The Political Potential of Postliberalism
This essay is adapted from “Quel est le succès politique réel du postlibéralisme et des intellectuels catholiques?” which appeared in La Nef.
In May 2004, President George W. Bush sat down with evangelical and Catholic journalists. He said that “the job of a president is to help cultures change,” and the first cultural change he mentioned was promoting a culture of life. Bush gestured to a priest in the room: “Father Richard helped me craft what is still the integral part of my position on abortion, which is: Every child welcome to life and protected by law. That is the goal of this administration.” The Father Richard in question was Richard John Neuhaus, the Lutheran pastor turned Catholic priest who had been active in the 1960s’ social movements and went on to found First Things.
Months after that meeting, Time named Neuhaus one of the twenty-five most influential evangelicals in America, under the headline “Bushism Made Catholic.” A senior official in the administration was quoted as confirming that Neuhaus did “have a fair amount of under-the-radar influence” on the administration’s policies on abortion, stem-cell research, cloning, and the defense of traditional marriage. In a photo from this time, President Bush is listening to Neuhaus, the two sitting in high-backed chairs in the center, while Neuhaus’s friends George Weigel and Mary Ann Glendon looked on from the side. For religious conservatives and progressives, the photo set a high watermark of what was right or wrong about the present moment: Bush’s domestic policy took the direction it did because “he helps me articulate these [religious] things.”
Neuhaus died in 2009 shortly before Barack Obama took office. Like Bush, President Obama saw himself as an agent of cultural change—but in the opposite direction. As those changes became more radical, dissent from the established conservative consensus began to grow. Broadly speaking, it took two forms. The populist critique of conservatism focused more on politics and economics. It saw the American economy not as an engine of social mobility but of social destruction. Populists wanted not less government intervention, but more. Government intervention was necessary to support vulnerable families and communities who had been left behind by the globalized economy. And more radical action was required to combat the woke elites who had captured America’s institutions of education, culture, and government.
At the same time, the post-liberal critique of conservatism emerged. It saw America as misbegotten from its founding, wedded too closely to John Locke’s vision of freedom. Postliberals argued that liberalism’s neutrality was false in two ways. First, by restricting the state from ordering society toward higher religious goods, liberalism lowered our horizons and hindered people from realizing their final end: salvation. Second, liberalism’s neutrality is not neutral at all. Rather, liberalism is a kind of civil religion of its own, preaching its own gospel, legislating its morality, and proposing other gods for our worship.
Neuhaus’s most famous book offers a critique of “the Naked Public Square,” a vision of politics from which religious values and voices were excluded. For Neuhaus, the opposite of the Naked Public Square was not the Sacred Public Square but the Civil Public Square, in which citizens come together to work for the political common good conceived broadly enough to accommodate different understandings of what that good entails.
To borrow Neuhaus’s terms, post-liberals argued that the public square is inevitably sacred: the question is whose god is worshiped, and Catholic citizens should work to make it the right one. Some post-liberals focused more on the theological principles that should shape our governance, while others proposed that Catholics should infiltrate the leading elite and occupy positions of power from which to decide cases, administer, and legislate according to their values and principles, not liberal ones. In many cases, postliberal arguments accompanied populist ones.
It was clear that postliberals wanted to become the political leaders for Catholicism—to some degree for religious conservatives more generally—and that this would be difficult. In some cases, postliberalism meant that conservatives needed to shake off their quietism and cowardice, to vote and legislate according to their convictions. But this is what Richard Neuhaus had been advocating for some time. Or, postliberals said, conservatives needed to remember that the law is a teacher, not a neutral arbiter, and to pass laws conducive to virtue for the sake of protecting the common good. But this was the argument of Robert George’s Making Men Moral, a touchstone for the consensus that postliberals sought to overturn.
In other cases, postliberalism meant offering not a blueprint of a political project but a critique of the present order and a philosophical sketch of what its successor should look like. In response to my review, Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinley clarified that their book on Catholic politics was “not really one of strategy, at least in the short term.” Drawing up political blueprints was not the point of their project, which was still in the “the pre-conceptual stage.” But, as I noted in turn, politics requires us to move into the conceptual stage and engage in responsible action in our own time.
When postliberalism sought to do this in practical ways, its proposals could become unrealistic for a pluralistic democracy. They included passing laws that give privileges—such as suffrage—to the baptized, that restrict the practice of other non-Christian faiths, or that otherwise work toward some kind of religious establishment. These were not only political nonstarters, but contrary to the main currents of theological argument in the Church and its magisterium. Perhaps for this reason, no American bishop stepped up to serve as a postliberal counselor to the secular arm. Rather than treating the great commission as a political problem to be solved with the state’s help, the bishops see it as the Church’s exclusive mission, as do the vast majority of American Catholics. And so the question remained: what would it look like for postliberals to actually lead as they sought? What would postliberalism actually accomplish?
