A previous version of this essay was originally published in German on the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s website as “Eine Kraft, mit der man rechnen muss,” translated by Matthias Oppermann: https://www.kas.de/de/web/geschichtsbewusst/essay/-/content/eine-kraft-mit-der-man-rechnen-muss-postliberalismus-liberal-ordnung (June 18, 2026). The present article is a revised and substantially enlarged version of the German text. We would like to thank the Adenauer Foundation for the kind permission to publish the essay on the Niskanen Center website.
The world we live in
Are we already living in a postliberal world? If we are to believe Matthew Rose, the author of A World after Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right, published in 2021, the answer is yes: The postliberal moment has already arrived, and it is high time we learn how to cope with it.1 Five years later, his statement rings even more true than when it first appeared in print. Three new books, by Matt Sleat, Laura Field, and Arnaud Miranda, offer detailed and fascinating accounts of the rise and diversity of the postliberal universe.2 While different in scope and style, they skillfully and usefully map the intellectual ecosystem from which contemporary postliberal thought has emerged and trace the complex ways in which postliberal ideas have moved from niche circles into mainstream politics and society. In so doing, these books shed light on a variety of topics, from the postliberals’ critique of procedural liberalism and market individualism to their embrace of common-good constitutionalism and futuristic social and economic scenarios.
The current moment offers legitimate reasons to be concerned about the future of our liberal-democratic regimes. The political and public spheres around the world are dominated by populists and nationalists, techno-anarchists, and religious traditionalists who believe that the classical tenets of liberalism have become obsolete and must be replaced with something else to save our civilization from extinction. “Hard-right parties are now Europe’s most popular,” was the title of a study published in The Economist in February 2025.3 Benefiting from the steady decline of traditional parties, they now draw a quarter of the vote across European democracies and exercise a powerful influence over the mass media, using sophisticated communication and mobilization strategies. The Russian invasion of a sovereign country in 2022 has called into question the entire post-WWII security order in Europe. The hectic and pugnacious second term of Donald Trump has led many across the entire world to fear that the liberal order may be a thing of the past; not surprisingly, comparisons with the Weimar era have become commonplace.
Postliberal thinkers explain these developments by arguing they are a natural response to a global liberal order that is slowly hollowing out our societies and ways of life. These critiques come mostly from the right — but not exclusively. While there is no single organized postliberal Left comparable in influence to integralism or national conservatism on the Right, there are notable self-declared postliberals on the Left. Thinkers such as John Milbank and Adrian Pabst in the U.K. join conservative postliberals in denouncing the increasing wealth inequality, the excesses of market individualism, and liberalism’s alleged neutrality toward the good life.4 They deplore the weakening of solidarity in society and converge in arguing that liberalism has exhausted itself socially, economically, and morally. Even leftist critics who at some point may have viewed themselves (or still regard themselves) as liberal, advocate a set of ideas that sometimes overlap with postliberal critiques of liberalism.5 Of course, merely being a critic of liberalism does not automatically turn one into a postliberal or antiliberal.
While most of these objections to liberalism are by now well-rehearsed, it is far less obvious what a postliberal world might look like. The lack of clarity has to do, first and foremost, with the fact that the postliberal camp is varied, idiosyncratic, and by no means unified, especially on the Right. When it comes to issues such as religion, nationalism, gender, immigration, and order, there are notable differences between Left-postliberals like Milbank and Pabst and their counterparts on the Right. Meanwhile, there are many flavors of right-wing postliberalism: the “aristo-populism” of Patrick Deneen, differs from the paleoconservativism of such figures as Paul Gottfried, and different again are members of the so-called hard Right or alt-Right, such as Steve Bannon, Michael J. Anton, or Darren Beattie. National conservatives like Yoram Hazony have a different focus from the agenda pursued by influencers and journalists such as Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes. Integralists and common-good conservatives like Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari, and Gladden Pappin differ from Christian nationalists, anti-woke activists, techno-monarchists (Curtis Yarvin), techno-libertarians (Peter Thiel), and techno-realists (Alexander Karp).
