A worthy display of clarity and concision; you do a great job summing up in a few paragraphs the various factions' progenitors, rhetoric and (where possible) political programs.
Much of this stuff is so woolly as to be unworkable. All the same--except for the high integralists, who have the clearest program but are downright repugnant--I can't imagine that *any* of these factions wouldn't improve things to some degree if they came to power. In fact there seems to me not much between them: the phrase 'narcissism of small differences' springs readily to mind.
But do these people even *want* power, or are they just so many pied pipers, obscurantist jesters and crumb-gatherers at the tables of the elites? Disputes between 'Jeffersonians' and 'Hamiltonians' or, even more so, 'Rooseveltians' and 'Wilsonians', while admirable for their historical literacy, are at best a bit quaint. Seen more realistically, the pursuit of petty distinctions on such grounds reeks of impotence, distance from power or--in the worst cases--strivers and grifters pandering to the lizard class and covertly benefiting from its largesse.
Revealingly, unless I'm very much mistaken, what they have in common is that they're 'race blind'. As such they are incapable of solving the primary issue of our times: mass immigration, not 'individualism', 'liberalism' or 'atomisation', which are secondary (individualism and liberalism, without the scare quotes, are sort of a feature-not-bug of the Western tradition, anyway, and were never a massive problem before the inception of mass immigration). The high integralists--other Catholic factions, too, but especially them--even approve of it, provided it comes from the Catholic Third World.
I’m late, but I wanted to say that as a Catholic, the group that’s closest to me would probably be the Populist Christians but add a touch of race realism. Very good article. Peace ✌🏻
This is fascinating. I’d have to put myself in this category, post liberal but with a pinch or two of race realism. Your basic Blue Labour/Sohrab Ahmari/Matt Ygleisas/Amy Wax mash-up.
I'm a modern New Dealer politically and am stridently opposed to Republicans on economics. I note in my article on pollical categorization that the New Deal was launched by the Red Party of that time (Democrats).
In a speculative piece looking at possible outcomes to our current crisis that could follow Democratic victories in 2024 and subsequent elections (see link):
Frustrated Republicans might seek to restructure their party by trying to appeal to disaffected “Blue” constituencies. After losing much of their business and investor class constituency, they could try to appeal to working class people of color alienated from the now fully neoliberal Democratic party while keeping much of their white working-class base by moving to the left on economics.
I wrote that just 11 months ago and it seems even more pie in the sky now than it did then. I was intrigued by this particular post so I thought I'd put in some links to my stuff in case anyone is interested.
Good to hear from one of this tendency. There's these guys and there's also the National Developmentalists under 'National Conservatism'.
I'm not gonna lie, ever since Sohrab Ahmari started dismissing the culture war and showing immense ingratitude to Elon Musk I've grown to dislike him. His new 'economically left-wing' friends have made it clear as day they are never going to accept him, and only ever see him as a 'bigot'.
But Sohrab Ahmari is better than Michael Lind. This article (disable Javascript) to me was absolute blasphemy and the encouragement of pathetic surrender, and warrants total exclusion of Lind from the right-wing space.
Basically seeing how all these people are dismissing the culture war, people like Matt Walsh, Elon Musk, and Chris Rufo, when the other side literally wants to erase biological sex from law and society and is mutilating kids, makes me see them as gatekeepers.
I see cultural issues as second tier issues. As I see it, when New Deal Liberals were in the ascendancy over the 1930's through early 1970's, they controlled the economic culture.
Conservatives, unable to affect economics, sought to achieve results in the social/cultural domain. So we got stuff like the Hays code, married couples on TV with separate beds, and putting God into the Pledge of Allegiance. (I'm not sure how true this actually was, it is simple a conjecture).
With the Reagan Revolution conservatives were now in control of economic culture and liberals had to fall back on social/cultural issues. Social conservatives who joined with the Republicans as junior partners because they objected to Civil Rights and integration, enabled them to take command of the economy, leaving the culture to the Left. They made their own bed so to speak. (I feel I am on firmer ground when I characterize Democratic political offerings over the last 40 years as more cultural than economic).
I looked as the two nominally economic left groups you outlined and they are still supportive of the current neoliberal economic culture. There is little *functional* difference between them and Republicans. Ordinary people will not perceive any differences between an economy run according to their preferences and what we have now.
You would be remiss to not mention the Steubenville think-tank and magazine New Polity backed by folks like Andrew Willard Jones, Marc Barnes (formerly Bad Catholic Blog), D. C. Schindler (son of David Schindler, O.G. postliberal), and Michael Hanby, probably best categorized in Right Christian Democrats, though there is some rivalry and disagreement with the Postliberal Order folks. Patrick Deneen was a founding editor until parting ways with their vision.
The main disagreement seems to be the emphasis at which level the main locus of political power should reside, federal vs. local. E.g., New Polity is very much against the bureaucratic nation state as an institution and has on-going debates against nation state level Neo-integralism. Even though Deneen literally founded(?) localist Front Porch Republic (another group/blog/publication for you to consider btw, and also grouped similarly, but maybe a more agrarian Wendell Berry type. Paleocon?), he seems to have shifted more recently to side with folks like Sohrab Ahmari or Adrian Vermeule that the existing big government bureaucracy should be captured and wielded for good.
