(PD) John F. Doherty–Postliberalism’s Rebellion Against Reality 

The title of James Patterson’s and Thomas Howes’s book Why Postliberalism Failed is not inspired by a belief that the contemporary American postliberal movement (made most famous in Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed) has collapsed. Quite the contrary: the authors believe that, in spite of an apparent retreat of postliberalism, the movement continues to influence contemporary American political discourse. Indeed, people who have publicly endorsed it (and who continue to defend postliberal positions) are in positions of the highest power in the U.S. government. All the more reason, Patterson and Howes argue, to understand what makes postliberalism tick. 

The authors helpfully summarize the whole postliberal platform (not just its integralist wing, the subject of Kevin Vallier’s excellent book All the Kingdoms of the World), which is diffused throughout hundreds of articles, social media posts, and several books. Postliberals reject liberalism’s protection of individual liberty as a precursor to communism, atheism, and other ills; they instead “advocate for restoring a divinely ordained hierarchy, with the Church providing spiritual rule and the state political rule.” (In theory the state submits to the Church if the two bodies disagree.) Demoting individual freedom means centrally organizing the economy (“in collaboration with state-approved guilds or cartels”) and concentrating all political power in a unitary executive that governs through bureaucracy (hence many postliberals’ sympathy for China’s present government). Unlike conservatives, who (out of respect for everyone’s freedom and dignity) try to effect political change through constitutional processes, postliberals employ cultural Marxist tactics, “us[ing] political power to reward their friends and crush their enemies.” They accept the administrative state and seek to populate it with their own numbers, “put[ting] that bureaucracy to work providing a kind of right-wing welfare state.” Whereas progressives use federal bureaucracy to advance sexual liberationism, many postliberals would use it to advance patriarchy. Finally, postliberalism rejects America’s responsibility for helping to uphold the law of nations; the United States should be neutral in all global conflicts, they say, even if that means allowing stronger countries to annex weaker ones. 

One of the book’s greatest achievements is to show in detail the similarity between contemporary postliberal theory and dozens of regimes that have actually existed in relatively recent history (although not in the memory of young postliberals), all of which failed to usher in the Christian society they promised (hence the book’s title). Contemporary postliberalism is not a discovery made by the American New Right in the last two decades; postliberalism has been a constant temptation of Western conservatives, especially religious ones, at least since the French Revolution. We’ve been through all this before, and it has always ended badly. 

Read it all.

John Doherty of @WitherspoonInst reviews @ThomasDHowes and @McGillPatterson’s Why Postliberalism Failed @PublicDiscourse — https://t.co/ME7aLT2aOF

— Matt Franck (@MatthewJFranck) September 24, 2026