Eight years ago, a wave of conservative academics declared a new ideology, “post-liberalism,” which would both explain and justify international right-wing populism. While their beliefs were hardly uniform, their promises were. They declared that they could explain all of modern politics as the rejection of the “old” Republican Party. In their view, Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016 represented the repudiation of the “neoliberal paradigm” of the Ronald Reagan years, in favor of a new ideology which sought virtue rather than freedom.
This project has failed. Post-liberals seem entirely disinterested in the actual values of Trump voters or the political moment, and they have thus created a marginal theory disconnected from the conservative movement. This movement has centered broad illiberalism rather than anything particularly post-liberal, producing a wave of “illiberal post-liberals.” But post-liberalism may still be salvageable, albeit in a quite different form from how the first wave of post-liberals discussed it. The salvageable form of post-liberalism will, in fact, explain the political alliances, ideology, and policies which underpin the current Republican Party. It will show how post-liberalism can build on liberal theory while rejecting that liberal ends are the only proper ends of politics, implying a view that is post-liberal, not illiberal.
The central view of the post-liberal movement is that Trump’s success represents the rejection of many conservatives’ focus on free markets and, more broadly, freedom as an end. Liberalism, according to post-liberals, is the belief that the main value of government is to ensure freedom rather than to try to enforce particular moral values. This view has underpinned both historic American conservatism and progressivism, from Ronald Reagan’s support for markets to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s support for labor regulations.1 Post-liberalism’s founding political theorist, Patrick Deneen, argues that the loss of a monoculture has led America away from liberalism to a “communitarian moment” in which voters desire greater powers for communities and fewer freedoms for individuals. This implies the need for a broad “statist” movement which can defend both greater government spending and socially conservative policy. Trump’s election, says Deneen, was an expression of this desire.
Further, according to the post-liberals, the voters were right in rejecting this view. To post-liberals such as Vice President J.D. Vance and legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, traditional conservatism was actively wrong to place freedom first.
Drawing on a 1960s article by conservative public intellectual Brent Bozell rejecting “fusionism,” named after the fusion of conservative ideology with the libertarian skepticism of the state, Vance has argued that no level of freedom is necessary for virtue, or even valuable in itself; rather, people should only be as free as will be conducive to “virtuous action.” Vermeule similarly argues that valuable liberty only exists insofar as it is used for virtuous ends.2 Accordingly, post-liberals think that the era of liberalism was wrong, that fusionist policies which furthered freedom during that time were wrong, and that the goals of the Republican Party throughout much of the 20th century were wrong.
In fact, it is these post-liberals who are wrong. Descriptively, the “communitarian moment” upon which writers like Deneen focused seems to have passed, if it ever existed in the first place. The number of voters who support both left-wing economic policies and social conservatism has fallen to an all-time low, while actual voter preferences have forced Republicans to adopt progressive views on everything from abortion to gay marriage. The only reason why it seemed that voters were drifting towards broad statism was that, as Democrats veered left on immigration throughout the late 2010s, many otherwise socially liberal left-wingers were classified as “socially conservative” by comparison. As the views of both parties on immigration have returned to the center since 2024, this mirage has faded. On an international level, Hungary’s “post-liberal” government lost power in a landslide election, while successful European populist parties in countries from Italy to France are increasingly converging towards freedom-loving fusionism rather than statist post-liberalism.
Why post-liberals have failed to accurately understand our political moment is because they were never interested in it in the first place. The ideology underpinning the contemporary conservative movement is not a rejection of the historical one, just a belief that its recommendations alone cannot answer the questions of today.
To demonstrate, Ronald Reagan, the prototypical punching bag for post-liberals, has a 96 percent approval rating among Republicans today. Meanwhile, post-liberal icon Richard Nixon remains the only Republican president of whom a majority of Republicans disapprove. Over 40 percent of Republicans say that freedom “best represents” America, and a plurality says that America should strive to be even more free. Conservatives clearly do not reject the concept of freedom or the 20th-century conservative tradition.
