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.  

A Century of Horrors 

Consider America’s own hemisphere. It may be hard to recall now, after the communist takeovers of Cuba and Venezuela, but in the twentieth century many Latin American countries, including Brazil and Argentina, were governed by right-wing postliberal regimes. But in those governments, the Church—in their cases, the Catholic Church—was subordinated to the state. That violation of postliberal theory owed less to the weakness of the postliberal movement in those countries than to political realities. Catholic postliberals, both laity and clergy, helped right-wing politicians come to power; but once in office those politicians could maintain power without the Church’s help, and they didn’t need to give postliberals what they had promised earlier. 

In twentieth-century Europe, politicians executed the postliberal agenda more consistently, and brutally, in the so-called “clerical fascist” regimes.  

Francisco Franco, the self-styled “Leader by the Grace of God,” oversaw a harsh right-wing government in Spain for forty years. The communists who governed Spain before Franco had killed seven thousand priests and religious and destroyed twenty thousand churches; but after the Spanish Civil War, Franco, leader of the victors, oversaw the execution of 180,000 people who had been sympathetic to the losing communists.  

Franco justified much of his brutality (with the enthusiastic support of many Catholic bishops) as necessary to counteract the alleged Judeo-Masonic conspiracy; practically all other postliberal regimes of the time also believed in such cabals, as do increasingly many of today’s postliberals. Why are postliberals attracted to such conspiracy theories?  

Postliberalism developed as a reaction of European conservatives—supporters of monarchy and aristocracy—to (often violent and atheistic) widespread rebellions against established governments, from the French to the Russian revolutions. These rebellions took many political and ecclesiastical leaders completely off guard, moving them to search for answers. If they had taken the Bible’s counsel, leaders might have examined their own consciences, to consider whether they were partly responsible for the widespread dissatisfaction with their governance. The ancien régime was not as bad as the Jacobins thought, but it had big problems: heavy taxation of the poor and middle class, with low taxation of the nobility; sometimes zero tolerance for religious nonconformists; and the persistence of widespread poverty and even serfdom (which lasted in central and eastern Europe through the middle of the nineteenth century).  

But many leaders refused, or were unable, to deal with such realities, or even to admit their existence. They concluded not that government had to change, but that the gullible, infantile masses had been duped by a minority group from outside the established cultural-religious order—a small group, easily hidden, and not fully committed to the prevailing order’s creeds. Jews and Masons fit that description well. Postliberals developed and promoted such conspiracy theories at length, and many people believed them. Once postliberals gained power across Europe, riding the wave of Hitler’s rise in Germany, the terror began. In Vichy France, with the endorsement of numerous bishops, Marshal Philippe Pétain seized the papers of the Masonic Lodges (finding no grand conspiracy, however) and sent 70,000 Jews to be murdered in the Nazis’ concentration camps. In Croatia, Ante Pavelić (a Nazi puppet dictator), directed his Ustaše Catholic integralist party “to spread the faith by the sword,” causing the deaths of up to 290,000 Serbs, 40,000 Jews, and 40,000 Roma. Similar atrocities were committed in Austria and Slovakia. 

These facts could help explain why, in the decades after World War II, the practice of Catholicism declined in France, Spain, and other countries where the Catholic hierarchy had “contributed significantly to the … public legitimacy” of postliberal regimes. (Only now is European Christianity starting to recover.) The story of Christian Europe’s alliance with postliberalism vindicates the warning of Alexis de Tocqueville: in the long run, churches undermine their credibility when they ally with particular political parties, especially any as odious as the fascists.  

Truth’s Consequences 

Why Liberalism Failed also provides a thorough intellectual history of postliberalism, exploring the figures of the modern European conservative movement: Joseph de Maistre, founder of political “traditionalism”; his friend Louis de Bonald, founder of modern antisemitism; Augustin Barruel, the Catholic priest who came up with the first conspiracy theory to explain the French Revolution; Charles Maurras; and others. 

The book also goes through the complicated history of papal statements on which integralist postliberals base their skepticism of religious freedom and their support for a close legal union of church and state. Patterson and Howes argue that integralism is not clearly the position of all bishops or popes before the Second Vatican Council (as many suggest), and that the prelates who promoted it often had political interests that compromised their intentions.  

