Postliberalism Is Not About Economic Transformation
Disregard the empty allegations of ‘socialism.’ The real problem with postliberalism is its underlying authoritarian vision.
ARE POSTLIBERALS THE “SOCIALISTS OF THE RIGHT”? So argues right-wing troll and race-science promoter Richard Hanania, whose case against the postlibs has been echoed by others on the dwindling center-right.1 Their concern is that their rivals—whose ranks include blogger Rod Dreher, Notre Dame prof Patrick Deneen, and the vice president of the United States, JD Vance—are trying to move conservatism in not only a postliberal but a post-capitalist direction by using a veneer of social conservatism as a way to smuggle in “left-wing economics.”
In fairness to these critics, it is true that postliberals are more willing than much of the American right to advance conservative criticisms of capitalism—an unusual point of view in America, but one with a long history.2 In his 2016 book, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, R. R. Reno, a postliberal thinker and the editor of First Things, muses that when the most bullish capitalist conservatives talk about “economic freedom,”
they can sound irrelevant, even perverse. The free flow of capital, goods, services, and labor is all well and good if you’re one of the winners in the global economy. But what’s in it for the high-school-educated guy in Toledo who has to compete with low-wage workers in Thailand?
Some postliberals go so far as to propose ways to offset what they believe to be the worst effects of capitalism. In a 2017 interview, Rod Dreher described capitalism as having a corrosive effect on institutions like “families and communities.” (He made clear he was “not advocating socialism.”) He commended nationalist politicians opposed to excessive globalization and high levels of immigration, predicting they may “save capitalism in our day by imposing limits on it.”
And some figures in this camp, including Dreher, did become fanboys for Viktor Orbán–style “illiberal democracy,” which harnessed the power of the state in an effort to incentivize native family formation (a failed policy, in the end). In his book Regime Change, Patrick Deneen calls for strengthening labor unions, making trade schools more accessible while reducing the number of people who pursue a university education, and making efforts to “break up or limit the power of monopolistic economic organizations.”
But while the ultra-capitalist right-wingers are right to identify a number of right-wing anticapitalist gestures in these proposals, the “socialist” accusation ultimately fails. These thinkers are not interested in the sort of systems-level change that allegedly inspires the horror of their right-wing critics; they are interested in tinkering with capitalism to mitigate some of its excesses while mobilizing the state to pursue socially conservative policies. (More on that shortly.)
That the claim is false isn’t altogether remarkable; right-wingers throw around the “socialist” allegation constantly, as they have done for decades. But beyond being inaccurate, the claim is distracting. There are truthful and substantive reasons for rejecting postliberalism, and they should be at the center of any honest conversation about the goals of the political movement and ideological tendency.
IN HIS COMPREHENSIVE CRITIQUE, Against Post-Liberalism, Paul Kelly, a political theorist at the London School of Economics, argues that postliberals’ potshots against capitalism derive more directly from their authoritarian instincts than from any beliefs having to do with human equality or welfare. They “are uncomfortable with libertarian and neoliberal theories because these privilege freedom and autonomy as primary goals of politics or as a basis from which a reasonable moral order might emerge.” As Kelly notes, “post-liberals are not interested in fundamental equality, whether that be an equality of wealth and resources for all. They appear to be quite happy with a structurally unequal society, as long as the ruling elite is not the current one.”
Postliberals are not against capitalism tout court; they simply oppose versions of capitalism they take to have undermined their preferred moral order. Kelly observes that what is “most surprising about post-liberalism is that, for all its commitment to a politics of the common good, it is unwilling to address the legitimacy and justice of the fundamental question of the distribution of wealth, resources and economic power.” Kelly consequently regards the postliberals’ signature rhetoric about the centrality of the common good to a just political order as “just spurious.” They would be perfectly content with a tame capitalism and a reactionary political order—and they’ve shown this to be the case time and again.
Kelly is on to something: If you remove the mysticism and high-minded theory from most postliberal arguments, it gets difficult to avoid the conclusion that what largely animates the movement isn’t indignation over economic inequality and class exploitation. It’s rather something like disgust at the sight of men holding hands on the street. That’s because instrumentalizing economics to protect and preserve a conservative social and cultural order is close to the heart of the postliberal project.