So illiberal post-liberals have failed at their basic task. As they are more interested in smuggling in their own views than in describing the current political climate, the post-liberal movement seems increasingly disconnected from mainstream politics. This disconnect is encapsulated by Vermeule’s expression of disinterest in “the liberalism debate.” Similarly, Sohrab Ahmari, a major founder of post-liberalism, has moved away from conservatism altogether, defending American liberals from Lincoln to Roosevelt and, more broadly, “American democracy,” as representative of Catholic values. Remaining post-liberals, politically inert, increasingly trend towards extremism. The “Postliberal Order,” an outlet which has acted as a mouthpiece for post-liberals from Vermeule and Deneen, now hosts regular paid articles by Mason Stallings, who has elsewhere expressed support for James Fishback’s failed, fringe, and openly anti-Semitic campaign for Florida governor. This is not an ideology with a finger on the pulse of mainstream American politics.
That post-liberalism has fallen into disrepute is a sorry fact. There is, after all, a kernel of truth in the endeavor. What initially drew people to post-liberalism was the belief that liberalism was, in the words of Vermeule, “no longer [a] live option.” Rising political movements on both the left and right believe that the government should take a stand on moral issues. Conservative donor networks are increasingly made up not of traditional business elites with economic agendas but of technology elites who believe that the government should shepherd a visionary, science fiction-influenced shift in American life. Meanwhile, Americans from across the political spectrum are increasingly skeptical that there exist any impartial institutions, or even that such a thing could exist. Indeed, politicians increasingly justify everything from industrial to social policy in terms of its partisan moral effects. As ex-Times columnist Ross Douthat has argued, it seems today that liberalism has faced a “crisis” over the past ten years which has made a return to “liberal normalcy” impossible, or at least uncompelling. Recognizing this loss of confidence in liberalism in the 21st Century was once the central insight of post-liberal thinkers.
But post-liberalism was not originally compelling only because it could justify the pull away from liberalism, but because it could do so without rejecting the wisdom of Republican luminaries such as Reagan. Post-liberalism need not say that liberalism is always wrong everywhere. Rather, it need only say that liberalism is not right at the current political moment. The view of Vance, Vermeule, and Deneen is not post-liberal; it is illiberal. This article defends a conception of post-liberalism that is not illiberal.
In practice, illiberals have uniformly shown contempt for the view that Reagan’s politics were good then but would not be good now. Indeed, a central element of illiberal post-liberalism is the claim that historic political conservatism was altogether a mistake, and that its misguidedness justifies illiberal policy in the present. This erroneous inclination is easy to understand. After all, liberals often talk in terms of the “ideal society.”3 How could the ideal society have changed between 1985 and today? Certainly, if liberalism is this sort of theoretical ideal, no form of post-liberalism is possible, whether illiberal or not. But historic liberalism does not need to be justified in this utopian manner. Many of the most influential defenses of liberalism, particularly on the right, have been based on pragmatic benefits which liberalism brings to society.
If liberalism is justified by these empirical arguments, then as times change, it may lose viability. Both Kevin Vallier’s defense of liberalism for the sake of social trust and Joseph Raz’s defense of liberalism for the sake of virtue illustrate this claim. These two thinkers demonstrate that American conservatives’ belief in the moral impartiality of the state has been based not on pure theoretical lines, but rather on empirical facts. And in each case, they show how these facts have changed.
In doing so, Vallier and Raz provide a post-liberal framework that respects the liberalism of the past and recommends a politics that is neither liberal nor illiberal. Vallier’s view lays the framework for pessimistic post-liberalism, which shows why, due to changing preferences, post-liberal policy may be necessary to maintain a stable, trusting society. Meanwhile, Raz’s view lays the framework for optimistic post-liberalism, which shows how new technologies make that post-liberal policy consistent with our freedoms. These two theories can also, in a complementary way, explain the political trend towards post-liberalism, and the strange alliance between the technology industry and the conservative base that has emerged behind it. Pessimistic post-liberalism can explain why the economically downtrodden (who are most concerned about the cost of living) believe in post-liberal policy, while optimistic post-liberalism explains why many technologists in Silicon Valley, those who fund these post-liberal candidates, have increasingly converged towards post-liberalism.
