Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
„Only through a repair of time can we move toward a repair of the nation."
Modern consciousness is historical consciousness: it cannot get behind the knowledge that the present is the result of historical processes, just as it cannot get behind the knowledge that history is a temporal process whose end is open. Concepts of time and philosophies of history shape the language of politics and are objects of its reflexive working-through in modern political theory. „Postliberalism” too can be described as a programme of historical and temporal politics, and at the level of theoretical reflection it expressly understands itself as such — as the demand quoted at the beginning shows. It comes from Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future, the most recent book by Patrick J. Deneen, who in recent years has earned himself the dubious reputation of postliberal leading thinker.
Remarkably, the liberal engagement with its ideological challenge by postliberalism largely tunes out this historical and temporal-political dimension. It is worth clearing this up: perhaps in it lies a remedy for the analytical and political helplessness of liberals against the new opponent.
First, a conceptual preliminary is in order. „Postliberalism” is a fashion and propaganda word and, as such, demands special care in use. It currently shows up, first, as the self-description of a well-networked group of mostly Catholic or Catholic-converted intellectuals, connected to one another and into the Trump and Orbán government circles, who for over a decade now, on common publishing and networking platforms, have been trying to lay the intellectual foundations for an overcoming of „liberalism”. Besides Patrick J. Deneen, this circle includes for instance Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, Rod Dreher, Chad Pecknold, Philip Pilkington, Ed Feser, or Edmund Waldstein. They are in what follows called „the postliberals”.
Second, „postliberalism” increasingly meets us as a diagnosis of the times. It then brings to a concept the thesis of a worldview-shift in the transatlantic world, observable in the normalisation (and electoral reward) of programmatic (and so no longer merely provocative-populist) transgressions of a liberal consensus. What exactly these transgressions consist in, or which transgression is judged concretely as decisive for the diagnosis of a worldview paradigm shift (for example: the abandonment of a multilateral paradigm in foreign, security, and trade policy; the rejection of principles of separation of powers and of the state’s principle of neutrality; the breach of the rules of truth and truthfulness that a deliberative culture presupposes), depends on the speaker’s position just as much as the assessment of these transgressions does. Even within the left-liberal spectrum, differences open up: some left-wing authors currently try to overtake the decidedly reactionary anti-liberalism diagnostically in such a way that the overcoming of liberalism is postulated and a „postliberal” programme is demanded from the left (which, of course, still awaits elaboration).
This essay does not follow the thesis of an already completed postliberal paradigm shift: Liberalism has not failed yet, to contradict Deneen in Deneen’s own register. But it can be held that political liberalism as a worldview project is being massively challenged, and that the structural features of this challenge (programme, supporting groups …) differ so significantly from those connected with the three historical opponents of liberalism — „conservatism”, „socialism”, „fascism” — that a new term, „postliberalism”, seems analytically useful.
The temporal character of women’s bodies
The postliberals claim the failure of liberalism as a political project on the basis of above all two observations: liberal societies of the transatlantic world are polarised, first, to the threshold of civil war and therefore highly unstable; they produce, second, unhappy, lonely, and disoriented subjects. This development has, in the postliberal analysis, an ideational ground (on the political-economic eye one remains deliberately blind): the very „-ism” of liberalism. According to the postliberals, liberalism is marked by both at once: a progress ideology that judges political programmes and ways of life by their „progressiveness” and so not only carelessly gives up the wisdom of tradition but also fosters a Manichaean worldview; and on the other hand a structural blindness (and a practical relativism) toward the question of the good life.
The first critique addresses the liberal concept of historical time. Against this, Deneen, for example, in the chapter of „Regime Change” quoted at the beginning, recommends an „integral” perspective on historical time, in which past, present, and future are „interwoven”. The second critique addresses the absence of a concept of lived and experienced time already at the level of liberal theory design: the postliberals’ notorious critique of the „atomistic” subject of liberal theory is at the same time a critique of its „empty”, procedural concept of time. It blocks the view, both of the mortal human being’s need for orientation and of the unavoidable temporal character of embodied life as such — something the postliberals fetishistically thematise with a view to the temporally limited fertility of women’s bodies: the post-menopausal, involuntarily childless „cat lady” (Vance) is the favourite example in postliberal discourse for the supposed cruelty of the liberal ideology.
In many postliberal texts, the critique formulated in this theoretical way is, on one hand, translated into temporal-political policy proposals, for example in the form of the demand to establish public places for the purpose of contemplation and the experience of the sublime. At the same time, the asserted desideratum of a political philosophy that (again) speaks to the question of a good life is addressed performatively. Postliberal texts, starting from a critique and analysis of the present, like to formulate teachings of behaviour and virtue: they speak (more or less authoritatively) to the question how a life should be led in order to become a successful life.
The corresponding teachings of behaviour and virtue look at the human being as a body-bound being conscious of its finitude. They are essentially techniques for handling borrowed time: they include, for example, the cultivation of (theologically understood) „hope” or of „memory” and the tending of tradition; they include the concrete calls to action to found a family as early as possible, for a woman to put the career of child-rearing first in her life planning, to pray each week for the common good, and so on.
