I’m fascinated by ideological definitions and taxonomies. What are “post-liberals”? It’s a question that presumes one knows what “liberals” are, which Crispin Sartwell has argued we don’t. I think liberalism’s varied forms have commonality in asserting some sort of individual rights against some social order deemed exploitative or anachronistic; “liberal” also implies an interest in incremental reform of ideas or institutions, in contrast to the demands for faster, sweeping change implied by “progressive” and, more so, “radical.”
What are “national conservatives”? They’re a more-nationalistic breed of conservatives, but “conservative” too is a label that’s meant various things. What’s the “New Right”? It’s a term that’s recurred over the decades, often in contrast to a pre–World War II “Old Right,” but the current New Right also takes inspiration from that Old Right, sometimes in contrast to versions of the right deemed contaminated by, or subsumed into, liberalism. Such attempts at purity often target neoconservatives, another slippery term that initially referred to defectors from the left, and later increasingly to foreign-policy hawks.
In Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, which I reviewed last year, “Postliberals” (stylized as such) are one of three categories that make up the New Right, along with “Claremonters” (centered on the Claremont Institute and putatively defending US founding principles) and “National Conservatives” (who seek to be an umbrella group). The Postliberals, in her telling, have “a particular (religiously inspired) conception of the Common Good” and propensity to depart from free-market economics.
An upcoming book, The Opportunists: Post-Liberals and the Reinvention of Reactionary Politics, by Hannah Gurman (The New Press, Oct. 20), offers a different taxonomy, with “post-liberals” an umbrella term encompassing categories such as “theocrats,” “nationalists,” “natalists,” and “populists.” Beyond nomenclature are differences of perspective and emphasis. Field was once affiliated with conservative institutions, while Gurman, who teaches history and American Studies at NYU’s Gallatin School, has published at left-wing magazines such as The Nation and Dissent. Where Field probes the origins of New Right ideas, Gurman, as her book’s title suggests, tracks right-wing intellectuals as ambitious people carving out careers in an evolving political landscape.
The Opportunists offers fresh and surprising insights. A chapter titled “The Nationalists: Neoconservative Zionism and the War Against the Global Elite,” elucidates how, in contrast to perceptions that the New Right’s a reaction against neoconservatism, notable continuities exist, exemplified in the career of Yoram Hazony, who’s propounded both American and Israeli nationalism as bulwarks against “globalism.” Such synergy has faded amid surging anti-Semitism in the New Right, but the history Gurman recounts helps explain how Donald Trump, despite campaigning against Mideast wars, joined with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu in starting a calamitous one.
Another chapter, “The Natalists: Reactionary Feminism and the New Right’s Politics of Care,” also limns neoconservative influences on post-liberalism, as with the husband-and-wife team of Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb’s emphasis on marriage and family as an antidote to social problems and government dependency. Notably, such traditionalism was spurred by fears both of overpopulation in the 1960s and 1970s, and population decline more recently, with the racial mix of population projections a persistent concern.
I’ve written a great deal about my disaffection from the New Right, seeing it as a departure from the neoconservative and libertarian tendencies I’d once embraced; these were key elements of the right in the 1980s and 1990s and had a certain compatibility with each other, in keeping with the “fusionist” idea promoted by Frank Meyer of National Review. While the right has substantially broken with its past on various matters—such as trade, immigration, and the value of alliances—the continuities that fed into post-liberalism shouldn’t be underestimated.
Nor should there be any doubt that the New Right has changed the country and the world, often in ways not readily reversible. Gurman argues that post-liberals gained influence, in significant part, by pointing out genuine problems with liberalism. Her own hopes are for a collaboration of liberals and the left that will, in some respects, follow the post-liberals’ example and methods, by “recovering and elaborating a multiracial, care-oriented, and truly populist vision of the common good.”
That sounds ominous. If the “common good” is so flexible a concept that post-liberals can invoke it in defense of the orgy of corruption and authoritarianism now underway, it can also help a future left-wing administration whip up a brew of populist autocracy.