Yeah, what is 'Post-Liberalism' anyway?

Questions for Ross Douthat

The “revelation” of the rampant antisemitism problem on the right kicked off a sub-debate about the responsibility of the so-called post-liberals for the turn of the conservative movement into open bigotry and unreason.

But before we attend to that: What is “post-liberalism?” There are two senses in contemporary usage. One is a self-conscious intellectual movement of the right that believes that liberalism, as a philosophy of economic and moral individualism, is corrosive to both personal and collective well-being and should be replaced with a vision of the “common good,” usually defined through a synthesis of conservative Catholic social teaching and nationalism. The other sense describes the general turn on both the left and right away from the liberal consensus of the late 20th and early 21st centuries—often called neoliberalism by its critics—towards other traditions like Marxism or the aforementioned Catholic Integralism. The implication in both usages is that liberalism is not merely being opposed, but transcended in some way: the good things in liberalism, like pluralism and toleration, would be preserved, while the bad stuff, like alienation and class stratification, would be eliminated.

It sounds nice. And that’s the problem: It’s essentially a euphemism.

David French, in his critique of the post-liberal intellectuals, blames them for the lurch into fascism:

The postliberals absolutely helped blaze the trail for the Groyper moment. It wasn’t just the attack on liberal democracy and the principles of the founding, it was also the way in which they attacked -- hysterical rhetoric, deeply personal attacks.

They taught the groypers that the classical liberalism of the founding was a fool’s game, and that the way forward is through punching and attacking, through insults, derision, and mockery.

Trump was the most powerful force in transforming vice into virtue in G.O.P. circles, but the postliberals treated their own vices as virtues by so often and so relentlessly abandoning decency in the public square.

Once you’ve demolished respect for liberal democracy and demolished any real value in rectitude and character in public life, it’s a short trip to nihilism and fascism.

I actually think he’s got it kind of backwards. The post-liberals were following the crowd but believed they were guiding it. “Post-liberalism,” “national conservatism,” etc., are all attempts to come up with a kind of fascism lite: ex post facto attempts to contain an explosion of reactionary energy and make it respectable and rational. Not only a fascism lite, but also an antisemitism lite and therefore a national socialism lite: instead of Jews, there would be “Jews” sotto voce: references to cosmopolitanism and “globalist elites.” There would be “nationalism,” but somehow not racism. It turns out that the only people who want fascism lite are the diet fascists. And I totally agree with French that they are partly responsible for contributing to the atmosphere of moral collapse.

Ross Douthat acknowledges that the post-liberals are not masters of events when he writes:

...,what the post-liberal thinkers are doing, for the most part, is trying to describe and guide popular rebellions, whether by fitting them into pre-existing critiques of the liberal order, adapting those critiques or inventing novel ones. They are not, in the lingo of the internet, “player characters” in the current discontents; they are explainers, advisers, would-be guides, who are chasing political developments rather than driving them.

From the point of view of their liberal critics, this need not make them any less culpable — if you go along with the mob, you are guilty of its crimes; if you endorse the demagogue, you are party to his sins. But their culpability isn’t causal, and if you removed them from the story, someone else would play their part, and the underlying crisis would probably look more or less the same.

I would go one step further: if you produce propaganda for a regime, you are partly culpable for what that propaganda covers up or encourages. It doesn’t matter if someone else would have done it in your place. That’s what war criminals say: It’s a moral evasion of the gravest order. And this gets to my disagreement with Douthat. His version of events turns everything into grand historical forces, where individuals have no agency and therefore no responsibility. Trumpism, etc, is an inevitability. In this, he reminds me of the “conservative revolutionaries” of Weimar, people like Spengler, Heidegger, and Jünger, who may have disdained the vulgarity of Hitlerism but whose gloomy prophecies of civilizational decadence and decline also gave it a dolorous glamor. I pointed out to Douthat that this invocation of Zeitgeist was exactly what Hannah Arendt was criticizing in her essay “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.”