Late to the party but this is my faction and yes I agree that the main point of difference when compared to the rest of the post-liberal groups would be the localism/distributivism and profound distrust of the bureaucratic state.
Notably, this group also tends towards the “prophet” side of the Prophet and Wizard distinction (I can’t remember who came up with that but N. S. Lyons wrote about it) and therefore has some environmental concerns that aren’t shared by other groups.
I think Rod Dreher belongs here, as does Paul Kingsnorth I think (haven’t read as much Kingsnorth as Dreher so I could be wrong), and what I have started to think of as the Steubenville School (I just made that up but maybe someone else has used it) of Catholic political thought, like Alex Plato say.
Let’s see, who else. Larry Chapp probably, the Catholic Land Movement fits in on a vibes basis although they don’t so explicitly lay out a political philosophy, OG Patrick Deneen but not later Deneen, I could probably brainstorm more except I need to go back to exchanging my labor for capital over here.
If you want to understand postliberalism better, you must go back to philosophical ethics post-WWII and the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley and the re-activation of the Aristotelian tradition.
Good read. And while there may be many factions and subfactions of political ideologies. I think you can basically divide conservatives into two broad groups. "Conservatives" neo conservatives who are only economically conservative and support most if not all of the left's cultural aspects. Such as immigration, homosexuality, transgenderism destruction of heritage and culture and bending over backwards for mud skins. There are parties groups across many countries that fall into this first category. The "conservative" party in Canada, a large chunk of the Republican party, the CDU in Germany, the Republicans in France, the PPP in Spain etc. the second faction is the conservatives actual conservatives, paleocons who value traditions and cultural and ethnic heritage. The latter is a unfortunately much smaller faction but in many countries there is a growing community of paleocons whether they identify as paleo conservative or not. Such as the afd in Germany, reconquest in France, reform in Britain* vox in Spain etc. personally I don't really care about small differences between right when factorizations as long as they fall into the Paleo con category they are good with me we should not dwell on our small differences.
A worthy display of clarity and concision; you do a great job summing up in a few paragraphs the various factions' progenitors, rhetoric and (where possible) political programs.
Much of this stuff is so woolly as to be unworkable. All the same--except for the high integralists, who have the clearest program but are downright repugnant--I can't imagine that *any* of these factions wouldn't improve things to some degree if they came to power. In fact there seems to me not much between them: the phrase 'narcissism of small differences' springs readily to mind.
But do these people even *want* power, or are they just so many pied pipers, obscurantist jesters and crumb-gatherers at the tables of the elites? Disputes between 'Jeffersonians' and 'Hamiltonians' or, even more so, 'Rooseveltians' and 'Wilsonians', while admirable for their historical literacy, are at best a bit quaint. Seen more realistically, the pursuit of petty distinctions on such grounds reeks of impotence, distance from power or--in the worst cases--strivers and grifters pandering to the lizard class and covertly benefiting from its largesse.
Revealingly, unless I'm very much mistaken, what they have in common is that they're 'race blind'. As such they are incapable of solving the primary issue of our times: mass immigration, not 'individualism', 'liberalism' or 'atomisation', which are secondary (individualism and liberalism, without the scare quotes, are sort of a feature-not-bug of the Western tradition, anyway, and were never a massive problem before the inception of mass immigration). The high integralists--other Catholic factions, too, but especially them--even approve of it, provided it comes from the Catholic Third World.
Yes, I would agree with you that they are all race blind. I probably should have mentioned that more.
Good article, will be following for future analysis.
I’m late, but I wanted to say that as a Catholic, the group that’s closest to me would probably be the Populist Christians but add a touch of race realism. Very good article. Peace ✌🏻
This is fascinating. I’d have to put myself in this category, post liberal but with a pinch or two of race realism. Your basic Blue Labour/Sohrab Ahmari/Matt Ygleisas/Amy Wax mash-up.
I'm a modern New Dealer politically and am stridently opposed to Republicans on economics. I note in my article on pollical categorization that the New Deal was launched by the Red Party of that time (Democrats).
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/an-alternate-american-political-spectrum
In a speculative piece looking at possible outcomes to our current crisis that could follow Democratic victories in 2024 and subsequent elections (see link):
Frustrated Republicans might seek to restructure their party by trying to appeal to disaffected “Blue” constituencies. After losing much of their business and investor class constituency, they could try to appeal to working class people of color alienated from the now fully neoliberal Democratic party while keeping much of their white working-class base by moving to the left on economics.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/a-possible-political-resolution-for
I wrote that just 11 months ago and it seems even more pie in the sky now than it did then. I was intrigued by this particular post so I thought I'd put in some links to my stuff in case anyone is interested.
Good to hear from one of this tendency. There's these guys and there's also the National Developmentalists under 'National Conservatism'.
I'm not gonna lie, ever since Sohrab Ahmari started dismissing the culture war and showing immense ingratitude to Elon Musk I've grown to dislike him. His new 'economically left-wing' friends have made it clear as day they are never going to accept him, and only ever see him as a 'bigot'.