It is, therefore, worth reflecting on the diversity of postliberalism as a political movement. Some of its leaders occupy the limelight, while others can be found mostly in obscure corners of the internet. Some are Substack intellectuals or have influential podcasts; others prefer think tanks, venture capital circles, or online journals such as The American Mind and the Claremont Review of Books, both publications of the Claremont Institute, which has become one of the main intellectual centers of the postliberal milieu in the U.S. What all postliberals share, however, beyond an engaged and energized base, is the fact that they have a powerful and firm narrative about the ills of our contemporary world and a strong ambition to chart a path beyond the liberal horizon. As such, in Mark Leonard’s words, postliberals constitute “a political force distinctly adapted to today’s political world”6 that must be taken seriously and reckoned with.
Precursors of postliberalism
Before we assess the originality and impact of postliberal ideas, it is important to examine briefly the genealogy of postliberalism broadly defined. Those who confidently announce the death of liberalism and the arrival of a postliberal world should remember that these are not new topics. Liberalism has always had its fair share of critics from all sides of the political spectrum. When liberal principles and institutions appeared, they unleashed a true economic revolution, which Deirdre McCloskey described as “the Great Enrichment.”7 The key change was made possible by the rise of “bourgeois virtues”—prudence, justice, courage, temperance—as societies began to place greater weight on innovation, commerce, entrepreneurship, experimenting, toleration, and trading. As such, liberal principles formed a distinctive way of thinking not just about the economy but also about the state, the law, culture, religion, and society at large. If we are to judge by its critics, it was a radical approach that fostered economic prosperity, progress, inclusion, and stability.
Soon after it asserted itself on the political scene at the beginning of the nineteenth century, liberalism was scorned as a sinful doctrine and accused of promoting everything from atheism and materialism to nihilism and destruction of social values and norms. Liberals were accused of seeking to destroy the family, subverting morality, or provoking social anarchy. The Catholic church was an early and sustained critic of liberalism. The famous encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) put forward a trenchant critique of the economic and moral assumptions of nineteenth-century classical (laissez-faire) liberalism, insisting on the corrosive effects of unbridled individualism and free markets. Although it eventually reconciled itself to the political pillars of liberalism, the Vatican remains skeptical of liberalism’s faith in the free market, excessive individualism, greed, and profit for profit’s sake.
It is important to remember today that liberalism was first declared “dead” in the late 1870s, then “died” some more at the turn of the twentieth century, and has been dying almost continuously since 1920.8 Eight decades ago, two German philosophers, while living (rather comfortably) in southern California, wrote an influential book in which they claimed that for all the noble ideals of the Enlightenment, its instrumental rationality had produced mostly negative consequences for humanity.9 At the beginning of the 1980s, Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue offered another severe critique of the liberal principles and values based on Enlightenment ideas.10 In his view, liberalism treats morality as a matter of individual preference or rights and not as an objective human good; as a result, moral and political debates become interminable because there is no shared standard for resolving them. MacIntyre also took issue with liberalism’s claim that the state should remain neutral among competing conceptions of the good life. Some of his thoughts would eventually overlap (to some extent) with the critiques mounted by liberalism’s radical opponents from the Right, dissatisfied with the liberal emphasis on individual autonomy that portrays individuals as independent, self-choosing agents. They reject this view, arguing that people are fundamentally embedded in families, communities, and historical traditions that shape their identities and moral reasoning.
The dissatisfaction with the liberal consensus that prevailed in the waning years and immediate aftermath of the Cold War became evident a few years later when Ross Perot, an eccentric, self-made businessman from Texas, won 19 percent of the vote in the presidential election of 1992. He promised to become the leader of this revolt against the liberal elites but failed to do so. Instead, the two politicians who achieved this task in mid-to-late 1990s were Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan. If Gingrich was effective in reshaping the strategy and agenda of congressional Republicans in Congress from 1994 onward, Buchanan focused on cultural issues. By igniting the culture wars, he highlighted the values and lifestyle of those who had been left behind, giving voice to the forgotten Americans living in the fly-over zone between the two coasts. Buchanan’s The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization combined several tropes that would later inform the postliberal vocabulary, such as a strong critique of liberal individualism, demographic anxiety, hostility to multiculturalism, a defense of Christian civilization, and a strong anti-globalist stance with isolationist overtones.11
In the realm of ideas, it was Samuel Todd Francis (1947-2005) who sketched out an agenda for bringing middle America back to life and reinventing conservatism.12 His Leviathan and Its Enemies, written in the early 1990s but published posthumously in 2016, anticipated the rise of Trumpism and the MAGA movement and signaled the arrival of a new form of conservatism whose main goal would be to replace existing liberal (allegedly corrupt) elites with what he dubbed “the real masters of the house.”13 Like Buchanan, Francis foresaw the importance and potential of a new electoral base, the so-called middle American radicals. The term was coined by the sociologist Donald I. Warren in the 1970s to describe a large segment of the American middle and (mostly white) working classes that felt increasingly alienated from political, economic, and cultural elites. Energized by a long list of grievances, humiliations, and frustrations, Francis argued, the middle American radicals were “a body without a head,” waiting for a charismatic figure and a new political movement that could give voice to their fears and hopes. In his view, the task of the new social conservative movement he advocated was to seize power to depose liberal elites and enact much-needed regime change.
