Another Perspective on Post-liberalism
Some Outside Reading
For some reason, Substack isn’t letting me cross-post two articles I wanted to share with my readers, so I’m going to embed them in this post as links. If you’re tired of esoteric right-wing debates between academics whose labels can be hard to keep track of, you might want to skip these. But I’ve written enough about post-liberalism myself that I think readers will be familiar with the concept.
Phil Magness (author of “Why I Am Not a Neoliberal,” among other things) has begun a series (which I believe will have more than two installments) taking aim at post-liberal thinkers. Naturally, his first two are on Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermuele. So much of his thinking (including his head-scratching reaction to the fact that these two seem so certain in their dismissal of economic freedom and the American Founding even as they betray a basic lack of knowledge about economics, free market arguments, the history of this country, and even the basic political context of the American Founding) matches my own. There are so many insights I could tug on, here, but I should just let you read the pieces.
Deneen borrowed many arguments from the left, with whom he shares basic intuitions about community, the natural environment, private property, and capitalism. At one point he predicted that Peak Oil would cause the imminent collapse of capitalism as the inherent contradictions of classical liberalism piled up (if this sounds like Marxism, that’s because it is).
Despite operating well out of their depth on economic matters, most postliberals write as if they have exposed some devastating truth about the discipline — if only someone would listen. The situation is akin to the astrologer who chastises NASA for ignoring horoscope advice in advance of space launches, while also promising to lead the space agency’s course to Mars if only their fellow astrologers could be given a seat at the rocket scientists’ table. And with the “Tariff Man” Donald Trump in the White House, the economic astrologers finally found their coveted seat.
It’s particularly revealing that libertarians, rather than the left, have become the primary intellectual scapegoat of the postliberal scene.
Read the entire thing:
As for Vermuele, the through-line in his career has been the worship of power. He has long believed that emergency justified the aggressive expansion and use of power, with different “emergencies” being slotted in at different times to fill that role of justification in his worldview. In my opinion, Vermuele cares less about what is done with the power than he does about power itself. Perhaps that is a harsh accusation, but I think it is an accurate one. He has changed his mind on the executive bureaucracy and the judiciary at times, with the continuity being that in every case his arguments have been about streamlining the channels through which power can be wielded an exercised in ways that strike him as the most convenient/most likely to redound to the benefit of “his side.” Naturally, he drew on the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt.
This conceptual framework empowers despotism under the cover of unilateral emergency actions that no court or congress could challenge. Vermeule and Posner acknowledged as much, noting “civil libertarians invoke the shadow of Weimar” to warn about the dangers of expanding executive power in times of emergency.
They answered that in two ways: First, they claimed that historical analogies don’t apply because we can only understand emergencies in hindsight. And second, they insisted that emergency power would not “produce another Hitler … in today’s liberal democracies anyway; and if it did, there would be nothing that civil libertarian judges could do about it.”
So, essentially, you’re silly to worry about dictators because even if they were to come about, what could a judge even do to stop them?
Ultimately, they have no real answer to the problem of Hitler.
Ultimately, the post-liberals make the exact same argument that Woodrow Wilson and the early progressives did, the same argument Mussolini did, the same argument FDR and the Brain Trust did, the same argument many environmentalists and technocrats make today, an argument which is probably one of the oldest arguments in political philosophy, but which is perpetually billed as a “new” argument. It was probably put forth as a new argument the first time anyone ever tried to establish a political regime based on freedom, and it has been advanced almost immediately after the establishment of any free society. It is always couched in forward thinking terms, based on the claim that freedom worked in the past, but has outlived its usefulness.
The argument sounds complex, but is really quite simple: that modernity (always defined as the current moment, whatever moment that happens to be) with its faster pace, advanced technologies, ever-evolving societal complexity, and new challenges, requires aggressive expansion of power (usually in the hands of one person, or a few people). Modern life (again, this could be steamships and railroads or AI and the internet) has made freedom increasingly untenable. Legislative debate is too slow. We need the government to be able to do Big Things and we need to Move Fast. It’s Important.
You can tell how little I take this argument seriously by my use of capitalization. Of course, the post-liberals will contest that this isn’t what they are about at all. Naturally, they will post-liberal-splain (a cousin of “man-splaining”) that I couldn’t possibly understand what they are talking about, because I haven’t read the proper medieval thinkers (and possibly because my brain just isn’t galaxy-sized enough). Like the CRT left, they like to cloak their designs in academic psychobabble, in the belief that Using Big Words makes them Sound Smart. More importantly, it makes it more difficult for lay readers to understand.
For my part, I’m with Calvin Coolidge. There are very few new ideas under the sun. This “new” argument isn’t new at all. It’s very old. It’s as wrong now as it was in 1926.
Don’t take my word for it. Read Magness’s essays.
Please keep up the explanation of the post-liberals because I'm one of the simple minded. I read and read and become confused by the endless comparisons to history and philosophy when it's unnecessary. Straight simple reason will be more helpful, just like yours. Thanks. Take care.