Will the Republican Party be a party of free markets and limited government, or one of industrial policy and activist government? Should the government be confined to fighting crime and preserving liberty, or should it take an active role in promoting morality and preventing self-destructive behavior?

In some ways, this is a debate about the conservatism of the past 50 years, but it’s also a debate over the founding of the United States.

What ‘liberalism’ are the post-liberals talking about?

A crucial clarification at the start: The “liberalism” being debated here isn’t the same as “progressivism” or “leftism.” In this debate, we’re using an older, broader understanding of the world, closer to what is often called “classical liberalism.”

The participants in this debate will argue over the meaning of “liberalism,” but here’s a rough sketch:

Liberalism is an attitude of general neutrality that gives the individual maximum liberty. Free-market capitalism is liberal in this sense. In contrast, Trump’s tariffs or Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) intensive regulation are illiberal because they put the government in the position of steering the economy.

Freedom of speech is a liberal tenet, while the less liberal impose restrictions on what can be said without official punishment — for instance, the Left’s university speech codes or old-fashioned conservatives’ indecency rules.

While this notion of liberalism sounds laissez-faire or libertarian, neutrality is just as central: Our laws should treat a KKK rally the same way as a pro-choice rally, which we should treat the same as a pro-life rally. Justice must be blind. Our tax code should simply collect revenue, not try and pick winners and losers.

Equality under the law is a keystone of liberalism.

The post-liberals reject many of these ideas or believe they have gone too far.

Drug use and compulsive gambling are now rampant. Elites in media, academia, and half of our politics reject as “Christian nationalism” the idea that the U.S. is founded on Christian ideas, or that our rights are God-given.

What’s more, argue leading post-liberals such as Patrick Deneen, liberalism run amok has actually restricted our freedom. Live-and-let-live sexual mores have led to gay marriage and the official embrace of transgenderism. In turn, these “acceptance” movements led to the persecution of Colorado bakers and speech codes banning “misgendering.”

The recent excesses of wokeness have stoked conservative interest in post-liberalism, as did Trump’s election in 2016. Trump ran on openly illiberal approaches to international trade, immigration, and freedom of the press. He openly rejects neutrality in favor of a politics of helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies. Trump has none of the conservative movement’s qualms about picking winners and losers in the economy.

Another driving cause behind post-liberalism: Liberalism arguably gets the blame for the erosion of civil society — downtowns replaced by big-box shopping centers, community-mindedness replaced by individualism, religious congregations emaciated by secularization, and rootedness replaced by cosmopolitan hypermobility.

The collapse of belonging and the crisis of loneliness are at the root of our most pressing social problems, such as the baby bust, the retreat from marriage, falling trust, and rising despair.

The post-liberal view

Some of the Trump-era post-liberals focus on economic nationalism — most notably Vance. Others focus on using government to discourage vice and promote virtue, or even to reestablish Christianity as a pillar of American society.

There is no unified post-liberal agenda, but it has included establishing more explicitly Christian cities through the use of military force, propping up domestic manufacturing because factory jobs support breadwinners, more strictly policing vice, among other ideas ranging from reasonable to utopian.

Some post-liberals reject the American founders, while others try to claim them. Some talk of Catholic integralism, while others leave their prescriptions vague, focusing instead on what they see as the failures of liberalism.

Catholic integralism is an absurd idea in the 2020s. There is no public support for banning contraception and in vitro fertilization, barring commerce on Sundays, or prohibiting indecent dress in public. Attempting any of these policies would spur massive blowback. Even banning pornography or criminalizing adultery might not be politically feasible.

Bold post-liberal policymaking may not be feasible these days, but the post-liberal diagnosis of our problems certainly deserves attention.

Liberalism unchained

Liberalism is best considered an attitude rather than ideology. Liberalism has long been understood as rules of the game.

As long as it was limited to this role, liberalism has promoted human flourishing, material wealth, and healthy politics. But liberalism seems to have slipped its leash in recent decades. What was once an approach to government and a method for making pluralism work is rapidly becoming a belief system in itself — even an anthropology.

If equality, neutrality, expressive individualism, and capitalism are held up as goods in themselves, then we start to see ourselves as fundamentally autonomous individuals whose interactions with others are best thought of as consensual transactions. This contrasts with a Jewish or Christian view of humans as fundamentally relational and familial.

Academia and the commentariat regularly peddle this liberal anthropology. Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, in describing the benefits of liberal immigration policy, argued, “A diverse population reduces social solidarity, which is good for economic growth because people don’t want wealth-destroying policies to help out people who look different.”

Less connection to neighbors, friends, and family yields more reliance on the free market. This is true, but it seems odd to consider it a good thing.

Samuel Moyn, a professor at Yale Law School, recently went on a New York Times podcast and rejected the notion that parents are the best judges of their children’s interests.

“I think parents generally confuse the interests of their family with the interests of their children, and part of our goal, I think, as parents, but also as a society, is trying to make sure that children aren’t the hostages of their parents.”

Liberating children from their parents — and from tradition and religion — is the clear goal of many public school systems.

Likewise, the logic of capitalism often creeps into our personal relationships.

Suze Orman is one of the most famous personal finance gurus in the country, and she advises all married people to keep separate bank accounts. “You all should be autonomous human beings. You’ve come into this relationship as an autonomous human being.”

A New York Times op-ed writer praises divorce as replacing living together with “a lot of very tidy and businesslike communication” that is “transactional” and “freeing.” She recommends all couples adopt such a transactional, businesslike, contractual 50/50 custody agreement.

This is what happens when liberalism becomes a lifestyle.

Consider also how neutrality has spilled out of its proper boundaries. It’s good for government to be neutral on whether you drive a Tesla or a Ford. Also, it’s really nobody’s business if you have three beers with dinner, paint your dining room orange, or call your wife “sweet cheeks.”

But these days, we seem afraid to admit that some things are better than others. The prime examples are our baby bust and retreat from marriage.

Our schools and our media seem afraid to say that marriage and family formation are a good thing, for fear of being too prescriptive. All lifestyles and family models are to be judged equal. If an employer offers maternity leave and accommodates nursing, that’s discrimination against non-mothers — and where’s the neutrality in that?

Liberalism as an ethic means you shouldn’t have an opinion on how anyone else lives his life. Even giving people life advice becomes uncouth. This ethic would prevent you from criticizing the marijuana, pornography, and gambling businesses that are obviously ruining the lives of young men, endangering our future, and corroding our culture.

Now you see where the post-liberals are coming from. They see real evils in society, and they see that liberalism run wild is at the root of these evils.

Deneen, among others, argues that liberalism by its nature will always run wild — it will always escape its pen. And so they declare liberalism a mistake.

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But again, the dream of a post-liberal conservatism does not seem realistic, if only because nobody has found how to centrally plan an economy effectively and a Catholic theocracy is not really attainable right now.

It may be that liberalism has failed, but that rather than scrapping it, we need to fix it.