I tire of debates about postliberalism. So it was with reluctance that I turned to Zachary Chambers’s intervention, “The Logic of Liberalism” (Law & Liberty, March 18, 2026), which warns of “the danger of this new right-wing ideology.” The usual fright-words are deployed: “totalitarian,” “authoritarian,” “counter-revolutionary.” We are told, “Post-liberals threaten to subvert and undermine the conservative movement.” Your humble scribe is identified as a voice of this dangerous and (according to Chambers) anti-American way of thinking.
The sweep is grand. Modern man has learned to think for himself. Truth is a matter for the individual to decide: “The direction of meaning has been reversed and now comes from inside of man out into the world.” Do you suspect that this “direction” might lead to subjectivism and relativism? Chambers tells you to go read Hegel, who explains “how modern philosophy can continue to make normative, even ethical claims, without abandoning its logic.”
The appeal to Hegel is hand-waving. Chambers’s argument against postliberalism rests on the assertion that liberalism, with its logic of personal and private truth, is our fate. We can’t go back. The notion that we can recover metaphysical truth and shared loves “is really a summons for a return to childhood.” And it is futile: “The bell of individual subjectivity cannot just be unrung,” and “one cannot re-enter childhood.”
It’s a familiar claim, one that I can’t take seriously. Decades ago, I took a graduate seminar with Ruth Marcus, a famous philosopher and logician. The assigned reading made a claim about the purported significance of modern historical consciousness. Marcus dismissed this dogma, saying, “I’m sure if I had an hour with Aristotle, he’d be convinced of the truth of Newtonian physics.” Perhaps she was wrong. Who can know? But her remark freed me from the presumption that I am somehow remote from those who came before, even long before. Historical change is real. But there are no unbridgeable metaphysical chasms.
In a literal sense, you can’t turn back the clock. We can’t snap our fingers and recreate American society at the time of the Founding, or for that matter at the time of my childhood. But I can read Tocqueville to inform my judgment, and I can recall my younger years and be reminded of social goods (and evils). On the basis of these and other efforts of reflection, I seek to inform myself so that I can play a role in the theological, moral, and political debates of our time, contending for what I think is true, just, and useful.
Moreover, the truism about never being able to turn back the clock works both ways. I am a twenty-first-century man, formed by the modern West. Therefore, when I argue that same-sex marriage is contrary to natural law and God’s revelation, or observe that liberty and equality are not the sole criteria for a just society, I am by definition doing so as a “man of today,” not as a “man of yesterday.” To claim otherwise is an old progressive trick, whereby their judgments are crowned with history’s mandate.
The Founders read Plutarch and Cicero. They were influenced by the political form of the Roman republic. Although Venice and the Netherlands were republics at the time of the founding, the most powerful nations of Europe were monarchies of one kind or another. “History” seemed to be against the American Constitution. In a sense, therefore, the Founders were “turning back the clock.” But, of course, that’s not an accurate description of their intentions. They sought to establish what was, in their judgment, the best form of government for the American people in that time and place. They drew upon sources according to their pertinence, not their place on a historical timeline.
The postliberals of my acquaintance do the same thing. Curtis Yarvin urges us to embrace monarchy, not out of nostalgic, but because he judges that today’s democratic procedures have become dysfunctional and the problems facing the United State require vigorous executive action. I’ve made arguments about the priority of love over freedom, among them, that a culture of freedom is rooted in strong and galvanizing loves. And I’ve noted that love reanimates the language of authority, which liberalism has difficulty accommodating. Yarvin’s and my reflections are certainly debatable. But they are “threats” only in the sense that dissent always threatens an established consensus.
As I noted, I find these debates wearisome. Chambers ends with a grandiose warning: “Post-liberalism ultimately threatens our very notions of man and freedom.” This is worse than hyperbole. Abortion, doctor-assisted suicide, transgender ideology, transhumanist delusion—the threats to “our very notion of man” are evident. Woke censorship, economic precarity, a dispiriting nihilism—the conditions for freedom have eroded. Is it far-fetched to think that liberalism and its strong emphasis on the individual have played a role in bringing us to our present, unhappy condition—and offers little guidance about how to reverse course and chart a path toward a society more likely to protect human dignity and sustain a culture of freedom?
