In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.
In politically connected circles, it is becoming increasingly common to hear the term “postliberalism.” Like many political identifiers, such as liberalism, fascism, socialism, and democracy, postliberalism has evolved a broad enough extension to contain various ideas and movements, some of them mutually exclusive. Though first discussed in Protestant theological circles, in political discussions today, postliberalism usually refers either to the broader New Right movement associated with people such as Tucker Carlson, which seeks to undermine the “post-war liberal consensus,” or it refers specifically to a movement promoted by Catholic intellectuals such as Harvard University Law’s Adrian Vermeule and Notre Dame University’s Patrick Deneen. Vice President JD Vance is unique because he has a foot in both postliberal worlds.
The Catholic postliberals have a noteworthy intellectual pedigree. Around 2010, an old Catholic theological movement called integralism began to pick up steam. These “neo-integralists” reinterpreted the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom to treat its support for religious liberty and liberal democracy as merely pragmatic concessions. This opened the door for more traditional political arrangements where the state would become subordinate to the church, or at the very least more active in promoting what integralists consider the common good.
Subsequently, after Obergefell v. Hodges made gay marriage legal nationwide, two social conservatives, one Eastern Orthodox and the other Catholic, wrote influential books that sparked the movement.
The first, Rod Dreher, opted for a politics of retreat in his book The Benedict Option. Dreher calls for Christians to intentionally build resilient communities and cultivate a distinct Christian culture by withdrawing from mainstream secular society. This was followed by Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, in which the Notre Dame professor argues that the voluntarist social contract theory of Thomas Hobbes and the mastery-of-nature philosophy of Francis Bacon helped spawn the political ideology known as liberalism, which eventually dismantled traditional social structures. Likewise, Deneen calls for Christians to retreat from national politics, focusing on local democracy while they await liberalism’s eventual collapse.
However, this plan of mitigated retreat would not last for long. Vermeule, coming from an integralist perspective, reviewed Deneen’s book, praising it effusively but critiquing Deneen’s proposed alternative. Rather than wait back and retreat from national politics, he argued that postliberals should instead try to capture the national bureaucracy to nudge politics toward what postliberals consider the common good while awaiting liberalism’s eventual collapse. He called this strategy “integration from within.” Deneen’s subsequent book, Regime Change, adopted a similar approach, explicitly critiquing the separation of powers and checks and balances in America’s “liberal” Constitution.
In subsequent years, as their critiques of America’s founding became politically problematic, they began to reinterpret the founding, attempting to show that it was not “liberal” from the start. By “liberal,” they mean “classically liberal,” i.e., as the American experiment is usually understood as promoting constitutional democracy and special solicitude for democratic minorities and individual rights, especially religious freedom, free speech, free association, and private ownership.
Today, these Catholic postliberal intellectuals are quite politically active. One of them, Gladden Pappin, works in Hungary, leading an organization funded by the Hungarian government. He frequently speaks of the new post-liberal order and has promoted efforts to install loyalists in Washington. Postliberal thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin, whom Vance has credited with shaping his thinking, say they prefer an executive branch unbound by constitutional constraints. Like Carl Schmitt, the thinker most influential to Vermeule, postliberals favor democracy but of an illiberal sort, opposed to the novelties of modern constitutionalism.
Unlike Vermeule, Deneen does not favorably cite Carl Schmitt, who is infamous for his time in the Nazi Party and his defenses of Franz von Papen’s Prussian coup and Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives. Instead, Deneen has at least once cited favorably two of the three men that Schmitt considered forerunners, Louis Bonald and Juan Donoso Cortés (the other was Joseph De Maistre). Deneen told the Catholic bishop Robert Barron (who was likely unacquainted with these thinkers) that he saw them as proven right in their critiques of liberal democracy.
What presumably unites these two thinkers (Bonald and Cortes), if Deneen is reading them through the same Schmittian lens as Vermeule, is that they all favor a strong, broad, politically absolute, individual sovereignty. What this means is that unlike modern constitutionalism, which typically sees the law as sovereign insofar as it is legitimated by the consent of the people (a rule of law, in the strong modern sense), these thinkers favor a rule-by-law of a personal sovereign (e.g., a king, prince) who is constitutionally unbound in his or her service to the common good of the political community, which he or she transcends as its protector. This makes them natural allies with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
These Catholic postliberals thus draw on a preexisting Catholic reactionary tradition that went out of favor following the moral failures of Vichy France, Franco’s Spain, or Dollfuss’s Austria. Deneen believes that the Church needs to rethink its support for liberal democracy, expressed in the Second Vatican Council.
THE BIGGEST POLITICAL LOSERS OF 2025
The far more likely fate of this contemporary iteration of postliberalism, however, will not be that of Vichy France or Franco’s Spain. It is more likely to falter like integralist movements in Brazil and Argentina, outcompeted by other, more powerful factions within their coalition. Even if Vance becomes president, his loyalty to them will be split with his loyalty to Big Tech figures, such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
Still, those who do not share their political vision will find Vance’s relationship with postliberals troubling. And it is unsettling that they have already shown a remarkable propensity to lift above their weight. Those of us who still like American constitutional democracy should be on guard.
Thomas D. Howes is a university lecturer in politics and has a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of America. He is editor-in-chief of the Vital Center and the founder of the Reagan Caucus and Reagan Caucus Action. Along with James M. Patterson, he is a co-author of the upcoming book Why Postliberalism Failed. His X handle is @ThomasDHowes.