The postliberal mind
This agenda might have seemed exotic two or three decades ago, but it is no longer so. Navigating our moment of disruption will become easier the more familiar we are with the intellectual currents shaping it, including postliberalism and the alt-Right. Despite the diversity of postliberal thought, we can identify distinctive habits of mind that crop up repeatedly in this genre. One is a sense that postliberals are not only underdogs striving to win a contest of ideas, but rather representatives of a truly downtrodden and systematically marginalized but large constituency whose voice deserves to be heard and whose interests ought to be defended today. While some are driven by a sense of humiliation, dispossession, and resentment due to status loss or institutional exclusion, others are motivated by cultural alienation, civilizational panic, distrust of liberal institutions and norms, a desire for revenge, or anger at influence of liberal ideas and elites. Some postliberals deeply committed to our founding principles may no longer feel at home in today’s world but still hope to be able to conserve what remains valuable in the American dream.
Second, postliberals seem to share the same propensity for big narratives about the decline of modernity, even if they might not agree on when history took a wrong turn (the Enlightenment is often presented as the main culprit, but the social, political, and cultural changes in the 1960s are also mentioned). They all tell some variant of a decline story and advance bold explanations seeking to account for almost everything that doesn’t work well in our societies. In their view, anything in that category is (or should be recognized as) liberalism’s fault. Another common trait is the postliberals’ inclination to see and interpret our current situation in simplistic, binary terms, leaving very little room for nuance. If contemporary liberalism is declared bad or dead, then all types of liberalism, without exception, must be similarly dismissed and condemned.
Scholars have also shown that postliberal narratives often misread the evolution of liberalism and miss the complexity and diversity of the liberal tradition broadly construed. For example, critics of Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and its sequel, Regime Change (2023) have highlighted what they took to be misrepresentations of key liberal thinkers such as Locke and Mill, along with the tendency to cherry-pick ideas from liberal writings to suit the author’s narratives.14 In their attempts to paint with a big brush, postliberals tend to give their readers the impression that there is a liberal Bible, when in reality, liberalism has no single authoritative, foundational text analogous to Marx’s Communist Manifesto or Mao’s Little Red Book. Moreover, postliberals usually gloss over the fact that there are notable differences among liberals, who have often disagreed over important issues such as the role of markets and governments or the balance between rights and duties. As a result, postliberals tend to treat current of liberal thought such as progressive liberalism or neoliberalism as if they comprise the whole liberal doctrine. In reality, as Edmund Fawcett, Helena Rosenblatt, and Alan Kahan reminded us, liberalism constitutes a much larger picture, a family with many dialects that takes diversity and disagreement within its own camp seriously.15
Postliberals believe that Western elites and institutions are in deep civilizational decline, and we are on a “Flight 93” path that requires bold and decisive action before it is too late.16 Many of them are not interested in reforming or compromising with liberal principles and ideas; instead, they seek to transcend them altogether, declaring them obsolete or dead. Yet, it is remarkable what confidence other postliberals summon to announce the dawn of a postliberal age or advocate for (often radical) regime change when no realistic or reasonable postliberal alternative is visible on the horizon. Some of them would want us to return to ancient paganism, others to medieval papacy or even a modern form of Inquisition sui generis. Others, like Rod Dreher, contemplate the possibility of a Benedictine retreat into small communities as a response to the fact that the moral and religious assumptions that once underpinned Western societies have eroded because of secularization, radical individualism, and materialism. In an influential 2017 book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, Dreher called for a limited withdrawal from aspects of modern culture to strengthen Christian families, schools, churches, and local communities.17
In general, postliberals tend to be suspicious of key aspects of modern economy and society such as immigration, free trade, and free markets, which they see as existential threats to the survival of our society. Their writings reflect a shift in thinking about the state, technology, markets, and global order. Interestingly, a few on the fringes of postliberalism go so far as to embrace technological acceleration as a means of statecraft and as the foundation of national military strength and economic growth. Although he may not be easily characterized as a postliberal, Alexander Karp, who holds a Ph.D. in social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main (where he studied under Jürgen Habermas), rejects the notion that technology is politically neutral and argues that artificial intelligence, data analytics, and cyber capabilities are essential instruments of state power, making technological leadership a matter and asset of national security and geopolitical competition.18
