>What is Trumpism? After all these years, we’re still asking the question. For some, Trump’s second term has revealed the fascism that was there all along; others diagnose a peculiar combination of 1970s New York swamp politics and Southern white supremacy. One thing is beyond dispute: recent months have seen an extraordinary concentration of executive power and an unprecedented weakening, perhaps the outright destruction, of what US civics textbooks once touted as a robust separation of powers. A simple explanation would be that the GOP and Trump’s lackeys on the Supreme Court are letting him do it. A more interesting account – in fact a justification – is provided by thinkers often grouped together as ‘post-liberals’.
>Like other terms featuring what has sometimes been called a ‘magical prefix’, ‘post-liberal’ has both a complicated history and many conflicting meanings. It was first used in the 1970s by American theologians who sought a post-liberal alternative to forms of Protestantism that had made too many compromises with the modern world. More than a decade later John Gray, disillusioned with Thatcherism, proposed post-liberalism as a new path; more important, the English Anglican (leaning heavily Anglo-Catholic) John Milbank radicalised the theological project, breaking with liberal thought as well as the social sciences, and influencing what came to be known as Blue Labour and Red Toryism. Representatives of both tendencies turned against laissez-faire capitalism; both claimed that excessive individualism and an increasingly overbearing state were not in opposition, but constantly reinforcing each other. One proposed remedy, the Big Society, amounted at most to Thatcherism with a human face: the Cameron government talked of empowering communities and local associations, but the reality was austerity and deregulation.
>In the US, three strands of post-liberal thought have emerged over the last decade. Most prominent are the self-declared ‘populists’, such as Sohrab Ahmari and the GOP senator Josh Hawley, who seek to replace the Reaganite fusion of pro-market ideology and traditional morals with a ‘working-class conservatism’. Then there are the ‘National Conservatives’, who are opposed to globalisation in general and the institutions of ‘global governance’ in particular, but are much more likely than populists to praise ‘free enterprise’. Finally, there’s a smattering of religiously inspired theorists – mostly hard-right Catholics – who are less interested in big societies than in big states promoting, or even enforcing, traditional morality.
>For these American post-liberals, liberalism is guilty of more than the destruction of Gemeinschaft. It is, they say, profoundly hypocritical: liberals talk about tolerance and individuality, but are dangerously intolerant and eager to enforce conformity. They deploy state power to eradicate ways of life devoted to anything other than the pursuit of individual autonomy: a much cited example is the requirement, introduced by the Obama administration, that employers provide workers with access to contraceptives through their insurance plans (this was restricted after a legal challenge by the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic group). According to post-liberals in the US, liberalism only pretends to be neutral in conflicts between what John Rawls called ‘conceptions of the good’; in reality, its insistence on a single human good amounts to totalitarianism.
>What might a post-liberal politics look like? Those lacking a general political theory tend to gesture towards a specific place: Hungary. Viktor Orbán’s self-declared ‘illiberal democracy’ has become a Disneyland for the international far right. Its attractions include natalist policies, an unashamed ‘Hungary First’ attitude, the promotion of Christianity in public culture and an assault on academia intended to end a supposed left-liberal hegemony. In 2024, J.D. Vance declared that ‘the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary. I think his way has to be the model for us.’ (It has indeed proved to be the model for the second Trump administration, except that Orbán is too intelligent to gut scientific research.)
>But Hungary is a small, highly centralised Central European country with relatively little ethnic diversity and an industrial base reliant on German car manufacturers. Does it really provide a plausible template? Symptomatic of post-liberals’ uncertainty about which direction to take was a book called *Regime Change* by Patrick Deneen, one of Orbán’s great fans and fellow-travellers, which was published in 2023. Deneen, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, had risen to prominence five years earlier after the appearance of his short book, *Why Liberalism Failed*. After the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump, liberals were not only embarking on Trump safaris in Appalachia and repenting of their supposed failure to pay attention to the ‘left behind’, but were seeking too to signal an openness to non-liberal ideas, with even Obama praising Deneen’s ‘cogent insights’. At that point, however, Deneen’s prescription was curiously defeatist: a retreat into illiberal communities in small-town America, in the hope that the increasingly totalitarian liberal state might somehow leave you alone.
