Liberalism has faced strong intellectual headwinds since 2008. The collapse of the financial system did not just rock consumer confidence but the political system on which it was founded. Ever since, we have witnessed rising concern about the state of liberalism in America, creating a genuine fear of backsliding. Could a political order again emerge that sees inequality between peoples as natural and ongoing? Will political movements fearful of globalisation and its fruits gain the upper hand? Will identity-focused politics overwhelm liberal ideals and values about intrinsic human worth?

It is true, we should not see liberalism as merely “natural” and thus inherently correct. As Jason Blakely has argued in his new book, Lost in Ideology, we should not treat any particular way of seeing the world as natural. Our understanding of the world uses “maps” that can get us lost inside the rabbit holes of our own ideologies. By opening up the question of ideology, we necessarily must question each other and ourselves more deeply. In many progressive political minds, though, liberalism comes as a natural, even scientific argument whereas all forms of conservatism amount to a regression of the human condition.

There are, however, humane and liberal forms of conservatism that seek to retain notions of tradition and, as Burke put it, the contract between the living, the dead, and yet to be born. The value of this form of conservatism is driven home by the emergence of a new form that challenges the notion of liberal democracy altogether. Liberal democracy is built upon two separate pillars of legitimacy: free democratic elections and a constitutional order guaranteeing our freedoms as citizens and limiting the scope of government excess. Post-liberal conservatism sees a fundamental clash between these value sets, i.e., the want of the people and the freedoms guaranteed by constitutions. Seeking to reset relations between the people and the state, “post-liberalism” reshapes the polity altogether.

The name “Post-liberalism” conjures up images of real invention that moves beyond the liberal experiment. Indeed, it makes us think of something other than the common garden-variety conservative. Yet from “common good constitutionalism” to “aristo-populism,” post-liberal ideas have almost all been outlined and tried before. The arguments aren’t actually post-liberal—they are merely restated yearnings for a pre-liberal order.

The Crisis of Liberalism

From the post-Cold War period, liberalism has been assumed by some to be an arrogant, universalist argument. The man who has borne the brunt of these attacks in the modern day is Francis Fukuyama. The author of the oft-remarked-upon book, The End of History, is seen as the primary defender of liberal politics. The simplistic argument attributed to Fukuyama is that liberalism represents the end of political fights, meaning the world will soon succumb to the universal reign of liberal democracies.

However, this analysis fails to consider Fukuyama’s complexity and potential doubts. While he does acknowledge that liberty and equality are two twin phalanxes of politics that cannot be bested by previous ideologies, he also recognises liberal democracies regularly fall short of these ideals. The liberal democratic state may not ultimately be able to attain the equality it idealizes. And the notion of material abundance has the potential to make us bored and is ultimately unable to satisfy our needs for equal recognition. Moreover, Fukuyama recognises the ongoing attraction pre-liberal forms of politics exert, especially in appealing to our desire to be seen and recognized not merely as equals, but as superior to others (megalothymia). Indeed, The End of History expresses Fukuyama’s fear that liberal democracies themselves may succumb to the need to be recognised as superior.

The end of history therefore cannot be seen merely as liberal triumphalism but also as a warning shot—one which Fukuyama has fired more recently in shorter books such as Identity. His passionate attachment to liberal democracy is clear, but it would be an error merely to place Fukuyama in the camp of those who preach a natural liberal supremacy.

Liberalism, therefore, even in Fukuyama’s terms, does not solve all political problems or stop potential backsliding into systems that pre-date the emergence of liberalism. Instead, it merely highlights a Hegelian “end” of ideology that has not been surpassed. It is hard to argue against this claim, given the inability of post-liberal thought to formulate a truly new critique.

However, the crisis of liberalism does speak to a dangerous vacuum in our political systems. In the world of ideas, we are running on empty. Liberalism—once an idea that changed the world—has now succeeded and does not know what to do with its empire. A lack of real innovation (identified by John Stuart Mill as fundamental to liberalism)has, according to Fukuyama, helped create the potential for catastrophe. Economically and socially, liberals increasingly rely upon old answers that no longer cut the mustard.

