My initial fall down the Dissident Right pipeline was being interested in Postliberalism. As somebody who for a long time identified as economically left and socially right, and who felt betrayed by the left abandoning the working-class for Wokeism, Postliberalism provided the analysis I needed. It was perfect to portray Wokeism and neoliberalism, two things I hated, as part of the same atomized individualism that had destroyed the communitarian golden-age of the Post-War Era.
In addition to reading books like Patrick Deneen’s ‘Why Liberalism Failed’ and his follow-up ‘Regime Change’, both of which I would heavily recommend, I also heavily read publications like The American Conservative, American Affairs and Compact Magazine. Politicians like Ben Houchen, Mayor of Teesside and Josh Hawley, Senator of Missouri, felt fresh and exciting, representing a new realignment that was going to restore the spirit of the ‘Old Left’ against Woke neoliberalism.
So why did I move away from Postliberalism? Why do I no longer feel it provides an ideological and tactical path forward for the anti-Woke movement?
Definition of Wokeism
I will use the term Wokeism throughout this essay as I do not think using the blanket term ‘liberalism’ is sufficiently precise, though I am not a James Lindsay-type who thinks liberalism is totally blameless in the emergence of Wokeism.
The idea that ‘Woke’ is just a word to describe ‘everything conservatives don’t like’ has some currency because it is used that way often, particularly when environmentalism is included under the umbrella. However, a consistent definition of what we are fighting against is necessary for a serious and successful critique.
My definition is the same as Wokal Distance, who is too IDW for my taste but does occasionally make some good points. He did an article on this which I agree with, and his definition of Woke is as follows:
‘Wokeism is the belief that traditional Western culture is inherently oppressive to all who aren’t non-disabled, non-‘trans’, straight white men, that this oppression is all-pervasive across all aspects of the society and is intersectional, and constant deconstruction and activism is needed to dismantle these hierarchies of oppression, in order to establish equity.’
At the core of Wokeness is a hatred of Western civilization, and the desire to endlessly deconstruct and destroy the foundations of the society, in order to attack straight white men.
The Anglo-Saxon Individualist Tradition
To explain where I depart from Postliberalism, we will discuss the traditional emphasis that Anglo-Saxon societies have placed on the individual.
England was always a more individualistic society compared to its continental neighbours. The factors that explain this were: its status as an island power reliant on trade, the fact that serfdom had disappeared relatively early (by the 16th century), and it being Protestant and therefore having the associated ‘Protestant Work Ethic’.
Sociographic research also shows that the two parent household and adult children living independently from their parents, was the norm in England as early as the Middle Ages, sharing this in common with its North Germanic neighbours. The ‘nuclear family’ is based on the idea that a child will move out of their parents home and be required to fend for themselves instead of relying on family resources, and it is theorised to be a crucial factor in explaining why some European nations are more individual-oriented than others. Whilst the nuclear family is seen as a communitarian arrangement today, it is in fact a highly individualistic social arrangement compared to the average human society.
Whether a society is individualist or collectivist is a spectrum. Anglo-Saxon societies are historically the most individualistic, with America more individualistic than the other Anglosphere nations, and New Zealand probably the least. This is followed by other Protestant European societies like the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Northern Germany, more individualistic than Catholic European countries. But Catholic European countries are themselves more individualistic than Orthodox societies, and Orthodox societies more so than non-Christian societies.
What the Postliberals Get Wrong
The beliefs of the Postliberals very much reveal their core Catholic character, and are therefore fairly alien to the traditions of the Anglo-Saxon world, at least in their respective emphases. As mentioned in the last section, England was always a society where the individual ‘telos’ was a degree of self-actualisation, compatible with the Protestant Work Ethic.
It’s not that there is nothing of value in the Postliberal movement. I still recommend ‘Why Liberalism Failed’ for how it analyses liberalism’s inherent hypocrisy; its focus on individual freedom only serving to empower the centralised state at the expense of local community bonds.
