The MAGA New Right

Postliberalism

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Postliberalism

One of the three main intellectual camps of the MAGA New Right, per Laura K. Field. The Postliberals are the most intellectually sophisticated camp, least enamored of the American founders, and most rooted in Catholic social teaching and traditional philosophy.

Core Beliefs

Postliberals argue that liberalism — not just its progressive variants but liberalism as such — has failed. The diagnosis comes primarily from Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018): liberalism destroyed the very institutions (family, church, community) that it needed to sustain itself, producing atomized, rootless individuals who paradoxically become more dependent on the state.

The Postliberal prescription goes beyond Deneen’s localist “Benedict Option.” Led by Adrian Vermeule, the more radical postliberals argue for what Vermeule calls Integration from Within — strategically occupying liberal institutions, including the administrative state, and using their machinery to advance a substantive vision of the “common good.” This vision is drawn from Catholic natural law and, more controversially, from the German jurist Carl Schmitt.

Key beliefs:

  • Liberalism’s claim to neutrality is false — it enforces a comprehensive (hedonistic, individualist) theory of the good
  • The alternative is not mere localism but a state actively directed toward human flourishing as defined by natural law
  • The separation of church and state should be dismantled (the more radical integralist version)
  • State power should be used to shape culture, morality, and public life
  • Economic reform — against neoliberal capitalism — is a genuine commitment, not just rhetoric

Relationship to Catholic Integralism

Some Postliberals, notably Vermeule and Gladden Pappin, are also Catholic integralists — they believe political life should be subordinated to spiritual aims, and that the separation of church and state is a historical mistake to be remedied. This is a small but intellectually serious current within the broader Postliberal movement.

Key Figures

  • Patrick Deneen — Notre Dame professor; Why Liberalism Failed (2018), Regime Change (2023)
  • Adrian Vermeule — Harvard Law professor; Common Good Constitutionalism (2022); author of Integration from Within
  • Sohrab Ahmari — journalist; founder of Compact magazine; former editorial writer; wrote the famous “Against David French-ism” essay
  • JD Vance — Senator and Vice President; self-identified postliberal; admirer of Deneen
  • Gladden Pappin — Harvard PhD; co-founder of American Affairs; President of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs

Aesthetic and Tone

Field describes the Postliberal aesthetic as “sober, traditionalist, and highbrow.” These are the most serious thinkers of the New Right, the ones most likely to engage with actual political philosophy and the least likely to indulge in the internet-culture provocations of the Hard Right.

JD Vance is the political face of Postliberalism. His trajectory — from memoirist (Hillbilly Elegy) to senator to Vice President — tracked almost perfectly with the rise and radicalization of the Postliberal movement.

Key Texts

  • Why Liberalism Failed — Deneen (2018); the movement’s founding diagnosis
  • Integration from Within — Vermeule (2018); the movement’s strategic blueprint
  • Regime Change — Deneen (2023); the movement’s most explicit call for political transformation
  • Common Good Constitutionalism — Vermeule (2022); the legal theory of postliberal governance

The Iberian Regime-Form Reference

Per Iberian Vistas (Zúquete & Hawley, 2025): contemporary postliberalism has a previously-untraced through-line to the postwar conservative movement’s Catholic admiration of Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Estado Novo. The retrieval is the wiki’s clearest concrete answer to the question “what does the postliberal regime look like, in concrete institutional terms?”:

  • Salazar’s Portugal = corporatist representation + administrative-state primacy + Catholic concordat → admired today by Vermeule (administrative-state-bureaucracy thread) and Pappin (corporatist-representation thread)
  • Franco’s Spain = “Throne and Altar” military-Catholic strongman → admired today by Charles Haywood (“Foundationalism”), Josh Abbotoy (“Is a Protestant Franco inevitable?”, First Things 2023), Joseph Pearce, Michael Knowles
  • The earlier American attempt = Bozell’s Triumph magazine (1966–1976), which both lived in Franco’s Spain (with Willmoore Kendall) and openly advocated the Iberian model. Triumph failed institutionally; the contemporary version is split between politically viable but theologically less pure (Postliberal Order, American Affairs) and theologically pure but politically marginal (Edmund Waldstein’s Josias circle).

The wiki’s structural reading: postliberalism’s anti-liberal positive program has its closest historical analogues in mid-20th-century Iberian Catholic authoritarianism. The wiki does not claim contemporary postliberals advocate Franco’s specific means (mass executions, censorship, PIDE). It does claim that the regime form — concentrated executive authority pursuing substantive moral ends in alliance with the Catholic Church or Catholic political vocabulary — is what gives the movement its silhouette. The relevant brake (Hawley 2024): the constituency for Catholic-authoritarian transformation in the U.S. is shrinking demographically.

Tensions Within Postliberalism

  • Deneen vs. Vermeule on strategy: Deneen initially favored localism and community-building; Vermeule argued for seizing the state. By Regime Change (2023), Deneen had moved toward Vermeule’s position.
  • The Carl Schmitt problem: Postliberals sometimes invoke Schmitt — a Nazi jurist whose “decisionism” and “friend/enemy” distinction are explicitly anti-liberal. Field notes this is a major red flag. Schmitt is a useful intellectual resource for anyone seeking to justify extra-constitutional state power.
  • Capitalism: Postliberals are genuinely critical of capitalism in ways that mainstream conservatives are not. Whether this produces real economic policy or is rhetorical cover is disputed.

Cross-References

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