The moment moral issues are raised, even in passing, he who raises them will be confronted with this frightful lack of selfconfidence and hence of pride, and also with a kind of mockmodesty that in saying, “Who am I to judge” actually means, “We’re all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone.” Hence the huge outcry the moment anyone fixes specific blame on some particular person instead of blaming all deeds or events on historical trends and dialectical movements, in short on some mysterious necessity that works behind the backs of men and bestows upon everything they do some kind of deeper meaning. As long as one traces the roots of what Hitler did back to Plato or Gioacchino da Fiore or Hegel or Nietzsche, or to modern science and technology, or to nihilism or the French Revolution, everything is all right. But the moment one calls Hitler a mass murderer-conceding, of course, that this particular mass murderer was politically very gifted and also that the whole phenomenon of the Third Reich cannot be explained solely on the grounds of who Hitler was and how he influenced people-there is general agreement that such judgment of the person is vulgar, lacks sophistication, and should not be permitted to interfere with the interpretation of History.

This abstracting and intellectualizing tendency—tracing everything back to “ Plato or Gioacchino da Fiore or Hegel or Nietzsche, or to modern science and technology, or to nihilism or the French Revolution”—is alive and well among the post-liberalism. It’s the presence of these “greater forces” that makes Douthat call for mutual understanding rather than recrimination. When I put this problematic to him, Douthat had two responses:

That’s a good passage; on the other hand we don’t live under a dictatorship and I think our debates are in fact currently longer on mutual hate than accurate understanding of historical forces.

It’s not hateful to say the truth: only one side has both the theory and practice of ending constitutional rule in this country. And you and I don’t live in a dictatorship, Ross, but can the same really be said of the people grabbed by ICE and sent to some hellish torture dungeon overseas, beyond the reach of the law? We do not live in a dictatorship yet, but a growing number already do. Douthat admitted to me that Trump’s designs were tyrannical. But he said that the post-liberals were not united in their support of dictatorship in principle. I would reply, "Yes, many of them want to pretend what’s going on is something else.” Not to mention that to praise or excuse a tyrant out of love or ambition or perversity rather than fear is more blameworthy than if we did live under a total dictatorship; they don’t even have the excuse of being afraid for their lives or livelihoods.

I already mentioned in a previous newsletter Douthat’s response to me:

But to my mind the best way to think about it is that the liberals and post-liberals slinging epithets at one another are locked together in a cycle of mutual failure, both striving to master events that are happening independently of any theory or intellectual worldview. Which ideally should inspire a dose of mutual sympathy and maybe even productive conversation across this particular divide.

When I said something like this on social media, the left-wing writer John Ganz quoted Hannah Arendt to suggest that doing analysis this way, talking about how we’re all just caught up in large historical forces, can end up as an excuse for acquiescing to authoritarian evils and excusing people for collaborating with them.

This is a fair warning. But unlike Ganz, confident in a very specific antifascist narrative, I don’t think we actually know which form of contemporary politics is the most dangerous or destructive for the long term. And we certainly have no idea what form of politics — a renovated and renewed liberalism, a more humane and serious post-liberalism, an unexpected marriage thereof — is going to see us through this crisis or build something on the other side.

To me, it is another evasion. We can see now very clearly what the more dangerous and destructive form is. And it has no logical bearing on the moral question at hand: is this regime, in the here and now, detestable? That some future crimes might be committed does not make a crime today any less of one.

Abstractions without principles are mere euphemisms. All these phrases: “post-liberalism,” “national conservatism,” etc., etc., are just ways to paper over what’s happening in actuality: rampant lawlessness, cruelty, and corruption. They allow people to avoid using their judgment about what’s in front of them. More to the point, they are essentially lies. I want to quote another part of that same Arendt essay, which has to do with the breakdown of judgment:

…what disturbed us was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about. They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it. Without taking into account the almost universal breakdown, not of personal responsibility, but of personal judgment in the early stages of the Nazi regime, it is impossible to understand what actually happened. It is true that many of these people were quickly disenchanted, and it is well known that most of the men of July 20, 1944, who paid with their lives for their conspiracy against Hitler, had been connected with the regime at some time or other. Still, I think this early moral disintegration in German society, hardly perceptible to the outsider, was like a kind of dress rehearsal for its total breakdown, which was to occur during the war years.

Yes, intellectuals may not be able to bend great social forces to their will, but they are ultimately responsible for the judgments they make. To judge the present as anything less than obscene is to contribute to the obscenity. Post-liberalism means nothing.