Shame is powerful, we want to be good, our American myth of individualism is held tightly like a shibboleth and practically speaking we daren’t be on the wrong side: it is embarrassing, a bad career move and socially gauche to be a post-liberal.
Marshall McLuhan spoke of figure ground relationships. The “figure” is liberalism’s individualism exulted and it worked when “grounded” in a Christian or generally theistic ethos of community and duty beyond oneself. Now the old paradigm has been trounced, all past practices vilified, and we see what comes of unfettered individualism. We are lost.
To answer your question, "Why have we not yet abandoned our pacifying libertarianism?" I would answer, greed. Politicians are greedy. CEOs are greedy. The professional-managerial class is greedy. In order for the postliberal project to separate itself from right-liberalism, it's going to need to provide a more robust analysis of political-economy. The cultural issues are important. I think it's vital for the common good that our children, and society at large, are inculcated with the principles to live a virtuous life (principles likely fleshed out from the Judeo-Christian tradition); to proscribe the pornificiation of every nook and cranny of American life; and to full-throatedly speak to the importance of marriage, family, and children. All of that is good and important, but there's a symptomatic silence in the postliberal project concerning the social organization of the means of production and the manner in which wealth is distributed. Symptomatic because I don't think even the leading intellectuals of the postliberal project have adequately grabbled with the materialist component of such (a postliberal order).
I noticed in Professor Deneen's fantastic book "Why Liberalism Failed" the word "commonweal" was used consistently throughout the text. I also saw the word "communitarian" at least a couple of times. You don't need to be a socialist to sniff out common ground that could be forged between the moral-ethical imperatives of the post-liberal project and communitarian commitments to political economy.
Unfortunately, I don't see any national figures aware of or interested in the electoral gains to be mined here: anti-woke, family focused, for national prosperity, community-oriented, morally-ethically Judeo-Christian AND willing to forcefully denounce the local, national, and international depredations that increase yearly as unrestrained capitalism reigns supreme.
Well said. I am having trouble teasing out the specifics that "post-liberals" advocate. The progressives did not just weaponize the technocratic state. They created it! So why do the post-liberals defend it? GKC knew it, to an extent, although he romanticized merry old distributism. CS Lewis knew it. Huxley knew it.
There is absolutely a need to question and move away from the synthetic assumptions of classical liberalism, particularly those that ignore the medieval understanding that we are truly persons with dignity, but among other persons. And that right reason is founded up divine laws, which must form the basis of such reason.
However, Murray Rothbard, the greatest libertarian, already knew these things at the end of his life. Yet he stuck to libertarian conceptions of a private property order (something I agree with). He simply recognized, however that a free society can only be maintained by a culturally moral and sound one, where people have the freedom to do good and the leeway to make those choices.
In the 1990's, Rothbardians and similarly minded Christian and Catholic libertarians had a break with the Pat Buchanan conservatives, in a well-known episode at the time. It was because while the libertarian wing appreciated and took much from their conservative allies, those allies refused to learn economics. The Austrian school, or more specifically the "causal-realist" school, has a lot to teach anyone interested in post-liberalism. Intellectual humility is required to understand the problems of monopoly and government planning. They don't just "not work." They are actually irrational because they prevent or interfere with the voluntary choices of individuals engaging in trade and basic action, with no way to account for profitability or whether the cost "outweighs" the costs of letting people be free.
I am not sure this h’is not an entirely fair criticism of the authors behind this Substack and post liberals in general - in fact, they have written about their support for corporatism and rebuilding intermediary bodies such as labour unions, reshoring outsourced jobs and setting out a new industrial plan for the USA to chart a path away from total economical dependence on antagonistic foreign regimes, supporting single-income families, etc (on other sites, admittedly, but every article cannot cover every single aspect of potliberalism and the authors clearly have a more political background).
I think you are right to point out that there are grounds for political alliances with left-leaning political groups towards specific policy goals (e.g. the work of Sohrab Ahmari et al. at Compact is a fairly good example of trying to recover a politics and culture for blue-collars by both the right and left), and indeed I am quite sure the authors would endorse this - it’s easy to envision how the common good could be furthered for example by reining in stock buybacks and getting rid of tax loopholes for the rich by reaching across the isle to work with the less liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Likewise on family policy, access to healthcare, etc.