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>What is Trumpism? After all these years, we’re still asking the question. For some, Trump’s second term has revealed the fascism that was there all along; others diagnose a peculiar combination of 1970s New York swamp politics and Southern white supremacy. One thing is beyond dispute: recent months have seen an extraordinary concentration of executive power and an unprecedented weakening, perhaps the outright destruction, of what US civics textbooks once touted as a robust separation of powers. A simple explanation would be that the GOP and Trump’s lackeys on the Supreme Court are letting him do it. A more interesting account – in fact a justification – is provided by thinkers often grouped together as ‘post-liberals’.
>Like other terms featuring what has sometimes been called a ‘magical prefix’, ‘post-liberal’ has both a complicated history and many conflicting meanings. It was first used in the 1970s by American theologians who sought a post-liberal alternative to forms of Protestantism that had made too many compromises with the modern world. More than a decade later John Gray, disillusioned with Thatcherism, proposed post-liberalism as a new path; more important, the English Anglican (leaning heavily Anglo-Catholic) John Milbank radicalised the theological project, breaking with liberal thought as well as the social sciences, and influencing what came to be known as Blue Labour and Red Toryism. Representatives of both tendencies turned against laissez-faire capitalism; both claimed that excessive individualism and an increasingly overbearing state were not in opposition, but constantly reinforcing each other. One proposed remedy, the Big Society, amounted at most to Thatcherism with a human face: the Cameron government talked of empowering communities and local associations, but the reality was austerity and deregulation.
>In the US, three strands of post-liberal thought have emerged over the last decade. Most prominent are the self-declared ‘populists’, such as Sohrab Ahmari and the GOP senator Josh Hawley, who seek to replace the Reaganite fusion of pro-market ideology and traditional morals with a ‘working-class conservatism’. Then there are the ‘National Conservatives’, who are opposed to globalisation in general and the institutions of ‘global governance’ in particular, but are much more likely than populists to praise ‘free enterprise’. Finally, there’s a smattering of religiously inspired theorists – mostly hard-right Catholics – who are less interested in big societies than in big states promoting, or even enforcing, traditional morality.
>For these American post-liberals, liberalism is guilty of more than the destruction of Gemeinschaft. It is, they say, profoundly hypocritical: liberals talk about tolerance and individuality, but are dangerously intolerant and eager to enforce conformity. They deploy state power to eradicate ways of life devoted to anything other than the pursuit of individual autonomy: a much cited example is the requirement, introduced by the Obama administration, that employers provide workers with access to contraceptives through their insurance plans (this was restricted after a legal challenge by the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic group). According to post-liberals in the US, liberalism only pretends to be neutral in conflicts between what John Rawls called ‘conceptions of the good’; in reality, its insistence on a single human good amounts to totalitarianism.
>What might a post-liberal politics look like? Those lacking a general political theory tend to gesture towards a specific place: Hungary. Viktor Orbán’s self-declared ‘illiberal democracy’ has become a Disneyland for the international far right. Its attractions include natalist policies, an unashamed ‘Hungary First’ attitude, the promotion of Christianity in public culture and an assault on academia intended to end a supposed left-liberal hegemony. In 2024, J.D. Vance declared that ‘the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary. I think his way has to be the model for us.’ (It has indeed proved to be the model for the second Trump administration, except that Orbán is too intelligent to gut scientific research.)
>But Hungary is a small, highly centralised Central European country with relatively little ethnic diversity and an industrial base reliant on German car manufacturers. Does it really provide a plausible template? Symptomatic of post-liberals’ uncertainty about which direction to take was a book called *Regime Change* by Patrick Deneen, one of Orbán’s great fans and fellow-travellers, which was published in 2023. Deneen, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, had risen to prominence five years earlier after the appearance of his short book, *Why Liberalism Failed*. After the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump, liberals were not only embarking on Trump safaris in Appalachia and repenting of their supposed failure to pay attention to the ‘left behind’, but were seeking too to signal an openness to non-liberal ideas, with even Obama praising Deneen’s ‘cogent insights’. At that point, however, Deneen’s prescription was curiously defeatist: a retreat into illiberal communities in small-town America, in the hope that the increasingly totalitarian liberal state might somehow leave you alone.