new would emerge from this upswell. Young intellectuals were casting around reading esoteric reactionary texts from the early-20^th century – the writings of Julius Evola being the most notable – and seemed to be prepared to launch a new type of political philosophy.

At the same time, on the conservative conference circuit, the work of the British philosopher Roger Scruton was seeing a resurgence. Conservative intellectuals were turning to Scruton’s work as an antidote to what they saw as the anodyne utilitarianism of the liberal conservatism that came to dominate after the Reagan and Thatcher turn to neoliberalism. Scruton, it was argued, offered a more grounded form of conservatism that latched on nicely to other trends in the political culture of the past decade – most notably, perhaps, the emergence of the psychologist Jordan Peterson and the tendency for young conservatives to engage more deeply with the cultural symbols of their respective countries. This overlapped especially with the movement for Brexit in the United Kingdom which many assumed would give birth to a new era of British conservative politics.

The tree can now be judged by its fruit. No new political philosophy has emerged out of the ethno-nationalist intellectual experiments of the past decade – and no truly new politics has emerged out of Scrutonian conservatism. Brexit has proved to be a failure. Yet while these intellectual adventures have gone nowhere and created nothing, the upswell of that collective online Id has cashed out in an increasing obsession over migration and ethnicity in Western conservative politics. When I say “obsession” I mean obsession. Migration is an enormously important topic in today’s politics – although, being grounded in half a century of below replacement fertility rates it is much misunderstood by many who discuss it. But migration is not the only relevant topic in today’s politics – nor is it, if you understand the demographic realities that have shaped today’s migration politics, the root cause of our demographic woes. Yet it has become an almost singular point of focus amongst large parts of the right-wing movements in the West.

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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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