Postliberals are fond of proposing that the common good replace freedom as society’s lodestar. Once the common good is weakened, many of them argue, only a responsible new elite can renew and reinvigorate it with the aid of extensive state action. Some of them are openly critical of the separation of church and state, while others advocate an activist role for the state that has an authoritarian ring. In their view, the size of the state is a secondary question compared to whether or not the state is oriented toward and promotes a certain view of the good life and the common good broadly defined.19 Adrian Vermeule’s common-good constitutionalism is a good example of a legal and political theory endorsing this view. It argues that constitutional interpretation should be oriented not primarily around individual autonomy but around promoting the substantive common good of a political community, consisting of justice, peace, abundance, health, safety, and security.20 In turn, Patrick Deneen’s definition of the common good refers to “those needs and concerns that are identified in the everyday requirements of ordinary people” and are “daily reinforced by the habits and practices of ordinary people.”21 His common-good conservative tradition also emphasizes common sense, shared culture, and a specific type of “mixed constitution” with Aristotelian overtones.22 But Vermeule, Deneen, and their like-minded colleagues offer relatively few concrete indications about how to negotiate between competing visions of the common good in a pluralistic and free society that lacks anything approaching universal standards for defining the good life. It has been remarked, for example, that Deneen mentioned using Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends, leaving his readers to guess what that might actually mean in practice.
The idea that the liberal project is ultimately “self-contradictory” and culminates in the depletion of the moral and material resources needed to sustain a free way of life appears in the writings of prominent postliberal thinkers. In their accounts, the foundations of our inherited, civilized order have been eroded under the influence of liberal principles. Far from fostering equality, equity, and diversity and protecting human dignity and freedom, liberal values and norms have generated massive inequality, enforced uniformity and homogeneity, and fostered material and spiritual degradation.23 On this view, the embrace of liberal dogmas has left us with disintegrating national states, ruined families, imperial adventures, and eviscerated religious traditions — a true “carnage,” as Donald Trump famously put it in his first inaugural in January 2017. The implication (as spelled out in Deneen’s widely read book, Why Liberalism Failed), is that the real and serious problems facing the world today exist not because liberalism has failed, but because it has … triumphed. The most radical conclusion one can draw from this view is that liberalism’s endgame is nefarious, unsustainable, and self-defeating in every respect, and that our world is bankrupt and has “the meaningless ring of a hollow drum and the odor of slow death.”24 Hence, we are told that we must reject the belief that our ailments can simply be fixed by implementing better (or more) liberal policies that promote unlimited economic growth, constant technical progress, and more freedom of choice, and more individual autonomy.
It has been remarked, however, that some postliberals (such as Patrick Deneen, for example) still defend key tenets in the liberal pantheon, such as freedom, the rule of law, private property, freedom of speech, individual liberty and rights. Yet, they tend to distance themselves from the liberal understanding of those concepts, which they criticize for its abstract and universal connotations. Postliberals criticize liberalism for seeking to maximize individual freedom and autonomy, for its alleged relativism and hedonism as well as for its narrow and etiolated understanding of the good life. The liberal conception of freedom, they claim, prevents genuine human flourishing and is inimical to tradition and morality, offering only a false illusion of the blessings of liberty. In their opinion, religious freedom, freedom of thought, free markets, and checks and balances cannot serve as effective replacements for piety, truth, and fair and just government.
Riding the tiger
Whether we agree with postliberals’ theses or not, it would be prudent to take their writings seriously. To characterize these thinkers as reactionaries and dismiss them as irrelevant would be an unpardonable mistake.25 Instead, it would be much wiser to read their writings and try to understand what motivates them to propose radically alternative views of society and call for regime change. The reason is not that we should try make the postliberals’ ideas salonfähig, acceptable in polite society. The rationale is simply that “we cannot know what we affirm without knowing what we deny, and we cannot know who we are if we do not know what other ways of life are possible.”26 If we truly believe in liberal ideas and principles, then we might want to begin by reading and engaging with those with whom we disagree, provided, of course, they are clever, honest, and spirited.