For most Americans, post-liberalism is based on a loss of trust in our institutions. Much of the modern right believes that the world, and in particular America, is getting worse. Indeed, the whole concept of the “Make America Great Again” movement is to make America similar to the great nation it once was – that is, to keep America from some postulated decline. Usually, rhetoric on this issue relates to America having somehow lost its status as a “high trust” society, leading to regular allegations of rampant fraud or of conspiratorial control of “the system.”4 This loss of trust leads to a rejection of the ostensibly corrupted liberal institutions in favor of those that can support Americans’ conception of the virtuous life.
In Vallier’s view, the loss of trust in liberalism can only be explained by the government’s divergence from liberal policy. He argues that liberalism can be justified in terms of maintaining stability, particularly through public trust. When governments illiberally seek to implement moral views, they require people to follow rules which they will find not just wrong but unjustified. These factionally imposed rules make people distrust society. This distrust then leads to polarization, factionalism, and the undermining of the good life. Government policy therefore ought to avoid legislating morality, according to Vallier, because otherwise, the nation will lose stability and social trust, and thus the outcome will be bad from any moral viewpoint.5
Yet, this hardly seems like a full explanation of the sorts of policy which can undermine public trust. While some of the fall in public trust may, as Vallier argues, originate from illiberal elements of our society, illiberalism cannot explain the whole story. The institutions which Americans (and particularly conservative Americans) still trust are not the ones which are purportedly neutral, but rather those which directly enforce or teach morality.6 Vallier’s account of public trust, thus, cannot fully explain what causes people to trust or distrust institutions.
Alternatively, the fall in public trust may originate from people’s resentment at the government’s failure to ensure them the opportunity to live virtuous lives. When people are saturated by a culture which undermines their access to a good life, resentment for the government is a natural response.7
The recent, overwhelming public focus on the “cost of living” can be understood as exactly this kind of resentment. While some view the rising interest in the cost of living as purely economic, it seems to be connected to a desire for a certain kind of life. Americans who avoid having families due to concerns about the “cost of life,” for instance, are often motivated not by the unaffordability of basic necessities but rather by the absence of social and intellectual resources for their children, including high-quality childcare, educational opportunities, and community. That is to say, Americans are increasingly motivated not by economic needs or basic freedoms but by a desire to live lives of value. When Americans’ demands are unmet because institutions avoid taking a moral position about what sorts of lives deserve to be supported, they may lose trust in those institutions. It is instructive that there is an empirically close relationship between the rising cost of living and the loss of public trust.8
This is not to say that pessimistic post-liberalism completely rejects the liberal desire to abstain from questions of morality. In fact, it seems that whenever the government directly adjudicates moral issues, it does, as liberals say, lose significant public trust. Thus, moral impartiality is a value to be defended. But, notably, it is just a value, not the value. Morality-based factionalism may undermine public trust, but it is not the only way in which social trust can be undermined. And in many cases, the loss in public trust caused by political factionalism is less than whatever would be lost by taking the neutral moral position; indeed, factional policy may sometimes be the only means of maintaining trust in institutions. Thus, the post-liberal believes in a general reason not to engage in factionalism but not a universal requirement to avoid moral factionalism, and in this way, the pessimistic tendencies on the right – the view that the cultural effects of anti-factional liberalism have brought the US to a point where it must be willing to undertake morally factional policy – can be justified without the unlikely implication that liberal policy was always wrong.
Thus, one arrives at a sort of post-liberalism that can more accurately represent how ordinary people think about this political moment. It is not that contemporary conservatives want to overturn the freedoms of Americans or to undermine the conservatives of the past. Rather, post-liberals merely believe that the sorts of policies which are called for at this moment may not be perfectly liberal. If people lose faith in institutions because basically good options in life like buying a house or raising a virtuous family seem impossible in light of the rising cost of living, factional government policy which rewards virtuous kinds of life like these may be necessary to make those sorts of lives possible, and thus to maintain public trust. This is true even if, in doing so, the government will undercut the interests of those who do not want to engage in this sort of life.
