Published Fall 2024
For most of our lifetimes, American conservatives have defined themselves in opposition to “liberals” — a term basically interchangeable with “progressives,” “the left,” and even “Democrats” in common parlance. But liberalism? That’s a different matter, as anyone might learn in Political Theory 101. There, the term “liberalism” describes the shared political philosophy of both conservatives and progressives, the bedrock upon which America, and indeed much of Western civilization, was built.
Though they lambasted liberals for decades, American conservatives generally didn’t seriously question liberalism — that is, until the trifecta of Obergefell, Brexit, and Donald Trump provoked a comprehensive reassessment and realignment on the right.
The clarion call for this reassessment came in the form of Patrick Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, which proved a minor sensation in political-theory circles and has continued to shape the conversation ever since. Deneen charged that liberalism, the 400-year-old political philosophy and cultural program dedicated to the “unfettered and autonomous choice of individuals,” was at last running aground on the rocks of its own contradictions. Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism, published that same year, also marked liberalism — with its “vision of free and equal human beings, pursuing life and property and living under obligations that arise from their own free consent” — as its bête noire. Mark Mitchell’s The Limits of Liberalism combined elements of both critiques, asserting that due to liberalism’s commitment to the “free and unencumbered individual,” it must reject tradition — the formal, tacit knowledge of a concrete community that can shape and constrain the individual. Accordingly liberalism, “in attempting to eradicate any limit beyond individual choice, has denied the reality toward which any healthy tradition points.” It is thus “incoherent and self-destructive.”
Seeing in these critiques of liberalism the reactionary sentiments they had always suspected the right of harboring, progressives lost no time in pouncing on the new rhetoric. Centers for “illiberalism studies” cropped up to chronicle the global slouch toward authoritarianism, while books with titles like The Rise of Illiberalism and The Twilight of Democracy drew links between liberalism’s critics and authoritarian dictators. Writing in The Atlantic under the headline, “The Illiberal Right Throws a Tantrum,” Adam Serwer conjured up the specter of a coming regime
where rigged electoral systems ensure that political competition is minimal, the press is tightly controlled by an alliance between corporations and the state on behalf of the ruling party, national identity is defined in religious and ethnic terms, and cultural expressions are closely policed by the state to ensure compliance with that identity.
Meanwhile, a chorus of self-avowed “post-liberals” emerged, hosting conferences, publishing journals with names like Postliberal Order, and blasting away at “Conservatism, Inc.” for its decades-long slavish collaboration with the enemies of civilization. Within the conservative movement — and especially its new “national conservative” wing, spurred by Hazony — the debate over liberalism and post-liberalism has proven bitter and divisive.
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Brad Littlejohn, Ph.D., is a Fellow in EPPC’s Evangelicals in Civic Life Program, where his work focuses on helping public leaders understand the intellectual and historical foundations of our current breakdown of public trust, social cohesion, and sound governance. His research investigates shifting understandings of the nature of freedom and authority, and how a more full-orbed conception of freedom, rooted in the Christian tradition, can inform policy that respects both the dignity of the individual and the urgency of the common good. He also serves as President of the Davenant Institute.