Ultimately, I am quite sure the answer is greed - recovering a politics not solely turned towards profit (be it at the individual wealth or macro GDP level) will be key to working out an economic system that works for the common good.
The folks behind New Polity have been actively trying to pursue (re)discovering a post liberal understanding of economics, grounded in Church teaching (e.g., prohibition of usury, duty to give alms, etc.) and applied concretely to daily life (e.g., supporting local stores and producers, untangling ourselves from the cult of investment and passive income, focusing on manual labor much more and rediscovering the worth of work itself, etc.) - that said, they take a much more State-adverse stance on what a post liberal regime should look like. I’d say they focus more on building it from the familial-communal level up than from the upper echelons of government down - both approaches need not be mutually exclusive and can indeed be quite complementary.
I agree with many precepts espoused here and by the post-liberals generally. Liberalism has a misordered set of priorities, and most fundamentally, synthetically ignores human nature and the reality of divine law.
It's like a Kantian attempt to impose a moral ideology of rule and power that is somewhat based on human nature--and so it has compatibility with natural liberty and God's laws--but it draws its authority from its own self-assertion and historical experience alone, putting the divine into a box of irrelevance.
But! I don't follow why that means "post-liberals" must impliedly support a large, activist, technocratic, taxing, etc., monopoly government. I think the post-liberals might define more clearly the following:
--What is the nature of private property and homesteading, and how far does it extend;
--Responding to Hoppean argumentation ethics around the irrationality of opposing private property or advocating for its regulation;
--Kingship of the old West was very, very different from modern states that emerged in the 1600's. Democracy of the modern sort is totalitarian by comparison. What does a post-liberal "state" look like?
--More fundamentally, what makes a government legitimate? What is the response to Murray Rothbard and Lysander Spooner? St. Augustine found that a state without justice is just a powerful pirate. Who gets to assert power if not a private property owner that has homesteaded an area?
I don't mean to take on the synthetic assumptions of liberalism with Robinson Cruesoe thought experiments, although I don't think those are worthless constructs for working out problems. People are born into structures and customs and the like. But like GKC stated more eloquently, we aren't supposed to just conserve for the sake of conserving. That's when you become the pagan-paleo-right, which sometimes looks a bit to fondly at Rome and Greece without the Christian baptism.
So in the exercise of right reason, what should we seek for government? Should we not see it as extensions of families working together, with layers of authority (subsidiarity) and interlocking arrangements, sort of like, gasp, feudalism? Or just every day civil contracts with their unappreciated complexities?
Classical liberalism went off the rails, in part, because liberty without grounding in Tradition came to mean liberty from all "harm" and authority, not merely injustice. Well, harm avoidance uber-alles led to the Covid hellscape and post-modern twisting of words as violence itself. Are post-liberals making the same mistake? Why do they want to entrust so much power to a state for the common good - what souls are saved if I'm coerced to give treasure or avoid sin, rather than done freely?
It seems too easy to point to progressives being unafraid to wield power and saying conservatives should do the same. Progressives are so good at it because they are tearing down which is easy (tearing down traditional values, etc). Postliberals want to build something good, and that is far more difficult. Can we look at someone swinging a wrecking ball and say that is the best way to build a home?
Right-liberals gave up the culture in exchange for the Market and wound up with nothing. Clinging to the golden age of powdered wigs is a boomer cope. Great essay!
Many Thx to Guest Author. It is heartening to know the next generation in America has such goodly creatures in it to help allay the wild waters whose roar has all but smashed not only the sail but the compass.
The supreme irony is in a land that prides itself with the ideal of individual autonomy, the push and pull of group think has, in a mere quarter of a century, completed a process of constituting a force more powerful than Panopticon, reducing every individual to a prisoner of “what’s trending" in a misguided definition of Freedom, one which countenances no responsibilities, only rights. The invisible guard in the tower is the alluring seductive power of sound-bites and sound-baits deployed in one-dimensional and exclusionary binary analysis of what is supposed to be REAL.
Is it necessary to embrace technocracy in order to champion postliberalism? Who avers this? I can easily envision a postliberal state that is less powerful and intrusive than the one we have at present.
Shame is powerful, we want to be good, our American myth of individualism is held tightly like a shibboleth and practically speaking we daren’t be on the wrong side: it is embarrassing, a bad career move and socially gauche to be a post-liberal.