For starters, the most prominent postliberals, including those mentioned above, are hardly capitalism haters. In the same book in which he speaks up for the Toledo, Ohio everyman, Reno writes that global capitalism has gone from “strength to strength over the past few decades, transforming societies throughout the world, especially in Asia.” And in this capitalist era, Reno describes himself as inclining “toward free markets” and being “suspicious of large-scale government interventions,” at least as far as the provision of goods and structuring of economies are concerned. In Return of the Strong Gods, Reno even rails against the “government-provided security” that would come with a “progressive” and “redistributive plan” to implement a universal basic income.
In Reno’s mind, there is no contradiction between his lament for the Ohioan with few prospects and his opposition to policies from the left intended to improve the man’s prospects. He’s ultimately not opposed to the inequality part of capitalism: His complaint is that capitalism seems to have a liberalizing effect on populations. While the “benefits of economic freedom do in fact extend even to the poor, what trickles down from lifestyle freedom is dysfunction, disorder, and disarray,” he writes.
Reno’s desire is for a market system without these malign knock-on effects of licentiousness and libertinism. He suggests a reconceived class war: Instead of economic exploitation, this one’s leitmotif would be the depredations of permissive liberal social policies. Reno describes how the “class war, the war on the weak, is epitomized in the campaign for gay marriage”—a bogeyman he has, in the intervening years, put in the company of other bogeymen such as COVID-related public health interventions and the public existence of trans people.
COMPARED TO RENO, DENEEN appears more willing to countenance economic change. As far back as 2007, Deneen was intoning about the impending catastrophe of “peak oil.” As always, liberalism was to blame for the economic calamity owing to its endorsement of selfishness and its mandate to conquer nature for humanistic purposes. But even then, with what he took to be a major economic crisis on the horizon, Deneen offered restrained, moralistic, and decidedly non-socialist recommendations: Embrace “stoicism” and learn to live with less. Whatever this is, the Green New Deal it is not.
Today, Deneen’s agenda amounts to little more than watered-down Eisenhower-era economic policies: domestic manufacturing in certain sectors, the strategic use of tariffs as a “policy of last resort,” more education in the trades over university (Deneen insists university education could be “substantially reduced”), national service requirements, stronger unions and limits on the power of monopolistic companies—that’s the gist of it. Anything more would raise the professor’s hackles. Regime Change offers a negative account of “the main aim of the populism of the left,” which is, Deneen writes, the “redistribution of wealth.” What is needed is “not an economics that purportedly seeks the equalization of outcome through the actual or effective elimination of private property, but an economic order embedded within a broader context of the common good”—one that supports and encourages social conservatism, naturally.
This sentiment echoes Deneen’s arguments in his career-defining Why Liberalism Failed, where he argues that even moderate liberal aspirations for greater economic equality are simply a vehicle for a deeper goal liberals don’t want to fess up to: destroying the cultural values that once brought the country together. As he puts it, the liberals’
appeal to economic justice and taming of the market—never realized, of course—was advanced not ultimately in the name of greater equality but to secure the liberation of those living outside the guidelines and strictures of cultural practices that supported the flourishing of the greater part of humanity.
Deneen might regard convictions about economic justice as insincere simply because he can’t imagine sincerely holding them. In Regime Change, he intimates that he has no problem at all with the idea of an economic and ruling elite, with all the inequality entailed thereby. The only real problem for him with our current political arrangement is that our current elites are mostly liberals. What is needed is a post-liberal “elite [that] must govern for the benefit of the many, while the many must restrain the dangerous temptations of the elite.”
So intense is Deneen’s nostalgic illiberalism and hostility to modernization that in his recent book, American Odyssey, he even chastises George Bailey, the iconic protagonist of holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life, for being too radical. In Deneen’s reading, we should commend Bailey’s efforts to build affordable housing for the poor so they can escape the slums of Mr. Potter—but only to a point. After all, Bailey’s project came at the unacceptable price of changing the makeup of the idyllic community of Bedford Falls. More important than improving the town for most of its citizens is preserving its “deep sense of place and history.”