In its third and final section (to my mind the best written), Why Postliberalism Failed refutes the simplistic view of doctrinal development on which much of integralism depends. The book cites (among other sources) Pope Benedict XVI’s 2005 Christmas address to the Roman curia:  

[T]he Church’s decisions on contingent matters—for example, certain practical forms of liberalism … —should necessarily be contingent themselves, precisely because they refer to a specific reality that is changeable in itself. It was necessary to learn to recognize that in these decisions it is only the principles that express the permanent aspect, since they remain as an undercurrent, motivating decisions from within. 

The Church now recognizes, Benedict continues, that one of those permanent principles is the right to “religious freedom as a need that derives from human coexistence, or indeed, as an intrinsic consequence of the truth that cannot be externally imposed but that the person must adopt only through the process of conviction.” But “[o]n the other hand, not so permanent are the practical forms that depend on the historical situation and are therefore subject to change,” such as political constitutions. A society that is open to truth must also be a free society, because, as Dignitatis Humanae reminded us, “truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, [entering] into the mind at once quietly and with power.” Men should strive to orient political life toward truth, but politics will never be perfect, because no political solution is “big” enough to fit the mystery that is each human person. 

A Call to Examination of Conscience 

Why Postliberalism Failed is not without flaws.  

The tiresome refrain with which each section of the historical unit ends (“his/their postliberalism failed”), the book’s final conclusion (“Postliberalism will always fail. Deo Gratias.”) and other excessive rhetoric bespeak an overconfident triumphalism. The lovers of truth should indeed hope that falsehood will fail in the long run; but rather than gloating over the failures of past postliberals, we should ask why ordinary men and women, who were little different from the rest of us, were seduced by them. Each of us is capable of the sins that past postliberals committed unless we strive to love God with the commitment of saints. As the old adage says, “There but for the grace of God go I.” We should also take the counsel that conservative leaders of the nineteenth century did not: to examine how much the spread of bad ideologies (in today’s case, of postliberalism itself) may be the consequence not just of postliberal propaganda, but of the failures of all of us to live up to the demands of the Gospel. Young people might be less attracted to political strongmen and anger-driven conspiracy theories if the adults in their lives gave better witness both to love of truth and to love of freedom: standing up for justice calmly but firmly, eschewing the contemporary world’s self-indulgent lifestyle, and instead sacrificing their own comfort to service of God and their fellow men. 

The book might also have explained better why the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy is false. The authors do well to cite verbatim the texts of Bonald, Maurras, and others to show how absurd and unjust their ideas were. But in confused times like these, when many are willing to believe the absurd, more thorough arguments are needed. Several times the book suggests that right-wing leaders cited the conspiracy as an excuse to ignore “the very real problems of the ancien régime” that better explained people’s discontent. What were those problems? What were the true causes of the French Revolution and later revolts? I suggested a few answers earlier, but the authors say little. They do point to “differences in culture between the Christian French and the Jewish diaspora,” which may have explained misunderstandings between the two groups (especially after Jews were allowed to participate more in public life after the French Revolution); but more could have been said. Contemporary antisemites and others might dismiss the book for asserting the falsity of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy without proof. True, ideologues are sometimes so irrational that one can do little to persuade them (one should rather pray and fast for them, as Jesus counseled). But ideologues have many followers, especially among young people, who are not irrational but merely confused, impressionable, and looking for answers. 

But all told, Why Postliberalism Failed is a very timely and helpful resource—a must-read for anyone trying to understand the evil twin of critical Marxists’ identity politics that is seducing much of the American right. As Patterson and Howes warn, “It is good to oppose communism. It is not good to oppose communism out of support for clerical fascism.” Postliberalism reduces the mystery of evil and sin to a conspiracy of heretics instead of Marxism’s conspiracy of “false consciousness,” scapegoating Jews and Masons instead of the bourgeoisie; it opposes Marxism’s insane rebellion against the reality of human nature with its own mad rebellion against the reality of human freedom. 

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