Postliberals are often mistaken or biased in their critiques of liberalism and their blueprints for the common good and regime change are nonstarters. Any calls to impose conservative values by force on a society that is fundamentally pluralistic and divided about what the common good entails must be resisted and rejected. Yet, postliberals point to real shortcomings and inconsistencies of liberal practices and institutions that we may not ignore. If we only try to rebuff the postliberal accounts of liberalism without engaging the strongest versions of their arguments, we are not properly equipped to adequately address the underlying issues they raise.27
That is why I believe that reading the postliberals’ writings can be a sobering and useful enterprise. The sense of alienation and the intensity of resentment that motivate their camp are real and cannot be dismissed as irrelevant. We must be honest about what works and what does not work in our liberal societies. Furthermore, the postliberals’ calls for radical change are not devoid of a special rhetorical appeal that some might find charming. For example, Deneen suggested the possibility of renewal by appealing to a few memorable poetic images that caught my attention. “The day is late,” he wrote on the last page of Regime Change, “but a lighter shelter can be discerned amid the gloam. It is time to abandon the ruins we have made, seek refreshment, and then build anew.”28 Chateaubriand would have certainly agreed with Deneen’s words.
While postliberals’ proposals for rebuilding our institutions must be taken with a big grain of salt, I believe that we can and should learn from their “fractional truths” even when we disagree with their views. One such important lesson has to do with the postliberals’ plea for bringing the community and a certain view of belonging back in. Another has to do with rethinking the role of virtue, patriotism, education, and tradition in social and political life.29 Of course, it would be as difficult to endorse a view of common good that is universal or theologically grounded as it would be to try to educate everyone about what that good is or might be. Challenging the separation between church and state would also be a non-starter. Catholic integralists risk going too far in their attempt to criticize, in the words of an influencer, “the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life.”30 Their vision would require an active and interventionist state that would encroach on individual rights and liberties that all Americans cherish.
Yet, while we may not endorse any arguments for stronger church-state integration and unity, we should not dismiss the idea that one of the purposes of politics is to foster a form of human flourishing that requires a special role for local communities and families and other groups. As Christopher Lasch perceptively wrote three decades ago, “[a] public philosophy for the twenty-first century will have to give more weight to the community than to the right of private decision. It will have to emphasize responsibilities rather than rights. It will have to find a better expression of the community than the welfare state. It will have to limit the scope of the market and the power of corporations without replacing them with a centralized state bureaucracy.”31 While Lasch was not a postliberal by any means, his writings have inspired some prominent postliberal thinkers such as Patrick Deneen in their search for alternatives to the current liberal order.
In my view, postliberals’ writings also prompt us to reflect on new eclectic combinations, scenarios, and possibilities that we may not have considered seriously until now. For example, as I have argued elsewhere, one might be a defender of a social-democratic welfare state in economics, of limited government in politics (focused on enforcing the rules of the political game), and of conservative viewpoints when it comes to culture and religion.32 At the same time, postliberal critiques remind us that liberal democracy may need a stronger ethic than mere tolerance, and liberals ought to do more to address the role of virtue in political and social life. They should also be more vocal about the role of morality and tradition in sustaining a free and open society. This is all the more important since postliberals’ appeal is unlikely to go away anytime soon in our age of anxiety and accelerated technological change, when many feel that they live in countries that are slowly sinking. One can only hope that postliberals will not give up on key liberal principles such as the rule of law and freedom of speech, conscience, and thought. As Alan Kahan contended, liberalism needs to reclaim and reinforce the moral pillar that has often been neglected by deontological liberals (in the Rawlsian tradition). By placing the principles of justice and individual rights prior to any substantive conception of the good life, these liberals struggle to account for the moral and cultural foundations that sustain a political community.
As we are all searching for new forms of solidarity and belonging, liberals will need to emphasize more that it is possible to reconcile the “need for roots” (to borrow Simone Weil’s phrase) with a renewed appreciation for the real benefits of our liberal (cosmopolitan) civilization. Those who dream today of regime change should also be reminded that the imperfect liberal societies in which we are privileged to live are, in Raymond Aron’s own words, “a happy exception” in the history of mankind. “These societies which we describe and which we critique,” Aron wrote in 1978, “these societies which live by permanent debate concerning the order which ought to be, … are historically exceptional societies. […] We ought never to forget, to the extent that we love liberties or liberty, that we enjoy a privilege rare in history and rare in space.”33 This rare privilege is no small matter, and we must be profoundly grateful to all those who have made it possible for us to enjoy it today.