This view, one which says that perfect liberality is, here and now, counterproductive in light of the hurdles which face Americans seeking to live virtuous lives, is pessimistic post-liberalism. The vast majority of ordinary Trump supporters seem to fall into this ideological camp. It is the ideology of “American Carnage,” rhetoric about American decline, and of Make America Great Again.
Still, even if we can avoid reducing public trust, it may seem that illiberal policy is nonetheless wrong. This is because illiberalism may make people’s lives less virtuous by restricting their autonomy. According to many liberals, such as Joseph Raz, impartiality is not just good because it makes people feel respected; it is good because it stops government overreach that would inevitably make them less virtuous. Raz believes one should have the ability not to make whatever decision one wants, but to choose among different virtuous options. A life in which one is forced to become a good doctor when one wishes to become a good teacher is hardly a good life, even if it is a successful one. However, because government policy is imprecise and life is complex, many policies which seek to make people live some virtuous lives would inevitably stop them from living other virtuous ones, paradoxically making their lives less virtuous. Raz therefore argues that only the sorts of life which are clearly vicious can be restricted – namely, violent or otherwise harmful lives. He therefore defends liberalism by declaring illiberal policy bad for virtue, and thus bad on its own terms.9
However, due to the development of technology, the clumsiness of government policy may be significantly reduced. Jonathan Quong (criticizing Raz) imagines a hypothetical brain implant which removes the ability to act badly while leaving all good actions possible. This policy would promote virtue without undermining the autonomy to choose our own good lives. It is thus illiberal without undermining autonomy.10A brain implant like this may seem like unrealistic science fiction.11 But technologies which can be subtly altered to undermine immorality without sacrificing autonomy increasingly dominate our lives. For example, some forms of artificial intelligence alignment make certain conclusions inaccessible to consumers.12 Few people would reject AI alignment policies because they undermine our right to learn new slurs or build bombs. It seems likely that in the era of data collection and social media, altering algorithms can similarly render bad actions unappealing without undermining our autonomy to engage in any good actions.
This is optimistic post-liberalism. It is optimistic because it claims that, because of technological discovery, we have transcended liberalism. While optimistic post-liberalism takes a liberal perspective on many traditional social policies (refusing to directly ban immoral actions), it nevertheless justifies a government directly involved in moral debates. Such an ideology may seem unpopular; after all, the American public has an increasingly negative view of technological discovery. That being said, optimistic post-liberalism is not nonexistent on the right. Many conservatives in Silicon Valley (that is, those who bankroll the Republican Party) have long believed that by bringing about technological discovery, virtue would follow. Thus, this understanding of post-liberalism can explain how a real segment of the actual conservative movement has moved past liberalism.
While pessimistic and optimistic post-liberalism may seem inherently contradictory, a movement responsive to both may be more effective than either view on its own. Pessimistic post-liberalism cannot justify very much policy alone. While individuals’ freedoms do not automatically prevail for the pessimistic post-liberal, they are still important to respect. Thus, if the only way in which one can hope to enact post-liberalism is via heavy-handed traditional policy, the post-liberal may look quite similar to the liberal, albeit with minor differences on the margins of trade or immigration policy. But, if one incorporates the insights of optimistic post-liberalism – that legislation can alter much of modern life without undermining one’s autonomy – a much broader conception of post-liberalism can be justified. This post-liberal framework may be able to use the efficacy of emerging technologies, from social media algorithms to pharmaceutical drugs, to bring about virtuous lives far more effectively and with a far less negative effect on individual autonomy than many illiberal policies of the past.13
We see in this moment two quite different trends bringing about a perfect storm for post-liberalism. On the pessimistic side, cultural and economic trends are making good lives and safe families increasingly difficult to obtain and maintain, reducing public trust and undermining the promises of liberalism. In light of this, it increasingly seems that America needs some kind of post-liberal policy for its citizens to retain trust in the country’s institutions, even if such policy may abridge liberties. But just as the problem worsens, technology is developing that can change behavior without undermining one’s autonomy, making liberal policy consistent with individuals living good and free lives. Thus, post-liberal policy looks less unacceptable than illiberal policy.