But this is just the same with conservatives. From the “trad” movement to populist democracy to the rejection of globalization, post-liberal conservatives are repeating the same ideas and themes that have been bandied about many times before. This does not make the critiques any less potent, some are stronger than others, some are actively dangerous, but they are not new or post-liberal.

Post-liberalism as Pre-liberalism

William Buckley said, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history yelling stop.” If conservatism aims to stop liberalism in its tracks, then what is post-liberalism? As scholar Stefan Borg has outlined, John Gray described post-liberalism as a movement that wants to shed liberal values, such as pluralism, and imagine a more traditional version of the West.

But this is hardly new in and of itself. Whereas moderate conservatives such as Burke did not want to “remake” society but enact gradual change predicated upon constitutional tradition, more radical conservative movements have often trodden down the path of anti-liberalism. Labeled as entitled, arrogant, and presumptuous, liberalism has been presented not simply as an ideological error but as an attempt to re-order and re-organise our societies from the ground up.

The conservative southern agrarian movement in the twentieth century repeated similar arguments about the busybody nature of liberalism and its destruction of an order that prided itself on duty, honour, and order. Indeed, when we think of politicians like George Wallace, we can find genuine anger at the role of the federal government enforcing a more liberal and equitable settlement for all Americans. Wallace’s anger was not simply at integration—it also had a sharp economic edge, demanding greater fairness for workers curating a mixture of class and racial warfare.

If the critique of transformative liberalism is not new, then what is? Perhaps more fruitful ground is to be found on the question of loneliness. Post-liberals oftentimes assert that liberalism has made us more atomised. By prioritising a focus on the self and unleashing technological innovations, post-liberals often argue that liberalism has caused genuine community to wither away. We are left isolated, alone, and in a world of our own.

Yet, once again there is nothing necessarily new here. Conservatives such as Alasdair Macintyre have long written about the effects of excessive atomisation and the importance of assigning cultural meaning and importance to our lives and activities. Shared meaning and significance can come in many forms—from citizenship in Greek city-states such as Athens, or communal belonging to sports clubs and even political parties. This critique need not lead to a neo-Luddite desire to resist all innovation, but to demand something which has been lost. It is the hope for a revival of community where we recognise each other and thus fulfill, at the very least, our mutual desire for recognition—though it can descend into an expression of megalothymia.

What then about critiques which treat progressivism as a natural outgrowth of liberalism? Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen’s more intellectually coherent work, fused progressivism with classical liberalism. Whereas Fukuyama sees a clear breach between these two traditions, Deneen and other post-liberals see the former as the inevitable end point of the latter. This is perhaps most clearly seen in Deneen’s discussion of Mill, where it is assumed classical liberalism allows for permissiveness based on Mill’s harm principle. Once the harm principle is invoked, the argument goes, then permissiveness becomes normalised and eventually celebrated.

Yet this ignores Mill’s complex thinking in On Liberty which saw utility as the foundation of moral distinctions between different kinds of actions. Post-liberals tend to ignore this moral component. Their misunderstanding of Mill’s work, with its focus on utility and complex ideas, contributes to the broader mischaracterization of classical liberal thought long held by more reactionary conservatives such as Carl Schmitt.

Imagining an end to pluralistic and selfish interest groups, Schmitt’s constitutionalism does away not only with ballot democracy but also with safeguards against emergency power, leading to a constitutional structure dominated by executive authority.

Schmitt’s account of liberalism held that liberalism could not properly understand politics and that it tried to dominate political and social life. His ideals came from a mixture of authors such as Hobbes, Rousseau, de Maistre, and Cortes. For Schmitt, political concepts were ultimately a form of secularised theology arguing that secular structures were mere copies of what had come before from the church. Although his faith in the executive to guide the state sounds thoroughly modern, Schmitt’s early romanticism and beliefs about the connection between the ruler and the ruled are thoroughly pre-liberal. Derived from a notion of representation that has long since passed with the arrival of modern nation-states, Schmitt’s ideals are hardly post-liberal but simultaneously fearful and disdainful of the emergence of the liberal world in the twentieth century.

