Breaking Back into Reality
Jacob Williams argues that postliberal politics should be grounded in the natural law which will help us order our society in line with the hierarchy of goods.
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).
