Great post. How can you tell me you long for fascism without calling yourself a fascist? By relying on these tactics of historical evasion.
"Obscene" is right. There is moral and political obscenity staring them in the face––but it seems to hold the possibility of seizing world-historical power. They claim the "degeneracy" of modern liberalism must be defeated so that a moral order can be reestablished. But when you have to defend or mitigate the crimes of a flagrantly corrupt, debased, lawless regime to acquire the power to impose the moral order, maybe it's time to admit that what you really want is just the power.
This is just "Kamala is communist" but for people with brains — the counter-proposal to liberals, asserting that Trump will bring on fascism, is that "it could be even worse without Trump". Ethical balance is therefore restored, the collapse of decency is beyond our control. The grand intellectual project of the right is simply to justify living like pigs by pointing out that "they made us do it".
There's another possible explanation for why conservatives tend to take refuge in "great historical forces'. It's a way to avoid talking about the sort of capitalism that's developed over the past several decades.
It, along with their idolisation of 'the working man' (even as they hurt him), is a sign of residual Vulgar Marxism Envy, much as Trump and the T.P. of which he assumed leadership had a lot of 'Sixties envy, from the libertinage to the enthusiasm for public vulgarity to the disdain for law.
Truly a great post. You do a great job at going right to the core of the issue.
To defend Douthat, he is nominally a never-Trumper but rather than just get angry at the Trump-regime’s crimes (something otherwise covered by different Times columnists), he is trying to position his writing as a kind of “cultural analysis” of the present moment from his traditional Catholic point of view. In the past this has generated some vacuous and harmless trend pieces about Sidney Sweeney or “the kids today.” But when the cultural trend is actual neo-Nazis, he does need to be told that pondering from the sidelines is not harmless.
In some ways the intellectual corruption of believing Trumpism might be functional and durable is more galling than the moral corruption of believing Trumpism to be justified.
I've always found it worthwhile to examine the forces that led to a particular historical outcome, but it's never occurred to me that individuals are thereby off the hook. There have always been elements in our country opposed to, or at least uncomfortable with, a pluralistic, inclusive society. Their actions to undermine it have largely been thwarted by the masses who see them as cruel or mean-spirited. It feels now as if too many are simply willing to ignore what's being done in the belief it won't be allowed to go too far (Congress will investigate; the courts will reverse them). The obscenity of this moment is being ignored in favor of self-preservation, not because there's agreement with the likes of Stephen Miller or Nick Fuentes but because it's easier to keep your mouth shut so long as it's not happening to you. This is no historical inevitability; it's laziness and fear. Douthat should recognize that.
Great post and I am glad you elaborated on it. When I read Ross' column the other week where he quoted you I honestly couldn't believe his response to your incisive comments was essentially just "that's true but in this case who knows what's right and wrong to begin with?".
I think it's really funny to see a lifelong reactionary like Ross suddenly fall back into I guess some type of "great historical forces" moral relativism when it becomes too clear that the movement he ostensibly supports is unjustifiable. Am I really supposed to believe that if given a choice between Catholic tinged reactionary Post Liberalism and secular Liberalism that Ross is genuinely undecided on what he things will be worse for society in the long run?
I guess my real question is, does he honestly believe this himself or is this just a way to couch his very mild criticism of current conservative trends towards antisemitism in a way that doesn't make him into a pariah like David French in the modern conservative movement?
Can you rely on Vermeule to tell you what he really thinks, or even to discern distinctions anymore that may matter to us? Would he object to propagating a pia fraus? I don't think so. I.e. he's sort of a troll.
I don't bother with the "post-liberals" myself, because I agree with John: they're either bad-faith actors or self-deluded apologists for some manic pixie dream fascism. Non-liberal communitarianism can look attractive sometimes(!), but only when embedded in a liberal democracy. It doesn't scale up to a state.
Vermeule and I were Twitter follows for a long time, from the days when it was Twitter. We had some agreements over Chevon deference, judicial overreach, antiwar principles, and the incompatibility of the brutal aspects of neoliberalism with Catholic social teaching.
Other than that, I wondered what the details of the governance of his ideal state would be. He made coy references to Salazar or absolutist French kings, but there was no comprehensive vision of who would rule and how would they rule. As a former governance functionary for USAID programs, I'm interested in the devil in the details.