Indeed, Deneen recognises that these fears of liberalism leading to progressivism are quite old, arising as a manifestation of traditional conservative movements which warned against the French Revolution and Marxism and drew upon a mixture of moral value and trust in the people. This is the bedrock on which Deneen ostensibly places his ideal of aristo-populism in Regime Change. A complex mixture of rule by the wise with democratic safeguards, it represents a model that fuses the old and the new. Combined with the economic reorganisation of institutions, Deneen’s post-liberal vision in Regime Change represents exactly how post-liberalism necessarily relies on traditional arguments to critique what is “new.” Deneen may believe old ideas presented in a new framework will promote something distinctly new, but it’s hard to believe this won’t merely be a replay of an old style of politics that liberalism replaced.

Restrained Accommodation or Radical Change?

An important question for post-liberalism is whether and to what extent it aims to accommodate liberal tendencies. Or does it seek to eviscerate any liberal feeling at all? Those who fear that liberalism has utterly transformed regimes will naturally seek to turn the tide away, enacting sweeping and radical changes.

In both Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change, Deneen presents liberalism as a planned change that uses the state to enforce new social norms—cultural shifts do not come naturally but are orchestrated at the top. This makes Deneen and post-liberalism different than many conservatives in their more radical rejection of small-l liberal values and societies. Some conservatives, including most mid-century Republicans, would seek accommodations with a broadly liberal state while enacting conservative codes and norms. Emerging post-liberals tend to go further in seeking a wholesale reimagination of the state and society along pre-liberal lines.

 A conservative thinker like Burke did not want to see radical change in any guise and this is in part what separates conservatism from more radical philosophies, including fascism. Traditional conservatism’s reluctance to embrace radicalism might prompt us to question whether post-liberalism is a form of conservatism at all, and not something new altogether.

Vermeule’s common good constitutionalism is a case in point. He rethinks the liberal order and reorients constitutional priorities entirely away from liberties and institutional checks and toward a substantive collective good. By binding citizens together and fusing politics and faith, Vermeule posits a constitutionalism would enforce a set of positive values to help guide the body politic.

This is not a new way of imagining constitutionalism and its role. Such notions of common good notions can be found in countries, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, which have ideological norms embedded within their constitutional framework. The use of institutions to enforce particular behaviours has the potential to collapse democracy by limiting political pluralism. The notion of the “common good” requires some belief of what is “common,” requiring a notion of connection and commonality that was once normal but today is difficult to find.

In the past, we have seen radical conservatives and anti-liberals such as Schmitt use the expression of constitutional mechanisms to curate a homogenous regime. Imagining an end to pluralistic and selfish interest groups, Schmitt’s constitutionalism does away not only with ballot democracy but also with safeguards against emergency power, leading to a constitutional structure dominated by executive authority. Authoritarian conservatives have often sought to use the power of the state to introduce a new dawn of anti-liberal thinking postulating that the ideology of liberalism is not just wrong but morally bankrupt.

The desire for a cohesive state that fosters similarity is a well-worn path. The only new thing that a twenty-first-century version brings is the power the state now has to enforce such things. In previous centuries, the state simply lacked the capacity for such regular enforcement. Today, it has tools that the most ambitious absolute monarch could only dream of.

This is not to pretend all post-liberals seek such radical shifts. Adrian Pabst, in Postliberal Politics, seeks a more conservative shift towards cross-sectional alliances against the neo-liberal project which has run amok. Pabst has been critical of post-liberals who he feels have gone too far towards a philosophical radicalism that could endanger some of the political progress the post-Enlightenment West has achieved. Instead, Pabst sees a failure within the liberal order to foster community and adapt to crises such as climate change. This makes Pabst somewhat different from Vermeule and Deneen in his analysis—not just of liberalism but of the type of post-liberalism he wants to see.

Perhaps like all empires, liberalism is destined to fall. There is some truth that Liberalism is in crisis, run aground on its own success. And there is little doubt things may get worse before they get better, especially in Western Europe. However, post-liberalism has offered little in the way of real hope for a viable political alternative in the twenty-first century. All too often it repeats the arguments of the past without sufficient ingenuity or freshness of their own.