But the Postliberals take a number of poor assessments as to what the core problem of our modern age is, and merge quite different phenomena under the singular banner of ‘liberalism’.
Being a Catholic movement, (particularly in America, British Postliberalism is somewhat different) the Postliberals are only focused on opposing the aspects of Wokeism that expand individualism, and in doing so violate Catholic teaching. For instance, liberal views on the family, abortion, and LGBT contradict those of the Catholic Church, and all are areas where the ‘Woke position’ can be seen as promoting an ‘individualism’ away from a common good.
But this is not the case with all aspects of Wokeism, which are more focused on ‘equality’. For instance, Postliberals have very rarely been critical of Civil Rights Law, because they subscribe to the left-wing idea that the state should be a social leveller to promote equality. This means they often are quite close to liberal views when it comes to race and immigration, as there is a ‘common good’ argument for the end of free association with the Civil Rights Act, as well as the fact that Catholicism is a universalistic belief system.
One must remember that the British Postliberals, such as John Gray and Adrian Pbast, are a lot more left-wing than their American counterparts. However, even the American Postliberals can be overly close with leftism to varying degrees.
A case in point is Sohrab Ahmari, one of the American ‘triad’ also including Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermule. Brought to fame for his valiant stand against David French, Ahmari has become the mirror image of French, only sucking up to the socialist left rather than mainstream liberals. He has recently been constantly dismissive of the fight against Wokeism, has no time for discussions on race, and spends half his time trying to cosy up to the ‘economic left’ that will never accept him. It’s almost tragic to watch, as Ahmari writes books like Tyranny Inc, and the left-wing writers are like ‘that’s nice and all…. but we still think you’re a ‘bigot’.
The Postliberal focus is entirely on how liberalism is atomised individualism, drawing a relationship between the economic individualism of neoliberal economics (what Deneen calls ‘right-liberalism) and the cultural individualism of post-1960s cultural liberalism (that he calls left-liberalism).
I would concede that there is a common thread in these two philosophies, going back to the social contract theory and the idea of the pre-social man, something Carl Benjamin talks about.
However, the Catholic character of the Postliberal movement means they do not criticise the emphasis on equality, as they fundamentally agree with the assessment that ‘all men are created equal’ and have ‘unalienable rights’, as they view those things as having come from God.
This is a problem, because it is the focus on ‘equality’, not individualism, that is the core pathology of our modern age. In many ways, there is a suffocating lack of individualism in the West today.
Coburn’s Critique of Postliberalism
I’m focusing on Poppy Coburn here because I think she articulates the issues with Postliberalism the best and the most comprehensively in her essays ‘The Post-Liberal Trap’ and her podcast with Louise Perry (42:23 for part specifically addressing Postliberalism). But she is not the only person who makes these points. I would also recommend Bronze Age Pervert’s article ‘The Populist Moment Never Happened’ and Patrick Casey’s lengthy X thread showing a lot of ideological differences the Dissident Right has with Postliberalism. Paul Gottfried has also criticised the determinism of the Postliberals, and focuses more on ‘mass democracy’ as the problem.
But it was Poppy Coburn’s article ‘The Postliberal Trap’ which got me to abandon Postliberalism, by reminding me of the suffocating lack of vitality in our modern age. In the article, Coburn makes the point that we’re already living in a postliberal society, where individual freedom is constantly subordinated to the ‘common good’. One can see this with state multiculturalism, hate speech laws, and Covid lockdowns, as well as the general lack of freedom and independence for young people that is sapping the life-force out of them.
Coburn also highlights that postliberal rhetoric can be appropriated by a wide variety of political movements, including those who are Woke. For instance, David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ was all about communitarianism and the ‘common good’, yet David Cameron views gay marriage as one of his greatest achievements and wants to ‘export it around the world’. ‘Blue Labour’ style rhetoric has been appropriated by various Labour figures, like Ed Milliband, Lisa Nandy, and Keir Starmer, who often talk about community pride and the common good. However, this postliberal emphasis is just ‘vibes’ and ‘aesthetics’, and doesn’t indicate substantive policy. Whilst Lisa Nandy talks in communitarian rhetoric, she is also fanatically pro-LGBT.