I hoped a lot of post-liberal was post-neoliberal: the return of regulation protecting workers in a European Christian- and social-democratic sense. Ahmari has been strong in this direction and seems to be moving out of the post-liberal orbit.
I don't know Schmitt from Shinola, but I gather that the "friend/enemy" distinction was a big part of Schmitt's political theory, and that Vermeule professes to be a Schmittian.
So, a few days ago when the right was fighting over Fuentes and Carlson , Vermuele posted something about maintaining unity when the enemies were at the gate. I answered him by saying "So Nazi Holocaust deniers and supporters of Israeli depredations in Gaza and the WB must make common cause? To fight who? Bernie Sanders and AOC? And for what?
More tax cuts? Crypto deregulation? Deporting fry cooks?" and for that he blocked me.
My impression is that the post-liberals are more averse to cultural and social conditions they identify with "the left" aka "Weimar" than they value freedom, so "the left" becomes the enemy in a Manichean struggle. Douthat implies he is on the fence on this when he says he doesn't "think we actually know which form of contemporary politics is the most dangerous or destructive for the long term."
My own theory is that a lot what is identified as "Weimar" is more a product of unregulated market capitalism than "the left." Vermeule and I once had a discussion about an aspect of that: the importation of child sex dolls from China and legal remedies for that.
The revulsion of the post-liberals for "Weimar" and their identification of it with "the left" just places them with the rest of the right including fascists because of that "friend/enemy" distinction. Political tribalism.
You hit on the core of it, I think: post-liberalism not only does mean nothing, but it must mean nothing, because there is no way to have a substantive "common good" and believe in substantive pluralism, for which goods differ. Thin or formal or second-order goods, like the liberal goodness of arguing over goods, are one thing, but anyone who says, in effect, "don't worry, you can keep your pluralism, but we'll all believe in the goodness of these first-order definitely-not-religious dictates," is full of it. Maybe I'm underread on conservative apologia (oh, no), but I think they should just be honest that they're anti-pluralistic, and thus that post-liberalism can only be pre-.
Does Molly Worthen's "floating brain intellectual history” apply to what Douhat is doing here? He does always seem to me to be attempting to strike some chin-scratching, Spock-ian posture on this stuff that is kind of evasive.
There’s a case to be made that Christianity is a necessary condition for Hegel’s system to even exist. Put a couple glasses of wine in him and Hegel himself would probably go so far as to say that it’s not just a necessary condition, but a sufficient one as well (clearly, plenty of his largely atheistic Left-Hegelian disciples would have disagreed with this take).
As for Ross…no way. Hegel was Lutheran through and through, and Ross wouldn’t stand for that. I daresay he wouldn’t even sit for it.
But … but isn’t Trump King David? A lot of this post-liberal hot air seems like a lame , though highly intellectualized, attempt to recapture the lost social relevance and power of organized religious institutions
Legal reasoning can seem mechanistic and unsatisfying on the Big Picture the Douhats take refuge in, but in times of great crime and destruction it offers the indispensable tool of cause-and-effect, and therefore of *responsibility*. MAGA criminals, the jailers, the propagandists, the money men, the power worshippers disguised as theorists - they all have names and faces, they bear responsibility. Douhat is telling you - telling everyone - that bearing witness, being concrete, is futile, uncertain, unsteady, unreliable. Arendt utterly detested this.
What I see in Douthat and in so many other ‘never Trump’ Republicans is the determination to obfuscate any line of thought or inquiry about where we are and how we got there that might lead back to Ronald Reagan. “World historical forces” is just a feint to get everyone to forget about “Trickle-down Economics” and his demonization of ‘welfare queens’ and blacks stepping out of their place driving pink Caldilacs.
Great post. How can you tell me you long for fascism without calling yourself a fascist? By relying on these tactics of historical evasion.
"Obscene" is right. There is moral and political obscenity staring them in the face––but it seems to hold the possibility of seizing world-historical power. They claim the "degeneracy" of modern liberalism must be defeated so that a moral order can be reestablished. But when you have to defend or mitigate the crimes of a flagrantly corrupt, debased, lawless regime to acquire the power to impose the moral order, maybe it's time to admit that what you really want is just the power.
