The Postliberal Hatred of America

The new religious extremism behind the attacks on liberal society and higher education. Second in a series.

1.

“What the hell is going on?”

Donald Trump asked this question in 2015 about our nation’s fight against Radical Islam (remember that?), calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” until it could be answered. (It never was.)

Now, of course, those of us who still follow the news ask a similar question every day. The zone has been flooded with shit, the Roy Cohn boxing manual has been followed, each day brings both a new absurdity (Qatar jet bribe! Meme coin! South African conspiracy theory!) as well as a new horror. There are so many different kinds of malefactors: plutocrats passing tax cuts for the rich, petrocrats gutting the EPA, isolationists weakening America’s position in the world, racists rolling back affirmative action and ending voting rights enforcement, MAGA enforcers deporting innocent people without due process, the Trump Revenge Goon Squad targeting political enemies and pardoning criminals.

All of these activities more or less cohere, sort of, but they also fly off in different directions, which can be disorienting.

Among the many constituencies in the Trump coalition, a new brand of Christian conservatives have, in part by sheer luck, ascended to power. Whereas previous generations of the Christian Right — Francis Schaffer, Phyllis Schlafly, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed — argued (based on a highly selective reading of history) that America was founded as a Christian nation but had strayed from the true path and was in need of correction, these new conservatives go a step further, arguing the very notion of American liberal democracy was fundamentally flawed, sinful, and doomed.

This school of thought has become known as “postliberalism." The ideology takes many forms, but it is generally a radical, religiously-grounded critique of American society that goes beyond conservatism and nationalism and argues that American constitutional democracy is incompatible with promoting goodness, and should be disassembled and replaced by a non-democratic society based on Christian values.

That is obviously a wildly radical program. It’s dour, extreme, overtly-antidemocratic, and not unlike The Handmaid’s Tale. I admit, it’s sometimes difficult to know how seriously to take it. But for the results of the 2024 election, postliberalism might still be a fringe theory popular among Opus Dei types but peripheral to mainstream political discourse. And yet, the 2024 election did happen; JD Vance, an acolyte of postliberalism, is vice president; and postliberal policies predominate in Project 2025, at least 80% of which has already been put into effect. So it can’t be ignored or dismissed.

Who are these people? The network of postliberals, common-good constitutionalists, and National Conservatives includes, on the pragmatic end, Russell Vought and Kevin Roberts, two of Project 2025’s principal architects, as well as figures like Rick Lowry and Leonard Leo; and, on the radical-intellectual end, Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermuele, Netanyahu-whisperer Yoram Hazony, Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, David Brog, and others. There are the funders, including Peter Thiel, Howard Ahmanson, and Barre Seid. And there is a long intellectual lineage that includes Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, Rene Girard, Edmund Burke, and others.

More broadly, postliberals are also in conversation with anti-intellectual and pseudo-intellectual figures like Dark Enlightenment/NRx sages Curtis Yarvin, and Costin Alamiriu (better known as ‘Bronze Age Pervert’), and even the new wave of Christian pop-culture figures like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, who recently said on his show that:

Unfortunately, the problem with living in a secular society and living in a society that has a lot of people that are atheists, that have no belief system at all, is you find a belief system… But I think as time rolls on, people are going to understand the need to have some sort of divine structure to things, some sort of belief in the sanctity of love and of truth. And a lot of that comes from religion. A lot of people's moral compass and the guidelines that they've used to follow to live a just and righteous life has come from religion.

It’s a sliding scale, of course; Rogan is not calling for Gilead-like theocracy, whereas Dreher, Deneen, and Hazony are. But thenotion that secularism has led to anomie and decadence — that is the shared core.

There’s a lot Midjourney got wrong here, but a lot it got right.

Finally, this cadre of disproportionately Catholic thinkers sits alongside a distinct, but mutually dependent, stream of Christian Nationalism, led by once-fringe evangelical and charismatic Protestant movements like the New Apostolic Reformation. As we’ll explore in a future newsletter, these two groups are quite different: post-liberals are mostly Catholic, intellectual, and highly-educated, whereas the ascendant Christian Right epitomized by Paula White (now director of Trump’s ‘White House Faith Office’) is mostly evangelical, anti-intellectual, apocalyptic, and suspicious of educated elites even within their own movement. In a way, this alliance replicates the original Christian Right of the 1970s and 1980s, which likewise united Catholics and Protestants — bitter enemies only a generation earlier — against the depredations of the Sixties. Only now with more radical agendas, and as we saw on January 6, 2021, violent proclivities.

2.

In a previous post in this series, I talked about the two radically different visions of American greatness held by small-l liberals on the one hand (again, that includes moderates and conservatives) and nationalists and post-liberals on the other. For small-l liberals, what makes America great is our shared ideals (quoting my earlier piece): “that all people are created equal; that we may say and believe what we wish, free from government interference; that we all have basic rights that were either given to us by God or agreed upon by compact; that the possibility of economic self-sufficiency was available to all; and that there are no lesser or greater Americans.” But for nationalists, being American is a national identity, and patriotism is less about upholding values than celebrating our national-cultural heritage.