In her podcast with Louise Perry (46:00), Coburn observes that the Postliberal ‘vibes’ (48:56) are essentially based on nostalgia for a Britain that no longer exists, the Post-War Era. Whilst nostalgia can be a good thing, we must not subscribe to a reactionary aesthetic which is irrelevant to the Britain of today; we must instead create something new, and seek to improve the lives of the people who actually are living today.
Therefore, we must create the conditions for young people that allow for greater personal freedom, as opposed to the tyrannical, ultra-regulated ‘nanny state’ which is hegemonic in modern Britain.
Rugged Individualism vs Expressive Individualism
Poppy Coburn’s points are very well made, and I agree with a lot of them. However, Patrick Deneen, who in my view is by far the best of the American Postliberal Triad of himself, Sohrab Ahmari, and Adrian Vermule, makes an argument in ‘Why Liberalism Failed’ that is in fact a lot more nuanced and sophisticated than Coburn makes out.
Deneen’s point is that you are getting some kind of collectivism anyway, as human beings have never been autonomous individuals but have always lived in groups and been subject to group rules, something backed up by science. So, if the individual must be constrained, you might as well have it be civil society and local communities, instead of the centralised state, that is far less accountable and less easy to opt-out of. His observations about the falsehood and impracticality of the ‘social contract’, and how a contractual basis of morality, that falsely places the individual as the natural state of man, leads towards state-imposed social breakdown, are very well argued. These points have also been made by Carl Benjamin in various podcasts with other commentators.
But I don’t think that the individualism that Coburn talks about and the type that Deneen talks about are truly the same thing.
What I am going to do is to try and synthesise the thought of Coburn and Deneen. Can these two strands of thought be reconciled? What is the precise nature of the individualism that we are so badly lacking, and the individualism that we have too much of and is so utterly corrosive to the social fabric? How can we be, in one sense ultra-individualistic, with made up gender identities constantly affirmed, and in the other sense extremely collectivist, as personified by the Covid lockdowns and the totalitarian ‘clap for the NHS’?
My view is that there are two types of individualism that are very distinct from one another. One is a sacred value of the Anglo-Saxon world, that allowed it to become the greatest civilization on earth, ‘Rugged Individualism’. The other was turbocharged in the 1960s counter-culture, primarily focused on dismantling the values of the previous society, and is the source of so many of our modern ills, ‘Expressive Individualism’.
Rugged Individualism
At the heart of Rugged Individualism is the belief the individual is in charge of his own destiny. He can make the best use of his talents, and pursue them without being completely prevented from doing so by the community groupthink, though the group does not have to approve of him.
Of course, the individualistic ethos of Britain became amplified in the United States, as colonial societies are often more extreme versions of their hosts. It was in America where the ideals of meritocracy, free enterprise, and Rugged Individualism were most present.
This allowed the development of the wealthiest society in history, allowing people like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford to make use of their talents, and serve the interests of humanity whilst doing so. Rugged Individualism is the creed of the entrepreneur and the American Dream, it shuns safetyism, and embraces risk and reward, allowing the most productive and innovative to succeed.
This is different from the vast majority of civilizations, where extreme communitarianism is the norm. The extended family is the primary unit of social organisation, with parents maintaining a high degree of control over their children, and shaming being used to keep people in line. Pimlico Journal talks about these cultural distinctions in a recent article ‘Against Oriental Anti-Feminism’, highlighting the problems that more communitarian societies have. One must ask yourself, is a stuffy, hyper-controlled form of familism the society you really want to live in? For me, it certainly isn’t.