This is just "Kamala is communist" but for people with brains — the counter-proposal to liberals, asserting that Trump will bring on fascism, is that "it could be even worse without Trump". Ethical balance is therefore restored, the collapse of decency is beyond our control. The grand intellectual project of the right is simply to justify living like pigs by pointing out that "they made us do it".
There's another possible explanation for why conservatives tend to take refuge in "great historical forces'. It's a way to avoid talking about the sort of capitalism that's developed over the past several decades.
It, along with their idolisation of 'the working man' (even as they hurt him), is a sign of residual Vulgar Marxism Envy, much as Trump and the T.P. of which he assumed leadership had a lot of 'Sixties envy, from the libertinage to the enthusiasm for public vulgarity to the disdain for law.
Truly a great post. You do a great job at going right to the core of the issue.
To defend Douthat, he is nominally a never-Trumper but rather than just get angry at the Trump-regime’s crimes (something otherwise covered by different Times columnists), he is trying to position his writing as a kind of “cultural analysis” of the present moment from his traditional Catholic point of view. In the past this has generated some vacuous and harmless trend pieces about Sidney Sweeney or “the kids today.” But when the cultural trend is actual neo-Nazis, he does need to be told that pondering from the sidelines is not harmless.
In some ways the intellectual corruption of believing Trumpism might be functional and durable is more galling than the moral corruption of believing Trumpism to be justified.
I've always found it worthwhile to examine the forces that led to a particular historical outcome, but it's never occurred to me that individuals are thereby off the hook. There have always been elements in our country opposed to, or at least uncomfortable with, a pluralistic, inclusive society. Their actions to undermine it have largely been thwarted by the masses who see them as cruel or mean-spirited. It feels now as if too many are simply willing to ignore what's being done in the belief it won't be allowed to go too far (Congress will investigate; the courts will reverse them). The obscenity of this moment is being ignored in favor of self-preservation, not because there's agreement with the likes of Stephen Miller or Nick Fuentes but because it's easier to keep your mouth shut so long as it's not happening to you. This is no historical inevitability; it's laziness and fear. Douthat should recognize that.
Great post and I am glad you elaborated on it. When I read Ross' column the other week where he quoted you I honestly couldn't believe his response to your incisive comments was essentially just "that's true but in this case who knows what's right and wrong to begin with?".
I think it's really funny to see a lifelong reactionary like Ross suddenly fall back into I guess some type of "great historical forces" moral relativism when it becomes too clear that the movement he ostensibly supports is unjustifiable. Am I really supposed to believe that if given a choice between Catholic tinged reactionary Post Liberalism and secular Liberalism that Ross is genuinely undecided on what he things will be worse for society in the long run?
I guess my real question is, does he honestly believe this himself or is this just a way to couch his very mild criticism of current conservative trends towards antisemitism in a way that doesn't make him into a pariah like David French in the modern conservative movement?
Can you rely on Vermeule to tell you what he really thinks, or even to discern distinctions anymore that may matter to us? Would he object to propagating a pia fraus? I don't think so. I.e. he's sort of a troll.
I don't bother with the "post-liberals" myself, because I agree with John: they're either bad-faith actors or self-deluded apologists for some manic pixie dream fascism. Non-liberal communitarianism can look attractive sometimes(!), but only when embedded in a liberal democracy. It doesn't scale up to a state.
“gloomy prophecies of civilizational decadence and decline also gave it a dolorous glamor.”
I love this line. I think conservative intellectuals have been seduced by a kind of sick civilizational self-loathing.
Vermeule and I were Twitter follows for a long time, from the days when it was Twitter. We had some agreements over Chevon deference, judicial overreach, antiwar principles, and the incompatibility of the brutal aspects of neoliberalism with Catholic social teaching.
Other than that, I wondered what the details of the governance of his ideal state would be. He made coy references to Salazar or absolutist French kings, but there was no comprehensive vision of who would rule and how would they rule. As a former governance functionary for USAID programs, I'm interested in the devil in the details.