Aurelian Craiutu is Arthur F. Bentley Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has published and edited many books, including, most recently, Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Since 2018, he has been Senior Fellow affiliated with the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.
- Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). I have reviewed Rose’s book in “Riding the Tiger,” Society, Vol. 59, No. 2 (March-April 2022), pp. 187-190. ↩︎
- Matt Sleat, Postliberalism, Cambridge: Polity, 2026; Laura K. Field, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025; Arnauld Miranda, Les lumières sombres: Comprendre la pensée néoréactionnaire, Paris: Gallimard, 2025. ↩︎
- The Economist, February 28, 2025, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/02/28/hard-right-parties-are-now-europes-most-popular. ↩︎
- John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990; John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, The Politics of Virtue: Postliberalism and the Human Future, London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016; Pabst, Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021. ↩︎
- See, for example, Samuel Moyn’s book, Liberalism Against Itself, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023, a book that I reviewed in my essay, “The Critics of Liberalism and the Perils of Revisionist History,” Society, 61 (April 2024), pp. 231-34. ↩︎
- See Mark Leonard, The New Right: Anatomy of a Global Political Revolution. Policy Brief. Berlin: European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), February 5, 2026. https://ecfr.eu/profile/mark_leonard/type/publication. ↩︎
- See Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. ↩︎
- See Daniel H. Cole and Aurelian Craiutu, “The Many Deaths of Liberalism,” Aeon Magazine (June 28, 2018), https://aeon.co/essays/reports-of-the-demise-of-liberalism-are-greatly-exaggerated\. ↩︎
- For a recent edition, see Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. ↩︎
- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. ↩︎
- Patrick Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. ↩︎
- For more details on Francis, see Rose, A World After Liberalism, pp. 111-35. ↩︎
- Ibid., p. 114. ↩︎
- See, e.g., Laura K. Field, “Revisiting ‘Why Liberalism Failed:’ A Five-Part Series,” Niskanen Center, Dec. 21, 2020. ↩︎
- Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018; Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020; Alan S. Kahan, Freedom From Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. ↩︎
- See Michael J. Anton’s essay (writing as Publius Decius Mus), “The Flight 93 Election,” Claremont Review of Books 16, no. 4 (Fall 2016). https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digital/the-flight-93-election. ↩︎
- Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, New York: Sentinel, 2017. ↩︎
- See Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Sift Belief, and the Future of the West, New York: Crown Currency, 2025. ↩︎
- Sleat, Postliberalism, p. 50. ↩︎
- Adrian Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022. For an extended discussion of common good constitutionalism, see Field, Furious Minds, pp. 220-51. ↩︎
- Patrick Deneen, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, New York: Sentinel, 2023, p. 230. ↩︎
- Ibid., p. 237. ↩︎
- Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018, p. 3. ↩︎
- These are James Baldwin’s words as quoted in Pankaj Mishra, “Grand Illusions,” The New York Review of Books (November 19, 2020), https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/11/19/liberalism-grand-illusions/. ↩︎
- Also see David Brooks, “History is Running Backwards,” The Atlantic, April 16, 2026, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/reactionary-traditionalism-worldview/686597/?utm_source=apple_news. I borrow the phrase “ride the tiger” from Julius Evola’s book, Ride the Tiger, Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2003. ↩︎
- Rose, A World After Liberalism, p. 153. ↩︎
- Sleat, Postliberalism, p. 41. ↩︎
- Deneen, Regime Change, p. 237. ↩︎
- For a summary of these issues, see Field, Furious Minds, pp. 318-22. ↩︎
- Edmund Waldenstein, “Integralism in Three Sentences,” The Josias, October 17, 2016. https://thejosias.com/2016/10/17/integralism-in-three-sentences/. ↩︎
- Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and The Betrayal of Democracy, New York: Norton, 1996, p. 113. There is a notable affinity between Lasch’s ideas and Deneen’s critique of liberalism that should not go unnoticed. ↩︎
- See Aurelian Craiutu, Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024, pp. 127-34. ↩︎
- Raymond Aron, Liberty and Equality, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023, pp. 54-55. ↩︎