Marshall McLuhan spoke of figure ground relationships. The “figure” is liberalism’s individualism exulted and it worked when “grounded” in a Christian or generally theistic ethos of community and duty beyond oneself. Now the old paradigm has been trounced, all past practices vilified, and we see what comes of unfettered individualism. We are lost.
To answer your question, "Why have we not yet abandoned our pacifying libertarianism?" I would answer, greed. Politicians are greedy. CEOs are greedy. The professional-managerial class is greedy. In order for the postliberal project to separate itself from right-liberalism, it's going to need to provide a more robust analysis of political-economy. The cultural issues are important. I think it's vital for the common good that our children, and society at large, are inculcated with the principles to live a virtuous life (principles likely fleshed out from the Judeo-Christian tradition); to proscribe the pornificiation of every nook and cranny of American life; and to full-throatedly speak to the importance of marriage, family, and children. All of that is good and important, but there's a symptomatic silence in the postliberal project concerning the social organization of the means of production and the manner in which wealth is distributed. Symptomatic because I don't think even the leading intellectuals of the postliberal project have adequately grabbled with the materialist component of such (a postliberal order).
I noticed in Professor Deneen's fantastic book "Why Liberalism Failed" the word "commonweal" was used consistently throughout the text. I also saw the word "communitarian" at least a couple of times. You don't need to be a socialist to sniff out common ground that could be forged between the moral-ethical imperatives of the post-liberal project and communitarian commitments to political economy.
Unfortunately, I don't see any national figures aware of or interested in the electoral gains to be mined here: anti-woke, family focused, for national prosperity, community-oriented, morally-ethically Judeo-Christian AND willing to forcefully denounce the local, national, and international depredations that increase yearly as unrestrained capitalism reigns supreme.
Well said. I am having trouble teasing out the specifics that "post-liberals" advocate. The progressives did not just weaponize the technocratic state. They created it! So why do the post-liberals defend it? GKC knew it, to an extent, although he romanticized merry old distributism. CS Lewis knew it. Huxley knew it.
There is absolutely a need to question and move away from the synthetic assumptions of classical liberalism, particularly those that ignore the medieval understanding that we are truly persons with dignity, but among other persons. And that right reason is founded up divine laws, which must form the basis of such reason.
However, Murray Rothbard, the greatest libertarian, already knew these things at the end of his life. Yet he stuck to libertarian conceptions of a private property order (something I agree with). He simply recognized, however that a free society can only be maintained by a culturally moral and sound one, where people have the freedom to do good and the leeway to make those choices.
In the 1990's, Rothbardians and similarly minded Christian and Catholic libertarians had a break with the Pat Buchanan conservatives, in a well-known episode at the time. It was because while the libertarian wing appreciated and took much from their conservative allies, those allies refused to learn economics. The Austrian school, or more specifically the "causal-realist" school, has a lot to teach anyone interested in post-liberalism. Intellectual humility is required to understand the problems of monopoly and government planning. They don't just "not work." They are actually irrational because they prevent or interfere with the voluntary choices of individuals engaging in trade and basic action, with no way to account for profitability or whether the cost "outweighs" the costs of letting people be free.
I am not sure this h’is not an entirely fair criticism of the authors behind this Substack and post liberals in general - in fact, they have written about their support for corporatism and rebuilding intermediary bodies such as labour unions, reshoring outsourced jobs and setting out a new industrial plan for the USA to chart a path away from total economical dependence on antagonistic foreign regimes, supporting single-income families, etc (on other sites, admittedly, but every article cannot cover every single aspect of potliberalism and the authors clearly have a more political background).
I think you are right to point out that there are grounds for political alliances with left-leaning political groups towards specific policy goals (e.g. the work of Sohrab Ahmari et al. at Compact is a fairly good example of trying to recover a politics and culture for blue-collars by both the right and left), and indeed I am quite sure the authors would endorse this - it’s easy to envision how the common good could be furthered for example by reining in stock buybacks and getting rid of tax loopholes for the rich by reaching across the isle to work with the less liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Likewise on family policy, access to healthcare, etc.
Ultimately, I am quite sure the answer is greed - recovering a politics not solely turned towards profit (be it at the individual wealth or macro GDP level) will be key to working out an economic system that works for the common good.
