Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
To call postliberalism a midcult at the very moment of its intellectual success would probably be presumptuous — after all, even diagnosing “peak postliberalism” speaks for its intellectual success. With a little mockery, though, one could aptly observe that postliberalism already looks discredited at the interim high of its success.
While “left postliberalism” is only now being discovered in the feuilletons of German newspapers, “right postliberalism” on the other side of the Atlantic is a suicide mission wasting away in the shape of the MAGA movement. For all those who have made themselves comfortable in Donald Trump’s vicinity, the drop keeps getting higher. In Germany, Trumpian Nibelungentreue, loyalty to the bitter end, at most still affects Axel Springer’s “freest freelancer”; in the USA, however, with the so-called “Tech Right” and the “postliberal right,” two influential currents at once are bound to the Flying Dutchman Trump.
In this respect, the connection between the postliberal right and the Tech Right deserves a second, closer look. The comfortable view so far has been to understand the Tech Right and the postliberal right, which in the form of J.D. Vance seem bound to each other like Siamese twins, as a tactical marriage of convenience. At some point, so the hope goes, this alliance will break apart again — as the conflict between Elon Musk and Donald Trump over skilled immigration had suggested. But the midterms are near, and as fragile as the Trump coalition is in some respects, the postliberal conservatives and the Tech Right seem just as stable in staying aboard the MAGA tanker, come what may. So perhaps a second explanation is needed.
I will have to be forgiven for joining the postliberalism trend, midcult, chorus (whatever …) when I try to expand the postliberal field by one more postliberalism: a libertarian postliberalism. For libertarians and postliberals alike, that is likely to be a premise to reject. To libertarians it would likely look like the liberal’s familiar attempt to distance himself artificially from his more radical brother, from the flesh of his flesh. And for postliberals it would likely end in incomprehension, since of all things the rejection of the economic liberalism inherent in libertarianism unites left and right postliberalism. Yet the intellectual milieu of the American vice president is not the only thing suggesting that the relationship between tech libertarians and postliberal conservatives could be more intimate.
If one had to break the postliberal field, itself a hodgepodge of political ideas and patterns of thought, down to six shared positions, they would probably be 1) the rejection of political liberalism, 2) the hope for an alternative vision beyond the liberal script, 3) the necessity of perfectionism, 4) the Christian religion as the source of the political, 5) the belief in a stronger interventionist state run by a 6) common-good-oriented elite.
While the Tech Right, with its Zarathustra-like image of man, has traditionally shown postliberal elements in its elitism, its perfectionism, and its rejection of political liberalism, in recent years a turn toward religious symbolism and — under the conditions of the “AI race” — support for state interventionism can be observed as well. Equally telling is an anti-canon of liberalism that postliberals and the Tech Right both play on. A bit of Huntington here, a bit of Spengler there — and plenty of friend-enemy dichotomies on top — there are no great differences to be found in either the style or the drama of the diagnosis: liberalism is going under, and it alone is responsible for that — as Peter Thiel remarked back in 2025 in a joint appearance with Patrick Deneen.
The Deneen–Thiel line also makes it plausible that between the Tech Right and conservative postliberals there is indeed an elective affinity. The Tech Right in particular seems ready to make substantive sacrifices for its new allies from the right. In the will to power, one is suddenly an apologist for protectionism, anti-meritocratic migration policy, and state dirigisme. One cannot help but think here of the figure of thought René Girard developed, scapegoating, which Thiel once popularized in Silicon Valley. In 1972, in Violence and the Sacred (La violence et le sacré), Girard had identified a way out for destabilized societies in the scapegoat mechanism. According to Girard, the path to social reconciliation lies in the expulsion of a demonized scapegoat, a reconciliation then stabilized by the mythical sacralization of that scapegoat. If one thinks this logic through to the end, it quickly becomes clear which scapegoat stabilizes the new fusionism of the MAGA camp: liberalism.
Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey’s rather confused attempt to draw an archetype of “libertarian authoritarianism” thus carries a kernel of truth after all — only in a different shape. Where the Suhrkamp sociologists suspect an authoritarian bottom-up libertarianism of the “little man,” postliberal libertarianism is emerging as a top-down autocracy. It does perform a majoritarian character, but only as long as liberalism can be scapegoated in the process. In short, one likes to talk about migration, public safety, and rampant diversity — here one fancies oneself part of the majority. But when it comes to unpopular data centers, corrupt crypto entrepreneurs, unloved social media platforms, and fraud via betting sites, one falls silent. Postliberal libertarianism is majoritarianism in name only.
In a sense, postliberalism in both its conservative and its libertarian shape is thus first of all the — so far open — bet that the age of liberalism might really be over. It is the bet on being able to shape liberalism’s “afterwards” — as the alliance with Donald Trump or Viktor Orbán proves. It is a new fusionism of conservatives and libertarians under different auspices: post-globalist, nationalist, and attention-economic. But it is also an alliance that depends on a sacralized scapegoat: liberalism. Its survival secures the lasting success of MAGA fusionism.
To return, at the end of this text, to the starting point of this issue, the good life: the predetermined breaking point of the postliberal alliance seems to lie precisely here. While left postliberalism has so far not dared to leave behind the — neutralized — good life of liberalism (because it is part of it), and the postliberal right tries to overcome the liberal worldview, libertarian postliberalism lives precisely in liberalism’s blind spot: its lack of order, digital as well as real. It is the calculated bet that Zarathustra can make himself most comfortable in the eternal interregnum, because under these conditions social and state constraints no longer matter. For postliberal libertarianism: it is the time of monsters, forever.