But Sohrab Ahmari is better than Michael Lind. This article (disable Javascript) to me was absolute blasphemy and the encouragement of pathetic surrender, and warrants total exclusion of Lind from the right-wing space.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/01/15/gop-donald-trump-abortion-evangelical-christians-primary/
Basically seeing how all these people are dismissing the culture war, people like Matt Walsh, Elon Musk, and Chris Rufo, when the other side literally wants to erase biological sex from law and society and is mutilating kids, makes me see them as gatekeepers.
I see cultural issues as second tier issues. As I see it, when New Deal Liberals were in the ascendancy over the 1930's through early 1970's, they controlled the economic culture.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-economic-culture-evolves
Conservatives, unable to affect economics, sought to achieve results in the social/cultural domain. So we got stuff like the Hays code, married couples on TV with separate beds, and putting God into the Pledge of Allegiance. (I'm not sure how true this actually was, it is simple a conjecture).
With the Reagan Revolution conservatives were now in control of economic culture and liberals had to fall back on social/cultural issues. Social conservatives who joined with the Republicans as junior partners because they objected to Civil Rights and integration, enabled them to take command of the economy, leaving the culture to the Left. They made their own bed so to speak. (I feel I am on firmer ground when I characterize Democratic political offerings over the last 40 years as more cultural than economic).
I looked as the two nominally economic left groups you outlined and they are still supportive of the current neoliberal economic culture. There is little *functional* difference between them and Republicans. Ordinary people will not perceive any differences between an economy run according to their preferences and what we have now.
You would be remiss to not mention the Steubenville think-tank and magazine New Polity backed by folks like Andrew Willard Jones, Marc Barnes (formerly Bad Catholic Blog), D. C. Schindler (son of David Schindler, O.G. postliberal), and Michael Hanby, probably best categorized in Right Christian Democrats, though there is some rivalry and disagreement with the Postliberal Order folks. Patrick Deneen was a founding editor until parting ways with their vision.
I didn’t know about these guys. Thanks for enlightening me.
This is just my interpretation. I’m very comfortable with people having slightly different categories to me.
What would you say the key differences are, out of interest?
The main disagreement seems to be the emphasis at which level the main locus of political power should reside, federal vs. local. E.g., New Polity is very much against the bureaucratic nation state as an institution and has on-going debates against nation state level Neo-integralism. Even though Deneen literally founded(?) localist Front Porch Republic (another group/blog/publication for you to consider btw, and also grouped similarly, but maybe a more agrarian Wendell Berry type. Paleocon?), he seems to have shifted more recently to side with folks like Sohrab Ahmari or Adrian Vermeule that the existing big government bureaucracy should be captured and wielded for good.
Late to the party but this is my faction and yes I agree that the main point of difference when compared to the rest of the post-liberal groups would be the localism/distributivism and profound distrust of the bureaucratic state.
Notably, this group also tends towards the “prophet” side of the Prophet and Wizard distinction (I can’t remember who came up with that but N. S. Lyons wrote about it) and therefore has some environmental concerns that aren’t shared by other groups.
I think Rod Dreher belongs here, as does Paul Kingsnorth I think (haven’t read as much Kingsnorth as Dreher so I could be wrong), and what I have started to think of as the Steubenville School (I just made that up but maybe someone else has used it) of Catholic political thought, like Alex Plato say.
Let’s see, who else. Larry Chapp probably, the Catholic Land Movement fits in on a vibes basis although they don’t so explicitly lay out a political philosophy, OG Patrick Deneen but not later Deneen, I could probably brainstorm more except I need to go back to exchanging my labor for capital over here.
This masterful essay perfectly captures both the overlap and disagreement with other post liberals (and other factions in the Rightosphere) in your categorization: https://newpolity.com/blog/a-defense-of-the-particular-and-the-universal
If you want to understand postliberalism better, you must go back to philosophical ethics post-WWII and the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley and the re-activation of the Aristotelian tradition.
Good read. And while there may be many factions and subfactions of political ideologies. I think you can basically divide conservatives into two broad groups. "Conservatives" neo conservatives who are only economically conservative and support most if not all of the left's cultural aspects. Such as immigration, homosexuality, transgenderism destruction of heritage and culture and bending over backwards for mud skins. There are parties groups across many countries that fall into this first category. The "conservative" party in Canada, a large chunk of the Republican party, the CDU in Germany, the Republicans in France, the PPP in Spain etc. the second faction is the conservatives actual conservatives, paleocons who value traditions and cultural and ethnic heritage. The latter is a unfortunately much smaller faction but in many countries there is a growing community of paleocons whether they identify as paleo conservative or not. Such as the afd in Germany, reconquest in France, reform in Britain* vox in Spain etc. personally I don't really care about small differences between right when factorizations as long as they fall into the Paleo con category they are good with me we should not dwell on our small differences.
Not being British, I don't fully understand the British Postliberals. However, they appear indistinguishable from the IDW.
The rhetoric is different, as is the focus on excessive individualism being the problem.