It is not as if traditional Anglo-Saxon societies were totally atomised societies either. In both Britain and America, Friendly Societies flourished, as people recognised that individual flourishing was dependent on having a social support structure. Rugged Individualism does not shun community, but rather allows people to opt-in and opt-out of the communities they wish to join.
This voluntarist system means that communities are made up of like-minded individuals, who are not bound to live amongst people whom they dislike, like in the more collectivist societies, and therefore have a high degree of social trust.
George Bailey in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, whilst numerous people have highlighted how the story is communitarian in many aspects, still centres George Bailey as an individual hero. His marriage to Mary is very much based on the individual desire of both of them and not pre-arranged by their parents, them setting up their own two-generational household, and indeed the ‘Bailey and Loan’ facilitating the ideal of the nuclear family for others. Bedford Falls is positively affected by the choices George Bailey makes, indeed the story is about the uniqueness and indispensable role of the individual in a community by posing the question of if he had never been born.
Whilst Ayn Rand hated the film for being ‘communist’, the opposite is true, both Frank Capra and James Stewart were both staunch conservatives and strongly opposed the New Deal. Far from being collectivist, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is in many ways the personification of the American, and indeed the Anglo-Saxon, ideal of Rugged Individualism, which was always anchored in a Christian belief in charity that Ayn Rand utterly lacked.
Poppy Coburn is right to point out that we have lost this spirit. Children are not allowed to play outside anymore or take any kind of risks. Interactions between the sexes are highly controlled and scrutinised by the ‘Longhouse’. DEI, affirmative action, and racial quotas are required by law, with state social engineering replacing the Rugged Individualism that defined the traditional Anglo-Saxon world.
Expressive Individualism
The problem is not individualism per say, but rather the explicit form of individualism that flourished during the 1960s: ‘Expressive Individualism’.
Expressive Individualism’ believes that the individual should be able to break social taboos as much as they choose, and breaking social taboos is an act of radical virtue. Whilst Rugged Individualism focused on improving the self, Expressive Individualism is focused on changing society. It is not enough for one to carve out their own space, their individualism needs to be ‘affirmed’ by society.
Of course, this individual self-expression only works one way. One would not be able to express themselves by wearing a Nazi uniform. It works towards the way of attacking traditional Western society and values. Anything that goes against the pre-1960s West is good, everything that reminds people of it is bad. Individualism is permitted ONLY for certain groups (not traditionalist straight white men), who demand that people constantly affirm their ‘individual self-expression’ even when it requires a literal fabrication of reality, like with transgenderism.
The 1960s counterculture was not a celebration of individualism per say. It did not pay regard to the entrepreneur or the self-made man, the woman who chooses to be a housewife, or the person who chooses to join a conservative religious community. It was an individualism purely dedicated to destroying the foundations of a healthy society.
The 1960s counterculture celebrated the worst traits in human kind, and the type of deconstruction they pursued was evil and depraved. It promoted the pathological, the therapeutic state, and the Cluster B society, seeing victimhood as virtuous and the ‘stiff upper lip’ as ‘repressive’.
Whilst the Yuppie movement of the 1980s and 1990s could be seen as personifying a more consistently individualistic spirit, both Rugged and Expressive, this still represented seeing the decline of moral standards that started in the 60s as good. By embracing the deconstructivist culture of the counterculture, big tech companies came to power to became spreaders and enforcers of Wokeism. This merger of neoliberal capitalism and the 1960s counter-culture created our modern Woke surveillance capitalism that seeks to impose its worldview on the entire globe.
What is to Blame for Wokeness?
People like Patrick Deneen, by putting ‘left-liberalism’ and ‘right-liberalism’ together, miss an important distinction. Despite its flawed intellectual framing around natural rights and the social contract, which led indirectly to left-liberalism and Expressive Individualism, the classical/right-liberalism and Rugged Individualism that dominated the American creed before the 1960s was very different in practice to how Deneen presents it.