In the weeks before the election, I spoke with a priest and a layman who worked at elite university chaplaincies in the US and Canada. They both told of a dramatic increase in interest in Catholicism among young people, especially young men who see the faith as the most potent antidote to modernity’s ills. These young men want a framework for their lives that explains and combats the progressive mainstream, one that tells them how to live even if they chafe against some of its demands. They want to know how to be good men in the face of an unsatisfying meritocratic society, especially if they are children of divorce or otherwise disconnected from their fathers. They are the kind of people who found postliberalism deeply attractive. And they sound a lot like J. D. Vance, who in 2020 published the story of his conversion in The Lamp, a journal of letters founded by young postliberal Catholics.
After his conversion, Vance came to befriend some of the leading postliberal intellectuals. He became a combative force on Twitter and a US senator. There’s a photo of him in a bar with his good friends Chad Pecknold and Patrick Deneen. In January, Vance will become vice president of the United States. It’s easy to imagine that photo transposed into the West Wing, with Catholic scholars once again advising the highest office in the land.
And yet the present moment is not without its ironies. Since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, abortion has become a political liability for the Republican Party. At the Republican National Convention last summer, Trump pushed through changes to the party platform to water down its opposition to abortion, assisted suicide, and same-sex marriage without giving social conservatives the opportunity to object. He went on to pledge that his administration would require the government or private insurance companies to pay for IVF, and said on social media that he would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.”
As a vice-presidential candidate, Vance himself has supported both mifepristone—the drug that causes most abortions in the US—being accessible and abortion access being decided by individual states. Vance also defended Trump’s promotion of IVF as part of the broader effort to help more people have families, despite the fact that the creation and destruction of embryonic life is an inherent part of its process. During the vice-presidential debate, Vance argued that as a Republican “who proudly wants to protect innocent life,” he would seek to make his party “pro-family in the fullest sense of the word.” This would include not just supporting IVF, but lowering the cost of childbirth and offering greater governmental support to families.
One can argue that such a shift was necessary, that Vance will still be a pro-life voice in the next administration, and that both he and Trump pushed back against Democrats’ extremism on abortion and transgender issues. But the longstanding argument of postliberals has been that conservative Catholics are too wedded to liberalism instead of the common good and Catholic principles. It is ironic, then, that the presidential candidate most identified with postliberalism has rolled back Republican commitments to marriage and life to their weakest point in recent history. One could read this irony as a conflict between populism and postliberalism that divides postliberals themselves, with Sohrab Ahmari defending “the populist compromise on abortion” and Ed Feser condemning Trump’s betrayal of social conservatism. That conflict indicates that we have yet to arrive at the moment of postliberal victory.
So the question remains: what will postliberalism actually accomplish?
In 2024, postliberalism’s arguments no longer give the frisson of novelty or controversy. Their shine has faded among many—but not all—Catholics. There are numerous reasons for this. Many Catholic intellectuals remain unpersuaded by postliberals’ arguments, and especially by their online style of argumentation. Some former disciples have a sense that postliberalism is really a kind of progressivism for conservatives—a desire for strong government intervention, but with our hand at the tiller. Recent Supreme Court decisions have clipped the wings of the administrative agencies that were supposed to be tools for integration from within. And some postliberal authors have moved on to other things. Chad Pecknold has ceased to publish popular articles and returned to scholarship. Earlier this year, in a rebuke to some postliberals entitled “The Poverty of Catholic Intellectual Life,” Sohrab Ahmari argued that Catholic intellectuals should be critically patriotic, return to the American political center, and recognize that “American democracy is itself a most precious common good.”
But even if Catholic postliberalism is no longer the intellectual avant-garde, populism is poised to shape the next few years of American politics. It may be that the enduring legacy of the postliberal moment will not be a sacred public square but a populist platform that seeks to combat elite institutions, protect American workers, and support American families. As vice president, J. D. Vance will have a great opportunity to shape Trump’s agenda. In the first Trump administration, Mike Pence did—up to a point. But as Pence learned, and as we have seen in his cabinet picks thus far, President Trump prizes personal loyalty above all. Egotism, chaos, and acrimony can easily derail a governing agenda. We do not yet know whether there will be a postliberal Neuhaus who helps a president “articulate these things.”
Image by Gage Skidmore and courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.