For post-liberals, mere nationalism doesn’t go far enough. Or far back enough.

In 2019, a group of postliberal thinkers created a manifesto entitled “Against the Dead Consensus,” published in the conservative journal First Things. The manifesto held that pre-Trump conservatism “too often tracked the same lodestar liberalism did—namely, individual autonomy. The fetishizing of autonomy paradoxically yielded the very tyranny that consensus conservatives claim most to detest… Yes, the old conservative consensus paid lip service to traditional values. But it failed to retard, much less reverse, the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, communal solidarity, and much else.” Like JD Vance’s recent politics, the manifesto argued that plutocratic Republicans had betrayed American workers, and embraced restrictions on immigration, and the banning of “pornography, designer babies,’ wombs for rent, and the severing of the link between sex and gender.” It was signed by many of the figures named above: Ahmari, Deneen, Dreher, and others.

Notice the radicalism here: it is autonomy, itself, that is the problem. American citizens (and presumably all human beings) should not be allowed to determine their own values and live their own lives. The state and the culture must embrace “permanent truths,” i.e. Natural Law, even if a majority of people do not agree with them.

If that is true, then the root of the problem goes back well before the Sixties. Dreher argues the trouble began in the Fourteenth Century, in fact, when nominalist philosophers ceased to regard the immanent world as connected to the transcendent God. In the medieval period, Dreher wrote in 2017, “men construed reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually and find meaning among the chaos.” But then came the separation of science and theology, Renaissance humanism, Reformation challenges to clerical authority, the Enlightenment, democracy, capitalism, and the sexual revolution.

As result, like the fox says in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, “chaos reigns.”

America, in other words, was doomed from the start. It was founded on Enlightenment values as a liberal, secular state, in which individuals had freedom of choice to determine their own morality and their own ways of life. This, for Dreher, was grave error, which he ascribes to Deism, the Christian philosophy that influenced John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and others, and that holds that “God that is a cosmic architect who created the universe but does not interact with it.”

And thus, since true Christianity and secular liberalism are fundamentally incompatible, the latter must be overthrown. “It is far more important to me to preserve the faith than to preserve liberal democracy and the American order,” Dreher writes. As for mainstream Christianity, Dreher says that “We have allowed our children to be catechized by the culture and have produced an anesthetizing religion suited for little more than being a chaplaincy to the liberal individualistic order.”

What is needed is sometimes referred to as ‘Integralism’ since it seeks to integrate ‘Natural Law’ into every facet of life: politics, culture, society, education, everything. None of creation is “off limits to grace,” writes Vermuele at one point, and thus nothing is off limits to government coercion to force us to act in accord with universal (i.e. Catholic) moral teachings.

A few weeks ago, I quoted a passage from Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 Supreme Court holding that limited Roe v. Wade but left it intact: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

To small-l liberals this statement is practically axiomatic. It is the foundation of American liberal democracy, even if we fall short of its ideal, which is one reason I hadn’t given it much thought until recently. And yet, as I wrote about earlier, it is anathema to post-liberals, who have singled it out for opprobrium. For Dreher, Justice Kennedy’s dictum was “the end point of modernity”: a valorization of “the autonomous, freely choosing individual, finding meaning in no one but himself.” This is what is wrong with America, he says.

3.

In 2021, J.D. Vance gave a talk entitled “Universities are the Enemy.” Here it is, you can watch the whole thing:

Vance begins his remarks by saying, “I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Later he suggested, “Maybe it’s time to seize the endowments, penalize them for being on the wrong side of some of these culture war issues.”

Which, of course, is exactly what has transpired.

If you listen to the entire Vance speech, he makes a lot of silly points. He points to one Twitter dust-up over an AI article as evidence that the entire university system promotes “deceit.” He harps on public health officials’ statements that Black Lives Matter marches in the Summer of 2020 would not pose a major Covid risk, without noting that these marches were outside and participants were largely masked (which turned out to be more protective than was needed, not less). He woefully misinterprets scientific studies of gender, citing the thoroughly debunked Mark Regnerus. He calls feminism a “fundamental lie” And so on.

But eventually, Vance comes to the point. Universities, Vance says, are simply about power. Anthony Fauci got his legitimacy “from a piece of paper” — not, of course, that Fauci completed years of undergraduate and graduate study of science, but that he was ordained, basically, by the liberal church known as the university. Colleges and universities “make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day” — not because these ideas do not hold up to rational argumentation, but simply as a matter of power. There’s no engagement here with the substance of what universities teach; there’s simply an attack on universities because they undermine conservative values. As in Dreher’s attack on Enlightenment liberalism, Vance sets up a zero-sum kulturkampf between conservative values and the university as if it’s some kind of wrestling match.

Of course, nationalists have many reasons for wanting to diminish the power of universities. Some are purely political: if a Mussolini or a Putin wants absolute power, then all those who question the leader must be silenced. Intellectuals question things, which is why Orban’s Hungary destroyed its once-proud universities and Pinochet’s Chile disappeared intellectuals. But it’s also the case that universities question moral values, religious myths, and claims to absolute truth. For nationalists, fascists, postliberals, and National Conservatives, from Yoram Hazony to Dedra Meero, they encourage “chaos.”