Classical liberalism, by keeping the size of government limited, did not attack the foundations of civil society like left-liberalism would go on to do. Again, whilst Deneen makes an important point that the contract and consent-based intellectual foundations of liberalism were false and began a trend towards social degeneration, in practice, community bonds were not weakened until the rise of ‘social liberalism’ and the welfare state.
As Paul Gottfried says, it is ‘mass democracy’ that erodes communities, not classical liberalism. Classical liberalism actually understood the dangers of democracy, and had abandoned much of the utopian, egalitarian elements of the Declaration of Independence by the 19th century, in favour of a more realistic view of human nature. Deneen however, seems to blame liberalism entirely whilst letting democracy completely off the hook, because apparently the people are naturally socially conservative. Unfortunately that isn’t true, people will believe whatever they are indoctrinated to believe by the most malign actors, as the acceptance of the judicial overturning of 32 state referendums on gay marriage shows. Democracy is not considered legitimate if it is an outcome liberals dislike, a natural outgrowth of social contract theory taken to its logical conclusion. It therefore is a dishonest system of manipulation and propaganda.
The semantics of ‘contract’ in the ‘social contract’ has changed since the 17th century, where it traditionally meant a contract between generations. However, the changing definition of ‘contract’, towards being a contract between individuals, has negatively influenced the trajectory of western thought. Henry David Thoreau, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Lysander Spooner logically concluded that the promise of the social contract has not been fulfilled, and that state authority was illegitimate because they did not personally consent to it. This idea that one can choose to opt-out of the law because their ‘natural rights’ were being violated then went on to influence the rights-fixated discourse and socially destructive direction of the post-war period, the Warren Court and the successors of the precedents it established in the United States, as well as ‘Human Rights’ precedent globally.
A term that I would prefer to use, to describe what classical liberalism meant in practice, is a ‘Territorial Covenant of Citizens’, the word ‘social covenant’ as a replacement for ‘social contract’ first being used in this way by Danny Kruger, and ‘territorial’ and ‘citizens’ added by me to provide greater clarity. The Territorial Covenant of Citizens is an obligatory reciprocal relationship between elite and ordinary citizens, where one could ‘opt-out’ only through leaving the territory. This would avoid the expansive interpretation of ‘rights’ that have been used to impose cultural disintegration on societies since the end of the World War Two.
However, it's clear that the main culprit of Wokeness is the legacy of the Second World War and the ‘Boomer Truth Regime’, which sees Nazism as the ultimate evil and Martin Luther King and the 1960s counterculture as the ultimate good. Underlying all this is an obsession with equality, with ‘equality of opportunity’ leading to expectations of ‘equality of outcome’, which leads to greater and greater attempts by the state to level the playing field, particularly when it comes to race. Until we break out of this paradigm and reject equality as a virtue entirely, Wokeness will continue to eat away at the fabric of our civilization.
The Individualism We Need
We are a society that lionises Expressive Individualism for selected groups, oriented towards destroying the previous society and promoting civilizational suicide, whilst demonising and repressing the vitalist Rugged Individualistic spirit, that made the Anglosphere the greatest civilization in history.
The crippling lack of Rugged Individualism means innovation and risk is sacrificed at the altar of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) cult, where children cannot play outside without adult supervision, where every second of children’s lives are micromanaged by their parents, where teenagers are forced to constantly show ID to buy alcohol, and people were locked in their homes for 2 years for the ‘common good’ of protecting the disabled and elderly, even though it had hardly any effect on deaths and even from a common good perspective, the lockdowns were an objective failure.
The overabundance of Expressive Individualism means we are a society with no understanding of objective reality, where ‘a man can become a woman’ is ‘2 + 2 = 5’, where confused and mentally unwell young women have their healthy breasts removed in horrific mutilating procedures in order to ‘affirm’ their identity, and where online platforms and payment processors constantly police citizens for ‘hate speech’ that ‘disrespects the identity of marginalised groups’. It is a tyrannical, feminised tyranny of ‘kindness’, the Longhouse and ‘Nanny State’ personified, though unlike the relatively benign if annoying spectre of Nanny-Statism, the Woke regime is actively evil, seeking to tear apart the fabric of our society.