Other postliberal actors also profile themselves essentially through life coaching in this sense: opinion entrepreneurs like the murdered Charlie Kirk and his wife Erika Kirk, like Ben Shapiro or Candace Owens, have gained enormous publishing reach and considerable political influence by recommending a „traditional” way of life as an antidote to the pandemic of unhappiness that they at the same time postulate and attribute to liberalism. J. D. Vance too chooses, in political communication, especially in addressing young men, this register again and again.
Apocalyptic horizons
From the conservative tradition, both are well known: the critique of an overly cheerful progress-oriented philosophy of history, and the attempt to raise the question of the individual’s conduct of life to the central political and political-theoretical question and to answer it in the sense of traditionalist value conceptions.
What distinguishes postliberalism from conservatism, however, is that at the level of historical time it develops a strong apocalypticism, and this apocalypticism transforms the named „conservative” elements of postliberalism in a decidedly anti-liberal direction. (I do not understand conservatism as anti-liberalism but as a slowing-down reaction to liberalism.)
The postliberal apocalypticism articulated itself first outside the academic texts of the postliberals (among others in the US evangelical milieu), but it has by now been taken up there and theologically refined.
It frames the present not from an open future (or, as in parts of the conservative tradition, a cyclically imagined course of history), but with a view to an end-times horizon whose approach is not awaited but feared. The central political task thus becomes the holding-back or the postponement of the apocalypse (and the theological figure of the „holder-back” or „Katechon” accordingly enjoys a renaissance in postliberal discourse).
The ideological consequence of this apocalypticism is threefold. First, the politics of preserving order and preserving the present falls under the spell of highest urgency. Second, the traditional or God-pleasing conduct of life now appears not only as a matter of personal fulfilment and the stabilisation of the common good, but also as a practice of salvation-historical holding-back. Third, the apocalypticism gives a boost precisely to that antagonistic thinking which postliberalism wants to identify as the central danger of the liberal „ideology of progress”. For the figure of the holder-back points to the counter-figure of the Antichrist, with whom liberalism, or liberal elites and institutions, are gladly identified in postliberal discourse.
Liberal treasures
The view of postliberalism as a programme of time and history partly explains its political success. Precisely as such, it has orientational force where lately that force has gone missing from liberalism. To remember: the liberal paradigm drew its plausibility for a long time from the reality of above all economic, but also political, progress. Looking back, for a long time the present seemed to many people of the transatlantic world gradually better than the past (and, besides, better than in the rest of the world). In today’s present, however, the states of the transatlantic world fare measurably worse on indicators like economic growth and social mobility than in the recent past, while exactly those world regions that maintain political competitor models to liberal democracy do better. The time of US-American and European hegemony seems to be running out. For many years the geopolitical and geo-economic structural change took place backstage in the transatlantic world; by now it is making itself noticeable there in everyday life.
For the spreading consciousness of crisis, liberalism has so far found no language; even less does it have a political programme on offer for shaping the crisis. The social promise of progress and emancipation that once marked it has largely perverted itself into individualised performance imperatives like „personal development” or „longevity”, by which „the future” becomes, on one hand, a distinction and, on the other, an extended present.
One reason for this speechlessness and futurelessness of present liberalism lies undoubtedly in its political-economic blindness, or in its reluctance to enlighten itself about its historical self-contradictions, which are grounded in the fact that its humanistic-idealistic programme often served as a cloak for an economic liberalism that hindered the realisation of that programme more than it furthered it. Another reason, which may stand in a causal connection with the first, could lie in the successive narrowing of the liberal discourse on time and history, which also accounts for liberalism’s analytical impotence vis-à-vis the Anthropocene.
This narrowing, however, is home-made. For contrary to the caricature postliberalism wants to draw of it, liberalism is no monolithic „-ism”. The tradition of liberal thinking is broad, deep, and many-voiced, because the imperative of reflection is its programmatic core. It includes a developed consciousness of the danger of a progress-oriented philosophy of history turning into a progress ideology, as well as of the blind spots of a proceduralist, „empty” concept of time. More than that: it includes attempts to grasp lived time and the narrative dimension of personal life in political-theoretical and ethical reflection and to bring this reflection into an appellative key — read Paul Ricoeur, Hannah Arendt, Charles Taylor, Judith Shklar, Martha Nussbaum, to name only a few. It includes concepts of borrowed time and of a present carved by „memory” and kairotic futures — think of Cornel West’s prophetic pragmatism or Johann Baptist Metz’s New Political Theology.
Put differently: the liberal tradition holds all sorts of (and especially theological) sources for the revitalisation of political liberalism. The postliberal texts, by contrast, already show that, in their real-political will to power, they freeze into dogma and polemic. Their greatest danger may then lie in our believing their caricature of „liberalism” too quickly.