Of course, the concept of post-liberalism discussed herein is hardly the sort of red-blooded, unencumbered legislation of morality which many of the first generation of post-liberals may prefer. What seems to underpin the ideology of many illiberal post-liberals is, in the words of the illiberal post-liberal Gladden Pappin, annoyance with the “limitations on the scope of politics” which make them unable to stand up to the “neoliberal economic system.” What these ideologues want, as Pappin suggests, is not a framework that can recommend particular helpful policies but rather a new ideology that can be to the right what Marxism is to the left: a way of changing the world (and perhaps being remembered for it).
This article’s conception of post-liberalism hardly offers that. Indeed, it accepts much of society as it is. While it rejects fusionism, it still recognizes the fundamental value of freedom and individual autonomy. While it allows the legislation of morality, it still views non-factionalism as a virtue. Thus, while it implies political action, it does not require that we change the fundamental structures of our society.
While Pappin may disagree, this is a substantial virtue of this article’s conception of post-liberalism. People do not want massive change for the sake of it. Large-scale ideological missions to restructure society cannot be justified by the fact that intellectuals or elites may feel ennui due to the constraints created by the limits of political morality. The purpose of politics is the public good, not private fun. This fact is one that intellectually profligate post-liberal intellectuals the world over, whether in Hungary or America, cannot afford to forget.
A broad term, “liberalism” includes classical liberals like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, social liberals like John Rawls and Franklin Roosevelt, and liberal conservatives (sometimes called “fusionists”) like Frank Meyer and William Buckley. It is thus a very broad term, not attached to a single political ideology.
Vermeule, Adrian. Common Good Constitutionalism. Polity Press, 2022, Ch. 1.
Quong, Jonathan. Liberalism without Perfection. Oxford University Press, 2020.
Deneen, Patrick J. Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press, 2018, Ch. 3.
Vallier, Kevin. Must Politics Be War? Oxford University Press, 2019, Ch. 2-3.
Brady, Henry E., and Thomas B. Kent. “Fifty years of declining confidence & increasing polarization in trust in American institutions.” Daedalus, vol. 151, no. 4, 2022, pp. 43–66, https://doi.org/10.1162/daed\_a\_01943.
Tahzib, Collis. “Is Schouten’s liberalism radical enough?” Analysis, 3 Feb. 2026, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anaf115.
Wu, Cary, et al. “A social price to the rising cost of living? the bidirectional relationship between inflation and Trust.” Canadian Review of Sociology, vol. 62, no. 3, 18 Aug. 2024, pp. 244–267, https://doi.org/10.1111/cars.12481.
Raz, Joseph. The Morality of Freedom. Clarendon Press, 2009, Ch. 14-15.
Quong, Liberalism without Perfection, pp. 55-6.
But we want to make clear, not too unrealistic. Recently developed weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy seem to have a similar effect, not healing people but rather removing non-disordered desires which undermine their health. Such a drug would seem to look quite similar to a brain implant removing the ability to pick or know about bad options. The government issuing prescriptions or paying for weight loss drugs is uncontroversial in America and much of Europe; it is thus a good example of the optimistic post-liberalism we set out in the rest of this paragraph.
Zajko, Mike. “Autocompleting inequality.” Journal of Digital Social Research, vol. 7, no. 1, 30 May 2025, pp. 66–82, https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v7i154879.
The reason why pessimistic post-liberals should prefer post-liberal policies recommended by optimistic post-liberals may not just be that historic illiberal policies were relatively wrongful but also would be relatively ineffective. One central policy which many illiberals like Vance have advocated is the return to “Blue Laws” which historically closed shops, workplaces, and cultural institutions on Sundays, based on historic research that showed that removing blue laws, by granting people greater autonomy, led to greater wrongdoing. In the era of online shopping and the dominance of introverted interests like video games and social media, though, studies have shown repealing Blue Laws has basically no significant effect on behavior.
Source: Connolly, Cristina, et al. “In cervisia veritas: The impact of repealing Sunday blue laws on alcohol sales and retail competition.” Journal of Wine Economics, vol. 18, no. 4, Nov. 2023, pp. 312–323, https://doi.org/10.1017/jwe.2023.26.