4.

There is a uniquely rich irony among this new wave of arch-conservative Catholics, beginning with Vance himself. On the one hand, Natural Law is said to be rational and objective – part of the structure of the universe, like gravity or the speed of light. On the other hand, most of these figures embraced conservative Catholicism for largely non-rational reasons: spiritual crisis, a personal sense of being unmoored or alienated from society. Postliberal claims to be about “permanent truths” but it is actually grounded in subjective spirituality.

Vance wrote rather movingly of his journey to Catholicism — I took a deep dive into his essay in this previous post. Dreher is a convert as well — twice, in fact, first to Catholicism and then to Orthodoxy. And I see this happen all the time: lost young people (more often men, but women too) find a traditional system of religion that gives them answers to their existential questions. In my case, I see it among Jewish baalei teshuvah — people who are not born into Orthodox Jewish life but take it on later. I myself was a baal teshuvah in this mode, from around age 22 to age 30. But it also happens among marginalized young men who embrace radical Islam, often with deadly results. And it happens among people who find Jesus in any number of forms, from emotive charismatic Protestantism to intellectual Catholicism.

Catholic baalei teshuvah are perhaps unique in insisting that what they discovered along their emotional and spiritual quest is, in fact, the one and only rational truth that is true for everyone everywhere. Natural Law is said to not even be particularly religious, unlike articles of faith like the Trinity, Virgin Mary, and resurrection of Christ. It travels around the academy, including the legal academy, claiming to be philosophy.

But of course Natural Law is no such thing. It is premised upon an unproven hierarchy of body, mind, and spirit, and the axiom that the former must be made subservient to the latter. It has a vision of society that claims to be scientific but ignores science, particularly the science of any sexuality or gender combination that doesn’t look like Popeye and Olive Oyl, i.e., a Dominant Strong Man and a Submissive Womanly Woman, even though other permutations are widely found among both human and non-human animals. And it is grounded in the existential crisis of human beings seeking for meaning.

It is religion, in other words, which is fine, except that these thinkers pretend that it isn’t. That life begins at conception and that the life of a blastocyst takes precedence over the moral judgment of an adult human — these are perfectly acceptable theological claims, but they are said to be demonstrable philosophical positions, which of course is poppycock.

Tearing it all down

As philosophy and as intellectual history, postliberalism is amateur hour at best. For example, is Dreher correct that there is a binary choice between Catholic (or Natural Law) theocracy on the one hand and “finding meaning in no one but himself” on the other? Of course not. Atheists, humanists, Kantians, existentialists, Rortian pragmatists, Buddhists, Unitarians, even utilitarians are obvious counterexamples; all derive meaning beyond themselves without having recourse to conservative Catholicism.

Natural Law is no more necessary for trans-subjective meaning-making than gin is for making a martini. It works well enough, but there are plenty of other options.

But now we have to take postliberalism seriously, because of a cosmic coincidence that, if I were a believer, I might readily believe to be Divine providence: these guys rode the Trump train to power.

It’s pretty clear that JD Vance, Catholic Integralism, and post-liberalism had absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump’s victory. Post-liberals were already in the MAGA coalition, and Trump won, all the data says, on the basis of the economy, not, say, the depredations of 14^th century nominalism. Trump was also quite close to choosing Doug Burghum, rather than Vance, as his running mate, until Thiel and others interceded. Toss a few coins the other way, and these wingnuts would be politically irrelevant.

But coin tosses are part of life, and part of politics. And so now Vought, Vance, Roberts, and dozens of their minions have power.

A lot of Americans have wondered what could possibly be gained by this administration’s seemingly suicidal enterprise in national self-destruction that is already demolishing American leadership in scientific research and innovation. After all, who could possibly think America is better off without scientists, without research, without higher education?

That is not a rhetorical question.

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Thanks for reading and thanks to subscribers for your support. If you are considering upgrading to a paid subscription, that would really make a big difference! I look forward to continuing this dive into postliberalism and the American spirit… but not every week.

Here are some things I’ve been reading:

• The Status Kuo
  did a great analysis of the fatal flaws in Kristi Noem’s attempt to stop Harvard from enrolling international students. Turns out, there are a laws about this stuff.

• I’ve longed for someone knowledgeable about art and kitsch to talk about Trump’s hideous Oval Office decor. Emily Keegan did just that in the Times.

• Looking for some Elon Musk schadenfreude? Here’s one about his broken spirit, and here’s one about his broken company.

• That statistic above that 80% of Project 2025 has already put into action? I got it here.

• Finally, the most original and startling piece I’ve read in a long time comes from

  Adam Tooze
  ’s Chartbook, “What Fires Burned at Auschwitz?” Tooze persuasively demolishes the conventional wisdom that the Nazis built an effective killing machine, instead showing how it was kluge’d together with duct tape and string. Along the way he makes some deeply unsettling points about technology, fascism, and human mythmaking — all highly relevant to the moment of course. Really startling.

Speaking of great pieces, I’ve been informed that I won third place (better than fourth place!) in the Society for Features Journalism award for general commentary. Sweet.