Against Post-Liberalism:
Why ‘Family, Faith and Flag’ Is a Dead End for the Left
by paul kelly
john wiley and sons ltd, 208 pages, $64.95
Paul Kelly’s forthcoming Against Post-Liberalism could hardly be more timely. Post-liberalism has recently been a topic of intense debate, as liberals and liberal-leaning conservatives blame post-liberals for accelerating the rise of the Joker-like performers such as Nick Fuentes. Kelly cuts through the fog of battle with a mostly accurate, mostly un-tendentious survey of the political movement he opposes. He sketches three faces of post-liberalism: national populists, common-good communitarians, and common-good authoritarians.
Liberalism is a politics of separation—church from state, right from good, public from private, law from morality. Post-liberalism represents an integralist reaction from big thinkers such as Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, and John Milbank, whose thought is mediated through journalistic popularizers such as Michael Lind, Sohrab Ahmari, and David Goodhart to political actors who want to change the rules of the game and advance a political program of faith, family, and flag. In Kelly’s telling, the varieties of post-liberalism are fueled by a shared nostalgia for a lost Eden of integration and solidarity.
National populists attack liberalism with a genealogy: Liberalism isn’t what it claims to be, a project of liberation and equality, but the ideology of a coercive and detached global elite that pursues its class interests while holding the broken masses it rules in contempt and justifying its power through a self-serving meritocracy. Populists target universities, because under contemporary liberalism they serve as credentialing agencies for the elites and because they uproot young people physically and culturally from their family, faith, and community. Elites shield themselves from the economic effects of mass immigration, while throwing the racism yellow flags to penalize anyone who objects. Kelly doesn’t think the truth of populist claims matters to populists, since they function as political weapons rather than arguments in a rational public discourse. Populists propose a renewal of conventional morality, but leave that morality without grounding. Practically, the populist program amounts to “That’s not how we’ve always done things.”
Common-good communitarians fix that problem by providing philosophical grounding for their project. Mounting an anthropological critique, communitarians attack liberal individualism, arguing that society isn’t a contracted conglomeration of individuals but a web of associations in which individuals are formed. Liberalism’s flaws are features not bugs; its commitment to individual autonomy and free expression necessarily dissolves the social and cultural institutions and values that keep liberalism solvent. Purportedly vacant at the center, liberalism actually imposes its own comprehensive vision of the good, which is liberalism itself. Following Burke and drawing on the reserves of Catholic Social Teaching, communitarians urge the renewal of a social covenant between generations to ground public morality in pursuit of the common good, a substantive and authoritative ordering of common life that opposes both vacant liberal formalism and an unchecked market. Pluralism is the Achilles heel of communitarians. They advance the common good at a time when the question of what and who defines the common good is in dispute.
Authoritarians have an easy solution: Coercive regime change, revolutionary in the literal sense of turning liberalism on its head. Borrowing from Carl Schmitt, sometimes explicitly, common-good authoritarians insist that political authority must have a transcendent rationale, and they operate in terms of Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction. They reject the Lockean claim that coercion is justifiable only with the consent of the coerced. Truth is truth, however widely rejected, and truth should shape social and political life. Liberalism robs law of its normative force, which arises from its integration into an authoritative order. Authority comes from above, not below. New elites, committed to a transcendent vision of the common good, must seize the levers of control and shape society to the truth, making use of whatever Machiavellian stratagems get the job done.
The faces aren’t entirely distinguishable, and some players change faces depending on circumstances. But it’s a usable taxonomy, and Kelly in the main does a good job of sympathetically explaining post-liberal motivations. He could have probed the theological roots of post-liberalism more deeply, which have affinities with the Yale School post-liberal theology of George Lindbeck and Stanley Hauerwas and the circle of Catholic thinkers that formed around David L. Schindler. He claims that post-liberals want to exterminate liberalism despite the explicit desire of some post-liberals to preserve the goods of liberalism.
Kelly’s analysis is mostly un-tendentious. Occasionally, it’s distorted; occasionally, contemptuous. Yoram Hazony’s dispassionate claim that the family was “instituted in order to pass on to another generation an inheritance” is, Kelly says, “intentionally provocative.” Hazony’s emphasis on obligation and the sacrifice in marriage implies, in Kelly’s view, that “marriage partners are not supposed to be happy”—which leaves me thinking Kelly knows little about marriage or sacrifice. Marriage breakdown, “women seeking fulfillment outside the home,” and women seeking liberation from “the claims of traditionalist marriage partners” are “bugbears” of social conservatives. You’d think family breakdown would worry liberals too. The notion that the family is “an educative community” resonates with “Dreher-type ‘home-schoolers.’” Why we need scare quotes around an educational ecosystem that includes 3.5 million American children is unclear. For the record, my wife and I started homeschooling when Dreher was still in high school.
Authoritarians offer a kind of answer to pluralism: Ignore it. Kelly doesn’t accept this, of course, nor does he opt for the comprehensive and perfectionist post-liberal liberalism of Samuel Moyn and Ronald Dworkin. Instead, he favors a repristination of John Rawls’s political liberalism. Rawls places the problem of pluralism at the center of his political scheme and sketches out a political form that demands only a thin, reasonable agreement about the terms of cooperation. Contrary to post-liberal critics, Rawlsian liberalism doesn’t privilege autonomy; it makes virtually no anthropological assumptions at all. Besides, Rawls paid explicit attention to what, Kelly says, post-liberals ignore: the ways wealth inequality, and the inequities of status and power that go with it, threaten democratic polities. Kelly pulls the striped shirt out of the closet, dresses liberalism as a neutral referee, and sends him back onto the field.
Disappointingly, Kelly doesn’t acknowledge, much less address, the fundamental problem with Rawls: What and who defines what counts as “reasonable”? Who makes up the rules the umpire enforces? When do speech or religion or assembly cross into the territory of un-reason, and who patrols that border? Those questions formed the wedge that pried open skepticism about liberalism in the first place. I suspect “reasonable” is more or less equivalent to “liberal,” which means Kelly’s solution is basically, “Steady as she goes.” Against Post-Liberalism doesn’t advance the debate, but circles back to leave us right where we started.