SO, IF POSTLIBERALS ARE BASICALLY COMFORTABLE with capitalism as long as it remains subservient to their cultural vision, what actually distinguishes postliberalism and “common good” conservatism from earlier iterations of the right?
In short, what’s distinctive is what’s written on the tin: their uncompromising rejection of “political liberalism”—the idea that the state should accept or even encourage the formation of divergent views on the good life, and secure for its citizenry goods about whose value there is overlapping agreement, but without endorsing a single overriding “thick” account of what specifically makes those goods valuable.
Postliberals simply prefer for their “thick” account of value to predominate and for the state to dictate or at least privilege a single account of moral reality for the sake of our communal well-being. Some postliberals flirt with the claim that political authoritarianism is necessary for the sake of saving the immortal souls of those compelled to abandon their sinful ways—and further, that such authoritarianism would be a just Schmittian punishment of and rejoinder to the already-existing “authoritarianism” of woke liberalism.
Just how far they are willing, or able, to go in this theocratic direction is unclear, especially since few Americans share their thick claims about the moral good. In his critical Post-Liberalism, Matt Sleat highlights Deneen’s frustrating vacillation between the “often-extreme tenor” of his calls for a regime change—that is, overthrowing liberal elites and replacing them with conservative ones—and the “relative moderation of his prescriptions.” The Notre Dame prof talks a big game, but ducks out on proposing genuinely transformative policy. Some read this tendency as a tactical move to lure in moderates. Others think it reflects genuine uncertainty on Deneen’s part about the kind of order he actually wants.
HOWEVER, NO ONE WOULD ACCUSE Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard law professor and author of Common Good Constitutionalism, of such ambivalence. In Vermeule’s manifesto, the discussion of property and economics is limited to a few sentences here and there. (Perhaps tellingly, it amounts to a little less space than he dedicates to mocking the Obergefell decision.) In the disinterested tone typical of postliberal discussions of economic issues, Vermeule suggests property rights ought to be “recognized as an important component of human dignity and development” even if they are a secondary concern to pursuing the common good.
With that tedium brushed past, the book returns to Vermeule’s real raison d’être: mobilizing the power of the American state to destroy every graven image of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Drawing on fascist jurist Carl Schmitt, Vermeule is emphatic that liberalism needs to go. He delights in his own perverse enthusiasm for authority in a controversial article in the Atlantic, calling for “legal liberalism” to be rejected and replaced by a “common good constitutionalism” that does not “suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy.” Such common good constitutionalists don’t fear order, because they see law as “parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits.” And while such domination and hierarchy might be “possibly experienced at first as coercive,” Vermeule is optimistic those feelings will disappear as the state and its laws “encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.” This is politics as Stockholm Syndrome at scale.
Needless to say, Vermeule is no fan of socialism, even mocking New York liberals’ anxieties about Mamdani for being, like Victor Frankenstein, “terrified by the monster [they] labored to create.” In the book-length version of the argument, Vermeule is even taciturn about the value of democracy. As he writes, democracy “may or may not be oriented to the common good; one has to see whether it is, and the answer will depend on circumstances.”
This last line makes clear the stakes of postliberalism. It is good to see through the “socialist” accusation against postliberals like Vermeule, of course, but we should not let the failure of the right-wing critics to correctly identify the problems with the postliberal movement stop us from seeing the movement’s illiberal vector clearly. With one of postliberalism’s foremost proponents already leading the field for the Republicans’ 2028 presidential nomination, that vector could soon enough become an imminent threat.
Some of this cohort express confusion over the connection between postliberalism and Catholicism; this ignorance comes in spite of the fact that the most radical postliberals have called for the outright integration of the American state and the Catholic Church.
Conservative critics of capitalism date back to at least Samuel Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, and their complaints were formalized into a program with the relatively modest paternalistic welfarist policies of Otto von Bismarck. These policies were themselves an effort to check support for the genuinely left Socialist Workers’ Party, whose organization Bismarck suppressed in 1878. Later examples of the larger tendency include the various forms of “Christian” democracy popular in post-war Europe, which supported markets and moderate forms of welfarism, and which placed a strong emphasis on law and morality.
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