The folks behind New Polity have been actively trying to pursue (re)discovering a post liberal understanding of economics, grounded in Church teaching (e.g., prohibition of usury, duty to give alms, etc.) and applied concretely to daily life (e.g., supporting local stores and producers, untangling ourselves from the cult of investment and passive income, focusing on manual labor much more and rediscovering the worth of work itself, etc.) - that said, they take a much more State-adverse stance on what a post liberal regime should look like. I’d say they focus more on building it from the familial-communal level up than from the upper echelons of government down - both approaches need not be mutually exclusive and can indeed be quite complementary.
Very well said. I enjoy Compact immensely.
I agree with many precepts espoused here and by the post-liberals generally. Liberalism has a misordered set of priorities, and most fundamentally, synthetically ignores human nature and the reality of divine law.
It's like a Kantian attempt to impose a moral ideology of rule and power that is somewhat based on human nature--and so it has compatibility with natural liberty and God's laws--but it draws its authority from its own self-assertion and historical experience alone, putting the divine into a box of irrelevance.
But! I don't follow why that means "post-liberals" must impliedly support a large, activist, technocratic, taxing, etc., monopoly government. I think the post-liberals might define more clearly the following:
--What is the nature of private property and homesteading, and how far does it extend;
--Responding to Hoppean argumentation ethics around the irrationality of opposing private property or advocating for its regulation;
--Kingship of the old West was very, very different from modern states that emerged in the 1600's. Democracy of the modern sort is totalitarian by comparison. What does a post-liberal "state" look like?
--More fundamentally, what makes a government legitimate? What is the response to Murray Rothbard and Lysander Spooner? St. Augustine found that a state without justice is just a powerful pirate. Who gets to assert power if not a private property owner that has homesteaded an area?
I don't mean to take on the synthetic assumptions of liberalism with Robinson Cruesoe thought experiments, although I don't think those are worthless constructs for working out problems. People are born into structures and customs and the like. But like GKC stated more eloquently, we aren't supposed to just conserve for the sake of conserving. That's when you become the pagan-paleo-right, which sometimes looks a bit to fondly at Rome and Greece without the Christian baptism.
So in the exercise of right reason, what should we seek for government? Should we not see it as extensions of families working together, with layers of authority (subsidiarity) and interlocking arrangements, sort of like, gasp, feudalism? Or just every day civil contracts with their unappreciated complexities?
Classical liberalism went off the rails, in part, because liberty without grounding in Tradition came to mean liberty from all "harm" and authority, not merely injustice. Well, harm avoidance uber-alles led to the Covid hellscape and post-modern twisting of words as violence itself. Are post-liberals making the same mistake? Why do they want to entrust so much power to a state for the common good - what souls are saved if I'm coerced to give treasure or avoid sin, rather than done freely?
“Hoppean argumentation ethics ”
No need to respond to nonsense.
It seems too easy to point to progressives being unafraid to wield power and saying conservatives should do the same. Progressives are so good at it because they are tearing down which is easy (tearing down traditional values, etc). Postliberals want to build something good, and that is far more difficult. Can we look at someone swinging a wrecking ball and say that is the best way to build a home?
Right-liberals gave up the culture in exchange for the Market and wound up with nothing. Clinging to the golden age of powdered wigs is a boomer cope. Great essay!
Many Thx to Guest Author. It is heartening to know the next generation in America has such goodly creatures in it to help allay the wild waters whose roar has all but smashed not only the sail but the compass.
The supreme irony is in a land that prides itself with the ideal of individual autonomy, the push and pull of group think has, in a mere quarter of a century, completed a process of constituting a force more powerful than Panopticon, reducing every individual to a prisoner of “what’s trending" in a misguided definition of Freedom, one which countenances no responsibilities, only rights. The invisible guard in the tower is the alluring seductive power of sound-bites and sound-baits deployed in one-dimensional and exclusionary binary analysis of what is supposed to be REAL.
Is it necessary to embrace technocracy in order to champion postliberalism? Who avers this? I can easily envision a postliberal state that is less powerful and intrusive than the one we have at present.
What a tour de force! Excellent! Thank you!
I wonder if there is a Founder who can be raised up as the paragon of Common Good Constitutionalism.