We need to completely invert this hierarchy of values. The entire destructive legacy of the 1960s counterculture should be overturned and destroyed forever, and the pioneering and Faustian spirit that defined the West’s golden age once again becoming hegemonic.
Society should be individualistic in that it depends on individual agency to improve the welfare of oneself and the community in which they live, and not just as a means for indulging in destructive behaviour. People should be able to choose their own marriage partners, be able to buy their own properties and start families.
Children should be encouraged to play outside, encouraged to take risks, not have their every moment micromanaged by their parents. Parents should instil moral standards within their children, and command respect and authority, but they must not be over-involved helicopter parents who claim to always act in their children’s best interests but really just stunt their growth. Children need to be encouraged to grow up fast, be allowed to get the life experience that Gen Z has been so lacking.
On the other hand, society should not indulge perversion. It should have standards of behaviour, with the heterosexual nuclear family being promoted over and above other family models as a means of ensuring societal stability, eudaimonia, and high birth rates. People who dissent from this norm will be legally tolerated, but they will not be celebrated, may be socially ostracised, and will not in any way be seen as ‘equal’.
A good individualism is that of George Bailey in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, not ‘I Am Jazz’, the latter of which is nothing more than sickening child abuse for which all involved should be arrested, jailed for life, or even executed, their depravity and evil being equivalent to Josef Menegle and other Nazi war criminals. A new regime should see ‘trans kids’ like the current regime sees the Holocaust, with the underlying message of ‘Never Again’ being everywhere.
Conclusion
Am I still essentially a communitarian? Perhaps. But I want people to have a sense of self-actualisation, a sense of independence, a sense of being in charge of their own destiny that they had in the past but so clearly lack today. I do not want to be stuck living with parents and being told what to do. In many cases, the rise of university education and young adults going back home afterwards has infantilized them, made them overly dependent on mollycoddling parents, who don’t let them grow and develop self-reliance.
We should restore the spirit of classical liberalism except make it clearer. A Territorial Covenant of Citizens, between the rulers and the ruled, with an obligatory reciprocal relationship of duties to one another. One may opt-out of this covenant, but only by leaving the territory. The majority of citizens shall earn the right to vote, and their leaders and elites be held accountable for their conduct. But there is no fantasy concept of ‘natural rights’, and ‘all men are created equal’. Claims of such fictional ‘rights’ being violated will not be indulged by corrupt, activist judges who hold democracy in contempt. A militant minority engaging in civil disobedience in response to the will of the majority will not be tolerated, and if continuing despite warning, will be brutally crushed.
The Postliberals and the Vitalists are both correct. Expressive Individualism is the source of so much of our modern ills, Rugged Individualism has been suffocated and suppressed. We must reverse this.
Thanks for the clarification. This is refreshing.
Part of me wants to avoid labels altogether and focus on goodness and righteousness (not necessarily the common good all the time).
I further believe that whenever people think politics is about a thing, it actually isn't a thing, but good and evil. As you point out, there is good individualism and bad individualism, good communitarianism and bad communitarianism, good rights and bad rights, good freedom and bad freedom, good government and bad government. It is not actually the thing, it is good and evil at the end of the day. We should strive for goodness as much as we can, often balancing different concepts and getting the best out of different kinds of things.
The balance you want to see is in the Backcountry settlers who came from Northumbria. After 700 years of endemic violence across the unsettled border between Scotland and England before King James I, the Northumbrians were both self-starters who get to work and the members of their clan who can be counted on to rally to their side. This culture is what made Daniel Boone and Andrew Jackson possible. They provided the backbone to the martial spirit of America along with the Tidewater settlers from Wessex.