The Postliberal Mind Virus
For several months now, controversy has swirled over Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts and his strange defense of Tucker Carlson against charges of antisemitism. A wave of staffers have resigned from Heritage in protest, as well as a number of high-profile trustees. More interesting than the daily drama of open letters and leaked team meetings, though, is the way the controversy has become a proxy fight for the battle to define the future of the conservative movement.
Many of Roberts’s most passionate and vocal supporters come from the so-called “postliberal” camp. They see him as a leader who might liberate the conservative movement from what they sometimes call the “beautiful losers” or “establishment” who came to power with Ronald Reagan and open up new possibilities for ideological realignment. Among the more eloquent defenses of Roberts along these lines came in a Chronicles magazine editorial by John Howting. He contends that the postliberal direction Heritage is going under Roberts’s leadership is a better expression of “conservative principles” than that of his more traditional critics. Senior staff at the Heritage Foundation certainly appreciate his argument; Genivieve Wood, a vice president of development, for example, expressed her support (although she later denounced Howting’s criticisms of the American Founding).
But, as many critics have pointed out, there is nothing particularly conservative about Howting’s position–nor the broader postliberal discourse within which it exists. These new ideologues of the right seem far less interested in preserving the particular arrangements and commitments of the American Republic (and the philosophical truths they incarnate) than in promoting some abstract sense of, to use Howting’s term, “Western identity.” Tempting as it may be, though, conservatives should not simply dismiss the postliberal argument out of hand—it is worth considering seriously.
Indeed, the abstractions at the heart of Howting’s argument reveal a broader problem with the postliberal attitude. Rather than conserving and appreciating our particular tradition, this faction seeks nothing less than revolution—or, as Patrick Deneen has put it, “regime change”—for the sake of a “postliberal future.” We must throw out the political forms of our fathers, they claim, in pursuit of a more abstract vision of the “common good.” The actual practice of the American political tradition–limited government, divided sovereignty, ordered liberty–must be sacrificed to postliberal theory.
Read more in Law & Liberty.