I hoped a lot of post-liberal was post-neoliberal: the return of regulation protecting workers in a European Christian- and social-democratic sense. Ahmari has been strong in this direction and seems to be moving out of the post-liberal orbit.
I don't know Schmitt from Shinola, but I gather that the "friend/enemy" distinction was a big part of Schmitt's political theory, and that Vermeule professes to be a Schmittian.
So, a few days ago when the right was fighting over Fuentes and Carlson , Vermuele posted something about maintaining unity when the enemies were at the gate. I answered him by saying "So Nazi Holocaust deniers and supporters of Israeli depredations in Gaza and the WB must make common cause? To fight who? Bernie Sanders and AOC? And for what?
More tax cuts? Crypto deregulation? Deporting fry cooks?" and for that he blocked me.
My impression is that the post-liberals are more averse to cultural and social conditions they identify with "the left" aka "Weimar" than they value freedom, so "the left" becomes the enemy in a Manichean struggle. Douthat implies he is on the fence on this when he says he doesn't "think we actually know which form of contemporary politics is the most dangerous or destructive for the long term."
My own theory is that a lot what is identified as "Weimar" is more a product of unregulated market capitalism than "the left." Vermeule and I once had a discussion about an aspect of that: the importation of child sex dolls from China and legal remedies for that.
The revulsion of the post-liberals for "Weimar" and their identification of it with "the left" just places them with the rest of the right including fascists because of that "friend/enemy" distinction. Political tribalism.
"I don't know Schmitt from Shinola" … I'm going to repurpose that line some day!
You hit on the core of it, I think: post-liberalism not only does mean nothing, but it must mean nothing, because there is no way to have a substantive "common good" and believe in substantive pluralism, for which goods differ. Thin or formal or second-order goods, like the liberal goodness of arguing over goods, are one thing, but anyone who says, in effect, "don't worry, you can keep your pluralism, but we'll all believe in the goodness of these first-order definitely-not-religious dictates," is full of it. Maybe I'm underread on conservative apologia (oh, no), but I think they should just be honest that they're anti-pluralistic, and thus that post-liberalism can only be pre-.
Does Molly Worthen's "floating brain intellectual history” apply to what Douhat is doing here? He does always seem to me to be attempting to strike some chin-scratching, Spock-ian posture on this stuff that is kind of evasive.
> the good things in liberalism […] would be preserved, while the bad stuff […] would be eliminated.
It’s okay, John. You can say “sublation.” You’re among Hegelians here.
Hmm, Is Ross a closet Hegelian ? Is Theism consistent with Hegel? Oh boy.
There’s a case to be made that Christianity is a necessary condition for Hegel’s system to even exist. Put a couple glasses of wine in him and Hegel himself would probably go so far as to say that it’s not just a necessary condition, but a sufficient one as well (clearly, plenty of his largely atheistic Left-Hegelian disciples would have disagreed with this take).
As for Ross…no way. Hegel was Lutheran through and through, and Ross wouldn’t stand for that. I daresay he wouldn’t even sit for it.
But … but isn’t Trump King David? A lot of this post-liberal hot air seems like a lame , though highly intellectualized, attempt to recapture the lost social relevance and power of organized religious institutions
Ah, so _that_'s why for Democratic-run cities he floated that proposal 'for all that pisseth against the wall'.
Legal reasoning can seem mechanistic and unsatisfying on the Big Picture the Douhats take refuge in, but in times of great crime and destruction it offers the indispensable tool of cause-and-effect, and therefore of *responsibility*. MAGA criminals, the jailers, the propagandists, the money men, the power worshippers disguised as theorists - they all have names and faces, they bear responsibility. Douhat is telling you - telling everyone - that bearing witness, being concrete, is futile, uncertain, unsteady, unreliable. Arendt utterly detested this.
What I see in Douthat and in so many other ‘never Trump’ Republicans is the determination to obfuscate any line of thought or inquiry about where we are and how we got there that might lead back to Ronald Reagan. “World historical forces” is just a feint to get everyone to forget about “Trickle-down Economics” and his demonization of ‘welfare queens’ and blacks stepping out of their place driving pink Caldilacs.
Reagan's publicly enjoying the prospect of botulism's striking the beneficiaries of a free breakfast scheme threatened to out-Trump Trump.