Postliberalism is a political tendency that rejects liberal neutrality, pluralism, and proceduralism in the name of shared civilizational truth, family, and the “common good.” Thinkers like Patrick Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed, 2018), Adrian Vermeule (“common good constitutionalism”), and Sohrab Ahmari (The Unbroken Thread, 2021) argue that liberalism has exhausted itself — that its commitment to individual autonomy, market rationality, and cultural pluralism has produced atomization, moral collapse, and civilizational decline. What is needed, they claim, is governance grounded in civilizational inheritance: shared moral authority, the natural family, religious tradition, and a substantive vision of human flourishing that the liberal state refuses to articulate.
Postliberalism presents itself as a break with both the left and the liberal right. It claims to transcend the culture war by grounding politics in perennial truths rather than procedural neutrality. But the content of these “perennial truths” consistently reproduces specific political commitments: patriarchal family structures, Christian (usually Catholic) moral authority, nationalist cultural identity, and suspicion of cosmopolitan institutions.
emsenn’s “A storm is a storm is a storm” (2025-09-22) argues that postliberalism functions as the bridge that carries fascist grammar into contemporary politics. The Volk became “the West.” Humiliation became martyrdom. Carl Schmitt’s enemy distinction became “moral clarity.” Postliberal thinkers inherit fascist categories while sidestepping their discredited vocabulary through what emsenn calls “strategic forgetting” — the deliberate loss of genealogical memory that allows the same structures to return under new names.
Related terms
- Carl Schmitt — whose political theology postliberalism inherits
- enemy distinction — the Schmittian logic postliberalism reactivates
- Producerism — the rhetorical framework postliberalism deploys
- Hegemony — the cultural dominance postliberalism seeks to reconstruct
- Late liberalism — the condition postliberalism claims to diagnose